|
|
|
Interview 1 Contents Idol Threats by Paul Cullum Shawnee Smith Shawnee Smith is exactly the kind of success story we like to hear about in these parts: lissome ingenue, plucked from greater American obscurity on the strength of her clarion natural beauty and wholesome pressence, excels in television where the challenges are few, yet secretly demonstrates real acting potential; steered toward the easy money by her advisers and manipulators, loses her currency even as she hones her chops and instincts to a gleaming point; is finally discarded as yet another front-line soldier in the cause of media dogmatism--canon fodder--in favor of newer and excruciatingly more wholesome ingenues; yet cherishes the lessons afforded her as privileged secrets, studies hard, shows what her people back home still refer to as "gumption," plots a strategic campaign of day-player and character roles, begins to stand out from everything around her and at some arbitrary point, still in her early 20s, emerges from the status of might-have-been to stand poised again on the precipice of a major Hollywood career--for weisenheimers like us to happen along and take credit for pointing out the obvious. There, in a mere 171 words, is a Hollywood success story even the cynical old souls down in press relations can take a modicum in pride in. And after filmstopping cameos in The Low Life, Female Perversions and especially Leaving Las Vegas, she won't be our little secret much longer. Originally from South Carolina, which is responsible for the merest lilt of an elliptical drawl at the corner of her speech, she made her way to greater Southern California just in time for the studios' vast talent discovery network to maneuver her into their web. "My mom remarried when I was 8," she says laughing, "and this man lived in Van Nuys, so we moved there. We used to go for walks around the block. Well, on one of our walks, she met this Irish woman Arleta, who's daughter Arlene was the papergirl. They would walk around the block and Arleta would talk incessantly about Arlene this and auditions this and commercials this, blah, blah, blah. My mom started getting steamed, like, 'My daughter can do that.' I've been tap dancing since I was 3 years old. So the next thing I know, my mom is taking little snapshot pictures of me and sending them in to agencies. And then I started doing commercials and the competition with Arlene was on." Eventually, she had a TV series by the mid-'80s, where she had something of the reputation that maybe a Claire Danes enjoys today--talented ingenue on the brink of something big. She was the youngest actress to win the Dramalogue critics award for stage work in L.A. When she made the break to the movies, it was as a lead--in the 1988 remake of The Blob, opposite Kevin Dillon. She was cast opposite Richard Dreyfuss in a play on Broadway, and found a niche playing demanding parts in made-for-TV weepies. But eventually, her career just seemed to run out of steam, or at the very least, out of focus. "What happened is this heat surrounded me, and the people who were handling my career weren't all that careful about my choices. I just got burned out doing whatever came along, but it never really got going. I decided I would love a career just doing character parts." Her first step on that long road back was a tiny part in Stephen King's The Stand. She was the randy Jezebel who first tries to seduce Rob Lowe in an abandoned small-town drugstore while his retarded friend waits at the bus stop, and who returns in the final installment, in the company of Miguel Ferrer, to audition as the Bride of Satan. "I remember the day I auditioned for that--and Diane Lane wanted to do the part, so I'd forgotten about it. I couldn't figure out, other than the timing of my life, why things weren't happening. Then out of nowhere I got called...Diane got pregnant and she couldn't do it, and they called me. I've had enough to keep me going for the past year. But I remember after I did that, people called and said, 'I probably can't afford you now.' People assumed I'd be so busy." At one point, tired of handing over her destiny to others, she returned to what has been a lifelong attraction to music. Nothing was happening with my acting and I was getting really frustrated, and I was feeling really spent. I'd been working on it for a long time, and I still had a long way to go with it. But I was feeling just unused. Like I wasn't using hardly any of myself at all. 'Cause I'd been used to working hard and throwing all of myself into something. So I said, you know what--screw it, I guess it's not meant for me. I decided to go visit my grandmother in North Carolina and go back to school. Go to college. Not acting or music, but English, history. So I bought the plane ticket. I sold everything. I gave away all the stray animals I had been collecting over the years. Sold all my furniture. Registered in school, and then suddenly there was a bit of interest from a couple of labels in New York. "So I thought, I better get it together quick. My ex-boyfriend is a really good guitar player, and his best friend is a great drummer. We found a bass player. We got together to play this one gig, and I was almost schizophrenic, 'cause we were doing this to maybe get a record deal, and then I'm leaving two days later. Then a couple of other things happened. We ran into this casting director, Carrie Frazier, at Starbucks. I told her I was moving, and she sat me down and just reduced me to shame. And then she cast me in Leaving Las Vegas. Her band, Miriam Fay, kind of a jazzy-bluesy alt-rock deal with Joni Mitchell or Suzanne Vega underpinnings, is currently entertaining several major label offers. Shawnee sings, writes the lyrics and melodies and, as she imparts with just a sidelong glint of conspiracy, "I can shake that shaker." The band has three songs on the soundtrack of The Low Life. The Low Life, George Hickenlooper's (Hearts of Darkness) first narrative feature, presents Shawnee in a single scene at a party where, boozy and flirtatious, she accidentally lets a key piece of exposition slip. For 40 seconds of screentime, it's tightrope acting without a net, and George for one is unabashed in his praise. "I think she's the best working actress in America," he says without qualification. Then in Leaving Las Vegas, Shawnee appears in a scene in a biker bar where Julian Lennon is the bartender and Nicolas Cage is dead drunk in the afternoon, just barely out of harm's way. To rev up the action, Shawnee leaves biker beau at the pool table and curls up cat-like on the bar next to Cage, who drunkenly welcomes the camaraderie, oblivious to the danger it comes wrapped in. Again, it's only one small scene, but in a movie that trades heavily on jack-in-the-box cameos (Richard Lewis, Valerie Golino, Bob Rafelson, Lou Rawls), the kind that pops out at you, her perfect mixture of precocious sexiness and tomboy wildness stays with you long after the film ends. Shawnee can next be seen in Female Perversions, a women's film by women about women, starring Tilda Swinton ("a little too much estrogen on that set," she recalls), another cameo, as well as a made-for-TV movie directed by Mary Lambert (Siesta, but also both Pet Sematarys, so work that out yourself) called Face of Evil, which airs in April on CBS. And then, I guess, all of Hollywood beyond. Don't say we didn't warn you.
This page is a mirror reposted here for your convenience.
|
