Thirty film companies turned down Clara Bingham's book before Warner Bros. picked it up. Thirty producers thought the story would be too hard to tell.
The movie, "North Country," came out in 2005, three years after Bingham's book "Civil Action" had been published.
"North Country" tells the "based-on-a-true story" of a sexual-harassment lawsuit filed by a group of women miners in Minnesota. The film garnered Charlize Theron an Oscar nomination for best actress and Frances McDormand a nomination for best supporting actress.
When Bingham comes to Salt Lake City on Monday for a visit sponsored by the Salt Lake Film Center, she'll talk about the process of turning her book into a movie.
Bingham sounded excited to have been a consultant on the film when she spoke to the Deseret Morning News by phone from her home in New York City.
She and the screenwriter Michael Seitzman became good friends. "He talked to me frequently. I gave him a lot of my raw material." Bingham was kept in the loop when it came to casting, as well, she said. She got to observe a few days of shooting — and she was invited to the premiere in Los Angeles.
In short, Bingham said, she felt lucky to be included to the degree she was. She said she was not bothered a bit about how much the story was fictionalized.
Bingham graduated from Harvard, has been a White House correspondent for Newsweek and has written for various magazines and newspapers. An attorney, Laura Leedy Gansler, was co-author of the 390-page "Civil Action." The book was widely praised for its readability, for the way in which it made a 25-year-lawsuit understandable and compelling.
Yet, even though what she did was recognized as good journalism, Bingham understood why her work could not be translated directly into film. It would have been a 6-hour docudrama that maybe three people would have watched, she said.
The "North Country" screenplay combined several characters and compressed the time frame and merged three trials into one and brought a rapist into the courtroom — all for dramatic effect. Bingham believes the invention of the teacher/rapist portrayed the emotional truth, if not the literal truth, of how hard the lawsuit was for the real miners.
In reality, Lois Jenson, the woman who brought the landmark sexual harassment suit, was forced to think about a long-ago sexual assault. She also spent half her adult life in that lawsuit, as compared to the relatively short time portrayed in the film.
But if there is one place the film was completely accurate, it was in filming the landscape of a mine.
Bingham says, "The director made a point of going up to Minnesota, up to the Iron Range." All the interior shots are very real as well, she said. But the exterior shots were even more amazing.
Bingham talks of the shots of the machinery and the isolation and the scale and the dirt and the grime. "You could smell it and taste it and hear it and see it . . . how very threatening this environment was. I was very pleased with Niki Caro, the director, who did a very good job of creating the atmosphere of fear inside that mine."
If you go
What: Clara Bingham
Where: Vieve Gore Concert Hall, Jewett Center for the Performing Arts, Westminster College
When: Monday, 7 p.m.
How much: free
Phone: 746-7000
E-mail: susan@desnews.com