Death to the Indie Queen

By Greg Reifsteck

Ding, dong!  The Indie Queen is dead, or at least it could be the end of the curse that once doomed her career. More and more actresses may be escaping this limiting label that once stuck like a career-stalling albatross to those who chose to play meaningful women's roles in independent films right out of the box rather than pay their dues fitting into stereotypical women's roles.  But now, for the first time, the industry is finally welcoming these rebel female thespians into mainstream films by major studios years after they made their mark as indie queens.  And that's a signal that the double standard of stereotyping female newcomers may be coming to an end. 

No longer can lazy film critics and pundits curse the career of a hard-working actress just to sell a few more copies of their pretentious publication at the newsstand.  And why can they no longer place this dreaded career-stalling moniker on actresses that have more than one promising film at Sundance?  Why can't they place the latest Lead Actress winner of the Independent Spirit Award up on a pedestal just to have her be pigeonholed as an actress that can't draw as much box office as Julia Roberts?  Why can't they stop her from starring opposite Tom Hanks or Jude Law in big budget dramas?

Because actresses like Virginia Madsen and Parker Posey are scratching and biting their way out of a situation that wasn't either of their fault. They are getting one more shot in their careers to break a curse placed on them by the movie-going public as well as by the male-dominated industry; a curse that promised that once a young actress turned her back on big budget roles in favor of movies that meant something, it was curtains for her career. Now they are getting an unprecedented and unexpected shot at being the next Gwyneth Paltrow, the next Reese Witherspoon, the next Angelina Jolie; Hollywood's next $20 million woman.

Posey has recently starred in a mainstream horror film, Blade: Trinity.  This is not a typo.  She plays Danica Talos, a blood-and-guts-feeding vampire out to get Wesley Snipes, in a film by a major studio.  That's right; the film is not distributed by an artsy arm such as Fine Line Features, but by New Line Cinema, the Time Warner-owned home of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. 

Posey has tiptoed between indie, mainstream and genre film worlds since being coronated with the Indie Queen curse, the coronation due in part to a Special Recognition Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 1997 for her performance as Jackie-O in The House of Yes.  Since then, studios have never given Posey the shot to open or lead a mainstream film for a major studio despite her having some strong supporting takes in Fox's 2001 comedy Josie and the Pussycats and, most recently, New Line's Laws of the Attraction.

The reason: Audiences and critics have instead kicked her down and only really accepted her in cerebral indie films. Being nominated for a Best Lead Actress Independent Spirit Award in the weighty role of the far-too-driven Greta for 2003's Personal Velocity seemed to be the final nail in her mainstream career coffin.  Until now, that is.

Welcome to the Fraternity

Madsen's career has been the inverse of Posey's.  She was the hottest rising star of the '80s (with 17 films under her belt for that decade) and started in mainstream films like MGM's Electric Dreams and Universal's Dune in 1984.  She then bravely fell into an indie, TV and cable film funk because these were the only places she could find roles juicy enough to whet her appetite to act.  And once she did, the big show was no longer an option for Madsen.

That is, until Alexander Payne's recent romantic comedy Sideways, where Madsen plays Maya, a love interest of Miles (Paul Giamatti), whom the actress describes as "going through a transition in her life." Not only is the film doing respectably at the box office ($51,760 per screen average its opening weekend in limited release), but her performance is being touted by critics as Oscar-worthy and she has been nominated for a Best Lead Actress Independent Spirit Award.

You see, actresses can't just start their careers like actors in lead roles of mainstream films. They don't hit the ground running like the men in Hollywood, who can receive a prime lead role after only a few supporting takes in mid-budgeted studio films. And if they do get that lucky starring break like the 41-year-old Madsen did two decades ago in Electric Dreams, they are not roles of any substance or with any dimension. Audiences view actresses in mainstream films as "the wife," "the love interest," or "the secretary."  They are "arm candy."

"I've lived a pretty full life, I'm in my 40s, I've been through a lot.  I have a lot of life experience behind me, so I can identify with my characters," says Madsen of the roles she's been given circa 2004 as opposed to 1984.  "The great thing about having the kind of roles I get to play nowadays, as opposed to the roles I played when I was in my 20s, is that those girls were never very interesting and now I get to play characters that have a lot of life behind them, and maybe a little bit of wisdom."

Colin Farrell didn't have to wait until his 40s to play a hefty role, which he did this holiday season for Oliver Stone in the lead of Alexander.  Did he really earn the right to play such a meaty and complex lead role?   Sure, he spent three years in his stints as an extra and in some TV movie roles.  But he came virtually out of nowhere carrying Joel Schumacher's Vietnam film Tigerland as the complicated Pvt. Roland Bozz.  The next year he was standing on the screen exchanging the majority of lines of dialogue with $25 million-dollar-man Bruce Willis in Hart's War, a big-budget war drama by MGM. 

The simple reason for all of this torture inflicted upon our novice actresses is that Hollywood is still a fraternity and not a sorority. Furthermore, the time it takes to get from his pledge pin to leading the next toga party can be a year for a new male flavor of the month, whereas the sorority sister must stand by the kegger and wait semester after semester until a director possibly comes along and fills her glass. 

"Critics label people last," says Madsen.  "I think who really labels them are the people that finance films.  It's a business. Casting is a business decision, let's not forget; it's not personal.  You're labeled if you don't have box office, if you don't have dollar signs that walk in the door with you."

A Scary Start

Usually an actress's first starring role is in what critics like to call skeletons-in-the-closet films.  All bankable lead actresses had to earn their chops by either baring their bodies or starring alongside serial killers and monsters in genre schlock. 

Take Demi Moore.  She succumbed to the horror bomb Parasite 3-D.  Oscar winner Renée Zellweger cut her teeth alongside Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw Massacre IV, and Holly Hunter, another Oscar winner, went up in flames in the stinker The Burning. Even Nicole Kidman joked openly, when honored by the American Cinematheque last year, that she never forgot her stellar motion picture debut in BMX Bandits.  These are all films where women are objectified or simply used as eye candy, with no real dialogue or character depth to bite into.

Some actresses might be able to avoid the embarrassingly objectified role, as did Julia Roberts back in the '80s when she started in piffle such as Mystic Pizza and Satisfaction (both in 1988).  But even though they were not typical huge box-office formula films or women-hating B films, they were still mainstream films that forced her into typical supporting archetypes. Casting directors finally gave her a shot to hold her own after she earned her keep amongst the Oscar elite in Steel Magnolias (1989), and the rest is history.

The same could be said for Reese Witherspoon.  Her debut in the mainstream hit The Man in the Moon (1991) playing the typical girlfriend role with a little edge got her noticed as a young ingénue.  Soon she was on the fast track in films like Fear (1996) and Cruel Intentions (1999). Again, like Magnolias, these roles were multi-faceted enough for casting directors and the public to trust her to carry a film.  Soon director Robert Luketic gave her a big break as feisty Elle Woods in Legally Blonde (2001) and she, too, graduated to Hollywood's A-List.  Thanks to Blonde's $95 million in box office receipts, she was rewarded with a $12 million-per-picture paycheck.

However, the character of Elle Woods is a movie studio marketing team's dream.  She is essentially a cute dumb blonde who trips over success with her shocking smarts.  When Witherspoon recently took on the challenging and much more complex role of temptress Becky Sharp in the period piece Vanity Fair ($16 million in B.O.), the same audiences who made her bubbly down-home romantic comedy Sweet Home Alabama ($127 million) a box office smash, stayed away in droves.

So, to reiterate, it's not just the moviemakers but the audiences, too, who don't like seeing all three dimensions in the characters of America's sweethearts.  Julia Roberts' romantic comedies (between $20 and $35 million on their opening weekends) always gross double that of her deeper character studies such as Mary Reilly and Conspiracy Theory (between $3 and $16 million on their opening weekends).

Is it a Self-Inflicted Wound?

Madsen never reached the box office success of Roberts, but it wasn't for lack of trying.  She was trotted out in the '80s as the one to watch in both major glossy movie magazines Movieline and Premiere.  She was fresh off of playing the lead in MGM's Electric Dreams (1984) and was back as part of an ensemble in David Lynch's Dune (1984), and playing third banana to two other fallen '80s actresses, Daphne Zuniga and Cynthia Gibb, in Modern Girls (1986).  But then she had to go screw it all up by trying to play women of substance in small independent productions that were on the industry's cutting edge.

"I did HBO's first film and it was produced by Richard Branson. It was a Virgin Vision production called Long Gone. Now, at the time that was thought to be a step down from a TV movie, if you did a cable movie," says Madsen. "An independent film? Why, doing that was just insane.  But I did all of those things.  I even did a mini series, which was a big no-no.  So I did all of these kinds of things that you weren't supposed to do, because I needed the freedom to experiment."

But is this choice of not graduating to the next level truly self-inflicted?  Parker Posey kept choosing indie films after she was labeled by Time Magazine as Queen of the Indies in 1994. Why wear the shoe if you know it doesn't fit?  Why keep taking roles in obscure films by Hal Hartley (1995's Flirt and 1997's Henry Fool) and a then-unknown Mark S. Waters (The House of Yes)?

"I might have made a few mistakes by just being interested in what character I was going to play instead of what director I was working with or what producer," confesses Madsen.  "I thought of it all as experimentation, so I didn't really look for all the elements to be there. Those big giant movies were the important ones, but I was always bridesmaid on those."

Still as a Statue

It all keeps coming back to the ego and the creative passion of the actress not feeling fulfilled.  Women's roles in major studio film scripts just don't have the depth that men's roles have.  So one would think that the only thing to do for an actress is to stick it out in the indies, hoping to win an award that will give them enough recognition to go play up with the majors, right?

Wrong.  Awards can also be a curse to an actress.  Having a statuette slipped into your waiting palm will give you a warm fuzzy feeling, an unmistakable glow and the delusion that your hard work, method acting and salary sacrifices have finally paid off.

But that brings us right back to Parker Posey's special recognition for best actress at Sundance for The House of Yes.  It's the award that marked her for life.  She tried to break the glass ceiling into major studio films with supporting roles in You've Got Mail, Scream 3 and Josie and the Pussycats.  She kept walking into auditions with a scarlet letter on her forehead.  Anna Paquin won a best supporting actress Academy Award for her role in Miramax's The Piano.  She is still slogging around in love interest and supporting roles.  The statue branded her as a supporting player, and casting people have never been able to see her as a lead.

Unfortunately, some actresses have not been able to rise from the dead of an award aura.  Elizabeth Shue, like Madsen, was also from the Class of 1984's Cinematic Most Likely to Succeed list.  She wowed audiences as Ralph Macchio's girlfriend in The Karate Kid (1984) and was soon in the driver's seat with Adventures in Babysitting (1987).  After a decade of being cast in supporting roles, Mike Figgis gave her the complex lead in Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and she won a lead actress Independent Spirit Award and garnered an Oscar nomination. 

But did it help? Nope!  Shue ended up back in supporting status playing the love interest in big-budget fiascos such as The Saint and Hollow Man, and was lost in obscurity.  She is turning to the horror genre like so many other actresses, hoping to spark her career by screaming opposite Robert DeNiro in Fox's Hide and Seek in 2005.

Silent Scream

But is there hope if Parker Posey can scare the label of Indie Queen off her back by experimenting in other genres with Blade: Trinity and USA's TV remake of the classic Frankenstein? Canuck indie regular Sarah Polley tried it last year, leading a battle against the zombie in Universal's Dawn of the Dead redux.  Trips into the genre world might raise their Q-rating, but venturing into gruesome territory, actresses run the risk of only confusing casting agents and producers.

Madsen tried taking that turn in 1992's Candyman. The critics praised her for her brave career move and her stellar acting.  But it never made scripts such as Erin Brockovich fall on her agent's desk.

"I think that was a hindrance in one way because no one really understood what I did," says Madsen of her genre jumping.  "They sort of would rather you do one thing, so that they can pigeonhole you, so that they can define you.  I guess the more you learn, the more it's going to help you.  But I also kept studying, I went back to acting class and I worked with an acting coach the last few years."

But in a transformed industry where acting heavyweights such as Al Pacino and Meryl Streep fight to play hefty roles in HBO films such as Angels in America and win Emmys, a Parker Posey, a Sarah Polley and a Virginia Madsen can manage to stay optimistic. 

That's because the rules in Hollywood have completely changed.  It is no longer career suicide to be on cable, in mini series or even on network TV.  And major actresses are flocking to new prestigious indie arms like Warner Independent Pictures because that's where the plum scripts are being developed.

"I think the wonderful, really very healthy, change in Hollywood is that there are no limits anymore," says Madsen.  "Perhaps it might have originally come out of the fact that there was just not much work to be had.  But now you see people in TV movies, in series, because everyone wants to do an HBO series.  Actors have more freedom than they have ever had in the entire history of filmmaking.  So, I'm very positive about where the industry is right now."

Madsen is right.  In the last two decades all of the big five have either purchased artsy production arms (Disney with Miramax) or created them in house (Fox Searchlight, Warner Independent Pictures).  This has allowed actresses to star in films with roles they can respect and still be part of the major studio film system in prestige films with Oscar potential.  It works out for the studios as well.  They can release blockbusters with thin scripts to bolster their bottom line with box office bucks from the working-class pockets of Middle America.  At the same time they can keep the coastal critical elite believing they are all about developing product to win gold statues with more highbrow fare.

An eternal optimist and proud mother, Madsen was wise to stay positive throughout her seesaw career, looking at the independent film world as a place of refuge where she was able to expand her performing boundaries.  So sticking it out has brought her through to the other side as a trailblazer of sorts, one who has stuck to her guns and now is respected for it.  "It's not the medium; it's the material," she reminds us.