US Premiere July 1996

US Premiere (July 96)

"There she is! There she is!" A gaggle of 2-dozen backpacked 14-year-olds smack each other excitedly and jockey for position behind a wooden barricade, staring past the trailers, video monitors, and a tempting catering truck that line a narrow beachside street in Ventura County, about 60 miles north of Los Angeles. Sandra Bullock emerges from a sky blue sandwich shack wearing rolled-up faded Levi's, a wedding ring- it's a prop- and a 5-dollar thrift shop blouse covered with bright orange and yellow flowers. She strolls up to the barricade and cocks her head at her Bop-aged fans. "Did you guys get something to eat?" "No!" a nervous chorus answers back. Bullock opens the barricade- and the catering truck's wide array of candy jars- while the kids swarm around her, waving index cards and begging for autographs. A driver sticks his hand into the fray and flags a card in her face. She swats it away playfully and patiently asks for each teeny-packers name. One by one, the kids excitedly pocket their signed cards and stuff fistfuls of candy in their mouths. "Did I miss anybody?" Bullock asks, before disappearing back inside the shack for a rehearsal.

Nope, no diva action here on the set of Making Sandwiches, a 40-minute short film Bullock wrote, is directing, and starring in opposite Matthew McConaughey, her costar in the upcoming John Grisham drama A Time to Kill. In Sandwiches, Bullock and McConaughey play a couple whose marriage and livelihood are threatened when a rival sandwich shop opens across the street. Their store motto, "Two slices of bread with a world of possibilities in between," doubles as Bullock's philosophy on life. "It's a basic sandwich principle that always reminded me of relationships," Bullock explains. "The more complicated the food, the more you put in stuff that you don't really need or want. That's why I like basic sandwiches." When asked the logical follow-up- "What kind of sandwich are you?"- her response is classic Bullock: "Very basic. Swiss, turkey, mustard, mayo, lettuce, tomato, on toasted white bread."
It may be cliched to compare a film crew to a family, but Bullock's Sandwiches ensemble is like one big, huggable Italian familia, mostly comprising friends and co-workers from her previous films and her days as a waitress cum struggling actress in New York. Before lunch, Bullock's business team- her manager, agent, publicist and lawyer- arrives and she greets everyone warmly, gathering all around a video monitor to review dailies. "It's like Parents' day," says Bullock. "I like this." Nonetheless, one month after she wraps Sandwiches, Bullock will cut 2 members from her team, drawing the only puff of what can be construed as negative publicity in her 2-year stint as a movie star. It's almost as though everyone- the public, her press, and her peers- wants to find a flaw in Bullock, even if the only flaw to be found is that she fires people when she's dissatisfied with their performance. See? The woman who burst into public consciousness driving a bombed-out bus in Speed, charmed her way from a tollbooth to the title of America's Girl Next Door with While You Were Sleeping, and solidified her status as box office honey in The Net can't possibly be as nice as she seems. Does Bullock have a dark side? "If you come to my house, you're going to see really, really bad sides of me," Bullock insists with a hearty laugh.

But by all accounts, Bullock is swell behind closed doors too. She's the kind of woman who sends a compassionate note and a gift when she hears an acquaintance has suffered a breakup. She's the kind of friend who, despite having injured her knee on a junkyard hunting expedition the day before, rises 2 hours early to plant Easter baskets around a rented home for vacationing buddies. She's the kind of family member who, for Christmas, replaces the standard fortunes in fortune cookies with personal notes she's created on her computer. When Bullock's sister, Gesine, a 26-year-old law-school graduate, opened her Christmas fortune, it promised to pay off her school loans. Bullock's parents recieved cookies pledging to pay off their mortgage. That's not to say Bullock's life has been devoid of tragedy or darkness. She's endured heartache, both public and private, and the death of friends. She's been mugged at gunpoint on the streets of New York. And she hung out in her trailer with Motley Crue long before Pamela Anderson ever knocked boots in hers with Tommy Lee.

John Bullock worked alone on his bulldozer, the same bulldozer that he and his 10-year-old daughter Sandy, were sitting in when he gave her her first beer. He regularly used the dozer to clear a roadway on his mountain property, located several hours from the family home in Arlington, Virginia- the property where young Sandy had busted open her head in the creek, leaving around her left eye the crescent scar that is often obscured by movie make-up. On this day, rains had made the unfinished roads slick, however, and John's knee slipped and hit the gearshift. He tumbled out of the dozer and rolled downhill. The massive machine shot downward, careened off an embankment , and ran over John, crushing him. For 24 hours, John, a Pentagon contractor and part-time operatic vocal coach, stayed alive, as Sandra later describes it, by "doing vocal excercises and yelling for help from his diaphragm to keep the blood circulating." Finally, a group of his students, who had come up to work on the property, found him and rushed him to the nearest hospital, 2 and a half hours away. "I answered the phone when he had the accident," Sandra recalls. "I was very calm about it. I said, 'Everything's going to be fine.' All I remember is, my mom had to leave, and I was sitting on the curb with my sister screaming her head off."
Though doctors anticipated having to amputate John Bullock's legs, a year in the hospital and another spent recuperating at home found him walking. And it left his eldest daughter forever changed. "It made me very protective of my sister," says Bullock. "I had dreams about being in storms and wondering, Is she okay?"
That protectiveness currently extends to her entire family, friends, co-workers, and the staff of her production company, Fortis Films. (Bullock chose fortis- latin for strong- after learning her first choice, aquila, was already taken.) Sitting in her loftlike Fortis office in West Hollywood, Bullock is perusing the latest draft of Speed 2, scheduled to start production this fall pending script approval from Bullock, Keanu Reeves, and director Jan De Bont. Peanut Butter, a blond pitt bull-ish mutt, pounces on an overstuffed red couch and nuzzles with her owner. Helping her look over the script is Mark Brunetz, a close friend from college who now oversees development and creative projects at Fortis. So what does Bullock laugh at now that she used to take seriously?
"My bra size," she answers with a laugh punctuated by a trademark snort. "Your hip size," Brunetz teases. Clad in a black, ribbed sweater and tan Gap chinos rolled above her ankles, her sockless feet tucked into black suede Hush Puppies, Bullock looks sleek these days, the result of dieting for her role as Ellen Roark, the ambitious law student who wears her sexuality on her sleeve in A Time to Kill. She radiates an open, friendly vibe dappled with flashes of the protevtiveness that underscores her personality- as she does when she's asked to explain the backstory of her decision to part company with long time manager Tom Chestaro and attorney Steve Warren.
"I had sort of let things get out of control businesswise because of my neglect and my not wanting to deal with it," says Bullock, who declines to give specifics when presses about the dismissals. "I said, 'I just want to act. I don't want to know about the money. I don't want to know what strings are attached.' I blame myself tremendously, because of my ignorance in not knowing and understanding what other people's intentions were." The installation of her father as her chief advisor has not only raised eyebrows around town, it's also drawn criticism from the press and from the industry pundits. "Everyone is going to make a joke: 'Here comes the voice teacher,' " Bullock says with a shrug. "My dad has always been in the midst (of my business affairs), but he was never so publicly, because he doesn't want to be part of this business. If my dad came to me one day and said, 'I want to be an actor or a producer,' I'd shoot him. He knows that. And Bullock dismisses a cautionary reminder about other young stars whose parental career involvement has led to accusations of mismanagement and strained familial relations with a laugh: "My dad has no idea who Macauley or Kit Culkin is."

While Bullock's childhood wasn't quite as all-American as, say, an episode of Family Ties, her pursuit of popularity- complete with the SAB monograms on all her outfits- is eerily reminiscent of the series' preppy protagonist, Alex P. Keaton. When the family Bullock returned to Virginia after living in Europe while mom Helga, a native German, toured with an opera company, self-proclaimed "drama geek" Sandy was determined to fit in in high school. She became a cheerleader, and hung out with her wrestler boyfriend. In response to her mother's no junk food rule, she developed bad eating habits that are by now well documented. ("I tried to stop the madness," says Denis Leary, her costar in Demolition Man and Two If By Sea. "The peanut-butter-and-potato-chip-and-chocolate-chip-cookie sandwiches. It's a train that's out of control.")
When it came time for college, her parents wanted Bullock to attend Juilliard (John's alma mater) or a school of the arts. Instead, Bullock chose East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. "I wanted to be in a place where I didn't have to live up to any clique or anyone's expectations of what I can and can't do. It was far enough from home to get into trouble, but close enough for my parents to get me out of it." Bullock transferred into the drama department her sophomore year and helped support herself by winning dance contests- anything fron the Shag to disco- with partner Mark Brunetz. Three credits shy of graduating (the tranfer to the drama department had cost her the credits needed to finish with her class), Bullock packed up her dog and her Honda and headed for New York. A bartending job in "a crack den" on 43rd and Broadway led to a string of waitressing gigs; a series of auditions, acting classes, and a lead in the off-Broadway play No Time Flat got her a part in the forgettable TV movie Bionic Showdown. She earned her SAG card, moved to L.A., and landed the Melanie Griffith role in the equally forgettable TV-series version of the film Working Girl.
It was B-movie king Roger Corman who cast Bullock in her first, as-yet-unrealeased feature, a low budget actioner called Fire On The Amazon. In preperation for her first sex scene, Bullock covered her breasts with two X's made of duct tape. "She was really nervous, and we found a bottle of tequila and began to relax with the bottle," recalls costar Craig Sheffer. "We would be doing the love scene and then she would go out and vomit and then we'd do another part of it."
Playing a dumpy research scientist in the sweet box office bomb Love Potion No. 9 paired her both on-screen and off with Tate Donovan, the star of the TV sitcom Partners. Supporting roles in such films as The Thing Called Love, The Vanishing, and Wrestling Ernest Hemingway followed, but her next big break came with Demolition Man. "She was just this chick with a trailer next to mine," says Leary, who remembers the time Bullock summoned him from the set to greet some guests who had unexpectedly dropped by to meet him. "She came out and said, 'There's some guys in my trailer who are here to see you.' I walked in and it was Motley Crue. There was a large entourage of guys with tattoos and earrings and long hair, drinking beer, and she had them eating marshmallow-and-peanut-butter sandwiches. Like 'You boys don't want to wait outside'- that kind of thing. I was like, 'How did you get Motley Crue in here?' She was like, 'Motley Crue?' She had no idea."
But it was her skillful maneuvering of a city bus that put Bullock on a map. Speed''s runaway success and Demi Moore's prior commitment to shoot The Scarlet Letter subsequently clinched Bullock the lead in (and a reported $1.2 million paycheck) in the $80 million grossing underdog romantic comedy While You Were Sleeping. "I wanted it so badly it's not even funny," says Bullock of the role. "It's one of the few things that I read that I would've driven off a cliff for. And it was so right for me at the time."

Bullock's ascent to the A-list- via the $50 million The Net earned almost solely on her name- coincided with the public's and the media's collective disenchantment with Hollywood's then reigning box office queen, Julia Roberts. "When I first cast Sandra, I would get all these calls saying, 'Is she the next Julia Roberts?' " says A Time To Kill director Joel Schumacher, who has worked with Roberts twice. "And I would always say, 'What's wrong with the old one?' "
"There's a lot of competition," acknowledges Bullock, who says she's "dying to" meet Roberts. "Artists are kept apart in a weird way," she says. "(People) don't want the females to meet the other females." Having walked a mile in Robert's shoes, Bullock is sympathetic with the ways in which her peer had handled the pressures of fame. "She didn't make any excuses, and people wanted every piece of her," she says. "Good for her, she took off 2 years. I can totally understand it.......In the past year, I go, 'Wow, this is a lot more than I ever anticipated.' I can handle it right now because I want to. But I think in about 2 and a half more years I won't want to handle it anymore." Looking back, how does Bullock think she would have managed success had it come overnight instead of in her late 20's, following years of failed auditions and less-than-titillating box office returns? She answers without hesitation: "I wouldn't be sitting here."
The off-camera lifestyle Bullock had lead has been decidedly less colorful than Roberts; still, the critical and box office dissapointment of Two If By Sea did nothing to dispel interest in her personal life. Though some have speculated that her 4-year relationship with Donovan deteriorated because he couldn't handle her success, Bullock firmly denies it. The 1994 break-up "happened before all this other stuff," she says. "Tate and I were talking the other day, and he's like, 'Do you notice that your entire career is based on our seperating?' " The tabloids have not ceased in their efforts to create friction between the two, who Bullock describes as "really strong soul mates." One recent report suggested that Bullock had disrupted a candlit dinner between Donovan and his current girlfriend, Friends Jennifer Aniston, at Donovan's home. (Bullock says that after reading the story, Aniston sent her a bouquet of roses with a note: I'M SO SORRY ABOUT THE ARGUMENT. I WILL PAY FOR ALL DAMAGES. LOVE, JENNIFER. Bullock then sent her own bouquet and note: I HAD NO IDEA A CHERRY BOMB HAD SO MUCH PUNCH.)

If Bullock's good fortune had no bearing on her relationship with Donovan, it definitely impacted her subsequent relationship, with Don Padilla- a grip she had met whole working on The Net- which ended several months ago. "The big bang happened when we started dating, and it was just too hard to see what it was doing to somebody else," says Bullock. "I felt incredibly responsible. He didn't care for this type of life and I couldn't control it. And it killed me. It just makes you realize how limited you are to having people in your life who can laugh at it." She adds, "I like simple people. People who aren't into money, who don't have extravagant lifestyles. A friend of mine said, 'Where are you going to meet those people?' "
Despite Bullock's efforts to "own" her huggable persona (by giving back to her public, via autographs, personal appearances, and charity work) as fiercely as she protects her privacy, she plans to build a career based on diversity as opposed to her patented accessibility. "All I want to do is go away from the last thing that I just did, so there is no expectation I can't live up to," Bullock says emphatically. She abandoned what she refers to as her "crutches" ("Every film I've done was another oppurtunity for me to be dumpy and funny and offbeat and quirky") for her $6 million role in A Time To Kill. "I remember (director Joel Schumacher) saying, 'You've got to be uncomfortable. Live to be uncomfortable.' "
And nothing seems to make Bullock more uncomfortable than the notion of herself as a sex symbol. "Being the Girl Next Door is very comfortable," muses Gesine Bullock. "She was never the sexy girl (growing up). She was always the pretty and funny girl. Maybe people don't think you're as nice and sweet and funny if you're sexy." To get into the Ellen Roark character in A Time To Kill, Bullock revved up D'Angelo's R&B groove "Brown Sugar" on the boom box and puffed on herbal ciggarettes flavored with- suprise!- marshmallows. "By the time I got out of that trailer, I was a whole different person," Bullock says of her transformation to the brashly seductive Roark. "It's me behind closed doors, but it's very uncomfortable when you have to be that way in public. It was like a great ritual I went through every day, so that by the time I got on the set, it was already there."
As she strived to stretch creatively, Bullock maintained her down-home persona, as evidenced by the suprise birthday gift she arranged for Schumacher shortly before shooting commenced. Bullock asked the set carpenters to build a large, white, tiered cake, into which she climbed, clad in a "size 20 fluorescent pink bikini" bedecked with balloons. When she burst out of the cake, she popped the glitter filled balloons, and flashed Schumacher with his age inked on her buttocks. "At a time when everyone was just getting to know each other, the biggest box office star in the movie let everybody know that she was just one of the bunch," says Schumacher. "She is one of the most inclusive people I have ever met. There's always room at Sandra Bullock's table for everyone. The driver is treated better than the studio executive because she knows hard people have to work."

As Peanut Butter's toenails click-clack across the hardwood floor past racks of costumes from Making Sandwiches- which her owner hopes to debut at the Sundance Film Festival next January- Bullock appears relaxed and content, and eager to take on her next acting challenge: a starring role opposite Chris O'Donnell in director Richard Attenborough's In Love and War, a true story based on Ernest Hemingway's love affair with nurse Agnes von Kurowsky. "When I was younger, I never enjoyed being in the moment," Bullock says. "All ofa sudden it's very clear how quickly you're here one minute and gone the next" She glances around the space she has created and filled with her extensive family. "I'm really blessed that I had great foundations long before any of this mess happened. It's the people in my life. These slices of bread." "Who knows how long the fame-and-fortune gods are going to smile on any of us?" Schumacher says. "But at the end f the day, what she has, she can't lose."

At the end of the day, Bullock is, and in all likelihood will remain, a generous, giving person striving to reconcile the demands of her public persona with her need to preserve her increasingly limited freedom. "I'd like to keep feeling comfortable with my freedom, to take it and not apologize for it," Bullock says. "It's a hard thing to own. I relinquish it a lot. And that's my fault."
But don't expect her to give up the simple pleasures of life in the process. "I will always eat pizza, and I'll always have a beer with the pizza," Bullock promises. "Heineken, a slice, or fried chicken with biscuits and gravy. That's America for crying out loud."