Producer Lindsay Goffman, "Dumbstruck"

Lindsay Goffman first decided to make a documentary about ventriloquists during the 2007 Writers Strike. Her screenwriter husband, Mark, was left virtually unemployed, leaving him with a lot of time on his hands.

Their solution? Make a documentary. Lindsay's mother was an amateur ventriloquist and traveled to the annual ventriloquist convention in Ft. Mitchell, Ky. Bingo.

The Goffmans will be in Indianapolis May 13 for a special screening of "Dumbstruck" at the Keystone Art Cinema at 7 p.m. and will hold a post-screening Q&;A.

Lindsay Goffman spoke to The Film Yap about the various characters she encountered and choosing not to emphasize that one of her subjects was a transsexual.

Are you from Indianapolis, or did you just live here?

No, I’m from Indianapolis. I went to Indian Creek (Elementary School) and Belzer (Middle School) and Lawrence Central (High School), and went to Indiana University.

Oh, cool! What year did you graduate?

I graduated from high school in 1998.

So at what point did you decide to make a movie about ventriloquists?

Well {laughs} at what point…well, I was working as a coordinator at the Tannenbaum Company, and I had seen (the spelling bee documentary) “Spellbound,” and my husband is a writer. He was writing for “Law and Order: SVU” at the time, and they were on a writers strike, and it all worked out because he wasn’t able to write, so he became the director for this documentary.

Did you look for topics, or did you know you wanted to do it on this subject?

Do you mean did I know I wanted to do a documentary on ventriloquism?

{laughs} Yeah.

Well, this movie is dedicated to my mom and inspired by her. She was a second-grade schoolteacher at IPS and she did ventriloquism with her kids as a fun thing. She’s very shy, and my dad encouraged her to go to this ventriloquists convention, which is in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky — this place called the Drawbridge Inn, which looks like medieval times, and 470 ventriloquists walking around with their dummies, you know, talking to each other. So my dad went with her and he brought a video camera, and my husband and I saw this footage and were blown away by it, like, "Wow, what an incredible world.” For my husband, what gelled for him was at our wedding, my mom went up to do a toast and instead of giving the normal toast, she was wearing this white glove, and she decided to use this glove like a puppet, and she gave this incredibly eloquent toast and just really came out of her shell.

Did you have any idea when you decided to go to the convention who you were going to talk to and follow, or did it just come about naturally?

No, we really didn’t. We did some research, but it became really just two camera guys, and Mark and myself. We knew we wanted to follow people who had certain goals — Kim being the beauty pageant winner and wanting to pursue cruise ships, Dylan wanting to be a professional. We wanted to follow these people on their journeys.

How long did you end up following them?

We originally thought filming would take a year, and that was our big plan, and it’s just not how things went. My husband is a TV writer for a living, and you can script things for that, but not here. You have to wait for the stories to play out and wait for things to unfold, so we shot for another year, then edited for another year to get the film to where we really wanted it.

The thing that’s been on my mind for a long time is Wilma, who is obviously a transsexual, but you never really mention that. You show photos of her as a man, but there’s only this vague thing about “medical problems” and “family problems.” What was your reason for not actually dealing with it?

When we made this movie, we decided we really wanted to make a movie about ventriloquism, and we wanted these characters to tell their own stories, and we put in there what she was comfortable saying. We could have made a whole other movie with just Wilma. She’s such an incredible character. I have never met anyone like her. It’s a movie about these characters and their journey, and we wouldn’t have had time to get into that because once it did, you’d be getting into all of these other questions, and I thought that could be a whole other documentary by itself.

It seemed almost like she didn’t feel comfortable about it, and you didn’t seem to push it.

Yeah, we finished filming and we were done, and she said, “You know, if you want me to talk about anything else, I’d be willing to do that.” We’d really earned her trust and we’re really proud of where it turned out. It was incredible.

Let’s talk about Terry Fator. When the film starts, he hadn’t yet landed his huge Vegas job. What did you make of him originally?

Yeah, that was a huge roller coaster for us. We discovered Terry while he was on “America’s Got Talent,” and we had no idea what was going to happen. What we thought was big news was the trip where he got the key to the city. We thought that was the shining light to our documentary. Then we got this call from his manager six months later saying Terry’s about to sign the largest deal in Las Vegas history. So we were there for that ride with Letterman, Oprah, the "Today" show. You couldn’t have scripted that.

With this unusual subject matter, how did you establish that fine line between laughing with or at these people? You really treated them with respect.

Yeah, it is a fine line, especially since my mom is part of the community, and we didn’t want to do anything to make her uncomfortable, but as far as laughing with them rather than at them, that would be too easy to do. It’s like, “Oh, ventriloquists. Let’s laugh at them.” That’s not the movie we wanted to make. It’s so easy. It feels like a cheap shot.