`Foxfire' Heroine Is A Female James Dean

The heroine of "Foxfire," based on Joyce Carol Oates' novel about adolescent female bonding in the 1950s, is a charismatic drifter named Legs Sadovsky.

Jon Voight's talented daughter, Angelina Jolie, plays her as a seductive outsider, updated to the 1990s, who empowers four contemporary Portland teenagers to take control of their lives.

"She's a female James Dean," said Paige Simpson, who co-produced the movie with Mike Figgis, and brought it to the Women in Film festival here earlier this year. It returns Friday for a regular run.

"She makes you wonder if maybe there's something you're missing. There has never been a `Legs' in my life, but she's kind of a mythical character, that `Shane' thing."

Legs develops an especially dynamic relationship with the movie's stable heroine, Maddy Wirtz, played by newcomer Hedy Burress.

"I never knew a drifter character like this," said Burress, who accompanied Simpson to the festival. "Nothing about Legs is comfortable or safe. She isn't soft or complacent.

"But I did know people who asked me who I was, who I think I am. They made me re-evaluate everything, think about my values. People tend to homogenize teens, to say they're all like this or this. Being in high school, my biggest motivator was standing out. I wanted to be unique, to become more and more aware of my own strength."

"Feminism is now starting earlier with girls," said Simpson. "I'm 40 and I missed that. It was still about nail polish when I was in school."

She admitted that changing the time period did lessen the radical nature of the characters' actions: "What those girls (in the book) did in the '50s was shocking, though it's hard to find something shocking for them to do today."

Simpson and Figgis also co-produced "Leaving Las Vegas," which earned a best-director Oscar nomination for Figgis earlier this year. They shot the two pictures simultaneously, though Figgis was so tied up with directing "Vegas" that Simpson was more closely involved.

"I went back and forth between Portland and Las Vegas," she said. "The book is set in upstate New York, but that was too cold. Our choice was down to Nashville and Portland, and Portland won."

Fresh talent worked

Although Jolie had already starred in last year's "Hackers," most of the other girls in the cast were inexperienced. An acting coach was on the set at all times.

"Taking on one new girl is one thing," said Simpson. "Taking on four is really a lot." But she thinks the freshness works for the picture.

"We were fighting against the 90210 look. We wanted five girls who wouldn't ordinarily be seen together."

Casting the adults, especially a predatory teacher and one girl's disturbed father, was more difficult: "Bigger names shied away from that, because they're not shown in a terribly favorable light. But Goldie's dad has his own problems, and the teacher isn't a stock villain. He's a funny guy with this little problem, which makes him scarier than an obvious child molester."

Six years ago, Figgis and Simpson were working together at TriStar Pictures when they first looked at Oates' book.

"Joyce has lots of things she's working on at the same time, and this was one of them," said Simpson. "It hadn't been published yet, and Mike wanted to direct it. Several critics had suggested that he was a misogynist, and I thought it would be great to show that he could direct women."

Eventually, however, Annette Haywood-Carter was chosen to make her feature-film debut with the piece. Her previous directing experiences include a 30-minute short, "The Foot Shooting Party," starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and an episode of "seaQuest." She also spent 10 years as a script supervisor for Bruce Beresford and Renny Harlin.

"The book was written by a woman, it's about women, and at some point it was decided to have a woman direct it," said Simpson. "There's a difference you get with a woman director working with young women. It's a film about women helping other women and finding out about themselves."

TriStar decided it wasn't interested in the project, but a female executive at Rysher Entertainment jumped in to save it.

"She went to her male bosses and pushed it," said Simpson. "It's certainly more offbeat than anything else the company was doing. There are all these male bonding films, but I wasn't seeing girl bonding."

Working with Oates turned out to be remarkably simple.

"She has no interest in writing scripts," said Simpson. "I did check with her to see if making the story contemporary would be a problem. She said no, as long as the spirit remained.

"We offered her first-class plane tickets to come visit the filming, but she said she was teaching full time and writing on several projects. She is nonstop. She just said, `Good luck to you.' "

Simpson added that she sometimes feels more in tune with the American films of the 1970s. The action-oriented foreign market is now so important that it affects what kinds of movies get made, and her more literary films are not always designed for that market. Her other producing credits include Frank Oz's upcoming "Ump" and the 1991 movie of Richard Ford's "Bright Angel."

"I always go to the novelist to get approval," she said. "With `Bright Angel' we didn't change a word. Richard would not let us. But I like the kind of situation where I can say to a writer, `I prefer to take these characters and these moments out and work with them.'

"I don't see why screenwriters get paid $500,000 to adapt a John Grisham or a Tom Clancy book. They're already films. I don't think it's a challenge."