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Post by ilovewinona on May 24, 2009 6:13:00 GMT -5
"Reality Bites", which opened Friday, is quite a switch, In it, Ryder, 22, plays Lelaina Pierce, a recent college grad and neophyte documentary filmmaker trying to land a media job without success. Yet the role ended up requiring research of it's own. "It was easier to relate to than my other movies because it was contemporary, and I'm so familiar with the music she listens to, her hobbies, the places she goes," Ryder says. ----- Rusty
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Post by ilovewinona on May 25, 2009 6:18:10 GMT -5
But she notes: "I don't hang out with young people a lot, people my own age. So that was the research I had to do: What's it like to be around people your own age? I have a couple of best friends -- I've had them my whole life -- who are in school right now, you can call upon that, but it's different. I really was basically playing a girl that I probably would have been a lot like if I hadn't become an actress." ----- Rusty
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Post by imayne on May 30, 2009 6:49:03 GMT -5
From the Irish Independent News:
Winona is the queen of the comeback kids
If there's one film guaranteed to give your average movie star a severe case of the heebie jeebies, it's Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard. For therein lies every screen icon's worst nightmare -- oblivion. Norma Desmond used to be a big shot, a luminous silent screen beauty deluged by fan letters and feted by Cecil B DeMille. But by the time William Holden's hard-on-his-luck writer stumbles into her life, Norma is a relic of a bygone age, clinging pathetically to former glories.
There have been lots of real Norma Desmonds down the years, and Gloria Swanson, the woman who played her in Wilder's film, was one of them. But any star who feels his grip on the greasy pole faltering should take comfort from some of the remarkable comebacks that seemingly dead-in-the-water actors have managed.
A few months back it was Mickey Rourke who returned, Lazarus-like, from beyond the cinematic grave to shine in Darren Arnofsky's The Wrestler and almost win an unlikely Oscar. And this summer it's Winona Ryder who looks set to return from a lengthy stint in the celebrity wilderness.
Ryder shot to fame in her late teens in films like Heathers (1989) and Beetlejuice (1988). Strong performances in Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth (1991) and Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (1993) cemented her reputation as a rising star, and in the early 1990s her relationship with Johnny Depp made them the Brangelina of their time. But by the late 1990s things were looking bleaker for Winona: there were rumours of drug dependency, and she hadn't had a decent hit in years.
In 2001, her already faltering career seemed doomed when she was arrested for shoplifting at the Saks Fifth Avenue store in Beverly Hills, and was subsequently made an example of by a DA looking to make a name for himself.
Bruised by the humiliation of a public trial and the 500 hours of community service she was rather unfairly lumped with, Ryder retreated from the limelight, abandoning Los Angeles for her native San Francisco and disappearing altogether from public sight.
Over the last couple of years she's been tentatively putting her toe back in the Hollywood water, but this summer she's set to star in a number of high-profile films, beginning with JJ Abrams' Star Trek, which opened here last week. In it, a handsome but barely recognisable Ryder plays Spock's human mother, and that turn will be followed by appearances in a couple of eagerly awaited films.
Later this year she'll star with fellow comeback kid Mickey Rourke in The Informers, an adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis book about hedonism in 1980s Los Angeles. And she is apparently excellent alongside Keanu Reeves and Julianne Moore in Rebecca Miller's The Private Lives of Pippa Lee.
The fact that a major studio has permitted Ryder's presence in a big budget film like Star Trek is a sure sign that her sins have been forgiven, because at one point she was considered uninsurable. Her route back to the top, then, looks fairly secure, and if she manages it she'll join a distinguished bunch of film folks who've managed to claw their way back from the brink of oblivion.
Katharine Hepburn is ranked by the American Film Institute as the greatest female film star of all time, but she might have become a mere footnote in cinema history if she hadn't recovered from an early slump. After shooting to stardom in the early 1930s, a string of flops combined with Hepburn's abrasive personality and open contempt for Hollywood mores led to her being declared "box office poison" in a famous poll of film distributors across America in 1938.
It was a blow from which many would not have recovered, but Kate was made of sterner stuff. She used her friendship with Howard Hughes to buy the rights to the hit play The Philadelphia Story, which she then sold on to MGM on one condition -- that she play the female lead. She did, and the 1940 film catapulted her back to stardom.
Joan Crawford was also on that 1938 box-office poison list, and her problems were compounded by the fact that she'd specialised in Depression-era melodramas to such an extent that she was considered a bad and terminally old-fashioned actress. Her star faded to such an extent that by 1943 MGM had bought out her contract and turfed her out of her studio-owned bungalow. But Crawford had a need for fame, and after wangling her way into Warner Brothers, fought tooth and nail to land the title role in Mildred Pierce (1945), against the express wishes of director Michael Curtiz, who only agreed to casting after seeing a powerful screen test. The film revived Crawford's career, and even won her an Oscar -- to the disgust of rival Bette Davis, who'd initially been offered the part.
More recently, John Travolta suffered one of the most dramatic falls from grace when, after becoming a big star in the late 1970s on the strength of Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978), he disappeared off the radar for more than a decade.
In the early 1980s, a string of flops and some very bad career choices left him in straight-to-video limbo for much of that decade, and it wasn't until 1994 that his career was given the kiss of life when Quentin Tarantino asked him to star in Pulp Fiction. After that people remembered that he could act, and his rehabilitation has been remarkable.
Ben Affleck nearly drowned in the wake of his disastrous entry into the vortex otherwise known as Jennifer Lopez; and Rob Lowe recovered reasonably well from the 1988 discovery of a sex tape involving him and several females, one of whom was a minor.
But surely the comeback king of this generation of actors is Robert Downey Jr, a hugely talented screen performer who has several times scuppered himself on the verge of triumph by exploding into rehab in the full glare of the spotlight. Once uninsurable, he's now a major star again, but with Downey, you never know what's around the corner.
pwhitington@independent.ie
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Post by ilovewinona on May 30, 2009 8:04:06 GMT -5
Imayne, that was a very good article, but any reference, from that article to the word "Oblivion" about Winona's career is annoying. ---- Sure we only have about five independant films Winona has done to look forward to in the near future. But let's look at her outstanding film career to date, so many masterpiece films. How can any self respecting Winona Ryder fan be sad. Our lady has had a film career of 23 years so far, so if it gets slow for awhile I hope her fans can just mellow out and wait for new films. If she wants to make new motion pictures I hope we will all be there to enjoy them. ---- Rusty
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Post by Charles on May 30, 2009 9:17:03 GMT -5
Thanks Imayne for the great find . . . a thoughtful article filled with up-lifting comeback stories. That sort of writing confirms what we fans have felt all along; its just a matter of time (and good roles) before Winona re-emerges in the public's eyes. While we might have rung our hands over the past several years, I don't think any of us doubted that, given time and the right roles, she would come back even larger than before. And judging from her recent roles and this recent spate of positive articles, the prognosis is excellent.
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Post by ilovewinona on Jun 2, 2009 7:35:40 GMT -5
Yet what most people might consider some of the simplest bits to pick up on -- from goofing on old TV shows such as "Good Times", to playing out the anxiety over landing your first job -- were tough for Ryder to master. ----- Rusty
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Post by ilovewinona on Jun 8, 2009 7:18:56 GMT -5
"I'm a couple of years younger than Helen Childress, who wrote the script," she says. "It sounds like nothing, just a couple of years, but it's a big deal nowadays because a couple of years is a couple of hundred TV shows that you're not familiar witn. I didn't kmpw all those references. We never had a TV growing up, so I'd never seen "Good Times"". ----- Rusty
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Post by imayne on Jun 8, 2009 20:16:35 GMT -5
"I'm a couple of years younger than Helen Childress, who wrote the script," she says. "It sounds like nothing, just a couple of years, but it's a big deal nowadays because a couple of years is a couple of hundred TV shows that you're not familiar witn. I didn't kmpw all those references. We never had a TV growing up, so I'd never seen "Good Times"". ----- Rusty Yeah it's funny...the girl can throw in a dozen classic movie references into one sentence in an interview, and but not when it comes to TV. But oh well, I consider it better she grew up influenced by classic Hollywood anyway.
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Post by ilovewinona on Jun 10, 2009 7:56:20 GMT -5
That was funny Imayne ! ----- Winona also adds "I felt a little bit like an outsider because everyone else on the set had lived through not finding a job and living in a dingy little apartment, and I hadn't. So I just tried to guess. I've been so blessed in my life that I've never had to be ambitious." ----- Rusty
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Post by ilovewinona on Jun 12, 2009 7:22:40 GMT -5
"Her ambition was something that I really had to investigate .... She's trying to get somewhere, she's trying to get respect, and I never had to ask for it in a way. I don't mean to sound obnoxious about this, but it's just the way it works for me and, like I said, I'm really grateful." In fact Ryder has been a fil star since her midteens, with her real breakthrough roles coming in the 1988 box-office smash "Beetlejuice" and the 1989 cult hit "Heathers". ----- Rusty
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Post by ilovewinona on Jun 16, 2009 6:47:59 GMT -5
One ambition that's been scotched in Ryder is the desire to move behind the camera someday and produce or direct. Her experiences with "Bram Stoker's Dracula" ended that. Ryder was the first person associated with the movie to discover James Hart's script. "I really loved it, but the script was different than what the movie ended up being. The script made a lot more sense and was more substantial, and there was more of a story. I wasn't attracted to what ended up on the screen.I'm not trying to put it down, it's just that if I would have read that version I wouldn't have done it." ------- That's all of the newspaper article, I hope you all liked reading it. ----- Rusty
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Post by ilovewinona on Jun 20, 2009 6:55:10 GMT -5
A small article which is on the same page as the one I just posted. ----- "Reality Bites" director strikes out against Generation-X ----- In "Reality Bites" director Ben Stiller also plays Micheal Grates, a young executive at an obvious MTV parody called "In your face TV". It's much of a stretch, since Stiller himself had a show on MTV for a couple of months named, like his one-season series on Fox. "The Ben Stiller Show". But Stiller's film, with a screenplay by Helen Childress, is hardly an affectionate look back at the music video network. It's a dark satire. ----- Rusty
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Post by ilovewinona on Jun 26, 2009 4:24:14 GMT -5
"Personality-wise I can identify with him and what his motivations are," Stiller says of anything-for-a-hit Grates. "But I look at guys who work in that world and I guess I was always trying to figure out how they justify their exsistance and their lives and where they find satifaction." ----- Rusty
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Post by ilovewinona on Jun 28, 2009 8:09:09 GMT -5
Stiller himself is a tempermental opposite from Grates, he actually walked away from successful stints not just at MTV but also at "Saturday Night Live", which he left after five shows. "They looked at me like I was weird for actually leaving," he recalls. "People don't like to walk away from that show, but I wanted to make short films and eventually long films, and they didn't give me opportunity to do that at that point." ----- Rusty
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Post by ilovewinona on Jun 29, 2009 7:15:29 GMT -5
Stiller's inbred show-biz background ---- he's the son of the successful television and night-club husband-and-wife team Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara ---- combinded with his professional disinterest to give the 28-year-old filmmaker a critical eye. And he didn't always like what he saw. In fact, part of what makes "Reality Bites" run is its anger at the way "hip" MTV tries to market young audiences. ----- Rusty
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