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In the 1970s, Estrada organized for farmworker rights alongside Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, participating in marches for the United Farm Workers and organizing grape boycotts in East Los Angeles.

In the frantic opening scene of "Dolores Claiborne" — released 30 years ago — a violent scuffle unfolds just offscreen at the top of a staircase, before an elderly woman topples backward from a wheelchair and careens down a flight of stairs, where she lands with an audible crunch of balusters and bones.

Worse, he was stopped cold by some of King’s more stomach-turning flourishes—in the novel, Vera flings and smears her own excrement around the bedroom to torment Dolores—but when novelist and family friend William Goldman suggested he should be the one to draft the screenplay, Gilroy pressed past his misgivings.

“Even patches of seawater along the shoreline froze,” Hackford recalls, “and it fit Dolores perfectly: a woman totally isolated at the end of the earth, savagely weathered and tough as nails.”

In another subtle effect, Hackford incorporated images taken from paintings by Belgian artist René Magritte, so that when Dolores shatters her window with an ax and when Selena stands before the mirror on the ferryboat, uncanny surrealist imagery signals the eruption of repressed memories.