Frank Beddor

Wicked

A gated desert development east of Los Angeles, a mother murdered in her own kitchen, and a fourteen-year-old daughter who steps into the empty place at the table — the meals, the dresses, and her father.

They would not shoot without Ellie

When Frank Beddor undertook producing Wicked with Michael Steinberg attached to direct, the two men agreed on one thing. “The only condition Frank and I set in advance of making the picture,” Steinberg said, “was that we had to find the right Ellie.”

They sent the script to the manager of a fifteen-year-old actress in SoHo. She replied with a handwritten letter explaining how completely she understood Ellie Christianson.

Beddor flew her to Los Angeles to read for him and Steinberg, and she blew them away. Her name was Julia Stiles, and she was the reason the film could go ahead at all.

Beddor then did something almost no one does with an unknown actor: he put her face on the poster and her name above the title. “I treated her like a star because I believe she would become one,” he said. He was right. The rest of the story is on the blog.

The one-sheet. Julia Stiles as Ellie stares out over a chain of paper dolls she holds against her chest — a mother, a father and two children, the father’s figure slashed through with a knife in red crayon. Her nails are painted black, the sky behind her is bruised purple, and her name sits above the title. Across the top: “From the producer of ‘There’s Something About Mary’, comes the story of a neighborhood 90 miles from the city, and 180° from normal.”

Trailer

Gallery

Julia Stiles perched high on the arm of a camera crane inside a church, in a red velvet jacket and pink floral trousers, waiting while the rig is set. A stained glass window and the lamp’s open barn doors fill the wall behind her. Michael Steinberg, Julia Stiles and Frank Beddor under the neon of the Guild 45th in Seattle, the marquee behind them reading Seattle International Film Festival. Stiles, in the middle, holds an award. Ellie stopped in a doorway in her mother’s red sequinned dress and long black gloves, a bottle of wine in one hand and a dish carried flat in the other, looking straight out of the frame. The hallway around her is lit hot orange.
Ellie and Lawson at opposite ends of a bathroom in the small hours. She sits on the counter in a patterned robe over a pink slip, one shoe still on, a towel in her lap; he sits on the far edge of the tub in a bucket hat and a loud shirt, one leg bandaged, watching her across the tiles. Ellie and her father Ben close together on the sofa at night, a quilt across both their laps, turned to look at one another mid-sentence. She is in her mother’s dressing gown with her lipstick on.
Frank Beddor in a white jacket, arms folded, on a garden terrace at Karlovy Vary. Beside him a festival poster reads “Wicked / Bestie” over a portrait of Stiles, with the wooded hills and the spa hotels of the town behind. Julia Stiles and Vanessa Zima between takes, standing back to back and grinning over their shoulders, in front of the painted backdrop of a tile-roofed house that stands in for Casa Del Norte. Scaffolding and a lamp on a stand are just out of the shot behind them. A black-and-white portrait of Frank Beddor and Julia Stiles standing together in a hallway, both looking straight into the camera without smiling.
Ellie standing alone in the middle of the road at dusk in a white jacket and a seaside-print skirt, a pink suitcase in one hand, the identical tile-roofed houses of Casa Del Norte receding behind her under a bruised sky. A black-and-white frame from the back seat of a car: Patrick Muldoon in a leather jacket on one side and Frank Beddor in sunglasses on the other, each pointing at the other across the bench, a street of shopfronts through the windows.

Credits

Produced by

Frank Beddor

Directed by

Michael Steinberg

The Waterdance, Bodies, Rest & Motion

Written by

Eric Weiss

Bongwater, Buffalo Soldiers

Premiered at

Sundance Film Festival

January 1998