The indie It Girl

Actress and filmmaker Adrienne Shelly. (Bowers/Getty Images)

Last November, the actress and filmmaker Adrienne Shelly was murdered in her New York apartment by a construction worker. At first, her death was reported as a suicide (grotesquely, the killer hung her body from a shower rod), and this seemed both sad and possible, a Hollywood Babylon ending for someone who once mattered to a certain segment of the popular culture, then faded away.

Bad endings come to It Girls, and in the early ’90s, Shelly was very It: Jolie-lipped-before-Jolie, a stylish and aloof muse to director Hal Hartley in the films The Unbelievable Truth (1989) and Trust (1990). But it turns out that Shelly’s death wasn’t a suicide, and she hadn’t vanished into obscurity at all. Since her brief moment as a hipster idol, Shelly had been training as a filmmaker. Her final movie, a lovely dark comedy called Waitress — in theatres May 11 — is a bittersweet lesson that some starlets do endure, and even thrive, long past the moment in which we freeze them.

The April 23, 1993 cover of Spin magazine featured a disheveled 26-year-old Shelly and a shirtless Evan Dando (lead singer of The Lemonheads), tongues intertwined and eyes closed, as if caught in a drunken grope in the back row of a Mother Love Bone show. It was Spin’s “A to Z of Alternative Culture” issue, which included stories on Pearl Jam, Naughty By Nature, Ice Cube and a polemic about “Clinton and the New Optimism” (also, sadly, a long essay on AIDS in Africa; plus ça change...).

Fourteen years later, most of these pop references are hilariously dated, as is the phrase “alternative culture,” a term which meant little more than the stuff being consumed by youth at the time. It was the height of grunge, a quick couple of years that reacted to ’80s materialism with an ascetic aesthetic of combat boots and Kurt Cobain-inspired new bohemia. While the Seattle vibe was quickly co-opted by the mainstream — Brenda wore Doc Martens to her prom on Beverly Hills 90210 — there was, for a moment, some flicker of agreement among young people that it was time to be angry and poetic, deliberately un-scrubbed. It’s over, man. Paris Hilton is the closest thing to a youth icon today, her porn star glasses and one-quarter-present gaze the preferred style mode of 20-something women.

Shelly was a different kind of pop figure. Her fame wasn’t tracked on YouTube and Gawker; you had to line up at a repertory cinema to find her, and consequently, those who loved her felt like they had made a discovery. Shelly had been a struggling stage actress when Hal Hartley cast her in his (and her) first film, a low-budget talker called The Unbelievable Truth. She played Audry, a teenage bookworm who agrees to attend Harvard on the condition that her father donate cash to an anti-nuclear group. An unlikely love interest appears in the form of an ex-con who wreaks havoc simply by being a Zen addition to her dull Long Island suburb.

A year later, in Trust, Shelly was a trashy high school dropout named Maria who announces to her dad that she’s pregnant. He has a heart attack and dies, and she goes on to find some kind of salvation in the arms of a furious slacker who carries a grenade in his pocket “just in case.”

Martin Donovan and Adrienne Shelly in a scene from the Hal Harley film Trust. (Channel Four Films)

Hartley tinkered with Trust to suit his new star. With her flat delivery and wide eyes that projected incredulous intelligence, she was a sky of irony flashing with sincerity, usually brought on by encounters with beauty or great literature. “I am ashamed of being stupid. I am ashamed of being young,” says her character in Trust, transforming from a gum-smacking bimbo to a glasses-wearing nerd in under two hours.

In the early ’90s, after the surprise success of the independent film sex, lies and videotape (1989), the number of filmmakers working outside the American studio system boomed. But most indie directors were male, making movies about men’s lives: Spike Lee, John Singleton, Quentin Tarantino (with notable exceptions like Rose Troche and Allison Anders). Hartley’s early films are about girls trying to escape the limits of their circumstances, and Shelly is the escape artist. Trust’s Maria confronts abortion and sexual violence, always finding her agency in the most complicated situations of a young life. If a sleazy man hits on a Shelly girl — her beauty assures he will — she uses her smarts to get away. She might have been tiny, but never helpless.

For all this, Shelley was featured in Vanity Fair, and photographed often for glossy magazines. Her films, her ginger looks and her sense of style — layers, vintage, wild hair — earned her the moniker “quirky. ” “When you read ‘quirky’ over and over again, ‘quirky’ starts to feel like an insult,” she once said, affirming her sharp, skeptical persona.

But then Shelly seemed to vanish, as It Girls do. The term It Girl comes from romance novelist Elinor Glyn’s script for the 1927 Clara Bow movie It. The film’s title card says: “‘IT’ is that quality possessed by some which draws all others with its magnetic force. With ‘IT’ you win all men if you are a woman — and all women if you are a man. ‘IT’ can be a quality of the mind as well as a physical attraction.”

But “It” is also fleeting, and specific to time and place; an ingénue’s calling, not a grown woman’s. When times change, the It Girl changes, too. Would Edie Sedgwick have been so beloved outside her shiny ’60s milieu? Marianne Faithfull, Twiggy, Parker Posey (currently starring in the upcoming Hal Hartley film Fay Grim) all had their moments as signifiers, and then their currency changed because the culture did. Would fans of the young Adrienne Shelly, who are now grown up and sold out, want to be reminded of her scrappy quest for authenticity anymore?

But Shelly had her own ambitions, steamrolling any expectation that she would become obsolete. Post-Hartley, she made frequent small appearances in small films (Hexed, Factotum), and on television (Law & Order, Oz), saying that she only acted to support her aspirations as a director. And so she wrote and directed short films and features: a 1997 comedy called Sudden Manhattan and a 1999 followup, I’ll Take You There, starring Ally Sheedy. The latter was particularly well-received on the festival circuit, but neither feature had wide distribution.

Director Adrienne Shelly (centre), with Keri Russell (left) and Cheryl Hines (right) on the set of Waitress. (Fox Searchlight)

Shelly was in the final stages of completing her third film, Waitress, when she died. The film stars Keri Russell as Jenna, the titular Southern pie slinger caught in a loveless, violent marriage. When she finds herself pregnant, her ambivalence about this “parasite” baby is at once shocking and funny, as is her sudden romantic entanglement with a gynecologist (Nathan Fillion). Shelly’s dialogue has some of the stagy, melodramatic rhythm of Hartley’s work, but a warmer pulse, too. To Jenna’s simple question, “Are you happy?” a fry cook takes his time with a beautiful soliloquy on the nature of solitude that ends with the just-right line: “I’m happy enough, and that’s my truth summed up for your feminine judgment.”

Waitress is small-scale Douglas Sirk: a film about a woman who is trapped. When it ultimately becomes a cotton candy ode to motherhood, Shelly strikes note after note of pure joy. By the time Sundance accepted the film, where it was a hit, Shelly had been killed; she never knew of its vindicating, warm reception.

Shelly plays a waitress in the film, too; a shy, gawky woman who is aging, but who refuses to give up on love. When Jenna does her friend’s makeup for yet another evening out, Shelly looks in the mirror and says: “Why, I almost look pretty.” It’s a rare false line in the film, because of course, Shelly is as beautiful as ever, even 40 years old and hiding under dorky glasses. It’s not surprising she would cast herself this way: Waitress is her escape from her face, from the pixie youth that could have penned her in forever. She strikes me as a woman who might have looked forward to getting old.

Shelly left behind a husband, Andrew Ostroy, and a three year-old daughter. Ostroy has started a foundation in her honour to help young women filmmakers, and this seems like a fitting legacy: a sobering reminder of all the women artists out there, struggling to get beyond It.

Waitress opens May 11.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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