At the recent press day for Hairspray, Michelle Pfeiffer talked about why she
hasn’t been seen on screen since 2002’s underrated White Oleander. It’s a messy tale, for those who haven’t heard about it. To wit:
“I spent a couple of years trying to get this movie going,
called I Could Never Be Your Woman,
which Amy Heckerling directed and Paul Rudd stars in with me,” Pfeiffer explains. “It hasn’t
been released and I’m not sure when it will be. But I really, really loved that
project and, frankly, for a few years everything paled in comparison, and it was the
only thing I’d wanted to do. So that was sort of to be my big comeback, and
that was two years ago.
What’s the delay? “It’s not really legal problems, it has something to do with
deal stuff,” says Pfeiffer. “There are no legal battles per se, but I think it’s about finding
the right distribution deal that everyone can be happy with. It’s the first
time something like this has happened (to me), and initially it was very frustrating. But now that
it’s been two years, I’m kind of not thinking about it, honestly. I would love
for it to come out, but the ship has sailed and I’m moving on.”
Of course Pfeiffer’s being fairly gracious and forgiving. Her make-nice statements are the press-pattycake equivalent of styrofoam packing popcorn — not totally forthcoming, but not necessarily false, either. The film is basically the biggest casualty of the implosion of upstart Bauer Martinez, which in turn is partly a result of the poor earnings of both National Lampoon’s Van Wilder: The Rise of Taj and Harsh Times, but also some rather shady and/or dizzying basic-level mismanagement. (Also caught up in Bauer hell: The Moguls, formerly known as The Amateurs, and Richard Gere’s troubled The Flock.)
Still, Pfeiffer insists that fans needn’t worry about her totally disappearing. Apart from the forthcoming Stardust, she’s also eyeing a couple other projects. “I’ve actually been working the last two years, it’s just that
now everything is coming out,” she says. “It’s kind of natural that I was
due to take a break. It wasn’t a conscious decision… but I’d worked pretty hard for a long time, and it
probably
made sense for my psyche.”