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The exterior of Pardee Hall will appear in a movie being produced by an independent filmmaker based in New York.
Filming of the outside south-center and southeast-center portions of Pardee took place earlier this week for Memoirs of my Nervous Illness. The footage will be used to portray the exterior of a mental institution. To match the setting of the film – near the turn of the 20th century in Germany — Plant Operations personnel raised shades to the top of each window and temporarily removed air conditioners.
Director and screenplay coauthor Julian Hobbs, a producer for cable channel TLC and employee of the New York Times, oversaw filming. Primary shooting was done in Hudson, N.Y.
Memoirs of my Nervous Illness is based on the life of distinguished German judge Daniel Paul Schreber, who, suffering from anxiety and insomnia, committed himself to Leipzig Sanatorium in 1893.
“Over the next five years, in the heavily medicated care of the esteemed Dr. Emil Paul Flechsig, Schreber descended further into madness, ultimately believing that his divine mission was to redeem humanity to its lost state of blessedness by transforming into a woman and immaculately conceiving the child of God,” according to a plot summary. “Schreber documented his every thought and vision into a journal, resulting in Memoirs of my Nervous Illness, ‘perhaps the most revealing dispatch ever received from the far side of madness.’ Part religious manifesto, part legal document, part Gothic novel, the journal is a masterpiece of psychological insight, filled with intrigue and revelation. As Sigmund Freud observed: ‘The wonderful Schreber ought to have been made a director of a mental hospital.’”
Hobbs, award-winning designer Fred Tietz, and Schreber scholar Allan S. Weiss scripted the drama from Schreber’s writings. The film stars Jefferson Mays as Schreber, Robert Cucuzza as Flechsig, Lara Milian as Sabine Schreber, and Joe Coleman as Moritz Schreber.