If These Walls Could Talk is a 1996 made for television movie, broadcast on HBO. It follows the plights of three different women and their experiences with abortion. Each of the three stories takes place in the same house, 22 years apart: 1952, 1974, and 1996. All three segments were co-written by Nancy Savoca. Savoca directed the first and second segment while Cher directed the third. Anne Heche, who starred in the 1996 segment, went on to direct the sequel, which received an Emmy Award.
The women's experiences in each vignette are designed to demonstrate the popular views of society on the issue in each of the given decades. The film became a surprise success, and was HBO's highest rated movie ever. The film's critical and commercial success was followed by an international release, and spawned a sequel, If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000), starring Sharon Stone, Michelle Williams, Chloë Sevigny and Ellen DeGeneres, which deals with homosexuality in three different eras.
The films Common Ground (2000) and The Hours (2002) would also use a similar format to address the issue of homophobia as If These Walls Could Talk.
Read more about If These Walls Could Talk: Cast, Awards and Nominations
Famous quotes containing the words walls and/or talk:
“The night in prison was novel and interesting enough.... I found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is a great advantage for any man to be able to talk or hear, neither ignorantly nor absurdly, upon any subject; for I have known people, who have not said one word, hear ignorantly and absurdly; it has appeared by their inattentive and unmeaning faces.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)