On Career Longevity and Receiving a Retrospective – Julie Carmen comments (Exclusive Guest Post)
I was trained to disappear into my roles. That dovetails with my chameleon nature, it even aligns with my ethnically ambiguous DNA. But it is also how I’ve preserved elusive anonymity in a celebrity centric business. When my kids were growing up, I dropped out of Hollywood and worked as a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist so I could observe other peoples’ complex operating systems. What I loved about that was that it was not about me.
As an actress, I have not been hot news for decades, so you can imagine my surprise when CinemaSFbay proposed a three night Julie Carmen retrospective to take place July 7, 8, 9th at the newly refurbished nonprofit Balboa Theater with Fogcutter Film Series Q&As moderated by author-filmmaker Robert Mailer Anderson and an after party. To be treated as relevant because I played the female lead in a catalogue of titles that were influential back in the day feels like I walked into a bright interrogation room. Suddenly people want to know Regine Dandridge’s back story and whether Linda Styles is real.
Hollywood is obsessed with each season’s new crop of productions, leaving little space for the scholarly critique, discovery and appreciation of ground breaking celluloid stories that once mattered. So, why are my old movies now being unearthed. restored and rereleased by Kino Lorber, Synapse Films, Redshirt Pictures, SONY Pictures Entertainment, Arrow Films, Warner Brothers Motion Picture Imaging and Universal Pictures?
I’m not ashamed to admit my giddy delight. It’s not the Dorian Gray effect of seeing oneself prancing around forty years ago. The delight is seeing audiences discover creative work that had been long buried. The art that we collaboratively wove out of thin air during the 80s and 90s is now being valued by enough people to warrant shiny new high tech restorations, giving the productions — and my work in them — a second life. Continue reading on THE FEMALE GAZE
ABOUT JULIE CARMEN
Born and trained in New York City, Julie Carmen danced on Broadway in Zoot Suit, starred in the recently restored Night of the Juggler, played the Puerto Rican mother in John Cassavetes’ Gloria and is known among cosmic horror connoisseurs as Regine Dandridge in Fright Night Part Two and Linda Styles in John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness. She’s a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and was inducted into the New Mexico Film and Television Hall of Fame for her iconic roles in Robert Redford’s Milagro Beanfield War and Gore Vidal’s Billy the Kid. While on the Board of Directors of IFP/West, Julie created the John Cassavetes Award for filmmakers who embrace Cassavetes’ experiential style. Julie studied with Sanford Meisner and Uta Hagen, has a Masters in Clinical Psychology, is an LMFT and certified yoga therapist.
