THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, March 27, 1995 TAG: 9503250038
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 232 lines
BOB HOPE USED TO REFER to Oscar time as ``passover'' at his house.
He contended, too, that the nominees give their greatest performances on Oscar night, applauding vigorously as they mutter obscenities beneath their breath.
Hope himself won't be the host tonight at the 67th annual Academy Awards show (9 p.m. on ABC), but hope will very much be present. In addition to greasing their palms in preparation to perhaps grasp the gold, the nominees have been noticeably talkative in recent months.
Tom Hanks, Jodie Foster, Jessica Lange, Morgan Freeman, Martin Landau, Dianne Wiest and John Travolta have all been chatting away to the media. On the day of their upcoming glory or defeat, here's an earful from the stars:
Most stars mumble unconvincingly about how the nomination is reward enough and winning isn't important. Martin Landau, 65, is the exception. He forthrightly says he wants to win it for Bela. You remember Bela Lugosi. He was the guy in black with the fangs and the European accent. Dracula. That's him.
In ``Ed Wood,'' Landau plays Lugosi in the last years of his life - a faded, but still proud actor who couldn't get a job until the cheapie moviemaker Ed Wood (played by Johnny Depp) hired him to appear in several of the worst movies ever made.
Landau broke into tears as he sat in a New York hotel room and said, ``This is a great part. It's the part that Bela never got. My own career has had its valleys between the peaks. I came to Hollywood to play a villain for Alfred Hitchcock in `North by Northwest.' After that, no one would think of me for anything other than villains. Those guys are one dimensional - repeats. An actor is in sheer hell when he finds that the only thing he can do is repeat.''
It is the third time Landau has been a heavy favorite to win the supporting Oscar. Perhaps Bela, somewhere up in vampire heaven, will be the lucky omen this year.
Talk to Tom Hanks and you get smiles, boyishness and modesty.
``I was scared to death of the accent,'' claims Hanks, 38. ``I just said I couldn't do it. Bob Zemeckis kept telling me `You've got to do it. All the great ones do accents. You're an Academy Award winner.' But I reminded him `Maybe I'm not one of the great ones.' Zemeckis (director of ``Forrest Gump'') is the hardest-working guy in show business. As for me, I'm no artist. I'm no craftsman. Acting is not working. It's just pretending.''
Sally Field, who was out in the hall, stuck her head in the door and said, ``You've got to stop telling people I'm your mother. I am NOT Tom Hanks' real mother.''
Also up for ``Forrest Gump,'' in the supporting actor category, is Gary Sinise, 39, who played Lt. Dan, the bitter vet who lost both legs to Vietnam.
``I was the guest of a veteran's group and they gave me a standing ovation when I came out on the stage,'' said Sinise, a veteran stage actor in Chicago. ``It's the greatest honor I ever had in my life. They were standing on crutches. Many of them had only one leg or one arm. Some of them just sat up straight in the wheelchair because they couldn't stand. To them, Lt. Dan in `Forrest Gump' is very real. I realized the importance of a movie role. Theater could never reach people like this.''
Sinise says he is most often asked how the visual effect of the missing legs was created. ``Everyone asks that,'' he said. ``It was done with computers, but I never quite understood it myself. To me, Lt. Dan was a gung ho military man who would have been happy to have spent the rest of his life in the military - probably becoming a general. When he lost his legs, his entire life, his entire career ended. To play that kind of bitterness, and then soften it, was not easy.''
The best thing about the whole Academy Award thing is that you get there by being fearless - by not listening to the people who tell you not to do something,'' said Jodie Foster, who is up for her third Oscar for ``Nell.'' `` `Nell' was a real risk, but I was attracted to her because I want to live lives I've never lived. To play her, you have to be an actor who is at peace with yourself. Nell didn't know that she was awkward. She didn't know that she was any different from anyone else. It's not a matter of `Look how flashy I am' at all. If anything, it's finding simplicity.''
But does Foster really want to win this one? ``I want to win because it would help the picture. Some more people would see it. I just hope I have a chance.''
Foster's biggest competition comes from adopted Virginia belle Jessica Lange, 45, whom we just reached several days ago. Lange has become the front-runner for her portrayal of a sexy military wife in ``Blue Sky,'' a 3-year old, low-budget film that just got released this year.
``I've never thought in terms of awards,'' she said, ``and especially a shock is what's happened with this picture. I never thought it would even get released, and now look.''
If she wins, she says she will thank her director, the late Tony Richardson (best director winner for ``Tom Jones'') who died since ``Blue Sky'' was completed.
Lange, though, won't comment on rumors that she may soon be moving from her horse-ranch home in Albemarle County. She's been living there for 13 years with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard. She's reportedly looking for a home in her native Minnesota. For now, though, she says, ``I'll be going back to Virginia when I'm not working.''
She says she was glad to have been filming ``A Streetcar Named Desire'' for television during the past month. ``It kept my mind off the Oscars,'' she said. Her dates for the Oscars will be her brother and Michael Caton-Jones, her director for the upcoming ``Rob Roy'' film.
Miranda Richardson, who is in the best actress race for ``Tom and Viv,'' had the very difficult task of playing the wife of poet T.S. Eliot, a woman he committed to an insane asylum.
``She was not insane,'' Richardson, 36, proclaims. ``If she lived today, this never would have happened. Women in her era had no rights. It's a very difficult role indeed, but one I was anxious to take. I'm beginning to feel sorry for actresses over here because there is so little worth playing. In England, there is more when you consider theater and the TV market, which isn't as good here. I think here, an actress has to develop her own part - produce the film.''
Nominated previously for ``Damage,'' she claims ``I think they've heard of me in Hollywood, but they don't, yet, think I can play American roles. I can. It's just another accent, you know.''
If Rosemary Harris, 64, wins for playing Richardson's mother in ``Tom and Viv,'' she'll bring the Oscar back to Winston-Salem, N.C., where she's lived for the past two decades. Her husband is a writer and teacher at the North Carolina School of the Performing Arts.
``I would be as shocked as I would be pleased if I were to win,'' Harris said. The British actress is not expected to be present - win or lose. She'll be on stage in London.
``They don't give you nights off in the theater,'' she said. ``Theater has primarily been my life, but I love film. If you're not working in theater, audiences forget you. With film, they remember you. You're always around.''
Winona Ryder, 23, the youngest of the best actress contenders, exclaims and says ``gee'' and ``golly'' about her nomination as Jo in ``Little Women.'' She's no lightweight, though. It was she who got the film made. Both Katharine Hepburn and June Allyson have played Jo before, but Ryder thought there was still room for a more serious, literate version of ``Little Women.''
``Everyone tells me I have clout in Hollywood now,'' she laughed. ``They keep telling me that. I don't know what that means, but, after all, we did get `Little Women' made - even after every studio didn't want it. I think it's an ensemble piece. If any of us won an award, we should all win.''
John Travolta, 41, has already scored the comeback of the year and, 18 years after his first nomination (for ``Saturday Night Fever''), is in the running again.
He pooh-poohs the violence in ``Pulp Fiction'' by saying ``I'm not going to be the guy who says movies don't affect people. My nose would grow. But `Pulp Fiction' is a comedy. This guy I'm playing is trying to be cool, but he's pretty stupid most of the time. He's also high most of the time.''
Quentin Tarantino, 31, a big contender for ``best director,'' loves to sit and talk about movies, particularly old movies. It was he who chose Travolta for ``Pulp Fiction.''
``Among other things, I loved him in `Blow Out.' Did you see that one? To me, John Travolta is a movie star and I couldn't believe they weren't giving him work.''
Tarantino's in a heated race with Zemeckis for best director honors.
``I'm not esoteric. I'm just a storyteller. I don't think violence is any better or worse in movies today than it ever was. Violence was always in movies. Most of all, with `Pulp Fiction,' I didn't want to follow the rules. I don't want to be bound by anything except imagination - and I haven't even begun yet to film the things I can imagine.''
If there is to be an upset, and there always is one at the Oscars, it may well be for Samuel L. Jackson's portrayal of a Bible-quoting mobster in ``Pulp Fiction.''
``I wanted Jules, my character, to have a unique voice. Quentin let that happen. Quentin's set is a happy place to be. We try everything.'' Jackson added that, ``no one recognizes me on the street. Sometimes, they'll say I'm Wesley Snipes.''
Jackson, 45, is in more movies than anyone else working, though. Currently in ``Losing Isaiah,'' he'll be seen soon in ``Kiss of Death'' as well as the third installment of ``Diehard.''
Morgan Freeman, 57, is taking his third nomination, as a veteran prison inmate in ``The Shawshank Redemption,'' quietly.
``Is he spiritual or cynical?'' Freeman pondered the question. ``He's a little of both. The man I play is better as a prisoner than he could ever be in the outside world. He has adjusted to his own world. For film, I believe that you do most of the acting with your eyes. The camera sees everything. It records everything I'm thinking. A part can be played with almost no lines - just the eyes.''
Even Woody Allen, 59, granted us a rare interview this year - long before he knew his comedy ``Bullets Over Broadway'' would receive a surprise seven nominations. He's in the running for best director again but, yet again, he won't be attending.
The movie was produced by his sister, whom he describes as his best friend. ``I've never had to compromise in the movie business,'' he said. ``I've had complete control of my films. For better or worse, they're mine. I work at a normal pace. I turn out one a year - one for each of the past 21 years or so. I don't think about awards or the box office. I just make them and put them out there. I'm working on the next one when this one comes out. I haven't become rich.''
The wispy-voiced Jennifer Tilly, 34, is a surprise nominee for playing an unbelievably bad actress in ``Bullets Over Broadway.'' ``I found her scarily easy to play,'' Tilly cooed. ``I had great empathy for her. She worked very hard, but she just had no talent. Woody didn't necessarily want me to improvise. He just wanted me to keep talking. I think I'm a character actress. Some people say I'm just a character. Hey, but no kidding. I've worked very hard, and I think everyone should vote for me.''
Chazz Palminteri, 43, has the laughable tough-guy role of a gangster who becomes an impromptu theater critic in ``Bullets Over Broadway.'' He is competing in the supporting actor race. Often, he writes his own movies, but not here.
``I like to have no control, to be just an actor, in a Woody Allen movie,'' he said. ``I'm not a writer for hire. I only write parts I act. Hollywood is a business run on fear. Lots of people don't want to be stars because they'd have to take the blame if a movie flops. The supporting actors can get all the good parts and not take the risks. Still, I'm getting star billing in my next picture. It happens.''
If there is a front-runner in all the Oscar races, it would have to be Dianne Wiest, 46, for ``Bullets Over Broadway.'' She has won every preliminary honor, and is a former Oscar winner for ``Hannah and Her Sisters.''
``Thank God for Woody,'' Wiest exclaimed as she sat for an interview in New York. ``This woman is not me. In the first few days of shooting, I couldn't get her. I couldn't get the voice. I couldn't get the rhythm. I went to Woody and told him I thought, perhaps, I should be replaced. I stuck with it. I thought about Tallulah Bankhead, Zoe Caldwell, early Joan Crawford, early Marlene Dietrich, early Bette Davis. There's something of all of them in her.''
The role is that of a fading Broadway actress who hits the booze regularly and admits only that she's a fading ``legend.'' To dominate every conversation, she says ``Don't speak'' and holds up her hand to silence visitors.
Wiest says that work is not plentiful between Woody Allen films. ``At a certain age, my age, it is difficult to find things worth doing.''
She claimed the first Oscar only meant ``temporary'' encouragement.
Like it or not, a second Oscar is likely for her tonight.
Remember, you heard it here first. MEMO: How to stay awake through the Oscars: Page E5
ILLUSTRATION: THE OSCARS
TONIGHT AT 9 P.M. ON ABC
[Color Photos]
Forrest Gump
Bullets Over Broadway
The Shawshank Redemption
Ed Wood
by CNB