She Likes to Watch

Just as we don’t always have room for every interesting tidbit that comes to light in our interviews, we also didn’t have room for every interesting interview tidbit we wanted to publish in today’s Ticket section. But we still want you to know about them, so we’ve published them here instead. Read on:

More of Sarah Linn’s interviews

James Cromwell
Best known as the tenderhearted pig farmer in “Babe,” James Cromwell seems too mild to be a political firebrand.

Spend a few minutes chatting with the lanky, Oscar-nominated actor about animal rights or the environment, however, and his gentle baritone rings with anger.
Cromwell appeared at the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival in March.
Cromwell credits his father, a film director who was blacklisted for nearly a decade for his political views, for setting him on a path of activism.

“He had cut out this little one-column squib from The New York Times … there was a theater that was touring the South that was auditioning for actors,” the actor recalled. “And Dad said, ‘Why don’t you go down and try?’ ”

That tour with the Free Southern Theater showed Cromwell the full injustice of 1960s-era segregation, he said, including whites-only restaurants and violent beatings and arrests.

Back in New York, he worked with the Black Panthers and joined the anti-war movement. Cromwell became a vegan and animal rights activist after starring in “Babe.”

“I’m a big supporter of throwing paint on fur coats. I know it’s incendiary and I know that it’s polarizing,” the fiery actor said. “You can’t give up.”

Rosanne Cash
Rosanne Cash could offer some advice about growing up in the limelight. The daughter of Johnny Cash and the stepdaughter of June Carter Cash, she rubbed elbows with some of country music’s biggest stars as a child and released her first chart-topping single at age 24.

More recently, though, the Grammy winner wowed critics and fans with “Black Cadillac,” an exploration of loss, love and redemption written after her parents and stepmother died in a two-year span.

Cash, who performed May 6 at the Cohan Center, is reluctant to call “Black Cadillac” a tribute album. In fact, she gets a bit peeved when anyone tries to apply extra meaning to her work.

OK, really peeved.

“When you go to Broadway and see a stage actor, you don’t think, ‘Oh, they’re being so public with themselves,’ ” she said. “You know what I mean? They’re an actor. They’re playing a part.”

Besides, added Cash with a chuckle, “It’s not as if I’m getting up reading pages from my diary.”

More of Patrick S. Pemberton’s interviews

Toots Hibbert
Sometimes I feel so … American. I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s just that I’m so accustomed to American accents, it can be difficult when someone talks like — well, like Toots Hibbert, whose Jamaican accent is thick. Really thick.

At one point, I know he was telling a good story, but I was completely lost. Then he said something like, “You know — Keith Richards?” And I was like, “Keith Richards?” And he said, “Sometimes I talk too fast and people don’t understand me.” To which I shamelessly tried to fake my way out of it and said, “Oh yeah, yeah — Keith Richards.”

So I think he had a good quote about Keith Richards, but you didn’t see it in the story.

Hibbert performed at Downtown Brew in September.

Ziggy Marley
Usually, journalists rush through celebrity interviews, hoping to squeeze in as many questions as possible before the allotted 15 minutes are up. But with Marley, who did not impose any time limit, I sort of gave up after 15 minutes. Let’s just say Ziggy isn’t much of a talker.

He was nice enough. And he didn’t get irritated when the inevitable questions about his father came up. (“My father is also one of my teachers, somebody I look up to musically. So I have no problem speaking about him.”) It’s just that a good source expands on things a bit. Which is to say that tired yes and no — or other one-word — answers aren’t always desirable during an interview.

Marley appeared at Avila Beach Resort in March.

— Tribune features staff

Ever wonder how they do it? The San Luis Obispo International Film Festival offers a series of workshops and panel discussions this weekend aimed at showing how filmmakers perfect their craft.

Today, start your day with “Hollywood Dreams,” a discussion about the challenges of acting and directing in Hollywood.
The panel discussion features Oscar-nominated actor James Cromwell and indie director Henry Jaglom, as well as “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” star Melissa Joan Hart, who directed the short film “Mute.”
It starts at 10 a.m. at the Oddfellows Hall, 520 Dana Street in San Luis Obispo.

Next at the Oddfellows Hall is “Meet the Filmmakers,” a panel discussion about the trials and thrills independent cinema. The talk, which features many of the filmmakers involved in this year’s festival, starts at 12:30 p.m.

“Behind the Scenes with CafeFX,” 3 p.m. at the Oddfellows Hall, highlights Santa Maria special effects firm CafeFX, which handles visual effects for some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters.

On Sunday, Hollywood screenwriters Gregg Rosen, Brian Sawyer and David Garrett share their tips for writing a marketable script.

Garrett is the co-writer of such hits as “Deuce Bigalow: American Gigolo,” “First Pet” and “Corky Romano.” Rosen and Sawyer have collaborated on a number of television and film projects.

That workshop goes from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the San Luis Obispo City/County Library, 995 Palm St. in San Luis Obispo.

All workshops and panel discussions are $15 or $10 for students and film society members. For more information, call 543-3456 or visit www.slofilmfest.org.

On the phone, James Cromwell sounds like your favorite smart uncle.
The Oscar-nominated actor is warm and self-effacing, with just the slightest touch of gravel.
He chuckles. He raises his voice to discuss a lifetime of activism — animal rights, the anti-war movement, the Black Panthers — then moves to another room when his wife tells him he’s being too loud.
Cromwell appears Saturday at the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival when he accepts this year’s King Vidor Career Achievement Award for acting.
The ceremony is at 6 p.m. at the Fremont Theatre, 1025 Monterey St. in San Luis Obispo; tickets are $25 or $20 for students and film festival members. Call 546-3456 or visit www.slofilmfest.org for more information.
Before you go, we bring you some insights that didn’t make the print edition.

As the son of a Hollywood director and two theater pros, was it always expected that you would become an actor?
I was actually going to be a mechanical engineer (at Middlebury College in Vermont). That sounds a lot fancier than it really was: I wanted to design sports cars.
My father came to the Sunday morning after a Saturday night fraternity party at my fraternity house — I think this was what prompted him. It was probably my wonderful stepmother who said, “You know, we should really take Jamie to Sweden.”
So he was making a picture in Sweden and once I saw him working, in my quasi-adult state — I was not an adult but I had pretensions to maturity — I thought, “That looks like a lot of fun. Let’s do that.”

At 6-foot-5, you tower over a lot of actors. Has your height ever been an issue professionally?
It’s been an issue for two groups … Somebody at Fox said, “Y’know, I gotta tell you, it’s going to be a problem because I can tell you more than five big stars who refuse to work with anybody over 6 feet.” So I thought, “Oh well, I guess I won’t be doing films.”
And then Blake Edwards (on the set of “10”). I came in with a wonderful casting director who really liked me and Blake said to the casting director, “What am I supposed to do with that?”
And the casting director said, “Oh, I thought for the cop.” He said, “How tall is Dudley? How tall is he?” He was trying to figure how he was going to get Dudley (Moore) and me in the same shot without tilting the camera.

You’re definitely taller than most people we see in the movies.
When you’re 45 feet in the theaters, you realize that even if you’re small of stature, one way to appear big is to be the lead in a motion picture. That’s as big as you can get. So it attracts people who have issues and who have compensatory behaviors of the Napoleon variety.
The problem is — and it happens on stage as well — it tends to make the person who’s tallest the normal one and everybody else short. So when I appear on stage with a normal-sized actor, I look normal and everybody else looks like they’re Lilliputians.

Besides your Oscar-nominated role as the farmer in “Babe,” you’ve played a number of authority figures: presidents, police officers, military men.
Do you ever worry about being typecast?
When you said typecasting, it (used to mean) that you were given the kind of roles which were one-dimensional and they really only cast you because of the look. They didn’t have to go through any exposition.
I think the creativity as far as casting directors has shifted from their ability to appreciate an actor’s range to being able to very specifically match an individual actor with the qualities a director describes that he wants for a role.
We get established in the audience’s mind as having a particular quality. It is that quality that the casting director sells to the director: You will be getting this kind of performance from this actor. It’s a given.

Do you ever get tired of taking supporting roles?
When you’re a supporting actor, you know what your role is. Your role is to support them and to assist them in the scene so they can keep the level of their performance where they want it to be rather than having to compensate for your inadequacy.
I’m not a believer in, “Listen. As long as the camera’s on me, it’s my film and I’m going to do any damn thing.” … What happens is the story is not told.

You call yourself “a strong opponent of the Academy Awards system.” Why?
The fact that it is a choice between five superlative performances in which one person will win and four people will lose is obscene in my mind.
My solution is that the five nominees gather together in a room. No one is allowed to vote for themselves. And they discuss each of the films and they vote one of them as being the performance that they admired.
To compare what Kate Winslet did in “Little Children” to what Helen (Mirren) did in “The Queen” is an absurd thing to do.
– Sarah L.