Brave Page 9

  They immediately put me in a Pauly Shore movie because I needed money for rent. Sure, I had done my first lead in a film, which I think people assume means you’re rich, but I wasn’t paid enough money to be able to afford more than a tiny apartment, which I shared with this girl Julie, who was six foot one with short platinum-blond hair, a loud Australian who sounded like a giant toucan bird, squawking all the time. I loved her.

  Being that I was now an actor, I kept waiting to feel like I had caught the “acting bug.” I read about other actors and their passion for the craft, and I kept waiting for that passion to hit me. I loved film so much, I loved how sets worked and that we could make things that affected people and shaped minds, but the bug wasn’t coming.

  The indignities that went along with being an actress, I resented greatly. You know what it’s like to go on a job interview and the stress/discomfort that goes along with it? Now, imagine that in your job interview you’re required to break down and sob or laugh maniacally, all while looking sexy. Imagine being asked to do humiliating things like stand and turn so they can see your body, a group of men staring at your ass and tits but pretending it’s about the role.

  Auditioning for me was always traumatic. Like that hallway scene from when I was a child in the cult. Here’s how it would go: I walk down a hallway, my heart is already racing, and I feel short of breath. There are maybe ten women on one side, ten women on the other, on little folding chairs under fluorescent lights. Everyone is in a teeny dress and heels or trying to look like the part, whatever it may be. I feel a surge of embarrassment being there with my hand out asking for the powers that be to choose me. I hate it. I hate every minute of it. The women give me the once-over and try to vibe me out. It feels like my skin is being pulled off with needles because I’m in a cattle call and I can see what I’m up against.

  The night before, I worked hard to memorize the two scenes from a script that some mediocre asshole guy wrote and thought was great. Whatever, I need the job. I’m required to scream and wail for the part. I’m sitting outside in the hallway now with these ten to twenty other actresses and I can hear the muffled screams from inside the casting room. I try to tune the wailer out. After waiting an hour or so, it’s my turn. They call me in. My heart starts racing even faster. My hands sweat, and my chest is turning red; I can feel the color splotches rising.

  I walk into a small boxlike room; there’s a camera set up to film me. There are five men in the room with a female casting director and the assistant operating the video camera. They’re sitting in a semicircle staring at me. Hideous fluorescent lighting once again. I wonder how anyone ever gets hired under lights like these. I say hello to everybody in the tiny bit of time I have to impress them. My hands shake the script papers I’m holding. The reality is that behind the scenes they most likely already know who they’re going to cast. They have offers out to stars while I’m in auditioning; they keep the auditioning going to have leverage and maybe a backup plan. I know that they’re looking for a bigger name. I still go on the off chance that if something doesn’t work out, maybe they’ll pick me.

  I hold my script scene papers in my shaking hand in case I forget the words. I proceed to do the scene. I, too, start wailing and crying at the appropriate moment. I wonder if everybody else out there is thinking the same thing as I’m thinking, but then I think maybe not because maybe they want to be here. Being that I was the accidental actor, I don’t want to be here. I find it excruciating, very embarrassing, and I resent being treated like cattle, just one of many. I have tears rolling down my cheeks. They ask me to do the second scene again. Is that a good sign? “Thanks, Rose, good to see you.” The casting director dismisses me. I shake her hand and say, “Thanks. Okay, bye.” All that crying and screaming, I’m just going to shove back down inside of my body, my poor body that doesn’t know what’s going on or why I dredged up intense feelings.

  Now I have to walk the gauntlet down the hallway past the other actresses staring at me. I seethe inside. I walk down the street looking for a trash bin to ditch my script pages. I always throw the script pages away as soon as possible because I don’t want to be seen as an actress walking down the street; I don’t want to add to my walk of shame. In two days I have another audition and I’ll have to do it again.

  I was sent in to audition for the role of Tatum Riley on an upcoming horror film, Scream. I was hoping they wouldn’t lay me on top of anybody this time. Thankfully, it was just the usual screaming, sobbing bit, and I did well enough. I got a call from my agent and was offered $50,000 for the part. Holy cow! That was the most money I had ever heard of coming my way. Protocol would have been for my lawyer to counteroffer $100,000, and then I’d wind up getting $75,000, but my lawyer went back at $250,000. This so infuriated the head of the studio, he made me retest (a filmed audition) for the role three more times, even though I’d already had an offer. To me, it felt like the studio head wanted to humiliate me and penalize me for my lawyer’s pissing contest move. That’s what they do. Punish the girl for the actions of the representative.

  Before I could retest, they hired Neve Campbell, an actress with dark hair. I thought, Oh, God. They’re never going to hire me now, because I have dark hair, too. Those are the rules. I mentioned to the blond producer that I was thinking of going blond. Everyone’s eyes lit up, ding, ding, ding, because you know, you can only have multiple females on-screen if they have different hair colors, because otherwise they think the audience is too stupid to tell them apart.

  I had no desire to be blond, but I knew that was the only way I’d get hired. One of the producers promptly took me to her hairdresser who turned me into a midwestern blond. My plan worked. I was officially offered the part, but for less than all my counterparts because of said money-pissing contest. After paying my agent, manager, and lawyer, I wound up probably with $12,500. But it was still the most money I had ever seen.

  My character died in Scream, but I wanted her to be more than a disposable young woman in a horror film. I was determined to make people feel for my character, Tatum Riley. I did not want her to go down without a fight. I wanted her to be memorable as a human.

  No one discusses how disconnected people are when they watch horror films. God forbid you watch someone die awfully and you feel something. If you don’t think this translates to real-life numbness, you’re deluding yourself. Numbing yourself to violence against women comes early and if it’s not coming to you at your home, and I hope it’s not, then it’s coming to you through TV and film. What I thought the original Scream did very well was to make you care about each character. We weren’t disposable.

  I’m proud of creating an indelible character who had one of the all-time most memorable deaths on-screen.

  I am also proud of doing my own stunt work in the famous garage door death scene, the scene where Tatum dies. I ended up with bruises from my shoulders to my waist, but I knew that it would look better.

  When I arrived on the set of Scream, who should I see? The same old creepy guy from my job as an extra on Class of 1999. The guy who molested me. He saw me and said, “I know you from somewhere. Don’t I know you?” My heart started racing. But I had blond hair, so he didn’t quite recognize me. He got replaced a week into filming, which made me incredibly happy.

  Aside from that, the set of Scream was a refuge for me. Wes Craven was a special and complex man. He grew up speaking in tongues in a Baptist church. He came from Ohio, where I think he was a teacher, and he left with his young children or child and his wife, moved to New York City, became a taxi driver, and made his dreams come true. I totally respect that. He treated us actors like his equals, and it was a very special environment. Wes Craven was so kind, a true gentleman. I thought all my movies with big directors were going to be like this one. I was wrong.

  We all kind of knew we were making something sort of magical, but we couldn’t anticipate that it would become the phenomenon it did. Especially not me who knew nothing about box office numbers
and things like that.

  I got a puppy, a Boston terrier, Bug, a week before I went to film Scream. Bug was an extraordinarily trippy dog. She was on sale at the Beverly Center, a big ugly mall in Los Angeles. I walked by one day, and I saw this tiny black-and-white thing with two giant eyes going different directions, her paws stuck through the metal cage wires. I noticed her price, and that she had been put on sale twice, and I thought, I understand what it’s like to be discounted. This is the dog for me.

  Wes Craven fell in love with Bug, as did I. She grew up on sets. She understood that she had to be quiet during takes. She was flawless. She would be perfectly still and not even jangle her collar. She was photographed many times, with my boy dog, Fester, another Boston I got a couple of months later. They were photographed by Bruce Weber, Ellen von Unwerth, David LaChapelle, some of the biggest photographers ever. Bug was quite a catch on the set, let me tell you. She added that extra “oomph” of weirdness.

  Shortly after Scream I went to the dentist. I was lying prone, with my mouth open as wide as it could go, in a fancy Beverly Hills dental office when the dentist stared into my mouth and declared: “You do not have movie star teeth.” And I believed him, even though at this point, I was, technically, starring in movies.

  As if I wanted some Hollywood bullshit teeth like his, with fake overly white Chiclets gnashing at the prospect of profiting off me? That was what my better self was saying, but how do you keep that better self intact when everything in the Hollywood system, in the media world, in the training you get as a young woman in this society tells you to do away with your realness?

  The idea of not having movie star teeth stuck. I was sure when Scream came out, my crooked teeth were going to look five feet tall on-screen. At the premiere it was all I could focus on. My fucked-up teeth. I should’ve pointed out that I was a movie star even with my crooked teeth, but I didn’t go that route. I started to straighten my teeth, something I actually regret doing. Most especially because it was an implanted idea and not one of my own. The bullshit brainwashing had begun in earnest.

  The bigger picture is that I was the one whose face was going to be blown up and sent around the world, to influence the rest of the population to look homogenized. Little did I know that by being on-screen, I was a stand-in for all women. That was my role. I just didn’t know it yet. And my straightened teeth were part of that messaging.

  DEATH OF SELF

  Most people have certain landmark experiences or events that become major milestones: high school, prom, college, wedding, that kind of stuff. Mine were truncated into an on-screen version. Scream was my version of college. And if Scream was college for me, Jawbreaker, which came next, was going backward into high school. It would be the only prom I would ever attend.

  In fact, my character, Courtney Alice Shayne, doesn’t just go to prom in an amazing gown, she wins prom queen. It’s all going well until someone plays a recording of Courtney confessing to murder over the loudspeakers, and then the entire student body turns on her, pelting her with their corsages and cursing her.

  So that was my prom. I loved the character I played. She was amoral, but I think sociopaths don’t tend to be aware of the fact that they’re sociopaths. So she just thought, What’s the big deal?

  I saw a classic film where the actress Gene Tierney played a sociopathic character. The film was called Leave Her to Heaven. In that, she pushes a little kid in a wheelchair off a cliff. When her husband says, “Why did you do that to Timmy?” she responds: “But darling, we needed more time alone together.” I always thought that was bizarrely hilarious, and so I based Courtney Alice Shayne on her, a character that was my tip of the hat to classic Hollywood. With Darren Stein, the great writer and director of Jawbreaker, I turned Courtney Shayne into an iconic character. The other girls did a tremendous job in that movie as well.

  In 1997 I had started doing another movie, Phantoms, made by the same studio that did Scream, Miramax. While still filming I was sent back to the Sundance Film Festival in late January. This time I was to be the belle of the ball. I had four movies at Sundance that year: one short and three films.

  One of my films at Sundance was called Going All the Way. It’s set in the 1950s, a beautiful little film, with a great production designer, great costume designer, and a great director. Jeremy Davies, the lead actor with whom I was friendly before we started shooting, was in it, too. I had to do a topless scene with him: in the scene I’m trying to turn him on and he can’t get it up. I’d done topless scenes in Doom Generation and I thought this time it would be easier since I knew the actor previously, but it wound up being way more difficult. It was harder to detach from my body as I had done during Doom Generation, and I felt it this time. I cried after filming the scene.

  At the Sundance premiere for Going All the Way, I took my seat in the theater, my heart racing with nerves as I would shortly be seeing myself on-screen, something that I couldn’t get used to. My manager, Jill, who was seated next to me, whispered in my ear, telling me the head of the famed studio Miramax was sitting behind me in the theater. Miramax, owned by Disney, was the superpowerful company that owned the company that produced Scream and was producing the movie I was currently starring in with Ben Affleck, Phantoms. In fact, it was my second film with Affleck because he was also in Going All the Way. The lights dimmed in the theater. I had seen the Studio Head’s name in the credits of Scream but had never seen his face. I didn’t want to turn around and make it obvious that I was looking, so I kept my eyes forward. I went back to watching the movie. The topless scene came on and I wanted the ground to swallow me up. It had been really hard shooting that scene in the first place and I sat there remembering how I cried after filming it. I slid farther down in my seat. I noticed my manager turning and nodding in the direction of the Studio Head. When I replay the chain of events in my head, I’ll always be chilled by that nod. I wondered what the nod meant for twenty years. Now I know.

  By now we all know the Monster’s name, but I have made a choice not to use it. I do not like the Monster’s name, and though I know it, and maybe you know it, I refuse to have his name in my book.

  When the film ended, the Studio Head was gone; he must’ve left early. Jill was superexcited when she told me that the Studio Head had summoned me to a business meeting the next day—a 10:00 a.m. meeting at the fanciest hotel in Park City, the Stein Eriksen. I was to meet him in the restaurant. Later on I would wonder whether the meeting got set up while we were watching the movie. Jill told me the Studio Head was a known star-maker, that this was my big chance to make a great impression. I told her since I already was in two movies produced by him, it was a safe bet I already had made a good impression and asked why I needed to go to the meeting if I was already employed. But she insisted the meeting was necessary and that I go. I said yes and the meeting was added to my already packed schedule the next day. Jill told me that this man wielded an incredible amount of “power” in Hollywood; I could sense it by the way she was breathlessly talking about him. I was so new to the industry’s upper echelon, I didn’t know anything about this man or what exactly his kind of power meant. I didn’t know what so many already knew, that he was a predator and I was walking into a trap—a trap that started the twenty-year conspiracy of collusion.

  The next morning at Sundance, I got up early, ready for my meeting with him, before the full day of press I had to do for the other three films I had at Sundance. I was overwhelmed just thinking about my to-do list, but I figured with Jill the manager at my side, I’d be able to pull it off.

  I have thought a lot about the day my life got hijacked by evil. There was an MTV camera crew following me around that day. “A Day in the Life of Rose McGowan” was the theme. The MTV crew was to wait outside the front of the hotel until I returned from my meeting. I’ve kicked myself through the years because before I went in to this fateful “meeting,” I turned to the MTV camera and, with a big genuine smile, said, “I think my life is finally getting easie
r.”

  I thought since I was now achieving a little financial stability and was in nicer environments, that it meant life was easing up a bit. I was tired of surviving, I was tired of fear, I was tired of pain, I was tired of hurting. I wanted to soar. I wanted to fly. I wanted to be free. Instead I got a prison sentence.

  I waved good-bye to the camera, walked into the hotel, and made my way to the restaurant. I said a chipper “Good morning!” to the grim-faced restaurant host. He told me that the Studio Head was stuck on a call, working from the office in his suite, and that I was meant to go up and wait. I smiled at the host and thanked him, but he turned away and didn’t smile back. I remember thinking, Well, he’s not very friendly.

  I found the room number and knocked on the door. Two male assistants opened the door. I offered them another chipper “Good morning!” The men said nothing and looked down. I thought, Well, gosh. They’re not so friendly either. They pushed past me silently and left me alone to walk in the room.

  When most people hear “hotel room,” they imagine a bed, dresser, and little bathroom. The Monster’s hotel room was the entire floor of the hotel. Probably about three thousand square feet, like an average- to large-size house, definitely not the small hotel room the mind conjures.

  I went inside, and into the largest living room I had ever seen, and there my boss was, the Studio Head himself, on one end of a huge couch, talking loudly on the phone. He gestured for me to sit down. He kept talking loudly on the phone while I waited for about five minutes for him to finish his call. I had time to study him. I was repulsed immediately.

  The Studio Head was not attractive in the least; let’s just say it would be the understatement of the century to say that he would never win a beauty pageant. Well, maybe a beauty pageant in hell. He might win the award for most monstrous. He’s a very large person, vertically and horizontally, oily skinned, his face pockmarked, with a bulbous fleshy nose and liver lips. His right eye squinches up more than the left, giving him a lopsided look. He reminded me of a melted pineapple.