Pitt alum discusses his film career

A soldier has fallen in love with a transsexual, one vaginoplasty away from womanhood. He… A soldier has fallen in love with a transsexual, one vaginoplasty away from womanhood. He endures the homophobic insults and assaults from the other troops on the base that eventually lead to his murder, in the form of a brutal, cowardly Louisville Slugger attack in his sleep.

This is the true story of a tragic love that Pitt alum Ron Nyswaner says he was born to write.

In Alumni Hall on Tuesday night, Pitt in Hollywood sponsored a screening of Nyswaner’s 2003 Showtime film, “Soldier’s Girl.” Several Pitt students and faculty members were shown the harrowing, twisted tale of fear, repression, anger and the strange circumstances surrounding the death of 22-year-old Barry Winchell in 1999.

“Barry’s decency really drove me to tell his story,” Nyswaner said after the screening, citing the soldier’s ability to look past the differences that segregate people that he labels as “myths.”

Present on the film’s set was Pvt. Winchell’s transsexual girlfriend, Calpernia Adams, who has since completed her sexual reassignment surgery and is described by Nyswaner as a close friend.

Frank Pierson, screenwriter of the 1975 film “Dog Day Afternoon” — about a man who robs a bank to pay for his partner’s sex-change operation to become a woman — directed “Soldier’s Girl,” which starred newcomer Lee Pace as Calpernia and Troy Garity, son of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, as the fated Barry.

In a question-and-answer segment after the screening, Nyswaner described the picture as “my version of the truth,” the only possible version because, “we go through the world and see only one version.”

The film, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in January of 2003 was rejected by five major Hollywood studios who, according to Nyswaner, wanted a contrived, “triumphant” ending that would have compromised the tragic truth of the story, before the Showtime network accepted the idea.

The decision to opt for a low-budget television production over a grandiose, star-studded Hollywood production is not one that he regrets, though his 1993 Academy Award nominated screenplay for “Philadelphia” was a major studio production.

As opposed to the story of Barry Winchell, Nyswaner said, “‘Philadelphia’ was to speak to the largest possible audience.” He described the fictional story of Andrew Beckett, a gay, AIDS-afflicted lawyer’s prejudiced firing from his law firm and his subsequent lawsuit against his former partners, as “the right story to be told at the right time.”

“I had a feeling that someone was going to do this,” Nyswaner stated, noting the emerging relevance of AIDS in the early ’90s, but he and director Jonathan Demme, who was riding high from the success of his 1991 film “The Silence of the Lambs,” were the only team developing a story that centered on a homosexual man with the deadly virus.

Then, after more than 20 drafts of the script, Nyswaner created a courtroom drama that focused on the relationship between the ailing Beckett and his homophobic attorney Joe Miller, played by Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, respectively. Hanks received an Oscar for his role.

After the film’s success, however, Nyswaner embarked on a downward spiral that he has since documented in his book “Blue Days, Black Nights: A Memoir.” The book features an anonymous man levitating above a bed on the cover, symbolic of a state that the writer believed he was in for a while.

Earlier in the day, Nyswaner discussed the decision to write a book with students at a screenwriting workshop held in the Cathedral of Learning.

Although he described writing as “egocentric” and that he puts a little of himself in every fictional screen character he writes, Nyswaner said, “I thought [the memoir] was more powerful if it was presented as nonfiction. I wanted to let the secret out.”

“The story dictates how it should be told,” he said, speaking of the mostly “modest” stories that interest him. Among others, he wrote the screenplays for “Smithereens,” “Prince of Pennsylvania,” “Gross Anatomy,” and “Mrs. Soffel.” The latter, like “Soldier’s Girl” is based on a true story.