 Bug Hall as Sam and Mischa Barton as Maurey.
skipped parts
|
“Everybody talks about sex these days,
but nobody ever talks about what
happens after you do it”
|
Based on the much-talked-about novel by Tim Sandlin - a book described by one critic as “JD Salinger if he had been from Wyoming” - Skipped Parts is the story of what happens when Lydia Callahan (Jennifer Jason-Leigh) and her 14-year-old son, Sam (Bug Hall, a long way from The Little Rascals), are banished from their home in the South and shipped off to GroVont, Wyoming.
Lydia soon makes her mark by having a scandalous affair with a strait-laced rodeo rider called Hank Elkrunner (Michael Greyeyes), while Sam develops a crush on rancher’s daughter Maurey (Mischa Barton, the video-tape girl from The Sixth Sense).
With a western-style score by Stewart Copeland, Skipped Parts also features an appearance by Drew Barrymore as Sam’s self-created Fantasy Girl (who, unlike real-life girls, is always willing).
“Everybody talks about sex these days, but nobody ever talks about what happens after you do it,” says director Tamra Davis, who burst onto the movie scene with her debut feature, Guncrazy, which had its world premiere in the Directors Fortnight at Cannes in 1992. “I think one of the things Tim and I really agreed on is that the movie was going to be just as brave as his novel, just as honest about different sexual attitudes and their effect on people, just as true to the many different kinds of families that exist in the world, and just as real about the funny and tough things that really go on in life.
“Reading Skipped Parts was like falling in love,” she adds. “It was so funny and so real and so original. I loved the characters and the settings: it just seemed to leap off the page and say ‘movie’ all over it. It reminded me of Catcher in the Rye, with a witty adolescent narrator who looks for the truth in the messed-up adult lives around him, but it had a different, more modern, more Western edge to it.
“My feeling from the beginning was that I didn’t want to avoid the story’s scandalous parts - I wanted the story to shock people because there are very real issues at the heart of it.”
|
