Keeping Up With The Joneses
"It's two miracles," said Gloria Jones of Sagaponack, of what will be the almost simultaneous release of movies based on "The Thin Red Line" by her late husband, James Jones, and "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries," from a book written by her daughter, Kaylie Jones.
Her book was optioned in 1994, said Kaylie Jones, while her father's had been optioned as long ago as 1988, so their arrival on the screen at about the same time, in the fall of this year, was a complete accident.
"A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries" is an Ismail Merchant/James Ivory production starring Kris Kristofferson and Barbara Hershey.
Americans In Paris
Drawing on autobiographical details of her childhood in Paris, Ms. Jones's book tells the story of the expatriate life of an American couple and of growing up in that milieu.
HarperCollins will reprint the book to coincide with the movie's release in September.
The movie covers a span of 10 years, from the mid-'60s to the mid-'70s, and two sets of children had to be found.
"The little ones weren't actors," said the author, "but they were bilingual. It was hard to find an older pair who were not only bilingual, but who looked like the first pair."
It is also a film about orphans, she said, and about "not fitting in." Both parents are orphans themselves and they adopt a 5-year-old French boy. He adapts and Americanizes himself, only to have his father die at the end of the movie.
Two-thirds of the film was shot on the Ile de St. Louis in Paris and the remaining third in Wilmington, Conn. Together with her husband, Kevin Heisler, and their 5-week-old baby, Ms. Jones traveled to Wilmington to watch the shooting.
"It looks very much like the Hamptons 15 or 20 years ago," she said. "It was filmed at a beautiful house on a waterway with views of the sunset. Very like Mecox or Sagaponack."
"Thin Red Line"
She was also invited to spend four days on the set of "The Thin Red Line" in Hollywood. John Travolta was in one of the scenes they watched being filmed, playing a cameo role as a general.
"The Thin Red Line," set in the South Pacific in World War II, is about an Army rifle company trying to take a hill on Guadalcanal from the Japanese. Produced by Phoenix Pictures and Fox 2000 Pictures, it is scheduled for release at Christmas.
The movie, which is directed by the eminent Terrence Malick, who made "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven," has an all-star cast - George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Bill Pullman, and Mr. Travolta - but two relative unknowns play the leads, Adrien Brody as Fife and Jim Caviezel as Witt.
"It makes it so much more realistic," said Ms. Jones. "This way, you don't know which ones are going to make it to the end of the movie."
She also felt that Mr. Malick ("He's magnificent, so talented.") insured that the roles would be truer to the characters in the book if the audience were not distracted by a famous face.
"It's amazing how everything al ways seems to happen at once," re marked Ms. Jones, to the background accompaniment of baby noises.