Photo by Yo Venice
If this isn’t the definitive news story on the Theresa Duncan tragedy, it’s getting mighty close.
Just as she promised on WLA’s comment pages, Kate Coe, who knew Duncan, has written an extremely well-reported story for the LA Weekly on the last years and months of Duncan’s life.
Certainly there’s more to report and write, as it doesn’t answer all of the questions. But it answers quite a lot.
Warning: The article isn’t cheery reading.
Here are a few excerpts:
Things looked incredibly promising in New York. Duncan was tapped to write and direct Closet Cases, an animated TV series for Oxygen Media, and a pilot for Left of the Dial, a TV series for VH1. She was awarded a grant for a new film called You Got the Look that would explore “popular myths of the outlaw, sex, glamour, and danger, while engaging notions of femininity and class.” In 2001, Variety announced that Duncan had sold a pitch to Fox Searchlight — Alice Underground — and would “pen the script” about teenage girls who kidnap a rock star. A month later, Variety reported Duncan was in talks with Fox to direct a feature based on Francesca Lia Block’s cult novels, the Weetzie Bat series.
But the reality was not nearly as glamorous as the image. Block’s agent, Lucy Stille at Paradigm, told the Weekly that Duncan was never formally attached to a Block project — the Weetzie Bat “talks” were just that. You Got the Look exists only as a proposal. And Alice Underground failed to materialize at Fox….
Art dealer and gallery owner Christine Nichols, who had known the couple for years, told the Weekly that Duncan sometimes found it hard to see Blake working with anyone but her. Their relationship was so intertwined, Nichols says, “You were either in complete agreement with everything they said or you were an enemy.”
According to Nichols and other friends who spoke to the Weekly only off record, Duncan began blaming her lack of success on the Church of Scientology, saying that the church was influencing “the studios.” Duncan accused her skeptical friends of stealing hair from her hairbrush to send to the Scientology Center, Nichols says, and confided to Nichols, “I really don’t have any friends.”
On her blog on May 20, she wrote that author and USC research scholar Reza Aslan was a “Muslim American seeming Homeland Security agent,” and blamed Scientologists for graffiti and a dead cat in her old Venice neighborhood.
Aslan told the Weekly that whenever he appeared on TV, she contacted him with strange rants. He gave Duncan’s threatening messages to his lawyer because “I wanted someone else to know about this.” Aslan knew her for years, and “she had always said kind of crazy, paranoid things,” but “it just got worse and worse.
(For the record, Reza Aslan is the nicest of men.)
And there’s a lot more....
I had a very close friend in college who was one of the most beautiful, and—in certain ways—brilliant people I’ve ever met. Creative, original, wildly funny …..and empathic to an almost eerie degree. She eventually had a full on psychotic break. Reading Theresa’s writing, and some of Coe’s account, reminds me of my friend when she was going off the rails— but none of us really understood how serious her distress truly was.
She’s dead now too.
What heartbreak. What waste.
*************
UPDATE: The LA Times’ Chris Lee has just now put up another very good piece on the couple that, in many ways, serves as a second bookend to Coe’s, by illuminating more about Jeremy. It will appear in tomorrow’s paper.
Truly a life unfinished; hers, his, theirs. An amazing story, Kate Coe. Thanks, Celeste for taking time away from your deadline to post it.
This is just too depressing. The situation needs on-going investigation and the story needs to be told, but it’s too hard to read.
She just sounds really sad now. I preferred to believe they really were being persecuted by Scientologists, rather than her making up paranoid delusions to justify her failure or, rather, inability to live upto people’s expectations of her as “brilliant and beautiful.”
lots of people knew Theresa,Katie Coe was an acquaintance…
the type who when you are dead,she’s going to keep throwing stones on your grave long after you’ve been layed to rest.
You know where Katie is coming from at the start when she iterates being intimidated by Theresa and how this isn’t usually the case.I was never intimidated by Theresa-I was totally impressed. Katie wants you to know that Theresa was a hyped up fraud in Hollywood-what better way to memorialise someone when they are no longer able bodied to defend themselves.If Theresa was sush a nobody,why is Katie writing about her 4 weeks post mortum? HOw many real unknown,nobody’s in Hollywood would die for an ounce of this
exposure…if I go to LA and attempt to do what Theresa did,and I fail and leave and kill myself-is Katie Coe going to write about me,and make psycho-analytical appraisals of me and thus my suicide..of course not-because I am an actual nobody. Katie is selling suicide,if you don’t believe her career failure angle,she wants you to know that Theresa was imagining things,that her fears were unfounded,etc and so on-she’ll even add a below the belt quote from Mr. Shlei suggesting Theresa ended her life realising she’d destroyed Jeremy’s career.What type of journalism is this-who is moronic enough to believe this
uninteresting writer.Jeremy Blake is beyond a rising star-he is an established artist-his career isn’t ruined or over.
Katie Coe has never authored a single sentence worth reading-her name barely comes up on search engines,pretty sad.Type in Theresa Duncan-you can pull up Katie more easily if you combine her name with Theresa’s-but Theresa comes up on her own-infact she’s the first name I ever yahooed 1995-I had just moved in with her-it came up way back then too. She was just a threat to you all,to so mnay she was the best,she was at the top of my list,and the Los Angeles LUnar Society si a real thing,it’s a code name for something you only know about when you are privy to it.Katie Coe is an old woman.Theresa was 40 eat your hearts out Los Angeles-she looked good and so did her man.
The following excerpt from above is pure smear campaign.
Reza Aslan is the nicest of men? He’s another propped up persona,working for Anderson Cooper who decided not to join the CIA,Anderson is CIA.
Resa Aslan! Please tell us the name of your close friend,who “went off the rails”.
She’s dead now,like a dead end.
The person responsible for pumping up Kate Coe here, good reporting is different from good journalism.Journalists no longer exist in commercial media.
Seriously Reza,what’s your friends name.?
(For the record, Reza Aslan is the nicest of men.)
And there’s a lot more….
I had a very close friend in college who was one of the most beautiful, andâ€â€in certain waysâ€â€brilliant people I’ve ever met. Creative, original, wildly funny …..and empathic to an almost eerie degree. She eventually had a full on psychotic break. Reading Theresa’s writing, and some of Coe’s account, reminds me of my friend when she was going off the rails but none of us really understood how serious her distress truly was.
She’s dead now too.
What heartbreak. What waste.