After minding her manners in such dressy period dramas as The Age of Innocence and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Winona Ryder, 22, says that she was ready "to wear jeans and look normal." "I'm soooo sick of wearing corsets and big hoopy skirts!" says Ryder, who welcomed the chance to star in the twentysomething romantic comedy Reality Bites. "I had to sing in the movie," Ryder says of a scene in which she and her friends belt out snippets of songs from popular Saturday morning cartoons. "I really hate my singing voice, so this was a big deal. I guess it wasn't so bad, because I sang 'Conjunction Junction' from those '70s educational cartoons. You don't have to sound like Whitney [Houston] to sing that. Believe me, I won't be launching a concert tour."
URBAN COWBOY
Stephen Baldwin, the youngest of the acting Baldwin brood, tackles bull riding in 8 Seconds, the true story of champion rodeo rider Lane Frost (played by Luke Perry). To portray Frost's macho pal Tuff Hedeman. Baldwin practiced on a mechanical bull for two months before finally mounting the real thing. "I had two rides that they filmed for the movie. The first one, if you blinked your eyes, you missed it. The second one was for five seconds on a raging, bucking beast. I was very scared, numb almost," says Baldwin, 27. Scarier still was meeting Hedeman at a screening. "I very nervously said, 'So, what did you think?' And he said, 'Well, you played me like a jerk, and I am a jerk, so I think it was great!' They don't call him Tuff for nothing."
BEKNIGHTED
Blue Chips opens at fever pitch with Pete Bell, a fanatically dedicated college basketball coach played by Nick Nolte, browbeating his losing players. Furniture is thrown. Expletives are undeleted. Sound like any actual college coach? It should. "My concern was to go to the man who could get Pete Bell off on the right foot, and that was Bobby Knight," says Nolte, 52, who studied for his role under Indiana's notoriously hotheaded coach. "He knew how to put me into action. He made me go out on the court, talk in front of the ballplayers. I [even] had to coach the Indiana recruits against the Big 10 recruits. That was my first game coaching. I lost."
MAE BE YES, MAE BE NO
How does Roseanne Arnold love a challenge? Let her count the ways. Envisioning the day when her top-rated sitcom is no more, she says, "First, I want to make my own movies—documentaries of interesting people I've met. Two, have an Oprah-type talk show. Three, read my poetry and set it to music. Four, move to a beach in Spain and become a nudist." As for rumors that she'll play her idol, Mae West, in a movie, Arnold, 41, who has just published her second autobiography, My Lives, jokes, "I don't think I can play someone that ain't as famous as me."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
