Holly Hunter, Still the Character

During a pivotal scene of “Miss Firecracker,” Holly Hunter’s character, a backwater waif named Carnelle Scott, discovers that her beautiful, self-possessed cousin has betrayed her. Audiences will read the pain in Hunter’s eyes as a reflection of Carnelle’s hurt. But director Thomas Schlamme knows that something more was going on during that hot summer day he filmed the scene in Yazoo City, Miss.

“Holly was very, very emotional, isolated, frightened of the scene,” Schlamme recalls. Later, Hunter confessed that she had been dealing with her own inner tumult. She was saying goodby to a character who had arisen out of her hungry past to haunt her, just as her Hollywood career was taking off with the force of a jumbo jet.

Five years have passed since Hunter played Carnelle Scott in an Off Broadway production of Beth Henley’s “The Miss Firecracker Contest.” Those were the BBN days--Before “Broadcast News.” A lot has changed since that 1988 hit movie, which meant fame and an Academy Award nomination for Hunter.

No longer struggling on Off Broadway stages, Hunter has shot onto Hollywood’s A-list of actresses. No longer stereotyped as a character actor with an eccentric personality and a Southern twang, Hunter today can choose from a variety of roles. In her next project, Steven Spielberg’s “Always,” due out in December, Hunter plays a woman blinded by love.

And then, of course, there’s the money that Hollywood dangles in front of stars from top-grossing movies. No comparison to Hunter’s life BBN.

So why did Hunter choose as her first project after “Broadcast News” a movie version of a play that had already consumed 10 months of her life? A film unlikely to become a box office or critical home run? Hunter, notes Schlamme, had “every opportunity in the world to back out. It was a lot less money than she could have gotten, and I was a first-time director.”

But Hunter didn’t feel she had a choice. “I was very possessive of Carnelle,” Hunter says. “If someone else had done that character, it would have tortured me. I had so many memories about the experience of doing the play, doing that woman.” Indeed, at some points during her performance Hunter felt that she was too close to the character. “I almost couldn’t get a beat on her,” she says.

Hunter, whose Carnelle Scott is a pathetic orphan with a “loose” reputation who tries to emulate her elegant cousin (played by Mary Steenburgen) by entering the town’s Miss Firecracker contest, was the only member of the stage cast to appear in the film. Schlamme had planned to cast his wife, Christine Lahti, in the Steenburgen role but dropped those plans when she got pregnant. Lahti and Hunter have been close friends since they both appeared in the film “Swing Shift.”

Henley, who lives in Los Angeles, says the film “is darker in a lot of ways (than the play). But it’s also funnier. The play had a lighter bent.”

The movie enjoyed relatively good business when it opened last weekend, but played in only six theaters. Reviews of “Miss Firecracker” were decidedly mixed, with The Times’ Michael Wilmington calling it “a low-budget production with major league acting,” and the New York Times’ Caryn James calling it a “superficial and sporadically witty piece.”

In the end, though, reviews and ticket sales don’t matter to Hunter. “It was almost like an exorcism for me,” she says. “I just wanted to do it and get it over with.”

That’s the kind of candid talk that accounts for Hunter’s feisty and forthright reputation. Gloss is not part of this woman’s vocabulary. She is country, she is street smart--take your pick. She belongs in her Jeep pickup, plowing down back-country roads, or sitting in a TriBeCa bar with a cappuccino and a ragged copy of an Off Broadway script. She does not belong in Los Angeles.

So as she sits in a Santa Monica restaurant, sans makeup, in jeans and a T-shirt, she pines for the streets of New York. “Ah,” she says, with her trademark Georgian accent, “it’s just a more honest place to live. I think culturally there’s a lot of deceit here. There’s a lot of effort spent trying to fool people. New York is awfully brutal but there’s no attempt on the part of the nucleus of that town to fool people. You really feel like it’s being shoved in front of you. I respect that.”

It takes a moment to adjust to the off-screen version of this actress, like coming out of a tunnel and trying to see through the bright light. “Broadcast News” director James Brooks has said he nearly mistook the 5-foot-2 actress for somebody’s assistant when she appeared to audition for the role of the neurotic news producer Jane Craig. When she shows up in the Santa Monica restaurant for an interview, no one recognizes her. With her still-wet hair and a knapsack on her back, she could be mistaken for the 16-year-old tomboy daughter of some local producer.

In her BBN days, Hunter says, “people had a tendency to put their arm around me, or kiss me. They don’t know me. People have these ideas of me, that I’m small and feisty, that I’m cute that way. When I give an opinion, and I’m fairly forthright about giving that opinion, they see something cute about it. If you put 10 inches on me, I might be considered threatening, and maybe even a bitch.

“So I’ve been patronized quite a bit. The accent doesn’t help at all with that. It only encouraged people to think I was cute.”

Hunter’s accent, as much as her “feisty” style, are products of her upbringing as the youngest of seven children on a farm in Conyers, a small town outside Atlanta. If her arms look muscular in “Miss Firecracker,” it is a legacy, not of Nautilus, but of her tomboy days climbing trees, she insists.

Her father, who died in 1982, was a manufacturer’s representative for sporting goods. “He roared his whole life,” Hunter says. Hunter’s mother, a study in contrast to her youngest daughter, has Southern genteel manners and a feminine grace. “We have a different chemistry,” Hunter says. “I take showers, my mother takes baths.”

Despite her conservative Southern upbringing, Hunter talks like an avid feminist. “I feel that a lot of the stereotypes and prejudices against women are still very much alive and well,” she says, “and being nurtured by women as well as men.”

Hunter’s feminism and her strong pro-choice position were behind her decision to star in the upcoming NBC movie, “Roe vs. Wade,” based on the landmark abortion case. A member of the California Abortion Rights Action League, Hunter calls the role “the epitome of what I could do to have some affect” on the abortion debate. The TV movie, which airs May 15, comes at a time when the public is awaiting the Supreme Court’s decision on a Missouri abortion case that could change Roe vs. Wade.

Hunter got her start in acting when she was 15 and one of the judges in a local talent competition invited her to a summer apprenticeship at his repertory theater in Upstate New York. After attending Carnegie Mellon University’s drama school in Pittsburgh, Hunter headed straight back to New York, this time Manhattan.

Even there, though, Hunter maintained her love for anything--people, places, literature--that was “Southern to the bone.” She appeared in Henley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Crimes of the Heart,” as well as “The Miss Firecracker Contest,” and became fast friends with the Mississippi-born playwright.

Hunter did not appear in the 1986 film version of “Crimes,” and in fact, she didn’t even like it much. “It was too pretty,” Hunter says. “I just didn’t think it was grounded in any kind of reality. The people were looked at from afar. They weren’t held, they weren’t embraced. They were played out.”

Among Hunter’s first films were “Animal Behavior” and “End of the Line.” But before “Broadcast News,” the project that gained her the most attention was “Raising Arizona,” in which she played a manic former police officer who cons her new husband (Nicolas Cage) into kidnaping a baby after her efforts to get pregnant fail.

“I’ve had a string of real eccentric parts,” Hunter concedes. “Even as a lead, I was considered someone with some pretty severe eccentricities.” Even Jane Craig, her network producer in “Broadcast News,” “had some pretty exposed rawness that is not characteristic of a leading lady. Not in a major motion picture.”

Post-”Broadcast News,” Hunter expects to continue to expand her range of roles. But, more importantly, this farm girl says, she wants to have a good time. When asked about her choice of “Always,” she begins to talk about the quality of the script and the honor of being asked to work with a director of Spielberg’s stature.

And then, true to form, she says of Spielberg and her “Always” co-star, Richard Dreyfuss: “I knew these guys would be pretty cool to hang out with on a set.”