SHOCK FOR TRIPLETS
2014, had a budget in excess of $200 million.
Louise Wise ceased operations in 2004 and its records were transferred to a New York resource centre known as Spence-Chapin. But Neubauer’s sealed study, which has long been housed at Yale University, was not released, and requests over the years by its subjects to unseal it were rebuffed.
After the completion of the film, Wardle said, some of the thousands of pages of the study were made public but they were heavily redacted.
“It really wasn’t very useful,” Wardle said. “You didn’t really learn that much from them about what was happening.”
While Kellman and Shafran say the release of the full study won’t undo the pain of growing up separately – the former in a working-class environment and the latter in an upper-middle-class home – at least it will reveal what their struggle was for.
“It would help us to know what came out of it,” Kellman said. “It would help us if we knew the study may have even done some good.” Neubauer died in 2008.
The Jewish Board did not take part in the movie, fearing interview quotes would be taken out of context, according to a person familiar with the group’s plans who was not authorised to speak publicly on its behalf.
The group has since worried about the negative perceptions because of the film and began exploring the possibility of hiring a crisis public relations firm to handle the fallout. A message to the organisation’s in-house media representative was not returned.
Shafran and Kellman are not the only people to speak out about the actions of Louise Wise. Identical twins raised separately, Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein also each learnt of the other’s existence as adults and wrote a book together.
The acclaimed journalist Lawrence Wright included material about the incidents in his book Twins. All three appear in the film.
It wasn’t easy to get the movie made. Wardle alluded to several television-film attempts that were made before, and said he believed they didn’t move forward because of legal pressure.
He and his producers were worried but did not face such pressure, he said.
Strangers, which was partly financed by CNN, will air on the network this year. The I, Tonya distributor Neon purchased theatrical rights at Sundance, ensuring the story would continue to gain exposure.
The film-makers and subjects say they hope the attention will move the board to try to heal the rift caused by the study.
“They can’t give us back our childhoods but they can find ways to show us they’re sorry,” Kellman said.
At a Sundance screening, Wardle turned to the brothers sympathetically. “You still haven’t gotten the answers you want,” he said. “You still don’t have the truth.”