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New Head Rest Okay, just came in from more than three-hour traffic and it's not cool. I've been running a thought of moving to a nearer place to maximize my time in doing my updates, longer rest and longer rest.=) I really need that, except I'll be missing my mom and dad. But I'll find time, I know. Driving to that new place, my bestfriend, Dush, has gone arche-type in showing me her pad outline. I love it! Check it out here. Dush, we need a phone line. :D Fox drama `Tru Calling' is latest television series to examine mortality By R.D. Heldenfels From Beacon Journal HOLLYWOOD - A hot trend in television is death. And not just seeing people die. We now have folks talking to the dead, and the dead talking back. On Showtime's Dead Like Me, dead people collect the souls of others about to die. Still Life, a midseason series on Fox, is narrated by a dead man whose family is trying to recover from his loss. HBO's Six Feet Under, which follows a family running a funeral home, often has dead folks talking. The WB's Angel, of course, moves among the living, dead and undead. Eliza Dushku knows the territory very well. The 22-year-old actress had a recurring role as bad-girl Faith on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. On that show, death could be a temporary state, and one in which people still had plenty to say. This fall, Dushku will star in the Fox drama Tru Calling as Tru Davies, a morgue worker who is asked to help save the dead -- by the dead people themselves. Tru will also have to deal with her own issues about death. Dushku said at a recent Tru Calling news conference that she could have gone into a Buffy spinoff about Faith instead. ``I love that show (Buffy) and that character's been good to me, and that show's been good to me, and I love the people involved,'' she said. ``There wasn't a doubt in my mind that we could have made an interesting show. But I think that you go down the road less traveled sometimes, and you take a risk.'' But why more about death? Dushku admitted a certain fascination with the subject. ``Six Feet Under drew me in with that,'' she said. ``It's almost like when you're driving down the freeway and you see a car accident. You don't want to stare, but... we just don't know about death and we want to know, and we want to see where life ends.... ``The morgue stuff (on Tru Calling), especially even just in shooting it -- that was stuff that I had never (known). I mean, this goes on every day and I knew nothing about it. And I think that people are intrigued and curious.'' But are they intrigued enough to spare Tru Calling from ratings death? In the fall, it's up against Friends, which has killed many a show. ``I grew up with Friends,''Dushku said. ``I grew up in middle school and high school with Friends. I find... that now there's a whole generation of 14-, 15-, 16-, 17-year-old girls who don't know the show like my friends. And I think that with the show ending (at the end of next season), it's, if anything, a good time to introduce new people, new characters that they can follow from Day One.'' Yes, the words spill out of Dushku like that. And she wasn't quite done. ``I think there is room for the show (Tru Calling) on that night,'' she said. ``So I am not intimidated. Thank you very much.'' And she thinks girls and young women will be drawn to Tru the way many were drawn to Faith. ``I'm intrigued by gutsy, outspoken, female characters,'' she said. ``I think that there should be more of them on television because... in our society, there aren't enough of those girls and females in television and films for people to look up to.'' July 25, 2003 New Mod-work Finally! Hyperion Blu Forum is up! The Board is designed to aid all the peeps out there in crafting a well-defined solution in web designing. Thread covers Flash Help and Advice, Photoshop, Free Downloads, Books and Software Reviews in the course of more subjects. Need help? Then Ask away! Funny though why the Chief Archon invited me to moderate some loops. Stan? Yes Sir! I’ll try to work on my new assignment. See you there! [Register Now] Dushku talks up her "Calling" From Disembodied Brain Actress Eliza Dushku sees her character Tru Davies in the upcoming Fox television series "Tru Calling" to be strong like her Slayer-gone-bad role of Faith in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" -- but in a different way. "I think she's more of a problem solver. I think she's going to try and think out and talk out her problems as opposed to beating them out," Dushku told fans at Comic-Con International in San Diego on Sunday. "And that might be nice for some people to see -- and send a better message." The title character of "Tru" is a woman takes the job of a morgue attendant on the graveyard shift who hears the voice of a woman who died from a gunshot wound ask for her help. Tru -- who has always wished she could have stopped the murder of her mother 10 years before -- wakes up the next morning to find she's living the previous day over again and has a chance to prevent a wrongful death. Tru's also a former track star, which comes in handy as she spends the much of her relived day running around to question the not-yet-dead woman's friends while trying to prevent bad things from happening with her estranged brother and sister, one a cocaine addict, the other a troubled gambler. In true Fox style, the pilot featured blindingly fast cut scenes set to equally fast music, sort of like the flashy interludes of "Angel" blended with the peppy soundtrack of "Alias." Comparisons to the "Groundhog Day"-inspired "Run Lola Run" were obvious and Dushku rolled her eyes when a fan asked whether the German film had been an influence. "Come on, now," Dushku said. "Is she going to get a car anytime soon?" another fan asked? "We're going to do a little ixnay on the unningray," the athletic Dushku replied. The show is scheduled for broadcast 8 p.m. on Thursdays. Executive producer Jon Feldman said future episodes will explore Tru's backstory and the reason why she can speak with the dead. "Every episode, she will have the opportunity to save -- or not save -- someone," Feldman said. Dushku, the co-star of "Bring It On" and "Wrong Turn," said she was drawn to "Tru Calling" by the pilot script's blend of humor, drama and suspense. "It just seemed to have the whole package," Dushku said. "I really hadn't done other previous TV except for 'Buffy' and I knew that, coming from that, my stakes were pretty high and this script really had it." The actress also told fans she wanted to take a risk and move away from her action-oriented Faith persona. "I love Tru," she said. "I really think that she's got depth and she's got stuff to give and to show and to charm all you fine-looking people over there." Fox officials also showed excerpts of two quirky mid-season replacement series with supernatural overtones. "Wonderfalls" focuses on an "underachieving twenty-something souvenir shop worker" who develops the ability to talk with inanimate animal figures. "Still Life" tells the story of a troubled family narrated by a ghost, a police officer murdered his first day on the job a year before the series begins. July 21, 2003 Articles and Some Hello! My second update after my revamp and I'm working on the flash intro and scraps. After completing the whole expansion, infer on great updates and interactivity. We'll have it coming! See you! By Daniel Fienberg LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) In late February, as the demise of UPN's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" began to loom, the show's passionate fandom speculated eagerly over the possibility of a spin-off starring Eliza Dushku as one-time rogue slayer Faith. Those hopes were stymied when Dushku signed on to star in the FOX pilot "Tru Calling," opting for a new beginning, rather than reliving a past role. "I started the character of Faith five years ago and the character kind of traveled with me as I grew up and was me in a lot of ways," Dushku tells reporters at the TV Critics Association press tour. "And I love that show and that character's been good to me and I love the people involved and there wasn't a doubt in my mind we could have made an interesting show, but I think that you kind of go down the road less traveled sometimes." Dushku's choice of divergent paths led her to the role of Tru Davies, a recent college graduate coming to terms with a great, if somewhat perplexing power. Working a medical internship in the city morgue, Davies discovers that the corpses are talking to her. As if that isn't bad enough, she then has to relive the entire day to save the life of the body on the slab, prevent a murder. Equal parts "Run, Lola, Run," "Groundhog Day" and "Early Edition," "Tru Calling" finds Dushku again playing a young woman chosen by unseen forces to save lives. Once again, Dushku's character faces her newfound skills with incredulity and once again, the character is driven by unresolved psychological issues (this time from dealing with her mother's murder). "She's strong, but she's not psychotic," Dushku says, comparing the characters. "I mean, let's be real, Faith was a little over-the-top sometimes, you know." "A lot of the characters that I've played have been given this opportunity to do something where it's overwhelming and there's enough to worry about as a 22-year-old or as a teenager in your normal life without all the drama and chaos and this whole fantasy aspect," she continues. For Tru, the dilemmas of ordinary life include a high-strung sister with a drug problem (played by Jessica Collins) and a brother who can't seem to stay out of trouble (Shawn Reaves). Saving lives and trying to keep your family together doesn't leave much time for dating or work, but Tru's biggest challenge may be protecting herself from a gang of starving, scruffy castaways and a certain sextet of buddies from Manhattan. FOX has scheduled "Tru Calling" for 8:00 p.m., opposite the battling behemoths of "Survivor" and the final season of "Friends." "We have a young star in a young show and what we like to believe is a really fresh concept," says the show's creator Jon Harmon Feldman. "We really think that there's an available audience of teens out there who have loved Eliza on 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' and 'Angel' and in her movies and will come and find us." "I think that there is room for the show on that night," Dushku adds confidently. "So, I am not intimidated. Thank you very much." The Boston Herald by Dave Mason Dushku finds her 'Tru Calling' on Fox HOLLYWOOD - Boston native Eliza Dushku will be back on TV this fall as another hero, this time facing her toughest battle: going up against NBC's unbeatable "Friends." But Dushku seems ready for the challenge. Best known as Faith, the rogue slayer from UPN's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," Dushku stars as Tru Davies in the fall Fox drama "Tru Calling," about a woman with the power to relive a day and save people. Her character knows all the bad things that happen in a day and tries to prevent them when she gets her second chance, which is triggered when someone asks for help. The supernatural series will air at 8 p.m. Thursday nights on WFXT (Ch. 25). Dushku said that with "Friends," TV's highest-rated comedy, entering its final season, now's the time to tackle that time slot. "(Tru) is strong but not psychotic. Faith was a little over the top," she said yesterday at a Television Critics Association press conference. "As a 22-year-old, you feel like you're carrying the weight of the world on your shoulder. And when you're really carrying the weight, it's overwhelming," Dushku said about the challenges Tru faces. "Tru Calling" also stars Shawn Reaves as Harrison, Tru's brother, who gets in trouble with his gambling; Jessica Collins as Meredith, Tru's older sister; A.J. Cook as Lindsay, Tru's lighthearted friend; and Zach Galifianakis as Davis, her co-worker in the morgue. The drama's pilot episode begins by showing Tru and her siblings at the funeral of their mother, killed in cold blood. Years later, as a medical student working in a morgue, Tru thinks she hears a corpse speak to her, asking for help. Tru finds herself reliving the day and doing everything she can to prevent a murder. Tru's power poses questions about responsibility and temptation that will be worked out in the course of the stories, executive producer-creator Jon Harmon Feldman and fellow executive producer Dawn Parouse said. The producers and Dushku said Tru will face saving the lives of bad people as well as the good. "Does she play God and decide who lives and who dies?" Dushku said. Dushku has made a career of playing strong women. Her movies have varied from "Bring It On" to "City By the Sea" (with Robert De Niro) and her current film, "Wrong Turn." "I have a fine line between acting and my real life," Dushku said. "My mother is the strongest, smartest woman I know. She's so beautiful. She's a feminist, liberal woman. "She's smokin'," she said, sounding like Faith for a moment. "She was a full-time professor," Dushku, 22, said. "My parents divorced when I was young, and my mother raised me with help from her closest woman friends. She raised me to support my fellow sisters." And in that spirit, Dushku liked how series creator Joss Whedon wrapped up "Buffy." Dushku appeared as Faith in the final episodes. "I was wondering how Joss would do it," Dushku said about the finale, in which Buffy shared her slayer strength with potential slayers, hundreds of women around the world. "I thought it was beautiful. "Joss and I discussed the (Faith) spinoff as an idea, and I want to work with him again, whether it's a spinoff or a film," Dushku said. "I love his writing. He's the man." Despite her busy film and TV career, Dushku, who lives in Los Angeles, makes time to visit her native city. "I go back to Boston every opportunity I can get," Dushku said. "I love Martha's Vineyard, the Cape, the snow." The Face Magazine by Jane Bussman True Faith As a child star, Eliza Dushku used to eat cake with Arnie and make Robert de Niro blush. Now, after her spell as a renegade vampire slayer in 'Buffy' - not to mention being attacked by sex-crazed hillbilly mutants in 'Wrong Turn' - she's become the camp queen of Hollywood horror. Nothing fazes Eliza Dushku. "I spent a week tied to the bed with chicken wire, this disgusting leather gag in my mouth. With this guy breathing over me and snickering, holding a knife to my throat..." Not a date with John Leslie, but the really ugly part of her horror movie 'Wrong Turn', when some heinously deformed hillbillies finish decapitating her fellow campers and move on to attempt some hot run action with Eliza herself. "...And God bless them, but when they're in those big prosthetic suits all day, they stink to high heaven." Eliza has a rare insight into what a backwoods mutant smells like: "really bad BO!" At just 22 years old, Eliza has clocked up over a decade playing the fiery alternative to apple-pie American youth. "I tripped and fell into this business as a child," she says, referring to the day she went to an audition with a brother, slipped and broke her nose - impressing a talent agent enough with her tantrum to get signed. Whenever a movie called for a girl who didn't twiddle her pig-tails and whimper, Eliza was booked. She stood up to heavy-weights like De Niro ('This Boy's Life' and 'City by the Sea') and Schwarzenegger ('True Lies'). Rather than losing it on crack sandwiches like many child stars, Eliza has matured into more complex bitch parts. At 17, she became a role model for non-blondes as Buffy the Vampire Slayer's nemesis, Faith. She was so intriguingly evil in the part that she was hired for Buffy's spinoff, 'Angel'. Eliza now has her own supernatural thriller series in production, 'Tru Calling', a sort of 'Minority Report' meets 'Run Lola Run' - minus the scientologists and sweaty Germans. Before she turned 20, Eliza had played a bad-tempered goth cheerleader in the excellent teen movie 'Bring It On', and starred alongside Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in Kevin Smith's cult comedy franchise 'Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back'. Which brought her to the hillbilly cannibals of 'Wrong Turn', a take on Wes Craven's Seventies horror classic, 'The Hills Have Eyes', with Eliza wielding axes as pussier co-stars are turned into dead meat. I meet Eliza in the crumbly elegance of Sunset Boulevard's Chateau Marmont hotel. Eliza bounces in wearing a wifebeater and no make-up, looking a lot younger in real life. She's not remotely bitchy or hard-edged, but the biggest surprise is her voice, which seems to belong to a heavyweight boxer. Listening to her talk in guy slang, it's clear why she has done so well in an industry of fragile actresses. Eliza might look like a vamp, but secretly she's a bit of a geezer. She laughs, a big dirty man's laugh. With 'Wrong Turn' beating X-Men 2's per-screen average across the US on its opening weekend, Eliza is on her way to the top and revelling in the daftness of fame, US style. She's just done 'Late Night with Conan O'Brien', America's last remaining truly funny chat show. "Fifteen seconds before I went on the producer ran up and said, 'We've planted Jim Carrey's phone in your seat, would you be OK with Jim running out to answer the phone?' Hell, yeah! Jim's trying to explain the String Theory (of quantum physics) and his phone rings and it's Stephen Hawking going 'Hello Jim, I understand that you're trying to explain to the people of the world the String Theory...' Unbelievable." Eliza's also kept her sense of humour about the flipside of celebrity. "I got a letter from prison - with a picture of this big guy with a thick moustache and a can of Bud Light. He wrote, 'We only get black-and-white TVs so could you send me a colour photo of you wearing little-to-no clothing...' he didn't understand why people were going to look at him like he was a bad guy for the rest of his life." Although that man can only live in hope, there's good news for those on the outside with designs on Dushku: Eliza isn't seeing anyone at the moment. "This is one of the first times in my life that I've been single. I've dated guys since I was 16. Because I was a tomboy I've always loved hanging out with guys, to have that companionship. Doing films, it was nice to have someone from outside who understood you and would come visit and was romantic." She tails off, then quickly says, "But I was a good girl! It wasn't like I was getting nasty from a young age!" She twiddles the fluorescent rubber bands on her wrist that read PURE and FAITH, a gift from her brother. So what kind of men does Eliza live? Tall? Short? Uncircumcised? "I like guys with a sense of humour." Any celebrity crushes? "Something about George Clooney is just super-hot, he's pretty easy on the eyes. But at the same time I don't think I would date me some Clooney. I think the age difference is too hot to handle..." Eliza won't stay single for long. She's such easy-going company. She doesn't clockwatch like most of LA, and goofing off in the sun takes priority over being seen at the right places. "I got to Venice Beach with my brother. You see the craziest people there. This guy wanted me to sit on his back while he walked across broken glass, then they have a 300-man drum session and 50 people Hula Hooping..." That's hula hooping for peach. Ah, California. Eliza was pretty much raised as a boy. She was born unexpectedly when her mother was 40, the fourth child after three boys. ("She thought she was a boy!" her brother Nate, a 26-year-old actor and yoga instructor, tells me later. "She did everything, down to getting a whiffle haircut when all three of us did - a buzz cut at the barber.") Eliza's Albanian dad skipped out when she was a baby and her mother, a single-minded Danish politics professor, raised Eliza to be tough and sensible. Rather than spending her child star years in the Viper Room with Tori "Hammerhead" Spelling, Eliza went to comprehensive school in Boston. "I'd come back from shooting 'True Lies' with Schwarzenegger and they were like, 'oh, are those movie star jeans?' Even the teachers would get on it. I'd have the same excuses as the other kids, and the teacher would be, 'You think you're a big star so you don't have to do your homework.'" Being a child star did have its plus side, though. "It was pretty cool to a 12 year old to be driven to Planet Hollywood for lunch by Arnold Schwarzenegger with your friend in his Hummer," says Eliza. "My friend was completely speechless for the entire meal," she says. "Then when dessert came, he said to her, 'This chocolate cake smells like lemon. That's weird,' and when she went to smell it he stuffed it in her face. She was completely mortified abd started crying, and he was like, 'Eliza, I'm so sorry, I was just trying to break the ice!' I think he broke her face." Eliza's tough-girl performances certainly owe something to her early real-life experiences. "You get this hard-as-nails, no one can bring you down exterior and it worked really well for Faith (in 'Buffy') and even better for Missy in 'Bring It On'." The fluffy chearleading in 'Bring It On' proved to be much more of a challenge for Eliza than it was for her co-actresses. "It was inbred in them by their moms and their moms' moms. I was climbing trees and playing in the dirt making mud pies in hand-me-down clothes. All I wanted to wear was soccer cleats (football boots). So on set they had to have special 'Eliza is Challenged' days." You wouldn't know that from her frankly spectacular athlectics, but she won't have it: "Through the power of editing they made me look all right." Even meeting Robert De Niro couldn't faze the young Eliza. "He's really shy. So I used to bust him a little bit, try to ruffle him up and he'd turn beet red. He comes in with a bit of a hard-up hairdo, you call him out..." she says. You heard right. As a little girl, Eliza teased Travis Bickle. The secretly shy Taxi Driver... De Niro played a violent father to Eliza and the young Leonardo DiCaprio on 'This Boy's Life.' "It was clear to everyone around that Leo was so good, he really had something. Half De Niro's size, half his age but really holding his own." Eliza and DiCaprio got into trouble on set. "You can't ride bikes because an accident could hold up production, but Leo and I had a bike he used to whip around and sure enough one day he fell on his face and skinned his whole chin open. I think he shut down shooting. He's like, "Sorry!" Then he gave them the finger and run off." We meet one of her three brothers, Nate, at the ultra-West-Coast-spiritual Urth Caffe in West Hollywood, among adverts for Clown School and healers talking crap about the undead. Nate has Eliza's big eyes and easy going air and teaches yoga locally. "I was in Geri Halliwell's yoga video," he confesses. He got the job after he and Eliza climbed into someone's front garden to take polaroids of Nate doing poses and sent them to Geri's people. Geri does her own stunts, apparently. "Yes, she was good. Before the video, they told me 'you need to be really prepared because it's a major star and we won't tell you who it is,' but she was very nice." Nate moved from Boston to LA for some of his own acting work, and secretly to support his sister. "It's a blessing, I was so lonely and everyone in my family knew but I wouldn't admit it," she says. "Me and my brothers really like each other - they always looked on me as their responsibility." "When she did 'True Lies' I came and stayed with her in Oakwood apartments where all the child actors live," Nate says. Oakwood is Hollywood's secret Munchkinland. "Everyone was there, Leo DiCaprio - all these kids you see now, we used to hang out in the Jacuzzi at Oakwood. You'd see them on (US TV Series) 'Growing Pains' or 'Family Ties'," Eliza remembers. Nate says, "it's a big community, you don't have to leave - there's a little convenience store and activities. The pool scene is all kids from the industry." Eliza says the way to success is to stand up for yourself, "even if someone calls you a bitch". Nate tells me that since Eliza was 12, she and her talent rep had this game where they call each other a bitch like "what's up, bitch?" "I'd go into a meeting and someone would be really obnoxious and I would always stand up for myself - say, 'You know what, fuck off!' Then she'd say, 'go bitch!" says Eliza. "I used to go into meetings when I was 14 and older producers would say, wow, aren't you jailbait? And I'd go to my mom, 'what's jailbait?' On one movie the entire crew's nickname for me was jailbait," she laughs. I ask her if she ever met any serious perverts as a child star. Nate interjects. "What about that time - " but Eliza gives him a look. "I can't really remember," he concludes, saving his sister from the memory of some major player who probably suggested something unimaginably horrible to the young Eliza. He's just as protective when I ask him to spill the beans on Eliza's love life. "We all live and learn, we all live and learn," she says. "Our mom never taught us to be extremely careful or traditional..." she pauses. "That sounds, er..." They both giggle. "This woman at my hair salon said she's speed-dating tonight," Eliza says. "You join online then you all meet in a hall, pay ten dollars and talk. They have four-minute, eight-minute or twenty-minute speed dates. Then you go hom and if you like that person you send them an email. The thing is if they don't reply you never feel dumped... I think we'll all go on speed dates tonight!" And with that, Eliza leads Nate off to hang out together, the pleasantly surprising Dark Forces of young Hollywood. New Pix At Wireimage New pictures of Eliza are up at Wireimage.com. 2003 San Diego Comic Con International - Day Four July 20, 2003 - The San Diego Convention Center San Diego, California United States [Click Here] Site Update KINDRED was accepted at Celebritywonder.com Thanks for this kind e-mail. Congratulation! Your EXCELLENT site is accepted to be listed on CelebrityWonder.com. It will appear after our next update, which will probably occur within the next 2-4 days. Added an affiliate site, too. July 17, 2003 Revamp KINDRED is back! And I'm pretty up too, I guess. So how's everyone? I totally missed you all. Not with all the gaggings, but hey, we need some catching up soon. Hence, what do you think of the new look? Be a darling and send me your love, have to!=) Basically running on it's first phase, expect new features soon. I'm thinking of putting an art work-a fan submission. Anyone interested in submitting their labor, be in the form of wallpaper, flashworks and the likes, just hit me back, and I'll put you on the spotlight. Cool? I know.=) Should I miss Eliza's musing? Then check below. Better catch Tru! From Comic Con And on Sunday, we have a special event. Eliza Dushku joins us at Comic-Con to present the first-ever screening of the pilot for her new Fox TV series, Tru Calling! This event takes place in Ballroom 20 from 12:30-2:00 p.m. New Pix Annie from our Message Board has posted several new pictures of Eliza. Thanks dear! We'll talk soon.[Go Here] |