Abigail Elliott gains Hollywood attention

When Abigail Elliott left Douglas County in the spring of 2007, she was going to California to make her dreams come true.

A year and a half later, she is back in Roseburg, and her dreams have developed in ways she couldn’t have imagined.

Elliott, who’s now 44, had been working for more than a decade on a screenplay called “Safe and Sound.”

The movie is a murder mystery that explores themes of sexual abuse and healing. One character is based on Elliott herself, and another is based on the man who she said sexually abused her throughout her childhood. Other characters are fictional.

Samantha, the character modeled after Elliott, is an adult directing plays in New York when the police knock on her door, asking about the shooting of her father and the murder of the stepmother she didn’t know she had. Carly is her younger stepsister, whom she’s also never met.

Samantha has to come to terms with her past and save her sister from their father, who is a police officer-turned-private investigator who knows how to work the system.

It’s a suspenseful tale with an ending that veers from the bad guy getting what he deserves.

Elliott took the script to Hollywood, and she found work producing television shows. She’d done camera work and directed theater in the past.

She worked as an associate producer for Discovery Health’s “Deliver Me,” and also as a production assistant for Jenny McCarthy’s DVD series on autism. Then she starved for a month, she said.

In the meantime, she’d been pitching the script she co-wrote with Roseburg resident Jane Addis-Docken. Elliott’s brother suggested she talk to his neighbor, who turned out to be Mark Burley, the supervising producer of Showtime’s “Weeds.”

“I thought it was an interesting story, and it was also a poignant story,” said Burley in a telephone interview. “It was told in an interesting way, and it wasn’t sort of a Hollywoody ending.”

Burley thought the script could make a good independent film, and he knew someone he thought would be right for the project — independent film producer Ryan Westheimer.

“He told me about Abby and her passion and excitement,” Westheimer said in a phone interview. “I saw there was something there, and I saw the intention and purpose of what the story was and what the characters were representing, and I was intrigued by that.”

Westheimer wanted to work on the project, but the script needed work first, he said. That usually takes about a year, but Elliott and Addis-Docken had the script turned around in three months.

“That says a lot about them as a writing team, their level of commitment,” Westheimer said.

That work has translated into one honor already. The screenplay was recently selected as a finalist at the Moondance International Film Festival, which will be held from Aug. 29 to Sept. 1 in Boulder, Colo.

Westheimer plans to seek funding for “Safe and Sound.”

Elliott has come back to Roseburg, and she and Addis-Docken have started their own business, Brave & Crazy Films. They hope to make “Safe and Sound” in Oregon.

“Why not take a $4 (million) to $14 million movie, shoot it in Oregon, put that money in the Oregon economy and put Oregonians to work?” Elliott said.

In addition to Westheimer’s work, Elliott said there are standard ways to find funding for a movie — sending out query letters and treatments.

“You let everybody read it,” she said. “You never know what’s going to happen because so much happens by just dumb luck. And finally if you find an A-list actor who reads it and likes it, all else falls into place.”

But Elliott is hoping for more than material success. She hopes the film brings new perspective and light to the problem of sexual abuse in the United States. If it does that, she said, she will have done her job.

“I hope it makes some good points,” she said. “I hope it looks at the issue in serious fashion, but is also entertaining and suspenseful and compelling.”



• You can reach reporter Teresa Williams at 957-4230 or via e-mail at twilliams@nrtoday.com.