It was about this time last year when audiences began rediscovering Peter Fonda, a long-ignored trouper who was starring as the emotionally scarred patriarch of a beekeeping family in “Ulee’s Gold.”
In Lila Cholodenko’s similarly low-profile “High Art,” another MIA–Ally Sheedy–turns in the kind of searing, and unexpected, performance that already has critics comparing the one-time girl-next-door to the one-time easy rider.
Although she is best remembered as the “skittish wacko” (Pauline Kael’s description) in John Hughes’ “Breakfast Club,” Sheedy made her mark as the archetypal “girlfriend’ in such disposable ’80s fare as “Bad Boys,” “WarGames” and “Short Circuit,” and as one of the anguished yuppies in Joel Schumacher’s Brat Pack epic “St. Elmo’s Fire.” Sometime around 1989, however, she fell off the face of the Earth.
Sitting on the patio of her suite in a Sunset Strip hotel, the chain-smoking New Yorker recalls the exact moment when her career took a hard right turn from mere obscurity into desperation.
“It was when I got kicked out of William Morris,” said Sheedy, who performed with the American Ballet Theater at age 6, and wrote the best-selling “She Was Nice to Mice” before turning to acting in her teens. “My agent fired me? I thought they were supposed to be working for me. That was pretty demeaning.”
The way it was presented to her left little room for optimism: ” `You’ve had your moment and your chance to be a movie star. It’s over. The best you can hope for is a sitcom.’ I was 30.”
In fact, Sheedy did try out for some television work, but her heart clearly wasn’t in it.
“It was hard to go in and try to get something I really didn’t want to get,” she explained. “Then, I wouldn’t get it and think, `Oh, my God, I can’t even get a sitcom.’ “
She returned to writing, with the book of poetry “Yesterday I Saw the Sun,” but her film work was sporadic and mostly relegated to made-for-cable fare. It didn’t help that she resisted attempts to be turned into a sex object.
“Not only was I being drawn to projects that weren’t commercial, but I also was refusing to do the things that I was told would make it easier for me,” she said. “I was brought up by a militant feminist, so there was no way I was going to have my breasts enlarged or take my shirt off. They told me to start putting on makeup–and I did take a makeup lesson–but it was a joke.
“The characters I wanted to play were the kinds that weren’t being written into studio movies, and the independent movement hadn’t kicked in yet. I thought, `Do I have to go to Australia, so I can be Judy Davis?’ “
The opportunity to star as the heroin-addicted lesbian photographer, Lucy, in “High Art,” came as an unexpected bit of good luck. The agent for Radha Mitchell–who plays Syd, the downstairs neighbor seduced into Lucy’s decadent world–sent a copy of the script to Sheedy, a one-time client, who then had to beg for an audition.
“It was my good fortune that Lisa had not seen my movies and did not have a preconception of who I was,” said the rail-thin 36-year-old. “One of the biggest obstacles I’ve had to overcome was the resistance of casting directors and producers to my coming in and reading for things. I expected there to be this huge boulder there, but there wasn’t any.”
Cholodenko, who won the Screenwriting Award at Sundance, based her depiction of Lucy on such photographers as Jack Pierson, Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, and the subculture of artists and junkies she encountered when she moved to New York. Lucy’s constantly wasted circle of friends and lovers is purposefully depicted as being attractive to an outsider like Syd, an aspiring editor at a glossy photography magazine.
Sheedy lives in Manhattan with her husband (actor David Lansbury) and their 4-year-old daughter. She was able to draw on personal experience for her portrayal of Lucy, who withdrew from public view to avoid the trendy New York art scene and commercialization of her highly personal photography.
“I’ve never taken heroin–and missed the whole heroin chic thing, because I was watching Barney with my daughter–but I had a problem with the tranquilizer halcion,” she said. “I knew what it was like to be dependent on something, but I had talk to people who were former heroin addicts. Basically, what I got from that conversation was that it’s this kind of warm, melty feeling . . . you don’t care about anything . . . and you’re sort of on the edge, dipping into oblivion.
“That was the reason I took halcion, so I understood the desire.”
Her mother is a lesbian who told her daughter when Sheedy was 18 and a student at the University of Southern California (“I already knew, in the way kids know.”). Charlotte Sheedy, a book editor, is active in LIFT (Lesbians in Film and Televison) and enthusiastic about the film.
“It’s very telling that she saw `High Art’ three times, because she doesn’t go to see some of my stuff,” she said. “She loved what I did in this movie and she feels Lisa handled all of that with a great deal of respect, sensitivity and truthfulness.”
Sheedy, who just completed filming a supernatural thriller in Australia for the USA cable network (“my benefactor”), isn’t sure how casting directors, agents and producers will react to her bravura performance in “High Art,” which opens Friday, or whether she’ll receive the same kinds of awards and nominations that greeted Peter Fonda’s Hollywood resurrection. For the moment, she’s appreciative of the critics’ raves and is encouraged by the response she’s received from the homosexual community.
“We were at the Toronto Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, and right before the movie was supposed to start, Lisa said to me, `We’ve been at Sundance and Cannes, but this is the first time it’s been shown to a queer audience,’ ” said Sheedy. “She’s a lesbian, but didn’t know how they would react. They loved it, and that was a big deal for her.
“After the movie, a group of women filmmakers came up to me and said, `You make a good dyke.’ To me, that was the ultimate compliment.”
