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.

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. Ryan Murphy set out on a quest to find someone who could embody the contrasting dark wit and upbeat spirit of the narrator of the film – the naïve boy with hairdresser dreams who is thrust into sexual, emotional and familial chaos -- yet also an actor who could truly make the part his own. “Most of all I needed someone who people would care deeply about because the audience has to follow Augusten without hesitation into these incredible events,” notes Murphy.

This was one role for which Murphy held auditions and it was during these that he came upon Joe Cross, an 18 year-old who made his feature film debut as a child in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Wide Awake” and has gone on to a promising career. ” Joe Cross was the only person who read for the role that made me cry,” the director recalls. Adds Dede Gardner: “Joe was so vulnerable and so real that you immediately cared about him. He enabled you to feel Augusten’s emotions but at the same time he really made you laugh at the absurd situation this poor kid is in.”

Cross had just started his Freshman year at Trinity College in Connecticut when he received the script. He stayed up until three in the morning finishing it and was completely riveted by the role of Augusten. “I thought it was one of the best parts for someone my age I had ever seen,” he says. “But it was also quite daunting because I knew I would want to do justice to him and to the screenplay.”

Ryan Murphy posed the tough question to Cross of just how he would aim to do that. “When I first met Ryan, he asked me what I had in common with Augusten – how would I be able to understand him?” recalls Cross. “It was such a valid question. First of all, I am not gay and I had a very normal upbringing with kind, loving, supportive parents. But, I had just spent my first semester away at college and it had been hard being away from my family and my closest friends for the first time. I made the comparison that college is also a chaotic place with lots of unusual people around – just like at the Finch house – but at the same time you’re really completely alone.”

Once cast, Cross faced the enormous task of taking his character through a 180 degree transformation from shocked, repressed child to humor-fueled survivor of a whole slew of life’s most devastating problems. “Augusten changes drastically,” he notes. “At the beginning of the film, he’s just an innocent child but then he has to deal with all these very adult situations: his mother’s psychosis, his father’s alcoholism, his parents’ separation, the involvement of the Finches in his life and then, his relationship with Neil Bookman. What’s so interesting is that Augusten is someone who so craves normalcy but he winds up in absolute bedlam and has to find his way through.”

Cross began by meeting at length with the grown up Augusten Burroughs, who openly shared his innermost perspective with the actor. “I really tried to explain to Joe where I was coming from,” recalls Burroughs, “that I was very shy and kind of uptight and concerned about my hair and my nice polyester clothes being lint free – and then I walked into the Finch’s house and realized it was sink or swim. If I was going to survive, I had to embrace my surroundings.”

To further get ready for the role, Cross also had to research the 1970’s, an era that had passed before the young actor was even born. “I watched videotapes of shows like ‘Johnny Carson’ and ‘Sonny and Cher’ and looked through books of 70s fashion just to get a better understanding of the feeling of the times,” he says.

In preparing psychologically for the role, Cross explored each of the intricate relationships his character has with both his biological and “adoptive” families. At the heart of Augusten’s life and unending traumas is his mother, Deirdre – and he can’t seem to shake her profound influence no matter what she does to drive him away. “Augusten’s relationship with Deirdre is really interesting because she’s constantly throwing him to the curb and dismissing him and not being the mother that he wants or needs -- yet he always goes back to her,” says Cross. “He has an unconditional love for her but in the end, he’s forced to see that she’s never going to be there for him and he has to move on. And as hard as it is imagine . . . I really do think he comes to forgive her.”

Meanwhile, desperately seeking someone to fill in the gaping hole left by his mom, Augusten finds it in the most unlikely of places: in Agnes Finch, the kibble-eating, cleaning-averse wife of his mother’s psychiatrist. Despite her mysterious ways, it is Agnes who gives Augusten hope for the future, advising him that “dreams can get you through the hard times.” “I think surprisingly, Agnes ends up being the mother that Augusten doesn’t have,” allows Cross. “She and Augusten form a bond, and when she gifts him with the treasured Handbook of Cosmetology, it’s the most selfless thing that anyone has done for him in a very long time – if ever. The fact that someone is interested in helping him obtain his dreams is a very important moment for him.”

In the freaky-deaky inner sanctum of the Finch household, Augusten also finds himself drawn to two of the family’s most unusual members: disco-loving, tough-talking teenaged daughter Natalie, who becomes his closest friend; and the disturbed but alluring Neil Bookman who seduces the teenaged Augusten. For Cross, Augusten’s under-age relationship with Bookman the pedophile is one of the most heartrending aspects of his coming of age. As written for the screen by Ryan Murphy, their unsettling alliance isn’t black and white, but filled with both clearly unethical behavior and legitimate emotional connection.

“Bookman is such a tragic character,” Joe Cross observes. “I think he’s probably the loneliest person in the story. Everybody has thrown Bookman away. But in an incredibly twisted way, I think he becomes another father figure to Augusten, the one adult to whom he can relate. Augusten can commiserate with Bookman about Finch and he can complain to him about his problems. Bookman gives him the attention that nobody else is giving him. It’s bittersweet because by the time Augusten realizes that he really does love Bookman, he has gone away and there is no way to find him. Bookman never knows that one piece of information that would have made him so happy.”

For all the madness and mayhem that young Augusten endures, and for all his run- ins with sex, drugs and insanity before he’s even grown peach fuzz, Joe Cross wanted to make sure that the character is never seen from a “poor-me” perspective – something he believes is key to understanding the poignancy of both the real Augusten Burroughs and the on-screen character. “I didn’t want it to ever come across that Augusten feels likes a victim or is self pitying, because he’s not,” says Cross. “He’s a very strong person and I think his story is about the idea that if you are capable of forgiveness you are also able to survive and endure through the most unbelievable things.”