by Joy Press
Soloway knew she wanted Jeffrey Tambor to play Maura Pfefferman, the role inspired by her own Moppa. A cisgender male actor best known for his comedic roles in The Larry Sanders Show and Arrested Development, Tambor reminded her of Carrie pretransition. Early on, Soloway asked Rhys Ernst, a transgender filmmaker who serves as a producer and trans consultant on the show, what he thought of casting Tambor. It was a potentially inflammatory move, but Ernst says he believed that occasional cisgender casting, “if done for the right reasons and done responsibly, makes sense.” Tambor fit those criteria for him “because we are all meeting this character pretransition, we are seeing this character through the adult children’s eyes, still as the father, so it makes sense to start with this actor. And [Jill] always talked about how Jeffrey reminded her of her parent, so it seemed like a responsible exception.”
Judith Light, whose career spanned soap operas (One Life to Live), eighties sitcoms (Who’s the Boss?), and Broadway dramas (for which she won two Tony Awards), was cast as Shelly Pfefferman, the brassy and sometimes clueless alter ego of Soloway’s mom, Elaine, after the two bonded by Skype over their devotion to LGBTQ activism. Amy Landecker, who, like Soloway, came up through the Chicago theater scene, initially turned down a chance to audition for the role of Sarah, the oldest Pfefferman child, because she was uncomfortable with the graphic nudity involved. But she reconsidered after watching Afternoon Delight, understanding that Soloway approached sexuality from a different perspective than most other directors. Afternoon Delight star Kathryn Hahn was tapped to play Rabbi Raquel, who brings a touch of poetic Judaism into the secular family’s life.
Hoffmann says Soloway has a genius for casting—or, as she puts it, “for gathering energies.” Laughing self-consciously at her hippyish phrasing, Hoffmann describes it as “an ability to tap into something that feels like it was already there and let it be. The way that Jill cast the show and put it all together is the same way that she now directs it: it’s all from the pussy, as she would say. It’s all instinct and heart.” The core cast smoothly fell into place, except for the character of Josh Pfefferman, Maura’s hipster son. Sitting at an LA dinner party next to indie filmmaker Jay Duplass, Soloway became convinced that he was the man for the part, but he protested that he wasn’t an actor and was already at work co-creating a series with his brother, Mark, for HBO (Togetherness). Undaunted, Soloway excitedly texted Hoffmann a photo of him after the dinner. “The first time I saw Jay, it was like a bolt of lightning,” Hoffmann says. “But we had to convince him to do it, right up to the last second.”
Just as she had “gathered” her actors, so Soloway intuitively amassed a team of writers with varying levels of experience and gender identities. Among them were Bridget Bedard, a cisgender straight woman who had written for Mad Men; Ali Liebegott, a gender-nonconforming novelist and poet from San Francisco who had been working at a supermarket to pay the bills; and Micah Fitzerman-Blue, a cisgender straight guy who had cofounded the Silver Lake group East Side Jews with Soloway and Jenji Kohan. Then there was sister Faith, who commuted from her home in Boston to work on the show, living in an apartment above the writers’ room.
Soloway’s initial instruction was for the writers to get to know one another. “We cried for two days,” Liebegott recalls. “It was like, ‘What is your life?’ Everyone just told all their stories.”
None of the writers was trans, however. So Soloway brought in trans artists/filmmakers Rhys Ernst and Zackary Drucker to act as consultants (and later producers); trans comedian Ian Harvie; and Jennifer Finney Boylan, an author and professor who transitioned late in life and helped inform Maura’s character. They shared stories and answered questions for cast and crew, and educated Jeffrey Tambor in preparation for the role. Tambor also embarked on field trips in character, including a crucial outing to a trans bar in the Valley.
“Jeffrey had never actually stepped fully into Maura,” recalls Ernst. “He’d been fitted for wardrobe and makeup, but he hadn’t been out in the world.” Ernst, Drucker, Soloway, and Frohna met Jeffrey in his hotel room in Santa Monica one night: “We sat around and got him into character slowly over a couple of hours. We all told personal stories about our lives and everyone’s experiences of gender—even cisgender people in the group, like Jill and Jeffrey.” Walking through the hotel lobby “turned into a really significant moment for Jeffrey,” says Ernst, “because it was the first time he ever experienced walking in those shoes and being in public and not knowing how people were seeing him as heads turned.”
Tambor held on to the sense memory of that walk through the hotel lobby, the feeling of living inside Maura’s skin. “I kept telling myself, ‘Remember this. Don’t ever forget this,’ ” he told Vanity Fair. “ ‘You’re an actor. You must understand what is going on here and bring it to this performance.’ ”
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Soloway had spent two decades in television waiting for her chance to make something of her own. She had long talked about fomenting a feminist revolution—even way back in 2005, in her book of funny autobiographical essays Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants, she called for “an unarmed yet mighty revolution, secession into an all-female state, with a big ol’ newfounded land . . . ruled by me, yes me, until the patriarchy is toppled and a global matriarchy run by me, yes me, is installed.” She named her production company Topple.
Once ensconced at Amazon, she proceeded to unravel all kinds of rules. While other showrunners struggled to get female directors approved by the networks, Soloway decided that all Transparent episodes would be helmed by her or other female and trans indie film directors she admired, such as Andrea Arnold, Marta Cunningham, Nisha Ganatra, and Silas Howard, who could not get a foot in the door of TV studios. (The one exception: an episode directed by cis-male director of photography Jim Frohna.) She calls those directing slots “golden tickets,” just like the ones found in Willy Wonka’s chocolate bars—except these were shortcuts to a career in television rather than entrance to a candy paradise. A directing slot on Transparent would make it easier for them to get other TV jobs in the future.
Soloway also developed what she called a “transfirmative action program,” actively seeking out trans personnel for the crew and even leading a trans screenwriting workshop to train new writers. Out of the latter process, she plucked Our Lady J, a singer-songwriter who ended up joining the Transparent writers’ room in the second season. “There’s a difference between laughing at somebody and laughing with somebody,” Soloway notes. “That gets taken care of if you have a trans man or woman in the writers’ room.”
She also forged emotional bonds on her set by bringing in Joan Scheckel, a kind of director whisperer who had worked with Soloway on Afternoon Delight. Scheckel runs a filmmaking lab and serves as a coach, teaching directors and actors how to tap deep into emotion. She engaged the cast and crew of Transparent in something that sounds a bit like primal scream therapy, stripping down to raw emotion and coaxing the actors into physical improvisations that brought a quick intimacy to their relationships. Amy Landecker described it as “a huge acid-trip emotional exploration of the script.” Scheckel taught Soloway and her cast to be alert to shifts in motivation and feeling that pulse behind every word and movement on-screen.
“I think it is group therapy,” Soloway tells me, sitting in the red kitchen of her Silver Lake house one December morning. Exploring scenes in that way, she says, creates a sense of unified understanding. “It’s like, Oh! That is what the scene is about. So, as a group, we can all feel together, Now we are going to go there.” Which is maybe an abstract way of describing the very real thing I witnessed on the set: actors who are so embedded inside their characters and so tethered to one another that they now instinctively inflect each line and movement with the unpredictable magic of reality.
Gaby Hoffmann recalls shooting a scene in which the whole clan is gathered at the house eating leftovers. Her character storms off in anger and then returns later—but Hoffmann kept missing her cue t
o reenter. “I was just so enthralled, I kept forgetting that I was supposed to be in the scene. The way that Jay would dip his spoon into the coleslaw and the way that Jeffrey would turn his nose up just slightly,” Hoffmann says. “I remember sitting there and thinking, God, they are so good.”
Soloway’s personal experiences have seeped into the series—translated into fictional plotlines, of course. All three Pfefferman children seem to derive slivers of their personality from Jill, but also from Faith. Jill’s mother, Elaine, the loose inspiration for Shelly Pfefferman, is getting ready to leave when I arrive at the Soloway home. She repeatedly gives her daughter a report on her plan to take an Uber across town, and Jill repeatedly offers to pay for it. In the other room, Jill’s son Felix watches TV, restlessly summoning his mom several times while he waits for his babysitter to arrive. Meanwhile, Jill is expecting a call from Eileen Myles, the downtown New York poet with whom Soloway fell in love while working on Transparent, and who was the inspiration for Ali’s dyke poet paramour, Leslie Mackinaw (played by Cherry Jones).
So, while creatively everything was coming together on Transparent, Soloway’s personal life was as chaotic as her characters’. Her Moppa’s revelation had blown up her universe. She had always felt straitjacketed by conventional femininity, and this new information freed her up to question her sexuality. Like Sarah Pfefferman, Soloway separated from her husband (the show’s music supervisor, Bruce Gilbert) and began to sleep with a woman; like Ali, she was experimenting with what it meant to be genderqueer.
“The series is just a couple of years behind real life, so [Faith and I] have been living it with my parents’ lives and our lives, riding on the coattails of this real emotional experience.” She takes off her designer version of a plaid flannel shirt. “First season, it’s all about the secret. And then it’s: What does it mean? And what do I not understand about myself that I would’ve understood had I known my parent was gender nonconforming when I was born? Who would I be?”
Looking out the window into her backyard, Soloway says softly, “What a moment! For me to have my parent come out as trans, for me to be really ready because I had just made my first film, and to have found Amazon, [which has] this business model that’s giving me artistic freedom. We are working really hard, but we are doing so from the place of what is artistically exciting, not to make a person from the network happy.”
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When Transparent’s pilot debuted online along with four other potential adult series in February 2014, viewers were encouraged to vote for the show they wanted Amazon to produce. Although Transparent didn’t necessarily get blockbuster numbers, those who liked it seemed to like it passionately. The full season began streaming in September 2014 and quickly became a critical darling. New York magazine’s review headline proclaimed, “Amazon’s Transparent Is Damn Near Perfect.” Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky tweeted, “I gotta hang @jillsoloway #TransparentTV next to the best of Philip Roth.”
The pilot dares us to hate Sarah, Ali, and Josh Pfefferman. They are the kind of spoiled cosmopolitans that heartland America loves to loathe, yet all their vulnerabilities and contradictions are splayed before us. Stay-at-home mom Sarah Pfefferman hands off a roast to her housekeeper before hustling her kids into an SUV, where she turns on that seventies feminist anthem “Free to Be You and Me”; younger sister Ali tells best friend Syd (Carrie Brownstein) of her plan to get rich with a novelty book that would be a cautionary tale about “slutting around”; brother Josh is busy photographing two bleached-blond hipster waifs, musicians with his record label.
The trio of siblings is brought together by a mysterious summons from their father. They agree it must be cancer. “He should start gifting us twelve thousand dollars a year now,” Josh crassly suggests. “For tax purposes.” Soloway leaves no room for illusions but lots of space for squirming. When the kids arrive for their dinner with Dad, retired professor Mort Pfefferman is dressed in a pale pink gingham button-down, his gray hair in a loose ponytail. He is dying to unburden himself of his secret while they eat barbecue, but his kids are convinced he is sick. “Stop! I don’t have cancer!” he roars, his face smeared with sauce like a small child. “I’m selling the house,” he declares instead—at which point the kids start arguing over which one of them deserves to inherit it.
As soon as his children leave, Mort shuffles around his house, pulling off his clothes. Moments later, he reappears wearing a caftan, pulling his hair loose from its ponytail. This is how we meet the real Mort: Maura Pfefferman.
Later, at a trans support group, Maura, dressed in a demure lavender wrap accessorized with a diamond ring and bracelet, complains about her kids. “They are so selfish. I don’t know how it is I raised three people who cannot see beyond themselves.” This is one of the leitmotifs of Transparent: How do you connect to others when you are so consumed by hiding who you are? And how do mistakes and horrors, whether it’s the Holocaust or sexual abuse or social pressure, perpetuate themselves in the generations that follow?
Soloway draws a personal-historical thread through the series. Flashbacks transport us to various points in Maura’s life as she struggles with her identity: secretly buying dresses that she can never wear, trying to convince loyal wife Shelly that his wearing women’s underwear is just a sexy game, visiting a vacation camp for transvestites. One third-season episode even revisits Maura’s childhood; sweetly embodied by a trans child actress (Sophia Grace Gianna), young Mort/Maura chafes at having to play little league baseball and makes an oasis of the family’s bomb shelter, wearing her mother’s nightgowns as she twirls around to pop music.
Pulling back even further in Pfefferman family history, Transparent pops up in 1930s Berlin, as Maura’s grandmother is trying to whisk her two children away from the looming threat of Nazism. Maura’s uncle Gershon has become Gittel (played by trans actress Hari Nef), a glamorous trans woman living at the Institute for Sexual Research. Although it resembles a set from Cabaret, the institute is based on a real place founded by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish-German physician, researcher, and activist dubbed the “Einstein of sex” in his day. Author Christopher Isherwood (whose writing inspired Cabaret) actually lived next door; the institute was seized by the Nazis in 1933, and many of Weimar Berlin’s “sexual deviants” rounded up. “You want to know what happened to your uncle Gershon?” Maura’s grandfather threatens when he catches his grandchild dressed in a frilly nightgown, late in season three. “He burned to death in the oven . . . because your mother and your grandmother let him run around in a skirt!”
This might have been a didactic moment if Transparent hadn’t already spent three seasons evoking the privileged twenty-first-century life of the Pfeffermans, who take their freedom for granted. By taking a giant step back, Soloway builds a context for the fear of Maura’s Jewish father, who is desperate to assimilate as a matter of survival, and tries to excavate the lost legacy of trans and gay ancestors. The Pfefferman children know nothing of Gittel’s history. All that remains of her is a pearl ring, passed around as a tainted heirloom. “Your father tried to propose to me with that farkakte thing,” Shelly tells Ali dismissively; she insisted he buy her something fancier. Josh proffers it to his pregnant girlfriend, who rejects the ring (and Josh) and proceeds to have an abortion. Finally, Ali, who has begun to research the fate of Jews and queers in Nazi Germany, takes possession of it, sensing it is a key to the family legacy.
Soloway wrote in 2005 that her own family tree included “a hell of a lot of freaky Jews. We had them all: gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, some of your early versions of transgender.” But she didn’t set out to write about the Holocaust in Transparent. A throwaway line about “Tante Gittel’s ring” in season one led the show’s writers to think about the Pfeffermans’ predecessors; Weimar Germany offered some startling parallels to twenty-first-century America. “There was an underlying sense back then that the world was going to end tomorrow,” Hari Nef said in a 2015 IndieWire interview. “In that sort of
half-nihilism, half-exuberant feeling emerged this amazing permissiveness and this experimentation and this collapse of binaries that was maybe holding the old world together.”
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In September 2015, Transparent was nominated for eleven Emmy Awards and won five, including Soloway for Best Director of a Comedy Series and Tambor for Best Actor. When Soloway took the stage in a black-and-white polka-dotted suit to accept, she made a point of thanking a female Almighty: “I promised the Goddess I would thank her. And Amazon. Goddess first, Amazon second.”
During the ceremony, she also made reference to “male gaze” theorist Laura Mulvey. Like Lena Dunham, Soloway was determined to inhabit a female gaze, through the way she wrote and directed. “Knowing how it feels to be inside a woman instead of what it’s like to look at them—it’s simply the inverse of what [directors] have been doing,” she tells me. During filming, she discusses with director of photography Jim Frohna the feeling characters should be evoking before the camera rolls on each shot. But for Soloway, the female gaze (a term she means to include anyone who identifies as female) is not just an aesthetic tool. It’s a political one that encourages empathy in the viewer. What does it feel like to be a trans woman learning how to live in the world as a female, to be a young woman exploring her sexuality or an older woman having an orgasm?