New Year for Frances Glessner Lee

 2023 is starting out wonderfully with editing our followup documentary to Of Dolls & Murder on Frances Glessner Lee, Murder in a Nutshell. Other projects and life got in the way but 2023 is going to be Frances' year. Reach out with any questions! 

Frances Glessner Lee Documentary Film June 2021 Update

 

I'm happy you care enough about Frances Glessner Lee to check in and see how the documentary film - a follow up to Of Dolls & Murder - is going! Thank you.

As a recap: we tried for years and years to get funding for this documentary but no foundation nor film funding organization would help. We went the traditional and non-traditional routes but still no luck.

As much as people say the support female filmmakers and stories about women in science, something doesn't add up.

Still, we persevere. I fit in re-edits whenever I can. Funding would make this film amazing but for now, I'm just doing everything in my power to keep Murder in a Nutshell: The Frances Glessner Lee Story alive. Frances deserves at least that much. 😉

I find some unexpected moments of sheer joy and wonderment as I go about re-editing. I'm glad we didn't give up on this film project. I almost did, but filmmaker Matt Ehling said, "C'mon it's all there. We just need to tease it out more." And so we are. 

Wish me luck and keep the questions coming! 

Happy Birthday Frances Glessner Lee!

Happy Birthday, Frances Glessner Lee! (March 25, 1878 - January 27, 1962)

Some call her the Mother of Forensics but I prefer the Patron Saint of Forensics.

She changed the world of criminology with her Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death and so much more. 

My documentary filmmaking team and I are working on getting her story out this year. I've been working hard on a new edit of Murder in a Nutshell: The Frances Glessner Lee Story. It's a bit different than the rough cut that screened at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. 

To honor Frances on her birthday, I recommend that you make something miniature, or solve a murder or watch our first documentary film on her Of Dolls & Murder. 

A preview of the work in progress.

Of Dolls & Murder documentary film shoot at the Body Farm in Knoxville.

Remember how we went to the Body Farm when we were filming Of Dolls & Murder? This article caught my eye. Turns out, an undergraduate researcher in forensic anthropology in Australia discovered that arms move quite a bit after death. 

They used time-elapsed cameras to film the decomposition of a donor body in 30-minute intervals over 17 months. They were astounded by how much the arms moved and this discovery may be a key discovery to help advance forensic anthropology. 

I wonder what Frances Glessner Lee would say about that?

At the same site as this article you can read more about Frances Glessner Lee here and here. 

Frances Glessner Lee and the Nutshell Studies on BBC Radio 3

More in the honor of Frances Glessner Lee's birthday! 

I was interviewed not long ago for BBC Radio 3 about Frances and her Nutshells. The entire episode is on dioramas - Between the Ears, Diorama Drama. The Nutshell section starts at about 24:50. I love how much the UK is waking up to Frances and the questions I get asked from the UK - so thoughtful and full of wonderment toward Frances Glessner Lee. 

I gave the producers of the show a bunch of photos to use, but unfortunately they didn't add an online gallery. I think it is truly difficult to do justice to the Nutshells with out seeing them, so I've added my photos of Barn - the spotlight Nutshell. Interestingly, this was the first Nutshell created. Frances Glessner Lee's grandson Charlie told me how he repurposed the wood from an actual rundown barn on the Rocks estate to work on it with the carpenter Ralph Mosher and his grandmother. 

What do you think of the BBC's take on what could have happened in Barn?  

Happy Birthday Frances Glessner Lee (Part 2)

In honor of Frances Glessner Lee's birthday week, let's talk more about how her story is being embraced! There are so many ways to tell her story: books, music, tv shows, podcasts, movies, more books, poetry, fan fiction, education material, your own Nutshells. The lists goes on and on. 

Once I was at a screening for Of Dolls & Murder and someone in the audience asked me I knew that I've started a cult of personality with my film. Certainly, I didn't start it but I'm thrilled that people want to know more and want to have a part in telling her story. 

In my last post, I wrote about the new documentary film coming out about her and the newest book. 

There's another book you should know about, if you don't already: Rachel Monroe's Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime and Obsession. I bet you can guess who one of the four true stories is about. I love this book and I can't recommend it enough. 

It's always a little funny to me when a procedural show uses dollhouses because my phone blows up with messages from people wanting to make sure I know about it. (I always know thanks to google alerts.) Seriously, if I had a dollar for every time someone told me that season seven of CSI had a Miniature Serial Killer - I would never need film funding again. 

Recently, NCIS did an episode In a Nutshell where Frances Glessner Lee gets a lot of love. What a trip it is for her great grandkids to run across shows like this. Check it out! 

Happy Birthday Frances Glessner Lee!

Frances Glessner Lee March 25, 1878 – January 27, 1962

Happy Birthday to the Patron Saint of Forensics. I love how much love she is getting these days. The world has been slow to wake up to the genius of Frances - so I'm thrilled when she gets the credit she deserves. In honor of FGL's bday, I want to showcase some exciting stuff in the tiny world of big time murder.

My documentary film  Murder in the Nutshell: The Frances Glessner Lee Story that I'm making with John Dehn and Matt Ehling is being re-edited. 

Matt and I went back to the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner to interview Dr. Mary Ripple and Bruce Goldfarb. We would have been done with this second documentary years ago, but we were unable to secure any funding. (Strange how funders say they want to fund projects about women by women, but somehow the answer was always no.) So Matt and I decided to wrap up the film and try to finish the edit in 2020, without funding. 

Author Bruce Goldfarb talks about the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death for the forthcoming documentary on Frances Glessner Lee.

Filmmaker Susan Marks and Frances Glessner Lee biographer Bruce Goldfarb in the Nutshell room. Oh if these walls could talk...

The first official biography on Frances Glessner Lee!

This year a new book came out about Frances - and from what I heard,  more books are in the works! 

If you haven't already, please pick up Bruce Goldfarb's book 18 Tiny Deaths: The Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics! You will absolutely love this book. Reach out to Bruce with any questions for your bookclub or interviews. 

This is just part 1! More post coming in honor of Frances Glessner Lee during her birthday week.

Side note:

We are completely out of stock of the Of Dolls & Murder DVD, but feel free to watch it online! 

Since we are in the middle of a pandemic - let's just stay home and read and watch movies and tv, shall we? Stay safe!