![]() ![]() “Well,” Chubbuck replied, “I thought it would be a nifty idea if I went on the air live and just blew myself away.” As Sally Quinn wrote in the Washington Post, Chubbuck had told “Rob Smith, 22, the night news editor,” that she had purchased a gun. Shilowich had searched for him for years, but had known him by a different name-Rob Smith. It wasn’t until he got on a conference call with Smitty and his team that he realized who Smitty was. The last text in the thread read, “Smitty knew Christine.” Shilowich thought it was a typo. Shilowich got a series of texts about InSync Plus taking the job. Not only that, he had been her closest friend there. Why? Four decades before, when he was twenty-two, he had worked with Chubbuck at the TV station in Sarasota. Smitty said he wanted to make the “Christine” trailer. His trailer house, InSync Plus, had a top-drawer reputation, most recently for its work on the “Spotlight” campaign. Then, in June, an executive at The Orchard heard from a guy named Smitty. (One executive described it as a “marketing challenge.”) Premières were scheduled, and time was running out. ![]() The companies it approached didn’t get the movie. When The Orchard went in search of a trailer house (a company that makes film previews), however, it encountered more ambivalence. “This is a thrumming, heartsore, sometimes viciously funny character study, sensitive both to the singularities of Chubbuck’s psychological collapse and the indignities weathered by any woman in a nineteen seventies newsroom,” Guy Lodge wrote in Variety. Of Hall’s performance, The Hollywood Reporter wrote, “Hall makes it impossible to look away from this portrait of a woman brought to the heartbreaking conclusion that she’s beyond hope.” But the same review also questioned the film’s commercial viability: “How curious today’s audiences will be about that bizarre story remains a big question.” Twelve days later, to Shilowich’s relief, The Orchard, a subsidiary of Sony Music Entertainment, bought the film’s North American distribution rights. Hall as her colleague “handsome George,” and Tracy Letts as her despised boss. “Christine” premiered at Sundance in January, with Antonio Campos directing, Rebecca Hall as Chubbuck, Michael C. With that material, he finished making the movie. He had talked to a few of Chubbuck’s contemporaries at Channel 40, visited a few other small TV stations in Florida, and found footage of her show. After years of searching, Shilowich gave up. He read news clips, but had trouble finding people who had known her well. Thirty-six years later, a young film producer named Craig Shilowich started writing a screenplay about Chubbuck. She pointed the gun behind her right ear, pulled the trigger, and fell forward. “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living color, you are going to see another first-an attempted suicide.” Chubbuck raised her right hand from below the desk. One morning in 1974, Christine Chubbuck, a twenty-nine-year-old newscaster in Sarasota, Florida, began her live-broadcast talk show reading from a script. Rebecca Hall plays Christine Chubbuck, a reporter who committed suicide during a live broadcast, in Craig Shilowich’s film “Christine.” Photograph courtesy of The Orchard ![]()
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