Francesco Quinn can't escape Dad's shadow
CULTURE MIX
IT'S not every day reporters get movie actors to personally deliver copies of their films for review. But Francesco Quinn, the son of Hollywood legend Anthony Quinn, didn't mind being his own messenger service to promote his latest film, "The Tonto Woman," which is nominated for an Oscar in the best live-action short category.
"I'll just run it up there myself," said the 45-year-old actor and motorcycle enthusiast, as if a 20-mile jaunt across the San Fernando Valley was like a trip to the corner store. Later that day, the DVD appeared tucked under my front door, a picture on the cover showing a woman's bare shoulder branded with the initials "TW."
The haunting, Sergio Leone-like western, based on a short story by Elmore Leonard, focuses on a fateful encounter between a Mexican cattle rustler, played by Quinn, and a mysterious white woman, played by blue-eyed British actress Charlotte Asprey, who had been kidnapped by Indians and kept as a slave for 11 years until rescued by her conflicted husband. He then keeps her living in isolation in the Arizona desert, forever branded as a squaw in white society by tribal marks left on her skin and her soul. The suspenseful 35-minute movie, filmed in Spain, marks the cinematic debut of director Daniel Barber.
For Quinn, the story of compassion and redemption marks a high point in a meandering career that started auspiciously 20 years ago in Oliver Stone's "Platoon," the Vietnam War drama that won a 1986 best picture Oscar. Among his costars at the time were other young actors who would go on to thriving Hollywood careers, including Charlie Sheen, Forest Whitaker and Johnny Depp.
But after his debut, Quinn seemed to vanish. He had earned a reputation, undeserved he now says, as somebody who was hard to work with. It may have had something to do, he acknowledges, with an altercation he had with actor Willem Dafoe on the sweltering set of "Platoon," a fight that Quinn says started with a profanity-laced argument over the use of a monkey in one scene and ended when he decked Dafoe.
Quinn says he was dropped by his manager and agent and had to retreat to Italy, where he was born, to find work for the next few years. He still holds on to his wounded pride from the confrontation ("I come from Mexican stock. Do not disrespect me"). But the temporary exile served to temper the excesses and expectations that come from instant success.
