This time, when Charles yelled, "Cut," everyone on set applauded. All the emotion I’d been keeping inside flowed out of me in the best catharsis I’d had in a while. The scene was organically funny in its absurdity, that a simple gift could be so misconstrued by an anxious bride-to-be. Steve knocked on the door and, for the first time, I turned around with tears streaming down my face. The thought was such a punch in the gut that suddenly I sobbed. I am failing." I’d cried many times in my life, not to mention recently, why couldn’t I do it now? A fleet of crew members stared at my back from behind the camera, and the producers and other VIPs continued to inspect and dissect my every move from video village just feet away. I looked out my pretend window as the effects person switched on the rain again. Patiently, Steve went back to his starting position, for maybe the 50th time. Kimberly Williams-Paisley shares a personal photo of herself with "Father of the Bride" director Charles Shyer on the set of the film. It was close to lunchtime and we’d been working all morning. "Gimme one more, Boobie."īoobie was the pet name he called everyone.
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," he would say, struggling to figure out how to help me. Steve and I waited in the quiet room for notes, and then finally Charles came through the door looking more and more stressed. But I just couldn’t conjure up the tears, and again and again, after our director Charles Shyer yelled "cut," there was silence. "Annie? Can I come in?"Įach time, I invited him in and began telling him what was wrong.
For hours, thirty to forty times, he knocked on that door. A special effects person aimed "rain" at the window, and a giant light shone outside the glass to simulate a cloudy day.Īs cameras rolled, Steve and I did the first half of the scene. A blender sat in tissue paper on the bed. As I walked up the steps to my doom, crewmembers prepared for the action. The cozy bedroom set had been constructed in the middle of a cavernous room on a raised platform that reminded me of a gallows. The night before we shot the scene, I didn’t sleep.
In retrospect, we should have just called in the hairy guy with the tweezers to resume plucking. I hadn’t had much training on how to access emotion yet, and the more I worried over being expected to weep, the less likely it became. Through each of my four auditions, I worried along with everyone else in the room that if I got the part, I wouldn’t be able to cry on cue. The scene is set for George Banks, played by Steve Martin, to come into her bedroom to find "Annie" sobbing. She questions the meaning behind the gesture and jumps to the conclusion that he expects her to be a housewife, instead of the career woman she’d planned. "Bryan," played by George Newbern, gives my character, "Annie," a blender as a wedding gift and it sends her into a dither. What plagued me most was that stinkin’ blender scene. But much of the time, I felt far away from my family, friends and all that was familiar. In many ways, my life couldn’t have been better. I was living out a dream I’d had since I was five-acting in a major motion picture alongside remarkable comedians I’d looked up to for years: Diane Keaton, Steve Martin, Martin Short. I felt like a naked chicken about to be roasted. I cried ugly tears, as an ironically hairy man yanked at my forehead with a set of sharp tweezers, while an apologetic lady in a white lab coat applied soothing warm wax to my thighs only to rip it off - along with my dignity - a second later.
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Little did anyone know, I spent my first day as a movie star literally getting plucked. It was a classic Hollywood story: I was "plucked" out of obscurity, chosen from an exhaustive nationwide search and thrown into the spotlight overnight at the age of nineteen. "Father of the Bride" began a thrilling and terrifying metamorphosis for me, as I left behind the last remnants of my childhood and became an adult. Couples often romanticize it as "their movie." Brides watch it as a rite of passage before their wedding day. Fathers see the film with their daughters, and weep over memories of long ago back yard basketball scrimmages.