A Hole in One

A Hole in One (2004)

Transorbital Lobotomy... is it right for you? Ask your doctor.

A gangster makes an employee pose as a doctor to prevent his troubled girlfriend from getting a lobotomy.

Date of release
2004-05-02
TMDB
5.0 / 10 (5)
Runtime
1h 37m
Genres
Comedy
Director
Richard Ledes

Casting

Interesting facts

A Hole in One is a 2004 film co-starring Michelle Williams and Meat Loaf. The film marked the feature debut of writer/director Richard Ledes. It received its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003.

Development

The idea for A Hole in One was born out of a performance piece Ledes had staged at the American Fine Arts Gallery in SoHo in the early 1990s. The performance was based on the records of a WWII veteran who had experienced a psychotic break and for whom it had been recommended that he receive a lobotomy. Ledes conducted extensive research for the film over many years, including volunteering at an outpatient center for severely mentally ill.

Rather than doing a documentary on Freeman or case studies on mental illness, Ledes opted for fiction:

“I never considered doing a documentary. For me it was always important to tell the story in this way. That there were truths about the subject of mental illness and the use of transorbital lobotomy that were inseparable from the truths that one finds in storytelling rather than the true and false of science.”

Ledes’ screenplay draws heavily on documents such as the New York Departmental of Mental Hygiene Annual Report of 1953.

In his DVD commentary for A Hole in One, Ledes mentions other insightful sources: Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness and Last Resort: Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness by Jack David Pressman.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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