I’m always amused by the way some actors and writers edit their credits, trying to pretend that some of their work never existed (you don’t hear Michael Mann talking about his days on VEGA$ much). Jessica Alba has been doing a lot of that credit-editing lately as she promotes FANTASTIC FOUR and SIN CITY. In her GQ interview, for instance, she charts the course of her career like this:
At 13 she decided to give acting a try and immediately found herself cast in an episode of the TV series Chicago Hope, playing a teenage girl who contracts gonorrhea of the throat from her 30-year-old boyfriend. Imagine explaining that
to your pastor. Next, at 16, she joined the Atlantic Theater Company
Acting School in Vermont, founded by David Mamet and William H. Macy,
where she was drilled in contrapositive Pygmalion fashion, on the intonation of lines like, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
She forgets to mention that, between her gigs with David E. Kelley and David Mamet, she spent three years in Australia as a regular cast member acting opposite a zany dolphin on THE NEW ADVENTURES OF FLIPPER (you don’t see Emmy & WGA Award winning writer Terrence Winter hiding from his producing gig on that show… he even mentioned it in his Emmy acceptance speech. That’s being a man. That’s integrity, bucko. In fact, I’ll admit here and now I worked on FLIPPER, too… and, even worse, THE HIGHWAYMAN).
Alba wants you to think she just burst onto the scene with DARK ANGEL. Speaking of bursting, let’s talk about Dave Gardetta, the horny reporter who was interviewing Alba and aching to go more, much more, in-depth :
Alba made an off-color joke about lawyers, and she glowed: Her skin
glowed, her hair glowed, her lips glowed. Where once her carnal
features—lips, breasts, posterior—seemed preternaturally swollen, as if
in a dead-heat race to burst from her skinny, teenage frame, now Alba
and her twenty-three-year-old body have settled into delicacy and grace
and balance while still drawing chat-room catcalls like “Damn! Shortie
got back!”
Down, boy. And later he writes:
And then one day her body rebelled against God. Her teenage breasts bloomed; her buttocks began straining against her dungarees.
You can almost hear him panting as he beats the keys on his computer…or something further south.