‘Welcome to Me:’ Welcome to Shira Piven’s First Film

Mark Jackson
Updated:

NEW YORK—“I like old shoes on a stage,” said Shira Piven, sister of Jeremy Piven (who plays Ari Gold on HBO’s comedy TV series “Entourage”), when she directed me in an Off-Off Broadway play called “Pilgrims.”  

Small world. Some 12 years later, we would meet again at Soho’s Crosby Street Hotel in New York to discuss her first Hollywood film, “Welcome to Me.” 

Serious stage directors like Piven know things like the haunting atmosphere created when audiences quietly meditate on the abject wistfulness of a 1940s pair of beat-up wingtips, lying on an empty stage.

Piven comes from Chicago theater royalty.

Both her father and mother were theater directors. Her husband, Adam McKay, is a former “Saturday Night Live” director now a Hollywood director. Her brother’s a movie star. The theater-art gene was passed along successfully.

Shira’s first feature film tells the story of a veterinary technician with a borderline personality disorder (Kristen Wiig, formerly of “SNL”) who wins the lottery for $86 million and self-finances her own show on a down-and-out local shopping channel because she wants to be Oprah.

It’s social commentary on our collective American reality-TV and selfie-infested mindset, and how, hypothetically, if we were to put a borderline crazy person on TV and let her go off her meds, America would enjoy watching the train wreck of it all.

Kristen Wiig as Alice Klieg in "Welcome to Me." (Courtesy of Alchemy)
Kristen Wiig as Alice Klieg in "Welcome to Me." Courtesy of Alchemy
Mark Jackson
Mark Jackson
Film Critic
Mark Jackson is the chief film critic for The Epoch Times. In addition to film, he enjoys martial arts, motorcycles, rock-climbing, qigong, and human rights activism. Jackson earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Williams College, followed by 20 years' experience as a New York professional actor. He narrated The Epoch Times audiobook "How the Specter of Communism is Ruling Our World," available on iTunes, Audible, and YouTube. Mark is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic.
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