#miss firecracker

[sagindie]

Happy 4th of July! 🎆

[rwpohl]

miss firecracker

miss firecracker, thomas schlamme 1989

🦖🦖🦖

*

firecracker, nada surf, the proximity effect 1998

[jisforjudi2]

Happy 4th of July

[evilhorse]

Big Bang Presents #1

[davealmost]

Miss Firecracker

[passed-out-real]

Alfre Woodard Filmography Part 1

Extremities (1986)

St. Elsewhere (1985-1988)

Miss Firecracker (1989)

Passion Fish (1992)

Heart and Souls (1993)

Crooklyn (1994)

Gulliver's Travels (1996)

A Step Toward Tomorrow (1996)

Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

Homicide: Life on the Street (1998)

[sparklepony]

[kevrocksicehouse]

Hazelhurst, Virgil, Yazoo City.  The small screwball towns of Beth Henley who turns 69 today:

Screenplay of Crimes of the Heart. D: Bruce Beresford (1986). When Babe McGrath (Sissy Spacek) shoots her abusive husband after he breaks off her affair with a black teenager, she moves to her old family home and reconnects with her sister the introverted Lenny (Diane Keaton), who never left and the rowdy Meg (Jessica Lange) who’s back after failing as an actress, to manage her defense and the ensuing publicity (It’s not their first time in the tabloids. When they were kids their mother killed herself after hanging the family cat first). Henley got an Oscar nod for adapting her Pulitzer winning-play and investing its dysfunctional-family themes with a screwball sense of absurdity. It was like watching a slapstick version of Tennessee Williams. 

Screenplay for True Stories. D: David Byrne (1986). Henley and Byrne co-wrote the screenplay for this post-modern musical about a town putting on a “Celebration of Specialness” on its 150th anniversary. Henley put flesh on Byrne’s concept of populating the fictional town with people from supermarket tabloids (“Woman Hasn’t Left her Bed in Years!” “Factory Worker Hears Radio Signals in his Head!”). She turns his distanced touristy vision (He’s always wearing gift-shop cowboy hats) with genuinely eccentric characters like Jo Harvey Allen’s “lying woman” (“Songs are easy. I wrote ‘Billie Jean’ and most of Elvis’s songs”) and Louis Fine, the “Panda Bear” who launches an advertising campaign for a wife (John Goodman’s first star performance). She turns high concept into high comedy.

Screenplay for Miss Firecracker. D: Thomas Schlamme (1989). Comedies about beauty pageants tend to be shooting-fish-in-a-barrel exercises that can’t measure up to the absurd surrealism of the real thing, but Henley’s adaptation of her hit play about a twenty-nine year old woman (just shy going over the age requirement) entering Yazoo city’s “Miss Firecracker” contest has an inspired goofiness to it. Carnelle (Holly Hunter) wants a win to match her cousin Elain (Mary Steenburgen) who won ten years before and to erase the “Miss Hot Tamale” nickname that years of promiscuity have given her – it’s her way of becoming a grownup. Henley wisely doesn’t hang her plot on a victory or defeat, but mixes it up with family dynamics (the cousinly rivalry between Hunter and Steenburgen is inspired) and oddball characters like Hunter’s unhinged cousin Delmount (Tim Robbins) and Popeye (Alfre Woodard), a local seamstress who has only designed prize-winning costumes for bullfrogs. When they get together towards the end, it’s both comic and romantic bliss.