Agnes Bruckner was in the makeup chair several hours a day to get the Anna Nicole look. (
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Agnes Bruckner and Martin Landau as Anna Nicole and her husband J. Howard Marshall. (
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Anna Nicole-Smith (AP)
Anna Nicole Smith was the ultimate cautionary tale: A gorgeous high school dropout from a tiny town in Texas who became a superstar overnight — only to crash and burn before our eyes.
During her 39 years on the planet, Smith’s journey from the Chicken Shack to the stripper pole to the bank — and then to the medicine cabinet — sustained thousands of tabloid covers. And now, perhaps inevitably, it’s the topic of a brand- new Lifetime biopic, Anna Nicole, starring indie actress Agnes Bruckner (“Blue Car”) as the tragic beauty.
“Everything happened so fast for her,” observes Bruckner, 27. “She grew up so quickly, got married, had a kid, left school. And then she was just thrust into fame. How overwhelming that must have been.” Bruckner says she can understand why Smith began acting out and becoming, as she describes herself in the film, a “balls-to-the-wall party girl.”
But there was a lot more to Smith, née Vickie Lynn Hogan, than her shocking downward spiral — and that’s what’s most surprising about Anna Nicole. While the Texas sexpot’s life could easily have been fodder for the worst type of Lifetime movie (“Liz and Dick,” anyone?) the creators of “Anna Nicole” strive for a more nuanced approach, in which Anna is depicted as vulnerable, well-meaning — and real.
Directed by Mary Harron (“American Psycho,” “I Shot Andy Warhol”) and featuring a star-studded cast that includes Martin Landau as Anna Nicole’s billionaire octogenarian husband J. Howard Marshall, Virginia Madsen as her misguided mother Virgie and Adam Goldberg as her exploitative lawyer Howard K. Stern, the movie focuses on Anna’s yearning to be loved — and how that clashes with her drug addiction and thirst for the spotlight.
“The way we saw it, she had two selves,” explains Joe Batteer, who co-wrote the script with John Rice. “The Anna Nicole self wanted to be famous and the Vickie Lynn self just wanted to be a good mom to her son.”
Smith’s own dysfunctional childhood — culminating in her getting married and giving birth to son Danny when she was just a teenager — fueled both desires, Rice says. “She thought, ‘I need to be a better mom than my mother was.’ But she also she wanted to escape into a fairy-tale life, with money and fame and billions of dollars.”
Batteer and Rice didn’t always have such a deep understanding of Smith. In fact, they admit that when they were first approached by producers, they balked. Longtime action movie writers, they had no inkling of how to write a Lifetime movie about a doomed starlet. “We weren’t familiar with that quadrant of the business,” says Rice. But they ultimately decided to keep an open mind. “You don’t know if a Lifetime movie can be really good or not when you’ve never done one,” Rice says, with a laugh.
After doing some research and speaking in depth with Harron, Rice and Batteer tackled the challenge of making a tabloid goddess into a flesh-and-blood heroine. “Just like her, we both have kids,” Batteer says, explaining that Anna’s love for her son Danny, who wound up dying of an overdose six months before his mother, was “a way in for us.”
Along with her crazy, excessive behavior, the team tried to show Smith’s softer more nurturing side, both in scenes with Danny (Graham Patrick Martin) and in her unexpectedly tender relationship with Marshall, her husband of 9 months. “It wasn’t a storybook romance, but they found their own weird love,” Bateer says. “There was no dispute that she brought him back to life. I think there’s a line in the script that’s pretty good, where he tells her, ‘You make me feel like I’m 74 again.’ ”
The way Bruckner, who was outfitted with 36DD prosthetic breasts to play the role, sees it, Smith got a lot out of the marriage too — and not in the way you might expect. “Before she met [Marshall], she didn’t have anybody in her life that genuinely loved her and wanted her to be happy,” she says. “Yes, he showered her with gifts and money. But at the end of the day the thing that meant the most for her was the way he looked at her, like she was this shiny beautiful thing. That was the core of their relationship.”
Landau, Bruckner says, “was incredible to work with.” And it’s the sweet, quiet scenes between them that make Smith’s stunning downfall all the more heartbreaking. During the last quarter of the movie, the onetime beauty becomes increasingly sad and addled as Stern parades her in front of the cameras on a reality show and feeds her a steady supply of pills. Still, she has moments of lucidity. And when the movie depicts her death in 2007 at the age of 39, we feel as though we’ve truly gotten to know her.
Rice remarks that Bruckner “didn’t want to play Anna Nicole Smith any other way than as someone real.”
And it’s no mean feat that — prosthetic boobs and all — she manages to accomplish just that. “One of the biggest concerns I had taking on this role was that I didn’t want her to be a caricature,” Bruckner says. “Yes, Anna Nicole was a crazy party animal. But she was also a human being.”
ANNA NICOLE
Saturday, 8 p.m., Lifetime