Seven Down, Seven to Show

Sybil Temchen is 25, with a face that could morph into Mira Sorvino’s and a resume perhaps best described as Parker Posey-ish--a clutter of independent films with titles like “Floating” and “Sweet Jersey” and “Freak Talks About Sex.”

But while her film career may seem to be off to a promising start, in another sense it hasn’t started at all. That’s because none of the six films Temchen has made in the last year and a half have been released into theaters. Indeed, the majority don’t even have distribution, which leaves her--and her career--in an odd limbo state. She may be the hardest-working actress in Hollywood--all of whose films have yet to be released.

“Sybil’s situation is a very good one, but a very strange one,” says Kira Bailes, her manager. “She’s been working almost nonstop. But no one’s actually seen her movies.”

They will soon, thanks to Temchen’s role in an upcoming Showtime movie, “The Passion of Ayn Rand,” starring Helen Mirren as the “Fountainhead” novelist. Currently shooting in Toronto, the film co-stars Eric Stoltz, Julie Delpy and Peter Fonda.

After the film wraps, Temchen will return to New York, back to the considerably less glamorous life of independent filmmaking.

For her it’s a variation on that age-old philosophical question about the tree in the forest: If an emerging actress makes a movie, and no one gets to see it, does it create a buzz?

“Everybody keeps saying to me, ‘Wow, Sybil, you’re working so much,’ ” says Temchen, over lunch at Hugo’s in West Hollywood. “But meanwhile you’re thinking, I finished six films by September, and I really need to work again.”

While independent filmmaking has become an increasingly celebrated medium--with innumerable festivals, and cable channels like Bravo and the Independent Film Channel raising visibility for actors and directors--the harsh reality is still, well, harsh. For every low-budget, independent dark horse that surprises at the box office, there are countless others that never make it out of the stable. It’s the unromantic flip side to the saga of a “Swingers” or “The Brothers McMullen”--the way independent filmmaking almost always works. Tales of budding filmmakers maxing out their credit cards to do their first feature make for irresistible spin, but the venture is ultimately better for Visa and MasterCard.

Consider the statistics. Of the 675 independent feature films submitted for a spot in the much-coveted Sundance Film Festival this year, only 103 were taken. And, according to the industry publication Back Stage, of the approximately 800 independent dramatic films made in 1996 without a production company or a name actor, only 2% even gained domestic distribution.

All of which makes Temchen, who grew up in New York and attended New York University, more than a little cautious when touting her work.

“Now when you say, ‘I’ve just done an independent film,’ people know what that means,” she says. “It means the film isn’t coming out any time soon.”

In “Sweet Jersey,” Temchen plays Joanne, a waitress stuck in a dead-end job and a dead-end relationship with the film’s lead character, a suave-but-hapless shoe salesman (Adrian Brody) who runs afoul of the local loan shark. If “Sweet Jersey” were a big-budgetfilm, with a studio and test-marketing figures behind it, Temchen might not have been called on to do anything but look pretty and pout on cue. Here, however, she gets to be an equal participant in her scenes with the male lead.

“I got to play a young Italian American woman who’s being emotionally abused by her boyfriend. She has to break out of those boundaries and create a life for herself. And she does. That was great for me.”

More significant than the substance of her role, however, is the fact that “Sweet Jersey” is in negotiations for distribution and has at least a vague release date--sometime later this year, according to the film’s 33-year-old director, Eric Bross.

Shot in New Jersey over 30 days in 1994 with a budget of about $200,000, “Sweet Jersey” has seen its investors back out, its distribution fall through and its title change.

Temchen, an associate producer on the film, was along for most of the pre- and post-production ride and got a quick indoctrination into the vagaries of independent filmmaking. At one point, she says, she and Bross went to Wall Street and offered passersby a producer credit on the film if they contributed $1. There was only one taker--a cabby, who handed over a buck and told the two to get a cup of coffee.

“We had so many huge disappointments with financing,” she remembers, “with people coming in and writing checks and then canceling them and leaving town, never to be heard from again. I maxed out my credit cards, lost all my credit. . . . If you’re raising the money yourself you don’t have to answer to anybody. That’s the great thing about it. The terrible thing about it is everything else.”

But buoyed by positive reviews after a screening at the L.A. Independent Film Festival in 1995 and then an even bigger break--an appearance at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival--”Sweet Jersey” is now on the cusp of a limited release.

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Temchen ticks off the films she’s done over the past year. There’s “Show and Tell,” where she plays the assistant to the producer of a slimy, tabloid TV show; “Restaurant,” another waitress role (to be shown at this spring’s L.A. Independent Film Festival); “Freak Talks About Sex,” which she describes, not surprisingly, as a seriocomedy; and “Origin of the Species,” a character-driven drama that deals with cancer.

Oh yes, and then there’s “Floating,” which played the Berlin Film Festival, and “Lesser Profits,” which is actually supposed to be out next year. She thinks.

Most of the films had budgets of $500,000 to $2 million. This is of more than passing interest to Temchen, because as a member of the Screen Actors Guild, she is paid according to the budget. On films with a budget of $500,000 or less, the SAG scale starts at $248 a day, or $864 a week. A budget over $500,000 but under $2 million puts the starting scale at $466 a day, or $1,620 a week.

But the money is not the point right now, says Temchen. The point is to find good scripts and do good films and hope they get released. Though Temchen has in the past done theater work (a play in New York called “Breakfast With Les and Bess,” starring Bonnie Franklin) and a stint on TV (she was briefly the Elizabeth Berkley character on the French version of the sitcom “Saved by the Bell”) independent films appear to be her niche.

Implicit in that equation is the hope that one of these films will get her discovered. Look at Vince Vaughn, Temchen says, referring to the actor discovered in “Swingers” who has since gotten big-budget film roles, including Steven Spielberg’s “The Lost World: Jurassic Park.” Look at Steve Buscemi, look at Lili Taylor.

“For a while at least, [Sybil’s] going to be beaten out by the Reese Witherspoons, the Renee Zellwegers, the Lili Taylors and Parker Poseys,” says Bailes. “Because every independent filmmaker is thinking, ‘If I can get Parker Posey in my film, then I’m going to have a success.’ ”

Or at least a film that gets distribution.