Movies

The true story behind “Freeheld”

Ten years ago, Cynthia Wade read about the dying police officer whose partner was being denied her pension benefits, and felt compelled to document the story of Laurel Hester and Stacie Andree. Earning their trust, Cynthia left her husband and two young children to move into the couples’ New Jersey home for the last 10 tumultuous, emotional weeks of Laurel’s life.

Cynthia captured the highly-publicized battle against the Ocean County Freeholders alongside the personal moments Laurel and Stacie shared in the home they built together and were hoping to hold onto after Laurel’s inevitable passing. And when the win finally came, Cynthia’s cameras were front and center, the footage being turned into an Oscar-winning short documentary, Freeheld.

“In 38 minutes, you have this experience-you get what’s at stake and you understand the personalities and you understand the personal cost of something political,” Cynthia said. “It puts a very real face on it.”

Cynthia (far right) with Stacie (middle) and director Vanessa Roth

After the Academy Awards, Hollywood producers came calling. Anyone who took interest in Laurel and Stacie’s story had to go to Cynthia because she owns Stacie and Laurel’s life rights, as well as those of Dane Wells, Laurel’s former partner in police work and her biggest ally in the battle for her pension.

“Dane and Stacie decided ‘We should do this because, quite frankly, anybody could take our story and fictionalize it enough that it’s our story, but it’s far enough that they don’t need our permission. And better it be told accurately and have Cynthia involved since she was living it,'” Cynthia said. “It was better to try to do it authentically and honestly as possible.”

Dane Wells (right) with Michael Shannon, who played him in the film

So when Cynthia was courted by producers like Michael Shamberg and Stacy Sherr, she was thrilled to be getting the chance to have Laurel’s story out in the world on a broader scale.

“Making the documentary allowed the feature to be made,” Cynthia said. “It’s one thing to talk about the discrimination that Laurel and Stacie faced, and to read an article, but I think because I was living inside their home and the last 10 weeks of Lauren’s life is a very visual experience, to watch it, and to see the real people. And I think honestly, if the film hadn’t been nominated and won an Academy Award, I don’t think I would have gotten the same kind of attention from high caliber producing groups as I was able to meet with, starting in 2008.”

It took several years (mostly due to the fact Hollywood is still a “sexist and heterosexist” environment, Cynthia noted), but the feature film adaptation of Freeheld finally went into production in 2014. Starring Ellen Page, Julianne Moore and Michael Shannon, the film takes a “journalistic approach,” Cynthia said, and she was heavily involved from the beginning, helping to make sure the script, the locations, and other facets of the real story were spot on.

Ellen Page with Stacie Andree

“I did a lot of consultations in terms of what the subtleties were, what the relationships were: How did Laurel feel on this particular day? What were some of the conversations? What was she wearing? Coats, sweatshirts, the kinds of cough drops she had beside the bed,” Cynthia said.

Ultimately, Cynthia said the feature is “very, very accurate.”

“I went down this path to produce this fiction film because the documentary could only be for a limited and selected audience,” Cynthia said. “I promised Laurel I would take her story as far as I could take it, and it will end up in multiplexes in suburban areas that the documentary is never going to show up. And it will, I think, infiltrate communities where this has been experienced over and over and over again. And it will resonate with those friends and family members and community members and that’s really what she wanted.”

But because feature films are, ultimately, fictionalized re-tellings of true events, we asked Cynthia about some of the moments in the film, and for the reality behind them.

In the film: Laurel was closeted at work.

“When she was in college, she’d been part of this sort of early ’70s gay and lesbian group and it had been reported-the reporter said she was going to use fake names and didn’t,” Cynthia said. “So when she went to her first police academy-not in Ocean County, I think it was Morris County-they called her in. She was very young, in her early 20s, and they said, ‘We know, basically, what you are and who you are and we’re telling you now, we don’t want to see it, we don’t want to hear it. Your work is your work and keep it quiet.’ And she said [to me] in an interview, ‘That was fine with me because I was there to work.’ So she’d been warned, sort of early on in her early 20s, but she was also a very-things had to have a certain place in her house. She was very orderly and regimented, just in terms of her personality. She just separated-and in a way, Stacie didn’t as much. Stacie was of a different generation.”

In the film: Laurel and Stacie sleep together on the first date.

“First, Stacie would tell you, right off the bat, that they did not sleep together on the first date,” Cynthia said. “That is very important for her. And Laurel would not have done that either. That obviously was compressed. It was a longer courtship.”

In the film: The cops who worked with Laurel aren’t initially supportive.

“I think the way in which [Laurel] kept asking Dane, ‘Why hasn’t this detective shown up? I want to have lunch with this person. Can you get this person to show up?’ and a lot of them didn’t show up, and he’d have to fib to her: ‘They’re out of town, or their mother is sick.’ For a long time he had to fib to her because he didn’t want to tell her the truth,” Cynthia said. “And she kept saying to me, ‘You should interview this person, you should interview this person,’ and after she died I was able to interview them, but while the controversy was going on, they didn’t come visit her-most of them didn’t. The chief visited her at the hospital, but the others didn’t and she thought it was a matter of scheduling and really it was Dane trying to to protecting her from people kind of turning their backs in the police department.”

In the film: There was a closeted gay cop in the police office.

“The [Todd] Belkin character is fictionalized. There was no outwardly gay cop who came out as gay,” Cynthia said. “That was fictionalized.”

In the film: Dane Wells is still working as a cop.

In reality, Dane had retired by the time Laurel was fighting for her pension, but his daily visits to the department better served the story. “It’s true Dane had retired, but it’s also true that he was the guy doing everything for Laurel around the clock.”

In the film: Dane Wells found out Laurel was gay by stopping by her house.

“Laurel was definitely very regimented about her life-very,” Cynthia said. “She didn’t like work and personal life to mix. She never said to Dane, ‘I’m in a relationship with a woman’ or ‘I’m gay.’ She never said that to him. I’m almost positive he didn’t learn it until she applied for pension benefits. She was very strict about everything, really. She had rules.”

In the film: Dane was Laurel and Stacie’s biggest supporter.

“It’s really really true to who Dane was. He got hate mail-his mother got pieces of mail that said, ‘Your son is gay,’ ‘Your son is a fag.’ He was getting all kinds of harassment from people in town,” Cynthia said. “He never expected to be an ally; he never expected to be an LGBT activist, but she was his partner, and the best partner he ever had and it was very hurtful for him. So that’s an example of the political becoming personal. And he was the person putting so much pressure on the department, on the freeholders, in the press. I don’t know whether if we would have won without him and Steven Goldstein.”

In the film: Local pastor Father John made a speech in support of Laurel.

“In the documentary, they went to church. It was mixed reactions at the church,” Cynthia said. “Father John was very, very supportive. Laurel really felt like-she said, ‘I don’t think anybody really loves me but Stacie. I don’t think God really loves me.’ And Father John would show up every week and sit with her and talk with her. And then Stacie started coming-on Wednesday nights, there was a smaller chapel service just so she could kind of center herself. He was so loving and just really a part of it. He makes this speech in the fiction film, but he was actually a bigger part of their lives than you would know.”

In the film: Gay activist Steven Goldstein was larger than life.

“The crazy thing about Steven Goldstein and the criticism of the Steve Carell character-he was more over the top than Steve Carell plays it,” Cynthia said. “In fact, he was on set and he said to me, ‘I’m not going to say anything because I know that’s really annoying to actors. So I’ll stay in the background.’ Then Carell came up to him and said, ‘How am I doing?’ And Steven Goldstein said, ‘You need to ramp it up. Shock and awe, shock and awe!’-that was originally not in the script. It was because Steven Goldstein on set was like, ‘I’d reign terror! Shock and awe!” extemporaneously, said it as an improv. So the one thing frustrating for me, just knowing him, is that it’s entirely accurate. It’s a persona he played to win the case, and of course he’s more multi-faceted than that, but what he showed and how he expressed himself in the Freeheld fight was, I would say, even more than Carell plays.

“And, truthfully, when we edited the documentary, I ended up pulling back on Goldstein because he was like a runaway train. I ended up cutting scenes out because he would dominate. As a matter of fact, in the documentary footage, when Laurel gets the vote and wins, he yells at one of the very conservative freeholders, ‘I love you! Will you marry me?’ And I had forgotten that and in the editing room we ended taking that out because it was Laurel’s moment-it wasn’t Steven Goldstein’s moment, and I’d forgotten we even had this struggle and conversation. And as it was being edited by [director] Peter Sollett and his editor, they came separately to the same conclusion. Because Steven Goldstein really threatened to kind of-he was such a big personality, we had to pull back on him. And like him saying, ‘I wouldn’t know what to do with your vagina’-he really said that. I reported that to [screenwriter] Ron Nyswaner. So in that way, it’s not like a bunch of straight people made a caricature-it’s an accurate representation and Steven Goldstein would say that.”

In the film: Stacie was a victim of homophobia at the auto shop where she worked.

In reality, Stacie never faced anything that “overtly,” Cynthia said. “People would whisper, people would talk, people would look. Some people would come up and say, ‘We support you’ while she was checking them out at the auto shop because she told me that. There was never an overt threat like that, as far as I know.”

In the film: Laurel wears a mask to her final freeholders meeting because she’s so sick.

“When they went to the emergency meeting, Laurel and Stacie had a disagreement because Stacie did not want Laurel to go because all of the germs. She really was upset. And Laurel said ‘I’m going,’ and Stacie said, ‘You’re so sick.’ It was actually quite a big fight that happened beforehand. She said, ‘You’re so sick-you need to be home. It’s the middle of winter-you can’t afford somebody sneezing or coughing on you,’ which was true. But Laurel said ‘I have to be there, I have to be there.’ It was only three weeks before she died and so the compromise became that she would wear that medical mask, which she did.”

In the film: Laurel and Stacie aren’t concerned about pushing for marriage equality.

It’s true that Steven Goldstein encouraged Laurel and Stacie to become the new faces of marriage equality, but they were more focused on the pension. “I think the fact that Laurel was-she wasn’t saying ‘gay marriage,’ which is a term I hate-I’d rather say marriage equality. But she wasn’t saying ‘Gay marriage!’-she was saying, ‘I earned this pension and I’ve earned the right to give it to who I want to give it to,’ and I think even the most conservative pockets-there is this kind of American ideal of ‘If you earn the money, you can do with it what you want.’ And so a lot of people didn’t have a problem with that. But they weren’t courageous enough to actually stand with her, a lot of them.”

In the film: Freeholder John Kelly skipped the final vote because he knew he’d lose.

“Of course the freeholders always denied my requests to interview them so what was going on behind closed doors, we can only guess at,” Cynthia said. “But there were definitely some gestures and facial expressions in the original freeholders meeting where clearly it was not five-zero. At least two of them-one of them was feeling profoundly uncomfortable; maybe another one of them was willing to be swayed. And it was really one of them, John Kelly, who didn’t show up at that final meeting, he definitely said and expressed repeatedly, ‘This violates the sanctity of marriage.’ I think it’s pretty accurate in that things were beginning to fracture behind closed doors.”

Cynthia’s documentary is available on DVD from Freeheld.com and comes with 100 minutes of bonus footage, including deleted scenes and her trip with Stacie to the Oscars. To really understand Stacie and Laurel’s story, both the documentary and the feature work together, hand-in-hand.

“I couldn’t recreate her being a live, healthy police officer,” Cynthia said of the documentary. “In a live film we can do that.”

Bonus: Cynthia, her 14-year-old daughter and husband all appear in the film, as do Dane Wells and Stacie Andree. You can see Stacie, Cynthia and her daughter sitting in the room during the final freeholders meeting.

Stacie with the fictional Freeholdersvia Twitter

Cynthia’s husband (who came up with the title Freeheld) is the honor guard standing next to the real Dane Wells, who is holding Laurel’s ashes at the funeral.

Freeheld is in limited theaters now. It will hit theaters nationwide on October 16.

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