1. ABOUT THE PRODUCTION At once a blistering comedy and a deeply moving human drama, RUNNING WITH SCISSORS is the mesmerizing tale of how a young man survived a nightmare childhood – while keeping his sense of humor and his sense of forgiveness intact. 2. TURNING PERSONAL MEMORIES INTO A MOVIE The film depicts Burroughs’ unsettling, humor-filled and highly personal recollections of growing up under the most berserk and often shocking circumstances. 3. HOW TO CAST LIFE’S MOST ECCENTRIC CHARACTERS As he was writing, Ryan Murphy tried to avoid the temptation of envisioning any particular actors in the roles he was creating. “I wanted them to truly be their own people,” he explains. 4. DEIRDRE BURROUGHS: ANNETTE BENING AS A MOTHER WITH DELUSIONS OF FAME AND FREEDOM For Ryan Murphy, one of the most vital characters in the film was always Deirdre Burroughs, who not only drives the events of the story but emerges as a deeply complicated and fascinating woman of her times beneath her often painfully hilarious words and actions. 5. AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS: JOSEPH CROSS AS A WRY TRAVELER THROUGH A CHILDHOOD HELL Casting a young actor to play Augusten Burroughs would become one of the first major cruxes of the production. 6. INTO THE FINCH FAMILY HOUSEHOLD: BRIAN COX, JOSEPH FIENNES, EVAN RACHEL WOOD, GWYNETH PALTROW AND JILL CLAYBURGH AS THE AMERICAN FAMILY TURNED UPSIDE DOWN This film tells the story of Augusten Burroughs who is just barely a teenager, when his mother abandons him to the care of her shrink, Dr. Finch. 7. NORMAN BURROUGHS: ALEC BALDWIN AS A MATHEMATICIAN WHOSE FAMILY JUST DOESN’T ADD UP For the role of Augusten’s father Norman, whose departure from the Burroughs family precipitates a devastating chain of events for his son, Ryan Murphy right away envisioned Alec Baldwin, with whom he had worked on an episode of “Nip/Tuck.” 8. AN AMERICAN GOTHIC, 1970’s STYLE: ABOUT THE FILM’S DESIGN The next challenge that lay in front of Ryan Murphy was creating a wholly unique visual world for the Burroughs and the Finches to inhabit.

HOW TO CAST LIFE’S MOST ECCENTRIC CHARACTERS

As he was writing, Ryan Murphy tried to avoid the temptation of envisioning any particular actors in the roles he was creating. “I wanted them to truly be their own people,” he explains. But once he finished the script, Murphy and Burroughs had fun sitting down together and coming up with a list of their ultimate “dream” cast. Astonishingly, across the board, each and every actor from that list eventually said yes.

Murphy knew there were no easy roles in the bunch. Without exception, each character in the film is rife with roiling emotions, flagrant contradictions and deep-seated problems – so he would need highly accomplished actors capable of embodying both the weird and the wonderful simultaneously, with both a comic tinge and a nuanced realism. “Usually characters are either good guys or bad guys but in this story, they’re very much both. I think actors love to play that because it’s so challenging. But I also knew I had to be prepared when I met with these actors,” he says. “I went to each of them and begged for a meeting. Then I would tell them why they I thought they were perfect, why they couldn’t turn me down and why I wouldn’t take no. The fact that I was able to convince this incredibly talented group of people, whose work I have long idolized, to be in my very first movie was thrilling.”

Producer Dede Gardner believes it was Murphy’s passion and page-turning screenplay that led the ensemble to take a chance on a first-time director. “Ryan’s talent is undeniable but he had never directed a motion picture before,” she says. “His calling card had to be the script and the words on the page that defined the roles. Every single character had so many dimensions - a beginning, a middle and an end. The script opened the door to the actors and then Ryan ushered them in.”