Besides, Davis would much rather talk about her latest film, which was scheduled to open in theaters this summer. But now she can find no one interested in interviewing her about her adaptation of novelist Tim Sandlin's Skipped Parts, because this month, the $2-million teen tale starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Drew Barrymore and young comers Bug Hall and Mischa Barton (the poisoned girl in The Sixth Sense) is being released not in theaters but on the new-release shelves of your local video store. For Davis, who's been obsessed with making this movie for nearly a decade, it's the closest thing to having it not released at all.
The film that establishes Davis as more than a director of the frothy and frivolous--her filmography includes Adam Sandler's Billy Madison, Chris Rock's hip-hop mockumentary CB4 and the stoner comedy Half Baked--is being treated like the ugly stepchild no parent wants, which isn't so far from the truth. That's because the studio that made Skipped Parts isn't the one releasing it: Last fall, Trimark, which financed Skipped Parts, merged with the Canadian-based Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., the latter of which helped distribute this year's critical favorite Amores Perros--ironically, a movie Miramax passed on. And, quite simply, Lions Gate has little interest in doling out the cash to promote a movie it has nothing to do with.
"Once we merged companies, we didn't have as many slots for releases because we combined the theatrical divisions," says Trimark founder and CEO Mark Amin, who's now Lions Gate's vice chairman and one of its largest stockholders. "Skipped Parts is a movie I like, but at the end of the day, after we merged the companies, we left it up to the distribution people to decide which movies go out theatrically. I was a little disappointed, but it's the reality of the business. Unless you're sure the movie is going to do business--and we thought it would get mixed reviews and that it wasn't the kind of movie you could sell simply by advertising and wide release--you'll do better to release it on video."
And so Skipped Parts gets skipped over, despite the fact Sandlin's novels bear love notes from the likes of Shoeless Joe author W.P. Kinsella, Larry McMurtry and Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon ("Angst has never been so charming," she offered for the back of Skipped Parts). And despite the fact it's a very good movie--a film about children, aimed at their parents.
"It's so sad," Davis says, sounding over the phone like a young girl who was dumped the night before prom. "It's one of those things. After you finish a movie you hand it over, and there is so little involvement after that. I can call as many times as I want or petition or do every festival and talk to every interviewer or whatever, but at a certain point there's nothing I can do."
Skipped Parts is a strikingly faithful adaptation of Sandlin's hysterical, oft-heartrending 1991 novel about a 13-year-old boy's coming of age in the Wyoming wilderness--The Catcher in the Rye, set in the frigid nowhere. The book was the first offering in Sandlin's GroVont Trilogy, so named for the fictional town to which Sam Callahan's (played in the film by Fort Worth native Hall) grandfather has banished the boy and his 28-year-old mother, Lydia (Leigh), after yet another one of Lydia's publicly humiliating escapades (she's a drunk and a sleep-around, and Sam's less her son than baby sitter feeding her bottles of Dr Pepper and gin). It's also a coming-of-age tale: Sam learns about sex by practicing on local girl Maurey Pierce (Barton), the only other kid in GroVont who shares Sam's passion for literature and the skipped parts of movies--ya know, the sex scenes. "We're just friends helping each other learn a new skill," Maurey explains, before insisting, to no avail, "You better not squirt."
