Everyone agreed, in awards season of 1994, that Linda Fiorentino deserved a nomination for the Best Actress Oscar. She’d played a wickedly amoral main character with iconic verve in The Last Seduction, a low-budget neo-noir from a director, John Dahl, who had form in the arena.
Critics went bananas for the eye-rolling allure of her performance as Bridget Gregory, a cool-as-a-cucumber schemer who makes off with $700,000 of her husband’s ill-gotten cash, then finds a patsy called Mike (Peter Berg) to get the heat off her. Going by the pseudonym “Wendy Kroy” – New York backwards and change – she hides out in a small town near Buffalo, and litters the area with the ruination of various men.
The only problem? Fiorentino, and the film, were deemed ineligible by Academy rules.
We’ll get to those. The actress, 36 at the time, could truly have benefitted from that kind of career boost: there was not yet one substantial hit on her résumé. She had made her debut as Matthew Modine’s love interest in Vision Quest (1985), and had a small but head-turning role as a bohemian sculptor in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985).
Since then, nothing had quite panned out. Offered Kelly McGillis’s role in Top Gun (1986), she met Tom Cruise and realised it could be a life-changing role, but she couldn’t get on board with the pro-military stance of the script, and turned it down.
Paul Verhoeven then approached her for Basic Instinct (1992) – but to play the supporting role eventually taken by Jeanne Tripplehorn. Fiorentino wanted the lead, but Verhoeven infamously reasoned that her breasts weren’t big enough. The part was in the bag for Sharon Stone. As the “erotic thriller” craze of the early 1990s continued to steam up bathrooms, Fiorentino found herself scratching in the margins in minor action thrillers, rather than landing these star-making roles Stone was getting.
The Last Seduction was her big chance. What made it a showcase and a half was the sardonic, no-holds-barred script, by first-time screenwriter Steve Barancik, which Fiorentino seized upon. Indeed, after reading it somewhere in Arizona, she drove for six hours straight to get to a meeting with Dahl, rather paralleling Bridget’s impetuous road trip at the film’s start. “I had never read anything so unique in terms of a female character,” she would later say. She point-blank ordered Dahl to cast her on the spot.
It wasn’t hard for him to say yes. Some 30 actresses had already read the script and passed on starring, disturbed by the very irredeemability of Bridget, and the brazen dangling of her sexuality, which struck Fiorentino as such tempting challenges.
One classic approach might have been to style her as a vamping, essentially unknowable femme fatale. But if we were kept out of her decision-making, this could easily have run the risk of the audience despising her.
Barancik had a Eureka moment while writing it to do the very opposite, and it’s this cue that Fiorentino avidly followed. She lets us in on things, in a sly compact with the camera, the audience, and no one else. She’s Iago – but without the passion. It’s the flickers of vulnerability in that calculating façade, and the sense of her luxuriating in all her stratagems, which make her a riot, and somehow also flesh-and-blood.
For all this, several factors counted against the film being a guaranteed mainstream success. Fiorentino was not a huge name by any means. Also, Dahl’s previous two thrillers, Kill Me Again (1989) and Red Rock West (1993), had both flopped, despite having bigger stars in the lead roles (Val Kilmer, Nicolas Cage). This one was also trying the unproven gamble of being wholly in the grip of an anti-heroine, with no Michael Douglas-esque Everyman keeping her at bay. Dahl could only drum up a budget of $2.5m, making it his cheapest, and commercially most disposable, film to date.
Making things extra dicey, the production company involved, ITC Entertainment, were on the verge of collapse, and would be absorbed by Polygram a year later. The film had been pitched to them, in Barancik’s words, as simply a “Skin-e-max style” erotic thriller, and they kept half an eye on the shoot with that in mind.
There were limits, though, to the creative licence allowed on set. One executive saw the dailies of a scene where Bridget dresses as a cheerleader, with suspenders over her breasts, and immediately shut down production, appalled at the idea that an “art movie” was being made on his watch. Dahl did manage to retain the sex scene – entirely Fiorentino’s idea – where she clings onto a chain-link fence while thrusting down on Berg.
ITC still had little faith in Seduction as a profit-turner for theatrical release, alas. Without even informing the film’s development executive, Stacy Kramer, they sold it to the cable company HBO, which hadn’t been rebranded yet as nearly such a premium home-entertainment player. So the film premiered, with minimal fanfare, on American TV in the summer of 1994.
Noticing that it had attracted rather more fuss in Europe, including at that year’s Berlin Film Festival, the boutique distributor October Films then picked it up, sensing an angle. They planned to screen it to critics, correctly predicting raves, and gradually widen it through the autumn, starting on just five screens. It took a solid $5.8m.
Fiorentino would start picking up awards here, there and everywhere. She was named actress of the year by the New York, London and Los Angeles Film Critics, was nominated for the Bafta, and won the Independent Spirit Award. Sadly, though, an Oscar nomination was already out of the question. The Academy has always had strict rules disqualifying any film from contention if it premiered on TV, even if a theatrical release then follows.
The perception of a tragic snub has followed Fiorentino around ever since, even if Bill Pullman, who played Bridget’s flailing husband Clay, argued on a DVD featurette that the sense of injury had been blown out of proportion. “It’s not that I don’t have empathy for Linda,” he said, before clarifying, “It was never even a guarantee we’d get a release, and then we didn’t, and went to cable, and then we did.”
“[That has] never happened to me before, and I’ve made about 40 films… And then it was a success! So to complain that we weren’t able to get any Oscar nominations, to me, is like having everybody forget your birthday, and then a month later get their act together and throw you the party you thought you weren’t even getting, and then complaining that you didn’t get every single present that you wanted.”
Still, what made the Academy’s ruling especially galling was what a feeble year 1994 was otherwise for the Best Actress Oscar – and what a mess voters made of the available options. Jodie Foster (Nell), Miranda Richardson (Tom & Viv), Susan Sarandon (The Client) and Winona Ryder (Little Women): this is not a runner-up roster for the ages. And the winner, Jessica Lange, had shot Blue Sky back in 1990, making it a pretty shopworn contender. Tony Richardson’s marital slanging match, set on an Alabama army base, had been held up four years by the bankruptcy of Orion Pictures. Also, Lange had won an Oscar for Tootsie already, so she was pretty lucky to scoop this one.
Had Fiorentino been eligible, there was a solid chance she might have won, with voters thrilling to the freshness of her work as the only first-time nominee. And perhaps this might have forestalled her slide into “where are they now?” territory, which led to her falling off the map within a decade.
Her next two films after The Last Seduction were the cheapo crime thriller Bodily Harm (1995) and the much more damaging softcore murder mystery Jade (also 1995) – a disaster that effectively marked the whole genre’s demise. Released a month after Showgirls, making it double turkey time for Basic Instinct alumnus Joe Eszterhas, it bombed even more badly, recouping just $10 million from a $50 million budget, and was generally a huge embarrassment for the 1970s dream team behind it, producer Robert Evans and director William Friedkin.
Fiorentino was scarred by association. Her character in Jade, a did-she-or-didn’t-she seductress who manages to be a brilliant psychiatrist in her off hours, barely has the screen time to make any sense, but she was already getting pigeonholed as a (possible) murderess with kinks and a husky monotone. Her reunion with Dahl on Unforgettable (1996), a gimmicky sci-fi mystery starring Ray Liotta, tanked horrendously, making just $2.8 million from an $18 million budget.
Fiorentino’s one true payday was co-starring in Men in Black (1997) as Agent L – third-billed, of course, but working that glacial charisma to renewed acclaim. She ends the film as Will Smith’s partner, but that was it: when it came to the sequel, they decided to bring back Tommy Lee Jones, and wrote her out. The possible reasons for this caused a certain amount of hoo-ha in the tabloids at the time. Reportedly, Jones only agreed to return if Fiorentino did not, calling her “difficult to work with”. (This is the same Tommy Lee Jones, by the way, whom Joel Schumacher and Jim Carrey did not enjoy working with at all on Batman Forever.)
Kevin Smith, after casting Fiorentino in his religious satire Dogma (1999), went rather further, stating for the record that he regretted not signing Janeane Garofalo instead. In an interview with TV Guide in 2000, he declared, “Linda created crisis and trauma and anguish. She created drama while we were making a comedy. She was ticked off that there were other people in the movie who were more famous than she was.”
He also accused her of dodging promotional duties after “going nuts” at a poster, which had spliced her head onto someone else’s body and amplified her cleavage. “She never did a photo shoot,” Smith explained. “It’s not like we were hinging on all that Fiorentino press – I fought to cast the woman in the movie.”
After teaming up with Paul Newman to rob banks in another crime flop, Where the Money Is (2000), Fiorentino has only made two further appearances in direct-to-video titles. (The more recent of the two, 2009’s Once More with Feeling, is some sort of drama about karaoke lounge singers, which bizarrely paired her again with Jade husband Chazz Palminteri.)
She seems fully retired at this point, unless someone has the gumption to lure her back for a withering cameo – perhaps as a divorce judge, or a corrupt politician’s scornful wife. Wherever Fiorentino’s final act might take her, though, the radical victory of Bridget Gregory – who’s never chastened, and never caught – feels imperishable.
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