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Recently in Salon Arts & Entertainment

Giving up
Record labels move to lift the minimum-price rules that kept mom-and-pop stores in business.
By Eric Boehlert
[04/12/00]

Column
Songs that kill
In the dark comic world of "American Psycho," pop is an essential soundtrack to murder.
By Sarah Vowell
[04/12/00]

Movies
Small moments, big nights
Actor-director Stanley Tucci talks about his new film, "Joe Gould's Secret," his struggle with the Writers' Guild and the importance of ambiguity in art.
By Susan Perry
[04/11/00]

Music
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury ...
There stands before you a murderer -- the band that killed rock 'n' roll.
By Ira Robbins
[04/10/00]

Movie Review
"Return to Me"
David Duchovny and Minnie Driver star in a movie that almost seems like a godsend in this age of romantic-comedy schmaltz.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[04/07/00]

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Was part of her intent to create a Cinderella who didn't need a fairy godmother or a magic pumpkin because she was more self-reliant? "I'm not sure that was conscious -- it may just not occur to me to come up with characters who can't take care of themselves, except for a person like Gwen [the anti-heroine of "28 Days"], where that's the point." A lot of the rough-and-tumble in "Ever After," and all of its gypsy shenanigans, came from Barrymore and the director, Andy Tennant, who wrote the script's final draft with his writing partner, Rick Parks. Grant was delighted with the finished film (an international sleeper hit).

By the time she finished "Ever After," Grant was "dying to do something with contemporary meat and muscle and pace, where you couldn't be languorous and there didn't have to be a certain delicacy to the language." She was exploring properties with Danny DeVito's production company, Jersey Films, when she got wind of the Erin Brockovich story. "First it was out to Callie Khouri ['Thelma and Louise,' 'Something to Talk About']; then it was out to Paul Attanasio ['Quiz Show,' 'Donnie Brasco']." But Grant kept coming back and asking, "Has she passed on it? Has he passed on it?" Grant had never done anything close to the gravelly texture of "Erin Brockovich." But co-producer Gale Lyon knew Grant -- and knew that underneath her Miss Porter's-Amherst pedigree, she had "a foul mouth and a quick temper and could get the character of that woman. I don't dress like Erin, but I'm not Brooke Astor, either."

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

Grant won the "Brockovich" job -- and, given the way Jersey Films ("Get Shorty," "Out of Sight") operates, the chance to develop a rich story on her own. "The people at Jersey know what they're doing. They've got good taste and instincts, and they believe in getting the script to a really good stage before they attach a director -- the fewer voices the better. Then they bring the director on." She spoke with Brockovich's lover, kids and her boss turned partner, Ed Masry. She also went to Hinkley, Calif., to interview the plaintiffs in Masry and Brockovich's case accusing Pacific Gas & Electric of chromium poisoning. The script presented enormous challenges. She couldn't talk to the plaintiffs about the case itself because, as part of their settlement, they'd signed a nondisclosure agreement. But Brockovich gave her "a lot of research. She had videotaped a lot of the plaintiffs and had notes on everyone she met with; she also had all the documents she got from the water board and, of course, legal documents."

The toughest hurdle was trying to mesh the case chronology with Brockovich's personal history. Yet Grant had a firm handle on the movie's emotional and dramatic core: "What was always really interesting to me, from the beginning, was the radical concept that tits and brains are not mutually exclusive. People are flummoxed by how Erin looks, so she is massively underestimated. She always speaks intelligently, but because she dresses the way she dresses and shows her body, which is gorgeous, people wouldn't credit her intelligence. And that didn't have to do with anything Erin was doing with the people she was working with, or getting information from, or negotiating with -- it had to do with their reaction to her. Her story is about somebody struggling for success, but only on her own terms. A compromised success, to Erin, would not feel like success. That's how she's made up. And I admire that a lot."

I thought the movie's open-ended depiction of Erin's increasing distance from her loving biker boyfriend and her young children was perplexing. (The biker begins to function as a single parent.) But to Grant, the film is probably stronger for not sewing up all its loose threads. Although at times Grant was "hamstrung" by the need to hew closely to reality, she also thinks "it saved us from making more conventional choices." Career leaps and family life, she feels, "rarely do get reconciled." Part of what gives the film its freshness is that Erin definitely doesn't have it all. Her work may renew her self-respect, but something is sacrificed in the process.

Grant found the real-life Brockovich an inspiration in other ways, too. "The producers made it clear that Erin shouldn't do the film if she did not trust us. She was really signing her life away. But she did have writer approval. We got along well and definitely became a team. She was very open" about unloading her gleefully unexpurgated brand of talk and allowing it to set the tone of the dialogue. In the film, Erin doesn't just sprinkle her speeches with an "ass" or a "bullshit" here and a "blow job" there; she also displays a gutsy street wit. When a big-shot lawyer (Peter Coyote) asks, in disbelief, how Erin got all the plaintiffs to sign off on their case, she calmly explains: "Seeing that I have no brains or law expertise, I just went over and performed 634 blow jobs. Boy, am I tired." Says Grant: "That's just a tame version of how she talked."

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