The Theresa Duncan Tragedy

A writer–game designer and her boyfriend commit suicide, and a façade falls away

Comments (0) By Kate Coe Wednesday, Aug 1 2007

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Yet Duncan seemed fearless. After hearing David Sedaris (then a part-time housecleaner) on local public radio, Duncan tracked him down, Gesue says, asking him to narrate the Chop Suey script. When the CD-ROM took off, Gesue says, “We started doing interviews, and I could see that Theresa would have been happier doing them [by] herself. She was always a little competitive with other women.”

Gesue had misgivings about their next project, a story of the Deep South called Shoo-fly Pie — she thought the humor was racist. But, Gesue says, Duncan hotly told Gesue she’d be nowhere without her. “I don’t know what came over me,” says Gesue. “I just said, ‘I can’t work with you anymore.’ ” They argued, and the next day, “I learned that she’d tried to get me fired. They moved us into different offices.”

Intertwined: Duncan, here with Jeremy Blake, pushed two storylines: Conspiracies and dream film projects always just around the corner. (Photo by Stephanie Halmos/Patrick Mcmullan.com)

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Then, a manager at Magnet questioned the racially tinged humor and recommended that the Shoo-fly Pie project be shelved. Gesue says Duncan lost control, shouting wildly — and was escorted from the building — a story confirmed to the Weekly by another former Magnet employee. Other staff packed up Duncan’s office things. Yet the two estranged friends still “had to do a photo shoot. It was awful. It was the last time I saw her.”

For Gesue, Duncan’s Shoo-fly Pie meltdown showed a dark side that worked against Duncan. Yet Duncan bounced back, heading to New York and working for Nicholson Interactive, where she created a new game. Dave Colker, in the Los Angeles Times, raved, “ ‘Smartypants’ is far and away the best disk ever for young girls . . . except for her earlier CD-ROM ‘Chop Suey,’ which is even better.”

In New York, Duncan started seeing Blake, a fine-arts grad student from CalArts who was working as a photo retoucher. They grew close, and Blake was hired as the art director on Smartypants. J.C. Herz, author of Joystick Nation, who moved in the same media circles, says New York in 1996 held “the freedom to experiment, to create out of passion . . . Anyone could call up some company and get their idea made.” Duncan impressed journalists, including Anthony Ramirez of The New York Times, who repeated that she had authored a senior thesis at the University of Michigan titled “Electric Fairy Tales: CD-ROMs and Literature.” Even in recent coverage of her suicide, the Los Angeles Times repeated this iconic Duncan tale. Yet U of M spokesperson Joy Myers tells the Weekly the university has no evidence of that thesis or a degree under her name, although Duncan may have written a paper on that subject. Duncan became the darling of an emerging niche market of games for girls, telling People in 1998, “Our model isn’t Bill Gates. It’s Maurice Sendak and Dr. Seuss.”

The People article identified Duncan’s collaborators as illustrator-boyfriend Blake and humorist Sedaris. In her ever-evolving public persona, Duncan had already obliterated Gesue from her new, official story.

Duncan soon began work on The History of Glamour, an animated spoof documentary that was an unexpected hit in the New York art world, accepted into the Whitney Biennial of American Art 2000. For that project, she assembled a very of-the-moment team including Blake, artist Karen Kilimnik, Blake’s pal Brendan Canty of D.C. proto-punk band Fugazi and former Bikini Kill bassist Kathi Wilcox to create the story of Charles Valentine, an androgynously named chick from Antler, Ohio, who becomes a rock icon — but finds that fame doesn’t suit her. Yet Duncan was preoccupied, even then, over whether she was keeping up. In an online forum of the Walker Art Center, she posted this battle cry: “Because competition contains so many shades of human behavior, including altruism, love and kindness, it makes the question ‘Are we winning?’ central to any entertainment.”

Things looked incredibly promising in New York. Duncan was tapped to write and direct Closet Cases, an animated TV series for Oxygen Media, and a pilot for Left of the Dial, a TV series for VH1. She was awarded a grant for a new film called You Got the Look that would explore “popular myths of the outlaw, sex, glamour, and danger, while engaging notions of femininity and class.” In 2001, Variety announced that Duncan had sold a pitch to Fox Searchlight — Alice Underground — and would “pen the script” about teenage girls who kidnap a rock star. A month later, Variety reported Duncan was in talks with Fox to direct a feature based on Francesca Lia Block’s cult novels, the Weetzie Bat series.

But the reality was not nearly as glamorous as the image. Block’s agent, Lucy Stille at Paradigm, told the Weekly that Duncan was never formally attached to a Block project — the Weetzie Bat “talks” were just that. You Got the Look exists only as a proposal. And Alice Underground failed to materialize at Fox. Renee Tab, Duncan’s agent when she died, says Paramount also passed on the script, because of budget issues. Producer Ted Hope, of This Is That Productions, who was familiar with Duncan’s big-budget Alice Underground script, said by e-mail, “Theresa was an original thinker and her script demonstrated that, which is often not helpful in the studio world.”