Other reviews and articles concerning Anne Heche

"Professional" Reviews of Anne Heche Films

General articles	Walking and Talking	Kingfish, a Story of Huey P. Long	Pie in the Sky	The Wild Side
Milk Money	O Pioneers	The Adventures of Huck Finn	The Juror

General Articles

from Cosmopolitan: November 1996. page 110.

Red hot right now

This cool eccentric, who steams up the screen as wife of johnny Depp's Donnie Brasco, is, off camera too, a spicy heartbreaker with wild-card ways!

By Michael Kaplan

Anne Heche sits in a midtown Manhattan cafe oozing cool eccentricity the way more-seasoned movie stars radiate charisma,her blonde hair tied back so that it sticks up and fans out, her laser blue eyes shaded by thick-framed sunglasses ("Cheapos," she volunteers). Told that she has the kind of look that must make it easy to roll out of bed, put on whatever's handy, and still seem sexy, this hot-as-a-pistol actress responds with a spicy smirk. "Why waste time thinking about it? Usually I climb out of bed and spend the day wearing whatever I slept in." she says,gleefully admitting that the baggy white slacks she's wearing right now are actually her pajama bottoms.

It's the kind of wild-card behaviour that Heche can doubtless get away with these days, considering her current success and the heightened degree of fame that's about to come her way. Starring roles in the independent films Walking and talking and Pie in the Sky have paved the road to her first major role in a big-budget movie, Donnie Brasco, in which she portrays the wife of Johnny Depp's title character, based on a real-life undercover cop who infiltrated the mob. "We got into bed for a love scene, and Johnny was the perfect gentleman," Heche gushes after verbally tussling with waiter over the finer points of half-and-half for her coffee. "He got into bed with his jeans on and told me a story about a love scene that he and Mary Stuart masterson had done together."

Does Heche, who's also enjoyed steamy on-screen moments with Alec Baldwin in The Juror, mind getting intimate before the camera? "Are you kidding?" she asks, scrunching up her face."It's total fantasy. Somebody tells me I have to kiss Johnny,and I'm like, 'All right, all right. As long as you're forcing me, I'll do it.'" She laughs at her own sarcasm, then adds, "I guess I'll just do every gorgeous guy in Hollywood.First Alec, then Johnny. Who's next? Bring them on!"

In the wake of a decimated romance with Steve Martin ----"A torturous love affair," he called it in Esquire, hinting that anne had broken his heart --- Heche is unattached. For the time being, she insists, her idea of nocturnal fun is to host marathon gab sessions with girlfriends in the West Hollywood craftsman-style house that she rents. As for men who cause a blip on her radar, "they like to laugh and aren't bogged down by what they've been conditioned to think." Crossing her legs,showing red-painted toenails and strappy sandals, Heche reveals she's got a knack for lifting the spirits of dour boyfriends."People who want to stay negative, they can. But sometimes, by seeing a person like me who's free, they realize you don't have to be so ... heavy." That said, she crooks her neck and adds,"Really, though I have no set type of guy that I look for. I don't ever limit myself. And when I get rejected, I always believe it's for a reason, that there's something else I'm meant to be doing. It's difficult not to take rejection personally, but nothing's ever depressed me for more than a day."

Heche's admirable resiliency no doubt derives from the roller-coaster life she's led to date. Born twenty-seven years ago into an ultra-religious Baptist family, she discovered at age twelve that her father, whom doctors had diagnosed with AIDS, was a closet homosexual. Even before that, though, the senior Heche, who'd devoted himself to founding churches, had run out of work,and his finances were in shambles. As if that weren't enough, Anne's brother was killed in a car accident three months after her father's death. While the other Heche kids pursued traditional teenage jobs, Anne generated cash flow by acting in a dinner theater near home in Atlantic City. Having helped the family regain economic stability by the time she was in high school, Heche had no intention of pursuing an acting career, but a casting agent from Another World happened to spot her in a class play and tapped her for the recurring role of twin sisters. Then, as she was set to enter Parsons School of Design in New York City, Hollywood beckoned, and she followed.

Anything but a hard-nosed careerist, Heche seems to have built up an enviable resume purely on instinct. "I listen," she says, getting up from the table to slip outside for a quick smoke. "Every time I try to go in a different direction, I listen for messages. I have a very strong connection to God/Goddess, but I don't believe in organized religion because I don't believe in rules."

What Heche does believe in is a total openness. "I put a very high premium on honesty," she says, emphasizing that it's more important to be truthful to yourself. "My father wasn't in touch with his sexuality, and he didn't know that acknowledging his needs and desires would make for a happier life. What I learned from his death is that if you don't accept your own sexuality, it will kill you. And that's a good lesson to learn when you're young." She considers her words for a moment, then stubs out the cigarette and heads inside to finish her coffee. Once back at the table, Heche adds, "Truth is love. Period."

Favourite Workout: "I like spinning to music. You can close your eyes and forget you're in a gym. You get into the experience of exercising rather than wonder whether you'll end up with the great body of that person in the corner."

Favourite Feature: "What I like most about myself are my eyes -- not because of how they look but because of what they allow me to see."

Favourite Wheels: "I have a 'seventy-nine Land Cruiser,and I love it. I used to have a Grand Wagoneer, but it blew upon the way to Long Beach. I was totally screwed because I had my dog, Sam, with me. He's huge, and I'd bought the truck especially for him. You know --- whatever makes Sam happy!"

(Los Angeles) Daily News [1/8

08697031 MOVIE STUDIOS BETTING ON PACK OF UNKNOWNS : HIGH COST OF HOLLYWOOD STARS PUTS SPOTLIGHT ON NEWCOMERS Daily News of Los Angeles (LA) - MONDAY, July 15, 1996 By: Jill Gerston

Their faces evoke no spark of recognition, and their names - Billy Crudup, Anne Heche, Liev Schreiber, Skeet Ulrich, Rachel Weisz, Renee Zellweger - sound like roll call in your high school algebra class.

They're at an age where some are still paying off their college loans, more are accustomed to Starbucks counters than the banquettes at Drai's, and most are nervous about being interviewed. They're brimming with eagerness and use the word ``lucky'' a lot when describing their careers.

In the next few months their lives are in for seismic jolts, as Hollywood unleashes a wave of major movies featuring them and other unknown young actors in leading roles.

The film industry is crossing its fingers that one or two of these tyros will dazzle audiences and become, as one casting director put it, the ``next new thing.''

``The whole machinery of Hollywood is based on finding people on the way up,'' said Peter Chernin, chairman of 20th Century Fox. ``It's more exciting to go with them than with middle-of-the-road talent. But it's risky. You bet on the thrill of discovery and hope you're going to be right, at least occasionally.''

With studios turning out more movies, stars demanding astronomical salaries and fickle audiences tiring of the same old perfect teeth and chiseled cheekbones, the film industry is more willing than ever to showcase a bevy of beginners.

``I don't remember when there were as many new faces being so prominently exposed,'' said Donna Isaacson, vice president for feature talent at 20th Century Fox, whose divisions are using many of these actors. ``There are many more movies being made, and lots have roles for younger people. Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt are in their 30s. The time is right for a new group.''

Already, the newcomer Matthew McConaughey (pronounced ma-CON-a-hay) is generating feverish buzz (including a two-page spread in Newsweek ABOUT the buzz) - and yet his first big film, ``A Time to Kill,'' based on the John Grisham best seller, will not be released until later this month.

Never mind that few moviegoers can identify this 26-year-old actor, whose has a handful of earlier credits, including small parts in the films ``Dazed and Confused'' and ``Boys on the Side'' and a pivotal role in the new John Sayles drama, ``Lone Star.''

As the centerpiece of a calculated media frenzy that might have daunted Clark Gable, McConaughey won't be bothered by anonymity much longer. (Next, he will film ``Contact'' with Jodie Foster.)

Big things are also expected of Liv Tyler, the lissome 19-year-old beauty starring in Bernardo Bertolucci's Tuscan idyll, ``Stealing Beauty,'' and the quirky, independent film ``Heavy.'' Tyler seems to be everywhere except on the cover of Organic Gardening.

``Whenever I see her, I think, `Just keep your head on,' '' Isaacson said. ``You hope she'll surround herself with smart people, challenge herself artistically and take some time to catch her breath.''

Not likely. The actress has been working nonstop, recently completing ``Inventing the Abbotts,'' based on a short story about sibling rivalry by Sue Miller, and ``That Thing You Do,'' a '60s rock 'n' roll romance that marks Tom Hanks' directorial debut.

Casting agents, directors and studio executives - ever on the prowl for bright young things no one has heard of - traipse to film festivals, acting workshops, London theater productions, off-off Broadway and even college drama departments. Hollywood's latest crop boasts a varied background: from Schreiber, who trained at the Yale School of Drama, to Heche, who got her start playing twins on the soap opera ``Another World.''

``To the general public, these kids are total unknowns, but to people in the industry, they have track records,'' said Marcia Ross, vice president of casting for Walt Disney and Touchstone Pictures, which is releasing ``Ransom,'' with Schreibera. ``We've had them in to read, we've seen their work - in low-budget films, in the theater - before they've gotten to a point where they're getting leads.''

In fact, Marion Dougherty, senior vice president for talent at Warner Bros., recalled testing McConaughey for the role of Julia Roberts' husband in ``Something to Talk About.'' ``He didn't get it because he was too young, but I wrote a letter, which I never do, to our CEOs recommending they get a contract on this kid,'' she said. ``He was that good.''

Acting ability notwithstanding, McConaughey and his young colleagues offer Hollywood an irresistible

attraction: cheap talent.

McConaughey received $250,000 for ``A Time to Kill.'' (His asking price has skyrocketed since then.) Weisz described her salary to appear opposite Keanu Reeves in ``Chain Reaction'' as ``a very small fee that is nowhere near a million dollars - not even close.''

Fox's Chernin said: ``If you're casting a big star, you figure you've paid your money for marquee value, and usually one top star is all you can afford. So you cast the rest of the film with the most exciting talent you can find, which is often new talent.''

If a top young star like Chris O'Donnell is not available, Ross observed, ``that doesn't mean you don't make the movie. You look around for someone else.'' To directors, working with unknowns often infuses a film with a raw energy and an element of surprise. Moreover, there are no entourages, bratty behavior or demands for creative control - at least not yet.

``It's exciting to work with people whose whole career is in front of them,'' said Joel Schumacher, the director of ``A Time to Kill.'' ``They inspire me. They don't just give you Emotion 26B or Smile 11A. Sometimes when stars have been told how much we love certain things they do, they start phoning it in.''

``Most of the new crop of young actors and actresses are very professional,'' added Schumacher, who also handled newcomers in ``St. Elmo's Fire'' in 1985 and ``Flatlinears'' in 1990.

``They are committed to being really fine at their craft. We went through an era where it was very popular to be late, lazy, arrogant, not know your lines and smash up hotel rooms. I see that changing. The people coming up now are not poseurs.''

Nor do they seem fearful about plunging into the deep end of the Hollywood pool.

``No way I'm overwhelmed,'' said Zellweger when asked if she was intimidated about working with Tom Cruise in ``Jerry Maguire.'' ``Sure, you're being scrutinized more. But even though you're in a bigger film with bigger stars, when you come down to it, it's the same process.''

If most of the newcomers don't seem fazed by their leap to large roles in big-budget films, some appear apprehensive at suddenly finding themselves swept up in the hype that engulfs a newcomer deemed hot.

``I would like to avoid being the next hot thing and all the hype that goes with it,'' said Weisz. ``I met a producer who said to me about Julia Ormond that after `Sabrina' came out, `The bloom is really off her rose.' It's petrifying that someone would say that.''

(Ormond was 30 when she played the Audrey Hepburn role in the remake of ``Sabrina,'' released last year amid a maelstrom of publicity to disappointing reviews.)

Schreiber, who just finished a workshop production in Seattle of Wendy Wasserstein's new play, ``An

American Daughter,'' with Meryl Streep, has similar fears. ``Chasing the buzz distracts you,'' he said. It's why a lot of people burn out in this business. In order to stay sane, you have to just think about doing the job.''

Simon Halls, a publicist with Huvane Baum Halls, who represents several newcomers, including Weisz and Billy Crudup, said that the actors, once discovered, must then deliver.

``When the hype goes away, they have to have the acting chops,'' he said. ``They have to prove they can do the work.'' Several of his young clients, he said, are less interested in seeking the stardom of Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise than ina patterning their careers after those of actors like Ralph Fiennes and Frances McDormand, performers who alternate films with plays and will accept character parts.

``Stardom and lots of money isn't the ultimate goal of these people,'' he said.

Oh, really? That's not a line from Hollywood's script.

``Talk to me a year from now about these kids,'' Isaacson countered. ``Fame is a very powerful aphrodisiac. One thing is definite: When the hype gets overblown, people change. More change than don't.'' And what happens if the movie tanks?

``If the movie is not successful, but you're good in it and you haven't been paid millions of dollars, you keep working,'' said Disney's Ross.

``New talent is judged by the kind of acting they're doing, not the box office they're bringing in. They aren't carrying the movie. What you want people to say is, `Who's that wonderful actress who was so great with Tom Cruise?' ''

Although McConaughey and Tyler appear early favorites on the track to stardom, no one's betting a Malibu beach house on it.

``When there is a magical meeting of the material, the actor and the timing, that's when someone becomes a star,'' said Ross.

And if this year's newcomers never break from the pack of the merely ``promising,'' there are many more - Edward Norton, who got rave reviews for his portrayal of a psychopath in ``Primal Fear'' this spring; Jeffrey Wright in ``Basquiat,'' opening next month, just for starters - ready to supplant them.

``Billy Crudup isn't even Billy Crudup yet, and already people are looking for the next Billy Crudup,'' Ross said, ``just in case his price gets too high.''

Top

Walking and Talking

Author: Flatley, Guy

Cosmopolitan, Sep 1996 v221 n3 p36(1)

Rev Grade: A

WALKING AND TALKING: Of all friends, childhood chums who stick by us through adolescence and into adulthood are the best. That's the feeling shared by New York singles Amelia and Laura - until the night Laura, a waffling wanna-be shrink, accepts the marriage proposal of Frank, her sweet, prosaic live-in boyfriend. Soon Laura, locked in premarital embrace with Frank, is ignoring Amelia's frantic request to please pick up the phone if she's there. Worse still, Amelia's besotted bosom buddy is annoyingly un-traumatized by the tragic news that Big Jeans, their communal cat since sixth grade, must undergo chemotherapy. If only Amelia could turn for comfort to Andrew, her former beau - but she can't because the lout has succumbed to the lure of lusty phone sex with another woman (and Amelia's going to be stuck with the long-distance charges!). What's an unlucky-in-love, best-friend-deprived girl to do? Nothing that will leave you gasping with shock; yet this modestly scaled exploration of the fragile but unbreakable bond of female friendship shimmers with warmth, humor, and truth. You'll identify with Catherine Keener and Anne Heche, the soon-to-be famous actresses who bring Amelia and Laura so memorably to life, and you'll welcome writer-director Nicole Holofcener as a major addition to the swelling ranks of women filmmakers.

by Roger Ebert

* * * (three stars)

Amelia ................. Catherine Keener

Laura .................. Anne Heche

Andrew ................. Liev Schreiber

Frank .................. Todd Field

Amelia's therapist ..... Joseph Siravo

Bill ................... Kevin Corrigan

Peter .................. Randall Batinkoff

Miramax presents a film written and directed by Nicole Holofcener. Produced by Ted Hope and James Schamus. Photographed by Michael Spiller. Edited by Alisa Lepselter. Music by Billy Bragg. Running time: 86 minutes. Classified: R (for sexuality, language and brief drug use).

The prologue of "Walking and Talking" shows two preteen girls intently studying "The Joy of Sex," and we somehow suspect that when they grow up, sex will be more of a joy to one than to the other. We are right. As the story resumes, the characters, now thirtysomething, are still best friends. But then Laura's boyfriend proposes marriage, and her first thought is that Amelia is not going to be thrilled at this news.

Amelia (Catherine Keener) is a smart, good-looking brunette who for some reason is not lucky at love. She was going with a guy and they are still friends, and sometimes they try to reconstruct why they held back from a commitment, but they can't quite remember. Maybe it has something to do with the way he borrows money from her to pay for phone sex. Now she finds herself making small talk with the clerk at the video store, who eventually gets up the nerve to ask her out on a date -- to a movie monster fan convention.

Laura (Anne Heche) is more confident of her future. Her fiance, Frank (Todd Field), designs costume jewelry, hates most of his work, but hopes to do better. He is also curiously detached some of the time, and we begin to wonder about him, especially when he refuses to have the doctor look at a mole on his shoulder. Is he harboring a deadly disease?

It's one of the gifts of "Walking and Talking" that it remains subtle and gentle about that possibility and others. Written and directed by Nicole Holofcener, it is not a soap opera or a melodrama, and many of our fears about Frank and others do not materialize. One thing I like about the film is the way it teasingly introduces elements that in other films would lead to big, dramatic formulas, and then sidesteps them.

Amelia, the central character, is not a desperate woman but simply a person of reasonable intelligence who stands on the sidelines and watches the sweethearts on parade. What is she doing wrong? Nothing. She looks perfectly datable to us. But when even the video clerk doesn't call her back, she begins to despair.

The clerk, whose name is Bill (Kevin Corrigan), is one of the treasures of "Walking and Talking." We have met people exactly like him. He doesn't talk fast, but he thinks before he talks and is not as much of a nerd as his taste in movies would imply. "You're really pretty," he tells Amelia at one point, and then adds: "You look like you really need to hear it." He has a good reason for not calling her back, which the movie handles wonderfully in a scene where Amelia finally confronts him in the video store.

No big events take place in "Walking and Talking." Laura begins to plan her wedding. Amelia helps her. There is the obligatory crisis in which the engaged couple have a big fight and stop talking to one another. There are sweet scenes where Amelia and her ex-boyfriend Andrew (Liev Schreiber) get together wistfully to remember that they were once in love. They also spend the day with his father, who is in the early stages of Alzheimer's. And we see Laura at work: She is a therapist who, on the eve of marriage, begins to panic about commitment and to toy with the idea of an affair with one of her patients. She even goes to see him in a play. He is a very bad actor. That is a relief.

How did I feel at the end of "Walking and Talking"? The earth didn't shake, and I didn't feel in the presence of great cinema, but I felt cheerful, as if I had gone through some fraught times with good friends and we had emerged intact. And I found myself remembering Bill, the video clerk and Fangoria reader, and wondering how his book is coming along. He's writing the life of Colette.

A Friend's Film About Best Friends

A Friend's Film About Best Friends Newsday (ND) - Thursday July 25, 1996

By: Liza Bear.

TWO DAYS BEFORE last week's Manhattan opening of "Walking and Talking," a movie about a crisis between two thirty-something women friends that opens nationwide tommorow, its 36-year-old director, Nicole Holofcener, paced up and down the corridor outside Catherine Keener's 11th-floor room at the Regency Hotel clutching a cellular phone, taking care of last-minute details.

Inside the room, Catherine Keener - who plays independent woman Amelia in the movie - wrapping up her fourth interview of the day, curled up on a chair, the contours of her face lit by daylight from the window. Holofcener, in slacks and T-shirt, squeezed past the bed and sat next to Keener at a small, round table in the crowded hotel room. The two women have an easy camaraderie and finish each other's sentences.

"People have been obsessing about my hair for days," said Keener, as she poured the coffee. She's now disconcertingly blond, having changed her natural rich dark hair color for Tom DiCillo's "Box of Moonlight," recently shot in Tennessee. And she's keeping it blonde for DiCillo's "The Real Blonde" which starts production in September.

Holofcener first spotted Keener in DiCillo's "Johnny Suede" when it was screened at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, where Holofcener's own short film, "Angry," was playing. She later saw her in person on the StairMaster at a West Hollywood gym reading Newsweek in a plastic sleeve. A casting director they both knew passed the "Walking and Talking" script to Keener. Actor and director immediately took to each other at their first meeting at an L.A. coffee shop.

"When I first saw Catherine in 'Johnny Suede,' " Holofcener said, "I thought she'd have the ability to feel the sadness and loneliness for Amelia's character very easily without self-pity or lack of self-respect." As it happens, the first scene of "Walking and Talking," in which the dark-haired Amelia meets her blond best friend Laura (Anne Heche), also takes place at a coffee shop, not in Los Angeles but in New York, at Chelsea's fashionable Le Gamin. In the scene, the obnoxious waiter ignores Amelia's order but immediately takes Laura's order when she arrives. Amelia is not fazed. "She gets overlooked, but she's still fighting," Keener said.

Holofcener was raised in New York and Los Angeles, got her first taste of filmmaking at San Francisco State and graduated from Columbia film school, eight years ago. Her thesis film, "It's Richard I Like," a subtle analysis of uncertainty in a boy-girl relationship, was picked up by PBS' American Playhouse. Keener grew up in Miami and got into acting while an English major at Wheaton College in Massachusetts.

"Amelia was based on me," Holofcener said. "I wrote about what I experienced when my best friend was getting married. And "Walking And Talking" is really Amelia's story, even though the problem in the friendship is what carries the plot."

For Keener, it was how Amelia's sadness was handled in the script - its humor - that drew her to the character. "What was really interesting for me about this movie was that it's told from Amelia's point of view," Keener said. "As an actress I often read scripts where there's a female lead, and then there's a best friend. And this movie was about the best friend. It reversed the normal setup. The best friend became the lead. Usually the best friend is relegated to a couple of scenes." "Usually they're caricatures," Holofcener said. "And they can't be as pretty as the lead," Keener said. "When I was casting the movie, Amelia was always recommended as being a plain Jane," Holofcener said. "Quirky," Keener said. "The quirky one with the zany vintage clothes," Holofcener said. "I'd say, 'Whoever said struggles in relationships are about who's prettier?' "

In the movie, the two women are portrayed as former roommates who also shared a large, furry cat, now dying of cancer. Like a stone thrown into a pond, the news of Laura's impending marriage changes the social dynamic of their small New York milieu, setting off ripples of anxiety in Amelia, who feels her friend will have less time for her. The big event also puts a strain on Laura's relationship with her future husband, whom she forces to have a mole removed, presumably afraid he might get cancer, like the cat. Or maybe it's a sign that she can't accept him, warts and all.

Analyzing the contrast between the two women in her story, Holofcener said that she saw Laura as the one with the power in the relationship. "Laura looks like she's in control more than Amelia does," Holofcener said. "Amelia doesn't look like she's in control and she doesn't fake it. Laura, even when she's not in control, acts like she is. Laura is less needy." While growing up, Holofcener, now married to a writer, said that she hadn't necessarily wanted to get married.

"I don't feel there's anything trapping, or demoralizing, or unfeminist about getting married," Holofcener said. "I met somebody and fell in love, and it was the most romantic gesture."

Among the film's many nice ironies: Laura, a therapist who fantasizes about one of her patients, points out to Amelia, who goes to therapy, that marriage isn't the be-all and end-all of life.

"When you're longing for something so much," Holofcener said, "when you're not in the club, it looks so much more glamorous than it really is. Amelia doesn't have anything near it. But in my movie I wanted people to feel moved by the longevity of friendship. If you can withstand the growing pains, you'll benefit from a lifelong relationship.

"If we can get in those places in life where we are coming of age with some grace, we're lucky. If not," Holofcener added, smiling, "we can turn it into a movie."

'Walking' Through Strains in Friendships

New York Newsday and Newsday

'Walking' Through Strains in Friendships Newsday (ND) - Wednesday July 17, 1996 By: John Anderson.

TEXT: (2 1/2 stars) WALKING AND TALKING. (R) Often charming, and charmingly aimless, story of best girlfriends, only one of whom is getting married. The too-rarely-seen Catherine Keener is terrific. With Anne Heche, Liev Schreiber, Todd Field, Kevin Corrigan. Written and directed by Nicole Holofcener. 1:26 (adult language, situations). At the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, Broadway at 63rd Street, Manhattan.

LIKE SNAPSHOTS from the subconscious, Nicole Holofcener's "Walking and Talking" feels like something we shouldn't be allowed to see. Its characters act in a fragmentary, unresolved manner. Their desires are embarrassingly simple. They yearn, they sneer, they indulge themselves at the expense of their friends.

They are, in short, too human for comfort.

The film, the first feature by Holofcener, also is based on a story almost too simple to have been a movie. Or too complex.

When we catch up to them, Amelia (Catherine Keener) and Laura (Anne Heche), best friends since

childhood, are maintaining their bond despite the stresses of New York and Laura's honey-I-cannot-live-without-you relationship with Frank (Todd Field).

When Laura and Frank decide to wed, however, the rest of Amelia's world begins to crumble, too. Her cat gets cancer. Her old boyfriend and current buddy Andrew (Liev Schreiber) tells her about his flourishing, bicoastal phone-sex relationship. She lowers her sights and accepts a date with Bill the video clerk (New York independent film monument Kevin Corrigan), who enjoys films like "Bugs That Latch Onto People's Skin and Make Their Insides Explode." ("If," Bill says,"they're done right.") But things don't work out there, either.

What we have here is one of those films that deals with a universal situation - in this case, the way life has of detouring friends away from each other - that is almost too simple and obvious to keep us interested. The ordinary misfortune of life is not as gripping as plastic explosives. Luckily, the film has Catherine Keener, she of the engaging screen presence and shamefully short filmography. As she showed in "Living in Oblivion," for instance, she has a rare charm, and Holofcener knows what to do with her.

Laura, a therapist, also has a sense for the way our impulses get the better of us. Immediately upon

becoming engaged, she gets a crush on one of her patients. She accepts a date with an actor-waiter (or

waiter-actor). She's got the pre-wedding heebie-jeebies. Frank, dismissed from the planning of the

wedding, feels left out. So does Amelia, of course. But so does Laura, in a way, as she watches her old self say goodbye to the new.

"Walking and Talking" has a throwaway title, a cliche that reflects its subject matter - the stuff of minor crises, pedestrian mishaps and banality. What's refreshing is how it's all handled with such major tact and a good deal of humor.

'Walking and Talking' Is a Wry Look at Friendships

Los Angeles Times (LT) - WEDNESDAY July 17, 1996

By: KEVIN THOMAS

TEXT:

In her gingery, aptly titled "Walking and Talking," writer-director Nicole Holofcener, making her feature debut, deftly reveals those moments of unintended hurt and unexpected vulnerability that seem an inevitable component of our closest relationships.

Inspired by personal experience, Holofcener deals specifically with the impact upon a young woman of her closest friend's announcement of marriage. From this point of departure Holofcener creates a wry, contemporary comedy from a prickly period of transition in a longtime friendship, resulting in growth and self-discovery on the part of two smart, capable New Yorkers nearing 30.

When Laura (Anne Heche), who is a blond, tousle-haired therapist, informs Amelia (Catherine Keener), an editor of some sort, that she's marrying her live-in boyfriend Frank (Todd Field), Amelia is taken aback. She's just told herself she has adjusted to being friends with her ex-lover Andrew (Liev Schreiber); now she's suddenly feeling very alone and that time is running out. Not helping matters is that she learns that the beloved cat that she's had from the time she and Laura shared an apartment may be dying. But she does find herself falling for a nerdy video store clerk (Kevin Corrigan, very funny yet surprisingly commanding).

If, on the one hand, Amelia begins to feel desperate, Laura is not without her own insecurities. Engaged she may be, but that doesn't stop her from fantasizing about other men--or from telling Frank she'd appreciate a little variety in their sex life. Amelia and Laura are both at a point where they need to sort out their emotions and priorities but now they'll be proceeding down their own paths, making it more of a challenge for each to be as supportive of the other as in the past.

To her credit, Holofcener resists trying to make Amelia and Laura adorable. They're both edgy, blunt women, often tactless; attractive but not beauties. Their vulnerability and forthrightness, their struggles to straighten out their lives and their capacity to cause and experience pain in the process, make them seem very real. It's a downright refreshing experience to be presented with people you can identify with, recognize yourself in them, without being asked to like them.

While Laura is about to enter marriage with her eyes determinedly wide open--and she does seem to love the boorish Frank even if we sometimes wonder why--Amelia is pondering Andrew's remark that she drove him away because she made him feel like he was "too important" to her.

Although "Walking and Talking," which has a rich, vital Billy Bragg score, is a romantic comedy with stellar portrayals, it often could scarcely be less romantic. When Frank, while urinating, hands Laura her diaphragm case in which she will discover an engagement ring, we're made to realize how far we are from the Lubitsch Touch.

Catherine Keener: Amelia

Anne Heche: Laura

Liev Schreiber: Andrew

Todd Field: Frank

Kevin Corrigan: Bill

A Miramax Films presentation in association with Channel Four Films, TEAM, Pandora, Mikado and Electric of a Good Machine/Zenith production. Writer-director Nicole Holofcener. Producers Ted Hope, James Schamus. Executive producers Dorothy Berwin, Scott Meek. Cinematographer Michael Spiller. Editor Alisa Lipselter. Costumes Edi Giguere. Music Billy Bragg. Production designer Anne Stuhler. Art director Roswell Hamrick. Set dresser Michael Kucmeroski.

PRICKLY FILM TAKES DIFFERENT LOOK AT TWO NEW YORK CITY FRIENDS Daily News of Los Angeles (LA) - THURSDAY, July 18, 1996

By: Janet Maslin

``Oh my God, how am I going to tell Amelia?'' wails Laura (Anne Heche) only seconds after she decides to marry Frank (Todd Field). Laura and Amelia (Catherine Keener) have been best friends since girlhood, and each knows the other's every quirk. Since Amelia is most definitely single, the prospect of her friend's wedding means trouble. But it also guarantees Nicole Holofcener's first feature a mother lode of revealing little intimacies and nicely neurotic wit.

``Walking and Talking,'' a date movie so enjoyably prickly it will seem funniest if you don't have a date, goes straight to the heart of the friendship between these women. It understands what has kept them together and why they drive each other crazy, too. Concentrating on the fine-tuned trivia that fuels so much television comedy, it also creates two bright, appealing heroines and watches them face life's little insults with fresh, disarming humor.

``Now that is the teeniest, tiniest adorable thing you've ever seen,'' the love-struck Frank tells Amelia, holding up one of Laura's tennis socks as he does the laundry. ``She wears an 8,'' Amelia exasperatedly replies.

There's not much more to ``Walking and Talking'' than the inviting day-to-dayness of such exchanges, but Holofcener weaves them together with impressive skill. Her film has a brisk style and clean good looks, thanks to exceptionally attractive cinematography by Michael Spiller. (Spiller has been similarly invaluable to all of Hal Hartley's features.) ``Walking and Talking'' also unfolds in a seductively peaceful, summery New York City, where the characters amble comfortably through neighborhoods that seem friendly and small. The setting is no minor part of the film's charm.

The story shows how Laura, a therapist in training, heads nervously toward marriage while daydreaming inappropriately about one of her patients. Amelia, meanwhile, has her own therapist (Joseph Siravo), whose hilariously neutral manner is among the film's many dead-on little touches. Having split up with an old flame who remains a close friend (Liev Schreiber), she finds herself flirting with the clerk at her video store, though his love of stomach-turning horror movies could mean he's not her type. Kevin Corrigan shows off his superb arch-slacker timing as he escorts Keener's Amelia to a display of horror artifacts, then happens to mention the screenplay he's writing. ``It's based on the life of Colette,'' he explains.

``Walking and Talking,'' acted winningly by its two blithe stars, moves confidently toward a warm affirmation of its heroines' lifelong bond. Stylishly and wittily, it also appreciates every bump in the road along the way.

THE FACTS

Behind the scenes: Written and directed by Nicole Holofcener. Released by Miramax.

Our rating: Three Stars.

HECHE LEARNS LESSONS FROM `WALKING AND TALKING'

(Los Angeles) Daily News [1/8

08712056 HECHE LEARNS LESSONS FROM `WALKING AND TALKING' Daily News of Los Angeles (LA) - TUESDAY, July 30, 1996

By: Jay Carr

Things are looking up for Anne Heche. After being sexually used and brutally murdered by Alec Baldwin in ``The Juror,'' she survives her own anxieties and neuroses to emerge fulfilled in ``Walking and Talking,'' Nicole Holofcener's semi-autobiographical comedy of friendship that opened Friday. In Bryan Gordon's imminent ``Pie in the Sky,'' she'll portray a free-spirited dancer who performs at toxic-waste dumps. Right now, she's just begun shooting ``Volcano'' opposite Tommy Lee Jones.

``It's a somewhat different kind of film,'' says Heche, a 27-year-old pale blonde in a land of suntanned blondes. ``My friends are killed in the first three scenes. I play a seismologist. My partner gets swallowed up soon into the film. She literally falls into a crack. I try and save her and I can't. So then Tommy Lee Jones becomes my friend, and he and I work together to stop the volcano from eating Los Angeles.''

Heche segues easily into chat about ``Walking and Talking.'' It's the kind of independent film that will always be a big part of her career, she says. It even taught her a few things about her own friendships. In it, she plays a therapist who needs therapy more than her patients. She's not only got the jitters about her impending marriage, she's worried about upsetting her lifelong friendship with her girlfriend, played by Catherine Keener. Keener plays the earthy one. Heche plays the jangly one.

``These women got into the habit of playing extreme roles - one saying she's in control and the other saying she's the vulnerable one. The film flips them in the end to create a balance within their friendship. That's what friendship is about, balancing needs and desires. Laura and the woman I play in `The Juror' both need to control their surroundings. And I think that what Laura learns in `Walking and Talking' is that that doesn't work. You have to allow vulnerability. That's the journey of Laura.''

What Heche found most appealing about the `Walking and Talking' project was the chance to break away from traditionally competitive pairings of women in movies. ``What these women do is get to the next level of intimacy, risking to express their needs and be vulnerable to each other. The beauty of this film is that both women learn to express their needs. I don't think we're taught that this is OK.

``The risk is that if I say what I want, will my needs get met? And in friendships I think that's the hardest step to take. My friendships have actually gotten easier because we've understood patterns and been able to discuss our needs. Now I know how to ask to be taken care of, even when I'm away. You also give someone the opportunity to say, `Well, I can't provide that, but I can provide this,' and so different friends provide different things.''

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Kingfish, a Story of Huey P. Long

New York Newsday and Newsday

It's Bat-Madness! Newsday (ND) - Thursday February 23, 1995

By: Liz Smith

(Excerpt)

By the way, keep an eye on Goodman's leading lady in "Kingfish," newcomer Anne Heche, who is being touted, somewhat startlingly, as "the next Barbara Stanwyck." Hyperbole aside, Heche is a striking, original talent.

(Los Angeles) Daily News [1/8

'Zooman' violence is the message Daily News of Los Angeles (LA) - SUNDAY March 19, 1995

By: Ray Richmond

TEXT: (Excerpt)

Hail the Kingfish: John Goodman is nothing if not larger than life. His charisma commands the screen, particularly when he's playing big, blustery characters such as Babe Ruth or Fred Flintstone.

So it's certainly no stretch for Goodman to be play U.S. Sen. Huey Long, the Depression-era Louisiana demagogue who ruled Southern politics with an iron (and corrupt) hand during the Depression.

Goodman does Long proud in "Kingfish: A Story of Huey P. Long" (debuting at 5 p.m. today and repeating at 7 and 9 p.m. on TNT). But once you get past his rip-roaring performance, "Kingfish" is curiously shallow and uninvolving.

The film scarcely hints at what made Long tick. The guy was such a dynamic personality, this is more than a minor omission.

Maybe that's why TNT labeled this "a story of Huey P. Long." It's exactly that - a story. Not the story. This one merely hints at what it should have embraced.

On the other hand, Goodman is magnificent in portraying Long, the controversial Louisiana politico who moved up through the political ranks the old-fashioned way: He lied and cheated and stole.

"Kingfish" opens with Long's 1935 assassination, then flashes back to chart his rise from railroad commissioner to governor to U.S. senator, cozying up to the right people as well as the common folk and greasing whatever palms were necessary.

We also see him sleep with his mistress (Anne Heche) and align himself with the mob while gaining an almost dictatorial power that intimidates even President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

But as good as Goodman is, we get no sense of what inspired this boisterous bear of a man aside from a simple lust for power. And that reduces "Kingfish" from a vivid period piece to a one-dimensional biography.

THE FACTS

The film: "Kingfish: A Story of Huey P. Long."

Starring: John Goodman, Matt Craven and Anne Heche.

Our rating: Two and One Half Stars.

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Pie in the Sky

Directed by: Bryan Gordon

Stars: Bob Balaban, Josh Charles, Christine Ebersole, John Goodman, Anne Heche, Christine Lahti, Peter Riegert, Wil Wheaton, Dey Young

P L O T: =============

This comedy chronicles the romantic exploits of a rather stodgy young man with a traffic fetish. Even as a child Charlie Dunlap was totally fixated by freeway traffic. Charlie's biggest idol is Alan Davenport, a radio traffic reporter. As a young man, Charlie falls in love with the lively, free-spirited Amy and they become lovers the night before she leaves for college. Their relationship disintegrates during her absence and Charlie ends up moving to LA to be near the great freeways. Even his rundown apartment overlooks the freeway. Single-minded Charlie is determined to get a job working for Alan Davenport, but his efforts to get hired at Metro Traffic are thwarted by an officious employee. He goes to a neighboring cafe and there discovers Amy working as a waitress. When not working, she performs with an experimental dance troupe that stages its productions at toxic-waste dump sites. Though he wants to start up their relationship again, she tells him she has found another. Charlie ends up having a passionate affair with his landlady. Later he meets Davenport and manages to achieve his dream and become his assistant. Through it all he still longs for Amy and in the end the two do indeed come together.

GENRES: Comedy, Romance

C A S T: =================

Bob Balaban (Paul Entamen) Josh Charles (Charlie Dunlap) Christine Ebersole (Mom Dunlap) John Goodman (Alan Davenport) Anne Heche (Amy) Christine Lahti (Ruby) Peter Riegert (Dad Dunlap) Wil Wheaton (Jack) Dey Young (Mrs. Tarnell)

C R E D I T S: ============

Producer: Allan Mindel Co-Producer: Allen Alsobrook Director: Bryan Gordon Cinematographer: Bernd Heinl Film Editor: Colleen Halsey Music and Lyrics: Michael Convertino Production Director: Linda Pearl Art Director: Michael Atwell Costumes: Louise Frogley Assoc.Producer: Robert J. Degus Greg Jacobs Rick Pagano Debi Manwiller Screenwriter: Bryan Gordon

All-Movie Guide ID #: V000135075

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The Juror

by Roger Ebert

* * (two stars)

Annie Laird, Demi Moore

The Teacher, Alec Baldwin

Oliver, Annie's son Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Juliette, Anne Heche

Eddie, James Gandolfini

Warren, Matt Craven

Columbia presents a film directed by Brian Gibson. Produced by Irwin Winkler and Rob Cowan. Written by Ted Tally and George Dawes Green. Photographed by Jamie Anderson. Edited by Robert Reitano. Music by James Newton Howard. Running time: 120 minutes. Classified R (for violence, language and sexuality).

"The Juror" tells the story of a woman who volunteers, almost eagerly, to serve on the jury in the trial of a Mafia godfather accused of murder. This is the sort of cross in life that many people happily would not bear, but not Annie Laird. When the judge asks her if she's read about the case, she says, no--but she's heard about it from her son. And she knows enough to know the defendant is said to be "the big spaghetti-o" in the Mob.

She says that, and worse, in an open courtroom, with the defendant and his henchmen sitting right there. Wouldn't her mother's instincts at least advise her not to mention her child? Is she a complete stupid-o? She's asking for it, and she gets it, in a movie that could have maybe been wrung down into a nice little thriller, but ends up long-winded and rambling.

Annie, played by Demi Moore, is a sculptor whose art consists of building boxes that you stick your hand into, to feel the strange things inside. Many observations could be made about this choice of work, but I will not make any of them. Almost before she's home from the jury hearing, a Mafia operator named The Teacher (Alec Baldwin) is inside her house, photocopying family pictures and phone numbers, and feeling up the artwork. The next day he surfaces as a so-called art buyer, who drops a check for $24,000 at her gallery, and asks her out to dinner.

The Teacher doesn't fool around. He tells Annie that unless she says two little words--"not guilty"--terrible things will happen to her son and her friends. She believes him, and votes not to convict, but that's only the beginning of her nightmare.

This Teacher is a piece of work. He is suave, he is cultivated, he quotes Lao-tse, he can talk knowledgeably about art, he builds puppets, and he is a psychopathic killer. He's obviously the smartest man in the mob (smarter than the godfather's son, that's for sure), and he gets off by psychologically manipulating his victims instead of just intimidating them.

Annie is foolish enough to think that maybe she can outsmart him. This does not work. In two really unnecessarily ugly scenes, the Teacher shows her how he could run down her child--and he forces her best friend to first have sex with him, then kill herself. Watching that second scene, I was wondering exactly what thought process went into the theory that it was necessary to the movie.

Without revealing plot twists, I will say that the movie goes on a long while--a very long while--after the trial is over, and that a trip to the jungles is Guatemala is unnecessary, to put it mildly. In the midst of all this psychological carnage, Demi Moore maintains uncanny self-possession, especially if you compare her work with the scorched-earth performance of Sally Field in the oddly similar "Eye for an Eye," which came out just two weeks earlier.

Both movies have the same buried plot: Mom fears child will be killed by violent nut, so takes the law into her own hands. I found "Eye for an Eye" offensive in its manipulative arguments for vigilante justice. "The Juror" didn't bother me as much, because the heroine doesn't deliberately choose her course: She has it forced upon her. It's an almost invisible distinction, I grant you, but this movie submerges its philosophy in the conventions of a thriller, while "Eye for an Eye" plays like an ad for handguns.

A performance that caught by eye is by James Gandolfini, as Eddie, the Teacher's sidekick. He has a very tricky role, as a Mafia soldier who is about as sympathetic as a man can be who WOULD, after all, kill you. His line readings during a couple of complicated scenes are right on the money (watch the careful way he learns from the Teacher about the death of Anne's friend). If the movie had been pitched at the level of sophistication and complexity that his character represents, it would have been a lot better. Of course, it would have been a different movie, too. I could have lived with that.

Los Angeles Times [1/85]

Tampering With 'Juror' Despite a Dream Team, the Thriller Doesn't Reach Level of Reality

Los Angeles Times (LT) - FRIDAY February 2, 1996

By: KENNETH TURAN

Annie Laird, the artist heroine of "The Juror," specializes in creating sculpture you feel without seeing. The film that tells her story manages the same trick, only in reverse: It's something you see without feeling anything at all.

Despite the star power of Demi Moore and Alec Baldwin, Oscar-winning screenwriter Ted Tally of "The Silence of the Lambs" and a director ("What's Love Got to Do With It's" Brian Gibson) coming off a major hit, "The Juror" is a torpid psychological thriller, muddled, misconceived and uninvolving.

The saga of a jury member so put upon she would've been grateful to be on the O.J. Simpson panel, "The Juror" is one of those films that thinks it's interesting but isn't. Perhaps group hypnosis convinced nominally savvy individuals that this was a tale demanding to be told; instead, it's yet another putative can't-miss project that did.

A busy single mom as well as a sculptor living and working in New York's Westchester County, Annie Laird (Moore) is initially happy to be picked for jury duty in the murder trial of Mafia chieftain Louie Boffano (Tony Lo Bianco) because she could use a little excitement in her life.

Also happy, but for less savory reasons, is a mysterious gangland operative known only as the Teacher (Baldwin), so named because "when you see him, school is out." Hoping to manipulate key jury members to acquit Boffano, he picks Annie as his target because her concern for son Oliver (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) makes her vulnerable. And besides, he confides to a dubious associate, "I think she's sexy and smart. Not your average mommy."

Insinuating himself into Annie's life by purchasing some of her art, the Teacher wastes little time in revealing himself and browbeating the poor woman into obeying his smallest command. The trouble is, what unnerves Annie Laird is not likely to make much of an impression on the audience at large.

For try as he might, Baldwin is unable to make the character of this psychotic know-it-all, a sensitive and solicitous sadist who claims to want nothing but the best for Annie and her son, into anything disturbing. A spouter of pompous twaddle on the order of "I bow to fear" and "The way of power is the unvarying way," the Teacher is much closer to tedious than terrifying.

The same goes for "The Juror's" screwy plot and leaden dialogue, credited to Tally from a novel by George Dawes Green, which has the Teacher continuing his wretched relationship with Annie after the trial is over and even posits that her endless nightmare becomes something of a demented growth experience for the horrified woman.

Awkward all around, with its surprises telegraphed and an ending that is laughable even in Hollywood terms, "The Juror" lacks the knack of making its story even minimally convincing. And without that connection to reality, nothing it does makes very much of an impression.

None of this is Moore's fault, but given the powerhouse diva personality she invariably projects, casting her as an uncertain woman who doesn't know her own psychological strength adds to the lack of believability.

For filmgoers who've just come back from the Sundance Film Festival, "The Juror" offers another reason to be dispirited. Anne Heche, who gave a pair of sparkling, offbeat performances in two Sundance films, "Pie in the Sky" and "Walking and Talking," is shoe-horned into the usual thankless and exploitative role as the heroine's best friend. To compare her work in those pictures with what she is allowed to do here is to understand why Sundance has become an oasis while the mainstream Hollywood that "The Juror" represents looks increasingly like a vast and barren desert.

Demi Moore: Annie Laird

Alec Baldwin: Teacher

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Oliver

Anne Heche: Juliet

James Gandolfni: Eddie

Lindsay Crouse: Tallow

Tony Lo Bianco: Louie Boffano

An Irwin Winkler production, released by Columbia Pictures. Director Brian Gibson. Producers Irwin Winkler, Rob Cowan. Executive producer Patrick McCormick. Screenplay Ted Tally, based on the book by George Dawes Green. Cinematographer Jamie Anderson. Editor Robert Reitano. Costumes Colleen Atwood. Music James Newton Howard. Production design Jan Roelfs. Art director Charley Beal. Set decorator Leslie A. Pope. Running time: 2 hours.

COURTROOM THRILLER OR MERE TRIAL?

Daily News of Los Angeles (LA) - FRIDAY February 2, 1996

By: Bob Strauss

TEXT: Basically the same slack courtroom thriller that "Trial by Jury" was a few years back, "The Juror" tries to juice up the proceedings with elements that seem borrowed from more effective shockers, like a deceptively resourceful, protective mother and an unhinged admirer. Call it "Cradle Attraction."

Demi Moore is Annie Laird, a suburban New York single mom who, quite ridiculously, is intrigued by the idea of serving as a juror at a Mafia don's murder trial. She's quickly chosen by the crime boss's brilliant, electronically sophisticated and thoroughly insane operative, the Teacher (Alec Baldwin), for intimidation. Blending charm, threats and an unhinged affection for Annie, Teacher terrorizes the experimental artist (she makes "cop-a-feel" sculptures - don't ask) into swinging the jury in his obviously guilty employer's favor.

And that's just the setup. Though it moves along in fits and starts, this preposterously plotted thriller (based on a book by George Dawes Green and scripted by "Silence of the Lambs' " Ted Tally) eventually piles up such an imaginative load of double-crosses and counter-schemes that it actually becomes fun.

But that's after more than an hour of a dressed-down Demi displaying, alternately, tough love for her endangered and uncomprehending son ("3rd Rock From the Sun's" Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and, of ourse, tears. Meanwhile, Baldwin behaves like a graduate of the Richard Gere School of Mood Swing Acting, bouncing from calculating to romantic to maniacal as Teach tries to impress on Annie that killing everyone she cares about is his way of saying "I love you."

One such incident involves forcing Annie's best pal (Anne Heche) to commit suicide. In the nude. Right after making love to her. I guess we're supposed to be encouraged by the way Hollywood is getting past its recent fascination with gratuitous rape scenes.

Before he descended to such appalling trashiness, director Brian Gibson made a real movie about a woman who reclaimed her life from a dangerous man: the terrific Tina Turner biography, "What's Love Got to Do With It." "The Juror" serves up cartoonish caricatures of that film's issues, with a bunch of stereotype mobsters and a climax in Guatemala (Guatemala?) tossed in.

THE FACTS

The film: "The Juror" (R; violence, language, sex, nudity, drug use, children in jeopardy).

The stars: Demi Moore, Alec Baldwin, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Anne Heche.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Brian Gibson. Written by Ted Tally, based on George Dawes Green's book. Produced by Irwin Winkler and Rob Cowan. Released by Columbia Pictures.

Our rating: Two Stars.

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The Adventures of Huck Finn

Adventures of Huck Finn 1993

All-Movie Guide Rating (1-5): 4 stars

MPAA Rating: PG

Directed by: Stephen Sommers, Howard Ellis Stars: Tom Aldredge, Curtis Armstrong, Robbie Coltrane, Frances Conroy, James Gammon, Anne Heche, Dana Ivey, Ron Perlman, Jason Robards

P L O T: ============= With all racial epithets and dialogue eliminated from this Disney version of the Mark Twain classic, there is still enough violence (lynch mob and physically abusive, drunken Father) to warrant caution with immature children. Otherwise, the friendship of ebullient Huck and his rock-steady friend, Jim, a runaway slave, work their usual magic on the journey up and down the Mississippi in this pre-Civil War look at life on the river. Good performances by Wood as Huck and by Vance as Jim. GENRES: Adventure, Childrens, Drama, Action, Classic KEYWORDS: adventure, Americana, children, civil-war, classic, Con-Scam, encounter, father, friendship, life, lynch-mob, novels, outlaws, river, runaway, slave, slavery, violence, will, wood, woods, work, young

PLOTLINES: Con/Scam, Friendship (between boys), On-the-road, On-the-run, Slavery, Slice-of-life (Americana)

Money: Domestic gross: $23,838,687, From book by: Twain, Mark, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Location: Mississippi River, Douglas, Civil War

C A S T: =================

Tom Aldredge *(Dr. Robinson)* Curtis Armstrong *(Country Jake)* Robbie Coltrane *(The Duke)* Frances Conroy *(Scrawny Shanty Lady)* James Gammon *(Deputy Hines)* Anne Heche *(Mary Jane Wilks)* Dana Ivey *(Widow Douglas)* Ron Perlman *(Pap Finn)* Jason Robards, Jr. *(King)* Courtney Vance *(Jim)* Paxton Whitehead *(Harvey Wilks)* Marie Wilson *(Miss Watson)* Elijah Wood *(Huckleberry Finn)* Dion Anderson (Sheriff) Richard Anders (Colonel Grangerford) Laura Bundy (Susan Wilks) Michael Cassidy (Bully) Gary Lee Davis (1st Fighting Man) Mary Goldberg Garette Ratliff Henson (Billy Grangerford) Renee O'Connor (Julia Wilks) Leon Russom (Shanty Lady's Husband) Ben R. Scott (2nd Fighting Man) Janet Shea (Mother Grangerford) Daniel Tamberelli (Ben Rodgers) Alex Zuckerman (Joe Rodgers)

C R E D I T S: ============

Director: Stephen Sommers Music Director: Steve Aaron Co-Producer: John Baldecchi Producer: Barry Bernardi Music: Bill Conti Film Editor: Bob Ducsay Director: Howard Ellis Costumes: Betsy Faith Heimann Cinematographer: Janusz Kaminski Producer: Laurence Mark Art Director: Randy Moore Production Director: Richard Sherman Screenwriter: Stephen Sommers Assoc.Producer: Llewellyn Wells Producer: Steve White Set Decoration: Michael Warga

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Milk Money

by Roger Ebert

* (one star)

V ................ Melanie Griffith

Dad .............. Ed Harris

Frank ............ Michael Patrick Carter

Waltzer .......... Malcolm McDowell

Betty ............ Anne Heche

Cash ............. Casey Siemaszko

Jerry the Pope ... Philip Bosco

Brad ............. Adam LaVorgna

Paramount presents a film directed by Richard Benjamin. Produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall. Written by John Mattson. Photographed by David Watkin. Edited by Jacqueline Cambas. Music by Michael Convertino. Running time: 105 minutes. Classified: PG-13 (for sexual themes and situations involving adolescents).

Sometimes they produce a documentary about the making of a movie. You know, like "The Making of 'Jurassic Park.'" I would give anything within reason to see "The Making of 'Milk Money,'" or, for that matter, to simply listen to recordings of the executive story conferences. In fact, it's funny ... as I sit here in a late-summer reverie ... why, it's almost as if I can hear the voices now ...

Studio Executive A: So what's the premise?
Studio Executive B: We got kids, we got sex, we got romance, all in a family picture.

A: Can't have sex in a family picture.
B. Depends. Nobody actually HAS sex. Sure, you got a hooker, but she's a GOOD hooker, with a heart of gold. Melanie Griffith is gonna play her.

A: Kind of like "Working Girl Turns a Trick"?
B: Cuter than that. We start with three 12-year-old boys. They're going crazy because they've never seen a naked woman.

A: Whatsamatter? They poor? Don't they have cable?
B. Ever hear of the concept of "the willing suspension of disbelief"? I know the audience will find it hard to believe but it's true: These kids don't know what a naked woman looks like. So they pool their pocket money and ride their bikes into the big city, and ask women on the street if they're hookers, until they find one who is. That's Melanie.

A: How much they got?
B: More'n a hundred bucks. So she shows them.

A: She strips? This has got to get a PG-13 rating.
B: Like I say, it's a family movie. She only strips to the waist. And we only see her from the back.

A (slightly disappointed): Oh. So that's 10 minutes. Where do we go from here?
B: There's more to the plot. Melanie is in danger from the evil gangsters who control prostitution, and after her pimp is killed they think she has all of his money. So she needs to hide out. And one of the kids thinks she'd make an ideal wife for his dad. So he invites her out to the suburbs.

A: The dad's not married?
B: We got a nice touch here. The kid's mother died in childbirth. So all his life he's had this single father. He wants to fix up Dad with the hooker, see? He thinks she'd make a great mom.

A: So we get a Meet Cute?
B: Yeah. See, the kid moves the hooker into his tree house, and then tells his dad that she's his buddy's math tutor.

A: What's she wearing?
B: A kind of clingy mini-dress with a low neckline. High heels.

A: Is that what a math tutor wears?
B: You ever see "My Tutor"? "Private Lessons"? Any of those Sybil Danning or Sylvia Kristel pictures?

A: You got a point. So Dad doesn't catch on.
B: Naw. He falls for her. Also, this is a nice angle, he's a high school science teacher who is fighting to save the wetlands near the school from an evil developer who wants to pave it and turn it into a shopping center. Dad is played by Ed Harris.

A: (nods approvingly) Ecology. Very good.
B: So the hooker is in the treehouse, Dad thinks she's a math tutor, and meanwhile the evil gangster is cruising the streets of the suburb with another hooker, looking for her. And Dad fights against the encroachment of the wetlands and chains himself to his automobile so the bulldozers can't come in. And meanwhile we throw in some of those cute conversations where one person means one thing and another person means something else. You know, so that all of the people in the town know she's a hooker except for Dad, who takes her out to eat and scandalizes your standard table of gossiping local biddies.

A: This is nice, this is original.
B: We put in some nice Norman Rockwell touches. Like, the way the kid communicates between his bedroom and the hooker in the treehouse is with one of those old tin-can telephones? You know, where you attach two tin cans with a string?

A: I was never able to get one of those to work when I was a kid.
B: Neither was I. But don't worry. No kid today has ever seen one before, so they won't know. Today's kids use cellular phones and beepers.

A: Good point.
B: And then we get the big climax.

A: What happens?
B: I don't want to spoil it for you, but let's just say the gangster doesn't get what he wants, and true love saves the day.

A: What about the wetlands?
B: The wetlands? Let me just say, from the point of view of the ultimate significance of this picture, the message for the family audience sort of thing, the wetlands are what this picture is all about.

A: Saving the wetlands. A good cause.
B: Of course, you don't mention the wetlands in the ads.

A: No, you mention the hooker in the ads. So what's the picture called? "Pocket Money"?
B: No, it's called "Milk Money."

A: Why "Milk Money"?
B: You'll understand when you see the ads.

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O Pioneers

LANGE BRINGS FORTH A BOUNTIFUL PERFORMANCE

Newsday (ND) - Sunday February 2, 1992

By: Terry Kelleher

TEXT: "How fine you are!" a male admirer exclaims to the heroine in tonight's television adaptation of Willa Cather's novel "O, Pioneers!" (CBS / 2 at 9).

How right he is, for the principal role of Alexandra Bergson is played with extraordinary strength and grace by Jessica Lange in her first TV movie. She gives life to a "Hallmark Hall of Fame" presentation that sorely needs it.

The publicity material for "O, Pioneers!" quotes a Cather scholar at the University of Nebraska on how the author might assess this film if she were alive to see it. "I think she'd be thrilled," says Prof. Susan

Rosowski. "I mean, it's such a literal, pictorial representation of what she wrote."

In other words, scriptwriter Robert W. Lenski and director Glenn Jordan (back on the turn-of-the-century prairie after last year's "Sarah, Plain and Tall" with Glenn Close) have taken a scrupulously respectful, Classics Illustrated approach unlikely to thrill any viewer without a proprietary interest in the original material.

The opening section of "O, Pioneers!" - a long flashback to Alexandra's youth - presents a strong temptation to tune out. The dialogue is stilted, the acting stiff. Heather Graham looks right as the early Alexandra, but delivers her lines in a measured cadence more appropriate to a reading from the Scriptures.

Admittedly, most of this preamble is necessary to establish Alexandra's devotion to the Nebraska land left by her father, as well as her resourcefulness and determination in bringing forth its hidden bounty. It also helps to know that Alexandra is attached to her younger brother, Emil; tougher and smarter than her older siblings, Oscar and Lou; and quite fond of her "best friend," Carl, who has an itch to go East and do interesting things.

Fifteen years later, the wheat is waving and the corn is standing tall, but the Bergsons' prosperous existence is not untroubled. Carl (David Strathairn) comes back from New York with an eye for Alexandra, but Oscar and Lou sourly warn that he's after her money. Emil (Reed Diamond), now a strapping collegian, is tormented by his feelings for Marie (Anne Heche), an unhappily married neighbor. Meanwhile, Alexandra must protect Ivar (Tom Aldredge), an eccentric old retainer, from those who would transfer him from the Bergson farm to the funny farm.

The plot is hardly free of melodrama and soap suds, and the dialogue too seldom resembles normal

human conversation. Lange, however, invests even the flattest lines with emotional nuance, and when her character speaks from the heart, the words throb with feeling. Alexandra is radiant yet unglamorous, beautiful yet believably lonely.

Once or twice, Carl seems a little too adoring in Alexandra's presence, but the quietly expressive Strathairn is not the type to gush, even when called upon to say, "You must know that you astonish me!" You'll appreciate the dignity of this mature couple, and you'll be hoping it's not too late for them to find happiness together.

There's much talk about "the land" in this film, and Dick Bush's photography captures some of the poetry of the prairie. But Lange is really something to see.

Los Angeles Times [1/85]

Cather's Paean to Prairie Values

- FRIDAY January 31, 1992

By: HOWARD ROSENBERG

TEXT:

Tabloids belch smelly gossip and innuendo. Newscasts banner misery and mayhem. TV movies spew sex crimes and gory murders.

Not to worry. The God of good television answers your prayers Sunday with "O Pioneers!," a lovely rendition of Willa Cather's reverential novel about the land and people of rural Nebraska near the turn of the century.

What a bracing reprieve from rot. With so much smoggy negativism choking the neighborhood, how refreshing to turn the corner and inhale the fresh, clean air and life-affirming values of this "Hallmark Hall of Fame" production on CBS.

Breathe deeply.

Airing at 9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 2 and 8, "O Pioneers!" benefits from the luminous presence of Jessica Lange, sweeping, wind-rustled cornhusker vistas and a resolve by producer-director Glenn Jordan not only to capture the tone and spirit of Cather but also to speak with her voice. You hear it in Robert W. Lenski's script.

"What I felt stirring in the long grass was the future," says Alexandra Bergson (Lange). Her vision, tenacity, hard work and leadership have made a crop-lush, fertile oasis from the rugged, almost-foreboding patch of prairie on which she, her three brothers and their struggling Swedish parents once lived so bleakly in a log house.

After honoring her father's death-bed plea to stay with the land, that young woman of an earlier time is now a person of means, living luxuriously in a large, graceful frame house while squabbling with her dullish, ungrateful oldest brothers and envisioning a glorious future for their head-strong youngest brother.

Although "O Pioneers!" acutely captures the punishing harshness of the prairie, where the land at times seems almost at war with the farmers who work it, there's a wistful, dreamy quality to this story, reflecting Cather's selective approach to realism. Reveling in the surrounding greenery, Alexandra's young friend, Marie, exudes with a sigh: "I think I could worship the trees if I didn't have the church."

When Marie says this, you want to be there, too, worshiping beside her in this ethereal setting. However, a terrible tragedy will intervene, ripping the serenity and testing Alexandra's almost inhuman capacity for forgiveness.

Although the smallness of the screen narrows the panorama, filming in Nebraska gives "O Pioneers!" a grand look, and Jordan masterfully contrasts the material richness of Alexandra's present life with the blip on the hard landscape where she and her family once lived.

David Strathairn, Tom Aldredge, Reed Diamond, Anne Heche, Leigh Lawson and Heather Graham give nice support to Lange, who is so believable as Alexandra, so subtly emotional and within herself, that she seems almost to have had a mind meld with the character she plays. Typically Cather, Alexandra is a survivor, an old-fashioned heroine possessing the strength and courage to face the future. It's the kind of positive reinforcement you rarely receive from TV these days.

THE PIONEER SPIRIT Lange, Heche drawn to Cather's charact

Daily News of Los Angeles (CA) - SUNDAY February 2, 1992

By: DIANE JOY MOCA

In 1883, Nebraska wasn't exactly filled with strong female role models, so popular American writer Willa Cather had to create her own. The heroine she invented in "O Pioneers!" was so strong and timeless that it inspired Academy

Award-winning actress Jessica Lange to take a break from her distinguished film career to star in her first made-for-television movie. Lange heads the cast of "O Pioneers!" as Alexandra, the spirited daughter of immigrant Swedish farmers. Not only does Alexandra provide leadership for her brothers after her father dies, but despite many struggles, she maintains the vision needed to transform the daunting landscape into a bountiful oasis.

Lange, the five-time Oscar nominee who stars in the recent film "Cape Fear," said in a released statement she accepted the television role because of her great admiration for Cather's novels and characters - specifically Alexandra, "the type of woman you don't come across very often."

Anne Heche, who plays Alexandra's best friend, Marie, said she shares that deep respect for the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 15 books.

"I had conversations with Jessica about it. We wanted to make the film as true to the book as possible. The script is so very close to the book. We all had our books with us when we were at rehearsal," said Heche.

Several months before Heche heard about the film, a friend coincidentally had given her "The Song of the Lark," the first book she read by Cather. "I liked it so much I went out and bought more Willa Cather. I had just started reading 'O Pioneers!' when I was called to audition for it," she said.

"The way she writes is so truthful and so descriptive and so touching. Her strength of women is incredible, and so is her respect for the land. Her fantasies and her dreams for what women would become are in her books.

"I think it's realistic. It's just rare. There were women like that. Willa Cather was like that. All of this stuff was very scandalous for that time. She took risks writing all her heroes as women."

The classic story of life on the prairie at the turn of the century was filmed entirely on location near Lincoln, Neb. Heche said the movie "couldn't have been made anywhere else" because the land is as important as the characters.

"I read 'O Pioneers!' and thought, 'There's no land that would be that barren.' I was wrong. As soon as you drive past the town of Lincoln, you're hit with exactly what she was describing: fields that go on and on," she said. "People still ride horses there. It was like we stepped back in time. Land is still the hero in Nebraska as it is in her books. That was great to discover.

"The more we worked there, the more powerful it became and the more connected we all became to it. A lot of us were from New York, and you kind of forgot about that life you left behind."

Heche, who currently lives in Los Angeles, was born in Ohio and grew up in New Jersey and Chicago. She has been acting since age 12, when she started performing in dinner theater to contribute to her family's finances.

"We had to do as a family what we had to do, and I was glad to be a part of it. It all seemed normal to me. I never thought it would turn into a career.

"Then I was seen in a school play during a talent search. I was 15 and turned down a job for 'As the World Turns.' I couldn't leave my mother (because her father had died two years before). (The scouts) came back two years later and asked if I was ready. They hired me while I was still in school. I left two days after graduation and moved to New York," she said.

At age 17, Heche began portraying the good-evil twins, Marley McKinnon and Vicky Hudson Frame, on "Another World." "I learned a lot. I was blessed to be given that experience. It was like my college years. I just happened to be getting paid very well for it," she said.

Heche, who was named outstanding lead actress at the Soap Opera Digest Awards last month, decided that it was time to move on after four years on the soap.

"It was my decision to leave (in June 1991). It was tough, but I wanted to try something new. 'O

Pioneers!' confirmed it was the right thing," she said.

Starring: Jessica Lange, David Strathairn, Reed Diamond, Anne Heche and Tom Aldredge

O Pioneers

All-Movie Guide Rating (1-5): 4 stars

MPAA Rating: PG

Drama Directed by: Glenn Jordan Stars: Tom Aldredge, Graham Beckel, Reed Edward Diamond, Heather Graham, Anne Heche, Jessica Lange, Leigh Lawson, David Strathairn

P L O T: =============

Made-for-television adaptation of Willa Cather's classic novel abouta turn-of-the-century woman who makes the family farm a successful enterprise -- much to the resentment of her brothers. Their hard feelings are brought to the surface when her former love seeks her out after a fifteen-year separation.

GENRES: Romance, Drama, Classic, Historical, Made for TV

WARNINGS: OK for Children

KEYWORDS: achievement, classic, determination, fame, family, farm, fortune, hall, homesteading, inheritance, land, landing, life, love, novels, resentment, women

PLOTLINES: Love (rekindled), Love-forbidden (with family antagonism) From book by: Cather, WillaTime period: Turn the century

C A S T: =================Tom Aldredge *Graham Beckel *Reed Edward Diamond *Heather Graham *Anne Heche *Jessica Lange *Leigh Lawson *David Strathairn *Josh Hamilton

C R E D I T S: ============

Director: Glenn Jordan

Top

The Wild Side

[While not strictly a review, this article about Donald Cammell explains alot about why the movie is the way it is -- perhaps it didn't have to be this way...]

Cinema sex magick: the films of Donald Cammell.

by Chang, Chris

from Film Comment, July-August 1996 v32 n4 p14(7)

Abstract: Filmmaker Donald Cammell made only four films in four decades, but those four remain notable for their unique sexual subtext. The late filmmaker wrote numerous screenplays and treatments that were never produced. His most lasting achievement was the film 'Performance,' which starred Mick Jagger.

A primordial landscape burns. A molten river carves its way through a terrain in a ritual older than the words that try to name it. Isis, the holy throne-woman, raises her scepter high, an invocation to her partner Osiris (he who sits upon the throne). He raises his in reply. When their eyes connect, sparks fly, the earth trembles, and a reptile crawls forth from its egg. (You are watching a Kenneth Anger film.) In the beginning, Osiris was the Egyptian god of agriculture, but as his story spread he became God of the Dead. His body, you see, was ripped into fourteen pieces by a truly demon brother (Setekh); but the loving hands of Isis reassembled him and he chose to stay on as Lord of the Underworld. When the plants along the Nile appear each spring, it is Osiris, reborn.

When Anger began shooting his second version of Lucifer Rising sometime around 1970 (the original 1966 footage had been stolen), Donald Cammell's Performance had just been released. At the time, Anger and Cammell were exploring similar themes. Both were fascinated by the allure of iconic fame and performance. Mick Jagger had appeared briefly in and composed the score for Anger's Invocation of My Demon Brother ('69), and his rock-star aura propelled Cammell's film into the underground pantheon. (It is no surprise that Anger wanted Jagger to be his Lucifer.) In an increasingly relevant turn of poetic inspiration, Anger cast Cammell as his Osiris.

On April 24th of this year, Donald Cammell committed suicide in his Hollywood home. He was 62 years old. His career as director leaves us with only four feature films, a handful of work from a career fraught with frustrations. Adding to the dismay, his first film--and easily his best--continues to be primarily thought of as a Nicolas Roeg film, Roeg having been Cammell's co-directing cameraman. The irony cuts deep: The male leads, Mick Jagger and James Fox, exchange and merge their narrative identities until the audience is forced into a confused doubletake. (In the real world, Cammell and Roeg would never publicly discuss who was responsible for what. As the copy for Performance's posters put it: "Vice. And Versa.") Indeed, correlations between the two directors' subsequent careers (Roeg's being far more prolific) continue to resonate.

Donald Seton Cammell was born in Scotland and in the wink of an eye was a child prodigy. Evidently, he was in the right household for it. His father, the writer and poet Charles Richard Cammell, was the author of numerous books including Faeryland, Verses for the Centenary of Lord Byron, and Aleister Crowley: The Man: The Mage: The Poet. (It has been rumored that Cammell is Crowley's "godson," a technical impossibility that will nonetheless be excellent resume material for Kenneth Anger gigs.) Showing a natural aptitude for paint, Cammell attended the Royal College of Art and went on to become a "Student of Annigoni" in Florence. Father Cammell had also written Memoirs of Annigoni, from which we glean small tidbits of director Cammell's formative days: The parties in the Annigoni household were intoxicated revels that occasionally involved disguise, roleplay, and the absolute adoration of The Beautiful (especially women). Not to mention poetry readings. Staring at a portrait of a lady friend who was possibly (one can only

hope) involved in a triangle of love with young Cammell and a fellow "Student of Annigoni," father Cammell is inspired to speak of a "symbol of the mystery of women's beauty and of its eternal power over the destinies of men." He was also fond of quoting Wordsworth: "The child is father of the man."

In 1953, Alice Mary Hadfield's young reader's version of King Arthur and the Round Table is published with illustrations by Cammell. The images are sheer Camelot: In one, we see Merlin and Vivien emerge from woods

encrypted in expressionism. In another, Mordred lunges towards the King as they stand on a landscape of slaughtered bodies. In another, a hypnotic line drawing infused with incantatory graphic waves vibrates

before our eyes. Underneath we read the words: "For three nights under the moon the wizards practiced their arts." In London, after establishing his own studio, Cammell creates "Sheridan, the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava," described by the London Times as "society portrait of the year." (His work also adorned a few covers of the British men's magazine Lilliput.) Needless to say, the art is moving away from the sphere of Annigoni and turning to the techniques and concerns of modernity, eg., seminars with Francis Bacon at The Colony, a British School wateringhole. From a review in Arts Magazine (May-June 1964): "The paintings are spare and stark and closely associated with the earth in its least fecund phases." He will, of course, fall prey to the "eternal power over the destinies of men," i.e., actresses and fashion models, and make his move into the cinematic medium.

His view from the inside of Swinging London provides inspiration for Cammell's first screenplays: The Touchables and Duffy, both released in 1968. (In both cases the degree to which we can ascribe a true Cammell signature can only be guessed at.) The former has evaporated into the realm of the unseen. We know it was co-written with Cammell's younger brother David; we know it was directed by Robert Freeman, who did the titles for Richard Lester's Beatles movies; we know the story involves the kidnap of a rock star by four young female fans who then tantalize/torture him for his attention (sort of a Misery gone Mod). We know intuitively that we're in the right ballpark, but that's about it.

Duffy is a different story. Starring Susannah York, James Mason, James Coburn, and James Fox and directed by Robert Parrish, it tells the tale of two brothers (described by their father as "a nothing and a bad joke") who concoct a scheme to swindle the old man out of an enormous sum of money. Planning the heist involves a trip to Tangiers (which triggers a "tangerine fields and marmalade skies" aside) and additional dialogue dementia. Coburn: "This whole thing is totally absurd, man!" Fox: "Precisely! You create beautiful absurdities; why can't I? I want to create a fantastic amateur theatrical! A happening! Sort of like shooting an absurd movie without a camera!" Coburn: "You might have to shoot people, man. That's not cool." Give the cast some Mardi Gras attire for their heist at sea and throw in York for polysexuality and there you have it: proto-Cammell. And Duffy's piracy motif would come back to haunt him; but that's getting ahead of the story. For the completist, Duffy can actually be found somewhere in broadcast television's eternal late afternoon. (For the obsessive-compulsive, Cammell can be seen in a 30 second cameo in La Collectioneuse, the fourth of Eric Rohmer's six "Moral Tales," made in 1966. Look for him mid-film, standing by his car asking for directions to the sea, clearly visible in the background.)

The ferment of 1968 was far greater than the sum of its 366 days. It was, and remains, an endless year. For our purposes, we can bring it back to 1963 and Joseph Losey's The Servant, an architectonic experiment in role reversal. In it, manservant wimp Hugo (Dirk Bogarde) rises through the ranks of Anglo-aristo degeneracy to dominance. Whose kingdom does he usurp? The inner sanctum of numb-snob Tony (James Fox, in his careermaking role). Losey knew, first-hand, what it meant to strike out and colonize new psycho-geographies. He was a relocated American escaping a certain Senator McCarthy back in the homeland. He also had a flair for making films with characters who were practically devoured by their own domiciles. In 1968, Losey made Secret Ceremony, with Elizabeth Taylor as a waning lady of the evening and Mia Farrow as the young, oversexual inhabitant of an art nouveau nightmare. The former is missing a daughter; the latter, a mother. Can you guess what happens? Close, but I forgot to tell you about Robert Mitchum. The two Losey films set the stage--using the device of fortresslike interior space for identity meld and transfer--for the delirium of Performance. Much has been written on the centrality of this "text" within the Great Books of Decadence. It is not so much a time capsule from the period but, rather, an elixir. To inhale its vapor is to become possessed. The two key elements contributing to its power are the formal psychosis prompted by the camera/editing style and the actual psychosis of everyone involved. Contrary to popular opinion, Cammell cut the film alone. In fact, when Roeg first saw Cammell's cut, he didn't like it. Ironically, it would be a few years later in Roeg's career when he himself would return to the style and then be erroneously associated with its inception. The story traces the trajectory of a feverishly brutal mobster, Chas (James Fox, of course), who has outdone himself and needs to lie low. He seeks sanctuary by conning his way into the ever-unfolding psychedelic interior of reclusive rock superstar Turner (Jagger)'s London house. At Turner's side are his righthand sex goddesses (Anita Pallenberg and Michele Breton). With a play of hypnotic music, schizoid montage, and chemical liberation, the four parties are set free to pair, triangulate, and quadranglize. The geometries extend beyond the barriers of the film frame as Keith Richards, Brian Jones, and Cammell himself jockey for libidinal positions in the wings. (Perhaps it truly was Roeg who held this thing together.)

The first time you see Performance, it is a shock to the system. It attacks mercilessly with a barrage of jaggedly discontinuous images and information. The standard film device of planting bits of seemingly innocuous information and then bringing them back later for a narrative payoff has been inverted and diffused into fractal psychology: payoffs are exploding at every turn and it is only later--if ever--that we come across the "plants" that lead to them. The veil of randomness parts and reveals obvious order, which, in turn, crumbles once you've grasped it.

The centerpiece--in a film that strives for the off center--is what may be the first fully realized rock video ever made. (D.A. Pennebaker and Richard Lester enthusiasts, hear me out.) Chas has been duped into eating a magic mushroom. The interior environment shifts from Turner's bohemia back into the business office of Chas's boss, Harry Flowers. Everything is in its proper place except Jagger--replete in the appropriate mob attire and hairdo--who now sits behind the desk. The music starts and the scene follows the actions we witnessed earlier. Meaningless gestures, repeated to music the second time around, suddenly become psycho-choreography--movements impregnated with significance by virtue of formal choices of repetition. A previous scene has been turned into a song--like a jazz standard that can be used as a guide to improvise from.

Unlike the song sequences in Lester's A Hard Day's Night and the "Subterranean Homesick Blues" sequence in Pennebaker's Don't Look Back, "Memo to Turner" creates a miniature world, a microcosm adhering clearly to its own internal, albeit hallucinatory, logic. We enter it when the song begins; we leave it in the end. This "film within the film" is not only a prismatic perspective into Performance as a whole, it also reflects a strategy that will be a Cammell trademark: the use of image echoes--recurrent patterns of symbols and psyches. Heightening the impact is Cammell's direction of actors, a seemingly tightly controlled method that nonetheless achieves high degrees of freedom. And high degrees of danger: James Fox was so psychically disheveled by the process of Performance, he withdrew from acting and joined an evangelical group for most of the ensuing decade.

The only real way into what was going on would be an interrogation of an involved psychotherapist (which is illegal) or a chat with the drug attendant (who, it just so happens, has written a book). Up and Down with the Rolling Stones, by Tony Sanchez (1979), page 113 (Marianne Faithfull is coaching Jagger on his upcoming film role): "Whatever you do, don't try to play yourself. You're much too together, too straight, too strong. You've got to imagine you're Brian: poor, freaked-out, deluded, androgynous, druggie Brian. But you also need just a bit of Keith in it: his tough, self-destructive, beautiful lawlessness. You must become a mixture of the way Brian and Keith will be when the Stones are over and they are alone in their fabulous houses with all the money in the world and nothing to spend it on." Sanchez goes on to reveal some of the "method" in creating Fox's role: sending him to an actual gangster's tailor, gym training with thugs, dry-run burglary expeditions, etc. And, lest we forget, the drugs. Page 115: Sanchez is narrating: "I could see the film draining both Jagger and Fox, for they were being forced to question the very roots of their beings. James, particularly, was becoming as dangerously disoriented off screen as he was on. And Jagger, too, seemed to have become Brian; he was beginning to crack up and lose his identity. The two would smoke DMT together in their dressing room so that they could add realism to the drug scenes. But the drug has the hydrogen bomb impact of a twelvehour acid trip crammed into the space of fifteen minutes and served to only alienate them further from the real world. Recently doctors have discovered that DMT can cause irreparable brain damage." Sounds like the voice of authority to me.

For some reason, when Warner Bros. saw the picture, they were horrified. The ensuing two-year battle over artistic integrity was both "a necessary evil and a process which he absolutely delighted in", says China Kong, wife and longterm collaborator with Cammell. When the film was finally released a certain superstar responded quite positively to it. His name was Marlon Brando. In 1989, indie writer-director Chris Rodley had the chance to talk to Cammell about Brando and their various hellfire collaborations. His article, "Marlon, Madness and Me," appeared in the premiere issue of a now-defunct British publication, 20/20. It contains a maelstrom of information but, in true Cammellian style, bends chronologies into confusing configurations.

It seems that around the time Cammell begins work on the Julie Christie vehicle Demon Seed, Brando learns that Cammell is romancing the teenage daughter of one of Brando's "long term lovers." As China Cammell puts it "he did not approve. He wanted to deport Donald." Eventually, sometime after Kong and Cammell's marriage, Brando will apologize. In any event, Brando was so impressed by Performance, he approached Cammell as a collaborator. His idea was a 1920s period piece called Fan-Tan. Evidently Brando was mulling over the idea of female pirates (remember Susannah York) and was looking for the writer-director who could bring it to life. The process was frustrating, time-consuming, and came to naught--in the cinematic sense. Towards the end, the preproduction scheme had evolved into a book that would be sold to cover the cost of filming and thereby ensure directorial control of the film. Brando would spew ideas; Cammell would write. Problem was, Brando continually refused advance offers from interested publishers. Why? Cammell: "Marlon maintained that he couldn't read it if he hadn't written it himself." A minor problem coming from the mouth of the man who hires you to write a script. Needless to say, before setting sail, Fan-Tan the movie sinks. The book, however, is a different story.

To back-pedal for a moment, there's Demon Seed ('77). Easily the least Cammellian of the four films (despite the de rigueur incessant battles with the studio), it's still significant in context. Julie Christie plays the wife of a genius, i.e. pretentious, computer scientist who is the father of Proteus--a superpsychedelic-mind-machine. The husband goes off on a research excursion, leaving Christie home alone with Proteus. The mechanism quickly announces its intent to spawn and achieve the best of both worlds, i.e., pretentiousness and sensuousness. Christie's remarkable performance, with its disturbing blend of repulsion/curiosity and its tightly mannered moments of madness, barely holds the farce together. Indeed, the film allocates what seems like well over half its total running time to the act of consummation itself.

But what an act it is. Basically, you get one part Anger's Invocation of My Demon Brother "ZAP/YOU'RE PREGNANT/THAT'S WITCHCRAFT" sequence mixed with one part Keir-Dullea-goes-Beyond-Infinity in Kubrick's 2001, with Cammell providing his brand of metasexual innuendo. Although the machine is made manifest with an endless variety of elaborate prosthetic gizmos, it is the depiction of its central eye, with all the attendant schizo-montage trimmings, that anchors the image--a voyeur in search of its own body. Cammell collaborator Drew Hammond says, "Cammell planned the film as a comedy." Witht the demands of seriousness placed on him by the studio, we're left with a joke--albeit a funny one. (A few years earlier Christie took part in another indelible sex scene at a somewhat different point in the spectrum as Donald Sutherland's wife in Nicolas Roeg's 1973 masterpiece Don't Look Now. And, in another footnote, the 1978 Brooke Shields flop Tilt credited Cammell as co-writer; he was going to direct, but when the producer substituted Shields for Cammell's choice of Jodie Foster, he walked. Since Tilt is hard to find, or hard to make yourself try to find, we can only surmise/hope that the "dazzling point-of-view photography inside pinball machines," according to Leonard Maltin, has traces of Cammell's Demon Seed machine-eye.)

The Sixties were distilled into Sex and Mysticism for Performance. The Seventies, with Demon Seed, became Sex and Technology. The Eighties, with White of the Eye ('87), became Disturbing Sex of Mythic Proportions. Set on the burnt industrial fringes of Tucson, White of the Eye tells the story of a young, desperately passionate couple who become enmeshed in the barbarous web of a serial killer. (Unfortunately for the wife, the husband has quite the collection of nasty trophies hidden in the bathroom.) As the action twists a benign homestead into a domestic nightmare, signature Cammell forms resurface--startling flash-cuts between the recent past and present creating schizoid sensations, an exaggerated emphasis on the eyeball as visual fulcrum for transitional delirium, and a soundtrack that announces invocation and possession. The film is a micro-cosm of psychological nuance as the seemingly attentive and harmless husband (expertly played by David Keith) slips in and out of dementia so effortlessly that the wife (Cathy Moriarty) and the audience remain suspended in indeterminacy until the very end. She could just take him back. Everything will be all right. We'll clean up the bathroom and forget about the whole thing. But no, the film ends with a landscape explosion reminiscent of the existentialism of Antonioni. Of course, true to form, the project was riddled with problems--censorship, a bankruptcy proceeding, lack of promotion; box-office oblivion.

In any event, word was circulated and a certain someone Cammell was all too familiar with resurfaced and arranged for a private screening. Marlon Brando had another project he wanted to discuss and, as described in the Rodley article, it was to be his Swan Song: In Jericho, Billy Harrington (Brando), a retired government assassin, is coerced back into action by evil CIA operatives (they introduce his daughter to a Colombian druglord's son, who falls for her). Harrington, named after Brando's psychiatrist who had died recently, embarks on an ultraviolent rescue mission. After "he kills everybody. Everybody! In the last reel," says Cammell, he returns home to brood in suicidal angst. Cammell: "The overall image of the film is a man living with his own guilt over all the horror he's perpetrated . . . . I felt I knew [Brando] as a performer and I could help orchestrate that performance, to see him bare his soul for once." The money, even though Brando demanded "a very high percentage of the profits," was made available. All that was needed was the script that Brando was determined to write alone. And it's anyone's guess what that means.

The last film Cammell made, Wild Side, was, upon completion, taken away and recut by the production house, Nu Image. The company is primarily known, if at all, for lowgrade exploitation films. According to Drew Hammond--collaborator on Cammell's yet-to-be-produced last screen-play--"they [Nu Image] were trying to break into the American art film market and achieve some degree of respectability." A side-by-side comparison of the two cuts reveals Nu Image's conversion of an over-the-top "art film" into an arty "exploitation film." Everything from the deliciacies of humor, the subtle but pivotal implication of Christopher Walken in a homosexual relationship, and the basic and unmistakable Cammellian editing strategy (i.e., the expansion of the film into heightened psychologies) has been removed. The homogeneity of the Nu Image version's editing style smooths out all of the danger, all of the power, all of the art. The film was sucked dry and secreted straight to cable.

Bruno (Walken) is a villainous financial racketeer who is manipulating Virginia (Joan Chen), a businesswoman who is also Bruno's somewhat estranged wife. She meets and falls in love with a female banker, Johanna (Anne Heche). Johanna, in her other guise as a high-priced call girl, is hired by Bruno, who is so impressed by her banking acumen he decides she will become his protegee. Adding the final point to the twisted polygon is Tony (Steven Bauer), Bruno's chauffeur. He is, of course, an undercover cop. As Virginia and Johanna twist tighter into the bonds of their newfound love and Tony grows more and more paranoid as his sting operation approaches the threshold of exposure, Walken implodes into the kind of performance that appears to damage the actual psyches of the cast, characters, and anyone else who cares to watch.

All four leads are absolutely topnotch and play off the various recombinant possibilities of the narrative with a mesmerizing urgency. The film is a psychosis of triangles within triangles, both love and hate. On the continuum sketched above--Sixties Hex Sex, Seventies Tech Sex, and Eighties Disturbo Sex--Wild Side actually allows for a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel, and the Nineties. True love, redemption, and a new life are alluded to. These things are possible in the fleeting conception of escape to the "third world," an apt metaphor for where things happen--in general--in Cammell's filmic universe. Be it London, Tucson, or Los Angeles, we are always just a flash-cut away from the point where exotica meets utopia, a place--always dangerous--that can open up and unfold images, characters, or viewers to their own inner-selves.

Along with four films in four decades and the thwarted projects already mentioned, Cammell produced a steady stream of scripts and treatments whose presence out there in limboland continues to tantalize. Attempting to collate them is like assembling a surrealistic index of possibilities, a soft Rolodex that drips off the edge of the horizon line: Mick Jagger and Norman Mailer in Ishtar, "the ultimate feminist film of all time." (That combination of names and words is what you call Advertising Copy.) An adaptation of the impossible-to-adapt Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov; the master read the treatment and sent a letter of approval to Cammell. Hammond: "Donald was very proud of that letter." A collaboration with Kenneth Tynan on the true story of Jack the Ripper, a film that would examine him in light of the Freemasons. An epic historical treatment of Lady Emma Hamilton. A treatment of the life of Machine Gun Kelly. An offer to direct Rob Lowe in Bad Influence. A project called 3000, the amount of money necessary to buy a call girl for the night (and exactly twice the amount that Johanna from Wild Side charged) that was juggled around between studios and eventually ended up as Pretty Woman.

And then there's his last screenplay, '33, co-written with Kong and Hammond. In it, a journalist is sent to Istanbul--in 1933--to investigate a heroin kingpin and ends up ensnared in his lair. With Cammell gone, I asked Hammond who would be his wish-list director and he answered, without missing a beat: "Stanley Kubrick." Not a bad choice, considering that there is an odd parallel between Cammell and Kubrick. Performance has obvious nods to Clockwork Orange, Demon Seed draws on 2001, White of the Eye follows the path of The Shining, and Wild Side is the film Kubrick hasn't made yet. Kubrick is, of course, the perfect model for the way Cammell wanted to work, i.e., an absolute and unique personal vision stands steadfast amidst the artless tools quivering behind the facades of paranoid studio money.

To end, it is appropriate to return to the voice of Cammell himself. Somewhere within the two-year period between the completion of Performance and its release, Cammell and Jagger fired off a telegram to the president of Warner Bros. It comes to us courtesy of Tony Sanchez (you remember, Keith Richards's chemo-chronologist):

This film is about the perverted love affair between Homo Sapiens and Lady Violence. In common with its subject, it is necessarily horrifying, paradoxical, and absurd. To make such a film means accepting that the subject is loaded with every taboo in the book.

You seem to want to emasculate (1) the most savage and (2) the most affectionate scenes in our movie. If Performance does not upset audiences it is nothing. If this fact upsets you, the alternative is to sell it fast and no more bullshit. Your misguided censorship will ultimately diminish said audiences in quality and quantity.

Some things never change. Osiris is with us in the springtime.

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