Bad Lit passes on the news that Diego Pillco, the construction worker who admitted to killing actress and Waitress writer/director Adrienne Shelly, has been sentenced to 25 years behind bars for the crime.

I still get sick to my stomache when I think about this story. I wrote a story for FILMMAKER Magazine last year about the Waitress team’s push to both capitalize on and redirect attention away from the murder when selling the film, first at Sundance and then to the mainstream art house audience. Waitress may not be the highest work of art, but it’s undoubtedly a personal, writer/director driven film, and I was particularly interested in the idea that the actors and producers who survived Shelly were tasked with uneviable responsibility of protecting her vision in her absence.

When the story (which is not online, although you can read excerpts/discussion here and here) went to press, Fox Searchlight had just begun releasing promotional materials, which they were very reticent to discuss. I was irked by the fact that Shelly’s name seemed to be downplayed in the trailer and poster, and I was ready to accuse the studio of whitewashing the film’s backstory by willfully ignoring it, in order to more easily bank their next feel-good, Little Miss Sunshine-size success story. The studio rep I spoke to for the story told me the marketing materials would highlight Shelly more as the campaign went on, and I went with it. Either the studio’s strategy changed after our conversation, or she just lied.

In the end, I suppose I was wrong, and Searchlight was right to downplay the bittersweetness lent to the film by the hanging cloud of Shelly’s death––Waitress went on to gross about $20 million, many times more than what Searchlight reportedly paid to pick it up, and that’s ultimately a victory for Shelly’s legacy as much as it is for Searchlight’s marketing department. Still, if my story had been due six months later, I would have surely added a footnote about how quickly the studio seemed to abandon any thought of pushing Keri Russell towards a Best Actress nomination as soon as they had another starlet in another unplanned pregnancy film to get behind. That speaks to the core question I had going into my story––how far can an independent film really get when its maker is not present to fight for it?

In any case, this sentencing should offer a sense of closure for those of us who have been watching the story for some time. Amazingly, you can watch the entirety of my favorite Shelly film, Hal Hartley’s Trust, on YouTube. I’ve embedded one of my favorite sections above.