I thought I'd read a jmdler review of this by now...I'm looking forward to seeing it. Should I be? Anyone...?
-Julius >From today's San Francisco Chronicle: When Frances McDormand called Lisa Cholodenko out of the blue and said she wanted to play the lead character of Jane in "<A HREF="http://www.sonyclassics.com/laurelcanyon";>Laurel Canyon</A>," the writer/director wasn't sure the actress was right for the part. "She got ahold of the script. I don't remember how she got it, but her agent or manager got it to her," Cholodenko recalls. "I thought it was an interesting idea, but I didn't realize that she looked the way she does now." Imagining the Coen brothers' sometime leading lady still looking like Marge Gunderson, the pregnant Midwestern cop in "Fargo," or the overprotective mom in Cameron Crowe's "Almost Famous," the San Fernando Valley native was unprepared for how perfect McDormand would turn out to be. "She came into this restaurant in New York looking like she does and being like she is in the movie, and it seemed almost like I had written [the part] for her," the filmmaker says. And what a fantastic part it is -- a mythical ex-hippie female music producer inspired by Joni Mitchell. The idea came to Cholodenko when her editor brought Mitchell's 1970 Ladies of the Canyon album to work while they were editing Cholodenko's first feature, 1998's "High Art." "We were just riffing about Laurel Canyon and the music scene about the time that Joni Mitchell lived there," she says. "And I said, 'Wouldn't it be interesting to write a film that had a female protagonist that was kind of in that mode and was somehow part of that music scene, but wasn't herself a musician like Joni Mitchell?" That thought stuck with 38-year-old Cholodenko when she started writing her next script. "She was the first character I started writing, and I knew I wanted to set a film up in Laurel Canyon. When I think of the history of Laurel Canyon, it's really about the music scene that was there in the late '60s and '70s. It's still there, but there was a certain period [around that time] where it got put on the map."
