So Evan Rachel Wood turns 20 today, meaning that she’s just one year away from being able to take her first sip of alcohol. Ahh, who am I kidding… she probably takes absinthe body shots off of boyfriend Marilyn Manson on a semi-regular basis. (And worse.) There was a Spin cover story on him recently that more or less intimated this, what with its author getting wasted with the subject, and then partying with all three.
Ingénues don’t date rockers 18 years their senior and live to bat their eyes and strike kewpie doll poses, either in real life or their art. When young actresses become these out-there public-performance creatures, either with drugs, drink, sex tapes or party-hearty lifestyles, it erodes their believability in disparate projects (see: Lindsay Lohan), and thus their occupational margin for error, probably a lot more so than with guys (see: Colin Farrell).
I had a chance to interview Wood before Thirteen and The Missing came out in 2003 (i.e., when she was 16), and it was clear even then that she was intelligent, precocious, but also a bit of a firecracker, and quite possibly stuck on herself. (But hey, you say, what actress isn’t? Some, actually…) Since then, apart from Thirteen, in which she played the good girl corrupted, Wood has already played shades of rebellious in Down in the Valley and Running with Scissors, and an icy manipulative vixen in the brazenly off-putting Pretty Persuasion. I haven’t yet seen Across the Universe (I’ll catch it next week), but I have seen King of California, and Wood delivers a credible performance, opposite Michael Douglas, as a world-weary high school drop-out who gets sucked into a treasure-hunting scheme by her cracked, crazily goateed father. So the good news is that Wood has the chops to pull off plaintive, jaded, emotionally vacant and other shades of grey, in addition to strident (which is really no great shake for any young actor worth their salt). But those aren’t the required tones of most mainstream projects, and Wood still runs the risk of sanding down to oblivion any potential soft edges.
Daily Archives: September 7, 2007
Wanted: Vinessa Shaw, Nude
Well, this has delicious potential: Deadline Hollywood
Daily’s Nikki Finke is reporting that… well, that would be too much
of a gloss, really. Straight to the point, she’s obtained an email from Hollywood-Elsewhere blogger/columnist Jeffrey Wells to 3:10 to Yuma director James Mangold, in which Wells
shares his thoughts on the movie and then solicits the filmmaker for nude and/or scantily-clad photos of Vinessa
Shaw, who shares a Yuma love scene with Russell Crowe. He even kind of pleads for said pictures, actually.
Tone and intent are the great mysteries of many Internet correspondences, having the ability to send everyone scuttling back to high school days of yore, when across-classroom glances and askance looks were dissected with a combination of fervor and fretfulness. So here the intent (at least from one side of things) is pretty clear, but without comment (yet) from Mangold and further context, the nature in which this was received is a bit hazy. Still, there’s the matter of professionalism (a perhaps silly notion when it comes to self-published entertainment journalists, I know), and while a quid pro quo is never explicitly proffered (nor, in my mind, really hinted at), at the very least this email seems exceptionally stupid and probably a little bit unethical to boot, because you’re asking a director to violate his trust with an actor and/or enlist others (per the email: “as one good hombre to another … you don’t have to be the guy who
passes along the stills — just tell the still photographer or the editor
or whomever caught her as she posed”) in a conspiracy to do the same.
Wells’ balls-on-table email response from the Toronto Film Festival, in which he sarcastically calls Finke’s post a brilliant, Earth-shaking exposé, leads with, “It
was seriously scummy of you to have run an off-the-cuff,
one-guy-to-another letter about wanting to get a jump on photos of a
hot actress that may or may not turn up on Mr. Skin a few weeks or months down the road,” and is reproduced in full under Finke’s original post.
Happy Birthday, Shannon Elizabeth
Also, the buxom Shannon Elizabeth turns 34 today (though I’m not sure how old her breasts are), and surely some cable network celebrates by re-running American Pie. Though that raises the question… why would anyone watch American Pie on cable television?