| A Hole in One | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Directed by | Richard Ledes |
| Written by | Richard Ledes |
| Starring | Michelle Williams Meat Loaf Aday |
Release date |
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Running time | 97 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
A Hole in One is a 2004 film co-starring Michelle Williams and Meat Loaf. The film marked the feature debut of writer/director Richard Ledes. It received its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003. [1]
Anna (Michelle Williams) is a young woman in an American suburb in the early 1950s. She is disturbed by her family’s rejection of her brother, a World War II veteran who comes home shell shocked. The impressionable girl is lured into a relationship with Billy, a local mob boss. When Anna’s brother dies and she witnesses Billy murder a local nightclub owner, she is driven to the edge of sanity. She develops a fixation with mental health that drives her to seek out a transorbital lobotomy. Anna learns about the procedure through sensational newspapers and Life magazine, which advertises the operation as the new vogue in American medicine. Also, her small town is buzzing about it when Dr. Harold Ashton, the foremost practitioner of this brand of lobotomy, comes to town. He starts performing the “icepick lobotomy” on alcoholics, veterans, and other troubled outsiders.
Billy is concerned with his girlfriend's obsession. He directs his girlfriend to a fake clinic fronted by Tom, a Korean War veteran on Billy’s payroll who masquerades as a neurologist. Tom convinces Anna to delay the procedure and visit him that night. Tom and Anna share their traumas with one another and grow closer. Billy finds them together and sets off a final conflict that draws the film to a close.
The idea for A Hole in One was born out of a performance piece Ledes had staged at the American Fine Arts Gallery in SoHo in the early 1990s. The performance was based on the records of a WWII veteran who had experienced a psychotic break and for whom it had been recommended that he receive a lobotomy. Ledes conducted extensive research for the film over many years, including volunteering at an outpatient center for severely mentally ill. Additionally, he visited George Washington University, which holds the archives of Dr. Walter Freeman. [2]
Rather than doing a documentary on Freeman or case studies on mental illness, Ledes opted for fiction:
Ledes’ screenplay draws heavily on documents such as the New York Departmental of Mental Hygiene Annual Report of 1953. [2] In his DVD commentary for A Hole in One, Ledes mentions other insightful sources: Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness and Last Resort: Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness by Jack David Pressman. He also cites The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness by Jack El-Hai, which came out after A Hole in One, as a reliable reference point. [3]
Ledes has compared the character of Dr. Ashton to Dr. Strangelove. While he isn’t modeled on one historical person, he is derived from real-life figures. [3]
As of June 2014, the film scores 17% on Rotten Tomatoes from 12 reviews. [4]
Psychosurgery, also called neurosurgery for mental disorder (NMD), is the neurosurgical treatment of mental disorder. Psychosurgery has always been a controversial medical field. The modern history of psychosurgery begins in the 1880s under the Swiss psychiatrist Gottlieb Burckhardt. The first significant foray into psychosurgery in the 20th century was conducted by the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz who during the mid-1930s developed the operation known as leucotomy. The practice was enthusiastically taken up in the United States by the neuropsychiatrist Walter Freeman and the neurosurgeon James W. Watts who devised what became the standard prefrontal procedure and named their operative technique lobotomy, although the operation was called leucotomy in the United Kingdom. In spite of the award of the Nobel prize to Moniz in 1949, the use of psychosurgery declined during the 1950s. By the 1970s the standard Freeman-Watts type of operation was very rare, but other forms of psychosurgery, although used on a much smaller scale, survived. Some countries have abandoned psychosurgery altogether; in others, for example the US and the UK, it is only used in a few centres on small numbers of people with depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In some countries it is also used in the treatment of schizophrenia and other disorders.
A lobotomy, or leucotomy, is a form of neurosurgical treatment for psychiatric disorder or neurological disorder that involves severing connections in the brain's prefrontal cortex. The surgery causes most of the connections to and from the prefrontal cortex, the anterior part of the frontal lobes of the brain, to be severed.
Rose Marie "Rosemary" Kennedy was the eldest daughter born to Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. She was a sister of President John F. Kennedy and Senators Robert F. and Ted Kennedy.
The Glass Menagerie is a memory play by Tennessee Williams that premiered in 1944 and catapulted Williams from obscurity to fame. The play has strong autobiographical elements, featuring characters based on its author, his histrionic mother, and his mentally fragile sister. In writing the play, Williams drew on an earlier short story, as well as a screenplay he had written under the title of The Gentleman Caller.
António Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz, known as Egas Moniz, was a Portuguese neurologist and the developer of cerebral angiography. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern psychosurgery, having developed the surgical procedure leucotomy—better known today as lobotomy—for which he became the first Portuguese national to receive a Nobel Prize in 1949.
Walter Jackson Freeman II was an American physician who specialized in lobotomy.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a novel by Ken Kesey published in 1962. Set in an Oregon psychiatric hospital, the narrative serves as a study of institutional processes and the human mind, including a critique of psychiatry and a tribute to individualistic principles. It was adapted into the Broadway play One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Dale Wasserman in 1963. Bo Goldman adapted the novel into a 1975 film of the same name directed by Miloš Forman, which won five Academy Awards.
Dementia 13, known in the United Kingdom as The Haunted and the Hunted, is a 1963 independently made black-and-white horror-thriller film, written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and produced by Roger Corman. It was Coppola's feature film directorial debut. The film stars William Campbell and Luana Anders with Bart Patton, Mary Mitchell, and Patrick Magee. It was released in the United States by American International Pictures during the fall of 1963 as the bottom half of a double feature with Corman's X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes.
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A hole in one is a golf shot where a player hits the ball directly from the tee into the cup with one shot.
James Winston Watts was an American neurosurgeon, born in Lynchburg, Virginia. He was a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute as well as the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Watts is noteworthy for his professional partnership with the neurologist and psychiatrist Walter Freeman. The two became advocates and prolific practitioners of psychosurgery, specifically the lobotomy. Watts and Freeman wrote two books on lobotomies: Psychosurgery, Intelligence, Emotion and Social Behavior Following Prefrontal Lobotomy for Medical Disorders in 1942, and Psychosurgery in the Treatment of Mental Disorders and Intractable Pain in 1950.
Adamo Mario (Amarro) Fiamberti was the first to perform a transorbital lobotomy in 1937. Fiamberti was later named Director of the Psychiatric Hospital of Varese, when it was opened in 1964.
Zawedde "Zawe" Ashton is an English actress, narrator, playwright, and director. She is best known for her roles in the comedy dramas Fresh Meat and Not Safe for Work, the Netflix horror thriller film Velvet Buzzsaw and for her portrayal of Joyce Carol Vincent in Dreams of a Life (2011). She will join the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a villain in The Marvels (2023).
Psychosurgery is a surgical operation that destroys brain tissue in order to alleviate the symptoms of mental disorder. The lesions are usually, but not always, made in the frontal lobes. Tissue may be destroyed by cutting, burning, freezing, electric current or radiation. The first systematic attempt at psychosurgery is commonly attributed to the Swiss psychiatrist Gottlieb Burckhardt who operated on six patients in 1888. In 1889 Thomas Claye Shaw reported mental improvement in a case of General Paralysis of the Insane after a neurosurgical intervention. This led to a lively debate in the British Medical Journal on the usefulness of neurosurgery for the treatment of insanity. In the 1930s the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz developed a surgical technique for the treatment of mental illness and called it "leucotomy" or "psychosurgery". Moniz' technique was adapted and promoted by American neurologist Walter Freeman and his neurosurgeon colleague James W. Watts. They called their operation, where burr holes are drilled in the side of the skull and the white matter is sliced through in order to sever the connections between the frontal lobes and deeper structures in the brain, lobotomy. In the United Kingdom it became known as the standard Freeman-Watts prefrontal leucotomy. British psychiatrist William Sargant met Freeman on a visit to the United States and on his return to England encouraged doctors at the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol to instigate a programme of psychosurgery.
Richard Ledes is an American filmmaker and writer based in New York City, best known for his 2012 feature film drama Fred Won't Move Out about Alzheimer's disease starring Elliott Gould and Fred Melamed.
Psychosurgery, also called neurosurgery for mental disorder or functional neurosurgery, is surgery in which brain tissue is destroyed with the aim of alleviating the symptoms of mental disorder. It was first used in modern times by Gottlieb Burckhardt in 1891, but only in a few isolated instances, not becoming more widely used until the 1930s following the work of Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz. The 1940s was the decade when psychosurgery was most popular, largely due to the efforts of American neurologist Walter Freeman; its use has been declining since then. Freeman’s particular form of psychosurgery, the lobotomy, was last used in the 1970s, but other forms of psychosurgery, such as the cingulotomy and capsulotomy have survived.
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