I first saw Kenneth Lonergan‘s Manchester By The Sea during Sundance ’16. As everyone knows by now the central tragedy in that film is a late-night house fire, caused by fireplace embers and the failure of Casey Affleck‘s soused character to properly contain them. The fire causes the death of Affleck and Michelle Williams‘ three children — two small daughters and an infant son.
It hit me during the summer of ’16 that a similar real-life tragedy that happened on 12.25.11 in Stamford, Connecticut and extinguished the lives of three small children, may have inspired the Manchester author to engage in a little borrowing.
The Stamford home, owned by divorced advertising executive Madonna Badger, burned to the ground due to mishandled fireplace embers, apparently due to careless actions by either Badger or her boyfriend at the time, the late Michael Borcina. The fire resulted in the death of Badger’s three small daughters as well as her parents.
It’s been reported that the initial idea of a grief-struck handyman was pitched by Matt Damon and John Krasinski sometime after the release of Margaret. Lonergan worked on the Manchester script for about three years, finishing it sometime in ’14. Even if the New York-based writer had begun work in the fall of ’11, or not long after the release of Margaret and a few weeks before the Christmas Stamford tragedy, it would have been a natural enough thing for him to have read about it, etc.
If Lonergan cooked up the idea of a family house fire all on his own, fine. But it’s quite a coincidence. The details are awfully similar.
