Barnum’s legacy
FILMMAKER PUTS CONNECTICUT’S MOST LEGENDARY SHOWMAN BACK IN THE CENTER RING
It’s likely hard for him to believe now, but there was a time when Corey Boutilier didn’t know much about P.T. Barnum. Like many people, Boutilier, a Connecticut native who works for WNYC Studios and New York Public Radio, knew snippets about the famed showman, politician, philanthropist and general icon. But it wasn’t much.
So it’s no surprise that the 46yearold burgeoning filmmaker never planned to make a movie about Barnum. But he was inspired by a newspaper story he read about a sculptor in Bethel, Barnum’s birthplace, making a statue in honor of the showman’s 200th birthday.
“I thought it would be a neat movie, to follow a sculptor around,” Boutilier recalls. “It was supposed to be a short film about an artist. But Barnum is so much larger than life, and he kind of just took over.”
The result is “P.T. Barnum: The Lost Legend,” a featurelength documentary Boutilier completed in 2017 that has been screened at film festivals and other venues throughout Connecticut and beyond. One of its most recent screenings was a free showing sponsored by Connecticut Film Festival FilmFest52 at Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport in June. Upcoming venues include the Mark Twain house in Hartford, where Boutilier hopes to screen the film in the fall.
“Lost Legend” turned out not just to be a chronicle of sculptor
Dave Gesualdi’s epic quest to complete his P.T. Barnum statue in 2010, but also sort of an oral history of Barnum. Boutilier ended up interviewing several Barnum experts, including Kathleen Maher, the executive director of the Barnum Museum in downtown Bridgeport.
He also enlisted some Alist talent to provide narration and voiceovers, including Sonic Youth musician Thurston Moore, who voices Mark Twain in the film.
As Boutilier was filming the documentary, a tornado hit Bridgeport and did major structural damage to the museum. So the film ended up weaving that story into an already complex narrative about Barnum, his achievements and the roller coaster nature of his life and its aftermath.
“Everyone’s life is messy,” says Maher. “It’s complicated. Barnum’s life was incredibly complicated.” So, she says, it was fitting to include the tornado and the havoc it wrought on a chunk of Barnum’s legacy.
However, back when Boutilier started the project, he had no idea exactly how dramatic a story he was going to tell. He was just looking for a project.
The movie is Boutilier’s second as director, his first being 2007’s “Honk for Peace,” which chronicled the 2006 Senate race between Joe Lieberman and Ned Lamont in Connecticut. That film was exciting to make, Boutilier says, as there were a lot of antiwar protests during the campaign that created some good drama.
Chroncling Barnum had its own challenges, Boutilier says. “It’s hard to film a documentary where the subject has long since passed away,” he said.
But not long after starting to follow Gesualdi’s efforts to create the Barnum sculpture, Boutilier became increasingly interested in Barnum’s story. He read the showman’s autobiography and “I was blown away,” he says.
Boutilier says he was fascinated by how many hats Barnum wore. Maher says Barnum was already 61 years old and an established entertainer in 1871 whenP.T.Barnum’sGrand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Circus opened. That, of course, later became known as Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and is the project for which he is arguably best known.
Yet the circus came years after Barnum opened his American Museum, on lower Broadway in New York City. That museum was lost in a fire in 1865.
Barnum was also a politician, who was at one time mayor Bridgeport, a writer, a temperance advocate and an antislavery activist, among many other things.
“Lost Legend” recounts many of these aspects of Barnum’s life, with a few fun facts dropped along the way. The most interesting? Barnum didn’t actually speak the quote most commonly attributed to him,
BARNUM DIDN’T ACTUALLY SPEAK THE QUOTE MOST COMMONLY ATTRIBUTED TO HIM, “THERE’S A SUCKER BORN EVERY MINUTE.”
“There’s a sucker born every minute.”
Boutilier says, since completing the film, he has shown it at as many live venues as possible. “There’s actually no way to see it unless you go to a live screening,” he says.
Though he concedes that making it widely available via screening platforms would increase exposure, Boutilier says there’s something profound about seeing the film with a live audience.
“Every audience reacts differently,” he says. “They all laugh in different places and get quiet in different places.”
Maher agrees, and says the audience involvement is particularly palpable during the scene’s depicting the wake of the tornado.
“There’s an audible gasp from the audience, because it’s such an unexpected turn,” she says.
The Barnum Museum recently celebrated the ninth anniversary of the tornado, which hit June 24, 2010, and it’s sIn till recovering. Boutilier says he was able to keep the film somewhat upbeat in spite of that tragedy, due partly to the celebration of Barnum’s birthday and the unveiling of Gesualdi’s sculpture.
Boutilier says he’s now working on a new project, a film focusing on an aspect of the Industrial Revolution (“It’s not boring, I promise,” he says.)
In the meantime, Boutilier says, he’s pleased with the reaction he continues to get for “Lost Legend.” “People really seem to like it,” he says.