That was just a different period of time.” Adds Lowry: “She knew the part - she just got it.
SPACE AGE LOVE SONG JENNIFER CONNELLY MOVIE
“She has nothing to be ashamed of: She’s really great in the movie and, like all of us, she's had a very eclectic and wonderful career since. “I don't know how she feels about it now,” Whaley says of his co-star, who went on to win her first Oscar a decade after Career Opportunities for the 2001 drama, A Beautiful Mind. If Connelly ever felt uncomfortable about performing those kinds of hyper-sexualized moments, she didn’t express such feelings to Whaley or Lowry. It was like, ‘Why is this guy talking? I want to see more of her!’” “I think the male critics and guys in general were a little bit annoyed that I was even in the film,” Whaley says, laughing. And during the movie’s climax, Josie distracts the Target bandits by riding a coin-operated rocking horse - an image that left at least one prominent male film critic, not to mention millions of teenagers, hot and bothered. Early on in the film, she aggressively flirts with two of her father’s business colleagues in a successful attempt to infuriate him. And while Career Opportunities is strictly PG-13, Josie is acutely aware of her sexuality. Prior to starring opposite Whaley, she played a small-town femme fatale alongside Don Johnson in the Dennis Hopper-directed thriller, The Hot Spot, which featured her first nude scene.
It’s like The Breakfast Club meets Home Alone - which had opened in theaters three months earlier, and became Hughes’s biggest-ever hit - albeit with a bombshell brunette in place of a pint-sized Rube Goldberg-in-training.Ĭonnelly was 19 years old when she filmed Career Opportunities and in the midst of transitioning out of the teenage roles - like Jim Henson’s 1986 favorite, Labyrinth - that defined the first phase of her career.
Over the course of one long night in each other’s company, they drop their emotional guards and reveal their inner selves… when they’re also not fighting off a pair of bumbling crooks (played by real-life brothers, Dermot and Kieran Mulroney) who decide to break in. When working class Jim (Whaley) gets a job as the nighttime custodian of the local Target, he discovers that his former crush, upper crust Josie (Connelly), also stayed in the store after-hours, working up the courage to shoplift supplies for her one-way trip to Los Angeles. In the film, which was directed by Bryan Gordon, Whaley and Connelly play a pair of high school graduates who come from wildly different backgrounds, but share the same dream of finding a way out of their dead-end town and away from their overbearing families. I do remember being at the studio, and they took pictures of us in various poses and that was definitely one of them.” “I don’t think anyone would have gone for that in the photo session. “That was added later, I think,” he says, suggesting that the studio cut-and-pasted Connelly’s plunging neckline into the image after the fact. Interestingly, though, Whaley doesn’t remember Connelly wearing that specific shirt when Universal Studios photographed them together for the poster. Instead, all eyes are immediately drawn to his co-star, who is perched above him in the poster image, wearing a revealing white tank top that’s also prominently featured in the movie. I remember seeing it at the time and saying, ‘Wow, this is something.’ It caught everyone’s eye, I can tell you that.”ĭespite being the star of the movie, Whaley is well-aware that he’s not the one turning heads, and nearly crashing cars, on the poster. “That poster, it popped,” Lowry says in a separate interview. I was like, ‘Holy s***.’” According to Hunt Lowry, who produced Career Opportunities with Hughes, that’s precisely the reaction the studio hoped to inspire when the movie arrived in theaters on March 29, 1991.
“I almost crashed the car - I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! That thing was enormous, and had my stupid, smiling face on it. and there’s that poster on a billboard above the Roxbury Nightclub,” the actor and director tells Yahoo Entertainment about the first time he saw the one-sheet for the 1991 John Hughes-written comedy in the wild. “I was driving down Sunset Boulevard in L.A. Thanks to Jennifer Connelly, the Career Opportunities poster has been turning heads for 30 years… starting with the head of its leading man, Frank Whaley. (Photo: Universal/Courtesy Everett Collect) Jennifer Connelly as Josie and Frank Whaley as Jim in the 1991 film Career Opportunities written by John Hughes.
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