I. A Child of Hollywood
Part I of this essay series, that I have determined to keep to three parts, had me talk as much of my formative interest in films, Hollywood history, and celebrity with the E! True Hollywood Story series being my gateway into geekery over many films and stars of yore along with more contemporary stars like Jennifer Jason Leigh. The show was more than fluff or simple summations of various cultural phenomenon, it also dove into a lot of true crime and mysteries, tragedies that could have been prevented. One ETHS that was imprinted on my mind was “The Twilight Zone Trial”, a trial that involved the deaths that killed three people, that included two young children and veteran actor Vic Morrow, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s father.
The incident on the John Landis section of The Twilight Zone: The Movie film anthology is one of the moments that was a major event at the time (the incident happened in 1982, the same year as the release of Fast Times at Ridgemont High), but had faded from cultural memory. It is from a pre-internet, analog era so to summarize the incident itself, Landis’ infamous section (he also did the film’s prologue) was “Time Out”. It was about a racist white man with massive resentment in being ‘passed over’ for minorities until the tables are turned and he experiences the traumas of every minority group: black man trying to outrun the KKK lynch mob in the Jim Crow South, a Jew chased by Nazis because he needs to be rounded up on a train, and a Vietnamese villager chased by American soldiers who throw a grenade at him. That last part was not how it was supposed to be. Morrow was supposed by chased by an American military chopper shooting at him. Think “Flight of the Valkyrie” scene in Apocalypse Now. The accident that occurred was because that helicopter lost control and crashed on not just Morrow but underaged children in the scene.
The incident had undeniable industry impact. The rules in running a set now can be dated to the fact that John Landis exposed people to danger and encouraged a helicopter to fly lower on that scene. The footage is out there and easy to find because it was public record in the courts. It is not one for the faint of heart. I have seen it and I have deeply mixed emotions about seeing it. It is wild and surreal to see a person’s last moment on-screen and simultaneously know what murdered Morrow, seven year-old Myca Dinh Le, and six-year old Renee Shin-Yi Chen. There was the helicopter but also having Morrow drag these two minors in a night scene with him, running from a chopper shooting at them into a body of water that itself was this monsoon and around them are explosions to mimic a war-torn Vietnam. No stunt doubles. One cannot help but feel incredible anger at the misguidedness, hubris, and frankly sadism in doing that to your actors and crew. So in a way I am fine with seeing it and wished others in powerful Hollywood positions had seen it. John Landis still got to make movies and have a career because he got acquitted in the trial. He still had friends in high places to continue, even if Steven Spielberg who collaborated on the film with Landis broke ties. Spielberg shaken by the set debacle that caused multiple fatalities while Landis was still able to continue making movies including major hits like Coming to America. I remember this because it was the first time I ever faced the fact a director whose movies I enjoyed also did something reprehensible, where it was not just a massive black mark on his character, it was something that happened on the job. This was something where artist and art could not be divorced in any type of cognitive dissonance that other people love to exercise with other directors (I do not have to name which directors at this point, they practically are a cottage industry for the cultural essay economy). John Landis was acquitted but he still paid undisclosed sums out of court with families of the deceased. Nevertheless, the verdict in The Twilight Zone trial, still feels like an incredible failure by our criminal justice system, especially when you know in retrospect that Landis’ career did not at all stop.
During this episode of ETHS, I remember seeing Jennifer Jason Leigh’s face flash up watching this as she was a daughter of the deceased. Her appearing in the episode was unexpected. I did not know she had famous parents, or parents in the industry. I was just a teen who had only discovered Fast Times and did not really know who Vic Morrow was. After seeing his face throughout the episode to suddenly see her mentioned as his daughter gave me a lump in my throat. She had his face! She looked so much like him. However, and the episode noted, that Morrow was at the time was estranged from JJL and her sister.
Jennifer Jason Leigh has remained private about matters pertaining to her relationship to her father. Some of that might have something to do with the out of court settlement and the fact that their relationship, from what little she has said since his death, seemed very complicated. In the aftermath of his death, and prior to the above infamous trial, Jennifer Jason Leigh had a profile in People magazine that talked about the dark cloud surrounding her stardom with Morrow’s death happening as her film was a hit. That it ended as strained with no closure or sense of mutual understanding is already an unimaginable thing, but to also have it be so public is another. The piece closes with a quote from JJL, “I always hoped we could work together and, through that, resolve whatever needed to be resolved between us. Now that chance is lost. That’s the real tragedy.”
The rest of the piece is worth reading, although the piece really wants to stretch and connect JJL having her late father’s “grit” because of her willingness to do demanding roles like the nudity in Fast Times and her other earlier roles (not to mention roles that are mentioned in the piece that never came into fruition). Perhaps it is remarkable that then in 1982, that she seemed different than other young actresses, especially in her poise in defending her character getting an abortion and having nude scenes, some of those nude scenes in Fast Times had to be cut significantly down to avoid an X-rating. But in that piece, JJL states her sister Carrie was more of a “daddy’s girl” whereas she was a “mommy’s girl”. And it would be clear for a lot of her career that perhaps the biggest artistic force for her was her own mother, Barbara Turner.
Barbara Turner is what you would call a “Hollywood Lifer”. She was trained at the Dramatic Workshop and moved to Hollywood to act just like her husband Morrow, but both she and Morrow showed a wider creative side that included writing and directing. They adapted Genet’s Deathwatch together and after they broke up, while Turner did continue acting into the 1970s she continued to write, including a screenplay credit on Richard Lester’s wonderful Petulia. Most of her credits were TV films and several script doctoring and consulting jobs. She had a known pseudonym Lauren Currier, which would be the name she had credited to her script for the film adaptation of Cujo. Her strongest work was the screenplays for Robert Altman’s underrated ballet film The Company, the Jackson Pollock biopic Pollock, and music drama Georgia, that would star her daughter Jennifer Jason Leigh at her peak and would net Turner an Academy Award nomination for her original screenplay. While nobody would confuse Turner for Ben Hecht, her work engendered a lot of female characters running the gamut. She wanted to write every type of female character and their complications. You can sense that type of attitude was passed on to JJL who in that piece says, “I like the idea of being able to play anything from waif to prostitute.”
II. Ascension
Jennifer Jason Leigh was certainly ready to transition into more adult roles but like most actresses of her age, Hollywood would rather milk out as much as they could to have her play a teenage girl. Her post-Fast Times roles included more After School Specials and played a high schooler up until 1987’s Under Cover. In-between that period she did step into an adult role by way of worker with a director who was more of an outsider and making his English language debut film. That was Paul Verhoeven and the film was Flesh + Blood. In this Middle Ages epic, JJL plays an aristocrat who takes a shine to Rutger Hauer’s mercenary commoner. She is introduced as a virgin and so comes her being widely perceived as having purity that is celebrated and coveted, but there is an edge to her. Particularly when there is trouble and trouble is plentiful for Agnes who faces the threat of rape for most of the film’s runtime. I would compare this role to Susan George in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs as far as having a lot of substance and subversion for a role that initially reads as a problematic character on the surface. Sexuality is not a simple scenario of Agnes being a helpless damsel. She wants something and is willing to negotiate and will the man into some agreement. Sexual desire and power are knotted up in her mind, but she is also smart and clever in this film. The effect she has on Hauer’s Martin also complicates his character, whose feelings toward a woman who saved his life is wanting to kill her rather than her return to the man she was supposed to be with all along. He is not doing it out of some dastardly plot, but because there is some deeply psycho-sexual urge in Martin retaining control and dominance over Agnes, that did get thrown into question earlier. Verhoeven was perhaps the first director since Heckerling to really show the dimension to Jennifer Jason Leigh and for a time the only director who gave her the quality film to display that dimension.
Her critical breakthrough happened with the 1990 releases of two films where she plays a sex worker in Last Exit to Brooklyn and Miami Blues. She earned a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress for those two films. Although both roles are technically in the same profession, the characters could not be more different. Last Exit to Brooklyn was adapted from the celebrated Hubert Selby novel by the Christiane F. director Uli Edel (The trend in her career was that if American directors could not give JJL the good role, the foreign directors tended to be the most reliable substitute) who turns 1950s Brooklyn into an all-out bacchanal. JJL’s platinum blond sex worker Tralala uses her body to try to gain what she wants which is earn day’s living although there is undeniable nihilism and anger to her in the film. She gets brutalized, gang-raped, not to mention ostracized from every corner she walks. She feels almost nothing from it as far as pleasure and escape into a normal life that is offered to by a sailor smitten by Tralala is tragic, in that it is she never really believes can happen for her. Playing a bride is just another role for her for one night. And that is the contrast between Tralala to her career-best role in George Armitage’s Miami Blues as Southern belle Susie Waggoner. When Alec Baldwin’s Junior offers her domestic bliss, she takes it with no questions asked. That is a life she wants and she stays with him so long even as it becomes clear that why Junior has the things he has due to illegal and criminal means. JJL’s character feels like a throwback to older tragic femmes in the crime genre. They are not femme fatales but the poor girlfriend or significant other strung along with the flattering promises from a charismatic man even if these men are setting off red flags and who will come undone by the end of the story. There is a sweetness to Susie that have you hope that she can find that bliss and happiness elsewhere, but also to stay away from danger that is ticking time bomb of Junior. She was almost thirty at the time but JJL brought a youthful naivete to the role, further accentuated by a Peter Pan-like bob haircut. Though Miami Blues is an excellent film and adaptation from the Hoke Moseley novels by Charles Willeford, there is an undeniable pull that Jennifer Jason Leigh brings that has her at the center of the film if just because her performance is so good. The film is still a macho meeting of the minds of a criminal and a detective, but she is its beating heart.
She continued to play sex workers on-screen, most notably as married mother Lois, a phone sex operator in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts. It would be one of the two films she did with Altman, a longtime friend of her mother’s. In this adaptation of various Raymond Carver short stories, the casualness in which JJL displays when acting the part on the phone as she is feeding her young child food manages to be striking and contrasting in a film and an ensemble that at times can hit histrionics. She does not look like a typical mother, looking closer to a high school burn-out who traveled with the Grateful Dead. She is subtly subverting her domestic station as a mother and becomes the unlikely breadwinner in her household that creates discord in her marriage. Her story thread ends with her jealous, depressed, and emotionally castrated husband Jerry (Chris Penn) strikes an unknown young woman with a rock after suppressing, his rage through most of the film, is one of the most shocking moments in the film, a matter of moments before an earthquake hits their Los Angeles suburb.
Admittedly, Altman in the 1990s is not my favorite Altman at all. Mostly because the actors in his films, the generation after his New Hollywood 1970s peak, act all too aware that they are in a Robert Altman film and seem to give their most broad impression of the quirks in which being in an Altman film entails. Not the case with Jennifer Jason Leigh and Altman was an earlier champion of hers stating, “She stands almost alone in her generation. Not only for her lack of ego but for her willingness to take risks.” She feels more closely tied to the Sandy Dennises, Karen Blacks, and Shelley Duvalls that he worked with over the years in their range, eccentricities, and fearlessness. Even in just two films, JJL’s range under Altman is quite impressive going from a lower-class stay-at-home mom who wears Led Zeppelin tie-dye t-shirts instead of dresses to the old Hollywood, flighty but dangerous spitfire Blondie O’Hara in Altman’s vastly underrated Great Depression era film Kansas City. Her camaraderie with Miranda Richardson’s opium addict Carolyn becomes an excellent two-hander in acting. There is a spark between these women out of tension in Blondie holding Carolyn hostage to get her man out of being hostage to a local gangster, but also the film is speaking to something more in representing the roles in which women at that time are tied to their man even if the men themselves are for the most part at the margins of the story. Kansas City spotlights those who need be in constant negotiation with power out of survival. Ultimately the connection between Blondie and Carolyn has to break and only one of them can survive.
In the 1990s, I would say Jennifer Jason Leigh’s niche became less about playing the contemporary woman during a time in which the movie stars were Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, and several studios trying to find a suitable ‘clone’ of those actresses and more to playing women in period dramas. It was a fine niche, she excelled in it. Perhaps the very best example of this is a performance that feels lost due to the fact the film is seen as one of the lesser offerings of these directors, Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Hudsucker Proxy. In the film’s hijinks around big business and hula hoops that is a send-up to Old Hollywood studio filmmaking and golden age animation, JJL’s Amy Archer falls almost into the uncanny in how much she feels straight out of her era and never has an anachronistic beat to give her away in that performance. She nails the character-type of intrepid, resourceful but cynical, workaholic woman who lets her guard down for the idealist everyman hero. She practically talks in a different, distinct language that is Hawksian woman in manner and at breakneck speed of name your iconic screwball heroine. She is admittedly on a whole other level than any other actor in the film.
JJL’s voice was itself a fascinating instrument to hear. Whether a Southern twang in Miami Blues, her accent that feels like the inspiration for Amy Sedaris’ Jerri Blank in Kansas City, or her incredibly precise pantomime in Hudsucker, that was itself a remarkable range. But her probably most polarizing was how she sounded as Dorothy Parker in Alan Rudolph’s Mrs. Parker and The Vicious Circle. The film, that at one time was a film that Barbara Turner had been working on writing, is showing Parker’s ascension as a reporter, to the peak of her powers at the center of the legendary Algonquin Round Table in New York, to the downtown- characterized in the film’s New York being in color versus the Hollywood backlot being in black and white- being an unhappy Hollywood studio screenwriter where her alcoholism has her slurring and muttering every other word. JJL’s Parker voice even before being consumed in alcoholism has an affected, almost purring quality that is striking, especially when Rudolph has her do spoken-word of Parker’s poetry directly to the camera in various vignettes. There were rumors a lot of her work had to be re-recorded as ADR to have her be more understandable. But critics rewarded her, another New York Film Critics Circle award was given to her yet again, this time for Best Actress. But like a lot of her best work, she was not in widely seen films. Hudsucker and Kansas City were financial flops and unfortunately, not very many people in the 1990s wanted to see a Dorothy Parker film.
It remains incredible that despite this great run, she never got an Oscar nomination. It seems she came closest to a nomination with 1995’s Georgia, the film written by her mother about two sisters, the oldest a star while the younger, rebellious one self-sabotages through drugs and alcohol despite having talent. It was a passion project between Turner and JJL, who co-produced in addition to writing and starring in it. Given it was written by her mother and her sister Carrie was an addict who had since been in recovery, one can examine the autofiction beats of JJL and her family unit. Carrie had herself been an inspiration and informed JJL in living a clean life off-screen but taking that observed behavior on-screen. Carrie Ann Morrow and Barbara Turner would die within months of each other in 2016. To watch Georgia, with JJL in the Carrie role so to speak as Sadie Flood and Mare Winningham (who would get an Oscar nomination) essentially playing the JJL role as the straight-laced, successful Georgia Flood, makes an already emotional film pack quite a punch. I mentioned earlier that her voice is an instrument in her earlier roles so it is no surprise how good of a singer she is, doing transfixing covers of Van Morrison while in a Sally Bowles meets 90s alt-girl type of look. She is also good at showing the self-sabotage in singing bad, whether due to some psychological block or being on drugs. This is an addict drama where ‘getting clean’ and ‘redemption’ are not all simple. Issues are still in tatters among sisters and other people close to Sadie and Georgia. They sing the same song that hits different. Georgia and Sadie are each in different places, one clean and the other it seems about to go on another downward spiral.
The commercial viability of Jennifer Jason Leigh was never consistent and at this point you can say she was more of a critic’s darling who made the most of her roles in an industry that did not know what do with her rather than a cover girl for the magazines. That said, the role she will perhaps always be remembered for most was the biggest hit of her career, in Barbet Schroeder’s Single White Female. Perhaps why it has still endured is due to its crude, low-grade Highsmithian-level obsession that persists now today in internet culture than the film’s quality. In re-watching it, however, I have to say the film may be trashy but it is beautiful to look at with its blues that rival Kieslowski’s Three Colours: Blue and haunting silhouettes. JJL plays Bridget Fonda’s roommate from hell with a secret that slowly peels away as she gradually wants to evolve into Bridget Fonda’s redheaded bob-cut ‘perfect woman’. JJL as Hedy manages to feel grounded as a very sad, tragic person full of trauma and instability despite the fact she does some of the most heinous, wretched, and repulsive things imaginable. The film feels of a piece to older films of homosocial female relationships that take on a queer subtext, albeit this film is not at all subtle. When JJL’s Hedy has Fonda’s Allie at knife point, they share a kiss on the lips. That is all what Hedy wanted. Some can call this another case of ‘gay villain’ trope on display (add in the fact that there is already a double-life dimension to Hedy, who is really named Ellen with a dark past), but I found myself still enthralled by how emotionally involved I was in this on-screen relationship. Allie and Hedy feels more legitimate in how it its intimacy and danger than any of the other relationships Allie has in the film. But perhaps what struck me most in my re-watch of Single White Female was a moment an ancillary character sees Hedy and says in earnest, “You're an actress, right? You're never the same person twice.” Although still early in her career, that line serves as a meta commentary that perfectly encapsulates Jennifer Jason Leigh in the 1990s.
Recommended Reading links:
2012 Slate piece on The Twilight Zone: The Movie disaster and its legacy in Hollywood.
1982 People Magazine profile on Jennifer Jason Leigh.