Logline:
The enigmatic southern writer, Flannery O’ Connor, shocks the literary world with her grotesque fiction while battling a debilitating disease… and her mother.
Synopsis:
Flannery is the dramatic story of author Flannery O’Connor whose unorthodox genius secured her standing in 20th Century American literary history. A Georgia native, born in 1925 and raised a Roman Catholic in the Protestant South, O’Connor’s works depict the world and what she called the “Christ-haunted” South in all its comic and horrendous incongruity.
The screenplay for Flannery reveals the person Mary Flannery O’Connor, who so self-effacingly said, “I write every day for at least two hours, and I spend the rest of the time largely in the society of ducks.” At her death in 1964 of lupus erythematosus, Flannery O’Connor owned forty peacocks that overran the farm where she lived in Milledgeville, Georgia. The focus of the script is Flannery’s relationship with her mother, Regina Cline O’Connor, who she lived with after being diagnosed with lupus at the age of twenty-five. In spite of their rocky alliance and Flannery’s feelings of being a “displaced person” in her myopic social strata, Flannery O’Connor was triumphantly able to create her remarkable fiction. With seemingly commonplace surroundings, O’Connor was able to explore human obsession and create characters not soon forgotten.
The script captures the essence of Flannery O’Connor and the mystery that surrounded her inspirations. Flannery weaves a complex story of the writer and her prose. Flannery is a tribute to one of the 20th Century’s great writers.