Baghead Cometh



Sacramento actress Greta Gerwig gets an amazingly-nice profile (they crown her the 'Indie-Queen') in the LA Times! With "Baghead", her star is definitely on the rise!

If I'm not mistaken, Gerwig did shows at the Woodland Opera House in 1999 and performed at her alma mater, St. Francis High School. I blogged about a Feb. 23, 2007 Sac Bee profile of her last year. Pam Kay Lourentzos says "She has the talent to be a triple threat, but she was so smart, so verbally aware, she was instead more attracted to other aspects of theater, like playwriting. Film is a good place for her."

Apparently "Baghead" was in Sacramento-area theatres for a limited engagement earlier this month.

It's wonderful to see someone who passed through the Sacramento-area community musical theater milieu on the way to Bigger and Better, doing Bigger and Better!:

Think of her as an ingénue for the text-message set. With her offbeat allure, charm and sass, actress Greta Gerwig has become something of an indie-film sensation over the last two years after several of her movies played to swooning responses at such festivals as SXSW and Sundance. Since her insightful portrait of youthful uncertainty and anxiety as the title character in 2007's "Hannah Takes the Stairs" (the defining movie of the recent low-budget, dialogue-driven "mumblecore" film movement), she has seemed to be on the cusp of something bigger.

But not quite yet. In the new micro-budget horror-comedy "Baghead," currently in theaters, Gerwig plays Michelle, a twentysomething transplant to L.A. desperate for attention and connection. The character is by turns flighty and wily, determined to get what she wants even if she doesn't always know what that is, and provides an ideal launchpad for Gerwig's distinctively natural, goofy-yet-sultry screen presence.

"Baghead," a hybrid of mumblecore's character-based talkiness jump-started with genre kicks, follows four struggling actors as they set out to make a movie in the woods, only to find themselves terrorized by an unknown assailant. Michelle is in no small part a complicated creation of Gerwig's own devising, as filmmakers Mark and Jay Duplass, whose previous feature was 2005's small-scale hit "The Puffy Chair," allow their actors a wide berth through improvisation and collaboration.

Gerwig is something of the accidental "It" girl, a reluctant starlet whose first on-screen performance, in the 2006 film "LOL," consisted largely of saved voice mails she had left for her then-actual boyfriend. (Along with risqué camera-phone pictures she took of herself for the movie in the bathroom of a university library.) Yet with her choppy blond hair, wide eyes and pouty mouth, she has one of those faces that the camera, at whatever the budget, just seems to like.

"The way I describe it is when I'm shooting, [the camera] just wants to go to her," said Jay Duplass, who besides being co-writer and co-director of "Baghead" also shot the film. "Greta, her face, like, glows."

"She's kind of her own secret weapon," said Mark Duplass in trying to define Gerwig's appeal. "She's got a lot of things working there and I'm still not exactly sure how it all computes, how all the pistons fire."

Gerwig, 24, puts across her characters with such ease that it can seem as if she is not acting at all. Whichever performance of hers someone sees first -- mischievous and a little dim in "Baghead;" whip-smart and reckless in "Hannah" -- it's all too easy to assume that's just her.

"I sometimes wish I could lose who I was a little bit more," Gerwig said of acting. "In my mind, my performance in 'Baghead' is so wacky and out there, and then I look at it and it's still me. I sort of can't get rid of who I am.

"I don't think anybody would hire me if they wanted somebody who was completely a blank slate. I'm not comparing myself to her, but if you hire Diane Keaton you're going to get Diane Keaton. She can play lots of different things, but she more often than anything is Diane Keaton. I think that would be something closer to what I would be able to do. I don't ever see myself playing Queen Elizabeth."

The comparison to Keaton works not only for Gerwig's eccentric mannerisms and personalized sense of style: Like Keaton, Gerwig comes across as a breezy combination of native California kookiness and bookish East Coast smarts.

Originally from Sacramento, Gerwig moved to New York City to attend Barnard College. There she studied English and philosophy and was an aspiring playwright. "LOL" led to working again with director Joe Swanberg on "Hannah," which costarred Mark Duplass, leading to "Baghead" and other roles.