The conference per se was over today, and most of the women were off back to wherever they had come from, but a few weren't scheduled to fly out until Monday morning. I had been talking to the two women who were staying with me about a film they should see, and they wound up inviting a bunch of the other women from the conference over to my house so they could all watch it.
It was a pretty cool experience, because the film in question was Rosanna Arquette's documentary "Searching for Debra Winger." In the film Rosanna interviews a few actresses she knows about what it's like to work in the movies, with an emphasis on the question of, "Can you do what you do and still have a relationship and raise a family?" It's actually a stunning film, because the women she is talking to about this are: Patricia Arquette, Rosanna Arquette, Emmanuelle Béart, Katrin Cartlidge, Laura Dern, Jane Fonda, Teri Garr, Whoopi Goldberg, Melanie Griffith, Daryl Hannah, Salma Hayek, Holly Hunter, Diane Lane, Kelly Lynch, Julianna Margulies, Chiara Mastroianni, Samantha Mathis, Frances McDormand, Catherine O'Hara, Julia Ormond, Gwyneth Paltrow, Martha Plimpton, Charlotte Rampling, Vanessa Redgrave, Theresa Russell, Meg Ryan, Ally Sheedy, Sharon Stone, Tracey Ullman, JoBeth Williams, Debra Winger, Alfre Woodard, and Robin Wright Penn. It was a nice film, and the women watching it at my house seemed to appreciate it very much, so I thought I'd mention it for the film freaks here. Very fascin- ating insights into the biz of movies and the toll it takes on actresses, and the reasons they put up with that. The whole film is worth watching just for the sequence in which Jane Fonda -- who at this point had not acted in 12 years -- talks about the 10 moments out of 49 movies that made it all worthwhile. Absolute magic. She nails it, and ups the score to 11 moments.
