Pam Grier Has Eye On Life After `Jackie Brown' Role

LOS ANGELES - The first time Pam Grier met Quentin Tarantino, she was surprised to see her bad, Afro'd self staring back at her from a poster on his wall.

Tarantino, whose affection for 1970s blaxploitation movies such as "Foxy Brown," in which Grier starred, is now reflected in his new film, "Jackie Brown," in which Grier stars, obviously knew more about Grier than she knew about the motormouthed moviemaker who had asked her for a meeting.

"I said, `Did you put that up because I was coming?' I mean, I figured maybe it was a gag or something," recalls Grier. "And he said, `I was going to take it down because you were coming.' "

Despite the fact that Tarantino spent most of the meeting fawning over Grier, who had pretty much disappeared from the mainstream movie radar screen, he ended up offering the role he had imagined for her in "Pulp Fiction" to Rosanna Arquette.

"But he said, `Don't worry, I want to work with you bad, we'll find something.' Then I saw him a couple of years ago at the Science Fiction Hall of Fame Awards, and he said, `Oh, I've got this great idea and I'm going to call you.' And I said, `OK, but do it before my teeth fall out and my breasts sag, OK? I don't have that long.' "

Obviously, he made that call on time, because Pam Grier's teeth are intact and her breasts and everything else appear to not only be defying gravity, but time itself. At 48, Pam Grier finds herself poised in the John Travolta Pole Position, a '70s star whose '90s career is almost certain to be reignited by her performance in "Jackie Brown."

And while the movie, which Tarantino has freely adapted from Elmore Leonard's novel "Rum Punch," is unlikely to have the same impact on the culture that "Pulp Fiction" enjoyed, it has already done its work for Grier. Her eerily assured performance as an airline stewardess trying to outmaneuver both her gangster employer (Samuel L. Jackson) and the ATF agent (Michael Keaton) out to nail him has made her the talk of an extremely talky town.

"Umm, let's see, I've met with Luc Besson, who made `The Fifth Element' about his new movie, and Larry Kasdan (`The Big Chill,' `The Accidental Tourist'), and I've had some interest in the three scripts that I wrote, as well as this television series I created. It's a good concept, but now I don't know if I'm going to have the time it would take to commit to something like that. I may have to get somebody else to star in it."

Tarantino says he never thought of anybody else to star in "Jackie Brown."

"When I was reading `Rum Punch,' Pam just just jumped off the page at me," says Tarantino, launching into one of his extended riffs and raves. "But I didn't want her for the role of Jackie because I was a fan. There are a lot of people I would love to work with, but you can't cast like that. Casting, that has to be 100-percent pure."

Though the character Leonard created was white, Tarantino says that making Jackie black "gives the character even more depth."

"The woman in the book is in her 40s, and she's going to lose her job if she doesn't cooperate with the feds in helping them nail this gangster. This is somebody who is at the bottom of the economic ladder already, and she's about to slip off. I had to have somebody like Pam who has lived life, all right? I mean, do you know how hard it would be for most actresses to act what Pam just does?"

No question, Grier has lived some life. When Grier, who was born in North Carolina, first came to Los Angeles in the late 1960s, she says she "was less interested in being a movie star" than "getting in the psychology" of the characters she wanted to play; instead, she found herself getting out of her clothes in a series of exploitation films produced or directed by legendary low-budget auteur Roger Corman.

"She was incredible looking," says Corman, "but she was also hard as nails."

It was as the female avenger in the so-called "blaxploitation" movies - violent, profane, streetwise action films aimed at urban audiences - that the actress became Grier the icon. Though Grier always planned to use those films as a springboard to "deeper work," she says she now realizes just how important such films as "Foxy Brown," "Coffey" and "Sheba Baby," and her roles in them were.

"Every day, someone comes up to me and says, `Sister, I wanted to dress like you and talk like you and fight back like you. I wanted to be you.'

"But what I think about now when I see those movies is what a trip that time was. I mean we were breaking out back then, knocking down some barriers. You had the women's movement coming on, people running naked at Woodstock, Jim Hendrix playing white rock 'n' roll and black people loving it, P-Funk and Sly and James Brown doing their thing and white people loving it, everybody loving everybody, black people becoming Buddhists instead of Baptists, I mean, I was Foxy Brown back in those days."

So much so, perhaps, that even after graduating to mainstream films and proving she could act as well as talk tough and look better (in movies like "Fort Apache"), Grier found it increasingly difficult to find roles in which no kicking was required. With Corman and the other exploitation movie producers having been rendered redundant by video and cable, Grier turned to theater, winning excellent reviews and awards for her performance in a revival of Sam Shepard's "Fool for Love," an experience that also inspired her to start writing.

"I started writing to take care of me," says Grier. "That's something I have always had to be good at, and that's one of the reasons I was so tuned into Jackie Brown. She's not foolish enough to sit around waiting to see what's going to happen to her, and she sure isn't waiting for some man to be her hero."

Grier lives half her life on a ranch in Colorado with relatives and the other half in Los Angeles with her boyfriend Kevin Evans, a vice president at RCA Records. She says she's not at all concerned if people see her performance in "Jackie Brown" as a Travolta-style comeback, even if, like Travolta, she has never stopped working in film ("Escape From LA," "Original Gangstas") and television. And if her "comeback" doesn't propel her to Travolta-type re-recognition, she says she'll simply keep writing and acting and perhaps producing.

"If it's another 15 years before I get a role this good, so be it, I'll be ready," says Grier.