Starring, Texas!

Remember the name: Klein third-grader Audrey Paris Scott gets her acting startin Revenge of the Bridesmaids

A third grader this fall at Klein ISD, Audrey Paris Scott recently completed twomovies.
Audrey Paris Scott with her screen mother, actress Beth Broderick, in the ABCFamily movie, "Revenge of the Bridesmaid," which will air twice on Sunday night.
Photo by Deneka Scott

There must be something special in Houston’s hard old gumbo soil. The talent that grows and is nurtured here is stunning. Creative people, especially.

When it comes to actresses, I can easily pluck examples of famous thespians who had upbringing in H-Town; Alexis Bledel (Gilmore Girls), Hilary Duff (Lizzie McGuire) and Renée Zellweger (Bridget Jones’s Diary). Each has had a huge share of the Hollywood spotlight due to their extraordinary talent.

Right now, though, a brand new crop of little girl stars is shooting towards the big and small screens. One in particular is a tiny third-grader, well actually she’s heading into third grade, who can be seen in a TV movie Sunday and a big Disney film this fall. Heck, my Sam’s Club bag of cat litter weighs more than this actress!

It’s all pretty hot stuff for a child who only began acting two years ago at the ripe old age of six.

Let me introduce you to Audrey Paris Scott. You will be seeing a lot of her and this is her very first interview.

First off, you won’t be surprised that she’s “gifted and talented” and a straight-A student at her Klein ISD elementary school in Spring. You kind of expect talented people to be smart. However, that she taught herself Scottish and Australian accents by watching videos? Or that multiple Oscar-winning director Randall Wallace (Braveheart) liked her performance so much he had lines scripted for her? Or that her TV movie director, Jim Hayman (Ugly Betty) ordered a camera, “Right now!” to capture her wee hand holding the dragonfly she’d caught for him on set?

Watch Audrey Sunday (7 p.m. and again at 9:00 p.m.) in the ABC Family Channel movie, Revenge of the Bridesmaids. It opens with a flashback of four little girlfriends playing “wedding” together. These girls grow up to be the bridesmaids of the title. Audrey plays the younger version of Caitlyn (played as the adult by Virginia Williams). Audrey’s real-life mother, Deneka Scott, says it’s a great part. Her daughter gets to “show her bratty chops” in the childhood scenes that are a prelude to the bratty bridesmaids the girls become.

When this movie was shot, Audrey was seven. Veteran director Jim Hayman wrote her a note extolling, “What a wonderful actress you are and how much fun. All your ideas, and your understanding of your character Caitlyn will help make ‘Revenge of the Bridesmaids’ a success. Thank you.”

Since February, Audrey hasn’t gone more than two weeks without an audition. I know a lot of adult actors who would kill for that kind of attention.

Audrey’s mom is the one who “discovered” her. At the time, the family was living in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Deneka worked for the headquarters of Denny’s restaurants. She was responsible for casting Denny’s commercials from the client side, and was experienced at recognizing talent. By the time Audrey was six and the family had moved to Houston, she had tried the typical activities of ballet, gymnastics and soccer without falling in love with any of them. Deneka then considered acting as an activity. (Audrey told me she’d watched TV and said to herself, “I think I can do that.”) Deneka convinced instructor Elsa Ward to accept Audrey in her Saturday classes at Next Level Acting. (Normally, age seven is the school’s minimum.)

Elsa is so glad she did and says, "Audrey Scott is a darling, phenomenally talented and highly professional young actress, who works hard at her craft in class and private lessons. She's achieved tremendous success, and we are so proud of her. We look forward to continuing to nurture this rising talent!"

Audrey’s dad Joshua has been a big player in the little girl’s career, too. He found a posting on Craigslist for a child actress to play a young Diane Lane in an upcoming Disney film called Secretariat and submitted her. The family then left for vacation and when they returned, their home phone was burning up with messages from casting director Brinkley Maginnis. For Audrey. For the part. Director Randall Wallace had picked her himself.

Secretariat is the true story of Penny Chenery, the woman who defied all odds by taking over her ailing father’s stables and ultimately fostering the first Triple Crown winner in 25 years of horse racing. Audrey plays the child Penny Chenery and Diane Lane is the adult.

(By the way, Diane Lane starred in the 2008 thriller Untraceable which was co-written by Houstonian, and surgeon, Mark Brinker. But that’s another column.)

Though Audrey was only on the Louisiana set of Secretariat for a couple of days, she made quite an impression on her director. Initially, she was supposed to be a photo double, but when Wallace heard her speak lines she became the actress for “Young Penny Chenery.”

Audrey is too young to understand the gravity of all the star-power she’s meeting (like actor Scott Glenn in Secretariat) but her mom and dad sure do. It’s breathtaking.

Back at home, she’s interested in more typical kid stuff — watching Scooby Do, iCarly, and Saturday Night Live. (“Saturday Night Live,” I asked? “That comes on much later than your nine-o-clock bedtime, doesn’t it ?” She patiently explained that on Saturday nights she’s allowed to stay up later. Hearing this, her dad clarified for the record that she watched an edited version of SNL on the DVR specifically to see Betty White. And even on Saturday nights, she’s “gone” by 10 p.m., he says.)

While acting is fun, and so is staying at cool hotels on location, there is a downside. The food. From an adult standpoint, it’s exceptional. To Audrey, it’s not chicken nuggets.

Should the youngster’s career taper off or Audrey lose interest, what would be the next best thing?

“I’d be a massage therapist,” she ventured.

Go figure.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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