by Ian Halperin
When Hackers was finally released in September 1995, the reaction was decidedly mixed. Although distinguished as Angelina’s major film debut, it is generally considered something of a box-office flop. It got many facts about computer culture wrong, which drew online attacks from nerds and technology buffs. The Miami Herald described the film as “flashy but unfulfilling” and elaborated, “In the end, Hackers fails as a thriller. It’s hard to get excited watching people pound on keyboards, and despite Softley’s creative efforts to visually represent activities that are by nature invisible, the movie never really grips you.” The San Francisco Chronicle called it a “shamelessly lousy movie” while the New York Daily News complained that the movie “gets lost in cyberspace.”
At the same time, however, some of America’s most influential critics were impressed, especially by the performances of Miller and Jolie. “The movie is well directed, written, and acted, and while it is no doubt true that in real life no hacker could do what the characters in this movie do, it is no doubt equally true that what hackers can do would not make a very entertaining movie … Jolie, the daughter of Jon Voight, and Miller, a British newcomer, bring a particular quality to their performances that is convincing and engaging,” wrote Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times.
Janet Maslin, film critic for the New York Times, was drawn to Angelina’s performance as Kate. “Kate (Angelina Jolie) stands out. That’s because she scowls even more sourly than Dade and is that rare female hacker who sits intently at her keyboard in a see-through top. Despite her sullen posturing, which is all this role requires, Ms. Jolie has the sweetly cherubic looks of her father, Jon Voight.”
Voight himself was certainly impressed by his daughter’s performance, telling an interviewer, “I hope she becomes a major star so she can look after me in my dotage. Of all my accomplishments, I am most proud of being Angelina’s father.”
Hollywood was starting to take notice of a fresh, new talent.
JONNY AND JENNY
The first hints of a serious relationship appeared while Jolie and Miller were promoting Hackers together in the U.K., in early 1996. Miller offered the cryptic clue to a British reporter that he was “involved with an American girl who lives in L.A.” Then Jolie made an appearance with a small gold band on her wedding finger. Eventually, during an interview with Empire magazine that spring, Jolie slipped her betrothal into the conversation. “We got married two weeks ago,” she announced, “and no, we didn’t have a big white wedding. We had a small black wedding.” The Empire reporter noted that the announcement was made as “casually as one might request an extra sugar in their coffee.”
The two had eloped on the spur of the moment on March 28, with only Jolie’s mother, Marcheline Bertrand, and Miller’s best friend, the still-unknown Jude Law, present to act as witnesses at the small civil ceremony.
When Jolie gave the wedding details to the press, it was the first time most people had heard of her. She certainly left a strong first impression: Miller wore black leather, she revealed, while the bride sported black rubber pants and a white shirt with the groom’s name written across the back in her own blood. Asked about this dramatic flourish, she answered: “It’s your husband. You’re about to marry him. You can sacrifice a little to make it really special. I consider it poetic. Some people write poetry, others give themselves a little cut.” She herself drew the blood “very carefully,” she explained to the New York Times, “with a clean surgical needle.”
Miller was quick to reassure his fans that he hadn’t gone half mad. “It wasn’t as gruesome as it sounds,” he explained. “I think they imagine some kind of Satanic ceremony. It wasn’t like that.” Angelina was equally nonchalant about it. “It was no more shocking than promising your life to someone,” she later explained.
Because they eloped, Miller had not yet met Jolie’s father and was nervous about their first encounter. “It was a pretty weird experience, saying, ‘Hello, I’m your son-in-law,’ to Jon Voight. But Jon’s a nice man, and we all breathe the same air.”
Although Hackers was quickly forgotten, Miller was beginning to attract worldwide acclaim for the film he completed shortly afterwards, Trainspotting, which was released prior to Hackers in Europe. Trainspotting follows a group of working-class Edinburgh heroin addicts through their adolescence. Miller was proclaimed a rising star for his role as “Sick Boy,” a punk obsessed with Sean Connery.
Jolie would have to wait a while for this kind of pronouncement on her own work. She complained during the European junket for Hackers, almost a year after its American release, that people cared more about her father and husband than about her. “It was weird to immediately be married, and then you kind of lose your identity,” she lamented. “You’re suddenly somebody’s wife. And you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m half of a couple now. I’ve lost me.’ We went on some morning show, and they threw rice on us and gave us toasters. I was thinking, ‘I need to get myself back.’”
Indeed, to observers it looked like she was already having second thoughts about the marriage by the time they returned from Europe and Miller moved into her small L.A. apartment. She started to ban the subject of her nuptials in interviews, almost foreshadowing an eventual breakup: “The way we both feel about life is to live in the moment and not think of the future. Even if we divorce, I would have been married to somebody I really loved and known what it was to be a wife for a few years. Marriage is no bigger deal than signing a piece of paper that commits you to someone forever.”
For his part, Miller seemed a little more open to the possibility of a long-term commitment. “When you love somebody, you want to be with them,” he said. “We are a couple who are into extremes, and the extreme is to get married. Having this eye-opening and honest relationship really opens doors within yourself.”
It was soon apparent that apart from acting, what the young couple really had in common was a proclivity for wild sex. In an interview with Allure magazine, Jolie hints that her bedroom saw plenty of action. “The English, they might be repressed, but they’re good in bed,” she said with a twinkle. “I’ve always been at my most impulsive when Englishmen are around. They get to me. When I was fourteen, I visited London for the first time, and that’s when I discovered my problem. Englishmen appear to be so reserved, but underneath they are expressive, perverse, and wild.” There were also hints that Miller was all too willing to indulge Jolie’s fetishes, ones that had arisen out of her bizarre exploits with her sixteen-year-old punk boyfriend.
She continued to add to her already massive collection of swords, battle-axes, and knives, and it was clear that they were not just for show. “You’re young, you’re crazy, you’re in bed, and you’ve got knives. So shit happens,” she told one interviewer who asked about the role her collection played in her sex life.
She was not shy about publicly discussing her penchant for S & M to more than one interviewer. “I have always felt really naughty,” she told the Scotland on Sunday newspaper. “I got involved in an S & M lifestyle and there were some people a lot further down that road than me. I had to be careful, because I am an actress. If I dominated for a few weeks, one person might recognize me. It fascinates me, though. I always felt that if someone approached me to try something, then I would be the last person to walk away. I’d have a go.”
She also revealed that, unlike a typical sadomasochist, she didn’t have a preference when choosing between master and slave. “I used to think dominating was the thing to do,” she explained. “But then I realized that the person who was dominating was really the slave, because they did all the hard work. They are exhausted, while the other person was lying there enjoying it. I thought, ‘I’m not getting anything for me.’ So I changed to thinking on the lines of being both master and slave.”
It’s hard to know exactly how kinky the sex got between them, but Miller later provided a hint. He claimed that he frequently sucked Jolie’s blood, saying, “She digs that kind of thing.”
Jolie has fre
quently credited Miller with getting her to curb her excessive drug use. During their marriage she talked publicly for the first time about the negative aspects of her long-time habit. “I have done just about every drug possible. Cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, LSD,” she told a Scottish paper. “The worst effect, oddly enough, was from pot, which made me feel out of control, and I became silly and giggly. I liked LSD for a while, until I went to Disneyland [high] and started thinking about Mickey Mouse being a short, middle-aged man in a costume who hates his life. My brain went the other way and I started thinking: ‘Look at these fake flowers, the kids are on leashes, the parents hate being here.’ Those drugs can be dangerous. I know friends who are no longer happy or interesting, living for junk all the time and using people.”
Shortly after Hackers had finished filming, Jolie landed a role in the low-budget comedy Mojave Moon. It is a road movie in which she plays Ellie, a girl looking for a ride out of the city and into the Mojave desert where her mother lives. An older man, played by Danny Aiello, gives her a lift, and from there a series of bizarre events unfolds. The film was released in early 1996 but was effectively dead on arrival; it appeared that Jolie had another flop under her belt. Nevertheless, critics again singled out her performance among the mediocrity. “Jolie, an actress whom the camera truly adores, reveals a comic flair and the kind of blatant sexuality that makes it entirely credible that Aiello’s character would drop everything just for the chance of being with her,” wrote the Hollywood Reporter.
Jolie was on the cusp of stardom, and her mother, who had long since given up her own career ambitions, was determined to do whatever was necessary to get her there, with a little help from her ex-husband. Claire Keynes was a close friend of Marcheline Bertrand’s and recalls those days when the town was starting to buzz about Angelina Jolie:
I think Angie had her own agent already, but Marche was acting as her manager. She was reading scripts, taking meetings and trying to sort of plot out her daughter’s road to the top. She was still close to her ex, and she enlisted him in all the decisions, constantly asking for advice and asking him to call in favors. You have to remember that Jonny was like a god in Hollywood circles. He wasn’t what you would call a superstar, because he did so few movies, and he could no longer carry a film, but he was revered, literally worshipped by the whole town. It’s hard to describe. You can’t really say he was in the same league as a Brando, that was a whole different stratosphere, but everybody respected him for his brilliance as an actor and, I think, for the fact that he never sold out. People were in awe of him—actors, producers, writers, journalists … He was also very well liked.
Nobody knew more than Marche that Jon held the key to his daughter’s ambitions. You had Angie changing her name and wanting to get out from her father’s shadow, but then you had her mother, who got her father to make the phone calls that opened the doors for her. Jonny was all too happy to oblige. He doted on both the kids; he would have done anything to make them happy. If Angie wanted to be a movie star, he’d do everything he could to make it happen, though he always said she would have made it with or without his help. He thought she was a terrific actress, just a little rough around the edges.
Around this time, in fact, Jolie explained to a reporter why she was using the name Jolie instead of Voight, a change she would legally make in 2002. “I’m not my dad, and I think people might have expected me to be him. I might never have known if I was being treated a certain way because it was me or because as soon as they were introduced to me they connected me with my dad.” Whether she used the name Jolie or Voight, her dad made sure people knew her family tree.
One of the scripts that had come across Bertrand’s desk was for a film called Foxfire. She didn’t know if it was right for her daughter so, as usual, she consulted with her ex-husband. He immediately gave it the green light. The script was based on a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, who happened to be one of his favorite authors. He made a few phone calls and got Jolie an audition, though it would be a mistake to say that it was her lineage that won her the role.
Foxfire executive producer Paige Simpson describes the progeny of Hollywood’s famous parents as “members of the Lucky Sperm Club.” At first she thought Jolie was just another of those. “She was introduced to me as Jon Voight’s daughter,” Simpson recalls. “But she comes in, and you can’t not look at her.”
Jolie seemed tailor-made for the film’s central character, Legs Sadovsky, a drifter who bonds with a group of high school girls and inspires them to assert themselves as women. The film, directed by first- timer Annette Haywood-Carter, updates the Oates novel from 1950s upstate New York to 1990s Oregon. Jolie plays Legs as a charismatic, butch, James Dean-esque character complete with motorcycle boots and black jacket. In fact, the film was compared by more than one critic to Rebel Without a Cause, though mostly unfavorably.
In Foxfire, four high school girls who barely know one another are galvanized into a gang by the sudden arrival at school of the mysterious Legs. Her motto is “Don’t take any shit,” and she convinces the girls to confront a teacher who is sexually harassing them. In their confrontation with the teacher, one of the girls, Rita, slams him against a lab bench and tells him, “If you ever put your hands on me again, I’m gonna snip your little nuts off with my toenail clippers.” The incident results in a three-week suspension for the girls. When they sneak back to school to retrieve an art portfolio, they accidentally start a raging fire. Later, in a memorable scene that received considerable attention, Legs and the other girls bare their breasts so Legs can give each of them a flame tattoo to commemorate their torching of the school.
More than one critic wondered whether the nudity of this scene was exploitative rather than feminist. As if to confirm such suspicions, the rest of the film devolves into a confusing denouement involving violence and car chases that effectively smother the feminist themes of the first half.
It seems clear throughout that Legs is a lesbian, and the director even shot a passionate kiss between her character and another, which got left on the editing room floor at the insistence of the studio. Yet, in publicity for the film, Jolie presents a different take, perhaps for box- office expediency. “I saw Legs as being androgynous, but sexual in a very animal sort of way: free, fascinating, intriguing and touchy,” she explained about her role. “The connection isn’t directly about sex. I could see her being around it or watching it, but she is very much by herself.”
Whether or not there was a lesbian vibe on screen, there was clearly one on the set. Jolie, still only twenty, began an intense relationship with her twenty-seven-year-old Japanese American co-star, Jenny Shimizu. “I fell in love with her the first second I saw her. I wanted to kiss and touch her,” Jolie revealed. “I noticed her sweater and the way her pants fit, and I thought, ‘My God!’ I was getting incredibly strong sexual feelings. I realized I was looking at her in a way I look at men. It never crossed my mind that one day I was going to experiment with a woman. I just happened to fall for a girl.”
Shimizu was known better at the time as a model than as an actress, having walked the runways for Calvin Klein and Versace, among others. She told the Sun some of the details of their affair:
During breaks in filming Foxfire, I got to sit down with this person [Angelina] and spend two weeks with them, meeting them and talking with them before anything got sexual. I actually felt like I was caring about someone much more than just simply having sex. And I didn’t feel there was a straight girl that I was just bedding and she was going to freak out the next morning. We had established such a nice relationship that I felt this girl would have me back, no matter what. I knew this person would be loyal and wonderful to me. Our relationship only got closer the minute that we had finished being together. I felt intense emotions, and I felt intense emotions from her. From that minute on we hung out together … After the second week of filming, we kissed. She is beautiful. Her mouth is amazing. I’ve never kissed anyone with a bigger mouth than Angel
ina. It’s like two water beds—it’s like this big, kind of warm, mushy, beautiful thing. She’s a gorgeous woman.
According to Shimizu, the two continued to date long after filming ended. “We used to visit strip clubs and there was this tension,” she adds as she describes their regular liaisons. She claims their relationship lasted for years.
Still, there was nothing unusual about homosexuality on a Hollywood set or a gay liaison between two actors. It is a tradition as old as Hollywood itself. Venerated actresses from Greta Garbo to Marlene Dietrich to Ethel Waters are all well known to have had lesbian lovers. Another equally old tradition, however, is the necessity to cover up such relationships for fear that public exposure would end a career. Jolie would later smash this tradition with surprising results, but for now, both actors kept their affair quiet.
When Foxfire finished shooting, it was clear to Jolie that it wasn’t going to make her a movie star. She later admitted that she didn’t think the film would even be released; she believed distributors would have trouble with its “demographic niche or message,” which she thought might be perceived as being anti-male.
Foxfire was eventually released in August 1996. But fortune had it that the film opened two days after the cruder but more powerful Girls Town, which shared many of the same plot elements. The inevitable comparisons were deadly. “Where Girls Town captures the hysterical pitch and hyperkinetic rhythm of actual teenage conversation,” wrote one reviewer, “the voices in Foxfire are generic teenage suburban, without accent or personal inflection. We are in Anywhere, U.S.A., which is really the same place as nowhere on earth.” Another reviewer called Foxfire a “vacant teen exploitation flick” while the Atlanta Journal-Constitution suggested, “Probably the kindest thing to do with the new movie Foxfire would be to burn all existing prints, thereby saving everyone concerned further embarrassment.”