Nude for Thought

Had the interesting experience last night of sitting next to an actress as she experienced for the first time a theater full of people seeing her naked on the big screen.

Attended "Chronic Town" with one of the stars, my friend Emily Wagner.  The film is the story of a group of marginally stable depressives in Fairbanks, Alaska.  If, like me,  you have an obsession with tract housing where it's 30 below zero, this is the film for you.

In the movie, Emily plays a stripper wrestling with the demons of her past.  Knowing that the big scene when she performs in her club was coming about halfway through the film, she began squirming in her seat from the moment the lights dimmed.  Since the idea of a naked image of myself being splashed on the screen in a sold-out theater is a suicide-inducing notion (as it probably was for other patrons that night), I wondered how an actress would steel herself for this.  Or, as actors are exhibitionists by nature, would she garner some perverse thrill from the moment?

"It felt like fire ants were eating me from the inside out.  Horrifying," was how she described it after the film ended.  When the scene played, Emily sank in her seat almost down to the floor, twisting in horror.  One of the bigger battles of the thespian path, apparently.  But the fact that she didn't take her life immediately afterward proves that Emily, and her fellow stars everywhere, are stronger people than I.

-- Richard Rushfield

(Photo: Jeffrey Scott Jensen, JR Bourne and Emily Wagner in "Chronic Town," courtesy of Sundance Film Festival)