Winnie co-wrote Roadies. This is seemingly an honest, really well observed account of teen life, and the parental reaction to it (and their own problems). She auditioned (and won) a small part in Jerry Maguire just to meet Cameron. Writing it while raising an eight year old, she needed to reconnect with school life, and was encouraged to write the diary of the lead character Angela first (played of course by Claire Danes). And she spent two days in a local (LA) high school:
The discovery I made was that, really in America, if you went to high school in our country, it doesn’t really matter where you went to high school. In a funny way, all high schools are the same. There’s a feeling, and I had forgotten what it was like to be imprisoned in a room and you couldn’t get up and leave and you had to wait for that horrible clock, and then all the trash in the hallways. There was a lot of trash, a lot of kids asleep, a lot of kids holding down another job. And I was trying to capture all of that.
You can see that Cameron would have liked all this being a great auteur of the teen experience himself from the book 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High' (try getting a copy of that book now for less than £250) and you can kind of see the connection to Roadies in the intermingling of the multiple characters. It's fun, for example, to find Angela's new 'wild child' friend Rayanne (A.J. Langer) gradually befriending the old one Sharon (Devon Odessa) in the ladies', though they 'hate' each other, and how the gay one of the group (Wilson Cruz, actually higher billed than Danes) becomes the confidant of both Jordan (Jared Leto) and Brian (Devon Gummersall).
Some dramatic stuff here, including a gun in school, and Rayanne overdoses (her mom played by Patti D'Arbanville); in a later episode, after 33 days of sobriety, she manages to sing in front of a queue, but then (in slow motion) takes a sip of beer. In moving (and timely) Christmas episode, marked by a lack of opening credits and straight into the story, Ricky is beaten up and homeless - we never find out what's happened at home - gets help from an unlikely source (an angel), whilst It's A Wonderful Life plays in the background (the show is a Bedford Falls production). Ricky homeless is heart-breaking.
Occasionally has the most incredible screenplay. 'Her hair smelled like the orange grove I'd pass on my way to my grandmother's when I was eight', and 'I just had the most unreal fight... It was like the fight was having me' being two good examples.
The parents are Bess Armstrong and Tom Irwin, sister is Lisa Wilhoit. Jeff Perry's the nice teacher, Lisa Waltz the restaurateur, Senta Moses Mikan with the crush on Ricky. Really good acting all round, but apart from Danes and Leto the other youngsters didn't seem to hit the big time.
Cancelled after one season (same as Roadies) of nineteen episodes, which is a shame, as we're left hanging.
Photographed by Winnie's brother Ernest Holzman. Many different directors.
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