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Between filming on Fox’s 24, an off-Broadway play and forming her own production company with husband Jon Hamm (Mad Men), Kissing Jessica Stein’s Jennifer Westfeldt is keeping busy.
Between filming on Fox’s 24, an off-Broadway play and forming her own production company with husband Jon Hamm (Mad Men), Kissing Jessica Stein’s Jennifer Westfeldt is keeping busy.
Catching up with the writer and star of the lesbian romp at the Paramount lot this week, the actress has plans to make headlines in the community again with the adaptation of Cusi Cram’s play Dusty and the Big Bad World.
Kissing Jessica Stein's Heather Jurgensen and Jennifer Westfeldt
The story of “Bustergate” and the fallout from a 2005 PBS censorship scandal, the film focuses on an 11-year-old girl with gay dads who wins a nationwide contest to have her family appear on her little brother’s favorite TV show, Postcards From Buster.
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The episode winds up pulled from the air after an influential member of the Christian right launches a campaign to cancel the show’s public funding.
Postcards from Buster
Westfeldt said this week that the smaller film, the indie, is actually going to be an adaptation of a play by (Cram) that’s going to be loosely based on the PBS censorship scandal in 2005 which was called ‘Bustergate’ and was when Margaret Spellings had this show canceled because it showed gay parents in one episode.
“Our production company is called Points West Pictures and we have three projects right now, two of which I’ve written and one of which I’m adapting and another we are optioning,” the busy actress said. “We’re also partnering with Donald De Line on the studio comedy that I wrote, which is a great partnership for us.”
Westfeldt’s more immediate plans are finishing up her role on 24 and heading to New York for a role in Cram’s off-Broadway play.
“I’ve been shooting a role on ‘24’ for the past month and a half and I’m going to start a new off-Broadway show next week; we start rehearsals next week,” she said. “It’s called A Lifetime Burning, and it’s at Primary Stages and it’s written by a real lovely writer named Cusi Cram and directed by Pam MacKinnon, who’s a really terrific New York director.
“It’s about these two sisters and I play the younger kind of fucked up bipolar sister and the play begins because I’ve written a memoir that’s been published and it’s largely fabricated, so my older sister is up in arms and the play sort of backtracks how we came to this moment where I’ve had this James Frey sort of incident,” she said. “It’s just an interesting look at depression and familial loyalties.”
