“Fairyland,” the new film based on Alysia Abbott’s memoir about growing up in San Francisco raised by a gay single father, has its fair share of touching father-daughter moments. In one scene, a college-aged Alysia (played by Emilia Jones), returning from a semester abroad in France, shares a notebook of her writing with her dad Steve (played by Scoot McNairy), who is himself a poet. There’s something particularly raw and real about the scene — partly because it’s an actual notebook from Alysia’s youth.
“That was kind of my first writing about my life that would become part of the memoir,” Abbott told SFGATE.
The film, released in theaters on Oct. 10, is set in the 1970s and 1980s and begins with the death of Alysia’s mother and a move with her father to a bohemian apartment in San Francisco where Steve begins to date men. Alysia grows up in a fanciful version of the city, in which she plays dress-up with her father’s roommates and is taught a respect for the arts. But by the time she reaches young adulthood, the AIDS crisis has overwhelmed SF’s gay community, and she becomes a caregiver for her father.
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The film’s director, Andrew Durham, had nearly an identical experience. After his parents divorced at a young age, his father moved from Palo Alto to San Francisco and became immersed in the gay community. His father would also contract HIV, with Durham looking after him in his final years.
“So many different parts of Alysia’s experience — the frustration, the anger, the embarrassment, you know, the fear — all of that resonated with me,” he said.
Abbott began working on the memoir while enrolled in an MFA program at the New School in New York in the years following her father’s death, eventually publishing it in 2013. Sofia Coppola quickly purchased the movie rights, but it took nearly a decade for filming to start in 2022. The movie premiered at Sundance 2023 and screened locally at Frameline months later, but it took two more years to reach the public.
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Emilia Jones and Scoot McNairy in “Fairyland.”
Courtesy of Lionsgate
Filming took place in the Bay Area, with two days of exterior shots in San Francisco, followed by interior work done in a huge decommissioned officer’s building on Mare Island in Vallejo. The set design of the interiors feels expansive and larger than life, rather than the claustrophobic nature of many smaller Victorians, a decision by Durham that was intended to give a sense of scale from a child’s point of view (Nessa Dougherty plays the younger version of Alysia). For Abbott, seeing the full scope of the sets had a surreal effect.
“I had the experience of walking around a single mansion and each room was dressed as a different period of my life,” said Abbott, who donated many childhood mementos to the filmmakers, including framed photos of her family that graced the walls of the rooms.
Although the San Francisco of the 1970s is long gone, producing the film locally instilled it with a sense of verisimilitude and helped capture an energy of the city that both Abbott and Durham remember fondly.
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Nessa Dougherty and Scoot McNairy in “Fairyland.”
Courtesy of Lionsgate
“The San Francisco that I grew up in, in my memory when I was young, was very magical and full of wonder and pretend,” Abbott said, remembering days spent wearing big Egyptian necklaces and medieval robes as her father worked on his writing.
Durham’s father, who worked as a fine art dealer and at the de Young Museum, raised him with a cosmopolitan bent, taking him to the theater and introducing him to then-exotic foods like sushi at a young age.
“We’d end up at these parties, and there would be all sorts of people,” Durham said. “There’d be the blue-blooded old money of San Francisco, and then the hippies from the Haight-Ashbury mixing with like leather daddies and then poets and tech people. It was just such an interesting thing to see as a kid, and be around all that.”
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Nessa Dougherty and Scoot McNairy in “Fairyland.”
Courtesy of Lionsgate
Seeing San Francisco through a child’s eyes in the beginning of the film results in a playful sense of wonder, contrasted by the challenges of single parenthood and the complications of raising a child among a cast of roommates living counterculture lifestyles. But as the ’70s shift into the ’80s, the tragic reality of the AIDS crisis takes hold and Steve comes to rely on his daughter for his survival. The film feels intensely personal, but reflects an experience felt by so many during that period.
“This isn’t just a story about me and my grief, as big as that was, or that my dad’s an interesting guy,” Abbott said. “… It was also a story about how San Francisco changed over those years, and how queer rights changed over those years, and how it wasn’t just my family that was impacted by AIDS, but there are so many people that were impacted by AIDS.”
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The last third of “Fairyland” is heartbreaking to watch and will undoubtedly lead to tears in the audience, but for Abbott, that release is something we as a society could benefit from.
“I think it’s good to cry — I think we actually have a lot to cry about, and it feels really good to cry with other people in a room together,” she said.