Neither the bracing punch of reality nor the rude backslap of irony is lost on Catherine O’Hara this holiday movie season.
The reality is, her performance in the Christopher Guest comedy “For Your Consideration” is generating O’Hara some Oscar buzz in the best-supporting-actress category.
The irony is that the entire plot of “For Your Consideration” revolves around a low-budget indie movie suddenly generating Oscar buzz for some of its cast, including O’Hara’s character. The movie’s little “buzz” bombshell – dropped by an obscure Internet site – drives the woefully insecure cast to near insanity.
“It can make you feel kind of excited in your tummy,” cackles O’Hara in an interview. “And then embarrassed that you’re getting excited. You just have to remember that ‘buzz’ talk is not an actual nomination. It’s coming from somebody who either really likes you, or who really hates you.”
Between now and Oscar nominations in January, O’Hara said, everyone else “gets to enjoy the irony, while I have to suffer.”
O’Hara, 52, is one of those well-employed, beloved comic actresses whose face many people can’t quite place with the name. She was born in Toronto and got her first real work with the incomparable Second City Television troupe that also spun off John Candy, Eugene Levy, Rick Moranis and others.
A generation of young adults knows O’Hara best as the frazzled mom in “Home Alone” from 1990, and the sequel “Lost in New York” in 1992. The idea of life so clearly imitating art in “For Your Consideration” is an old story to O’Hara, after the fame of “Home Alone.”
“I would walk through airports, and some 8- or 9-year-old kid would come up to me and say, ‘How could you abandon your child like that?”‘ O’Hara said with a laugh.
The fleeting fame was good preparation for the on-again, off-again career of her character, Marilyn Hack, in “For Your Consideration.”
“People I run into who remember ‘Home Alone’ say, ‘Did you ever do another movie?”‘
O’Hara said she doesn’t mind, since appearing in the sequel “made me more money than anything I’ve done since.”
O’Hara’s more recent fame is as a key member of the Christopher Guest comedy ensemble, responsible for such gems as “Waiting for Guffman,” “Best in Show” and “A Mighty Wind.” Other regulars in the Guest projects include Levy, Harry Shearer, Parker Posey, Michael McKean and Fred Willard.
While Levy co-authored “For Your Consideration” with Guest, the remainder of the loose-knit troupe just waits for a phone call when the script is done, O’Hara said. The notion of a finished script is a rather loose one: Guest rarely writes out full dialogue for scenes. He instead introduces a new character, then details that character’s vita sheet.
For an actress like Marilyn Hack, for example, the résumé includes fake titles of every movie she was ever involved in, art school transcripts and personal foibles. For the aging folk musicians in “A Mighty Wind,” Guest penned full discographies for the singers.
Once on set, Guest’s actors draw on this background info and the given situation to start improvisation.
“On my résumé,” O’Hara said of reading Marilyn Hack’s part, “I had apparently peaked while playing a blind prostitute onscreen in the 1970s. My résumé was serious, but pathetic in its own sad way.”
Guest works fast and cheap, O’Hara said, wrapping the whole movie in 25 or 26 days. There are no rehearsals. He simply rolls the cameras, and spends a long time in the editing room.
“He trusts us,” O’Hara said. “And he trusts himself to cut later.”
The movie-within-the-movie is a corn-pone-and-gefilte-fish howler called “Home for Purim,” about a Jewish family in the South. Marilyn Hack plays a dying matriarch, of course, which makes for great Oscar material.
Once Hack hears of a possible Oscar, she gets one of those pneumatic Hollywood makeovers that tightens her face so much her teeth would pop out if she smiled. Her breasts jump back in time a generation and up a cup or two, and her lips are injected within in an inch of tire pressure.
O’Hara achieved most of the ghoulish effects through sheer “muscle control.” Makeup took it further, with hairpieces and tooth extenders.
“And then a few really scary outfits,” O’Hara said. “To shove it all up and out.” While the results are intentionally comic, one crew member on “For Your Consideration” seemed to fall in love with the new Catherine.
“He came up to me and said, ‘You look great! I don’t know why more women your age don’t make the effort.”‘
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at mbooth@denverpost.com.
