So Much Lizzie Borden!
So much Lizzie Borden news since last I posted on Mondo!
A new Lizzie Borden letter was discovered, written to Frances Willard on July 23, 1893, thanking her for her and Lady Henry Somerset’s support during the ordeal of her trial for the murder of her father and stepmother.
Willard, a leader in the WCTU (Woman’s Christian Temperance Union), knew Lizzie through her work with the organization in Fall River. By 1893, the WCTU had a membership of 150,000 and was considered a powerful force in social reform.
Then it was announced that a new Lizzie Borden movie was in the works and, more recently, that a director had been secured. The new film will star Chloe Sevigny and Kristen Stewart. Chloe had visited the Lizzie Borden B&B years ago and fell for the story, vowing to make this into a miniseries or film. Of course, since then, Christina Ricci beat her to the punch with the Lifetime film Lizzie Borden Took an Axe and the two season series The Lizzie Borden Chronicles. The style of Ricci’s Lizzie story was bold and modern, very much like American Horror Story—loads of slow motion, stop action, slashing and hacking, and, of course, blood. But it was all in “good fun” and the film and the series was quite entertaining as camp.
Sevigny’s Lizzie will be a lesbian (yawn) and Stewart will portray Bridget Sullivan, which the film portrays as Lizzie’s suspected lover and possible accomplice. Sounds like Evan Hunter lives in this story! He wrote about just such a lurid relationship (lurid only because it is connected to the crimes themselves) and in an interview I conducted with him in 2005, and posted on his own website, EdMcBain.com, he confessed to not giving the story of Lizzie another thought after writing Lizzie, and came upon the lesbian idea after reading news reports about Lizzie’s friendship with Nance O’Neil and Emma’s departure in 1904.
The director will be Craig William Macneill, who last year made his directorial debut with The Boy, a horror thriller. Bryce Kass wrote the script and Naomi Desires is producing. Since the film is not tied to a network, it seems this one is to be made for theaters. We shall see.
In March, Dance Moms, featured a Lizzie Borden solo dance by one of the kids, Maddie Ziegler. Maddie is a ballerina and her rendition of a bloody, psychologically bent Lizzie Borden is well done.
When Harper Lee died, The New Yorker ran a story that included the following Lizzie story:
Reading Lee’s version of Capote, one longs to read her on everyone else she knew. The piece was published the same year that Gay Talese diagnosed Frank Sinatra’s cold, and one wonders what Lee would’ve done if assigned to profile someone like Eudora Welty, whom she admired, or George Wallace, whom she despised. As more of her letters become public, more tantalizing hints emerge about the kind of journalist she might’ve been. Among other things, she was a withering casino critic (“the worst punishment God can devise for this sinner,” she wrote a friend in Alabama in 1990, referring to herself, “is to make her spirit reside eternally at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City”) and an amusingly sympathetic homicide reporter (“I know exactly why she did it,” she explained in 1976 to someone in Lizzie Borden’s home town; “anyone burdened with long petticoats and having had mutton soup for breakfast on a day like that was bound to have murdered somebody before sundown”). Lee’s voice catches like a briar—it doesn’t tear its subjects, but sticks to them.
The City of Fall River produced a promotion video which featured film of the waterfront, parks, restaurants, and inside the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast.
For $71.97 you can purchase an “Adult Lizzie Borden Axe Murderess Costume,” just in time for Halloween. Remember, kids, she was acquitted!
Miss Lizzie was captured in a unique format: as a balloon!
Artists Chip Rascal and Sean Theroux create large balloons and decided to make a sculpture of Lizzie Borden, which was installed at the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast in April. Using 41 balloon, “minus the ones that popped”), they built a 6.5 foot Lizzie, complete with balloon hatchet.
Pretty cool!
Getty Images posted a photo of actress Anne Meecham as she sits outside of the 92 Second Street.
Actress Anne Meacham sits outside the onetime home of Lizzie Borden, where in 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were axed to death. Lizzie stood trial for the murders of her father and stepmother, but was acquitted of all charges. Meacham returns to the scene from the crime, located in Fall River, Massachusetts, in preparation for her upcoming Broadway role as Lizzie Borden in Reginald Lawrence’s play, ‘The Legend of Lizzie.’
Until next time…..