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Post by ilovewinona on Sept 27, 2008 8:55:42 GMT -5
The project will be produced by Meg Ryan and Nina Sadowsky through Ryan's Prufrock pictures. "Lost Souls" will mark the directorial debut of renowned cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, who won an Oscar for his camera work on Steven Spielburg's Holocaust drama "Schindler's List". The pic will be penned by Pierce Garner, who'll share the story credit with Betsy Stahl. Variety says the film is expected to shoot in the fall, which means Ryder will have to push back Columbia's long-delayed adaptation of the harrowing psychological novel "Girl Interrupted". Sources tell the trade the actress will likely move into that film after "Lost Souls" wraps. ---------- This part of the article is interesting. Of course at the time the films were being made no one could predict which film would become a classic Winona film and the other a so-so thriller. Now looking back at the article it's so funny "Girl Interrupted"'s production was pushed back for "Lost Souls" ----- Rusty
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Post by ilovewinona on Sept 30, 2008 6:26:02 GMT -5
According to Variety, the film was first pitched to New Line with Ryan in the starring role, but because it deals with issues of "spiritual crisis and rebirth," it was deemed too similiar to her recent hit, "City of Angels". ----- Cameron Diaz, currently generating good buzz from the upcoming low-brow pic "There's Something About Mary", has jumped onboard the offbeat black comedy "Being John Malkovich", reports Daily Variety. The flick, which we're assuming sounded really good in the pitch meeting, stars John Cusack as a puppeteer who finds a secret portal that leads into Malkovich's brain. He can see life through the actor's eyes, and he starts a side business renting out space in Malkovich's head to others. He finally lets his wife go for a visit,and she falls in love with a woman who thinks she's fallen in love with Malkovich. Follow that? Good. Diaz will play Cusack's wife, with Malkovich as himself. "Being" will be the feature directorial debut of video director Spike Jonze. Shooting is scheduled to start July 20. ----- end of the article ----- Rusty
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Post by ilovewinona on Oct 3, 2008 7:38:44 GMT -5
From November 23, 1998 ----- Winona, Whoopi Eyes Roles ----- Hollywood's obsession with May-December romances is still going strong. The Hollywood Reporter says that Winona Ryder is in talks to join Richard Gere in the romantic drama Autmun in New York. The film, which is likely to begin production next fall on location, concerns a man nearing 50 whose lifelong fear of commitment changes when he falls in love with a woman half his age. ----- And speaking of Ryder, the actress, who is currently appearing in Woody Allen's Celebrity, continues to gear up for her long-in-the-works adaptation of Susanna Kaysen's harrowing memoir Girl Interrupted. The Reporter says that Whoopi Goldberg is in serious talks to play a nurse in the film, which is about Kaysen's stint in a mental institution when she was a teen in the '60s. James Mangold (Copland) is directing and adapting the pic, which some describe as a female version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. In addition to starring, Ryder is also exec producing Girl, which is expected to begin shooting early next year. ----- Rusty
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Post by ilovewinona on Oct 4, 2008 19:25:57 GMT -5
Celebrities - Star Biography ----- Winona Ryder ----- People think that they just want movies like "Pretty Woman", when really they--at least the ones I know personally--have been waiting for something that doesn't completely insult them. ---------- The daughter of free-lovin', counterculture types who named her after the Minnesota town in which she was born (and she's the lucky one--her siblings are named Yuri, Sunyata, and Jubal), Winona Horowitz enjoyed what you'd call an unorthodox childhood--the Horowitz clan's idea of family bonding was a good-and-rowdy protest against Agent Orange. It will come as no surprise then, that her godfather was the late L.S.D. guru, Dr. Timothy Leary (Winona's father, Michael, formerly served as Leary's archivist and ran a bookstore called Flashback Books--need we say more?), or that Beat poet Allen Ginsberg rounded out her parents circle of friends. ----- More to come ----- Rusty
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Post by ilovewinona on Oct 7, 2008 5:06:06 GMT -5
Winona hastens to explain when asked about her rather nontraditional upbringing that her parents are politically active intellectuals, and not acid-dropping, Grateful Dead- dogging cliches. Leary himself summed them up as "hippie intellectuals and psychedelic scholars," a judgment bolstered by the fact that the couple collaborated on a book detailing Aldous Huxley's psychedelic experiences, and then co-authored a book alleging that Louisa May Alcott wrote "Little Women" while dosed up on opium. ----- More tomorrow ----- Rusty
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Post by ilovewinona on Oct 8, 2008 6:08:09 GMT -5
Growing up in a home where a high value was placed on reading, Winona's bible became J. D. Salinger's coming-of-age novel, "The Catcher in the Rye". With a world view shaped by such iconoclastic parents and an idol the likes of Holden Caulfield, it's little wonder that Winona would one day prove so deft at portraying offbeat characters. When she was 7 years old, Winona's family repaired to an upscale commune located on a 300-acre plot of land in the northern California town of Elk, where they coexisted with seven other families and a bunch of horses. The kids obviously didn't have televisions (after all, they had no electricity in their homes), but Winona's mother operated a movie theater in an old barn, where she screened the classic films that provided her enthralled daughter with the key to her future. ----- Rusty
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Post by ilovewinona on Oct 9, 2008 14:12:53 GMT -5
After a year of living in the sticks, the family moved back to the relative civilization of Petaluma, California. During her first week at her new school, Winona, a fresh-off-the-commune tomboy, was jumped by a gang of pubescent thugs who proceeded to trounce her good for being such an obvious wuss. ("They thought I was a gay boy," she has offered by way of explanation.) The unfortunate thrashing yielded fortunate results: Ryder earned a stint of home study, but more importantly, her parents let her enroll in acting classes at the prestigious American Convervatory Theater in San Francisco, where bullies were few and far between. Talent scouts spotted her on the A.C.T. stage and had her test for the role of Jon Voight's daughter in "Desert Bloom". ----- Rusty
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Post by ilovewinona on Oct 10, 2008 9:35:07 GMT -5
She didn't get the part, but her audition was impressive enough to gain her representation by Triad Artists, which set her up with a role as a poetry-loving teen in "Lucas"(1986). When the credits rolled, Winona Horowitz officially became Winona Ryder; her new surname was inspired by a Mitch Ryder album belonging to her father. ----- Ryder's memorable performance in the generally unmemorable film led in turn to a role in the little-heeded "Squaredance" (1987): her next role as an anti-war activist in the critically reviled "1969" was certainly nothing to write Petaluma about, either. Ryder's career tide finally turned for the better with Tim Burton's "Beetlejuice" (1988), in which she played a death-courting, black-garbed teen named Lydia, who understandably has more in common with the ghosts in the attic (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin) than with her own truly insufferable parents. ----- I have to correct the article a little bit ----- "Beetlejuice" came out before "1969", "Beetlejuice" March 30, 1988, "1969" came out November 18, 1988. ----- And I feel "Squaredance" deserves a better description than "little-heeded" from the article, it was a movie that showcased Winona Ryder in her first starring role. And Winona was fantastic as Gemma!!!!! ----- Rusty
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Post by ilovewinona on Oct 11, 2008 8:46:01 GMT -5
She again plumbed the darker teenage impulses in the black-as-coal comedy "Heathers"(1989) -- to date, the favorite film of her prodigious career -- which had her conspiring with a preternaturally sardonic Christian Slater to murder members of high school cliques and then make the deaths appear to be suicides. That same year, she turned in a fine performance (in a not-so-fine movie) as the 13-year-old bride and first cousin of Jerry Lee Lewis, in "Great Balls of Fire!" Her next few films flopped, as well, but one thing was becoming certain: Ms. Ryder had the warped teen thang pretty well nailed. ----- Rusty
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Post by ilovewinona on Oct 13, 2008 6:04:44 GMT -5
For Tim Burton's "Edward Scissorhands", she donned an ill-conceived blonde wig to play a more conventional teen -- a cheerleader no less -- swept up in an unconventional Beauty-and-the-Beast attraction with a bizarre creature played winningly by Ryder's then-fiance, Johnny Depp. While the film certainly was the most auspicious outing of her career up to that point, the fact remained that Ryder was fed up with playing a teenager, forever poised tremulously on the cusp of maturity. ----- Rusty
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Post by ilovewinona on Oct 19, 2008 6:10:46 GMT -5
Independant filmmaker Jim Jarmusch helped bridge the generation gap somewhat by writing a special part for Ryder in his anthology "Night on Earth", in which she played an L.A. cabbie who dreams of becoming a mechanic. On the maturity scale, the film was a baby step, to be sure. Ryder would have made a far greater stride in Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather Part III" , but she was forced to withdraw from the production due to a respiratory infection brought on by exhaustion; her departure from the project led to a particularly unforunate casting choice of the director's daughter Sofia, an inexperienced and ultimately inept subsitute. ----- Rusty
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Post by ilovewinona on Oct 20, 2008 5:37:08 GMT -5
Luckily, Ryder and Coppola's dealings were far from completed. After signing with Creative Artists Agency, where she had the foresight to reserve the right to review all scripts submitted to the agency, Ryder latched onto a promising screenplay based on Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. She approached Coppola with the script, and the rest is movie history. ----- Rusty
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Post by ilovewinona on Nov 4, 2008 6:12:09 GMT -5
Coppola's decadent and erotic "Bram Stoker's Dracula" provided Ryder with the break she had been looking for, finally, for the first time in her career, she was playing a mature woman, and what's more, the woman in question was the object of the immortal count's blood-soaked desire. Ryder also managed a fairly convincing British accent (the same could not be said for co-star Keanu Reeves), but not everyone was convinced that she pulled the role off. If critics were divided on the ultimate effectiveness of Ryder's performance in the film, they were in absolute agreement over her Oscar-nominated supporting role as May Welland in "The Age of Innocence", a film adapted from Edith Wharton's merciless portrait of 19th-century New York aristocracy. ----- Rusty
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Post by ilovewinona on Nov 5, 2008 7:44:59 GMT -5
In 1994, Ryder stepped out of her crinolines to achieve iconic status as the quintessential Gen-Xer in "Reality Bites", held her own in a cream-of-the-crop cast in the butchered adaptation of Isabel Allende's "The House of the Spirits", and then capped off the year with an Oscar-nominated (this time in the Best Actress contest) performance as Jo March in "Little Women". Ryder dedicated the latter film to Polly L=Klass, a young girl from Ryder's hometown who was kidnapped and brutally murdered in 1993. {At the time of the crime, Ryder put up a $200,000 reward for information leading to the child's attacker, and she continues to be a strong supporter of the Polly Klass Foundation}. ----- Rusty
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Post by ilovewinona on Nov 8, 2008 8:18:34 GMT -5
With the delicate, ethereal beauty of a comsumptive heroine of yore, and an impressive range, Ryder has already proven herself to be one of the most luminous and successful interpreters of the 19th century. But considering her card-carrying Generation-X status, her well-publicized love history (which includes steamy chapters titled "Johnny Depp", "Christian Slater", "Daniel Day-Lewis", "David Pirner", "David Duchovny", "David Pirner Part II", and Matt Damon". and her equal virtuosity at playing latter-day leads (as evidenced in 1995's "How to Make an American Quilt"), Ryder is undoubtedly very present in the present. ----- Rusty
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