Finding the Right Pieces : A Star-Studded Cast Joins to Tell the Story of ‘American Quilt’

You need a large wooden frame and enough space to accommodate it. Put comfortable chairs around it, allowing for eight women of varying ages, weight, coloring and cultural orientation.

--from the novel “How to Make an American Quilt,” by Whitney Otto

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How to make a movie of “How to Make an American Quilt”:

You need two sound stages, a few dozen trailers, six locations, four ravens (playing one crow), 13 actresses of varying ages, weight and cultural orientation, several million dollars, two producers, a screenwriter and a director.

Since this is a movie made by and about women, problematic in the industry, it is helpful also to have Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment in your corner.

Since making a movie--any movie--is about fitting pieces together to make a whole, a film titled “How to Make an American Quilt” is a natural. Set for a holiday release, it has a screenplay adapted by Jane Anderson (who won an Emmy for “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader Murdering Mom”) from the 1991 bestseller and a dazzling cast: Maya Angelou, Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Kate Capshaw, Claire Danes, Loren Dean, Melinda Dillon, Samantha Mathis, Dermot Mulroney, Kate Nelligan, Esther Rolle, Winona Ryder, Jean Simmons, Lois Smith, Rip Torn, Mykelti Williamson and Alfre Woodard.

Ryder plays Finn, a Berkeley graduate student spending a summer in rural Grasse, Calif., with “The Flower Sisters”: her grandmother, Hyacinth (Burstyn), and her great-aunt, Gladiola Joe (Bancroft). Finn is writing her master’s thesis and trying to decide whether she should marry her longtime boyfriend. Over the course of the summer, as the members of her grandma and aunt’s quilting circle stitch her a wedding quilt, she hears the secrets of their lives and, most particularly, loves, framed in scenes dating from 1860 to the present. Most strikingly, Finn learns that years ago Hy slept with Glady Joe’s husband and that Glady Joe has never forgiven her.

Inside cavernous Stage 29 of Universal Studios, it’s sunny (if you’re under the lights) and warm (if you’re drinking the caterer’s coffee). Actors and actresses come and go from the patchwork of trailers parked near the stage, each having agreed to just half a trailer, the same size as everyone else’s, in the interest of the Project and enough parking.

They shoot little scene after little scene, a snippet at a time, trusting Australian director Jocelyn Moorhouse (her independent film “Proof” got her this gig) to piece it all together. Moorhouse--who actually made a quilt when she and filmmaker husband P.J. Hogan (“Muriel’s Wedding”) were awaiting the birth of their son Spike--is after texture, as is cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, who won an Oscar for “Schindler’s List.’

Camera, sound and lighting people huddle in a tiny laundry room with a remarkable wall. Ryder’s Finn is staring at it--a wall of rage, encrusted with brightly colored shards of china and fragments of figurines her great-aunt Glady Joe smashed in her fury. “I was angry for a long time,” Glady Joe says to Finn.

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They shoot the scene over and over--first with the camera on Finn, then with it on Glady Joe. Between shots, Bancroft takes a sip from a brandy snifter--cola and water. “Not bad,” she says, holding the snifter with Mrs. Robinsonian aplomb. “No more drinks for Miss Bancroft,” says a crew member.

Co-producer Sarah Pillsbury is talking with a guy in a baseball hat who doesn’t look as if he really has a job. Still, Steven Spielberg’s arrival on the set--the parlor of a Victorian farmhouse, its wooden gewgaws copied from one in rural California--creates a small flurry among the crew, responding like a football team to the quarterback just before the ball is snapped. This is one of Spielberg’s last Amblin Entertainment productions. (Within the next two years the name will vanish into DreamWorks SKG.)

“I’ve always loved stories about women,” Spielberg says. After all, he notes, “I had three younger sisters. I was the only boy. Amblin until recently was dominated by women. That feminine side of my brain is very strong. I also like the adversity women always face when telling their own story. Women’s love stories are better than stories told by men. The strongest point of view in ‘Doctor Zhivago’ was Julie Christie’s.”

The cameras begin to roll as special-effects people feed autumn leaves into the maw of a giant whirling fan. At the word “Action!” Ryder scrambles after pages from her thesis, which the wind has blown all over the yard. Capshaw, inside, fights to shove the front door shut. “Cut!”

“Winona was the first actress we cast,” Spielberg says. “We all felt she had Finn’s aggressively curious spirit.” He adds that Capshaw, his wife, was Moorhouse’s choice.

Ryder is the youngest of the more experienced actresses. They are almost like an ensemble theater company, he says, with “so many lessons to teach the young upstarts.”

The younger versions of the older women are played by Claire Danes (“My So-Called Life”) and Samantha Mathis (“Little Women”), but the script tilts decidedly toward maturity.

“Even if it doesn’t prove successful,” Spielberg says, he and his new company “will do more stories that aren’t demographically correct.”

When Amblin optioned the novel, producing partners Midge Sanford and Pillsbury, who had been reading it before publication, backed off. But more than a year later, when executive producer Kathleen Kennedy was leaving Amblin and feared “Quilt” might get lost, she asked the two women to come on as producers.

This wasn’t the first time the growing network of women in the film industry had thrown Sanford and Pillsbury a lifeline. It was Orion’s Barbara Boyle who helped them get “Desperately Seeking Susan” made a decade ago. “Barbara didn’t blink,” Sanford says. “Certainly it fazed the men at Orion.”

Now that they have achieved a measure of success, “Sarah and I try to help women coming up in the business,” Sanford adds. She and Pillsbury are sitting in the Victorian’s sound stage front yard, with its profusion of silk roses and real shrubbery and, projected on a screen, trees and a country road.

Sanfordsays that it’s hard to even get men interested in playing secondary roles in pictures where women are dominant.

But on this set things are different. Dermot Mulroney, who plays Finn’s boyfriend, says he’s found it no different working with and for women than for men. Mickey Rourke, his co-star in HBO’s “The Last,” he says, took a lot longer to get ready for his scenes than do Burstyn and Bancroft. Besides, he says, “You get to kiss the director.”

Sanford offers Mulroney, who’s been feeling poorly, a cup of soup. “We’re all mothers here,” she says, smiling. They’re mothers who are producers, though, and if there’s a stump speech for mothers who are producers, perhaps this is how it goes:

“We don’t want gratuitous sex and violence . . . and sexual relationships between men and women where men are senior to the women,” Pillsbury says. “We can attest to the number of 50-, 60- and 70-year-old sexy women, because we’ve seen a lot of them.”

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The view that older actresses aren’t sexy, Sanford says, is pervasive to the point that female moviegoers have internalized it. It means less work for women whom Spielberg would like to see doing more.

“Ellen Burstyn should work every day of her life,” Spielberg says. “Anne Bancroft, Jean Simmons, Lois Smith should work every day of their lives.”

No thank you, Bancroft jokes in her trailer. “I got into show business so I wouldn’t have to work every day!” But then she turns serious. “Really, it’s just terrible. I went eight months without finding anything. Now I have two things [the other is “Home for the Holidays,” with Holly Hunter and Jodie Foster playing her children] so wonderful you must do them and try to find the energy and good health.

“If a quilt is a symbol of a life, you make it with a variety of experiences and emotions. Life is so full of these tiny details,” Bancroft adds.

The movie “really is like a quilt,” Burstyn muses by telephone after shooting is completed. Burstyn’s patch--or role--is Hyacinth, Glady Joe’s widowed and onetime duplicitous sister. She’s “a little muted, because some of her died with her husband. She’s like the garden in the late fall.” Burstyn extends the metaphor to describe Ryder as “so beautiful it’s almost hard to look at her. It’s like looking at a perfect rose. I just loved her.”

The picture’s start was delayed for six weeks to accommodate Ryder’s hectic schedule. “I had come off two movies back to back, which is never a good idea,” Ryder recalls. “I was really tired and really dreading it till I walked on the set and feasted my eyes on the people who were surrounding me.”

Most of her scenes are with Bancroft and Burstyn. Between takes, she says, “we weren’t talking about movies or the business. We were talking about our lives.”

Sometimes on the set, says Ryder, “I’d get that tingling in my nose and my eyes would well up. In my whole life I never thought this would happen, that I’d be surrounded by so much greatness and they’d all be so kind to me.”