Sandra Bullock: There’s Something About Sandy

https://lebeauleblog.com/2020/06/22/sandra-bullock-theres-something-about-sandy/

Sandra Bullock became an overnight success in the mid-nineties with movies like Speed and While You Were Sleeping. But she hit a bit of a rough patch with Speed 2 and Practical Magic. As the decade came to a close, Bullock fired her representation and took more control of her career choices. In this cover story from the April 1999 issue of Movieline magazine, Bullock dishes on her hits, her flops and her leading men.

There’s something about Sandy that’s different from Mary–or Cameron or Julia or Meg or Demi. Something that makes her the kind of girl (she’s 34, but “girl” seems the correctly affectionate term) audiences embrace. Even when she appears in movies that drop out of sight quickly, she’s still the gal we love to watch. That’s what the People said in January when they gave her the People’s Choice Award for favorite movie actress. It isn’t that she’s dripping with sexuality or that she can do any accent and pass for a native speaker. It’s that she looks like somebody you can trust, and she throws out sarcasm with the right balance of sincerity and leg-pulling, and she’s enjoyable to watch whether you’re a man or a woman. She’s the star who still wears bobby pins in her hair, who squints without glasses, who prefers junk food to haute cuisine, who doesn’t do drugs but will chug a beer and lick the foam from her upper lip. She always seems to be giving her best effort, and because of that, we root for her and applaud her perseverance.

Two economics professors recently reported that according to their esoteric statistical analysis of box-office winners, Sandy was one of the two surest keys to a movie’s ultimate financial success. So is she worth the $11 million she reportedly got paid for Hope Floats? Well, the movie did over $60 million and is still strong at the video stores. Speed, the movie that made her famous, grossed over $121 million; the modestly budgeted While You Were Sleeping (1995) grossed over $80 million; A Time to Kill raked in $109 million. But too many lukewarm efforts like The Net and Practical Magic, not to mention outright bombs like Two If by Sea, In Love and War and Speed 2: Cruise Control, and Hollywood’s confidence in you gets shaken.

Sandra Bullock wasn’t just thinking about her box-office clout a few years ago when she got rid of her management team. She just didn’t like the choices she’d been making. So she started her own production company, brought in her father and lawyer sister to help her with business affairs, sought out smaller, more comfortable films to make, and began to finance low-budget independent films for her friends to work in. You can trust that whatever Sandy is doing now, it’s exactly what she wants to be doing. Certainly her teaming up with Ben Affleck in Forces of Nature is something to look forward to. And the first film her company has independently produced, the tentatively titled Gun Shy with Liam Neeson and Oliver Platt, will be worth checking out, too.