10 Things I Learned About Kathleen Turner This Week

Kathleen Turner as Molly Ivins

Those of you in the Los Angeles area have two enticing theater options coming up. The first -- an absolute must see -- is the Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim's Follies. It's coming to LA soon from Broadway intact but for Bernadette Peters who will be replaced by another major but less famous talent, Victoria Clark (The Light in the Piazza). The other theater option is currently playing. I can't vouch for since I haven't seen it, but it's the one and only Kathleen Turner playing Molly Ivins in the one woman show Red Hot Patriot.

I have however seen Kathleen Turner live on stage twice (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and High) and she doesn't lose even one ounce of her charisma or gift on the stage the way many screen stars do when they attempt the transfer. Earlier this week she had a live chat at the LA Times Culture Monster and, though I've never participated in one of those before it was my darling Kathleen (she along with Pfeiffer and Streep is how I became such an actress-obsessive in my formative years) so I had to!

I told her I missed her onscreen and her response went like so.

I have a film coming out called A Perfect Family sometime this Spring. I still enjoy camera acting, but it's not as exhilarating to me as being on stage."

Ten other things I learned during her chat with fans after the jump...

10 Notable Bits From Kathleen Turner's Live Chat

10. Her favorite actors are Dame Maggie Smith and Dame Judi Dench. How strange is that? MOMENTS before this live chat we had just made a major plea for them to present at the Oscars together. This is empirical evidence that Kathleen was reading the Film Experience as she answered questions! ;) But in all serious lord knows if she ever googles herself, she's seen the site.  

"PUSSY WILLOW"

09. Her favorite of her own films is Serial Mom because she has so many wonderful memories from the set ("most laughs") and she is still close with John Waters. This movie prompted the funnest questions from her gathered fans. Had she ever made a prank phone call "For heaven's sake, no! Nor will I". One fan said the house the real Serial Mom lived in in Baltimore was for sale. Should he buy it and give tours? "Good luck!" was her perfect succinct response. 

8-1 after the jump

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Sally's Short Suspense

Sally sings a lullaby she wrote in "African Chelsea"A confession: I've never been this caught up in the drama of the short film categories before. But this year I await Oscar's finalist list on pins and needles. At least four former Oscar players are involved in shorts from the long 70ish wide semi-finals list (the actual list has been hard to come by with no AMPAS press release detailing it). One of them is 80s nominee Sally Kirkland who I've always felt a certain kooky fondness for. She campaigned tirelessly for the actressy drama Anna back when campaigning wasn't so loudly expected of people. She was rewarded with a spot in the 1987 Best Actress list which turned out to be one of the greatest in Oscar's entire history. There's not a dud or even a "just good" performance in that shortlist; they're all freaking great. Sometimes you've got to work for the nomination when your film is small.

There's a new somewhat provocative piece up at the LA Times Envelope about her current director Brent Roske's campaigning for "African Chelsea" the short she's currently co-starring in. Campaigning for short films is not, you see, the norm... though people do do it. I've recently been in contact with the short's director Brent Roske and I reached out for a comment today on working with Sally. Turns out he plans to do it again and quick-like no matter what happens with the short film race.

I've just finished writing an inspiring dramatic feature that Sally will be starring in called 'Alice Stands Up'. I'm hoping I can get her in the Best Actress discussion next year."

Ah, directors and their muses. We love it when they stand by their divas. It's probably too much to hope that a miracle like Anna could reoccur again but we wish him luck in trying. Shine that spotlight on Sally! 

Sally Kirkland sure was vivid in "Anna". Have you seen it? It's available on Netflix Instant Watch

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Burning Questions: How Much is "Overdue" Worth?

Michael C here to introduce my new column: Burning Questions. Every week I will tackle an issue of pressing importance to film lovers the world over - or I'll just let fly with whatevers on my mind when I sit down at the laptop. Either way, I'm jazzed to get started. First up, the question of the "career honors" Oscar win. 

One of my most vivid memories as a young Oscar viewer is the '97 race when Juliette Binoche beat out Lauren Bacall’s heavily-favored performance in The Mirror Has Two Faces. The press had declared Bacall a mortal lock. Not only was she Hollywood royalty, she was overdue Hollywood royalty. Should've been nominated for To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep and a half dozen others, so forget everything else and bet the farm on the former Mrs. Bogart. The unmistakable shock on both her and Juliette’s face when the envelope was opened suggests they had read the same coverage I had. It turns out that when voters were presented with the privacy of their ballots, Bacall's history of snubs proved no match for a strong performance in a popular film.

Yet despite this, every year we still get prognosticators writing about this or that star's overdue status as if it were a simple bank transaction, collect enough overdue points and trade it in for a shiny new trophy. This year the race is crowded such names. From Christopher Plummer with his career stretching back to Sound of Music, to the equally legendary Max Von Sydow, to five-time runner up Glenn Close, Albert Brooks, Nick Nolte, and the still never nominated Gary Oldman. With so much delayed Oscar justice poised to be dealt out it begs the question:

How much is “overdue” status really worth?

Of course, it's impossible to pin down the murky motives of Oscar voters with much certainty since the Academy doesn’t conduct an exit poll (Now there’s a thought). People often attribute Henry Fonda’s win for On Golden Pond to career honors, to name one example, but I think it had more to do with the fact that his was the strongest nominated performance and it was from one of the year’s most popular films. I think it’s safe to assume even if he had he won for Grapes of Wrath way back in the day, his performance in Pond would have gone home with the trophy anyway. 

To be fair, there are more cut and dry examples. One could make a strong case for John Wayne’s and Paul Newman’s Oscars being as much about career achievement as the winning performances. But even if that were true, it still shows the limits of such sentiments. Both triumphed over relatively weak, or in the Duke’s case divided, competition. If Wayne’s True Grit had come out a year later and gone up against George C. Scott’s Patton, all the overdue standing in the world would not have brought him a victory.

On the other hand, the list of superstars who missed in their last stabs at Oscar glory is long indeed. The wildly overdue Richard Burton lost for the seventh and final time to the youngest Best Actor winner ever up to that time, Richard Dreyfuss. Both Judy Garland and Monty Clift received their last career nominations for Judgment at Nuremberg and both were pushed aside to make way for the fresh-faced stars of West Side Story. The urge to hand Fred Astaire his first and only nod at age 75 was good enough to see him nominated for tripe like Towering Inferno, but all that good will went out the window when he went up against the young DeNiro’s take on Vito Corleone.

And let us not forget Peter O'Toole, the patron saint of Oscar also-rans, who set the all-time record for nominations without a win in '06 when he received his eighth Best Actor nod for Venus.  And what did all that accumulated good will buy him? A front row seat to witness the Forest Whitaker juggernaut cruise to victory - on his first nomination, no less.

So for all the importance placed on it I think it’s fair to say “overdue” status is over-valued. It’s a bump. A nudge. A tie-breaker. Did it help Alan Arkin eke out a win over Eddie Murphy? Probably. Will it be good enough for Glenn Close to beat this year’s stiff Best Actress competition if Albert Nobbs' reception remains lukewarm? Doubtful. In the final tally, the greatest benefit of overdue status lies less in garnering votes and more in garnering buzz, bringing attention to performances that are worthy on their own merit. All the career honors chatter is great for winning Beginners viewers, but when the ballots go out better for people to remember how terrific Plummer is this year than to think back on how badly he was snubbed for The Insider.

Any other questions you want me to tackle? Let me know in the comments. You can follow Michael C. on Twitter at @SeriousFilm

Naked Gold Man: Roles For Which Meryl Streep Was Not Nominated

For this week's gold man column, we're skipping the general overview and getting really specific. Who doesn't enjoy a good zoom in on Meryl Streep? The Iron Lady, her Margaret Thatcher biopic performances, begins screening very soon -- they moved the release date back but not the screenings. So we need to discuss this before it does and the focus shifts from groundless speculation to case evidence.

Every time I've floated the notion that Meryl Streep cannot be an Iron Lock for a Best Actress nomination since her film has not been seen, people object. "But Meryl is ALWAYS nominated," sayeth everyone. Not so, not so. While it's true that The World's Greatest Actress™ seems as much a can't miss prospect in Best Actress as she did in the 80s what with nominations for Prada, Doubt and Julia fresh in our minds, she has missed the shortlist. Yes, even THE MOST NOMINATED is not always nominated. Some of those roles even looked good on paper and in some of them she was marvelous onscreen. If there'd been Oscar blogs back in in the 80s and 90s, for example, pundits would've leaned on her whilst predicting each and every year with as much lazy force as voters do when balloting. There is no such thing as someone who is Oscar-nominated for everything they've ever done -- unless they only made one film or their name is Stephen Daldry (three-for-three thus far in Best Director). Even James Dean, who famously received two post-humous Oscar nominations, was only nominated for 66% of his three iconic film roles...

...yeah, yeah. true, true. okay, okay...

You can't be nominated in the same acting category twice in one year so theoretically Dean could have been nominated for Rebel Without a Cause if it hadn't been for East of Eden. This is an important point which we will discuss in the following "snub" list. 

25 Streep Roles That Weren't Oscar Nominated

Meryl's entrance into the cinema she would soon reign. Julia (1977)

1977 Julia
"Anne Marie" is really just a cameo (two scenes) but it's magically fitting that this then unknown actress's first screen role was opposite two acting legends: Jane Fonda & Vanessa Redgrave (a probable Best Supporting Actress this year as she is quite sensational in Coriolanus). For most people the only way is down from there but for Meryl she's all, like, 'hey shove over. I'm here!' If she felt intimidated it doesn't remotely show in her haughty, funny, scene-stealing bit. But only important actors get nominated for cameos, even cameos this juicy, and Meryl was not yet a star. [More on Meryl's debut]

1978 The Deer Hunter -1st nomination

1979 The Seduction of Joe Tynan and Manhattan
This was the year of Kramer vs Kramer (her first win, following her first nom for The Deer Hunter in '78) so Academy voters couldn't have nominated her politico's mistress "Karen Traynor" or her angry lesbian ex-wife "Jill" in Woody Allen's other 70s masterpiece. Though these roles undoubtedly helped her win (note that the critics awards she won that year include all three) they wouldn't have won her nominations in a theoretical Kramer absence given the Oscar reception of Tynan (zero noms) and her internal competition in Manhattan. [More on this her year of actressy ascendance]

1979 Kramer vs. Kramer -2nd nom/1st win
1981 The French Lieutenant's Woman - 3rd nom

1982 Still of the Night  
This noirish femme fatale role arrived two weeks before the Sophie's Choice juggernaut (her second Oscar win) so technically she couldn't have been nominated for it unless they demoted her to "supporting" which they didn't. (The actress who got the 'demotion so we can double dip' you was Jessica Lange for Tootsie, who went on to win supporting while losing lead to Meryl.)  Though this noir may have added to surface cries of "Meryl can do anything!" Meryl herself didn't think so; according to some reports she wasn't particularly thrilled with her own work in it.

1982 Sophie's Choice -4th nom/2nd win
1983 Silkwood -5th nom

1984 Falling in Love
Meryl's work as "Molly Gilmore" a married woman who falls for a fellow commuter (her Deer Hunter co-star DeNiro) is actually rather touching. But it arrived fast on the heels of five shape-shifting legend-making iconic roles. This normal contemporary woman probably felt underwhelming to voters. Something "Magic Meryl" could probably do in her sleep and why not take a wee break from the exhaustingly perfect new legend? Trivia Note: We can't prove it but we believe any American actress not playing a farm wife that year was disqualified in a special one-year-only AMPAS ruling.  That's the only feasible explanation for the psychotic snubbing of Katheen Turner in Romancing the Stone.

1985-2009 including the 3 most interesting case studies in When Meryl is Not Nominated AFTER THE JUMP.

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Theadora Van Runkle (1929-2011)

Take off those berets and fedoras and pay your respects. The great costume designer Theadora Van Runkle, a three time Oscar nominee, passed away this past Friday of lung cancer at 83 years of age [src]. For those who don't immediately connect her name to her movies, know that her work was seismic. 

Her most famous creations were actually those done on her very first feature Bonnie & Clyde (1967). She was able to do the picture only after Warren Beatty and the costume designers guild president screamed at each other for half an hour (she was not a guild member then) according to Mark Harris's invaluable tome Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and The Birth of New Hollywood.  She had never done a film and at one tense point admitted to Warren Beatty that she had no idea what she was doing. 

After Beatty vetoed her first period-specific ideas, she came up with the now legendary out of time ensembles that nodded to both the 1930s (when the story takes place) and contemporary 60s French New Wave that the project had always hoped to emulate (Beatty had originally wanted François Truffaut himself to direct).

You see people who are great beauties and never get anywhere. This was style."
-Theadora Van Runkle on Dunaway as Bonnie. 

Van Runkle even claims that she was the one who brought the unknown Faye Dunaway to Beatty & director Arthur Penn's attention. "There's the girl you should cast!" though there are competing legends as to how Dunaway first came up in the long search for the girl.

Because of the tight budget, many of the costumes worn by other characters weren't actually Van Runkle's designs but costuming the titular pair was enough to win her a permanent place in movie history and her first Oscar nomination. She was later nominated for both The Godfather Part Two (1974) and Peggy Sue Got Married (1986).

Those Oscar nominated movies were hardly the only memorable gigs. Other showy movies included the infamously delirious transgendered farce Myra Breckenridge (1970), the ill-fated Mame (1974), the post-war romantic drama New York New York (1977) and the bawdy gaudy musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982).

I'll always have a special place in my heart for her work on Peggy Sue Got Married. I love that too-shiny / too-tight gown that Peggy Sue is proud she can still fit into at her 25th reunion. Like Bonnie, Peggy Sue is straddling two eras, this time literally; a lovely mirage of the past clinging to a totally contemporary soul.

Good night and thank you, Theadora.