Celebrity biopics sell movie tickets, although it’s never a guarantee that any particular superstar has led an interesting life. So, if you’re a Hollywood scribe, you can squeeze your subject into a readymade template. Celebrity had a career decline? That calls for a Citizen Kane style rise and fall. Your famous figure OD’d? Great! Turn it into a tragedy, driving home some point or other about addiction. What if their life involves an unsolved mystery on par with the Mary Celeste? Dream up a solution.
Norma Rankin, twice grammy nominated singer-songwriter from Chicago, comfortably slotted herself into category three by vanishing off the face of the earth in 1992. Thus, esteemed director Ivan Shanks, auteur of such classics as “Your Mother and a Cow” (1985) and “Die Slowly and Painfully” (1988) made the acclaimed, highly speculative “Rankin Vanishes” (2000), which nabbed three Oscars, and a golden globe.
It did so by fudging the facts.
On the 17th of July ‘92, travelling by cruise ship across the Atlantic, Norma Rankin retired to her cabin at 10:30 pm. When she was called upon the next morning, her room was found to be empty. A hurried search of the ship revealed the singer was no longer on board. Rankin’s exact fate has never been determined, leaving a slew of overheated conspiracy theorists to step in.
It seems most likely (call it Occam’s Razor if you’re feeling fancy) that Norma Rankin fell into the ocean. But why? Was she inebriated? Suicidal? Or maybe thrown in?
“She wasn’t pleased with the reality of the record industry and deeply unhappy,” Norma’s sister, Lola explained in an interview “achieving her dreams came at a huge cost. She had also suffered a miscarriage a year earlier, so it’s possible she took her own life.”
Director Shanks evidently feeling suicide was too much of a downer, had the wilder theories delivered in Rashomon style flashbacks by several characters.
Amongst them:
Rankin fakes her death by jumping into the ocean and swimming towards a submarine where she’s reunited with her true love to live happily as a farmer’s wife.
She’s murdered by her ex-boyfriend. (A detail that had her real-life ex sue the filmmakers for character defamation.)
A lousy Loch Ness Monster lookalike (even by the standards of early 2000s CGI) devours the screaming Norma in a scene so over the top, you have to rewind it and laugh.
Space aliens whisk her away or something.
Still Shanks and his scriptwriters fearing the lack of a definitive conclusion, give the audience, a rousing and utterly fictitious ending.
Rankin is indeed living happily as a farmer’s wife, whilst her jealous ex-boyfriend closes in on her. Third act shenanigans have Rankin, and her new husband battling her axe-wielding ex, with a climax consisting of our heroine running away from an exploding barn in slow motion with the villain trapped inside.
In regard to that as the true outcome, Lola Rankin merely stated, “I think it’s unlikely.”
Celebrity biopics sell movie tickets, although it’s never a guarantee that any particular superstar has led an interesting life. So, if you’re a Hollywood scribe, you can squeeze your subject into a readymade template. Celebrity had a career decline? That calls for a Citizen Kane style rise and fall. Your famous figure OD’d? Great! Turn it into a tragedy, driving home some point or other about addiction. What if their life involves an unsolved mystery on par with the Mary Celeste? Dream up a solution.
Norma Rankin, twice grammy nominated singer-songwriter from Chicago, comfortably slotted herself into category three by vanishing off the face of the earth in 1992. Thus, esteemed director Ivan Shanks, auteur of such classics as “Your Mother and a Cow” (1985) and “Die Slowly and Painfully” (1988) made the acclaimed, highly speculative “Rankin Vanishes” (2000), which nabbed three Oscars, and a golden globe.
It did so by fudging the facts.
On the 17th of July ‘92, travelling by cruise ship across the Atlantic, Norma Rankin retired to her cabin at 10:30 pm. When she was called upon the next morning, her room was found to be empty. A hurried search of the ship revealed the singer was no longer on board. Rankin’s exact fate has never been determined, leaving a slew of overheated conspiracy theorists to step in.
It seems most likely (call it Occam’s Razor if you’re feeling fancy) that Norma Rankin fell into the ocean. But why? Was she inebriated? Suicidal? Or maybe thrown in?
“She wasn’t pleased with the reality of the record industry and deeply unhappy,” Norma’s sister, Lola explained in an interview “achieving her dreams came at a huge cost. She had also suffered a miscarriage a year earlier, so it’s possible she took her own life.”
Director Shanks evidently feeling suicide was too much of a downer, had the wilder theories delivered in Rashomon style flashbacks by several characters.
Amongst them:
Rankin fakes her death by jumping into the ocean and swimming towards a submarine where she’s reunited with her true love to live happily as a farmer’s wife.
She’s murdered by her ex-boyfriend. (A detail that had her real-life ex sue the filmmakers for character defamation.)
A lousy Loch Ness Monster lookalike (even by the standards of early 2000s CGI) devours the screaming Norma in a scene so over the top, you have to rewind it and laugh.
Space aliens whisk her away or something.
Still Shanks and his scriptwriters fearing the lack of a definitive conclusion, give the audience, a rousing and utterly fictitious ending.
Rankin is indeed living happily as a farmer’s wife, whilst her jealous ex-boyfriend closes in on her. Third act shenanigans have Rankin, and her new husband battling her axe-wielding ex, with a climax consisting of our heroine running away from an exploding barn in slow motion with the villain trapped inside.
In regard to that as the true outcome, Lola Rankin merely stated, “I think it’s unlikely.”
