CAT CALL

Spotlight

In the 1930s, Clare Boothe Luce, Vanity Fair's ambitious managing editor, had an epiphany in the powder room of a nighfclub. Why not write a poison-pen play about the backstabbing, spoiled New York socialites whose venomous ladies'-lounge gossip she regularly overheard? A few years later, The Women, featuring Ilka Chase (and a teenage Jacqueline Susann in the bit part of a lingerie model), was shattering Broadway records. Then, in 1939, Luce's sassy opus blazed onto the screen, showcasing an all-star, allfemale MGM ensemble, including Rosalind Russell as the bedizened, acid-tongued busybody; Joan Crawford as the hard-boiled husband snatcher from hell; and Norma Shearer as the lachrymose wronged wife. "Tears flowing steadily in all directions at once," critic Otis Ferguson wrote at the time, "and such an endless damn back fence of cats."

Though in the original film the on-set rivalry sometimes mirrored the scripted bitchery, in Picturehouse's $18 million remake, opening this fall, the super-A-list cast claim to have bonded in sisterly harmony. "My biggest challenge," says director Diane English (writer-producer of TV's Murphy Brown), "was getting financing. Studios still think it's a fluke when a women's picture succeeds. I'm going to prove them wrong—again." To update the campy fable, English reimagined the lovelorn countess (Bette Midler) as a rehabbing ICM agent; the wisecracking authoress (Jada Pinkett Smith) as overtly gay; the Reno ranch as an ashram-style retreat; the gold digger Crystal (Eva Mendes) as a Saks perfume spritzer; the betrayed, virtuous Mary (Meg Ryan) as a clothing designer; her crusty mother, Catherine (Candice Bergen), as a sleek, irreverent matriarch; and the two-faced Sylvie (Annette Bening) as—not unlike Clare Boothe Luce herself—a formidable glossy-magazine editor.

AMY FINE COLLINS