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Southport, where all of these dogged takes are going on, has been occupied territory since early May. It is a pretty and formerly sleepy little resort and fishing town, with a white clapboard church and live oak trees shading wooden houses with deep-set front porches. Town elders were unenthusiastic about becoming part of Mississippi, as the script stipulates, and having the town square blockaded. Then it was pointed out that the film company would spend a lot of money in town--$3 million or more is the current guess. Done. Once the deal was cut, the production company rented a fiber-glass statue of a Confederate soldier to put in the town square. Fields invited 300 local dignitaries to a cocktail party, and the county manager threw a clambake for the film people.
Translation from stage play to film meant opening it up, in movie jargon --adding exterior scenes--but the center of the action is still the kitchen of a batty old Victorian house belonging to the sisters' dying grandfather. The company bought a nondescript house on Southport's North Caswell Street and added $200,000 worth of Victorian folderol: two towers, a gazebo, a side porch, green shutters and purple-and-yellow stained-glass windows.
The plot resembles the house, an outrageous, turreted wonder. Lenny MaGrath (Keaton) is the oldest sister, unmarried, moody, leery of men because of a "shrunken ovary." Meg (Lange), the flamboyant middle sister, is a minor- league cabaret singer whose recent employment has been in a dog-food company. Babe, the youngest, has that little problem with the husband she shot wisely but not well. Meg tells cheerful lies to Old Grandaddy and worries later that when he finds out the truth, he will lapse into a coma. Babe and Lenny laugh so hard at this that they can hardly spit out the words to tell her that Grandaddy, who has just had another stroke--"Oh, stop! Please! Ha, ha, ha!"--already is in a coma.
This is precarious stuff, difficult to play at just the right edge of hysteria. Director Beresford, a big, comfortable, good-humored man, nudges the looniness in the proper direction. He is the right man for the job, Lange says, partly because "he really likes women. He enjoys their energy." The three actresses, each of whom has won an Academy Award, did not know one another before Crimes. They have maintained separate lives off the set. Lange lives with Playwright-Actor Sam Shepard, who plays her former lover in the film, their six-month-old daughter Hannah and Lange's five-year-old daughter Shura, whose father is Dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. Spacek moved into a house with her husband Jack Fisk and their three-year-old daughter Schuyler. Keaton has a house on the beach.