First Face: The Buck Starts Here
George Washington visited artist Gilbert Stuart to sit for one of the most famous portraits ever created — the image on the one dollar bill.
Loaded Gun: Life, and Death, and Dickinson
Along with a stand-up comic, a rock band, feuding academics, and Hollywood actresses, a man searches for the secret to poetic power.
- Series
- Independent Lens
- Premiere Date
- December 16, 2003
- Length
- 60 minutes
- Funding Initiative
- Open Call
Producer
Jim Wolpaw
A Brown University graduate, Jim Wolpaw has worked in independent film for 20 years. His films include the Academy Award-nominated documentary Keats and His Nightingale: A Blind Date; Cobra Snake for a Necktie, a portrait of Bo Diddley which aired on Showtime; and the feature comedy Complex World. He has freelanced as a writer, film editor,… Show more
- Other ITVS Films
- First Face: The Buck Starts Here
Producer
Steven E. Gentile
Since graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1987, Steve Gentile has had an extraordinarily diverse film career. His animated films The Ant Who Loved a Girl and The Soldier have won awards at more than 30 film festivals, including London, Hong Kong, and Zagreb. As an editor, he has six feature credits, including the cult comedy Complex World. He… Show more
- Other ITVS Films
- First Face: The Buck Starts Here
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The Film
Hundreds of scholars and biographers have tried to explain the life and work of Emily Dickinson, but the famously reclusive poet remains an enigma. In Loaded Gun: Life, and Death, and Dickinson, stumped filmmaker Jim Wolpaw uses a decidedly unorthodox approach to create a documentary about the writer whose beautiful, haunting, and cryptic poetry has never quite squared with her reputation as a sensitive spinster. Wolpaw’s efforts to illuminate this esoteric subject — more than 150 years after her death — yield some hilariously frustrating results.
Wolpaw begins his film by employing the standard documentary methods, interviewing historians, literature professors, U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, and even an opinionated trio of psychotherapists. “How did this woman, who was apparently too sensitive to go out in the world, write about the world with such power, precision and presence?” Wolpaw wonders.
Enlisting the help of this unlikely team of academics, actresses and artists, Loaded Gun dissects the meaning of its puzzling title poem, speculates about Dickinson’s possible love affairs, and recasts the poet in an array of contradictory personas: Emily as sexualized seductress, anxiety-ridden basket case, sarcastic comedian, reluctant interview subject, childlike genius, tormented spinster — even a talented second baseman. Who was Emily Dickinson, really? Perhaps it is this unanswerable question that makes her such a captivatingly modern mystery, inspiring legions of fans that include poetry-spouting English majors, rock bands and tattoo addicts. As Loaded Gun shows, Dickinson’s greatest legacies may simply be the strength of her words and her persistent refusal to be easily defined.
