They made sure my last name wasn’t used anywhere. They asked what they could do to show me how much they appreciated my work in the original. The company that originally bought The Blair Witch Project was purchased by Lionsgate and they’re the ones behind this new sequel. It’s all anyone wanted to talk to me about. My name and face are for ever going to be someone else’s intellectual property. Nothing I do will ever surpass what I did at 24. On learning of the sequel, I did what any sensible woman would do and drank very nice bourbon in a very nice bathtub while bawling my eyes out. So imagine my surprise when I heard about this new Blair Witch. Last year I co-created an independent pilot called The High Country, a comedy about the underworld of cannabis growing in northern California, (which is way more interesting than Hollywood). What came next was a return to writing and my memoir of a year growing weed, Growgirl, came out in 2012. Being literal-minded, I grew medical marijuana while I figured out what came next. I scrapped my LA life in 2007 and moved to a small town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, where people know exactly where they know me from. The upside of dying early is an early rebirth. While this work became record-breakingly profitable, what we were was dead. We shot it and independently provided the impetus for many of the scenes you see in the film, but we were not directors. We improvised all dialogue from an outline, but we weren’t writers. We were supposed to be really scared, so we weren’t actors (all of us are formally trained). It’s a strange thing to get no credit where credit is deeply due. It was the collaborative spirit of production that made my death feel especially violent. Photograph: William Thomas Cain/Getty Images The next year, people were dressed as us.Ī promotional ‘missing’ poster used to coincide with the US release of The Blair Witch Project in 1999. We went to Denny’s on Halloween after we wrapped and ate in the company of pirates and cats and sexy witches – the only witches seen during the production. The producers skulked about in camouflage with boom boxes blasting children’s voices, they bound blood and teeth in twigs, hung stickmen, dropped notes with the next essential conflict they wanted from us in a milk crate marked with a bicycle flag so we could find it. It was as scrappy and punk rock an affair as movie-making could be.
#Real blair witch movie#
Making the movie was (except for the wet days) a joy. Williams, Leonard and I did such a convincing job with our acting, improvising, and shooting that the movie went on to make about $250m at the box office – from a budget of around $75,000. But this one was supposed to be different. People love the safety of horror movies, the controlled anxiety. When the time came for us to finally show our faces, the number one question people asked was: “Were you really scared?” If we were not really dead, it was important that we were really scared. The crap kind with pears and water crackers and mostly packaging.Īs ticket sales began to level off and there was a boost to be gained from the late surprise of: JK! They’re alive! Joshua, Mike and I were allowed a resurrection. I wanted to say, “Well, are you sending me money?” But I was a 24-year-old actor so I said sorry. “We need you not to say things like that.” “You can’t say things like that,” said the marketing department. I sat there, under my enormous face, waiting for the car to cool down, thinking: “Surely this will work out?” When I arrived home that day I did an interview that I’d surreptitiously arranged with my hometown paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and shared this story, laughing: “I’m like the poorest new famous person in America!”Īs soon as it ran, I got a call. Who gets to do that? On a brutally hot July day, the 1984 Toyota Celica I bought with my temping pay when I moved to LA overheated (again), only this time it happened under a billboard with my face on it. I watched a significant time in my life unfurl without me. The first line of my obituary.īeing dead and alive at the same time has its advantages. The folks at the now-defunct Artisan Pictures bought an odd little midnight offering at Sundance that year called The Blair Witch Project, about three film students who go into the woods to make a documentary about said witch and are never heard from again. It was the marketing department that killed me. It said I was dead on IMDB, a site that was new when I first died in 1999 – a time when people still believed everything on the internet was true. It’s a complicated thing to be dead when you’re still very much alive and eager to make a name for yourself.
M y obituary was published when I was 24.
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