The Muse
Starring: Albert Brooks, Sharon Stone, Jeff Bridges, Andie MacDowell
Directed by: Albert Brooks
What's the big deal? Stone smiles!
"I've always felt like I work in a small little area that doesn't represent anything like the rest of society," says Brooks (Mother). The area, in this case, is Los Angeles, and Brooks stars as a struggling Hollywood scribe desperately seeking inspiration. He turns to a megasuccessful writer friend (Bridges) who turns him on to a muse — as in one of the Muses. Enter Stone as the thoroughly modern daughter of Zeus who's set up shop in the idea-sapped corridors of Southern California.
While Stone may seem an unlikely choice for an Albert Brooks comedy, she took the role with an eye toward testing her comedic legs, working with the same director who helped Meryl Streep tickle us in 1991's Defending Your Life. "I genuinely feel ready to go and do other comedies now," says Stone. "I understand this area of my craft in a way that I wouldn't have with someone else." Raves Brooks: "This is what she should be doing. It's like the glass slipper — this finally makes sense." Of course, the role has moments that seem etched for Stone. "This muse is an eccentric, goofy chick," she says. "And contradictory — that's sort of my thing." Her other thing, of course, is shedding her clothes, and she doesn't disappoint, though her nudity wasn't in the original script. "It wasn't written like that," says Brooks. "Sharon said to me, 'I think for this moment to be effective, I should be naked.' Believe me, she didn't want to parade around naked. It wasn't about that. It was about embarrassing Andie's character."
The director got others to stretch their limits as well. Elton John recorded the film's score ("Like getting another great actor in the movie," says Brooks), and some of Stone's satisfied customers include Martin Scorsese, Rob Reiner, and James Cameron, who make cameos as themselves. "Marty is a great comedy actor," says Brooks (who appeared in Scorsese's 1976 Taxi Driver). "He's literally the world's fastest-talking man." And how about the King of the World? Says Brooks: "All [Cameron] asked me is 'Will it be funny?' I said, 'I won't let you down.'" (Aug. 20, 1999)
Killing Mrs. Tingle
Starring: Katie Holmes, Barry Watson, Helen Mirren, Marisa Coughlin, Liz Stauber, Vivica A. Fox, Molly Ringwald, Jeffrey Tambor
Directed by: Kevin Williamson
What's the big deal? The Scream scribe takes his turn behind the camera — and ties Mirren to the bed!
Celebrated ink-stained wretch Williamson makes his directorial debut with this feature film about a wrong-side-of-the-tracks high schooler (Holmes, star of Williamson's WB drama Dawson's Creek) whose scholarship is jeopardized by a sub-par grade. Being conscientious, she helps take her straight-out-of-Hades teacher (Mirren) hostage. "It sounds absurd and sort of 'Omigod, um, what?'" laughs Holmes. "But little things build and build and at every moment [the characters] make the best decision possible." Despite the filmmaker's horror pedigree, Killing Mrs. Tingle is more akin to Fast Times at Ridgemont High than to A Nightmare on Elm Street. "It's more like a screaming comedy," says Williamson. "That's how they're billing it, I think. They just had to get Scream in there somewhere." Not that there isn't any blood: Tingle culminates in a series of scenes involving everything from crossbows to a gory catfight between Mirren and Holmes. "The funniest thing about the scene is that the whole time they're slamming each other, I'm tied to the bed," laughs Watson, who plays Holmes' love interest — and is just another victim of Williamson's bizarre bondage fetish. "So I'm thinkin', All right! People pay good money to see this kind of stuff!" (Aug. 20, 1999)
