"I'd only heard of one of them before, that Stacy Staysak or somethin'. * Someone told me she played in Farmer's Daughter. Celebrities are not unheard of here. Every year, Wilmington has an Azalea Parade, and one year they had Buddy Ebsen. He was on Beverly Hillbillies. I loved that program."
--Jim McMillion, 72, driver of one of two taxis in Southport, N.C.
They recognize Film Producer Freddie Fields and his friends in the Polo Lounge, but Fields is a long way from Beverly Hills, on patrol in deepest North Carolina. With him are Australian Director Bruce Beresford (Breaker Morant, Tender Mercies) and several indisputable movie stars--notably Diane Keaton, Sissy Spacek and Jessica Lange--in addition to the assorted children, nannies, pets, significant others, caterers, crew members, drivers, accountants, studio biggies, flacks, journalists, rent-a-cops, cutpurses and dancing bears that accumulate when a film company hits the road. Fields, Beresford and the rest have come to North Carolina for the filming of Beth Henley's movie version of her Pulitzer-prizewinning stage play Crimes of the Heart. On Broadway, Crimes was a simple, one-set, six-character kitchen comedy about three eccentric sisters in Mississippi. Shot here (Mississippi was rejected, perhaps because it looks too much like North Carolina, perhaps because Studio Head Dino De Laurentiis has his headquarters 45 minutes away, in Wilmington), the film version will cost about $9 million, a low number by current accounting.
One reason for the bargain price is that Fields is getting his money's worth from Jewell Floyd. She is 48, a round, silver-haired woman who operated a computer terminal for a nearby construction firm before she answered an ad for extras. By now she has worked four days, 7 a.m. to 6:15 p.m. The pay is only minimum wage, she says, standard for the local people hired as extras, "but they feed us out of this world. And I do feel like a celebrity. I'd do it again, yes, ma'am. In a heartbeat." Today she has played a townswoman meeting a bus. Just now she is watching another scene being shot and reshot: Sissy Spacek, as the youngest MaGrath sister, Babe, looking on forlornly as her 15- year-old black lover Willie Jay and his dog Dog, each wearing sunglasses as disguise, leave town on the same bus. (Babe, who is impulsive, has shot her nasty husband Zackery, leaving him perforated but not terminated, and he has threatened to do bad things to Willie Jay.) The dog actor, whose real name is Casey, is supposed to turn and look at Spacek as the bus starts. Casey will not turn. "Today they brought a lady's kitty cat to try to capture Casey's attention," reports Floyd. "I don't know if they've gotten it yet. I didn't hear them holler, 'Wrap.' "