A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow Anatomy of an art heist on ABC; Hartman's possible replacement Doctor Dolittle Reviewed by Stephanie Zacharek Eddie Murphy has some dumb fun with the critters Y E S T E R D A Y The A-Team By Jonathan Curiel A tour of Africa's biggest pop stars becomes the biggest musical bargain in America (06/24/98) Sharps & Flats Reviews of new CDs by Billy Bragg and Wilco, Neil Finn, Spinanes, Ellis Marsalis, Robert Pollard and Genesis (06/24/98) R E C E N T_. M O V I E S Home Movies By Charles Taylor L.A. transcendental: The dark side of Hollywood's New Age (06/23/98) The X-Files Reviewed by Joyce Millman The movie fans have been waiting for is just a big tease (06/19/98) Mulan Reviewed by Jenn Shreve Disney's first heroic female protagonist battles Huns and gender stereotypes with equal valor (06/19/98) I Went Down Reviewed by Charles Taylor From beneath overcast Irish skies, a surprisingly upbeat buddy/gangster movie emerges (06/18/98) Home Movies By Charles Taylor Women on the verge (06/16/98) BROWSE THE MOVIE ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS

HEROINE CHIC | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - Substitute Hollywood for the New York art world, and the phrase functions nicely as an epitaph for Sheedy's tumultuous tenure in Tinseltown. After successful roles in "Bad Boys," "War Games," "The Breakfast Club" and "St. Elmo's Fire," Sheedy starred in a handful of commercial flops ("Heart of Dixie," "Maid to Order"). The casting calls stopped coming. "I was considered to be ice cold, uncastable, unhirable, unfuckable," she says. She was told by her managers and agents to "get her tits done," wear more makeup and less clothing and hang out with movie stars whose careers were flourishing so she could reclaim some "heat." "Let me tell you, I'm not some morally invincible human being -- I did do some of those things," Sheedy confesses. "I did go out and change my hair color and put on makeup. The whole thing was a ridiculous exercise, it really was." She readily admits that she played a role in getting herself blacklisted from Hollywood. In true Allison Reynolds fashion, she scattered her dandruff all over town, flouting convention and refusing to play by the rules. "I. Made. Things. Very, very difficult for myself," Sheedy says in a jarring, stop-start voice that resembles a sputtering engine. "I did not do the things I was supposed to do to make myself into a movie star. Part of that is because it went against my ethics, and part of it was I realized at a certain point that being a movie star isn't what. I. Wanted. To. Be." Sheedy pauses and raises her eyebrows to make sure I'm following before she continues. "At the same time, I was told, 'Nobody wants to fuck you and this is the problem.'" She enunciates the "F" in "fuck" with jaws clenched, still visibly upset over conversations that took place years ago. "I was absolutely not going to do it, and I didn't do it. And my career went straight into the toilet." Sheedy left Hollywood and returned to her native New York. There she met and married actor David Lansbury and hunkered down to study with famed acting instructor Harold Guskin, who has been her mentor for over a decade. "He encouraged me along the path I was going on and kept saying, 'Don't worry about those people in Hollywood, just concentrate on your work,'" Sheedy says of Guskin. "I took every script for every shitty job I got to Harold, and we took it apart and tried to make it better. And if we couldn't make it better, he told me to look at it as a chance to challenge myself in this way or that way," Sheedy says, her voice husky and defiant. "Instead of getting breast implants and spending four hours a day with a trainer, I spent four hours a day with Harold." If she seems hardened by the path she took, she's even more vocal in her disdain for the career decisions of her old best friend Demi Moore. "Her choices were against all of my principles and all the political philosophies I was brought up with," she told the New York Post, referring to Moore's surgically enhanced figure and her roles in "Striptease" and "Indecent Proposal." "On a deep level, it offends me." Those political philosophies were cultivated in the Upper West Side lefty household where she was raised by her now-divorced parents, Charlotte Sheedy, a literary agent who was involved in the women's rights and civil rights movements, and John Sheedy, a Manhattan advertising executive. Sheedy sips from an oversized mug of cappuccino and smokes like a fiend, her cigarette seeming more like an appendage than a prop. In person, she is much more fidgety than the cool, detached persona she wears as Lucy in "High Art." But her look -- Heroin Chic incarnate -- is almost the same. In the movie, Sheedy floats around in tank tops that cling to her bony frame. In person, her clothing is more conservative -- dark jeans and a cardigan sweater -- but her collarbones protrude and her face is gaunt. A slew of recent articles about Sheedy have all made mention of her weight, or rather the lack of it. "It's so funny," she says incredulously. "I've gotten beyond my problems with my weight, beyond my fixation with weight and now all of a sudden everyone is talking about my weight!" A girl can't win. After "St. Elmo's," Sheedy was told she would have to lose weight in order to get work, and now that she looks like a stick figure, no one will leave her alone. When I tell her that one journalist referred to her as "unsettlingly thin," she begins to laugh uproariously. "What's this about?" she demands. "Is it because I've been heavier in the past? Is it because I've talked about my bulimia? I'm not practicing that anymore," she says, referring to the eating disorder as if it were a religion. Sheedy assures me that the reason she's so thin has to do with genes ("I'm built like my father, who is a string bean"), pregnancy (oddly, having a child made her lose weight) and the fact that she simply grew out of her obsession. "I went through all this stuff working on my bulimia, going to the therapists -- for years," she admits. "What happened was I hit my 30s and all of a sudden I was not spending so much time thinking about my weight, because there were too many other things going on. It was almost like I exhausted it." I want to believe her, but her explanation seems a little too easy, too pat. I think of the many girlfriends who have sat before me, justifying their dramatic weight loss with explanations like this. I want to gently point out to Sheedy that caffeine and nicotine aren't part of the food pyramid. I want to feed her. Sheedy chats on as if she's unveiling the newest diet plan: OD on self-loathing, throw out someone else's ideals and the weight will come right off! "I don't know, maybe I just got normal," she offers, then reconsiders: "I don't have time to obsess about my weight, because now I'm obsessing about my kid." By the time Sheedy was her daughter Rebecca's age, she was already in the throes of precociousness. By age 6, Sheedy was dancing with the American Ballet Theater; at 12, she published a children's book and before high school she was writing reviews of kids' books for the New York Times and the Village Voice. She has also contributed three articles to Ms. magazine about her experiences growing up in an activist, lesbian, feminist household. In a discussion about whether "High Art" will be ghettoized as a "lesbian film," I suggest to Sheedy that perhaps the fact that she is heterosexual and married with a child might make mainstream viewers more willing to see it. "Now look, here's the thing, OK? I don't go for those sorts of terms," she says, referring to my use of the word "heterosexual." "Some people -- I always think it's for political reasons -- like to have a term applied to them. If they're really concerned about being seen as heterosexual, then they trot out their family when they play a gay character. And if they are a militant lesbian, then it's very important for them to be defined as a lesbian." Sheedy pauses for a drag of her cigarette and interrupts me midsentence when I try to reframe the question. "I'm from another school. I'm actually from my own school. I think everybody has the ability to fall in love with a man or with a woman or a white person or a black person or a Jewish person or a Protestant person or whatever," she says, as if explaining it for the hundredth time. "I never thought to myself, I'm going to grow up and fall in love with a man or I'm going to fall in love with a woman because my mother is a lesbian. It's kind of a radical statement, because instantly someone will say, 'You're a bisexual!' I just feel like those kinds of definitions don't apply and I don't buy into them." When I note that the sex scenes in the film were some of the most natural I have ever seen, Sheedy replies: "I'm just more comfortable with women -- for the obvious reasons." I ask her to elaborate. "We know each other's bodies, for one. And it's easier to have a dialogue: 'What are you comfortable with?' 'What are you not comfortable with?'" It's unclear to me whether we are talking about real life or "High Art," so I ask her to clarify: Has she ever been in love with a woman? "I've had crushes on women, I've been attracted to women before," she says. "And I've even talked to my husband about it, and he told me that one of the things he loves about me is that I don't find women who are beautiful and sexy and graceful and incredibly intelligent threatening." Sheedy continues: "Who wouldn't be attracted to [those qualities]? I mean he's attracted to them, too." Unlike her romp with Andrew McCarthy in "St. Elmo's Fire," where the two tumble awkwardly, slamming their puckered mouths together in forced, fabricated fits of passion, Sheedy's love scenes with Radha Mitchell, who plays Syd, are gorgeous, haunting episodes. The sexual tension between the two is palpably charged. Each glance is a titillation, each wry smile part of a delicate seduction. When the two finally have sex, the moment is wrought with pathos -- the kind that real-life sex often elicits. The sex scenes in "High Art" are not, as Sheedy points out, gratuitous, with the requisite "tit shots" and moments of moaning, climactic bliss. "Those are complicated," she says of her love scenes with Mitchell and with Patricia Clarkson, who plays Lucy's strung-out girlfriend Greta. "And they are not in the movie just to get somebody off, you know what I mean? I think that if guys want to watch a couple of chicks roll around in bed, then they should rent a porno," she says with irritation. Sheedy plays the role of Lucy almost effortlessly, as if Cholodenko wrote the part with her in mind. (In fact, Sheedy had to beg to read for the part; the director had never heard of her.) From the film's first moments, the camera languishes on Lucy, inviting the viewer into her gauzy psychological universe. Sheedy adds definition to Lucy's shadows and is remarkably convincing as an artist who must wrestle her demons to the ground before she can mold them into something meaningful. "I don't know why I was attracted to this character and why I love her so much. I just know her," she tells me. And this time I believe her. In some ways, Sheedy is the sum of her best roles; she's gone from being the eccentric girl to being a complex woman and artist. I don't know why, with all her baggage, I'm so attracted to her -- I just know her. SALON | June 25, 1998