And the Oscar Does Not Go to . . .
By AMY WALLACE
OS ANGELES
WHEN Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep make their appearances at the 75th Academy Awards, Kari Wuhrer will not be watching, and her decision has nothing to do with the chance that news from Iraq could lead to the ceremony’s postponement. Ms. Wuhrer, a 35-year-old actress, rarely tunes into the telecast in any year — after appearing in more than 60 B-movies with titles like “The Hitcher II: I’ve Been Waiting” and “G-Men From Hell,” she knows that an Oscar is probably beyond her reach. Still, this year, as in all years, Oscar night will cause her pangs of regret.
“It just depresses me,” said the actress, who has perched for so long on the precipice of real fame that she coined her own wry nickname: “the A-list B-girl.” A petite brunette, Ms. Wuhrer has worked with Jack Nicholson and Sean Penn in the art-house film “The Crossing Guard.” She’s been in mainstream fare like the 1997 scary snake picture “Anaconda,” and she got second billing in last year’s “Eight Legged Freaks,” starring David Arquette. She hoped that movie, which was produced by the team that made “Godzilla” and released by Warner Brothers, would be her big break. Instead, it tanked at the box office. So Ms. Wuhrer flew to Romania to make the straight-to-video “Hellraiser: Deader” — the seventh in a series.
“So many opportunities were right there for me,” said Ms. Wuhrer, who returned to Romania just 10 days ago to make another movie that won’t ever be screened in a theater, “The Prophecy 4.” “I thought, ‘This is the one, this is the one!’ over and over. And it doesn’t happen.”
“I’ve compromised,” she continued. “I might have taken my clothes off one too many times in movies. I never, ever, ever expect to be Gwyneth Paltrow. But still, I’ve just never understood why more people in the business don’t know who I am.”
When most people think of Hollywood, they imagine palm trees and swimming pools and movie stars with recognizable names and faces. But there is another, far less glamorous Hollywood — the one inhabited by Ms. Wuhrer and hundreds of actresses like her. This is the world of the B list, and it is meaner — and far more crowded — than the A-list fairy tale described in celebrity magazines.
This year, as Hollywood’s elite gather for what some have called Ladies’ Night at the Oscars, the largely female stars of two movies in particular — “The Hours” and “Chicago” — are expected to clean up. But what about the many struggling actresses, the ones who, in the words of one casting director, “get scale after Meg takes all the money”? Forget Malibu beach houses and $20 million paydays. In B-list Hollywood, apartments are shared, credit cards are maxed out and actors — both male and female — are thankful to work for scale in low-budget movies made especially for cable, international or straight-to-video markets.
This is a thriving pocket of the film industry. Last month, at the annual American Film Market in Santa Monica, 389 independently financed movies — a majority of them bullets-and-babes or horror pictures — were up for sale, nearly twice the number of films (190) released by major Hollywood studios in 2002. You don’t need calculus to figure out that B-movies are where a lot of the acting jobs are. But for women, especially, life on the B list is a daily test of resolve. Here, where the casting couch still gets a workout and actresses often need not apply if they won’t appear naked in films, the desire to be famous still keeps hope alive. But to talk to some of the hopefuls is to wonder, Is fame worth it?
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That question has resonated more powerfully since February, when a B-movie actress named Lana Clarkson was found fatally shot in the home of Phil Spector, the wealthy music producer, whom she had apparently met just hours before. Mr. Spector, who has worked with groups like the Beatles and the Ramones, was arrested on suspicion of killing Ms. Clarkson but has not been charged. Even as the news media rushed to analyze the erratic behavior of this once influential man, the poignant story of his lesser-known companion captured this city’s attention.
Ms. Clarkson, 40, had starred in a number of films made by the king of the B-movies, the producer and director Roger Corman. Her occasionally topless roles in films like “Amazon Women on the Moon” and “Barbarian Queen” had won her a cult following. But she had to work as a hostess at a Sunset Strip club to pay the bills. And it was at that club, the House of Blues, where the police say she met Mr. Spector the night she died.
Just days earlier, the actress had delivered a new set of photos and résumés to her agent, who was lining up auditions for television sitcoms. “We were getting ready for pilot season,” said the agent, Ray Cavaleri. “She realized she was no longer the ingénue. But she was fine with it. She said, ‘Now I can go for the comedy, go for the more character kind of roles.’”
“She had to take the job at the House of Blues because she needed the money,” Mr. Cavaleri said. “But she looked at it as a positive. She was working one of the private rooms, so she was networking, meeting the top people.” After 20 years in the business, Ms. Clarkson knew that Hollywood is all about relationships. And as a B-movie queen searching for a mainstream job, she also had to know this: She needed all the help she could get.
Just ask Fern Champion, a veteran casting director who for five years cast the television series “Beverly Hills, 90210” but now works frequently on indies with titles like “Scorcher” and “Written in Blood.” When Ms. Champion is casting a straight-to-video film, she typically receives more than 1,000 submissions from actors who would walk through fire for even a supporting role. Women over 30 are particularly hungry, Ms. Champion said.
One afternoon recently, Ms. Champion was on the phone trying to book an actress for a cable movie. She told the actress’s agent that the producers had some specific demands. “They will not make a deal with her unless there is tasteful nudity in the two shower scenes,” she said, adding, “Do you want to have the conversation with her manager about the nudity?”
She hung up, shaking her head. “We’ve offered the part to another actress with no nudity, but she has a scheduling conflict,” she said. So why was this backup actress being required to disrobe? “She appeared in Playboy — they know she’ll do it. God knows, there’s way too many unemployed ladies who just need to work.”
And all of them have movie star idols. For Lana Clarkson, it was Marilyn Monroe. For Ms. Wuhrer, Judy Garland. “When I was a little girl, I used to watch ‘That’s Entertainment!’ on my black-and-white TV in my bedroom with the door closed,” Ms. Wuhrer said. “I would cry that I wasn’t Judy Garland. I wanted to be her so bad. There’s this blind confidence of youth. You think you can do it all and you’ve got all the talent in the world. The older you get, the more you lose that.”
To help her get it back, Ms. Wuhrer’s boyfriend recently gave her a karaoke machine. “I lock myself in the apartment and pretend again to get that imagination going and have more ambition,” she said. It’s working, sort of. “When people see you as straight-to-video girl or B-movie girl, there’s a stigma attached. It’s just not fair.”
Jenny McShane loves Anne Bancroft. A striking blonde who won’t specify her age other than to acknowledge she’s in her 30’s, Ms. McShane has been in a string of straight-to-video films, most recently last year’s “Shark Attack 3: Megalodon.” Since moving to Los Angeles from the Midwest, where she was the oldest of eight children growing up on a 500-acre pig farm, she has had plenty of brushes with stardom. She was a roommate of the actress Emily Lloyd for a while, and once lived next door to Burt Young, who played Sylvester Stallone’s brother-in-law in the “Rocky” movies. The other day, she gave a friend who is a hairstylist a ride to Steve Martin’s house, and ended up in a bluegrass jam session with him — she on guitar, he on banjo.
Heady as that might sound, Ms. McShane has faced tougher situations. At 20, she was in a limousine on her way to an airport to shoot her first credited role when the movie’s producer suddenly insisted that she agree to “undisclosed nudity” (meaning anything the filmmakers wanted), or she would be replaced. Her agent at the time told her to leave the movie. Instead, she said, she agreed, but then talked the producer out of it. Since then, though, she has bared her body more than once on film.
“I’ve worked with incredible actors,” she said, ticking off a list: Michael Madsen, Keanu Reeves, James Spader, Ben Gazzara. “I worked with Don Johnson on ‘Nash Bridges.’ I work with actors who should be at the Oscars.” And she no longer has to tend bar to pay the rent.
But it’s a constant hustle. She has auditioned for 20 television pilots this season and so far has come up empty. “It’s really a name game,” she said. “Elisabeth Shue just took a pilot. So it’s hard competition.”
Ms. McShane, who used her real name, Jennifer Miller, until somebody suggested that her mother’s maiden name was catchier, has auditioned for directors like Quentin Tarantino and Cameron Crowe. But she has yet to break through. Right now, she’s hoping for a callback on a remake of “The Bionic Woman” as a television movie. Whether or not that happens, she says she won’t quit.
“I graduated fifth in my high school class,” said Ms. McShane, who noted that she had shot three movies in South Africa, two in Bulgaria, one in India, one in Canada, one in France and only one in this country. “I was National Honor Society. I know I have the intelligence to do whatever job I have to.
“I want to do this till the very end. I want to be like Katharine Hepburn.”
Tarri Markel feels the same way. Last year, as the female lead in the coming video “Air Marshal,” the 30-something actress for the first time portrayed a character who survived the entire movie. (She had been nibbled to death in “Rats” and shot in the heart in “Death Train.”) Ms. Markel, who looks like a cross between her idol, Susan Sarandon, and Sela Ward, has seen agents come and go. (She, like Ms. McShane, is agentless at the moment.) But she is happy to be her own promoter.
“In my previous job,” she said, describing the career she junked six years ago to pursue acting, “I sold $50 million of frozen shrimp a year.” Back then, she owned a four-bedroom house in the seaside community of Redondo Beach. Now she rents a two-bedroom apartment in the flats of Hollywood. She admitted that when she first began acting, “I had a little bit of that ‘Wait till you get a load of me’ attitude.”
“But I never expected anything to come easy,” she said. “And God knows, it hasn’t.”
Once, Ms. Markel said, an A-list movie director took a liking to her at an audition. He began calling her at 4 a.m. and asking her to come see his house. She declined. More recently, a B-movie producer offered her a leading role. “He said, ‘It’s yours,’ “ she recalled. Then he asked her to perform oral sex. She laughed and tried to make light of it. She didn’t want to offend him by saying no; still, she didn’t say yes. “But I have to tell you, it flits through your mind,” she said. “It’s a part. It’s $35,000 for six weeks. Well, someone else got the part. She could do it. I couldn’t.”
Ms. Markel didn’t let it get her down. “I’ll do whatever it takes — whatever hard work it takes — to succeed,” she said, counting off the acting classes and the workshops she attends. “A break could come tomorrow or six months from now or six years from now. I don’t have a time limit. Because if I did, I’d think it would happen the day after that limit expired.”
Before Sharon Stone was Sharon Stone, after all, she appeared in B-movies. So did Sandra Bullock and Ally Sheedy. Angie Harmon did cheesecake in “Baywatch” before she appeared in the television drama “Law & Order.” And just last year, Kristanna Loken, a former Norwegian model who had appeared in videos with one-word titles like “Panic” and “Gangland,” got the role of T-X/Terminatrix in the coming film “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.”
“So you just never know,” said Shana Landsburg, the casting director who put Ms. Loken in “Panic.” “Sure, you can do too many ‘Panics.’ But the bottom line is, I believe, if you’re really talented, cream rises to the top.”
Or so every B-lister wants to believe. Ms. Wuhrer, for one, has begun to tire of the dream of becoming a household name. Last year she had an epiphany, she said. She had her breast implants removed and began splitting her time between Los Angeles and New York. “I had to get out of L.A. to figure out that the reason I’m in this business is not stardom but because I really love what I do,” she said. “You do a certain number of movies, like I have, and, thank God, you’ll always be able to get a movie financed. You’ll always get at least $100,000 per movie. You’ll always make a living.
“I’m proud of the career I have. I have my own section in some video stores. But what I really want is to do a good job — really work hard at something — and have somebody go, ‘Hey, not only is she good, but we can let her in the club a little bit.’”