Kitchen Comedy on Location Crimes of the Heart Goes

By John Skow

"I'd only heard of one of them before, that Stacy Staysak or somethin'. * Someone told me she played in Farmer's Daughter. Celebrities are not unheard of here. Every year, Wilmington has an Azalea Parade, and one year they had Buddy Ebsen. He was on Beverly Hillbillies. I loved that program."

--Jim McMillion, 72, driver of one of two taxis in Southport, N.C.

They recognize Film Producer Freddie Fields and his friends in the Polo Lounge, but Fields is a long way from Beverly Hills, on patrol in deepest North Carolina. With him are Australian Director Bruce Beresford (Breaker Morant, Tender Mercies) and several indisputable movie stars--notably Diane Keaton, Sissy Spacek and Jessica Lange--in addition to the assorted children, nannies, pets, significant others, caterers, crew members, drivers, accountants, studio biggies, flacks, journalists, rent-a-cops, cutpurses and dancing bears that accumulate when a film company hits the road. Fields, Beresford and the rest have come to North Carolina for the filming of Beth Henley's movie version of her Pulitzer-prizewinning stage play Crimes of the Heart. On Broadway, Crimes was a simple, one-set, six-character kitchen comedy about three eccentric sisters in Mississippi. Shot here (Mississippi was rejected, perhaps because it looks too much like North Carolina, perhaps because Studio Head Dino De Laurentiis has his headquarters 45 minutes away, in Wilmington), the film version will cost about $9 million, a low number by current accounting.

One reason for the bargain price is that Fields is getting his money's worth from Jewell Floyd. She is 48, a round, silver-haired woman who operated a computer terminal for a nearby construction firm before she answered an ad for extras. By now she has worked four days, 7 a.m. to 6:15 p.m. The pay is only minimum wage, she says, standard for the local people hired as extras, "but they feed us out of this world. And I do feel like a celebrity. I'd do it again, yes, ma'am. In a heartbeat." Today she has played a townswoman meeting a bus. Just now she is watching another scene being shot and reshot: Sissy Spacek, as the youngest MaGrath sister, Babe, looking on forlornly as her 15- year-old black lover Willie Jay and his dog Dog, each wearing sunglasses as disguise, leave town on the same bus. (Babe, who is impulsive, has shot her nasty husband Zackery, leaving him perforated but not terminated, and he has threatened to do bad things to Willie Jay.) The dog actor, whose real name is Casey, is supposed to turn and look at Spacek as the bus starts. Casey will not turn. "Today they brought a lady's kitty cat to try to capture Casey's attention," reports Floyd. "I don't know if they've gotten it yet. I didn't hear them holler, 'Wrap.' "

Southport, where all of these dogged takes are going on, has been occupied territory since early May. It is a pretty and formerly sleepy little resort and fishing town, with a white clapboard church and live oak trees shading wooden houses with deep-set front porches. Town elders were unenthusiastic about becoming part of Mississippi, as the script stipulates, and having the town square blockaded. Then it was pointed out that the film company would spend a lot of money in town--$3 million or more is the current guess. Done. Once the deal was cut, the production company rented a fiber-glass statue of a Confederate soldier to put in the town square. Fields invited 300 local dignitaries to a cocktail party, and the county manager threw a clambake for the film people.

Translation from stage play to film meant opening it up, in movie jargon --adding exterior scenes--but the center of the action is still the kitchen of a batty old Victorian house belonging to the sisters' dying grandfather. The company bought a nondescript house on Southport's North Caswell Street and added $200,000 worth of Victorian folderol: two towers, a gazebo, a side porch, green shutters and purple-and-yellow stained-glass windows.

The plot resembles the house, an outrageous, turreted wonder. Lenny MaGrath (Keaton) is the oldest sister, unmarried, moody, leery of men because of a "shrunken ovary." Meg (Lange), the flamboyant middle sister, is a minor- league cabaret singer whose recent employment has been in a dog-food company. Babe, the youngest, has that little problem with the husband she shot wisely but not well. Meg tells cheerful lies to Old Grandaddy and worries later that when he finds out the truth, he will lapse into a coma. Babe and Lenny laugh so hard at this that they can hardly spit out the words to tell her that Grandaddy, who has just had another stroke--"Oh, stop! Please! Ha, ha, ha!"--already is in a coma.

This is precarious stuff, difficult to play at just the right edge of hysteria. Director Beresford, a big, comfortable, good-humored man, nudges the looniness in the proper direction. He is the right man for the job, Lange says, partly because "he really likes women. He enjoys their energy." The three actresses, each of whom has won an Academy Award, did not know one another before Crimes. They have maintained separate lives off the set. Lange lives with Playwright-Actor Sam Shepard, who plays her former lover in the film, their six-month-old daughter Hannah and Lange's five-year-old daughter Shura, whose father is Dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. Spacek moved into a house with her husband Jack Fisk and their three-year-old daughter Schuyler. Keaton has a house on the beach.

Still, says Lange, a friendly intimacy has developed. "No one has any desperate need to be center stage. We've all been there." She notes: "I don't believe in living and becoming the character off screen. I find that a little sophomoric. But your mannerisms and speech are affected. The two older sisters, for example, are tremendously protective toward Babe, little Babe. Diane and I treat Sissy the same way." Spacek says that Babe "taps a real part of me. The side of me that's Babe got me into a lot of trouble in school. Teachers couldn't get me to shut up. I have so much fun playing her that sometimes I get carried away. Watching myself at dailies, I realize I have to pull it down." Keaton, still the lovable tangle of insecurities she played in Annie Hall, worried at first about her Mississippi accent, and says, "Phoo" or "Oh, no, no, no" to herself when she is not pleased with a take. Her habitual air of distraction seems to manufacture comedy, even off the set. In a Southport restaurant, she says, a local fellow asked her to dance, and she declined. "Why?" said he, "I don't have any holes in my socks." And then, she goes on helplessly, he took off his shoes to prove it.

With the shooting in Southport down to the last few days, Beresford is pleased but cautious: "It's all just puzzle fragments until you put it together." He will solve the puzzle somehow in August in Los Angeles. Crimes will be released in December. The house on North Caswell Street is to be sold. Southport's mayor has asked that it be accorded landmark status.

With reporting by Elaine Dutka/Southport