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.

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. The idea was to capture in the film’s look the very essence of Augusten’s memories – an adolescent’s ultra-vivid take on an emotionally askew and mentally unhinged universe set against the stylistic funk and spiritual yearning of 70s America.

Murphy knew it wouldn’t be easy to nail the film’s tone or to get the exact right blend of the comically macabre with the poignantly true. So he put together a trusted team that includes cinematographer Christopher Baffa, production designer Richard Sherman and costume designer Lou Eyrich – each of whom he’d worked with on “Nip/Tuck” -- and collaborated closely with them in creating his vision of an American Gothic, 70s style.

Says Dede Gardner: “Ryan was extremely involved in creating the overall look of the movie. He had a lot of ideas in his head before even taking his first meeting with the crew. And when it came to the Finch house, he didn’t shy away from making a statement. I think he felt that this was an extreme life with extreme surroundings so why not display that, have fun with it, let it be dramatic and become a compelling part of the story.”

The Finch house would clearly be the visual heart of Augusten’s coming-of-age, and Murphy put an intense amount of creative energy into bringing it to life. He began with Burroughs’ memories of clutter and constant motion but then took off with his own vision. “I’ve always been taken with the cartoons of Edward Gorey so that was a big influence,” Murphy says. “Mostly, I wanted the house to be a character, to be its own special element. But it was nerve-wracking when Augusten visited the set because he might have said ‘it wasn’t at all like that.’ Instead, he said it seemed ‘shockingly familiar,’ which I loved. He seemed to feel that we got the essence of the house.”

In bringing the sets to life, production designer Richard Sherman (whose recent credits include the acclaimed “Kinsey”) found the unabashed madness inherent in the character’s lives liberating. “They’re all so crazy that it sort of opened the full gamut in terms of design,” he notes. “We were able to do wild, fun things and have a really good time with them. The audience will probably see some and not others, but the cast was very aware of them and it helped to create a very strong artistic environment.”

Sherman began with Augusten Burrough’s tidy childhood home, which reflects the state of Deirdre’s mind before the crash-and-burn of her marriage. “The Burroughs’ home was highly art directed which I thought it needed,” Sherman explains. “Young Augusten’s life with his mother is very methodical and structured and you see that Deirdre has created a very clean, pristine environment. At this point, she is very ‘thought out’ and knows exactly what she’s going to do with her life. The house is very reflective of her and stands in stark contrast to the world to come.”

Sherman used a mid-Century private home in Los Angeles’ trendy Hancock Park as a stand-in for the Burroughs’ early 70s residence – but he eschewed all modern touches. “The important thing was to create a look that would be specific to this movie and not have it be a 2005 interpretation of the 1970’s,” he comments. “Through the use of color and authentic furniture, we were able to come up with a look that was truly unique to the 70’s – one you wouldn’t see today. The colors we used are very specific to that time and not popular now. It was a completely different color scheme and a different way of life.”

Then came the piece de resistance for Sherman: the Finch home, which he knew from his extensive conversations with Ryan Murphy had to astound and provoke audiences from the second they see it on the screen. “It had to be an absolute abomination of a house - shocking pink, with clothes and rotting boats and weird little plastic dolls and bits of garbage piled up outside,” says the designer. “It had to jolt you before Augusten even enters it.” For the interior, Sherman went all out in creating an iconic vision of total domestic chaos. The film’s entire art department toiled to transform the interior of a perfectly nice Los Angeles house into the wreckage that is the Finch household. After learning from Augusten Burroughs that Agnes Finch was an inveterate tag sale shopper, Sherman lined every last inch of the house with absurd objects seemingly acquired without reason. “There are animal heads and stuffed birds and crazy horns all over the walls and tabletops – things that presumably each person would bring in and dump someplace. Wherever they landed, that’s where they stayed,” says Sherman.

But he also left a few heart-rending reminders that the Finch house had once seen better times. “I always felt there had to be a time when things were good,” says Sherman. “So we mixed in elegant, stately furniture with the piles of junk.”

Most of all Sherman riffed off of Ryan Murphy’s concept of using Edward Gorey as an inspiration. One of America’s most renowned illustrators and a master of the territory where the macabre meets the mundane, Gorey became famous for his sketches of death and dismal behavior in stuffy settings – turning unspeakable horrors into irresistible cartoons. “There is a lot of Gorey’s influence in the details of the Finch house,” says Sherman. “We have highly textured draperies over wallpaper that’s also textured and Oriental carpets one on top of the other piled up everywhere. Everywhere you look there’s a plethora of colors, patterns and layers.”

While everyone else was going out on a limb design-wise, cinematographer Christopher Baffa was doing the opposite – pulling back to create a very subtle, yet shifting, emotional mood. “When we first started discussing the film,” Baffa recalls, “Ryan wanted to create a feeling that would mirror the journey of Augusten as he goes into the increasingly bizarre environment of the Finches. But one of the things we talked about is that the material is so extreme, the characters so heightened and the situations so odd that it was important that the visuals never try to compete. We chose to keep things more naturalistic so that the audience has something they can identify with when everything else is spiraling out of control.”

He continues: “So the nucleus of the photography was normalcy - nothing too extreme. The palette shifts very subtly from warmer palettes when Augusten’s a young boy to cooler as we progress into the Finch home where things become a little darker and not quite as safe.”

Throughout, a key visual theme became mirrors, which are used throughout the film to literally reflect the characters’ emotional isolation in innovative ways. “For example, we photographed a scene with young Augusten on the bed having a conversation with his mother as she’s looking into her mirror preparing to go out. It was a way of putting them both in the same frame as they were having a conversation. They were visually linked, but it was also an interesting way to show their differences and highlight their similarities,” says Baffa.

Another mirror shot involves Deirde and Norman in the middle of a fierce argument. “We did a slow, continuous zoom onto Deirdre’s face and basically ended up cutting Norman’s head off as he was yelling at her. I love that shot because visually Norman goes right out of the reflection. You’re left with Deirdre staring at her own reflection again – but in a very different way,” he says.

Throughout Baffa consulted closely not only with Ryan Murphy but with production designer Richard Sherman and costume designer Lou Eyrich. “Both Richard and Lou understand photography, so we had a lot of conversations about tonality and how to carry out the warm to cool slide in terms of the overall visuals,” he says.

Meanwhile, costume designer Lou Eyrich was busy coming up with designs that would do for each character what Sherman was doing for their house. Eyrich began the immense job by building concept boards for each individual character, edifying numerous details – such as Dr. Finch’s flowered bow-ties and vintage Gucci loafers and Neil Bookman’s down and dirty leather look – and sketching out how their costumes would change and evolve in the film’s decade-long time frame.

The character whose look shifts the most is Augusten Burroughs himself. “Joe Cross had 32 changes indicating Augusten’s transition from a clean-cut, tidy, well put together young man with matching outfits to trying to figure out who he was during the years at the Finch house, which involves a lot of experimenting,” says Eyrich.

Likewise, Deirdre Burroughs undergoes a major fashion transformation in the course of the story. “Her wardrobe moves from that of a suburban mom and wife of a university professor to someone who wears caftans and has lots of African masks on the walls. She starts to wear more leather, feathers and beads in her clothing as she tries to find her own creative identity,” the designer notes.

Some of Eyrich’s favorite designs were, ironically, for frumpy Agnes Finch. “I loved dressing Jill Clayburgh,” she confesses. “Ryan, Jill and I all agreed on who Agnes was and Jill just made the clothes come to life. We didn’t want Agnes to look bag lady-ish – just disheveled and not particularly concerned with her appearance. The hard part was that because of her tall, slim frame, everything Jill put on looked elegant, which was not at all what we were after. She’d put on an ugly, drab dress and it would look like vintage couture, so we often had to do two or three fittings to get it just right.” Eyrich got another creative jolt from creating Natalie’s wardrobe, which is as wildly flashy as Agnes’s is withdrawn. Here, Eyrich was able to really have fun with an authentic 70s sense of style, including hot pants and mile-high wedges. “Ryan and I talked about how we didn’t want Natalie to feel too styled. But you could put Evan in anything and she made it look good – throw on some hot pants and a little swim top and ‘boom,’ you’d have it,” she says. “I think Evan had a lot of fun with her clothes and she could wear those high- waisted pants perfectly. As for the towering platform shoes, she put them on and walked out of her trailer as though she’d been wearing them all of her life!”

But while the main cast seemed to feel utterly in sync with their costumes, Eyrich faced a different challenge with the film’s extras. “I have to admit that there were some people that we never could make look ‘70’s which is when the hair and makeup and prop departments stepped in,” she says. “We added lots of sideburns on the men and gave out lots of 70’s style glasses.”

In the end, the re-creation of that time and place jibed so well with the feelings that Augusten Burroughs remembers from growing up that he found his visits to the set felt like time warps. Sums up Burroughs: “When I walked into the set of the Finch house for the first time, I actually for an instant had this very strange sense of being home again. It’s a different house, of course, but it felt the same in spirit. It was so funny to look around and see little tiny things – like the China cabinet stuffed with fabric -- that were exactly the way they had been. It was exciting and it was a relief because it was so deeply familiar.”