Presenter: Dustin Morrow
Registration Number: 015
Institution: Portland State University, Oregon, USA
Abstract: My presentation will detail the production and content of my four-part narrative podcast series Short of Breath. As a filmmaker, I had to rethink narrative structure and media production to tell this story in the podcast format, using elements of filmmaking, radioplay, and new media strategies.
Set in the days leading up to the election of Donald Trump, the series follows Olissa, a single mother in her early 30s who loses her factory job in the series’ first scene. It’s terrible luck and even worse timing. This event, which happens at the end of a shift on a Friday (as layoffs so often do), starts a ticking clock for Olissa. A judge refuses to postpone a custody hearing for her young daughter scheduled just three days away. Olissa is trapped in an all-or-nothing, last-chance scenario. She has only that weekend to find a decent job and clean up her act once and for all, or risk losing her daughter. Although she means well and tries her best, Olissa is one of those people to whom bad stuff is always just happening. It’s always one thing or another with her—drama just seems to follow her everywhere she goes. She’s missed hearings and appointments in the past and has demonstrated other irresponsible behavior, and the system is now past caring. Complicating her situation are her battles with addiction and with terrible asthma, made worse by years of abusing her body. Her inhaler is never far from reach.
I conceived this series in response to the challenges faced by working Americans following the election of Donald Trump. I was influenced in part by the Dardenne brothers’ film Two Days One Night (2014), in which a pending deadline presents potentially devastating socioeconomic consequences for its protagonist. I also thought a lot about Kelly Reichardt’s film Wendy and Lucy (2008), in which a traveling woman on the brink of homelessness loses her dog after her car breaks down in a city with which she is unfamiliar. What I responded to in that film is how sympathetic everyone is toward Wendy, but how few people can actually help her. This is a version of the world we rarely see in narrative media, one in which people are basically decent, but must grapple with the limits of how much they can assist someone else when they probably need a little help themselves. That was the reality of 2016 among an increasingly desperate working class, and it seems only to have gotten worse in the years since Trump’s election.
As we struggle to recover from another recession, this time brought on by a worldwide health crisis, I believe Short of Breath is a prescient series—an urgent series.
Bio: Dustin Morrow is an Emmy-winning filmmaker, bestselling author, film programmer and professor based in Portland, Oregon. His films have won numerous awards and have been shown in venues around the world. He has received grants for his work totaling more than half a million dollars. Before re-entering academia, Morrow was an editor and director of short-form projects and series television in Los Angeles, for such clients as Sony Pictures, MTV, FoxSports, the Discovery Channel, and for such filmmakers as Spike Jonze, Michael Apted, and Steven Soderbergh. He continues to operate his own independent production company, Little Swan Pictures, for which projects have taken him as far away as the Aleutian Sea. Among his recent works are the book Kathleen Turner on Acting: Conversations about Film, Television, and Theater, a collaboration with the iconic actress that was published by a division of Simon and Schuster. The book was endorsed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Sofia Coppola and was featured on Larry King Live, CBS Sunday Morning, Good Morning America, and in The New York Times Book Review. Prof. Morrow also recently finished Black Pool, a feature-length thriller that he wrote and directed, which tells a taut revenge story set against the backdrop of the political conflict in Northern Ireland. The film was shot partially in Dublin and Belfast, and was picked up at the Cannes Film Festival for worldwide distribution. Learn more about that film at its website, www.blackpoolfilm.com.