Slain Filmmaker's Work Shines On

By Carl Glassman
POSTED FEB. 2, 2007

The day before the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, last month, Andy Ostroy, husband of the slain actress and filmmaker Adrienne Shelly, walked down the middle of Main Street, tossing his wife’s ashes into the air. The next day he scattered more remains in and around the theater where the film that Shelly wrote and directed was about to premier, to much acclaim.

“Not only was Adrienne with me the entire trip, but her spirit was soon all over Park City,” recalled Ostroy, a 15-year Tribeca resident. “I’d like to think that somehow she was aware of her tremendous success at the festival, and that on some level she got to experience the joy and enormous sense of pride that it would’ve brought her.” Shelly, who was 40 when she died last November, had found success as an actress in independent films, most notably with the director Hal Hartley. But her passion lay behind the camera as a screenwriter and director.

Two previous films that she wrote and directed failed to gain wide distribution, and Shelly’s hopes were pinned on her latest movie, “Waitress,” a romantic comedy that she wrote and directed, and also acted in alongside Keri Russell and Cheryl Hines.

Just weeks after Shelly’s horrific and much publicized murder in Greenwich Village in November, allegedly at the hands of a construction worker who staged the crime to look like suicide by hanging, Sundance announced it had accepted the film.

Following the premier of “Waitress,” to a packed theater of 1,300, Fox Searchlight bought it. It was a wish that Shelly would never know had come true.

“You go into the dictionary and you look up ‘bittersweet,’ you can’t get more bittersweet than this,” said Ostroy, seated for an interview in the comfortably untidy Varick Street loft he shared with Shelly, his wife of four years, and their 3-year-old daughter Sophie. “This is really the fulfillment of a career-long dream for her. And everything she dreamed for Sundance came true, and then some.” Determined to honor his wife’s talent and passion for filmmaking—and help other women who share the same dream—Ostroy, who runs a marketing consulting firm, established the Adrienne Shelly Foundation (adrienneshellyfoundation.org). Money raised by the foundation could go towards a scholarship for a female student or help a woman filmmaker complete a movie, or provide opportunities to showcase scripts. “A lot of women like Adrienne want to make the leap from acting to directing,” he said. To help him find worthy recipients, largely through existing programs, Ostroy has assembled an advisory board of distinguished actors, directors, producers and academics. Following the tragedy, Ostroy said, he was deluged with calls from friends and business associates who wanted to donate money in Shelly’s memory. For the first hellish week, he put them off. “It was very hard to think about where I’m going to step next, let alone figure out charitable kinds of things,” he said.

But as his mind began to clear, the idea came to him.

“What Adrienne really felt most passionate about—and when you see ‘Waitress’ you’ll understand who she was as an artist—was filmmaking and women making films, and the opportunities they have, or don’t.”

Ostroy announced the foundation following the Sundance premier of “Waitress,” and  again at a “pie breakfast” the next morning, with pies donated by Ron Silver, owner of Bubby’s in Tribeca. (The movie is about a pregnant southern waitress and brilliant pie maker, Keri Russell, who tries to escape an abusive husband through an affair with her doctor.)

Getting the foundation off the ground, Ostroy said, may have been part of his healing. “It enabled me to fixate on something good amidst something that was so horrible, and still is so horrible.”

But that healing, he said, also is made more difficult by the continuing attention on the film. The father of three children from a previous marriage, Ostroy said that his wish for his family would be that the “film went to Sundance, didn’t get sold, end of story.”

But for Shelly, he added, “I want to be standing on the stage of the Kodak Theater in March of 2008, accepting an award on her behalf.”

Indeed, there are more Shelly scripts,  and Ostroy said he will keep pursuing his mission to honor the filmmaker’s memory and talent by shepherding those films, too, into theatrical release.

“I’m a big Jimi Hendrix fan. The guy’s still putting out albums 35 years after his death,” Ostroy said. “So the Adrienne Shelly story isn’t over just yet.”

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