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It was in 1974, before Lange's debut in the Dino de Laurentiis King Kong, that she read Farmer's autobiography, Will There Really Be a Morning? In vain she tried to persuade Bob Rafelson or Bob Fosse to direct it. (Rafelson would hire Lange for The Postman; Fosse is now preparing a film based on the tragic life of a modern starlet, Dorothy Straiten, with Mariel Hemingway in the lead.) In the interim came Shadowland, William Arnold's incorrigibly readable Farmer biography. The Frances screenwriters claim their script is based on original research, so Arnold has sued and awaits a showdown at the film's completion. But Lange's and Farmer's time is now. Says Lange, who beat out Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Tuesday Weld and Goldie Hawn for the role: "The movie is a statement about women's independence and how frightening it can be. Politically, Frances was a radical. But she didn't have a generation backing her up. The Hearsts hated her, and Hollywood raped her. L.A. is a tricky place—there are a lot of killers here."
Farmer didn't have to go to Hollywood for that. She had a character assassin right at home: her own mommie dear est, Lillian. Six feet tall and fearsome as a Pauline Bunyan, Lillian made headlines in World War I when she crossbred a Rhode Island Red, a White Leghorn and an Andalusian Blue to produce a red-white-and-blue chicken—the Bird Americana—as she called it, which she proposed as the new national emblem. By the time of the next World War, Lillian was convinced that the Communists had driven her poor daughter crazy. And so, in 1944, she declared Frances insane and had her locked up at the Western State Hospital at Steilacoom, Wash.
It is eerily appropriate that Lillian in the film is Kim Stanley, the imposing stage actress who 25 years ago played yet another troubled movie star in Paddy Chayefsky's The Goddess. Stanley still has star quality: when Mel Brooks, Hollywood's reigning zany and the executive producer of Frances, was told that she might be available to play Lillian, Brooks jumped on his desk for joy. Stanley, the holder of a master's degree in psychology from the University of Texas, looks at her role and says, "Lillian mixed her identity with Frances'. She was in love with this child, obsessed with her. When a mother wants a child to be glorious, the child is in trouble. It can be crushed."
Stanley is as fascinated with Lange: "Jess was the kind of dame I wanted to work with — with-quick, open, smart." But the out-of-sequence shooting on a movie set disturbs her: "You have to be a clerk. You have to file, recall — 'When was this part of the scene last shot?' The theater is to drool. You rehearse. You're not playing poke-in-the-dark." This is only her third theatrical film in a 35-year acting career.
The part of Frances' fictionalized friend Harry York is taken by another part-time movie star, Playwright Sam Shepard, who "picked this movie because it's like a Greek tragedy." But one with a happy ending. Now the stardom that Frances Farmer never quite achieved in her prime is likely to be hers a dozen years after her death.
— By Richard Corliss. Reported by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles