LITMIR.BIZ

      One day I got a call from my agent. New Line Cinema had just produced the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, and they were now planning to make a movie called The Hidden.

      “They’re recasting the role of the alien-possessed stripper. It’s the only female role in the movie. It’s light on dialogue, but you get to shoot machine guns.”

      I went along to audition but knew I was in trouble when I read that one of Brenda Lee Van Buren’s essential character attributes was that she be “big busted.” At 120 pounds and 5'9", I didn’t have much going on in the chest department, but, never one to give in, I prepared for the audition by stuffing my bra with socks and tissues. I got an immediate callback, although this time they wanted me to come in wearing a bikini. I began to panic, worrying that my chest’s secret identity would be revealed. I rose to the challenge and concocted an ingenious device made of shoulder pads and electrical tape.

      I knew that wouldn’t be quite enough, so I set about devising measures to draw attention away from my faux boobs. The next day I strutted into the production offices wearing a khaki dress with snaps down the front. When they asked to see my body I ripped the dress open in one dramatic movement, did a quick spin, thanked them, and left. An hour later I had the job.

      I love acting. Aside from being Vladimir Putin’s girlfriend, where else can you start your workday at a police academy shooting Steyrs and AK-47s and end it learning how to pole dance from Janet Jackson’s choreographer? The guns I was good at, but the pole dancing—I had no natural ability in that department. The choreographer did her best, and then threw her hands up in frustration and sent me to some men’s clubs to see experts in action. I took my best friend to the Aladdin, a strip joint on Sunset Boulevard, and came to appreciate just how athletic some of those girls are. I met the dancers after their shift. One of them was a former Olympic skier. Some were clearly drugged up and working to support their habits, but most of them were hardened pros earning serious money and seemed as sharp-minded as any executive I’d encountered in the entertainment industry.

      Now it’s bad enough when you have to put on a convincing strip show in front of cameras for the first time, but when I learned that I’d have to do it in a g-string made out of dollar bills my anxiety scaled previously unconquered heights; it’s every actress’s worst nightmare to see her butt fifty feet tall in a movie theater.

      I decided that I needed to lose more weight for the role and visited a place called the Lindora clinic where they put me on a 500-calorie-a-day diet and shot me full of a combination of vitamins and a substance that I would later discover to be pregnant-horse urine.

      My first day on set I was scheduled to perform the strip scene. The director, Jack Sholder, was not a happy man when he discovered that I’d duped them in regard to my physical attributes. Luckily, I’d already come clean to the wardrobe mistress, who’d set about designing a set of prosthetic breasts that I could wear under a cut-off T-shirt. It was a double win for me, because it meant that I also got to dodge the topless scene that Jack had planned on filming.

      Working with Kyle MacLachlan was very exciting. By then he’d starred in the David Lynch movies Blue Velvet and Dune. Both he and Michael Nouri were total gentlemen, a real pleasure to work with, and the rest of the film went without a hitch. Well, mostly.

      I was on the roof of a building shooting my final scene, and I mean that literally. I shoot Kyle with a machine gun, Michael Nouri shoots me in the head, and I shoot him back, knocking him over the side of a building. Kyle comes to rescue him, shooting me nine times in the process, rescues his friend, loads a fresh clip in his gun, and shoots me another seven times, and then I escape by jumping through a twenty-foot-high neon sign and fall three stories to my death. Simple, right?

      In the movie business they attach little explosives called squibs to your clothes to make it look like you’re being riddled with bullets. One of the squibs exploded close to my face, and a piece of the metallic jacket I was wearing shot into my eye. It burned like a son of a bitch but I kept on until we got the take. But after that, I lost the ability to shoot a gun without blinking. Back then I had the Bruce Willis open-eye stare down perfectly, and now I have this blinking reflex, and I look like a total amateur. I recently found myself at a firing range shooting antique firearms for charity with Joe Pesci and Lou Ferrigno, the original Incredible Hulk. I was determined to show these guys that I knew what I was doing, but the instant my blunderbuss went off, my eyes slammed shut, a reflexive protection against fashion shrapnel.

      I attended the premiere of The Hidden and was pleased that my fake boobs looked convincing. Whether the horse piss worked I don’t know, but when my butt had its premiere on the big screen, I breathed a sigh of relief; the nightmare had been averted—my alien-possessed ass looked pretty damn good.