I have the immense pleasure today of welcoming a very special guest, actress Wendy Phillips, to CINEMATIC REVELATIONS for an interview. Wendy has acted in many motion pictures over the years such as AIRPLANE II: THE SEQUEL, MIDNIGHT RUN, FRATERNITY ROW [my review of the film can be found here], THE WIZARD, BUGSY, I AM SAM, FRIENDS WITH MONEY, and RENDITION, to name several. Wendy has been an acting teacher privately for many years, and is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Southern California. In this interview Wendy will be discussing her part in FRATERNITY ROW, acting in cinema and on television, and her academic career.
Welcome to CINEMATIC REVELATIONS Wendy!
Wendy: Thank you, I’m happy to be here.
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Athan: When did you first realize that you wanted to be an actress?
Wendy: Well, my parents were actors, and my father was a Broadway actor for many years, fairly successful, and was blacklisted right around the time I was born. So he went into teaching acting, and one of his students, it's almost a cliche, was my mother. They got together, and I was born along with my two brothers, and they'd just grown up in the theatre, or in acting classes.
Wannabe actors were our babysitters. We had to sit through all the plays my parents did, and it became second nature. It's the family business, what can I say? So I went to Cal Berkeley [University of California] sort of thinking I wanted to be an attorney, a lawyer, a criminal lawyer, and right the wrongs of the world. But then I realized I really hated law.
So I guess life picked me to be an actor. I got an audition, got it, and just kept going.
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Athan: Where did you study acting?
Wendy: Well, first with my parents growing up, but when I came down to Los Angeles, I had worked a little bit at the Strasberg Institute because Lee Strasberg was a close friend of my father's, but a really good person who taught me the most was a woman named Peggy Feury. She had a studio called the Loft Studio, and a lot of children of actors from New York studied there because they respected Peggy so much. People like Sean Penn, Angelica Houston, Adam Arkin, lots of people.
And I met my best friend there, Hallie Foote, who's the daughter of the playwright Horton Foote. So we were all twenty somethings in this acting class, and she was a very good teacher, and I owe her a lot.
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Athan: As the multi-faceted Betty Anne Martin in FRATERNITY ROW, your performance was excellent. What it is that drew you to the part of Betty Ann in FRATERNITY ROW, and how did it feel to make your film acting debut in the movie?
If you wanted a villain, get someone who's really nice because they will present complexities, as opposed to someone who's just, excuse my language, well, someone who's just kind of rotten to play a rotten person, you just, you just get two rottens. But if you cast opposites, you get a duality, which is what you look for in complex performances.
At that young of an age though, you always want to be the liked one, or the pretty girl, but over time, I appreciated it. And again, one of my oldest friends is Greg Harrison and also, Nancy Ritter. From that movie, you kind of bond as young actors. You don't know anything. You're pretending you know everything and you form very close relationships at those times of transition.
I had done a movie before FRATERNITY ROW, which is what brought me to Los Angeles. I'd done a movie of the week called Death Be Not Proud, which was really excellent, with Robby Benson, Jane Alexander, and that was my sort of professional debut. And a Los Angeles agent saw it and wanted to sign me. She also happened to be Greg Harrison's agent, and she submitted us both for FRATERNITY ROW.
That very first year was young.
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Athan: FRATERNITY ROW had an accomplished cast with yourself, Peter Fox, Gregory Harrison, Nancy Morgan, and Scott Newman as the lead group of protagonists. What was it like working with these performers, and have you kept in contact with any cast members and crew from FRATERNITY ROW?
Wendy: Well, it's interesting looking back on it. You know, Scott Newman shortly passed away after the movie, but he was difficult. He was a difficult character probably because of the demons he was struggling with, and because of who his father was. But looking back on it, he was extremely charismatic. And I'm so sorry that he wasn't able to somehow work his way through his demons.
Greg and I became very close friends, very good friends. We were the only two actors that my agent represented that were not from New York. I was from San Francisco, and Greg is from Catalina. So all those parties, we kind of just huddled in the corners, the two non-New Yorkers.
But we were very good, good friends, and we played brother and sister in season eight of Falcon Crest many years later. And Nancy, who became Nancy Ritter, John Ritter's wife, was just a wonderful person. And I went a couple of years ago, I went back to an acting class, I just wanted to. I was teaching, and I felt like I needed to walk in the shoes of being an actor again, to help my teaching.
And there's a wonderful teacher that she was in that class, so we got to sort of reconnect after many years. She's just a great person, really great. I value my friendship with both of those people. And Peter, I like Peter, but I don't know where Peter went. I think he's president of the Theater Alliance in Los Angeles, but ninety-eight percent of my work has been filmed, so I don't know very much about theater in Los Angeles.
I love film. Perhaps it was my own personal validation, my family or theatre, and I went into film. Fortunately, film accepted me in and I love it. I loved the hours, I loved the camaraderie of being the crew. I love the intimacy film that you get, that's harder to get on stage, I think.
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Athan: For you, what was the most demanding, but emotionally satisfying segment of filming FRATERNITY ROW?
Wendy: It was during the summer of 1976 maybe. We took over a paternity house at USC, and the cast and the crew in a weird way almost lived there. We just, we would just shoot sort of around the clock. Most of it takes place at night, so it's night shoots, which particularly throws your rhythm off.
So we would spend a lot of hours just hanging out at that fraternity house while they were setting up cameras. And it was conducive, conducive to conversations of the soul around 4:00 AM in the morning while you're waiting for the next shot to be set up.
In terms of a sequence from the movie, there's a fight scene in there. I think that's my favorite scene, and its with Peter Fox. I have a fight scene and I'm really not very nice, but my feelings are heard. I don't understand why everybody else feels different than I do. I’m arguing by a tree with Peter Fox, then he leaves me crying there.
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Athan: FRATERNITY ROW was directed by Thomas J. Tobin, in his only film as director. What was the experience of being directed by Mr Tobin in FRATERNITY ROW, who made his movie debut helming the picture?
And it was an experiment to see if they, if, a graduate department, of course USC cinema, USC cinema, a School of Cinematic Arts, is about as prestigious as you could get in this country. So I would say seventy-five percent of this, the crew were students, graduate students. Our DP [Director of Photography] had been a professional director of photography, and I think Tom had directed some, but he really hadn't worked with actors extensively. He was lovely. And I think he did an amazing job considering the pressure he was under with the school, just being the first time the school attempted to do this.
And they did find a market and you know, a year later it was sold for release and we all got paid. But at the time, everybody was doing it as a labor of love. We weren't being paid at that time. The actors weren't and neither was the crew. And once it was paid, everybody, they kept the hours, they kept the accounting. I have a wonderful story about Greg Harrison. This is a little off topic, but we did the movie, and then we didn't hear anything more about it for about a year.
And that's not unusual, but we went our own ways. But Greg Harrison was having a hard time getting any work and he was working, selling shoes. I think Carl’s Shoes didn't have any money, and all of a sudden it was just before Christmas that they cut the checks for FRATERNITY ROW. And with all his overtime, and remember, this is 1977, his check was for $36,000. From working to selling shoes, he knew that with amount of money, he could live at least a year in Los Angeles and pursue acting. And soon after that, he got Logan's Run, which was a dream. But he came over with a check because I got my check. and was in tears because it was in the nick of time.
Athan: Isn't it something when something like that happens? Many times a situation saves.
Wendy: The thirteenth hour or something and you go, oh, here I'm gonna make it.
Athan: Makes you not want to give up on life, doesn’t it?
Wendy: I don’t know, it ain't over until the fat lady sings. Do you have that expression?
Athan: Yes.
Wendy: Baseball expression here. And I think you hang, you know, it's over until, it's over. You know, it's, so hang in there.
Athan: That's it. Exactly.
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Athan: You have also acted in many television shows over the years, with Executive Suite, Lou Grant, B.J. and the Bear, CHiPs, Trapper John, M.D., Taxi, and St. Elsewhere, Falcon Crest, and more recently in E.R., Ghost Whisperer, The Mentalist, and SEAL TEAM. You have appeared in telemovies, with Paper Dolls, Shattered Vows, and Appearances just a small sampling. What, for you, are the main differences between film, and television?
Wendy: Well, there's one time, just time. TV, they have to get big, they have to tell the story. You have eight days for an hour of tv, if you're lucky. And for a feature for two hours, a two-hour feature could be like four months. So a lot of that goes to the lighting, and they can go on location. And the richness of the quality of production is much richer on a big feature.
So feature writers can write to that, while TV writers know that they have to keep the story within a certain kind of containment or they just can't shoot it in time. I think the hour long format may be the format I love the most, but it may be the most tiring to me on a series for an hour drama because you're just every day shooting for months and a different story every day. While with a feature, you have one story over a couple of months.
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Athan: You have been an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Southern California Graduate School of Film for the last fourteen years in the John Wells Division of Writing for Screen & Television. What is it about this role which gives you the most satisfaction?
Wendy: Oh, I'm very grateful. You know, in Hollywood there's not much use for older actresses. When I finished my last series Promised Land, I was 50 something. And while there are parts for older women, if they are any good, then Meryl Streep is doing them. There's so few, and most of them are just written like in broad terms and aren't, aren't really very interesting.
It's not why one becomes an actor. And I got offered this job out of the blue. I did a film called MIDNIGHT RUN with Robert De Niro, and the man sitting next to me in a dinner party loved that film. He turned out to be the head of the cinema department at USC, and asked if I wanted to come teach this class that had been taught by Nina Foch, who had just died one or two years earlier.
They were looking for her replacement. And I couldn't imagine teaching screenwriters the process of acting, because that's the class I teach, which, is a required course. It's the first course they get when they enter graduate school. And it's magic, it's absolutely magic. I would prefer to teach screenwriters than actors because actors are constantly, how am I going to get a job?
You know, giving them information, but they want to know, is this going to help me get a job? It's hard for them to hold onto the big picture of their journey as an artist. But if you're a screenwriter, you're like, what the heck? I've got to take this acting class? And then all of a sudden they kind of get it. They kind of get how the actor is also a storyteller, and that their words, and these people, merge together to create one story for you to view.
But the director, the writer, the actor, the cinematographer, they're all coming together to tell this story as truthfully, and fully as possible. And you know, you really, there's always one or two during a semester where you see the light comes on, you know, behind the eyes and they go, oh, I get it, I get it. And I know those people when they direct now, will truly appreciate what actors do, and not see them merely as talking puppets, which is, I kind of think, that a lot of people think actors really are. Either they're exhibitionists, or they practice in front of the mirror, and make a series of expressions, and that's not it at all.
Yeah. And I'm 72, and I get to go work with young people who are really smart and excited about their futures, and it makes me feel young. Campus in the fall and they're all arriving and their script hasn't been written yet, and they're so, they're ready to go. And you can just be, it's contagious. It really, it makes me feel very alive.
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Athan: Do you have any upcoming projects of which you would like to tell readers?
Wendy: I've been retired from acting for a good fifteen years, maybe longer. Maybe every once in a while it crosses my mind and someone will ask me if I'm interested in something. But you know, acting is a muscle. You have to believe in yourself. You have to have confidence that you are the best person to tell or act the story of this character.
And you have to do it a lot to believe in that. It's a kind of a trick in the mind. You have to practice it a lot so that when a part comes at you go, I know this character better than anyone else, and I can do it better than anyone else. You have to walk in with that kind of belief. And that's why young actors are always in acting class. It's not necessarily just to learn acting, it's about keeping that muscle going so that when they do get a job, they've been acting every day or you know, they've been at it for a while.
Actually teaching it is a very different part of the brain than the doing of it. And now that teaching part is really built up and the doing of it is, that's why I went to that class where I reconnected with Nancy, because I just wanted to touch it again and, make sure that part of the brain still existed. But no, no, no, just not just, I want to teach as long as I can.
You feel like that, you know, you're where you belong. You could feel it in your body, and it's not like every day is happy and there are days when I go, I don't want to teach anymore. But overall, you know, you're receiving an enormous amount of nutrition for the soul, and I'm really, really grateful for it. Really grateful because I too have, I have had acting jobs where I just could not wait for it to be over.
And if I could quit in the middle of a project, I would've, as they would have been like nightmare experiences, just because I wasn't where I was supposed to be.
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Thank you so much today for your time Wendy, and for the keen insights you have provided into the art of acting, FRATERNITY ROW, cinema, television, and academia. It has been wonderful having you on CINEMATIC REVELATIONS. You are welcome to return whenever you wish.
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Wendy Phillips links
+Wendy Phillips IMDb Actor Page
+FRATERNITY ROW movie IMDb page
+Wendy Phillips University of Southern California profile
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