Apparently CB was supposed to play Elizabeth Short in Brian De Palma's "The Black Dahlia"!!!I am glad that she did not do it, she has too much intelligence and is too beautiful for De Palmas misogynistic take on that character.
Almost The Black Dahlia
Apparently CB was supposed to play Elizabeth Short in Brian De Palma's "The Black Dahlia"!!!I am glad that she did not do it, she has too much intelligence and is too beautiful for De Palmas misogynistic take on that character.
Catherine Black stars as André Cazabon in “Letters to a Street Child”
Catherine Black stars as André Cazabon in “Letters to a Street Child”
By. Sarah Jane McKenna
“Letters To A Street Child”?, one immediately thinks, “How does one get a letter to a street child?” Well, André Cazabon’s (NFB) father found a way and André made a movie about it starring Catherine Black (American Psycho, Highlander) as André Cazabon herself. “The actually letters written by André’s father were handed to me before filming. I can’t tell you what an honor that was to see the emotion not only in the words but in the hand writing itself; the shaky urgent need to communicate love and support in every stroke”. Catherine herself left home at 15 but her story was much different. “I was blessed, I was hell bent on going wherever the wind took me, and the wind was good to me. In the first week of my runaway life I found myself cast as Juliet in a professional production of Romeo and Juliet. I got rave reviews, I got money, an apartment and a fantastic beginning to my new life”. André’s story is one of rape and drug addiction, loneliness and of desolate aimlessness. Looking at Catherine right now, all clean and bright and soft and quite pretty, I can appreciate even more what a prolific actress she is. Even her body, her now relaxed face, the sound of her voice, is eerily different from the pained, dark, strained drug addict she portrayed so empathetically accurate in “Letters To A Street Child”. And the hair. Catherine sported a Mohawk of many shades and spikes in the gritty film. “I only had one audition for André and the producers which consisted of both an improve and a prepared piece from the script. Afterwards André was rather cold but had asked me to return at the end of the day. When I did all she said to me was “There is only one reason I would not cast you and that is because you have beautiful hair and I will have to destroy it.” Destroy it!” Catherine cheer’s. This is André’s first film as a writer/director/producer but you would never know. André is lovely and speaks with utter conviction just as any pro. I ask Catherine what it was like to work with André. “André is only a couple of years older than me so we really became friends. The full on hands on experience was ideal I think. I found that I needed to be apart of every aspect of the film pre and post, and André invited me to really truly know her. I was playing her after all. She invited me to really create too, to add to the entirety of the film, from casting to shot lists, script ideas and even the finale edit. We camped out in her living room and watched days and days of daily’s. I really got not only a feel for the force of strength that André is, but a taste of the filmmakers spirit”. I ask Catherine if she would like to make her own films, “Oh yes I think so, but not yet. I am so not ready to tackle such a demanding beast! But I think one day yes, I would like to be like a Woody Allen or Mel Gibson; writing and and directing and casting myself in the perfect most fabulous roles. But acting is really what has it’s hold on me. I love acting.” And it shows Catherine. “Letters To A Street Child” premiered last night at the R.O.M. and will be airing on CBC this December.
Toronto Life Magazine . Sept. 4th 1999
In a Heartbeat
This Catherine on the Disney show, In a Heartbeat as the sexy pro motocrros racer, Bobby The Bullet. CB just finished filming the lead role in a comedy feature film called Dogs Playing Poker.Catherine Black is an accomplished actress, and visual artist.
On the film, television and stage front, Catherine has been quite active. Catherine made her stage debut at the age of 16 as “Juliet” in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at the Leah Poslums Theatre in Toronto. Having been bit by the acting bug, Catherine would go on to star in several Dora Award winning productions such as Walls of Africa (Theatre Passe Muraille), Crimes (Can. Stage/Berkeley St. Theatre) and The Human Zoo (Factory Theatre). On the big screen, Catherine is best known for her work starring opposite Christian Bale in American Psycho and working with director Amy Heckerling in Loser. Catherine has also worked extensively on the small screen. starred in the ABC/Disney MOW Mr. Headmistress. Catherine’s Select television credits include, Show Me Yours (Showcase), I Love a Mummy (YTV), Blue Murder (Global TV) In a Heartbeat (Disney/Family) and Odyssey 5 (Showtime). Catherine just finished filming the leading role in Dogs Playing Poker, a comedy set to hit theatre’s in 2007. However, it is the starring role in the CBC movie of the week, Letters to a Street Child, and of course, “Juliet", that are her favourite performances.
As a visual artist, Catherine has been equally active. Painting will always remain precious and close to her heart, no matter how far her career as an actress takes her. Catherine just finished exhibiting her current collection of paintings; Benevolence, at The Engine Gallery In Toronto. Having studied under the tutelage of classic painter Paul James, Catherine learned her craft while still in high school. Even as young as 15, Catherine was given the opportunity to grace her school’s halls and classrooms with full wall murals, as well as being chosen to hang her paintings in the foyer of the Toronto Board of Education. Currently her medium of choice is oil on wood. Catherine’s paintings have been exhibited for several years throughout Toronto and she is in demand to do portraits. Beyond Toronto, Catherine has also been commissioned by a missionary group in Cuba to visually represent orphaned children for their Orphanage. Currently Catherine is working on her next show.
Catherine is also a classically trained singer who studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. Having performed with various musicians in venues such as The Cameron House and The El Macombo, Catherine continues to perform and write in her spare time.
Faze Magazine
How many people really impress you? If you're like most people, not many. But I think even the most jaded among us will be impressed with what Andre Cazabon (National Film Board) has done. We see this in Catherine Black’s (American Psycho, Loser) intense portrayal of Andre in Letters to a Street Child. Catherine claims she got her inspiration from Andre herself. Catherine was actually instrumental in the whole production, and worked with Andre from day one. “There are some shocking things I could tell you about Andre being a street kid at 13, about her drug addiction, about some of the horrible things that have happened to her, but the most memorable would be the day we walked into the CBC to ask for forty thousand dollars. As we strolled through the doors Andre turned to me and said, “it will be a piece of cake Catherine, I used to be a drug addict.” “And the fact that she has recovered, gone to university, and works in the film industry really is all very shocking. What she has done is something truly courageous: she has gone back to her painful past, looked it over, and realized that she has something to say about it.” Explains Catherine.
Letters to a Street Child is a story about a young girl (Catherine Black) from a safe suburban home who leaves, becomes addicted to glue, and finally is sent off to a treatment center by her parents. In the beginning, she passed this story off as fiction. And why not? Who wants to blab about any part of their past, especially one as difficult as that? But Andre Cazabon couldn't quite do it, She realized that she was in a unique position to explore the issue of drugs and street kids. So she did, And the film was born.
Now, maybe you're thinking "what about the parents? Aren't they to blame for Andre (Catherine Black) being out on the street?" And fair enough. According to Dennis Long, of Breakaway Youth and Family Services in Toronto, about 60-80% of street kids are running away from abuse in the home, whether physical, sexual or psychological. But in Andre's case, her parents were the normal, worrying, over-protective parents most of us know and (try to) love. In the film, Andre (Catherine Black) doesn't blame her parents. She recognizes that they went through an incredibly difficult ordeal when she left home. In the film she follows the parents ordeal to show compassion for the hell that they went through. Andre's parents never forgot the pain of giving custody of their child up to Children's Aid, only to watch, helpless, as Andre acted out even more under their control. Letters to a Street Child is a tribute to love concurring all.
Andre’s mother says, "it's as if we were dead inside. Sometimes we just want to die. We don’t know how to cope anymore." This is not a film for the weak-hearted. It is also not a film full of hard facts and cold statistics. Instead, it's a heartfelt personal essay by someone with the strength to re-examine a part of her life that most people would want to forget. And she has a message that is echoed by the professionals I have spoken to in the field: there are not enough treatment centers out there for young people, there is not enough money or energy being poured into the issue of drug use on the street.
We watch Andre(Catherine Black) at 13 years of age as a street kid, panhandling and getting high. She roams the streets of Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. During her time on the street her father writes to her. These letters are the subject of her film, Letters To A Street Child. It focuses on the pain parents feel while their children spiral into self-destruction, through voice over conversations. The film also dispels the myth that all street kids come from abused families. It is a true life account of a family torn apart when their daughter, Andre(Catherine Black) takes to the streets for two long years. It is told as a series of letters from the father and the daughter over Andre’s bleak lifestyle of drugs and aimlessness. The father warns the viewer that what happened to their family, could easily happen to anyone. The family is financially comfortable and has done many things together as the father refers to their trip to Acapulco. The daughter, as we learn, in the fathers letters, did very well in school and received prizes for music and sports.
Catherine Black, as Andre is actually hard to watch at times. She grabs your heart with her desolate performance, creating empathy from the viewer. The film is very graphic in its language and situations. For these reasons, it has great power, though sometimes difficult to watch. Several scenes are particularly disturbing. The first involves Andre’s (Catherine Black’s) inability to remember when, “I pissed my pants.” She goes on at length trying to remember if it was last night or the night before, and she asks her partner to remind her to get new pants. Meanwhile he is so spaced out he can’t form sentences. When the next day finally arrives, she is far more keen to get drugs, and her pants are long forgotten. She does state that she would be horrified if her parents saw her soiled pants. However, getting drugs, not pants, is her real priority.
Another scene involves Andre (Black) and her friends waiting behind a dumpster for someone to throw garbage in. As soon as their wait is rewarded, the group happily go through the garbage like kids on Christmas morning. Andre(Catherine Black) is raped just after that, making her pull away from the group as she is clearly too rattled and isolated with her demons to continue in the same way she has been. This is what finally forces her to seek help and reunite with her family. However, the father knows that parental love is not enough and he insists that she go away for rehabilitation first. The family knows that two years on the street cannot be magically washed away. It is Catherine’s transformative performance while Andre is in treatment that is most gripping. This reckless punk rocker is brought to her knees. I think everyone in the theatre had a tear in their eye.
There are no happy endings as the film concludes with the father urging his daughter to use her inner strength to get properly rehabilitated. Which Andre: the real Andre Cazabon, clearly is. Andre was lucky. She knows that many are not, and she's dedicated this film to letting us in on a world many of us try to ignore. Being on the street isn't about being cool, or rebellious, or independent. In a published statement, Andre writes "Wanting to be 'cool' almost killed me when I was 14." Maybe this article has convinced you that we need to put some solid thought into why kids turn to the streets to escape from their lives. But solving the problem involves more than just money. There are a lot of different treatment options out there, and a lot of different views on what we should do to help. There's the idea of "tough love", which says: if your friend/sibling/child won't stay sober or continues to steal from you, cut him out of your life. There's something called "harm reduction", which is a treatment approach that says: we can't make you get off the streets, but here are some things to do to protect yourself. There are methadone programs, which replace heroin with a less destructive addictive drug. There's outpatient treatment, day patient treatment, short-term residential and long-term residential programs. All these things work for some people, some of the time. But is there more that we could be doing? How do we convince the kids who need help to get it? How do we keep more kids from turning to the street? Hopefully this film will shed some light and lend some help.
By Frank Loreto 2004
Letters to a Street Child is a story about a young girl (Catherine Black) from a safe suburban home who leaves, becomes addicted to glue, and finally is sent off to a treatment center by her parents. In the beginning, she passed this story off as fiction. And why not? Who wants to blab about any part of their past, especially one as difficult as that? But Andre Cazabon couldn't quite do it, She realized that she was in a unique position to explore the issue of drugs and street kids. So she did, And the film was born.
Now, maybe you're thinking "what about the parents? Aren't they to blame for Andre (Catherine Black) being out on the street?" And fair enough. According to Dennis Long, of Breakaway Youth and Family Services in Toronto, about 60-80% of street kids are running away from abuse in the home, whether physical, sexual or psychological. But in Andre's case, her parents were the normal, worrying, over-protective parents most of us know and (try to) love. In the film, Andre (Catherine Black) doesn't blame her parents. She recognizes that they went through an incredibly difficult ordeal when she left home. In the film she follows the parents ordeal to show compassion for the hell that they went through. Andre's parents never forgot the pain of giving custody of their child up to Children's Aid, only to watch, helpless, as Andre acted out even more under their control. Letters to a Street Child is a tribute to love concurring all.
Andre’s mother says, "it's as if we were dead inside. Sometimes we just want to die. We don’t know how to cope anymore." This is not a film for the weak-hearted. It is also not a film full of hard facts and cold statistics. Instead, it's a heartfelt personal essay by someone with the strength to re-examine a part of her life that most people would want to forget. And she has a message that is echoed by the professionals I have spoken to in the field: there are not enough treatment centers out there for young people, there is not enough money or energy being poured into the issue of drug use on the street.
We watch Andre(Catherine Black) at 13 years of age as a street kid, panhandling and getting high. She roams the streets of Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. During her time on the street her father writes to her. These letters are the subject of her film, Letters To A Street Child. It focuses on the pain parents feel while their children spiral into self-destruction, through voice over conversations. The film also dispels the myth that all street kids come from abused families. It is a true life account of a family torn apart when their daughter, Andre(Catherine Black) takes to the streets for two long years. It is told as a series of letters from the father and the daughter over Andre’s bleak lifestyle of drugs and aimlessness. The father warns the viewer that what happened to their family, could easily happen to anyone. The family is financially comfortable and has done many things together as the father refers to their trip to Acapulco. The daughter, as we learn, in the fathers letters, did very well in school and received prizes for music and sports.
Catherine Black, as Andre is actually hard to watch at times. She grabs your heart with her desolate performance, creating empathy from the viewer. The film is very graphic in its language and situations. For these reasons, it has great power, though sometimes difficult to watch. Several scenes are particularly disturbing. The first involves Andre’s (Catherine Black’s) inability to remember when, “I pissed my pants.” She goes on at length trying to remember if it was last night or the night before, and she asks her partner to remind her to get new pants. Meanwhile he is so spaced out he can’t form sentences. When the next day finally arrives, she is far more keen to get drugs, and her pants are long forgotten. She does state that she would be horrified if her parents saw her soiled pants. However, getting drugs, not pants, is her real priority.
Another scene involves Andre (Black) and her friends waiting behind a dumpster for someone to throw garbage in. As soon as their wait is rewarded, the group happily go through the garbage like kids on Christmas morning. Andre(Catherine Black) is raped just after that, making her pull away from the group as she is clearly too rattled and isolated with her demons to continue in the same way she has been. This is what finally forces her to seek help and reunite with her family. However, the father knows that parental love is not enough and he insists that she go away for rehabilitation first. The family knows that two years on the street cannot be magically washed away. It is Catherine’s transformative performance while Andre is in treatment that is most gripping. This reckless punk rocker is brought to her knees. I think everyone in the theatre had a tear in their eye.
There are no happy endings as the film concludes with the father urging his daughter to use her inner strength to get properly rehabilitated. Which Andre: the real Andre Cazabon, clearly is. Andre was lucky. She knows that many are not, and she's dedicated this film to letting us in on a world many of us try to ignore. Being on the street isn't about being cool, or rebellious, or independent. In a published statement, Andre writes "Wanting to be 'cool' almost killed me when I was 14." Maybe this article has convinced you that we need to put some solid thought into why kids turn to the streets to escape from their lives. But solving the problem involves more than just money. There are a lot of different treatment options out there, and a lot of different views on what we should do to help. There's the idea of "tough love", which says: if your friend/sibling/child won't stay sober or continues to steal from you, cut him out of your life. There's something called "harm reduction", which is a treatment approach that says: we can't make you get off the streets, but here are some things to do to protect yourself. There are methadone programs, which replace heroin with a less destructive addictive drug. There's outpatient treatment, day patient treatment, short-term residential and long-term residential programs. All these things work for some people, some of the time. But is there more that we could be doing? How do we convince the kids who need help to get it? How do we keep more kids from turning to the street? Hopefully this film will shed some light and lend some help.
By Frank Loreto 2004
Black is not so dark
Black is not so dark
April 2000
By G.W. Brazier
TORONTO–Perhaps it’s the name, the hair colour and the green eyes that make her look like a cat from another world? Maybe it is her intelligence and almost Sag like wisdom that starkly contrasts with her shocking good looks and snow white shell? Whatever the reason’s sitting across from Catherine Black; a light and bubbly, sweet little young lady, I find it hard to believe that she has been so bad this year.
Catherine stars in four movies this year(American Psycho, Loser, Letters To a Street Child and Enfer et Contre Tour!)all of which have her either doing drugs, sporting mohawks, smoking black cigarettes, or riding motorcycles. In her little 1950's pink dress, I find it hard to imagine that she could eat out of a dumster or utter the words “I pissed my pants last night”, which marks, not only my favourite line in a movie, but one of the most tragic, and realistic depiction of a drug addict in cinema.
“My uncle died from heroin use, and even though I never met him, I have been haunted by his ghost, by the reasons why he died so young. I have always both been against drugs and extremely fascinated with how someone could ruin their entire lives over it. Just recently I had a man tell me that I saved his daughters life. Apparently she watch Letters to a Street Child and that she related to my character so much that it inspired her to get treatment, just like my character Andre did. This made me cry! I tried so hard to play that role as uncomfortably and as unglamourously as possible. I hate how drug addicts are made to be so cool in movies. It is reckless as far as I am concerned. Knowing that I helped someone to live and that I helped an entire family is the number one reason I will continue to act. I love acting, but making a difference in the world is what I want to do. I don’t think I could continue if I wasn’t making a difference. I think that is why we are all here, we all have one way to communicate and contribute that is most effective, and I have found mine.”
Catherine doesn’t sound as young and innocent as she looks. I begin to understand how this deep and sensitive soul could be confused with dark. Catherine was an athlete growing up, a competitive gymnast, so she had no time to dabble in drugs or be a rebellious teenager. She tells me how she moved away from home at the age of 16 not so she could party and skip school, so she could move to the city, finish highschool at a school for gifted students, act in theatre and hold a part time job. Catherine is also a very talented visual artist and while in highschool she painting murals in the school and had art shows of her work. She is a self proclaimed perfectionist and over-achiever. Currently with seven films already under her belt, and two tv shows, Catherine is studying Opera at The Royal Conservatory of Music.
“I think my eyebrows make people think I am wild!. Only a bad girl would have such an untamed brow.”
Maybe it is the brows, but whatever it is, Catherine knows how to get to the bottom of some of the darkest roles. You can see Catherine this month in theatres across the country opposite Christian Bale and Reese Witherspoon in the most anticipated movie this year, American Psycho. Black plays Reese’s gothic artist cousin from the East Village; which she very pointedly scolds the Psycho himself over. Bateman(Christian Bale) mocks her about hailing from Soho. Catherine, as Vanden, simply takes a long drag off her Black Russian cigarette, blows blue smoke in Batemans face, while starring him down and slowly says, “We are from the East Village actually”. At the posh restaurant with Reese Witherspoon and Christian Bale, Black gorges on sushi and smokes like a banshee, pounding back sake after sake as she argues with Bale like she doesn’t care, in true bourgiosie gluttonous fashion.
“It was my idea to be an absolute gluttonous pig. I thought it would be really funny if this artist was just gorging on everything she could get her hands on while having dinner with all these shallow rich socialite types who weren’t even touching their plates. Mary Harron love it. After the first take she came running over to me and was so excited saying how funny I was! She wanted ever angle of my me pigging out, so we had a 17 hour day that day thanks to me!”
Apparently, Harron had a secret dinner party for the cast at a house she rented on the Danforth. No one could know anything about the filming process or where Mary was staying because there was so much controversy and uproar about the film by raging feminists and the fact that the book was linked to the Paul Bernardo murder. Apparently it was his favourite book that he kept on his night stand. The film was called The Untitled project during pre production and production to protect the film and those involved from any violent protesters ironically.
“When I arrived at Mary’s house, I walked in and Mary was about ten feet away standing beside Christian Bale and Samantha Mathis holding her baby, she yelled from acroos the kitchen and threw the hall at me “Catherine, I loved your audition tape! You were so obtuse! My husband and I kept rewinding your audition in bed...you were hilarious!” Well that was quite the introduction. It was hard to picture this “mother” as the controversial punk rocker that I read about. In the end, she was a real gentleman really.”
Catherine has another movie coming out later this year called Loser opposite Greg Kinner. Loser is another big studio film directed by Fast Times At Ridgemont High director, Amy Heckerling, where she plays another tough girl decked out in punky military army fatigue fashion.
“It is funny, I have been cast by two super cool cutting edge woman directors who both told me that my character was based off of them.. What a honor really.”
Not really that funny.
COPYRIGHT 2000 G.W. Brazier
April 2000
By G.W. Brazier
TORONTO–Perhaps it’s the name, the hair colour and the green eyes that make her look like a cat from another world? Maybe it is her intelligence and almost Sag like wisdom that starkly contrasts with her shocking good looks and snow white shell? Whatever the reason’s sitting across from Catherine Black; a light and bubbly, sweet little young lady, I find it hard to believe that she has been so bad this year.
Catherine stars in four movies this year(American Psycho, Loser, Letters To a Street Child and Enfer et Contre Tour!)all of which have her either doing drugs, sporting mohawks, smoking black cigarettes, or riding motorcycles. In her little 1950's pink dress, I find it hard to imagine that she could eat out of a dumster or utter the words “I pissed my pants last night”, which marks, not only my favourite line in a movie, but one of the most tragic, and realistic depiction of a drug addict in cinema.
“My uncle died from heroin use, and even though I never met him, I have been haunted by his ghost, by the reasons why he died so young. I have always both been against drugs and extremely fascinated with how someone could ruin their entire lives over it. Just recently I had a man tell me that I saved his daughters life. Apparently she watch Letters to a Street Child and that she related to my character so much that it inspired her to get treatment, just like my character Andre did. This made me cry! I tried so hard to play that role as uncomfortably and as unglamourously as possible. I hate how drug addicts are made to be so cool in movies. It is reckless as far as I am concerned. Knowing that I helped someone to live and that I helped an entire family is the number one reason I will continue to act. I love acting, but making a difference in the world is what I want to do. I don’t think I could continue if I wasn’t making a difference. I think that is why we are all here, we all have one way to communicate and contribute that is most effective, and I have found mine.”
Catherine doesn’t sound as young and innocent as she looks. I begin to understand how this deep and sensitive soul could be confused with dark. Catherine was an athlete growing up, a competitive gymnast, so she had no time to dabble in drugs or be a rebellious teenager. She tells me how she moved away from home at the age of 16 not so she could party and skip school, so she could move to the city, finish highschool at a school for gifted students, act in theatre and hold a part time job. Catherine is also a very talented visual artist and while in highschool she painting murals in the school and had art shows of her work. She is a self proclaimed perfectionist and over-achiever. Currently with seven films already under her belt, and two tv shows, Catherine is studying Opera at The Royal Conservatory of Music.
“I think my eyebrows make people think I am wild!. Only a bad girl would have such an untamed brow.”
Maybe it is the brows, but whatever it is, Catherine knows how to get to the bottom of some of the darkest roles. You can see Catherine this month in theatres across the country opposite Christian Bale and Reese Witherspoon in the most anticipated movie this year, American Psycho. Black plays Reese’s gothic artist cousin from the East Village; which she very pointedly scolds the Psycho himself over. Bateman(Christian Bale) mocks her about hailing from Soho. Catherine, as Vanden, simply takes a long drag off her Black Russian cigarette, blows blue smoke in Batemans face, while starring him down and slowly says, “We are from the East Village actually”. At the posh restaurant with Reese Witherspoon and Christian Bale, Black gorges on sushi and smokes like a banshee, pounding back sake after sake as she argues with Bale like she doesn’t care, in true bourgiosie gluttonous fashion.
“It was my idea to be an absolute gluttonous pig. I thought it would be really funny if this artist was just gorging on everything she could get her hands on while having dinner with all these shallow rich socialite types who weren’t even touching their plates. Mary Harron love it. After the first take she came running over to me and was so excited saying how funny I was! She wanted ever angle of my me pigging out, so we had a 17 hour day that day thanks to me!”
Apparently, Harron had a secret dinner party for the cast at a house she rented on the Danforth. No one could know anything about the filming process or where Mary was staying because there was so much controversy and uproar about the film by raging feminists and the fact that the book was linked to the Paul Bernardo murder. Apparently it was his favourite book that he kept on his night stand. The film was called The Untitled project during pre production and production to protect the film and those involved from any violent protesters ironically.
“When I arrived at Mary’s house, I walked in and Mary was about ten feet away standing beside Christian Bale and Samantha Mathis holding her baby, she yelled from acroos the kitchen and threw the hall at me “Catherine, I loved your audition tape! You were so obtuse! My husband and I kept rewinding your audition in bed...you were hilarious!” Well that was quite the introduction. It was hard to picture this “mother” as the controversial punk rocker that I read about. In the end, she was a real gentleman really.”
Catherine has another movie coming out later this year called Loser opposite Greg Kinner. Loser is another big studio film directed by Fast Times At Ridgemont High director, Amy Heckerling, where she plays another tough girl decked out in punky military army fatigue fashion.
“It is funny, I have been cast by two super cool cutting edge woman directors who both told me that my character was based off of them.. What a honor really.”
Not really that funny.
COPYRIGHT 2000 G.W. Brazier
Walls Of The Fantasy Woman
Here are some articles that I have found on CB
MONTREAL MIRROR ______________________________________
OUT OF TOWN THEATRE April 6-12 2003
Walls Of the Fantasy Woman: Catherine Black speaks up
by SCOTT HUOT
Tristan, Euripides, Orestes, J. Alfred Prufrock, all live again in the shy Mr. Pym(Layne Colmen). Resentful in his longing, sleepwalking through an outwardly solitary life in bookish academe, painfully absent, He lives in a rich fantasy life that focuses on the shape-changing Woman who inhabits his dreams and destroys his reality-Catherine Black.
Now into it’s 6th sold out week; the remounted Dora Magnet; Walls Of Africa, we catch up with the Fantasy Woman herself, Catherine Black on her whirlwind 23 hour sprint to Montreal. Catherine is here for a dress fitting for her next film, on her one day off this week. This girl is hot and yet so cool as she sips her stout at a dive bar on St Laurent. Dressed in jeans and a t-shirt it is hard to imagine Catherine giggling in a buurka, pouring beer on her breast, haunting us with an undeniably fierce and erotic dance as she kicks off the show each night.
I saw Catherine perform in Walls of Africa and was immediately bewitched. Catherine’s allure is her absolutely subtle and genuinely sexy performance. Seemingly unaware of her silent strengths on stage she opens the show with such a ball grabbing presence which she maintains through the entire show, leaving us shattered with her absence; such is the job of a Fantasy Woman. Mr. Pym never had a chance. This three hander is already an all star cast with veterans Layne Coleman and Dora’s granddaughter and winner Tedde Moore, but the show is truly illuminated by Catherine’s performance.
“This role has opened me up to my power as a woman, I mean Fantasy woman! How on earth can one live up to that? Of course the words and direction only gave me the perfect forum to be the perfect woman in all her aspects, but I was so terrified of this burden I had to live up to” She laughs infectiously as she explains. “however, as specific as Hrant was about the character, he did give me all the freedom in the world to explore and create myself as my own perfect fantasy woman without any boundaries in his very very specific vision.”
And catherine did indeed fill the stage, the role and each hat that she was asked to wear; because as we all know, men’s fantasy’s are very complex, subject to change and easily found routine, and Catherine managed to be intuitively aware of this. She wore every shoe, and not just as a cliche`, she actually managed to be so many different woman, which is what is so extraordinary about her performance. She just was these woman.
“What a treat to explore so many versions of myself and woman for that matter and what it is to be sexy. Of course there is the visual, which was where Hrant was very very very specific (uncontrollable laughter). The librarian, the mother, the whore, the seducer, belly dancer, hag, the princess, what have you, that is what you see, but as a woman, these were roles I had to embody, and that was what was most enjoyable and most challenging and to fit that into the context of the play which is essentially about loneliness and longing. Walls of Africa is the saddest play in the world!...the music, the words, each scene was so beautifully sad. I love that! Sadness that just is, not horrible, not to be denied, but explored in a way that makes it beautiful; like Tom Waits or Beethoven or Paris! That is what going to the theater each night to perform Walls is like for me, like being in Paris in the 40’s listening to Beethoven and having a whiskey with Waits; my favorite acting experience to date.”
OUT OF TOWN THEATRE April 6-12 2003
Walls Of the Fantasy Woman: Catherine Black speaks up
by SCOTT HUOT
Tristan, Euripides, Orestes, J. Alfred Prufrock, all live again in the shy Mr. Pym(Layne Colmen). Resentful in his longing, sleepwalking through an outwardly solitary life in bookish academe, painfully absent, He lives in a rich fantasy life that focuses on the shape-changing Woman who inhabits his dreams and destroys his reality-Catherine Black.
Now into it’s 6th sold out week; the remounted Dora Magnet; Walls Of Africa, we catch up with the Fantasy Woman herself, Catherine Black on her whirlwind 23 hour sprint to Montreal. Catherine is here for a dress fitting for her next film, on her one day off this week. This girl is hot and yet so cool as she sips her stout at a dive bar on St Laurent. Dressed in jeans and a t-shirt it is hard to imagine Catherine giggling in a buurka, pouring beer on her breast, haunting us with an undeniably fierce and erotic dance as she kicks off the show each night.
I saw Catherine perform in Walls of Africa and was immediately bewitched. Catherine’s allure is her absolutely subtle and genuinely sexy performance. Seemingly unaware of her silent strengths on stage she opens the show with such a ball grabbing presence which she maintains through the entire show, leaving us shattered with her absence; such is the job of a Fantasy Woman. Mr. Pym never had a chance. This three hander is already an all star cast with veterans Layne Coleman and Dora’s granddaughter and winner Tedde Moore, but the show is truly illuminated by Catherine’s performance.
“This role has opened me up to my power as a woman, I mean Fantasy woman! How on earth can one live up to that? Of course the words and direction only gave me the perfect forum to be the perfect woman in all her aspects, but I was so terrified of this burden I had to live up to” She laughs infectiously as she explains. “however, as specific as Hrant was about the character, he did give me all the freedom in the world to explore and create myself as my own perfect fantasy woman without any boundaries in his very very specific vision.”
And catherine did indeed fill the stage, the role and each hat that she was asked to wear; because as we all know, men’s fantasy’s are very complex, subject to change and easily found routine, and Catherine managed to be intuitively aware of this. She wore every shoe, and not just as a cliche`, she actually managed to be so many different woman, which is what is so extraordinary about her performance. She just was these woman.
“What a treat to explore so many versions of myself and woman for that matter and what it is to be sexy. Of course there is the visual, which was where Hrant was very very very specific (uncontrollable laughter). The librarian, the mother, the whore, the seducer, belly dancer, hag, the princess, what have you, that is what you see, but as a woman, these were roles I had to embody, and that was what was most enjoyable and most challenging and to fit that into the context of the play which is essentially about loneliness and longing. Walls of Africa is the saddest play in the world!...the music, the words, each scene was so beautifully sad. I love that! Sadness that just is, not horrible, not to be denied, but explored in a way that makes it beautiful; like Tom Waits or Beethoven or Paris! That is what going to the theater each night to perform Walls is like for me, like being in Paris in the 40’s listening to Beethoven and having a whiskey with Waits; my favorite acting experience to date.”
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