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Trimark Pictures
By Josh Wolk
Josh Wolk
Josh Wolk
Josh Wolk is a senior writer at EW and the author of ''Cabin Pressure: One Man's Desparate Attempt to Recapture His Youth as a Camp Counselor''

In the just-released Larry Clark ("Kids") film "Another Day in Paradise," James Woods plays a manic thief who lures two teenagers into his next heist. But Woods was even more manic in his role as coproducer of the $4.5 million indie. He set out to hire Melanie Griffith to play his aging drug-addict wife and accomplice, knowing that her name would help land financing for the film. The only problem: He couldn't afford her usual price.

Woods remembers calling Griffith up and delivering this speech: "Melanie, this is exactly the kind of thing you need in your career right now. No more 'Milk Money' and all that crap. This is a move that's going to redefine you the way Ann-Margret was redefined when she did 'Carnal Knowledge.' You're going to play a woman who hit a brick wall called '40' like you were going a hundred miles an hour. You're not going 'pretty little sex kitten' anymore, you're going to be a woman who has bruises and bumps and is torn to pieces by life and is hanging on by a thread." The shocker? Griffith agreed... once Woods offered her half his salary (undisclosed) and half of his coownership of the film.

The documentary-style film captures the gritty life of low-rent drug users and desperadoes, and Woods was the biggest cheerleader for getting rid of all movie glamour. "To make this film, we were going to have to be open to a kind of dirtiness and brutality," he says, singling out one of Griffith's more graphic scenes: "Melanie, after (her character's) being a junkie for 20 years is, yes, going to have to lift her skirt and pull up her panties to shoot in a vein because that's one of the only ones left. I said, 'Melanie, are you willing to do that?' And she had to say, 'Yep, I'm going to walk around with sores all over my arms and be unbelievably brutal.'" Makes you wonder what Woods made his fellow actors do on the set of "Vampires."


Posted Jan 27, 1999 | Order Article Reprints