Rose McGowan is a homewrecker

[ManxMouse]

Originally Posted by PlayfulKisses

ManxMouse:
It sounds like you are saying my screen name ("manxmouse") represents my knowledge of the movie. Truly inscrutable to me. If I am such an idiot, can someone else here please help me understand what on earth Soth is going on about? I'm serious, someone enlighten me.

^^Manxie (no offense meant)
I think ole Soth probably has a fabulous sense of Aussie ironic humor/wit...fill in the blank. Problem is I'm usually unable to translate his Aussie into USA. (And no, Soth...I'm not 'dim' witted )

He hit me with a fast one on one of my posts. My first reaction was WTF did I do to him. But I think I'm finally catching on to him. We'll see based on how he responds to this response...YIKES

Hi, PK! I really do appreciate your input, thanks! I'm all for irreverent senses of humor! However, I feel like life is too short to spend wondering about the motivations of someone who directly calls me confused and noxious right off the bat, for having my own opinion. Not to mention the pretentious obfuscation designed to disguise the hostility towards me. If Soth has a different agenda than what it appeared to me, he is free to let me know. I'm all ears!

[purple rain]

I agree that Rose and Robert are both scum. I feel bad for his wife, because apparently she has a little baby at home. She deserved better after being his partner at work and at home for 16 long years.

[Soth]

Playful and Manxie......Group hug guys.......Im not nasty I just have a drinking problem.

Seriously, I dont believe either of you to be deficient in any capacity...I just am paper bound to not reveal too many details about myself and work....translations from OZ to US are your problem, not mine though....

I dont remember attacking playful kisses per se but Manx, get over it mate......a bit of time has gone by we can learn...laugh....and cuddle as friends.....but nothing more.....

My agenda must keep you up late at night......dude....unclench

[DitaPage*]

Originally Posted by doriangray

i can't wait to see this movie. i love rose mcgowan but she doesn't strike me as a real fuck machine. frigid actually unless she wants something type.

Really? she strikes me as someone who is into kinky sex. She DID sleep with Marilyn Manson after all.

[aabbcc]

Originally Posted by StayYoung&Pretty

She DID sleep with Marilyn Manson after all.

I wonder if he washes off his public face before having sex? That would just be creepy otherwise.

[buttmunch]

I was thinking about this earlier today and decided that she is just as much to blame as him. Since the wife is the producer, chances are strong that the bimbo met the wife--and was probably sweet and nice and whatever. She wasn't hoodwinked by some guy who 'forgot' to mention he was married and only found out after the fact. She went in with her eyes and legs open, which, in my opinion, makes her equally culpible.

[Mookie]

wow he really screwed her over. this articles a few yrs old...still sad tho.


The Bryan-College Station Eagle > Entertainment > Movies


September 18, 2003
Rodriguez's Reign
By ANN HORNADAY
The Washington Post

“I see him go from doing music to drawing to writing to mixing something, back to drawing, back to the computer because an idea came to him. He’s the most fascinating person I’ve ever met.”

That’s Elizabeth Avellan, talking about her husband, Robert Rodriguez, in an expression of what most people would recognize as wifely devotion. But Avellan isn’t speaking merely as an adoring spouse: She is also speaking as that far more hard-boiled character known as the movie producer.

Rodriguez, who wrote, directed, shot, edited, composed music for and edited sound on Once Upon a Time in Mexico — which opened Friday and was the weekend’s top-drawing film — has been something of a legend in Hollywood since he burst onto the scene in 1992 with a $7,000 contemporary western called El Mariachi. The film — which Rodriguez made for the Mexican video market to hone his filmmaking chops — was an unexpected hit with studio executives, who led the director, then 23, on a whirlwind courtship that ended with sudden fame, a theatrical release for his “home movie,” and a contract to make two Mariachi sequels with Columbia.

The release of Once Upon a Time in Mexico ends the Mariachi cycle on an epic note worthy of Sergio Leone, as its title suggests. It also brings Rodriguez and Avellan’s story full circle a perfect 10 years after El Mariachi was released.

But their story begins years before that. It’s a story of discipline and sacrifice and uncommon focus. It’s a story of drive and ambition and tenacious will. It’s a story of dreams and destiny, of an unstinting work ethic and fierce filial loyalty.

It’s a love story.

Prologue

Elizabeth Avellan remembers when she first met Robert Rodriguez. It was 1988 and she was working as an administrative assistant in the executive vice president’s office at the University of Texas when Rodriguez walked through the door as the staff’s new file clerk.

“The poor guy was barely making it,” she recalls. “He had holes in his pants, holes in his shoes. ... It was just like too much for this kid.” Rodriguez had moved to Austin from San Antonio to study film at UT, but his grades were too poor to qualify for the film program.

Capitalizing on a lifelong talent for doodling, he created a cartoon called Los Hooligans, based on the antics of Rodriguez and his nine siblings, that quickly became a favorite feature in the school’s daily paper, and he was holding down two other jobs.

Avellan, whose family moved to Houston from Venezuela when she was 13, had an almost immediate bond with Rodriguez, who was five years her junior. Both were from big families (Avellan has six brothers and sisters), both were Latino and both were obsessed with movies. Avellan’s interest was almost a birthright: Her maternal grandfather founded Venezuela’s broadcast television system in the 1940s. “He literally put the antenna up himself,” she says. “He got zapped and almost died in the process.”

About a month after they began working together, Rodriguez invited Avellan and a few friends to see a short film he’d made that had just won a local cable contest. It was called David and His Sisters, and like all of Rodriguez’s short homemade movies, it starred his siblings in an antic, cartoonishly violent action comedy — this one featuring his 4-year-old sister in a tutu brandishing a cork gun.

“My eyes just popped out of my head,” recalls Avellan, who had worked in theater and studied film at Rice University. “I’d been to film school, so I’d seen lots of student films. This was different. Different.”

Avellan and Rodriguez’s friendship eventually blossomed into romance, and she began to beat a constant tattoo: You should be entering your films into festivals. Have you entered your film yet? Do you know that the deadline is tomorrow? Have you sent it in? Just calling to remind you that the deadline’s today!

Rodriguez would reply with a variation on the stock answers of I’m-not-finished, It’s-not-good-enough, I need-to-shoot-more, It’s-too-late-anyway.

But finally he edited three of his short family films together, called the package Austin Stories, entered it into a local festival and got a standing ovation from the judges when he wasn’t even in the room. Oh, and he beat out a number of students from the UT film program that he hadn’t been able to get into. On the basis of Austin Stories, Rodriguez started film classes in 1989.

Two years later, for his second student film (his first was a festival hit, a short called Bedhead), Rodriguez decided to make El Mariachi, a spaghetti Western set in Ciudad Acuna, Mexico. The ambitious — but actually quite reasonable — plan was to make a trilogy of Mariachi films, sell them to the Mexican video market and use the profits from the first to finance the second, and profits from the second to finance the third, all the while perfecting his skills. Then, with three movies under his belt, he’d go to Hollywood.

To finance El Mariachi, Rodriguez did what he’d done in the past to raise quick cash: He agreed to live in an Austin drug-testing facility, this time to participate in a month-long study of a cholesterol-lowering medication. Avellan, who had married Rodriguez six months earlier, covered for her husband at work that summer until he emerged from the lab with $3,000 (nearly half his budget) and a script he’d written on legal pads in his bunk.

Avellan, meanwhile, decided to complete her art and architectural history degree at Rice University while keeping her full-time job 165 miles away in Austin.

“We were like machines at that point,” Avellan recalls. For the next year, the couple held down jobs while Rodriguez edited El Mariachi and took it to Los Angeles to find a buyer. While Avellan was finishing her credits at Rice, Rodriguez landed an agent and entered the Mariachi feeding frenzy. “Literally the day I took my last final was the day when the (Columbia) deal was closed,” says Avellan.

Even after Rodriguez signed a contract worth a quarter of a million dollars, Avellan refused to quit her job until El Mariachi came out on video, because that’s when the Writers Guild of America “sent us this card saying we had health insurance.”

Whereas such sudden success might have sent people twice their age into drugs, debauchery, divorce and rehab, Avellan and Rodriguez decided to use the money to ensure that his mother could retire. Their maturity and focus, Avellan says, was born of their similar backgrounds. “He’s the third in 10, I’m the second in seven,” she explains. “You had to raise the little ones.”

The Second Reel

Today, everything has changed. Far from a one-hit wonder like so many of his peers on the Sundance-to-Spago circuit, Rodriguez has proved to be a consistently profitable filmmaker, with two lucrative franchises to his credit. (Desperado, the second film of the Mariachi trilogy, earned more than three times its budget at the box office and became an unexpected cult hit on video; Spy Kids, Rodriguez’s family action-adventure series, has made more than $300 million.) Rarely has a young filmmaker working so independently and on such a modest scale been so commercially successful.

Rodriguez and Avellan live with their sons, Rocket, Racer and Rebel (a fourth child is on the way), in a 6,000-square-foot stone house 40 miles west of Austin on 60 acres overlooking the Pedernales River. Four years ago, on the site of the former Austin airport, they built Troublemaker Studios, a 25-acre complex of offices and three soundstages that employs between 12 and 150 people in the course of a production and houses the biggest “green screen” (used to combine live action and computer effects) in the Southwest.

When Rodriguez first signed with Columbia, he stipulated that he be able to stay in Austin, not move to Los Angeles, “where people treat you funny.”

Having produced six movies in Austin over the past decade, Rodriguez has pumped nearly $70 million into the local economy, becoming a vital, even revered, part of a film scene that includes Richard Linklater, Mike Judge and, hovering over it all like a benevolent eminence grise, Terrence Malick.

And yet surprisingly little has changed. In many ways, Rodriguez’s films are live-action elaborations on the flip-book cartoons he used to doodle in high school. The creations of someone who is clearly still in touch with his inner child, Rodriguez’s movies consistently favor action over introspection, guns and gadgets and acrobatic stunts over narrative nuance.

And almost all of them star Hispanic actors; perhaps Rodriguez’s most subtle achievement in Hollywood is to create movies whose worlds are effortlessly, unselfconsciously Latin. His approach to filmmaking hasn’t veered much from the El Mariachi days, either. He’s the ultimate multitasker, handling duties ranging from operating the camera to composing the score, jobs that directors might take on for their first movies but usually delegate to others once they can afford to.

Rodriguez, now 35, is famed for keeping his budgets almost pathologically low; his movies come in at one-half to a third of the typical $60 million Hollywood budget. That’s why he’s been able to negotiate a deal that’s virtually unheard of, especially for such a young director, giving him total control of his movies — from final cut to sequel rights to what goes on the poster — and the ability to work free of studio meddling.

The secret, he insists, is constantly paring down flab in production crews, taking on more duties himself or letting other crew members multitask, and spending the savings on added special effects and higher production values.

For the past nine years Avellan, 39, has produced her husband’s movies, negotiating budgets and salaries, coordinating locations and crews, impersonating everything from a mother hen to an MBA during the course of a production.

“Robert has all the ideas,” says Bob Weinstein, co-chairman of Dimension Films, Rodriguez’s home for the past nine years. “But there wouldn’t be any movie if it wasn’t for Elizabeth. She’s in charge of physically making everything that Robert imagines get done. It’s the perfect symbiotic relationship.”

A typical day might find Rodriguez cooking dinner for his editing staff at the house, where he cuts all his movies. Avellan usually shuttles the boys to school before going into the Troublemaker offices, which she decorated to look like home with cocoa-colored walls, El Mariachi and Spy Kids props and Mexican textiles and furniture. Avellan notes that the same principles of thrift and probity that took hold during the couple’s early years still hold true.

“We have no debt,” she says. “Everything we have is bought outright. All the equipment, our cameras, the editing equipment, our sound-mixing room, everything. It’s always, ‘Let’s move slowly, and with a sure foot.’ ”

Happy Ending

Robert Rodriguez still evinces surprise that it all worked out this way. Even his habit of taking on multiple roles within a production is an accident, he says, a product of El Mariachi’s success.

“I was just fortunate that that was the first movie that came out and got recognized, so I got pigeonholed into that methodology,” he says. “If my first movie had been one that I did with a crew, even a small crew, or with a ‘low’ budget, like $250,000, with studio backing, I wouldn’t have been able to drop back. In filmmaking, it’s all about precedent.”

Rodriguez has started work on his next two films, one an animated feature and the other a thriller he hopes will suggest what Alfred Hitchcock “might have made after Vertigo, with a Mexican touch.” And he and Avellan recently founded Rodriguez International Pictures, a production company that will allow Rodriguez to write, edit and produce movies that emerging filmmakers will direct. The company’s name is homage to Roger Corman’s American International Pictures, which worked on a similar model.

It’s a simple enough plan, but considering Rodriguez’s simple idea to make three little movies for the Mexican video market, it has the potential to become bigger than even he can foresee.

“We always just wanted to have as many kids as we could afford. Elizabeth would be the one with the job, and I would stay home and draw and work on my projects and be Mr. Mom,” Rodriguez says.

Today, he adds, they have “the dream life we always wanted.” Avellan insists that she never even dared to dream on that scale.

“Robert is the visionary,” she says. “To dream this big for me would not be in my character. Sometimes he (even) gets on my case: ‘You think too small!’ And I say, ‘That’s why I have you. For you to think big and then I make it happen.’ ”

[Soth]

Harry Knowles jumps in for his 2 cents worth.......too

[Mel1973]

sometimes marriages don't work. they had a good run, I'm sure she'll make off with at least half.... as she surely deserves - she's been a partner for a long time.

[Icepik]

Originally Posted by aabbcc

I wonder if he washes off his public face before having sex? That would just be creepy otherwise.

You know, that got me thinking..

If I were to have sex with Marilyn Manson, I would want him to leave the makeup on.

[buttmunch]

I'd want him to get a chin implant.

[Mel1973]

I'd want to commit suicide..

[greysfang]

WTF wants to see that thing without makeup?

[DitaPage*]

Originally Posted by Icepik

You know, that got me thinking..

If I were to have sex with Marilyn Manson, I would want him to leave the makeup on.

He's sexy with makeup, quite ugly without it.
That said, i must admit, I have a slight obsession with him. He is pretty brilliant, and his looks grew on me- but for some strange reason i LOVE the makeup
Haha, Dita was asked on the Tom Green show if Marilyn always wore the makeup and she says 'always more than me'.

[buttmunch]

Although I must say he is quite funny and reasonably intelligent in interviews--two thins which go a long way in my book.