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.

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.” It was Baldwin’s chameleon-like ability to disappear into his characters no matter how complex – a talent that recently earned him an Academy Award® nomination for his performance in “The Cooler” plus Tony and Emmy Award nominations and a Golden Globe Award for the revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire” – that drew Murphy.

For Baldwin the challenge lay in bringing to life a man who at first glance is a horror show. “He’s an alcoholic, self-destructive teacher who is unhappy and disconnected from his family,” sums up Baldwin. Yet Baldwin also saw the piercing agony at the soul of the character. “Norman’s in a place where he has completely stopped trying in his marriage and as a father, which is really tragic. I think that’s got to be one of the most painful places to be in life -- when your marriage is so toxic and so corrosive that you abandon your child to get away from it.”

Baldwin also was drawn by the opportunity to work with Annette Bening. “Hers is a very challenging role and nobody comes apart better on film than Annette. She is the greatest at creating a very real psychological context and she’s so convincing as Deirdre because there is both a sweet and a sour side to her performance. She’s not just nutty and difficult and intense – she’s also charming and funny and passionate. The scenes I had with her were just remarkable,” Baldwin says.

For Ryan Murphy it was the combined skill and passion of his entire cast that created a kind of charged atmosphere on the set – an atmosphere that seemed to bring to life the emotional electricity that defines life for the Burroughs and the Finches. He says: “I felt so fortunate to have such first-class actors and I loved setting them free with the material and watching them go, seeing what they did with it. It was fantastic.”

He continues: “This was a really hard movie to make but also a very joyous one. I think it’s rare when everybody sees a project almost in the exact same way yet all the people we brought together in this cast did that. We laughed a lot, even though the story could be so dark at times. I suppose that only in this movie could you be doing a scene with two teenagers playing with an electroshock therapy apparatus and think it was one of the calmer moments.”