The Dollar General
The Dollar General is a film inspired by Daniel Fish’s 2010 stage production of Clifford Odets’ Paradise Lost. Using actors and themes from that production, Fish stripped the play of most of its language and inserted new material (from John Milton, The Phil Donahue Show, Ayn Rand, Sesame Street). The movie, shot in an abandoned Ford dealership in upstate New York, reframes Odets’ depression-era living room drama to reveal one building’s transition from mid-twentieth century auto business to twenty-first century Dollar Store.
Artists Involved: Karl Bury, David Chandler, Stephanie Roth Haberle, Thomas Jay Ryan, Michael Rudko, and T. Ryder Smith.
Lead Artist: DANIEL FISH is a New York based artist working in theatre, opera and film. He received his BS in 1989 from the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University, where he was exposed to many diverse ways of making live performance. Recently, Fish has been creating new work in theatre and film from sources as varied as Shakespeare’s plays, Hollywood melodrama, The Phil Donahue Show, and Elliott Smith’s music . Last spring his A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, based on audio recordings of David Foster Wallace reading his work, played a sold-out run at The Chocolate Factory. Fish has taught directing and design at the Yale School of Drama, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Princeton University, University of California San Diego, and Bard College. This fall he will adapt and direct House for Sale by Jonathan Franzen produced by The Transport Group (The New Duke/ October 2012), and be Resident Artist at Baryshinikov Arts Center.