‘Big Stone Gap’ heads to the big screen
Adriana Trigiani brings her best-sellers to the big screen in
For Adriana Trigiani, “Big Stone Gap” represents nearly 20 years of staying the course and never giving up. Best known as the author of a series of best-selling novels, Trigiani was living in New York more than a decade and a half ago, working as a producer and writer on a number of TV shows, when she began to feel the pull of Big Stone Gap, her Virginia hometown.
She wrote “Big Stone Gap” as a screenplay, only to have a book agent friend of hers convince her to turn it into a novel.
“I wanted to start a family and figured I’d try to write a novel because it would keep me at home,” recalls the author. “It was an experiment [which] taught me to take a risk. I fell in love with writing books.”
And readers fell in love with Trigiani. “Big Stone Gap” became a best-seller and led to the blockbuster “The Shoemaker’s Wife” as well as three additional tomes set in Big Stone Gap.
Trigiani’s books became so popular, in fact, that she was dubbed by USA Today as one “the reigning queens of women’s fiction.” The New York Times called her “a comedy writer with a heart of gold” and described her books as “tiramisu for the soul.”
So, what was it about rural Virginia that so inspired Trigiani?
“Big Stone Gap has … the Appalachian dynamic, which is rich in Americana, including native American, African American, Scots Irish,” says the filmmaker who was born in Roseto, Pennsylvania, where she lived for six years..
“I love Big Stone Gap because it was different from what I came from, and I found the history exotic, and the storytelling fascinating. Virginia history is the history of our nation, and I’m still interested in it because of my education in the Wise County public school system.”
Shot entirely on location in Big Stone Gap, the film revolves around Ave Maria Mulligan (Ashley Judd), a self-described spinster who, when she’s not making deliveries from her family’s pharmacy, keeps chaste company with her longtime beau Theodore (John Benjamin Hickey), and exchanges good-natured barbs with local hunk Jack MacChesney (Patrick Wilson).
Ave Maria has, more or less, resigned herself to a quiet life when she’s caught off guard by the unearthing of family secret, an unexpected marriage proposal and a once-in-a-lifetime visit to Big Stone Gap by movie legend Elizabeth Taylor.
The rest of the movie’s cast includes Jenna Elfman, Jane Krakowski, Judith Ivey, Anthony LaPaglia, Jasmine Guy, Chris Sarandon and Wilson’s wife Dagmara Dominczyk (as Taylor).
In retrospect, Trigiani is glad she was forced to wait more than a decade to bring “Big Stone Gap” to the screen.
“I think everything works out for the best,” she says. “In art, what’s always interesting is that whatever you create captures the moment, wherever that moment lands.
“The movie ‘Big Stone Gap’ captured the moment we made it. The books, four of them in the series, helped me have a bounty of material when I was on my feet making the movie. I knew where Ave Maria was going emotionally, so in that sense, it helped me.”
Finding financing and convincing investors she was the right choice to direct “Big Stone Gap” was Trigiani’s biggest challenge.
“No one else ever asked to direct it, or inquired about directing it,” she says with a laugh. “However, it was important for me to direct it, because at long last, I could show the great people I grew up with as the beautiful, bright, amazing, flawed, yearning, complex folks they are- and not the stereotypical one note portrayals I have seen in the media.”
When she began working on the film, she took a good deal of inspiration from screenwriters who flourished during Hollywood’s Golden Age. She re-read the work of Anita Loos (“Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”) and Philip Dunne (“The Ghost and Mrs. Muir”) and imagined it was the ‘30s and “Big Stone Gap” starred Bette Davis (or Myrna Loy) and Gary Cooper in the roles played by Judd and Wilson, respectively.
As much as she’d have liked to work with those Hollywood legends, Trigiani was happy to have directed Judd, who hails from nearby Kentucky, and the Norfolk, Virginiaborn Wilson who, in a strange coincidence, had family living in Big Stone Gap.
“Patrick’s grandmother, Carol Wilson,
came to see me when Big Stone Gap was published in 2000 and said Patrick has to play Jack,” recalls Trigiani. “Patrick was in his 20s. I told her that I loved his work but he was a little young. She assured me he could do it.
“Thirteen years later, she had passed away, cameras rolled and Patrick was 40. He had aged into the role and he plays Jack brilliantly. Ashley was always in my mind for Ave Maria. I went to see her eight years before the cameras rolled. She was a delight and had great ideas. She too, was brilliant, prepared and surprising. Everything she is shows up in her work.”
Trigiani says she couldn’t have imagined the movie being shot anywhere but Virginia. Going back home to make the film was one of the most memorable experiences of her life.
“It was fantastic,” she says. “But it was about the nuts-and-bolts too. I felt so lucky that I had the opportunity and seized it every day.”
At the heart of the story is a message of hope.
“I want every person that feels stuck in their life, or feels that life has passed them by, or feels hopeless to go to this movie,” she says. “You will feel redeemed and feel hope again. This movie will not go VOD for at least a year, on purpose. It is being shown in theaters because we believe that it should be seen in community. It’s about community, about locking arms and taking care of one another.”
Trigiani learned the lesson about the importance of community from an early age. Her parents were part of a close-knit group of Italians living and working in Roseto.
The author calls the people of Roseto “tenants of love, faith and family. The Rosetans are good people, and they have good hearts. I remember how they looked out for one another and supported one another when times were tough. They lived loyalty.”
Trigiani was ambitious from an early age. At 15, she went to work as a news reporter for WNVA Radio.
“It was the greatest thing ever because I got to write a great deal,” she says. “I got superb on the job training. I had to write [segments] that were concise. I learned to time my writing to the format. I learned to distill something down to its essence and that’s very important in screenwriting.
“And I also learned how to have a real humane take on the world. Listen to people and their stories and their feelings. Pay attention.”
After moving to New York she honed her writing skills as a playwright before going to work in television. She wrote 15 pilots for the likes of Jasmine Guy, Raven Symone and Mario Cantone as well as serving as a a writer/producer for “The Cosby Show” and “A Different World” and executive producing “CityKids” for ABC/Jim Henson Productions.
She also oversaw “Growing Up Funny,” a television special for Lifetime which garnered an Emmy nomination for Lily Tomlin and penned a handful of television specials and series featuring Tomlin, Madeline Kahn, Dolly Parton, Whoopi Goldberg, Laraine Newman and Marlo Thomas, among others.
Still to come from Trigiani are more stories which “entertain and enchant … and ease your burden.”
Says the author, “I’m working on another novel. And the audience will tell me if they want another movie. I hope they do. I’ve got one for them.”