DALLAS (MCT)– The petite blonde in the Iron Maiden T-shirt and stylish black jacket stands off to the side as the final credits roll. The audience mostly women, many of them connected in some way to the world of roller derby whoops and hollers louder than the usual free-movie audience whoops and hollers.
Then Drew Barrymore steps out of the shadows toward the front of the theater inside Dallas’ Angelika Film Center for a Q&A session, and the crowd accelerates from loud to completely bananas. They stand and shout as one while the object of their admiration sits in a director’s chair, grinning from ear to ear.
These are Barrymore’s people, assembled to see her directorial debut, the roller derby comedy-drama “Whip It.”
More than that, they’re here to bask in her Drewness.
“I really want to reach people with this thing,” the 34-year-old said in an interview earlier that evening at a nearby restaurant. “It’s everything I’ve experienced. It’s all very personal to me, and I want to be very personal about the way I put it out there and not just go on talk shows and say, ‘Here’s this thing.’ You labor for something for years of your life, and in the end, you have to be personal about it if it’s personal for you.”
Barrymore, whose adolescence of excess has been widely chronicled (including in her memoir “Little Girl Lost”), carries herself with a sense of hard-won authenticity. You can see and hear the party girl in her familiar manner and laid-back vibe. But there’s also the earthiness and appreciation of someone who’s been to a dark place and come all the way back and then some.
She’s worn many hats _ child star, wasted teen, comedian, industry player (“Whip It” is the 10th film from her production company, Flower Films). She has no interest in concealing her excitement about her new gig: director.
Barrymore fell for Austin native Shauna Cross’ novel “Derby Girl,” based on Cross’ experiences with the Austin Rollergirls, when she read it in galleys. She signed on to produce but found herself unhappy with the direction the project was heading.
The epiphany arrived in, of all places, the parking lot of a Hollywood bowling alley. “I was standing there with a bowling ball in my hand,” she recalls. “I was (complaining) to my friend about the direction of the movie. Then it hit me: I want to direct this movie.”
“Whip It” stars Ellen Page (“Juno” ) as Bliss Cavendar, the restless daughter of a fictional Texas town Bodeen. Her mom (University of Texas grad Marcia Gay Harden) is obsessed with beauty pageants, in which Bliss feels like a square peg in a round hole.
Then she discovers the Austin roller-derby scene, and with it a sense of purpose. Bliss Cavendar becomes Babe Ruthless, one of the film’s countless colorful rink names, including Barrymore’s Smashley Simpson.
Barrymore loved the roller-derby milieu, and she proudly points out that she and her co-stars, including Kristen Wiig as Maggie Mayhem and Juliette Lewis as Iron Maven, did most of their own skating. But she also saw “Whip It” as a chance to explore ideas closer to her heart.
“The themes and the tones I’ve put into this movie are very important to me,” she says, and she begins to rattle them off: “The mother-daughter relationship and finding something you love and finding your tribe that you want to do it with. First love and friendship. Trying to figure out who you are in this world and being true to that and getting the support of your family, especially if they have a different idea of what you should be doing.”
Later in the evening, during the Q&A, the audience hangs on every Barrymore word. They ask questions about derby tracks. One woman stands up with tears in her eyes and thanks Barrymore for her Emmy-nominated performance in HBO’s “Grey Gardens.” The woman has alopecia, a condition in which hair is lost from some or all areas of the body; Barrymore’s character in “Gardens” had the same condition.
The crowd seems to see a part of itself in Barrymore, and, from all indications, she reciprocates. When she’s finished answering questions and thanking her audience, a pair of security guards leads her to an exit as the sounds of adulation, and beer bottles rolling beneath the seats, hang in the air.
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(c) 2009, The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
