I am standing on a cold, windy and very strange street corner in Manhattan’s macabre East Village, fending off the assorted glances of a great many very strange-looking people as I wait to have lunch with the Queen of Independent Movies.
She arrives a half-hour late for our rendezvous here at a run-down Italian restaurant that, it turns out, actually won’t open for another half hour–if this week. But that’s all right, because we go to a cafe next door (where the waitresses would all like to be in some kind of movie), for what the Queen really needs more than lunch: Coffee.
“My mind is like . . . ” she says, leaving the thought, like so much in life, unfinished, then asks the waitress, “Do you have actually like a latte, with skim milk?”
Her name is Marisa Ryan, and you may be saying, “Hey, she’s not the Queen of Independent Movies. She was on `Major Dad’ and now she’s a big TV star, playing Detective Delaney on Fox Television’s `New York Undercover.’ “
True, but actually that’s only what Marisa does to put food on the table and skim milk in the latte. In her real life, pursuing her true passion, she is undisputed Queen of Independent Films.
You’d dispute that, saying, “No, Parker Posey is Queen of Independent Films, or Lili Taylor.” But you are wrong. You know about Posey and Taylor because they are in films you actually get to see in movie theaters, like Posey’s “House of Yes” or “Waiting for Guffmann.” They’re in the kind of independent films that get bought up by Miramax, which was bought up by Walt Disney. Which may be why Posey so often dresses like Minnie Mouse.
Ryan is the real thing. She stars in and directs truly Independent Movies, which is to say, movies few ever get to see–though they probably should.
“The throwbackis that, yeah, you have the screening at the festivals, but they never get seen anywhere else,” she says, preparing to follow her latte with a large black regular coffee. “Most independent films, unless they have some kind of background to them from Sundance–the negative aspect is that they only play from a week to 10 days.”
She speaks, by the by, with the speed of a Hewlett-Packard Laser Jet Four si printer–especially after a latte.
Ryan’s a beauty: wide eyes, full lips, blondish hair. She dresses like Minnie Rat, in black leather jacket and with more rings on her fingers and thumbs than I think you’d find on display even in the East Village Ring Shop and Shrunken Head Storage, or any of those places on Melrose in Hollywood.
Like her Hollywood counterparts at Spago and Morton’s, Ryan likes to talk about the biz side of the biz.
“If you can get into theaters in New York or L.A.,” she explains, “you’re actually doing fine, though hot films have opened in six cities but not in prime theaters in New York or L.A. With independents on the whole, you have an array of theaters that go from Miramax on down, though a lot of them are not really independent. Woody Allen is not an independent filmmaker, except that he loses money.”
She also talks about the art side of her art, such as her recent, “Three Women of Pain,” which was featured at the Sundance Festival and also over the Sundance Channel on cable television, though I don’t think the channel’s available in Shepherdstown, W. Va., where I saw Posey’s “Waiting for Guffmann.”
“It’s about three women in New York who go away for the weekend,” Ryan says. “They go away to a cabin to try to bond and cleanse themselves and they end up coming across some of the worst feminine hygiene problems and a couple of men with sort of mixed . . . it’s actually quite a dramatic piece.”
She also did the movie “Love Always,” with Moon Zappa, playing “a struggling actress on a journey across the map in search of adventure and ultimately herself;” “Slaves of the Underground,” a Sundance favorite; “Delicatessen Story,” “Lunchtime Special” and the forthcoming “With or Without You,” in which she plays a bad girl opposite Sally Field!!!
Ryan also just finished “Johnny Twenties,” which is not about the Jazz Age.
“I’m doing either one or two new films next month,” she says, “and then I’m promoting two coming out, and then I’m going to go and travel. I was supposed to be doing a writing project in Latin America. I write for political organizations on both coasts like the Feminist Majority.”
She also, I hasten to add, has done Alan Rickman’s “The Other Side” at the Royal Theatre in London, “Little Foxes” at Broadway’s Roundabout Theatre and “Picnic” at New York’s Cherry Lane.
Ryan grew up in Queens and the East Village, the only child of writer/school teachers. She attended New York’s famous High School of the Performing Arts and New York University.
She says she “just got out of a five-year relationship.”
“I’m single for the first time since I was 14,” she says. “It’s very interesting. I’m 22–22.” She pauses. “I grew up too fast.”
I ask what she’d like to do next.
She says, “I’d like some more black coffee.”
