`Gas Food Lodging' Echoes Director's Own Life

Another bright spot from this year's Seattle International Film Festival is coming back to town.

"Gas Food Lodging," Allison Anders' character-rich tale of three women surviving in a barren New Mexico town, opens Friday for a regular run at the Harvard Exit. Produced for just $1.3 million by I.R.S. Releasing, it's yet another independent film that might have bypassed theaters and gone straight to video if not for the support of several influential critics.

Earlier this month, The New York Times' Janet Maslin compared it to "The Last Picture Show" and wrote that the script was "expertly balanced between quiet despair and a sense of the miraculous." Variety found it "fresh and unfettered," while The Village Voice's Georgia Brown praised Anders for her "original, indigenous style. What initially seems banal becomes downright affecting as Anders' intentions clarify."

Loosely based on a novel by Richard Peck, "Don't Look and It Won't Hurt," Anders' screenplay is also drawn partly from her own life as a single mother of two teenage daughters. In the movie, Brooke Adams plays a truck-stop waitress who has been abandoned by her husband (James Brolin) and raises her daughters, Shade (Fairuza Balk) and Trudi (Ione Skye), in a cramped trailer.

"The script is very different from the book," Anders said during her trip to the festival. "It's a wonderful book, especially for young girls, and I tried to keep the tone of the narration. The girl who's narrating the book does it in such a pure way that she doesn't accurately perceive what's going on.

"When I read the book, I thought, `This is my life, I can't believe I didn't write this.' It really appealed to me. Peck is a lot like Raymond Carver, whom I love. But the book is set in 1968, and things have changed radically for women since then."

Anders ended up creating all the male characters except the father and she changed the names of all the women. The narrator is the younger of the daughters, Shade, who goes to the movies a lot, nurses a rich imagination and has a crush on a show-biz-crazy boy who is probably gay (played by Skye's real-life brother, Donovan Leitch). Like some small towns in Eastern Washington, the local theater shows nothing but Mexican movies.

"If Shade goes to movies, we wondered, `What would she go to?' " Anders said. "If they were mall movies, we'd blow our whole budget paying for film clips. But we figured she was near the border and she'd go to Mexican films. I didn't know much about Mexican movies when we started, but once I started really watching them I realized there was this golden era of Mexican cinema.

"The place became a temple for Shade to learn about herself," she added. "Those scenes are not necessarily realistic, because no one's in the theater with her, but the images are so powerful, Mexican culture is so expressive - they're so out there with their feelings. For a young girl it's perfect. I never grew up with any of that."

Anders ended up casting actresses who knew something about their screen roles: "I had no idea that Fairuza and Ione were both raised by a single mother, but I cast real intuitively. I find that I inevitably cast people who have something in their experiences that I've hooked into."

Adams, who is also a single mother, is a friend Anders has been wanting to work with ever since she saw "Days of Heaven" 14 years ago. Skye, who usually plays bland teen-goddess roles, was delighted to get the role of the bitter, promiscuous older sister.

Balk was the last person to read for her part. Before she turned up, Anders admitted, she was ready to compromise because "we did have a good actress but she couldn't do Shade as I had written her."

As for Leitch, who gets to play the flamboyant boy who's obsessed with Olivia Newton John: "Most of the actors auditioning did over-the-top Christian Slater things. It was obnoxious. But Donovan did this magic monologue just like he believed it."

The movie includes a Newton John song, but to save money, Anders was forced to fake it: "We couldn't get her actual recording. We rerecorded it, and Olivia Newton John liked it. Everyone else but the record companies understand."

Although "Gas Food Lodging" marks Anders' solo directing debut, she co-directed the 1987 cult film, "Border Radio," with Dean Lent and Kurt Voss: "We had a unified focus on what we wanted that film to be, but I couldn't put any personal stuff in there. A lot of people thought it was a documentary."

Her next movie will be a drama about Latino gang members who live outside Echo Park. It's a long way from the Super 8 film she made to impress Wim Wenders earlier in her career at UCLA Film School.

"When I first contacted him, I was this fanatical fan who came out of nowhere," she said. "I wrote all these letters after seeing `Alice in the Cities,' which is the Wenders film that most impressed me. My Super 8 film, `Nobody Home,' was an homage - that French word for stealing. Wim Wenders knew that and he appreciated it."

Eventually Wenders hired her as a production assistant on "Paris, Texas," and she ended up running dialogue with Harry Dean Stanton, who plays a catatonic character in the film. A victim of childhood sexual abuse, Anders was herself catatonic as a teenager, and she and Stanton discussed the experience at length. He later gave her credit in press interviews he did for the film.

"It was the first time I realized my own painful personal experience could have some value," Anders said. "But I hated working on movies as part of the crew, and I never did it again. As a result I'm very sympathetic to my crews. I know what they're going through."