| Sunday, 27 Jan 2002, 6:30 |
| TWITCH CITY ***** SERIES 1 *** the Marathon! ***** |
 Don McKellar's opus shot with great style by Bruce McDonald. Our protagonist, Curtis, (Don McKellar) is a TV addicted, Frutti O's crunching recluse with a certain cunning as a landlord and a love interest for room mate, Molly Parker. A unique slice of Canadiana. Don McKellar's oddly charming character could be diagnosed as agoraphobic. His room mate gradually realizes he has a fear of leaving his home. He has adapted well to his situation and people around him accommodate his "quirk" but it is becoming a problem as his new friend challenges him to go beyond his boundaries. It's an anxiety disorder that is not so uncommon but little talked about and understood by those who don't particularly find the world beyond their bedroom door or front yard an immediately threatening place.We'll be discussing that topic with input from at least one person who lives with agoraphobia.fe. Produced by Shadow Shows and Accent Entertainment in association with CBC Television. Hi it's me, Don McKellar. Is Twitch showing this weekend, with the discussion and all? I was pleased to hear that you were showing the full set together. It has rarely been shown like that. The only other public occasion I can think of was at the Museum of Moving Pictures in NYC, where it played very well. I think they work nicely in one sitting and had even originally considered lumping them all together as a film script. Alas the CBC has never seen fit to even broadcast them all at regular times in successive weeks. I think that you will also find that showing them this way helps to draw out the over-riding themes, the love story, and the madness. I certainly thought of Curtis as a classic agoraphobia who had built a lifestyle and a set of behavioral quirks to hide the extent of his issues. To that end I wanted the audience to slowly pick up on his problems along with Hope. They are not really fully exposed until the third episode. And then the rest of the first series deals, more or less, with Curtis' struggles to overcome his sickness and recognise the extent that it is holding him back, especially with regards to his increasing need for Hope. I drew partially on my own experience for this stuff. I can recognize many of those traits in myself. And partially on a couple of guys I knew at a shared house I lived at in college. I never wanted to be reductive, as is usually the case in film and on TV, about the causes of Curtis' agoraphobia. I didn't want to trace it to any single event or relationship, but I did have some stories in mind that I had picked up from my friends. In the second season Hope and Curtis are now together and the shows have more to do with living as a couple. Hope is trying to overcome her low self-esteem (she's pretty damaged too) and Curtis, with his growing confidence, now has to temper his personality to suit his new partner. As it happens, my assistant when I was writing these scripts was a severe agoraphobia himself (among other things). He was going through intensive therapy during the whole development process. I believe, he asked me for some work after identifying himself in the first set. I won't pretend that he provided me with any authoritative diagnostic insight, but it was comforting to know that there was some validity to my rather off-hand exploration. Nice to know, as well, that he didn't think I was just making fun of the issues or exploiting a real, painful problem. Not much anyway. He even bought the strange events of episode six. I had meant for Curtis' resolve, when he leaves the apartment to meet Hope at the gas station, to be somewhat miraculous. It is a love story (of sorts) after all and I wanted Curtis, in a quiet way, to make a huge sacrifice. To have overcome an amazing personal obstacle, something I, the romantic, like to believe possible. But I wasn't really trying to suggest that he was cured. His agoraphobia continues in the second season, it is just less of an issue, something Hope has to learn to live with. This upset some people who wanted me to move on to some exciting new sickness. But, in any case, I always saw Curtis' problem to be more to do with people not spaces. If he had to go outside the best time to do it would be at night on a snowy day, when no one else would be around. This, not incidentally, quite accurately describes the symptoms of my assistant. If you have any other questions feel free to write. Best of luck! Say hi to all who venture out. Don |