Seven years ago, before Barry Shapiro bought (and sold, last year) Lighthouse Gallery and Frame in Vero’s arts district, he went on one of his frequent visits to Manhattan and found himself in the Strand bookstore.
Passing time in his old haunt, he picked up a book with an interesting face on the cover. It was slim volume by an art historian on the French artist, model and muse Suzanne Valadon, little known in the U.S. but a legend in France.
“I picked it up and thought, this looks interesting. Then I went, whoa! I’m fascinated, I get some more books, next thing I know I’m on the Internet finding everything I can.”
Sunday night, the screenplay Shapiro went on to co-write. “L’Alouette,” finally came to life – or at least came off the printed page. He and a group of artist and actor friends gathered in a yoga studio – about as Bohemian as Vero gets – for a reading of the script.
The owner of Yoga Pagoda, Shelley Adele, read the part of Suzanne. A one-time student of acting in New York, she was recently in the Vero Beach Theatre Guild’s production of “Hairspray.” Other actors from the Guild read as well, along with interested volunteers recruited by Shapiro. An impromptu audience, gathered from Shapiro’s Facebook posts, sprawled on yoga mats to listen.
It was the first time Shapiro had actually heard the play read through, start to finish. If voices raised emotions, the story’s visuals should be dazzling.
Suzanne Valadon turned many more heads than Shapiro’s in that bookstore. In turn-of-the-20th-century Paris, she earned the studious gaze of some of the most famous Impressionist painters, posing as a paid model and eventually becoming a respected painter herself.
Valadon epitomized the spirit of Montmartre. Her screen-worthy sexuality was as overt and unrestrained as her artistic talent, groomed at the knee – so to speak – of some of the biggest names in Impressionism: Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Renoir and many more. She was known to pepper artists for painting tips as she posed. Eventually she became accomplished enough to sell her works to many of them.
At 29, she became the first woman admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts.
Her own son, born when she was 18, would grow up to be the famous painter Maurice Utrillo, though his father was never revealed.
Apart from a short film based on Utrillo’s youth, a Grammy-nominated music video on her relationship with composer Erik Satie, and a French full-length film “Lautrec” which won a César award, no major film has been made of Valadon’s life.
Shapiro’s fascination with Valadon was not enough to develop her character. For that he turned to co-writer, filmmaker Mariette Monpierre. “I’d hit a wall,” he says of his early efforts. “What the hell do I know about being a French woman at the turn of the 20th century?”
Born in Guadaloupe, raised in Paris by her mother, Monpierre studied at the Sorbonne and Smith College. She came to the U.S. to produce commercials for advertising giant BBDO, then segued into directing music videos for a French record label. Her credits now number 50.
Shapiro, who studied art at Pratt Institute in the 1970s, worked as a freelance illustrator before getting into TV production, creating his own company in 1984. It was through connections in the advertising world that he and Monpierre met.
Monpierre was in the throes of making her first full-length feature film when Shapiro approached about co-writing “L’Alouette.”
That film, “Elza,” which has gone on to win numerous awards, is the story of a girl raised in France who returns to Guadaloupe to find her father.
Soon after the film was complete, Monpierre got in touch with Shapiro. “As she started taking it around to various festivals, people kept saying, ‘This is great. What’s your next project?’ So she called me and said, ‘Are you still working on that French artist film?’
“As soon as she got involved, it changed everything.”
By the time he closed Lighthouse last April, he had enough of a rough draft to take to New York. For a month, he and Monpierre hashed out plot, characters, dialogue and stages direction.
“She’s a freaking genius,” he says of Monpierre, whom he met more than 30 years ago.
“She came to me when she was thinking of leaving BBDO. ‘I want to be a director,’ she said. I said, you know, that’s a pretty tough thing to do. You’re a black woman in America. But she did it.”
The collaborative process evolved over email at first. “The first thing we had to determine was what part of her life to talk about. There are so many things that happened to her in her long life that we don’t even want to touch upon.”
Valadon, daughter of an unmarried laundress, went to work at age 11 and by 15, was a trapeze artist with a circus. Though she received no formal training, she worked as an artist for 40 years until she died of a stroke at 72. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were at her funeral. A small square in Montmartre is named in her honor.
In the end, they decided to choose her early years.
“We thought about taking different sections,” he says of the collaboration. “But it didn’t really work out that way. We would hash out ideas together, then I would write it and send it to her. She would change it and send it back.”
After a month in New York, Monpierre came here to Vero, staying at the home of Shapiro and his girlfriend Patricia Miles.
“We fought like husband and wife,” Shapiro says referring not to Miles but to his collaborator. “We’re both so emotional, Patricia used to say, ‘I’m out of here. I’m leaving you two alone now.’ Yet some of those differences and the tension between us is what create this screenplay.”
A second draft is in progress, he says, and they are beginning to think of casting.
“We have recently started to reach out to people,” says Shapiro. “A fairly well-known French actor has expressed an interest in looking at the screenplay. Mariette met with him a few months ago. We’re not ready to send anything to him yet, but we will in the next few months.”
For now, they are working on funding, and hoping the arts-friendly French government will kick in with a grant. “There’s a whole process to doing that, and they say to pick out the actors that you would want to see play the major roles.”
