Mockingbird Don't Sing (2001)

From the age of one and a half to thirteen, Katie, was imprisoned by her parents. Locked in a room, tied and immobile, bound to a "potty-chair", Katie endured years of isolated silence punctuated by brutality. When Katie’s case finally came to public attention she was moved to a hospital in Los Angeles, where it was discovered she had never been taught to speak. Katie was an anomaly, a modern day Wild Child. Medical and psychological doctors descended on the girl in droves, often with selfish motivations in this heart-breaking story. With stunning care to detail Mockingbird Don’t Sing tells Katie’s story of imprisonment, discovery and her difficult road to joining the human family as a beautiful young woman.

I Am Hoping Genie is Still Alive

I have this movie on a homemade video tape and I don't know how long I have had it. I have watched my tape a few times over the past 10 years or so and frequently wonder why there was never a follow-up on how Katie (Genie) did after being separated from Ms. Curtis, the only person who seemed to be able to reach her. Katie's childhood was certainly not geared to raising a normal child, chained to a potty chair and fed by an abusive, mentally-ill father who barked at her and a mother going blind from cataracts who did nothing to stop the abuse. I couldn't help drawing similarities between her daughter's living conditions and those of a character on a Star Trek episode titled Miri played by Kim Darby. One poster called the mother "spooky" and I thought that fit her to a Tee. However much the movie's depiction of Katie's abuse and linguists' inability to teach her language, I still wish it had ended with a means viewers could use to find out in later years how Genie was able to survive in our world. I did search the 'net and came up with: Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 19:48:16 +0000. From: Sandino L
Subject: Genie. Thanks to all those who replied to my query (Linguist 14.677) about Genie. I was offered interesting ideas, but most important, I received a mail from Susan Curtiss with up-to-date information about Genie: "I understand you have asked Prof. Brunetti whether Genie is still
alive. She is indeed still alive, lives in a good board-and-care home, and is, I hope, happy and thriving... And keep your fingers crossed. I'm trying to find a way to see her and have some hope that this could happen some time this year. I've been dreaming of this for years, so if this should happen it would indeed be a dream (more accurately "many dreams") come true. Best, Susie Curtiss" Since that was over five years ago it (if even truthful) does not answer the question Is Genie alive now? I can only hope that if she were to have died, it would have been made known to the public, so I hope it is a case of "Reports of my death are greatly exagerated." I also taped the Nova episode on Wild Child and urge viewers of Mockingbird Don't Sing to purchase it as it covers several feral children in different countries and would give them a wider picture of how children came to be feral and to what extent they can be rehabilitated.



July 12, 2008

A very disturbing movie.

This is one of the most disturbing movies I have ever seen. It documents the abuse a young girl suffered at the hands of first her father and then of the welfare authorities {in this case California's} who are charged with protecting such children.

I think it is beside the point to get bogged down in whether this movie is successful as a artistic creation. And whether it is fully true. The movie's power comes from watching this helpless child being shuttled from one inadequate environment to another.

The young actress who played the child, Katie, was superb in a very difficult role. September 7, 2007

Why not help the real Genie??

Instead of spending money to make rediculous re-enactments of this horrific and true story, why not try to help and perhaps the real Genie- who is now around 48 years old and in a home for retarded adults. It makes me sad the real person was exploited and then thrown away when public fascination wore off. Why this child was put back in the care of one of her abusers (who then gave her up to more abuse in foster care) boggles my mind. The selfishness of her mother was Genie's true downfall. March 11, 2006

waw

i watched m.b.d.s with myu friends this morning and the story is so powerfull i cant believe someone would just rent the dvd for the actors/actrese that were in it i think that is awfull and that they show no real emotion towards people October 16, 2005

XTRO goes Lifetime with mixed results.

Mockingbird Don't Sing (Harry Bromley Davenport, 2001)

This film was, shall we say, something of a surprise. To date, the only other Harry Bromley Davenport film I've been able to track down has been his first, the brilliant, gruesome sci-fi shocker XTRO. Upon finding out he'd done a film about "Genie," the famous feral girl discovered in California in 1970, I expected something quite different than what I got.

Genie (whose name in the film is Katie Standon) spent the first thirteen years of her life being brutally abused by her father, before her mother (played with chilling effectiveness by Better Off Dead's Kim Darby) left him, took her, and went to the social services office looking for welfare benefits. The woman at the desk took one look at the child, called the cops, and the rest is history. The film focuses mostly on what happened after the child was rescued from her initial environment; for a number of years she was in the care of a number of doctors and observers from Childrens Hospital, Los Angeles. The main protagonist in this film is Sandra Tannen, real name Susan Curtiss (played by singer Melissa Errico), a linguistics grad student from UCLA assigned to document Genie's ability to learn language despite having passed what is known in psychology as the critical period; screenwriter Daryl Haney (who, oddly, usually writes softcore movies) and Davenport based the movie around, according to the DVD's liner notes, Curtiss' version of the story.

Therein lies the movie's major failing. Even without reading the liner notes, it's obvious that Curtiss (or Sandra Tannen) is the hero of this piece, the one untarnished person in the child's life. This leads to the story feeling incredibly biased, as well as having the other characters sometimes act in rather bizarre fashion (for example, Darby's character goes from throwing her out of the house one second to launching into a lengthy explanation of her husband's mental state the next, then slips right back into evil-bitch mode once the explication is done). Thus, the very structure of the film itself should be leading the viewer to question the authenticity of the story which, despite being obviously docudrama, is marketed as a true story.

Definitely not Davenport's best work, but an interesting artifact in the world of film. *** December 14, 2004

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