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Blow by blow
Why Shainberg’s film is spanking good
BY GERALD PEARY

Version one of the kinky-sweet, naughtily delicious Secretary was a 22-minute short made by Yale grad Steven Shainberg when he matriculated from the American Film Institute. Based on the Mary Gaitskill story from her celebrated 1988 collection Bad Behavior, it told of a low-esteem young woman whose budding secretarial career turns weird when her employer, a lawyer, gives her sadistic spankings and, one unhappy day, masturbates on her.

"I was moved by Gaitskill’s writings, what was said about male-female relationships that I’d never before read about," Shainberg told me earlier this month at the Toronto International Film Festival. "The short was good, but when I went to make it into a feature, everyone asked, ‘How does the secretary get over her problem?’ I said, ‘She now doesn’t have a problem.’ The story was a jumping-off point, but I was more interested in a different tone, in flipping it."

Shainberg’s savvy decision was to turn Lee’s masochism into her pathway to bliss and liberation. The lawyer, a disgusting brute in Gaitskill’s story, would be a lonely, screwed-up guy who can be freed by this uninhibited woman who grooves on his spankings. Shainberg explained, "I looked at Hepburn–Spencer Tracy movies in planning. I love those movies, but I twisted the paradigm into something not quite recognizable."

Erin Cressida Wilson’s screenplay for Shainberg evolved into an S&M screwball comedy. Shainberg and Gaitskill have been friends ever since he secured her permission for his short of Secretary, so he invited her to the screening of the feature. "After 20 minutes, Mary turned to me and said, ‘I love it, but it has nothing to do with my story.’ That’s true, other that a girl gets a job with a lawyer and gets spanked."

James Spader as the lawyer? "I had stars who said the project was very interesting but who were afraid to take a chance. Look at films like sex, lies, and videotape and Crash and you can’t find a major actor who has done such sexually explicit films as Spader. I say, ‘God bless him!’ The key here was that he’d be willing to remove the mask he had in Crash. I love David Cronenberg, but Spader’s too cold! In [Luis Mandoki’s] White Palace, he showed his vulnerability."

And Maggie Gyllenhaal, who’s so superb as the secretary? "She was the very first person to come in for casting. I said to the producers, ‘You might think I’m insane, but I think I’ve already found the girl. She has tenderness, honesty, a sense of humor, and an odd physicality that could lead to something beautiful. And you feel she’s making her own choices and is never going to be taken advantage of.

"Then I looked at 60 or 70 other actresses. A star sees a part like this and all the people around her worry, about her wearing a saddle, being masturbated on at work."

That wasn’t Gyllenhaal’s reaction. Said the 1999 Columbia University graduate at Toronto: "I read three-quarters of the script, got really excited, called my agent, and said, ‘It’s fuckin’ awesome.’ I said, ‘Call Steve,’ and then got really nervous, not because of the S&M and masturbation but because it could come out as an anti-feminist film.

"My mother, who is a screenwriter, was really worried about me when I was shooting. She didn’t trust the script. ‘Who is this guy, the director?’ But now my mom loves Steve."

And the strictures of feminism? "They need to be shaken up a bit. Secretary is a forward step. What Lee and the lawyer are after is ‘feelings,’ and the only way they can feel is to hurt themselves awake. So many people are asleep and need waking up."

RIP: Katrin Cartlidge, 41, the magnificent British actress in Mike Leigh’s Naked and Career Girls, Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, Danis Tanovic’s No Man’s Land, of a sudden blood infection. I got this e-mail from Charles Merzbacher, BU filmmaking professor and her second cousin. "I met her a number of times in London. She was a living contradiction: a mix of fierce intensity and graceful humility. I recall her mom throwing a big dinner when my wife Marcia and I paid a visit to their flat in Hampstead. This was at the time when Katrin was becoming internationally famous. . . . Throughout the dinner, Katrin quietly helped with the serving of the food, the clearing of the dishes, and so on. That was just her nature — to be famously selfless. In recent years, with parents elderly and ill, she had been the backbone of the family, keeping the home fires burning. . . . Enough said. I hope you spread the word regarding this loss."

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com

Issue Date: September 26 - October 3, 2002
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