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Eric Stoltz

If you haven't seen any movies with Eric Stoltz in them, you're missing something major. One of the most prolific actors of our generation, he started his film career with a small part as a stoner compatriot to Sean Penn in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High,". Stoltz first came to attention with his lead role in "Mask," as the young man stricken with a disfiguring disease. Since then, he has been a mainstay of the independent cinema world in such movies as "Pulp Fiction," "The Waterdance," and "Mr. Jealousy." Stoltz also produced "Mr. Jealousy" as well as the film "Sleep With Me." The films that drew him mostly to the acting world were the classics made by Elia Kazan in the 1950s, like "Babydoll" and "A Face in the Crowd." He calls them "performance films, the ones that were really actor-centric." But then another filmmaker had a profound effect on him. "I remember taking six pals to see 'A Clockwork Orange' on my 16th birthday," he said. "It didn't sit too well with my parents, as you can imagine." By college, he was branching out in his film taste. "I went to USC, but I was desperately unhappy there," he said. "I took to going to local revival houses, the New Beverly Theater in particular, and seeing films there. Any film that was playing. I didn't bother to see what the title was, I'd just go and be swept up in it." Here he found the classics: Fellini, Welles, Ford, Sturges, the list that any young film buff could rattle off. "I still get a good feeling about these filmmakers," he said. "To see them for the first time on the big screen was heaven for me." Currently working on a radio play of Noel Coward's "Hay Fever," Stoltz's next film is "The House of Mirth," directed by Terrance Davies who also directed "Distant Voices, Still Lives." "We spent all summer in the wilds of Scotland recreating New York City in 1905. It was a blast." But Stoltz's real concern for the coming millenium is the state of independent cinema as numbers tend to crunch the chances of the small movie breaking out. He wants us to care whether a movie is "good rather than just popular." "Those things don't always go together despite what we're told," he said. "I try to throw my little nine bucks towards the underdogs. If enough of us do that, imagine how the lists that are reeled off on the morning news shows will change. I'd like to see that happen."

- Charlie Brown