(8 of 9)
Tatum seems jaded just now; she is on the outs with a childhood buddy ("You can't be friends with people who are not in the business; they are basically jealous"), and thinks that drugs and surfing, the normal amusements of rich, 15-year-old Los Angeles kids, are time wasters. "I think it is best that I grew up as fast as I did," she says. "I have a productive thing going. Those poor kids have nothing. Their parents leave them with maids."
Like Shields, who is a friendly acquaintance, Tatum feels most comfortable on a movie set. "You know everybody; it's like a family." She travels with Diane Lewis, a woman in her early 30s who has been her companion since she was small, and a friend called Esme, who is also her standin. Her only complaint about moviemaking is that in California—though not in England, where she filmed International Velvet—the law requires that child actors go to school for at least four hours a day. "On Little Darlings, the picture I just finished, we got in about three hours of work a day, what with lunch and makeup." This month she begins filming Circle of Two, a love story about a teen-ager and a painter of 60, played by Richard Burton. Tatum will get $500,000 and a percent of the gross.
Will she continue acting? She looks surprised. "Sure. God, I don't know what else I could do. They got me when I was a baby." But the thought does not trail off there, and this teenager, who has been interviewed too many times, sounds resilient. "I also want to do other things, like open a business, maybe design clothes or go and help people with problems, like help the refugees in those boats."
Linda Manz. "I didn't have to act. I just did it. I was brought up scared, so I act scared." Linda Manz, a street-corner scuffler with old eyes, whose half-deaf mother worked as a cleaning woman in Manhattan, tells about her first film role as Richard Gere's kid sister in Days of Heaven. "Ursula was the name of the character at first, but they changed it to Linda, 'cause it was me. It ain't no girl in the 1900s." The film is a strange, dreamlike reminiscence of days when migrant harvesters followed steam-driven threshing machines through the wheatfields of the Texas Panhandle. As in a dream, a flickering story line is overwhelmed by visual images—blowing wheat, threshers outlined against a sunset, locusts darkening the sky. Linda's Second Avenue voice threads through the film, speaking a moody narration, much of which is her own improvisation: "From the time the sun went up, till it went down, theys was workin' all the time . . . Just keep goin'. If you didn't work, they'd ship you right out of there. They don't need ya. They can always get somebody else." The gritty, childish voice holds the film together. Originally, the narration was to have been spoken by Brooke Adams, the older actress who plays Gere's lover. But Days of Heaven came to be Linda's film.