The wolf is waiting

In which our Diva sees a little action

Just after Christmas, I got a Facebook message from Nathyn Masters: "Are you available Friday or Saturday?" I've worked with Nate on a couple projects, including his epic supernatural action feature Epitaph: Bread and Salt (which, in cast you missed it, you can view in its entirety on YouTube), so I happily went pretty much straight from traveling to getting my Black Widow-esque assassin on to shoot some enigmatic scenes for him with gifted actress and good friend Anita Nicole Brown, as well as meeting some new-to-me faces among what I've come to think of as the TimeCode Mechanics Rep Company.

This was a bit of an experiment, cooked up in Nate's fertile brain during a break in production on his main current project, The Perfect Letter, with no script and minimal direction. I was given the gist of what I should communicate in improvised dialogue, as well as a nice little chuck of Nate's signature comic-book-style fight work.

A few days later, it had a title - Crisis Function - a Facebook page, and a trailer:

I still know only as much as this will tell you about what it's about (and yes, I felt a little bit like I was back in the Resonance-verse - definitely in a good way!), but I'm looking forward to seeing it all play out!

The Mom Zone revisited

In which our Diva spotlights a certain category of supporting character

A couple years ago, I hit a threshold in my acting career - the one where you start playing moms, and really never stop until you start playing grandmas. Since I don't have kids in real life -- and, due to the vagaries of genetics, was still frequently being asked where I went to school up until very shortly before that (and have been carded more than once since!) -- it felt weird. Really weird.

I've since gotten over that initial weirdness in the process of playing Busy Single Mom, Updated Fairy Tale Mom, Wholesome Civil-War-Era Mom, and Slightly Nervous Suburban Mom. Sure, it's great to be the lead once in a while, and women -- particularly mature women -- need to be more often, and in more varied ways. There should be more than this set of supporting roles out there for my type and age bracket. But that's a much larger discussion than I'm tackling today, and it doesn't change the fact that these roles, for all their limits, can be much more varied and meaty than we sometimes think.

Which is how I came to tweet last week, only semi-jokingly, that as long as I'm spending so much of my acting time in the Mom Zone, I want to be the Hollywood Midwest answer to Lena Headey.  Seriously, though, the last few years have seen this lady take on three, count 'em, three high-profile characters who function in their respective narratives primarily as mothers -- but you sure as heck can't say she's in a rut.

First, of course, she stepped into Linda Hamilton's iconic shoes as the ultimate "mama grizzly," Sarah Connor, on the TV spinoff Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Sarah started out (as seen in the original 1984 movie) an ordinary working-class girl, not long out of high school, who waited tables and went out dancing with her not-long-out-of-high-school friends, until one night Kyle Reese dropped out of the sky... er, future and informed her that her yet-unconceived son would be the only hope for the survival of the human race. Caught between trying to give John a childhood and preparing him for the brutal realities he would face as an adult, she made everything up as she went along, trusted nobody, got really really psychologically damaged, ended up more dangerous than most of the machines, and never ever, not once, failed to be riveting to watch.

Then of course, there's Game of Thrones' Cersei Lannister, defined primarily as mother -- particularly after Joffrey takes the throne and promptly derails any plans Cersei might have had of doing any actual reigning as Queen Regent -- but also as wife, sister, illicit incestuous lover, and most of all as bitter, viciously resentful product of a pseudo-medieval fantasy society's strictly enforced gender norms. She hates the role that's been thrust upon her but plays it to perfection and to whatever advantage she can gain, coping with an apparently endless royal wine cellar and a nasty pastime of mocking her intended daughter-in-law for believing and sincerely doing her best to embody the ideals of highborn feminity they've both been raised on. She is, by and large, an awful person who does awful things, and the show would be much poorer without Headey's sly, snarky performance.

Currently on multiplex screens (for the moment, anyway; the box office hasn't exactly been all they hoped for) -- and setting off this whole thought process -- we have Jocelyn Fray in The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, who belongs to a subset of mom-dom that I'd quite like to take a crack at: the Unexpectedly Awesome YA Mom.

YA (for those who don't hang around the same people and blogs I do) stands for "young adult," and refers to a segment of the literary market primarily intended for teens. It's on my radar primarily as an arena where female authors are thriving and young female readers are finding a welcome breadth of young female characters driving their own stories. (Even more breadth would be great, of course, and it would also be nice if, say, publishers didn't go around slapping whitewashed cover images on the few books that do star PoC protagonists, but that's another topic getting important discussion elsewhere, and not my topic today.)

It's also on the public's radar, to the extent that it's a well Hollywood has been drawing from quite a bit the last few years, ever since Twilight caught them off-guard as a juggernaut franchise and finally brought to their attention the fact that teenage girls and young women have *gasp* actual, legal-tender money they quite like to spend on movie tickets. (The merits, or lack thereof, of said franchise are also beyond the scope of this particular post, and quite frankly I'd be happy to never see another comment about them as long as I live. Just so we're clear.)

Being girls, of course, the things they like can't possibly be actually worth anything (for a nice summary of that particular cultural meme and the problems with it, see this interview with YA author Sarah Rees Brennan), but their money? Ah, that can move mountains of calcified industry conventions. Or at least budge them a little.

But the thing I've been noticing as these movies based on YA (and middle-grades; let's not overlook the number of cars hooked to the Hogwarts Express here) books come out, even more than the fact that a lot of them have girl protagonists, is that said protagonists' moms are often some seriously awesome characters in their own right.

Now, mostly I'm familiar with the fantasy ones, because that's the genre I'll always gravitate to by default, regardless of the age bracket of its intended audience. So I don't know how much it holds for YA novels in other genres. But YA fantasy novels are often some variation on the "destined hero" narrative, with a protagonist who discovers some fantastic heritage kept hidden throughout her/his childhood. With that structure in place, Mom almost has to be involved in said heritage somehow, as a keeper of knowledge if nothing else. And she's often a lot else. (See also: Virginia Doyle, mother of Gemma, protagonist of A Great and Terrible Beauty and its two sequels, a property I would dearly love to see adapted to film even though nobody is going to let me play Virginia. Which I would love.)

Which brings us back to Jocelyn. Who was apparently even less prepared than Sarah Connor to raise a kid with A Destiny, since it's pretty clear that she had no opportunity to learn how to raise a kid at all. The secret society of Shadowhunters and their solemn duty to hunt demons with their special innate badass abilities seems great and all, until the younger (and more prominent) characters start telling you what it's like to actually grow up in that world. Which Jocelyn did, and there's a world of interesting in whether it was a good idea to keep that fact (and by extension a lot of other facts) from her daughter Clary, the central character. Like Sarah, she made up this whole parenting thing as she went along, and she got a lot of it right and a lot of it wrong, but at the end of the day she and Clary love each other ferociously even while they're arguing, and it's a beautiful thing to see. (Also, she's hell with a cast-iron skillet. That fight sequence is worth the price of admission all on its own.)

Mom's role is unquestionably a supporting one, but this week-plus later, I still find myself thinking a lot about it, even though the movie overall is kind of a hot mess, albeit one assembled from a lot of interesting bits.

I'm not sure what the point of all this musing is, except that I'd love to see more of this kind of story, and this kind of character, in the indie milieu. There's plenty of room for it, given that, for example, the YA properties picked up for big-budget adaptations are uniformly led by pretty white straight girls. It would be great to see Hollywood fix that, and I'm all for continuing to talk about how to get them to do so. While that inevitiably arduous process continues, though, I'm looking for the indie community to step up first and show them how it's done.

So how about it, indie filmmakers? When I look at the Chicago/Midwest casting breakdowns on Actors Access tomorrow, what kind of moms will I see? Stay tuned...

Trailers and festivals

In which various of our Diva's projects are coming to light

Film is a delayed-gratification world. You work intensely for a short time -- days, weeks -- and then comes the waiting. Which sounds sort of awful, except you then have nifty surprises trickling out all through the the post-production PR process. Maybe it's just me, but shiny things in which I look all professional and stuff are that much more exciting when they pop up on my computer as I'm sitting here in my PJs with scrungy hair.

A quick rundown of the things I've been excited to see come to light lately:

Rose White continues to get fantastic reviews across the indie film blogosphere, and will soon be coming to a festival screen near, well, some of you. It's an official selection at the Nevermore Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina, February 22-24 (keep an eye on their website for the full schedule). More festival dates are expected soon, and will be posted to the film's Facebook page and Twitter feed.

I've only seen a rough cut myself, but even in that form it's absolutely stunning, and I'm all kinds of proud to be a part of it.

Speaking of festivals, Words Like Knives will be screened at Blood at the Beach in Virginia Beach, May 10-12. (It's not yet listed on their Events page, but I expect that'll be updated soon.) It's already garnered a couple of great reviews too, including one over at The Critic's Word that really qualified as one of those surprises that make my day:

Michael Wexler and Valerie Meachum delivered spot on performances as Mr. and Mrs. Price. What I found most impressive was how both actors handled themselves on screen, body language plays a big role to a great performance, and both actors showed a good display of that.

Can hardly ask for more than that!

Finally, I'm over the moon about how Witchfinder is coming together. The rough cut I've seen of it looks amazing, and I'm so proud of the team for realizing this ambitious 17th-century vision on an absolute shoestring. The trailer hit the web this week, and I can't wait to see the finished film.

The Boy Who Looked Suspicious

In which our Diva's life imitates art imitating life

Yesterday I had the privilege of watching this brilliant young actor share a scene with veteran powerhouse Kelsey Grammer.

Rotimi Akinosho is a soft-spoken, engaging young man who's "still getting used to" being recognized on the street. As extras, anyone who wants to keep working knows to respect the actors' space and working process, and it's understood that we leave them alone unless they address us. Sometimes that's an awkward dance, like during yesterday's rain-enforced downtime, when twenty extras were instructed to gather in a building entryway where Rotimi's chair had been placed in the corner. He could have retreated farther into the building, but instead chatted with extras about his experience of the neighborhoods of Chicago, his college days at Northwestern, and how blessed he is in this role at the start of his career.

A couple weeks ago, I tweeted about looking forward to the impending return of Boss for a second season of production in Chicago, and was surprised by a reply from Rotimi -- who I hadn't even known was on Twitter -- that he was looking forward to being back too. Yesterday, between takes, he shook my hand and told me it was nice to meet me in person. He's down-to-earth, smart, and incredibly talented, and I look forward to watching him grow and continue to succeed.

At one point, the scene called for Rotimi to pull up his hood as he walked away, a perfectly sensible action on a rainy day.

And as this slight, baby-faced figure in the hoodie walked by, my stomach lurched. Because on another street, on another rainy day, unprotected by the bustle of a television crew and security detail, another bright young man's promising future was extinguished by a bullet.

As I drove home last night, there was another lurch, as a BBC World Service anchor quoted President Obama saying that if he had a son, he would look like this. The media and public discussion swirling around the Trayvon Martin tragedy is grappling with a dozen complicated and interlocking demons of the American social psyche, which will take months if not years to untangle and properly name, let alone really address. Many are how-could-this-happen?? shocked, while others are bitterly unsurprised, only heartbroken that it cost this teenage boy's life for the world to even begin to notice the minefield their children face every day.

In early coverage of the case, we were told George Zimmerman had stated that he thought Trayvon was "suspicious" because he was walking slowly in the rain with his hood pulled up. Earlier this week, I had to wonder what was going through the head of Zimmerman's attorney when he let his client publicly assert that this beanpole kid, armed with nothing more deadly than sugar and caffeine, attacked a stranger with ten years and a hundred pounds on him. Where on earth that line of defense is leading, only time will tell, but one thing is certain: They're banking on the justice system to believe it, and not without reason.

Black male in a hoodie. In any movie, TV show, or even advertisement, it's shorthand for shady dealings, gangs, drugs, violence. Even in a sophisticated context designed to subvert or deconstruct the trope, it works because the trope is already there. And where pop-culture images go, public perception follows. A casually dressed black guy can never be just a casually dressed guy.

On Wednesday, a grass-roots "Million Hoodie March" took shape in street demonstrations and online solidarity. One of those posting a picture for the latter was Elon James White, creator of the satirical webseries This Week in Blackness. As he recounts on Tumblr, this resulted in a commenter objecting that "This is a thug in a hoodie" and that it confused the message. The photo, of course, is of White himself, and you can see at the link above how the dialogue played out. And you can bet the farm that the commenter -- who did not back down from their original position -- would have said no such thing about an image of a thirtysomething white guy wearing the same casual outfit, facial hair, and appropriately sober expression.

On Boss, Rotimi's character, Darius, is by no means an upstanding innocent. Neither is he simply a "thug," though it would be easy at a glance to label him as such and write him off. There's a reason we first met him as the worried caretaker of an elderly uncle. Boss is a grim show, committed to throwing a harsh light on the worse angels of our nature behind the gloss of political maneuvering, rife with racial tensions and moral corner-cutting. I have to admit it's not something I'd regularly watch on its own considerable merits, if it weren't the proud flagship drama of Chicago's growing TV industry, produced entirely here and well stocked with local talent and crew. It's a little too grim for my taste, but I'm still glad it's here.

And when I watch the scene we shot yesterday, I'll be thinking about that hoodie, and what the costume designer knows perfectly well it symbolizes. And watching for how the visual code plays out, for Darius, and for Rotimi, and for a nation of young men with their lives ahead of them.

Autumn in Hollywood Midwest

In which our Diva ponders leaves falling and cameras rolling

Long time, no blog, once again. Oops.  Part of that I can blame on a one-two punch of a nasty summer cold and a sneaky computer virus that took out both my netbook and my desktop within 24 hours.  I've also been auditioning a lot and doing a little bit of background work on a couple of TV shows.

Being an extra is a funny thing. I joke a lot about people thinking of actors as weird parts of the set that move on their own, but with background, that's almost literally true. This living room would look weird without a couch, so we put one in it.  This party would look weird without people milling around, so we put them there.  It's not really acting, but it can be a good time, and it's a great way to learn about how things work on a big-time set.

So far this year, I've worked on the new series Boss, which premieres on Starz in October, and the second season of Showtime's Shameless.  Like a lot of shows set in Chicago, past and present, the latter mostly shoots in L.A., but they do come here for more than just second-unit establishing shots, bringing the principal cast a couple times a year for a week or so at a time, and that work is definitely appreciated by extras and local crew members alike.

The former, though, is part of what we're starting to see more of: A series filmed entirely in Chicago, studio scenes and all. That increased activity has been rendered feasible by several factors, including the renewal of the 30% tax credit for another ten years by the state legislature, but a definite linchpin has been the opening of Cinespace Chicago in the defunct Ryerson Steel complex. For a while there, it looked like the studio facility -- a new venture of a company that already runs a successful production complex in Toronto -- wasn't going to happen.  There'd been buzz when they first made the deal for the Ryerson property, but then the estimated timetable for opening the first stage came and went, and I didn't hear anything more.

And then I did: In addition to Boss, the studio was home to portions of Transformers 3 and the Nightmare on Elm Street remake. Then, a day after Fox's gut-punch cancellation of last season's The Chicago Code -- which made its home at the already-established Chicago Studio City -- local talent and crew got a shot of good news in NBC's pickup of The Playboy Club, which is now occupying pretty much every available inch of Cinespace through December.  This summer has also seen visits from the superhero pilot Powers and (briefly) from the Man of Steel himself.  (But Batman went and abandoned us for Pittsburgh. That's just rude, Mr. Wayne.) 


That's a lot of activity. We've got room for more! And it's especially heartening to see them casting minor speaking roles as well as extras locally, as well as opportunities for area natives like Jennifer Beals to come home to work for a while.  On Boss, I lucked into a featured-extra spot with the campaigning governor, played by Steppenwolf veteran Francis Guinan, who has managed to remain Chicago-based while building a solid character-actor career. I'd love to be able to do that.

Everyone says you have to go where the work is, and there's no denying the truth of that. But here's hoping Chicago continues to be where more and more of the work is.  We've got the people, and increasingly we have the infrastructure. The success of the productions that are already here will help that grow. Here's hoping!

Bunnies and buzzwords

In which our Diva is officially tired of the word "empowerment"

In the wake of The Playboy Club's moment in the spotlight at the annual Television Critics Association press tour, debate is bouncing around the internet about just what the show means. Personally, I think what it means is really damn complicated, and that's exactly what I like about it. Is what I'm about to say colored by the fact that the show is being produced in Chicago and employing some of my friends and colleagues? Probably. But that's not the only reason I want it to be good and do well.

Some people, notably Melissa Silverstein over at the indispensible Women and Hollywood, have zeroed in on the comments by cast members asserting that the position of their characters is proto-feminist and "progressive."  There's more skepticism about this than I think the the comments actually warrant, though Silverstein is right that Amber Heard's attempt to explain her position didn't quite say what I think she intended it to. From my vantage point, sandwiched between Heard's generation and Gloria Steinem's, I can see both perspectives, and where and how they're missing each other. I've never hesitated to call myself a feminist, but it's not hard to see why many younger women do, and it's not quite the reason I've often seen put forth by their elders. Not so much that they think it entails various other political baggage, but that they have been repeatedly told that it does.

If I'm honest, I have to say I have more sympathy for those young women's position, because I've listened to those who paved the way before me, and heard how often what they have to say sounds an awful lot like "We didn't fight for your right to make your own choices just to have you make the WRONG choices!" How it sounds like going any way but theirs makes you an ungrateful wretch who's setting The Entire Cause Of Women back by decades. Think that sounds melodramatic? Check out the three, count 'em, three indignant comments on the W&H post by judybrowni, who apparently considers childish namecalling to be the appropriate response here. There is no quicker way to send my estimation of you into the toilet than to call any other woman a "bimbo" -- hey, how about throwing in "whore" or "witch" while you're at it? -- and tossing in "know-nothing" and "anorexic" (people still think that's okay? seriously?) into the bargain, along with rampant ageism and repeated implications that acting  isn't "real work" (And what possesses people from various walks of life to tell people from other walks of life that what they do for a living is invalid? It never, ever fails to sound petty and foolish.), pretty much seals the deal.

But I digress. I do think Heard's statement, as quoted in the post, was ill-chosen, and the whole spin of "it's all about empowerment" (although, has anyone from NBC actually used that overworked word, or is it coming from the press? h/t to Mizzelle for confirmation, via this NPR article, that yes, it seems to have started with executive producer Chad Hodge) is ill-advised. And Silverstein is right that the spin is what it's about at this stage of the game, but I'm a bit baffled as to why she -- who writes compellingly about the industry every day, and knows how the spin works and how little it often has to do with the actual product -- seems to be letting it color her impression of the show so much. I doubly scratched my head at this:

Me thinks this young woman better have a damn good show or she should just shut the fuck up and admit she’s on a show that’s about women wearing bunny costumes trying to get by in the world where it was really difficult for single women to get jobs that would pay a decent wage.  You see if they framed it that way, I could potentially be interested.

I... really don't understand how that's not what's being said. I honestly don't. That's exactly the impression I get from the interview videos on NBC's website, and at the Twitter stream from the press conference, and NBC's own description of the show as "a sophisticated series about the transitional times of the early 1960s and the complex lives of a group of working-class women."

One of the places I've seen that last quote is in this article over at Fangirltastic, in which regular contributor Theron expresses skepticism that the show will ultimately prove to be anything more than a standard-issue prime-time soap. She also touches on the much-publicized call to boycott by the Parents Television Council. And while I'm skeptical of the PTC's "Playboy = pornography = unalloyed evil" position, it has raised in advance issues that are relevant, and which seem like they will actually be part of the show. I've seen several comments in various places pointing out the tendency of many people to conflate Bunnies (hostesses/servers in the Playboy Clubs) with Playmates (nude models in the magazine). With this important distinction in mind, I was struck in the trailer by Brenda (Naturi Naughton) bluntly and proudly declaring her ambition to be "the first chocolate centerfold."  There are multiple thorny issues wrapped up in that one line -- the divide between Bunny and Playmate and what it means when one woman sees the first as a stepping stone to the second; our culture's unsettled relationship with a woman who chooses to trade on her sexuality as a commodity; the fetishization of race. (The last is particularly interesting in light of the way Naughton has embraced the "chocolate Bunny" label in her own press statements.)



"You're either the living, breathing fantasy that is the Playboy Bunny," admonishes senior Bunny Carol-Lynne (Laura Benanti), "or you're not." Hugh Hefner tweeted earlier this evening, "Was being a Playboy Club Bunny in the 1960s empowering or exploitation? Why not ask the original Bunnies themselves? They'll tell you."

I don't have one to ask, but it seems to me the only honest answer is "both." That's certainly what I'm looking forward to in the show, based on the glimpses NBC has given us. And if that seems nostalgic or irrelevant, take a look at this photo from NBC's mock Playboy Club at the recent San Diego Comic Con, of a Bunny flanked by two Tilted Kilt servers. Time warp, anyone?

So, bottom line: We're looking at a show about a very messy and complicated time and place for women. At least, I hope that's what they'll let it be. Because the messy and the complicated haven't entirely left us, and that's the story I'm interested in seeing.