Woman who killed herself on TV

ON JULY 15, 1974, Christine Chubbuck, the 29-year-old presenter of a local TV magazine programme in Sarasota, Florida, announced, live on air, that ‘in keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living colour, you are going to see another first . . . attempted suicide’.

She then drew a gun and shot herself in the head, dying shortly afterwards.

Her grotesquely public death helped to inspire Sidney Lumet’s 1976 film Network, and is now the subject of this intriguing if rather overlong documentary, in which actress Kate Lyn Sheil tries to find out what made Chubbuck tick, supposedly in preparation for a feature film.

She speaks to those who worked with Chubbuck, and goes to great lengths to look like her, visiting a wigmaker and a tanning parlour. She also visits the store where Chubbuck bought her lethal weapon, finding that the shop has changed location, but still goes by the same name: The Bullet Hole.

At one level, Robert Greene’s film is a powerful indictment of relaxed U.S. gun laws, but there’s much more to it than that, as gradually Sheil finds the empathy and understanding she requires to do justice to the role.

It’s a surprisingly fascinating process — just as enlightening about the craft of acting as it is about the life and death of a sad and lonely woman, who by all accounts was still a virgin when she killed herself, agonising over an unrequited crush on a male colleague.

No footage of the shooting is thought to exist, so Sheil must do the best job she can in recreating it. But it becomes clear that she might not be able to go through with it, adding a dark psychological dimension to what is already a troubling, thoughtprovoking film.