PORT ANGELES — When Tess Gallagher of Port Angeles first read the script for “Birdman,” this year’s Best Picture Academy Award winner, she found it crazy — in a thrilling way.
“It just gets wilder as it goes along,” she recalled of the screenplay cowritten by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, recipient of an armload of Oscars — Best Director and Best Original Screenplay along with Best Picture — on Sunday night.
The latest exhilarating rise on that ride came around 9 p.m. Sunday when Inarritu, addressing the Academy, the Dolby Theatre audience in Hollywood and viewers in 100 nations around the world, said:
“There are so many people to thank. I want to thank Tess Gallagher, which is the widow of Raymond Carver, who allowed us to use the Raymond Carver story, which is incredible.”
“Isn’t it something? I was so happy,” Gallagher said Monday morning.
She watched the Oscars with a houseful of friends, all of whom “just erupted” as “Birdman,” a movie that opens with a Carver poem and then wends its way through one of his stories about love, took the movie industry’s most coveted prize.
“Birdman” opened last November at Port Townsend’s Uptown Theatre and had a good three-week run.
Next it went to the Rose Theatre, also in Port Townsend, where it played to sellout crowds in the Starlight Room.
Now it’s in the midst of yet another run at the Rose, 235 Taylor St., and owner Rocky Friedman said it will stay through Tuesday, March 3.
The limelight has shined hard on Michael Keaton, whose character Riggan is a Hollywood actor who used to play a superhero named Birdman.
Costars Emma Stone and Edward Norton blazed too, winning Oscar nominations alongside Keaton’s.
But “Birdman’s” foundation is What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, Carver’s short story.
Riggan is staging the piece on Broadway in a bid to do something meaningful; to reinvent himself.
Inarritu needed Gallagher’s permission to use the story, so he contacted her — and found she was already familiar with his movies including “Babel,” “21 Grams” and “Amores Perros.”
Gallagher said she’d even held a film festival of her own, watching one Inarritu movie after another and becoming an admirer of his unconventional style.
Once the two met, they became fast friends: Both are lovers of poetry and of humor, just like Carver was. Gallagher gave the Mexican filmmaker a shirt that had belonged to Carver — and when Inarritu won the Directors Guild Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement earlier this month, he donned the shirt for the ceremony.
Carver lived the last 10 years of his life with Gallagher in Port Angeles; he died in 1988 of lung cancer at age 50.
He is buried at Ocean View Cemetery, where a marble stone bears his poem Late Fragment.
That poem, also about love, appears on the screen at the beginning of “Birdman.”
Gallagher and Carver had just gotten together when he wrote What We Talk about When We Talk about Love.
They moved in 1979 to Tucson, Ariz., where Gallagher taught at the University of Arizona, and where Carver had a writing room in their little house.
“He was still getting sober,” she remembered.
In his writing room, he composed that story, about a couple he and Gallagher knew.
Many more short stories and, later, poetry would come, as Carver remained sober and moved with Gallagher to Port Angeles.
She watched her husband reinvent himself through writing, living and loving, as he writes in Gravy, another poem composed late in his life.
With “Birdman,” she believes, “Ray continues to be more and more alive.”
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
