Starlet

An unusual friendship between a young woman and an elderly widow develops in California’s San Fernando Valley.

Even if a screening is sold out, tickets are often available 30 minutes before the start of the film at the box office at each venue.


Image gallery

  • Director Sean Baker
  • Producer Starlet LLC
  • Screenwriter Sean Baker, Chris Bergoch
  • With Dree Hemingway, Besedka Johnson, Stella Maeve
  • USA 2012
  • 104 mins
  • Sales Rezo Films

Jane is a beautiful young dreamer swanning around California’s San Fernando Valley, preferring the company of her pet chihuahua to the housemates she has ended up moving in with, as they are either getting high or on the make. After a confrontation at a yard sale, Jane finds a muddled motive to befriend the woman she has argued with, a cantankerous elderly widow named Sadie. Sadie is naturally suspicious and appeals to be left to tend her garden and play bingo, yet Jane’s persistence wears her down. Sean Baker’s striking feature is at turns sweet and disarming; the gauzily beautiful imagery luring the viewer in while its plot takes deft and provocative shifts in tone. Supported by a vibrant cast are two exceptional first timers; Dree Hemingway (great granddaughter of Ernest and daughter of Mariel) shines as the naïve but well-meaning Jane, while Besedka Johnson, making her acting debut at 85 years of age, is superb as the tough old woman accepting that she is coming to the end of her life.
Michael Hayden

Director statement

Starlet comes from two ideas wrapped in to one. For over ten years, I had a treatment sitting on a back burner. It was entitled Bric-a-Brac and it was about a 20-year-old woman who finds a large amount of money in a thermos purchased at a yard sale and instead of keeping it or immediately returning it... she befriends the elderly woman who sold her the thermos to assess if she needs or deserves the money back. Harold and Maude was most definitely on my mind. However, like Prince of Broadway, some of its inspiration stemmed from an ‘Our Gang’ short. This time around, it was a short entitled Second Childhood directed by the vastly underrated Gus Meins. In it, the gang gives an abrasive and lonely elderly woman a new outlook on life. The second idea came from living in Los Angeles in 2010. Starlet’s co-writer, Chris Bergoch, and I worked on an MTV show together. It was a comedy show that I co-created called Warren the Ape. MTV was targeting 16 to 20-year-old guys... so of course we were casting a lot of porn stars to please our demographic. The more we worked with these women and glimpsed behind the façade of their XXX personas, we slowly came to see that their personal lives were as unglamorous as the rest of ours. I had the idea to shoot a very small verité-type film about a day in the life of a ‘starlet’ focused on a day in which she wasn’t working. Chris and I started spit-balling ideas and he suggested combining my Bric-a-Brac plot with this newer concept and Starlet was born.
Sean Baker

Director biography

A New York native and a graduate of NYU film school, he directed the award-winning and Spirit Award – nominated films Take Out and Prince of Broadway. The latter was named one of the best films of 2010 by the Los Angeles Times. It won Grand Jury Prizes at the Los Angeles Film Festival and Woodstock Film Festival, and Special Jury Prize at Locarno. Baker’s second career lies in mainstream comedy television. He co-created the Fox and IFC series Greg the Bunny, and most recently directed, wrote and executive produced the MTV series Warren the Ape.

Filmography

2001 Four-Letter Words
2004 Take Out [co-d]
2008 Prince of Broadway
2012 Starlet