The Glass Castle

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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“Don’t let Hollywood get its hands on your story,” writer Jeanette Walls was advised. “It’s too complicated. They’ll Hollywoodize it.”

But just the opposite happened.

Gil Netter, producer of the Oscar-winning “The Life of Pi,” optioned “The Glass Castle.” 

“If he could make a movie about a tiger and an orangutan in a boat, I thought, maybe he could figure out how to turn my story into a movie,” says Walls.

Netter hired relatively unknown Destin Daniel Cretton (“Short Term 12”) to direct. And Cretton also “got it,” this story of a dysfunctional family.

He and fellow scripters wrestled what Walls called “my messy story” into a manageable movie. They focused on the relationship between a young woman and her “loving, destructive, damaged father.”

Moving all over the country to outrun debts, Rex and Rose Mary Walls dragged their four children along with them, from tumbledown house to converted railway station to their parents’ houses. Rex was an alcoholic; Rose Mary an eccentric painter; their children prisoners of squalor.

Based on the same-named book, “The Glass House” is currently playing at Tropic Cinema. It stars Oscar-winner Brie Larsen (“Room”) as Jeannette Walls. Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts play her dad and mom.

“Yes, they altered details, telescoped a few scenes, fleshed out a minor character into a more significant one, but always with my input and always with a passion for authenticity,” Jeannette Walls says of the finished film. She was happy with the results.

As she sums it up: “It was, I had thought, a shameful story, one I’d hidden for years, a childhood filled with poverty, alcoholism and homelessness. But it was also one filled with joy, pride and deep love. One day, challenged by mother to ‘just tell the truth,’ I wrote the story.”

And Hollywood told it.

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com