Sandra Bullock: The Star Next Door

She apes delighted astonishment when they tell her that they are aspiring actors. "We were practicing outside for this Levi's commercial when we saw you come in," explains the Howser replicate. "But first they had us doing acting exercises, saying gibberish, like, 'Bunny-bunny-bunny.'" She commiserates: "They're just trying to get you on tape looking stupid, so later, when you're famous, they can show you on some TV special going, 'Bunny-bunny-bunny!'"

After they shamble off, she mutters, "God, they were so cute. Bunny-bunny-bunny."

Nice that Bullock hasn't lost empathy with her own Bunny-bunny-bunny days, which, after all, weren't so long ago. Just a few years back, she was fronting direct-to-video wonders like Fire on the Amazon, Religion, Inc. and Who Shot Patakango? Missed those?

Bullock is completely open about what she calls "those $25-a-day student films." She says, shrugging, "Who was I to say no? They offered me money, movie experience, I took it. No matter how bad the movie is, no matter how many times I go. 'Oh my God. that's on TV again!' everybody has films like that show up all over the place. If it wasn't for the first funny little, embarrassing things that I did.

I wouldn't be here talking to you." I ask Bullock whether she suffered any casting couch indignities while coming up through the ranks. "One, in New York," she recalls. "But it had nothing to do with this industry. I was trying to find an apartment for friends of mine who were moving from California, so I went to see this guy who had an apartment and he had, like, a scarf around his neck. He must have seen me looking, like. Yo, what's with the scarf? and he said, 'I am a director,' as if that explained it, I was, like, 'Oh yeah? I'm an actor,' and he's, 'Oh, really?' After I said. 'Well, I'm here to see the apartment,' he sits me down and we go through this long conversation and at the end of it, he says, 'Okay, drop your pants.' I'm, like. 'You're joking, right?' but he wasn't, and I was so mortified I had to run out of there. He's going. 'You'll never make it in show business because you're too sour! You've got to do these things.' I'm running out, blubbering, "I quit, I quit!'"

In Hollywood, she explains, nothing like that's ever happened. "People don't see me as the little sexy hot tamale they could have a good time with." she says.

One thing to be said about learning the ropes through seat-of-your-pants moviemaking is that it offers opportunities for picking up survival skills. Like how to protect oneself from nudie footage surfacing later on. On Fire on the Amazon, an ecological thriller made for legendary skinflint Roger Corman, Bullock taped over her nipples with duct tape. "Don't use duct tape on your breasts," she warns. "We were shooting in the Amazon, for chrissake. Our entire equipment was a lightbulb and a piece of duct tape. I found that duct tape is also highly effective for bikini lines. But for covering up, I would suggest another kind of tape that's not meant to be permanent. Or else, put a bag over your head and just do the scene naked. Hey. I did it for art!"

The only thing that art led to, however, was stepping into the pumps of Melanie Griffith in the short-lived, widely panned TV version of Working Girl. Did she glean anything about Griffith that she hadn't know before? "Yeah, that I can't fit into her shoes, which are two sizes smaller than mine," she says, with a nice edge. "That show was the hardest thing I ever had to do, and I was so miserable, because the [creative team] was trying to fit a square peg into a very round hole. At the time. I didn't know how to fight and say, 'This is wrong. It's bad. It's not A funny.' One thing I know is that you can't make me a straight man."

You won't catch her being the straight man in anything she has planned for the next few years. She just wrapped the wistfully comic While You Were Sleeping, a kind of '90s spin on the screwball classic My Favorite Wife, in which she's smitten with Peter Gallagher, who's comatose, while being romanced by his brother. Bill Pullman, who isn't. Next, she's an agoraphobic computer nerd terrorized by cyber thugs in The Net, then a bluecollar art thief sparring with fellow crook Denis Leary in Two If By Sea, then a scientist romanced by a time-traveling 18th-century British nobleman in Kate and Leopold. But what if the heat were to cool and to lead her one day to, say, ''Sandra!" her own TV sitcom? "In which I'd play the quirky girl-next-door with a funky hairdo and an edge?" she offers, not missing a beat. "Well, if that's where my career is at and where my head is at, I'll do it. I would do a show like 'Absolutely Fabulous.' or something where you'd surround yourself with a good creative team and just have a field day."

Well, I remind her, since my research had told me that her mother was an opera singer and her father a vocal coach, and since I know she herself warbled a tune in Peter Bogdanovich's The Thing Called Love, she could also pursue music. "Actually. I'm thinking about cutting the album right now," she drawls, in mock movie star-cum-rocker style. "I'll call it The Thing Called Me. But the kind of album I'd want to do, somebody already has done. Tom Jones's latest album is phenomenal. I want to meet that guy, spandex and all. I must have that man's autograph,"

No fear. Her days of hounding other people for autographs seem over for quite some time. Does it bug her that other, bigger female stars were considered first for some of the roles she is now tackling? Notably, Julia and Demi. "No, it's flattering," she claims. "I totally understand there's a long list of people ahead of me and that is where producers and directors need to go first. Demi Moore has been around for a good number of years, done a great body of work and has worked her way up. She deserves it. But While You Were Sleeping was one of those scripts I had on my little pile, and I said, "Nobody could enjoy doing this more than I would.' When they said. 'You don't have to audition for it.' I said. 'I'll audition. I don't care,' because meeting me and knowing my work hadn't really swayed them. So, I went in as the very last audition of the day and I just knew." Still, it must be cool knowing that Joel Schumacher wanted her for his Batman sequel (which she couldn't fit into her schedule, so Nicole Kidman got it instead), and that Sydney Pollack considered her for the title role in Sabrina, which Julia Ormond will play. "I shouldn't play Sabrina," she says, "because Audrey Hepburn, the epitome of class, beauty and strength, played that role first." Laughing, she adds, "Maybe I'll play Sabrina's sister, Beatrice, who goes off to Scandinavia and comes back and makes pastries."

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