PARK CITY, Utah — Polly Williams was 29 years old when she slashed her wrists twice and downed a bottle of sleeping pills. What drove her to the edge? Two pieces of pizza. She hadn't been able to get home in enough time to throw them up.
Williams, one of four women with life-threatening eating disorders whose stories are told in the documentary film "Thin," came to the Sundance Film Festival with first-time filmmaker Lauren Greenfield, the acclaimed Venice photographer who has explored in often shocking images the relationship of girls to their bodies.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday January 27, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 36 words Type of Material: Correction
"Thin" -- An article in Wednesday's Calendar about the documentary "Thin" said that the film, about women with eating disorders, would air on HBO in the spring. The cable outlet plans to show it in November.
"I remember being so devastated that my body was digesting the pizza, and I couldn't handle it anymore," said Williams during a joint interview with Greenfield here.
The documentary, filmed in a South Florida clinic for women with eating disorders, which will air on HBO in the spring, grew out of Greenfield's 2002 photo book "Girl Culture."
If nothing else, it is an unflinching portrait of a deadly mental illness that is little understood and poorly treated. Each morning's weigh-in sessions are an exercise in horror and hope -- it's not uncommon for the women in treatment to weigh less than 85 pounds. A two-pound weight gain, while medically laudable, is met with disgust by one of the patients. "This is such a horrible disease," Williams said. "It's not something you can beat on your own."
Among the three other subjects in the movie is Alisa Williams, who joined the Air Force at the height of Operation Desert Storm because she thought a military regimen would help her lose weight. Before entering treatment, she tried to keep her calorie count to 200 a day (U.S. dietary guidelines recommend at least 1,600 calories daily for women) and compulsively changed clothes into the wee hours looking for something that made her look thin. Asked to draw an outline of her body on a big sheet of paper taped to a door, she produces an image that looks more like an NFL linebacker than the petite creature that she is. "This is the one thing I want -- to be thin," says Williams, the single mother of two small children, "so if it takes dying to get there, so be it."
Shelly Guillory, a psychiatric nurse, purges through the gastric tube that was inserted to save her life. Competitive with her identical twin, Kelly, she tells her therapist that "if I get bigger than her, that's the end of me."
