It’s sheer escapism
There are no innocents in Escape At Dannemora’s meticulous, manipulative jailbreak.
Escape At Dannemora Season 1 Wednesdays (from 13 February) M-Net (*101) 21:00
In absolute contrast to drama series Les Misérables (see right), there is no redemption and no innocence in miniseries Escape At Dannemora (2018). It’s based on a true story that had all the ingredients for the Hollywood treatment. In 2015, 51-year- old married civilian prison worker Joyce “Tillie” Mitchell (Patricia Arquette), a supervisor in the Clinton Correctional Facility’s sewing shop in Dannemora, New York helped convicted killers David Sweat (Paul Dano) and Richard Matt (Benicio del Toro) escape. The 150-page Inspector General’s report on the incident (which is available in full online) was so juicy that it was practically a script waiting for a cast. “It’s a page-turner. It’s got great pictures in it too. And looking at it, I was like, ‘This is almost like a novel’. That was the jumping- off point,” says series producer Ben Stiller.
VULGAR FAVOURS
According to the report, along with slipping the inmates cookies, love letters, sex and nude photos of herself, Tilly also passed along six hacksaw blades, two chisels, a steel punch, two concrete drill bits and other equipment for their time on the run. After her own arrest, Tillie claimed, “I believe I helped Inmate Matt and Inmate Sweat escape because I was caught up in the fantasy. I enjoyed the attention, the feeling both of them gave me and the thought of a different life.” Ben adds that “sex for her [Tillie] was sort of a currency. It was something that she used to manipulate people for her own ego. She’s the only woman that these inmates are around and she would flirt with them and she liked that.” The real Tillie wasn’t impressed by Ben’s interpretation at all though. She said in an interview, “He doesn’t care about the truth. All he cares about is making millions off me. He is an idiot.”
ESCAPE ARTISTS
But just who were these silver-tongued seductive escape artists? For one thing, 48-year-old Richard was actually an artist. To curry favour, he often gave prison workers paintings and drawings of their families and pets, based on photographs that they’d supplied him with, and he also taught 35-year-old David to paint. And while the sevenepisode series focuses on the titillating relationship with Tillie, she wasn’t the only one under Matt and Sweat’s spell. Correction Officer Eugene Palmer (David Morse) was also exceedingly generous towards them, giving the pair art equipment, a television, a screwdriver and pliers, warnings about upcoming cell searches, as well as letting them bypass the prison’s metal detectors. No sex required. “Everyone wants to get out of there. Joyce, who works there, wants to get out. Gene, he kind of wants to get out too. So the idea was sort of: everybody is escaping at Dannemora,” says Ben.
NO SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION
All their daydreaming was a dance with devils and the series doesn’t forget that. Ingenious, manipulative and charismatic as he was, Richard Matt could also be intensely intimidating. He had been a school bully and what eventually got him locked up was kidnapping, murdering and hacking his 76-year- old former boss to pieces. As for David, a violent youth who became a drug dealing deadbeat dad, he was arrested for shooting and deliberately driving over a police officer while he and his friends were robbing a fireworks store. “He feels that he was wrongly convicted, but I think it has to do with the fact that while he shot that officer a number of times, his friend also shot him multiple times and so in some way, David feels that he is not solely responsible [for the crime],” reveals Ben. “By episode 6 ( Wednesday 20 March), I feel like we show who the two lead prisoners are in terms of what they had done, and then I wanted to just show them as two people who have a natural instinct to survive and what that must’ve felt like for them as individuals.”