Edgar Oliver’s show Helen & Edgar, the spoken memoir of his terrifying Savannah childhood, was a smash hit at the Public Theater in 2012. The performances were sold out and the reviews were glowing. Ben Brantley at the New York Times called it “utterly absorbing and moving … Mr. Oliver has developed a cult following as a spell-casting raconteur, who sounds as if he learned to speak in the crypt of a Hammer horror movie …”

This fall, we’ll create the movie version of Helen & Edgar. 

Edgar will perform the show in Savannah for the first time, before a hometown crowd. Helen herself will fly in from Italy to join Edgar, and we’ll find she has a voice every bit as strange and sepulchral as his. But where, they both want to know, do their voices come from? They can’t recall a time when they didn’t speak like this. While searching out their old haunts in the moss-shrouded city, they’ll uncover new secrets of their unimaginably dark childhood, and of the madness in their family, which reaches back for generations. 

Their story will be told through Edgar’s performance; through cinematic recreations of Edgar’s childhood; through talks with Moth-founder George Dawes Green, through memories of old schoolmates, through an array old photographs and videos. 

Helen & Edgar will be vibrant new kind of movie-making. Part memory play, part concert film, part documentary. It will chronicle a mother’s descent into insanity. It will be a portrait of Savannah’s deviousness and unearthly beauty, and a carnival procession of surreal characters. But mostly Helen & Edgar will be the celebration of an unbreakable iron bond between brother and sister: how they endured their perilous childhood and made a glorious escape to Paris, and how they’ve finally tapped into the source of their revelatory, intertwined voices, and come to flourish as artists—Edgar as a playwright and Moth raconteur, Helen as a brilliant painter.

The film will be a creation of Vast Shipwreck Productions, in collaboration with Mason Holdings. Green will co-direct with Kristjan Thor, acclaimed director of the films Astraea and Diving Normal. Our producer is Susan Chamberlin.