A certain Hollywood director`s films have centered on vampires, strippers and prostitutes. The movies are violent, graphic, raw. The vision is dark, personal and imaginative.
Until two months ago, few moviegoers were familiar with Katt Shea and the films she has directed-”Stripped to Kill” (I and II) and ”Dance of the Damned” among them. But then ”Poison Ivy” came along, enjoying an unusually successful run at film festivals. And now its director is being lavished with scripts. And controversy.
”Poison Ivy,” a nightmarish study of a dysfunctional family and the devilish predator, Ivy (Drew Barrymore), who wreaks havoc on their household, opened in May. In reviews the film has been called everything from ”a fascinating piece of high-grade pulp” and ”a B movie with a vengeance” to
”deliciously (if preposterously) trashy.” In any case, people are paying admission and attention.
”They either love it or they hate it,” Shea says, relaxing on a couch in her home in a San Fernando Valley suburb of Los Angeles. ”It means it pressed some buttons. It affected people, which is what it was supposed to do.”
What has provoked audiences from the outset, she says, is its explicit violence, sex and malevolence. Some have found it anti-feminist.
That was the reaction of a small segment of the world premiere audience at the Sundance (Utah) Film Festival in January and a somewhat larger contingent at the Seattle International Festival of Women Directors that same month. Women, these critics said, should be above depicting abuse, particularly abuse involving women, the objects and subjects of sex and violence in ”Poison Ivy.”
Shea, who is in her early 30s, brands that attitude deeply annoying.
”On the one hand,” she says, ”you get one message-that it`s time to ignore the fact that the director is a woman. But the other message is, `How dare you do this as a woman?` So first I`m supposed to be out there, with all the guys-which I am-and then I get smacked down for being out there with all the guys.
”Some people are going to be good and some are going to be bad in movies,” she says, ”and some are going to have a lot of gray areas. Everybody does. Every group wants to have itself represented as perfectly moral and it ain`t gonna happen.
”So there`s a small group of women who say women shouldn`t be depicted this way. Now we`ve got a group of white males who say, `Let`s not depict white males this way anymore.` Then there are gays who don`t want gays depicted the way they`re depicted in movies. Then there are Asians and blacks and Irish-I mean, how far does it go? Pretty soon you can`t make movies. You can`t even tell a story because nobody wants to be the bad guy.
Shea takes her role as guide to the dark side seriously.
”If there`s going to be violence in my movies, I want it to be very violent, not something that people can stomach easily. And they don`t. What`s much worse are violent movies that make violence look nonviolent-like you can shoot somebody and not make a big mess.”
”When you show violence not as romantic, but as hurtful, with an aftermath-how it affects people`s lives-it`s anti-violent,” says Andy Ruben, Shea`s former husband of 14 years and coauthor of the screenplays for her five movies. ”Most violence in movies doesn`t go far enough-it doesn`t show the effects,” Ruben says.
Laurence Kardish, curator and coordinator of film exhibitions at New York`s Museum of Modern Art, which sponsored a four-film Katt Shea
retrospective in April,hails the director`s ”dark, complex, melancholic vision and the manner in which she creates a mood and sustains the tension.” ”Anyone interested in contemporary American cinema should watch her movies,” he says.
That`s the type of response Shea has received from a select group of critics and fans throughout her directing career of less than five years. They salute characters who, though incisively drawn, bear no resemblance to Shea-product of a middle-class girlhood in a Detroit suburb, the daughter of an art teacher and a nurse who have been consistently supportive and proud of her (”My father`s an artist (a painter) so he understands that you can`t deny what inspires you”).
For examples of the meanness in people, Shea says she can glean some inspiration from her trauma-filled elementary schooldays.
”I don`t know why a certain kid is picked as the scapegoat,” she says, recalling ”very, very painful” years as an outcast in grade school, which she kept a secret from her parents. ”But I got pegged.” Plagued with weak ankles that required orthopedic shoes, she was shy, vulnerable and the butt of jokes from other children.
”I`m not that unhappy that it happened,” she says, because those experiences gave her ”a deeper understanding of loneliness, of isolation-the kinds of things I write about.”
From high school-where she had no such problems-she went to the University of Michigan as an education major, graduating in 1978 at 19. Within a year she was on her way to Los Angeles, without any firm plans.
”I didn`t know what I wanted to do, but this just seemed like the place to be,” said Shea, who shortened her given name of Kathleen to Katt while she was acting.
Shea admits she`s ”probably socially dysfunctional,” but compensates for it by ”pushing past it and doing the best I can.” To combat her shyness, to confront her fears and to do something with her life, she chose acting-gaining small parts on television and in B movies such as ”Psycho III” in 1986.
Her life changed one day when she accompanied a friend who was attending a business meeting at NBC in Los Angeles. Shea waited around in a corridor. Then, she says, she saw Ruben, whom she did not know at the time, sitting in his office.
”He was crying,” she says. ”He told me the show he was writing had been cancelled. So I said, `Oh, I`ll take you out to lunch.` ”
That encounter in time led to their writing collaboration that has turned out five movies plus ”Poison Ivy.” Despite their divorce, their 50-50 business partnership continues.
”I knew when we started, in one of the first scenes we wrote together, that that was it,” Shea says. ”I knew I had found my future. Andy`s just brilliant at everything-an extraordinary writer, very unconventional, very strong in dialogue, very strong in relationships. We come at it in different ways. Sometimes he`ll be more sentimental than I`ll be-which I really like-because I can tend to be the more cynical, just what you wouldn`t expect.”
For his part, Ruben says, Shea ”allows actors the opportunity to explore their individual characters, keeping in mind that the whole must add up. And she has become an awesome writer who can create deep-feeling lines that come from the heart but are never trite, always appropriate to the character.”
Their first movie, ”Stripped to Kill” (1987), focused on a policewoman who goes undercover to solve the murder of a topless dancer.
”Dance of the Damned” brought a vampire together with a suicidal woman. ”Stripped to Kill II” was made quickly, when producer Roger Corman had the use of a topless bar for a few days. Then came ”Streets,” set in Venice, Calif., depicting the life of a teenage runaway caught up in drugs and prostitution. That film caught the eye of Marjorie Lewis, a New Line Cinema executive. She put Shea and Ruben together with an independent production team that had devised a basic idea about a sinister teenager. What New Line`s production president, Sara Risher, proposed was a teenage ”Fatal
Attraction.” The result was ”Poison Ivy.”
”The whole movie is my dream, and I decided to share my unconscious with the world,” Shea says. ”In some aspects it`s a nightmare, but the good part wins out in the end.”
Shea bonds viscerally with her characters: ”I know what`s happening on the streets-I really know, intimately.
”I`ve been with people when they`re shooting up in the bathroom. I know people who have committed sex crimes and are out of jail. I put myself out there. When you really go out into the world and you`re available and open, you`re going to meet some people. I`m not afraid of people because if I really allow myself to get involved, to understand them, that`s what life`s about.” Where does she draw the line?
”It depends on the material, and what I`m trying to get across to an audience,” she says. ”I`m not trying to entertain the audience entirely-I`m trying to make them think, trying to provoke them. I`ve been trying to provoke my whole life.
”I have to make a point with every movie, and I`ll take it to the edge, all the way, to make that point. I don`t think I`m really doing a good job unless I scare myself, unless I think I`ve really gone too far-and then I figure I`ve probably gone far enough.”
