Fairyland, a bittersweet film about a girl raised by her gay father in 1970s San Francisco, has been brought to the screen by director Andrew Durham and producer Sofia Coppola. The film is adapted from Alysia Abbott’s 2013 memoir, which details her childhood and adolescence with her gay father, Steve Abbott, a writer and poet who came out after her mother’s death. The story unfolds amid a backdrop of glitter and feather boas, with Alysia growing up surrounded by her father’s friends and lovers.
Durham, making his directorial debut, found strong personal resonance in the material. Like Abbott, he grew up in the Bay Area in the 1970s and later nursed his father, Jerry, after he contracted HIV. Both Steve and Jerry died in 1992. “I never ran into that many people who had gay dads who died of Aids,” Durham said. Coppola, who optioned the book, believed Durham was the perfect director for the film, having known him since the 1990s when he worked on her TV show Hi-Octane and her first short film.
Coppola, who recently turned 55, said she never considered directing Fairyland herself. Instead, she embraced the role of producer, following in the footsteps of her father, Francis Ford Coppola. “It’s in the tradition of what my dad did at Zoetrope, championing things you love and believe in,” she said. The film is a Zoetrope production and features the company’s original 1970s logo.
The film continues a pattern of father-daughter stories in Coppola’s work, including Somewhere, On the Rocks, and Lost in Translation. Coppola reflected on her own childhood in San Francisco, recalling her father in corduroy suits and the eccentric people who frequented their Victorian house. “I have this hazy little-kid memory of all these eccentric people,” she said.
