Geena Davis, actress and archer, targets the Olympics
Focus
Sure, Hollywood offers its share of thrills. But sometimes an actress wants more. Which, at least to a small degree, may explain Geena Davis's newish obsession: archery. At last month's national championships in Oxford, Ohio, Davis, 43, performed well enough to place among 32 candidates in the running to represent the U.S. at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. On Aug. 22 she begins the next round of trials in Bloomfleld, N.J.; eventually three competitors and one alternate will make the team. "She is a long shot to make the team," concedes Bill Kellick, National Archery Association spokesman. "But to have made it this far is the story." Indeed, Davis took up the sport only two years ago, after watching fellow Californian Justin Huish win two gold medals at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. In early 1997 she called him to ask for a lesson. "She told me it was cool seeing me at the Olympics and it would be neat if she could go someday," says Huish, 24. He thought she had promise and put her in touch with a coach, Don Rabska.
Since then, Davis has become devoted to her newfound passion, practicing five hours a day, six days a week. "Geena is very focused," says Rabska, "and her ability to take direction—as she does as an actress—has paid off for her in archery." On the set of her upcoming film, Stuart Little, she had a makeshift range installed so she could shoot between takes. The practice has done wonders. "She has come very far," says Huish. "She's smoking people who have been at it 10 years." But for the moment, archery will remain her second career. "I have to keep making movies," Davis told The New York Times last week. "I have yet to make a lot of money from archery."
Mercy's End
Robert Downey Jr. was suffering from stage fright. "I'm kind of shaking in my thongs here," he told Malibu Municipal Court Judge Lawrence Mira on Aug. 5. For good reason: That morning, Mira sentenced the actor, 34, to the maximum three years in state prison for violating probation by missing mandatory drug tests. With credit for time spent in county jail and treatment centers, he'll probably serve about a year.
This punishment vaults him past such recent celebrity miscreants as Christian Slater (who served 59 days in a suburban L.A. jail on battery and drug charges) and Tommy Lee (under four months for assaulting his wife, Pamela Anderson Lee). But then Downey had appeared before Mira several times in the past three years: including after the actor was found with heroin, cocaine and a .357 Magnum in his sport utility vehicle in 1996; after he fled a detox center that same year; and after he skipped court-ordered drug tests in 1997.
It remains to be seen whether hard time will be enough to help Downey, who has a small role in Steve Martin's new film, Bowfinger, shake the drug addiction he has struggled with since childhood. "It's like I have a shotgun in my mouth," he said in court, "and I've got the finger on the trigger—and I like the taste of the gunmetal." For his part, Mira maintained that the sentence was not about punishment. His goal, he said, is to "prevent him from eventually killing himself—or someone else."
Britney, One More Time
From the moment he first saw Britney Spears on The Mickey Mouse Club in the early '90s, Robert Stephens felt a special kinship. "People would tell me we could be brother and sister," he says.
Actually, they could be sister and sister. Wearing his "jailbait vixen Catholic schoolgirl costume," Stephens, 23, beat out 30 real girls in a Britney lookalike contest in Los Angeles sponsored by Sprint PCS. "I did the whole 'Baby One More Time' video look," says Stephens, a stand-in dancer in Disneyland's Mulan parade who impersonates Britney in clubs near his home in Glen-dale, Calif.
Stephens's prize? Four tickets, backstage passes and a limo ride to Britney's show at L.A.'s Universal Amphitheatre. Alas, no one had prepared Britney's people for the arrival of her doppelganger, and he was escorted out before seeing her. A few days later, however, a radio station and Spears's record company flew Stephens to New Orleans—and fox and faux finally met.
Shake and quake
Something new to worry about the shaky handheld camera action in The Blair Witch Project, which tricks the brain into thinking you're in motion when the body knows you're not. The result, for at least a few moviegoers—not to mention theater owners—is a real-life gross-out. Says Portland, Ore., theater janitor Naomi Kohn: "It's pretty rough cleaning up."
Next: The William & Harry Towing Service
It was the princely thing to do. Commoners Simon Thompson and Stephen James were struggling to shove their broken-down BMW off a busy London road Aug. 3 when they received a royal helping hand. Out of a green Range Rover leapt Princes William and Harry, who helped push the car to the shoulder. "I couldn't believe it," says James. "They said nothing at all, smiled and looked like it was no big deal. It was very neighborly." Also neighborly that same day—and risking more than just dirty clothes—was Dawson's Creek star Joshua Jackson, 21. When he saw two women floating helplessly in rough waters near a jetty separating Masonboro Inlet from the ocean off Wrightsville Beach, N.C. (the WB's Creek is filmed nearby), he and a pal jumped in after them. But his chivalry didn't go so swimmingly; though he helped them stay afloat, all four had to be rescued by the Coast Guard. Still, says Coast Guard officer Jody Howey, "they are heroes. They could have just as easily ended up on the rocks as in the inlet."
Richard Nixon, Man of Parts
Those eyes, those jowls, that voice: The late Richard M. Nixon has been very, very good to actors. Twenty-five years after his resignation following the Watergate scandal and five years since his death, Nixon keeps showing up on screens, most recently in Dick, a comedy in which he's played by Dan Hedaya (who also played a presidential pal, modeled after Bebe Rebozo, in 1995's Nixon). Nixon's tics and twitches have been interpreted by a whole gamut of actors and comedians, from mimic David Frye to Beau Bridges and Anthony Hopkins—even Glenda Jackson in 1976's Nasty Habits.
Why, for actors, does Dick click? "I studied his physical awkwardness," says Peter Riegert, who played him in 1984's Concealed Enemies. "It was like blocks of wood stacked on one another—a block of wood for the head, a block for the body." Frye, 65, is one of the few faux Nixons who knows how the original felt about him. "One of Nixon's aides once told me the President had seen me on TV," says Frye. "He was saying, 'I don't do that. Why doesn't he do what I do? I don't move my hands like that.' And all the while, Nixon is doing exactly what I'm doing."
ON THE BLOCK
ALL-STAR ABODE
Baseball slugger Jose Canseco is moving closer to the ocean, which is only natural in a man who plays for a team called the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. So he's putting his old home in Weston, Fla., up for sale and asking $4 million for the 12,000-square-foot property. It comes with a guest house and a 5,700-square-foot gym with indoor basketball court, volleyball court, state-of-the-art weight room, sauna and steam room. For those who like their exercise outdoors, the grounds feature three pools connected by a bridge. And there's a whirlpool nestled inside a cave filled with stalactites and stalagmites. Canseco's new home will be on a Florida beach—a present for his daughter Josie, 2, who, like any little Devil Ray, loves the sand and the saltwater environment.
- Contributors:
- Larry Sutton,
- Dan Jewel,
- Mike Neill,
- Liza Hamm,
- Matthew Beard,
- Lorenzo Benet,
- Sara Bennett,
- Champ Clark,
- Michael Fleeman,
- Alexandra Hardy,
- Simon Perry,
- Fannie Weinstein,
- Irene Zutell.
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!
