How to Make an American Quilt (1995) on Netflix
PG-1319951h 56mComedyDramaRomance
Graduate student Finn Dodd accepts a marriage proposal from Sam. She spends the summer with her grandmother Hy and great-aunt Glady Joe, whose quilting bee is making her wedding quilt.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.3/1013,230 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes63%
Trailer
Plot summary
Finn Dodd, a graduate student, has just accepted a marriage proposal from Sam, a carpenter she lives with. Her parents divorced after deciding they were better friends than lovers, and she does not want that for herself. She takes the summer away from Sam to restart a stalled thesis about rituals around handicrafts and to weigh the engagement. She stays in Grasse, California, with her grandmother Hy and her great-aunt Glady Joe Cleary, whose quilting group has met together since before Finn was born. The group is making her a wedding quilt.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about How to Make an American Quilt (1995)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Producers Sarah Pillsbury and Midge Sanford could not get any studio interested in the project, so they instead persuaded Steven Spielberg to personally finance the screenplay's development, an arrangement Spielberg said appealed to him because he grew up with three younger sisters and Amblin had long been shaped by women.
- Screenwriter Jane Anderson rewrote the source novel so that Finn, only a minor character in Whitney Otto's book, became the film's main character, and Winona Ryder was the producers' first choice to play her.
- Quilt guild president Patty McCormick was brought in to build the film's quilts and personally coach the cast in using thimbles, since only Anne Bancroft and Maya Angelou actually knew how to quilt beforehand.
