Bo Derek made her acting breakthrough in the 1979 romantic comedy 10, and her performance — including an iconic scene of Derek running down the beach in a skin-coloured swimsuit and cornrows — quickly propelled her to a status of femme fatale with overnight stardom — a perfect 10. Bo was everywhere — on the covers of magazines, newspapers and posters of the film alike that helped make the movie into a 10 on a scale of same among box office sleepers, with a gross of $60 million. It’s the only thing most people even remember about the movie. Suddenly, everybody was wearing cornrows, trying to look just like her, accrediting Bo more than anyone else for popularising cornrows. A 1980 People article even cited Derek as the catalyst for making cornrows a ‘cross-cultural craze’ and a ‘beauty store bonanza.’ In Derek’s own words “Being the part of 10 was such an unusual experience. I’m only in the film a few minutes but it changed my life. The film itself was about a man in his mid-life crises, haven’t been told before. I feel so fortunate to be a part of it.”
It was four decades ago, but the moment still looms over Bo Derek’s life. Born Mary Cathleen Collins in Long Beach, California, in 1959, Derek says she just sort of made up the name Bo around the time she was casted in cinema. Although Bo’s subsequent film Tarzan, the Ape Man (1981) did well on the box office, but it was raved with negative reviews due to the objectification of Bo rather than keeping the focus on Tarzan. Post Tarzan, Bo did Bolero (1984), Ghosts Can’t Do It (1990), Tommy Boy (1995) and a couple of other films, but Bo has always been interested in behind the scene aspects of the films and hence went into production soon after.
Bo Derek recently spoke to Community as she is visiting Doha to celebrate her birthday, about how she thinks cinema has evolved over the period of four decades, what keeps her busy now and her take on #Metoo.
“Absolutely everything has changed. There were just a few motion pictures made a year back then, now as a consumer or an actor there’s so much content and so much work because of streaming and Internet, cable and it’s a very exciting time. I like it,” says Derek.
Drawing a parallel between the old age cinema and the current scenario of online movie streaming services and how it has changed the media landscape, Bo Derek said, “It was so expensive to make a movie back in the 80s, so expensive to release a movie, and you had to make a film to please the masses. For the most part, the films were not that specific. Now, whatever you like, whatever documentary, whatever you want to learn about or however you want to be entertained — it’s just a click away and it’s fantastic,” she added, “I know there’s an argument in Hollywood right now that movies should be in the big theatre and you shouldn’t mix the two but I think it’s too late now and everything’s already just out there. Good movie is a good movie, I don’t care where you see it.”
Have method acting changed over the period of time? “I’ve never enjoyed performing — behind the scenes has been more my thing. When I act, I prefer to have a very strong director. That’s hard to find now. Today, actors are so good, so prepared now that I have to catch up and warm up and feel it, and I need the director to tell me what to do and exactly how to do it,” the actress says.
After her breakout role in 10, Bo decided to produce and act in films that she made with her husband, John Derek, even if that meant never having the starring role in a blockbuster movie.
from Gulf Times https://ift.tt/35lLatS
Comments
Post a Comment