A tragedy -- and unique love story

PARK CITY, Utah — Even by the relaxed standards of the Sundance Film Festival, quite a diverse quartet had gathered in an empty hotel ballroom to talk about a picture. But together in “Soldier’s Girl,” they helped create a kind of magic.

At age 77, so old that he joked about deserving a prize for “directors in their second childhood,” the senior of the group was Frank Pierson, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975).

Young enough to be his grandchildren were a pair of accomplished actors whose careers are just beginning. Troy Garity, excellent in Barry Levinson’s “Bandits,” is still best known to the public as the son of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden. Lee Pace, a 23-year-old recent graduate of Juilliard, is so new to the business he jokes that he has “about 20 minutes of life experience under my belt.”

None of these individuals would be in the room except for the fourth person, a demure, soft-spoken woman named Calpernia Addams. In 1999, when Addams was a preoperative transsexual working as a nightclub performer in Nashville, her soldier boyfriend, Pfc. Barry Winchell, was murdered for being gay. It was a death that called into question the efficacy of the Army’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, and when Addams’ story put her on the cover of the New York Times Sunday magazine a year later, the movie offers started coming in.

“There were a lot of people who started calling me for a lot of different reasons, but I was grieving, all confused, and it took me a long time to settle on a group I felt comfortable with,” recalls Addams, who chose producers Doro Bachrach and Linda Gottlieb. “A woman in my situation can be so exploited. And I didn’t want Barry’s memory dishonored by a portrayal of some flamboyant, cliched, drag queen character. I was really scared how it might be portrayed.”

Though her concern was understandable, Addams made the right choice. A Showtime movie playing in the festival’s Premiers section, “Soldier’s Girl” is a heartbreaking and touching experience. Persuasively written by Ron Nyswaner (“Philadelphia”) and acted and directed with remarkable skill and care, the film is especially effective in making us believe completely in the love story between Garity’s Winchell, “a straight boy” in Addams’ eyes, and Pace’s Addams, genitally male but, due to hormone treatment, a beautiful woman in all other respects.

Still, when Pierson was approached about directing Nyswaner’s script, he was far from convinced. “It scared the hell out of me,” he remembers. “It was beautifully written and so original and fresh but I didn’t know how I could cast it. It seemed an overwhelming thing to do on a TV budget so I reluctantly turned it down.”

But during the next two weeks, the story stayed with Pierson. “Most of the screenplays we read we can’t remember the next day, so I asked myself, ‘Why am I not doing this?’ and I changed my mind. But I was still terrified because there was no margin for error. It would either be an embarrassing disaster or very much worth seeing, nowhere in between.”

Though Showtime wanted stars, Pierson decided to remain true to the youthful age of the real characters, especially the young soldiers, “and actors who can play that range have not been around long enough to build marquee value.” He saw 40 to 50 actors for each of the leads (Shawn Hatosy got the key role of the barracks Iago) before settling on Garity and Pace, who had qualms of their own.

“I had a similar reaction to Frank, I was intimidated by the script,” Garity says. “Given the current state of pictures, I wasn’t sure how it would be handled, if it would be sensationalized. But I mean, listen, as an actor you’re constantly plagued with questions about what it all means at the end of the day -- am I being a contributing member of society. It’s so rare that a script comes across your desk that actually lives outside of itself, that’s about something greater than you. It’s so rare an opportunity in comparison to ‘Dude, Where’s My Car’ that you’d be foolish not to take it.”

Pace had similar and additional worries. “I didn’t think I’d be able to pull it off, it was so far from anything I’ve ever done, and I worried, ‘Am I going to be pretty enough?’ ” the handsome, 6-foot-3 actor says.

Each day’s shooting started for Pace with the application of three to four hours worth of molded-to-the-body prosthetics, including breasts and hips, which had to be remade at one point because Pace lost more weight than he was supposed to out of fear that he’d be too big for the part.

Before shooting started, Pace, on Pierson’s advice, went out and observed how women behave in public places. “The first time I saw you in high heels,” the director kids him now, “I thought you’d hurt yourself.” The actor got more comfortable with the role as shooting progressed. “On the first day, when someone said, ‘You look hot,’ it was like, let’s just get on with it. But by the end of the shoot, when I’d hear that, I’d say, ‘Thanks.’ ”

Pierson’s goal for the film was simple. “I wanted to make this a love story. The only thing I remember saying to the actors is that Barry keeps forgetting that [Addams is] a man; [Barry is] in love with a woman. Once you show the character’s sex to the audience, you can’t take that away from their awareness, so you don’t need to press the sexuality. I wanted to deal with getting to the truth of the love relationship, with what it feels like to be in that golden bubble.”

As the person who lived that relationship, Addams feels the film is “more beautiful than I could have ever hoped, though it’s hard to wrap my mind around it, it’s surreal. And the movie gave me a really unique chance to go back in time, to say goodbye to Barry, to relive those good moments again. That’s something nobody has.”

Addams is now a postoperative transsexual, writing and producing videos to help the transgender community with makeup and beauty. The child of a fundamentalist minister, she’s written a book about her experiences pointedly called “Mark 947” after the biblical verse that says “if thine eye offends thee, pluck it out.”

Consulted on specific questions of dialogue during the filming, Addams clearly enjoys the rapport with the actors that the shoot created. When Garity jokes with Pace that his work in commercials might dry up as a result of “Soldier’s Girl,” Addams waits a beat and says, “There’s always Maybelline.”