Roger Ebert / Chicago Sun-Times review

Ellie Parker
All the world's an audition
Release Date: 2005
Ebert Rating: ***
BY ROGER EBERT / Dec 16, 2005
To be a movie star and a good actor and a happy person is so difficult that Meryl Streep may be the only living person who has achieved it. Maybe Paul Newman, later in life. Okay, Tilda Swinton, Catherine Keener and Morgan Freeman. Maybe Frances McDormand.
I know such speculation is goofy, but it's how I feel after seeing "Ellie Parker," a daring and truthful film by Scott Coffey, starring Naomi Watts as an actress who is trying to get a start in Los Angeles. It is one of the ironies of this film about a failing actress that it only got made because a successful actress (the star of "King Kong" no less) agreed to appear in it. You'd think they could have given the job to someone who needed the job, but then they couldn't have lined up the financing, modest as it is.
This is the movie they should show in college acting classes, instead of tapes of "Inside the Actors' Studio." It is about auditioning for an idiotic Southern Gothic soap opera and then changing your makeup and accent in the car on your way to audition as a hooker in a soft-core sex film. About trying to impress a group of "producers" who are so stoned they don't have a sober brain cell to pass from hand to hand around the room. About suspecting that the only thing worse than not getting the job would be to get it. About being broke. About depending on your friends, who are your friends because they depend on you. About lying to the folks back home. About going to clubs to be "seen" and getting so wasted you hope no one saw you, and about suspecting that while you were in a blackout your genitals may have been leading a life of their own. And it is about having to be smart, talented, beautiful, determined and, yes, lucky, just to get to this point in your career.
"Ellie Parker" follows its heroine through about 24 hours of her life. Maybe more. I'm not sure and neither is she. The character is played by Watts with courage, fearless observation, and a gift for timing that is so uncanny it can make points all by itself. Watts, as Parker, is so familiar with her look, her face, her hair, her style, her makeup that she can transform herself from a belle to a slut in the rear-view mirror while driving from one audition to another, and convince us that she really could do that, and has.
She deceives herself that she might meet a nice guy who would -- what? Does she have time for a relationship if she's really serious about her career? Would a guy that nice settle for the life she has to lead? If he shared it, wouldn't that mean he was as desperate as she was? There's a scene here where a guy has sex with her and then confesses he fantasized that she was Johnny Depp. He should have told her this before they started, so that she could have fantasized that she was Johnny Depp, too, and then both people in bed could have felt successful.
In between these harrowing adventures, she engages in acting exercises where she dredges up sense memories that are worn out from overuse, and goes to see her therapist, whose occupation, she realizes, can also be spelled "the rapist." She doesn't know where to go with this, and neither does her therapist. We understand why Hollywood is such a hotbed of self-improvement beliefs, disciplines, formulas and cults. I walked into the Bodhi Tree psychic bookstore one day, and saw a big star rummaging through the shelves. What was she looking for? Didn't she know those books were written to help people get to the point she was already at? Maybe the star was trying to reverse the process. Maybe self-help bookstores should have a section named "Uninstall."
"Ellie Parker" is a good movie, fearless and true, observant and merciless. Naomi Watts was brave to make it and gifted to make it so well. Scott Coffey shot it off and on, as he was able to raise funds. The truth in this movie has been earned and paid for. Young people considering acting as a career should study it carefully. If Ellie Parker's ordeal looks like it might be fun, you may have the right stuff.
Cast & Credits
Ellie Parker: Naomi Watts
Sam: Rebecca Rigg
Chris: Scott Coffey
Justin: Mark Pelligrino
Smash: Blair Mastbaum
Dennis: Chevy Chase

Strand Releasing presents a film written and directed by Scott Coffey. Running time: 95 minutes. No MPAA rating (intended for mature viewers).

copyright 2005, rogerebert.com

New York Times review

NEW YORK TIMES

ELLIE PARKER
Written and directed by SCOTT COFFEY

Acting Classes, Therapy and Awful Boyfriends

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

In Scott Coffey's corrosive, deadpan comedy "Ellie
Parker," the camera pauses just long enough
to take in a marquee announcing a double bill of "Play It as
It Lays" and "The Day of the Locust." That's
right; once again, Los Angeles takes it on the chin.

In the film, Naomi Watts
delivers a fearless, largely unsympathetic portrayal of the
title character as a desperate, unstrung version of herself
(an Australian actress with a knack for dialects). The
unstable Ellie Parker is not unlike Maria Wyeth, the anomic
protagonist of Joan Didion's
prescient novel "Play It as It Lays," and it's probably no
coincidence that in the movie Ms. Watts resembles the young
Tuesday
Weld, who portrayed Maria in the 1972 screen
adaptation of the novel. Many of the symptoms of malaise
that afflicted Maria beset Ellie, who vents in cliche-ridden
psychobabble sometimes filtered through booze and Vicodin.

Ellie's exasperating streak of self-dramatization could
wear anyone down. "I don't know who I am," she whines to her
best friend, Sam (Rebecca Rigg), a more level-headed fellow
actress, who blithely retorts, "Nobody knows who they are."

Ellie complains to her female therapist, "I feel like I'm
waiting for my life to start," then hugs a pillow and
regresses into childhood. For Ellie, therapy is just an
extension of her acting classes. She also suspects her
therapist of having a crush on her. The very word
"therapist," she declares heatedly, suggests violation,
because if you take the word apart, it becomes "the rapist."

Ellie has infallibly awful taste in men. After she comes
home to discover her live-in boyfriend Justin (Mark
Pellegrino), a rock guitarist, cavorting in bed with a
casting director, she moves in with Sam and soon hooks up
with Chris (Mr. Coffey), an apologetic sad sack she meets
when they have a minor car collision. She later meets him
again by chance at the store where he works; he pretends to
be his own nonexistent twin brother before sheepishly
admitting he was lying. When they finally have sex, Chris
announces immediately afterward that he has just realized
he's gay; fantasies of Johnny Depp
carried him through the act.

But the movie's funniest and most significant scenes
dwell on the rigors of the acting profession. When Ellie and
Sam attend a class where they are encouraged to dredge up
painful personal experiences, Sam re-enacts a childhood
memory of burning down the house but afterward confesses she
invented the story. Ellie, aghast at her friend's deception,
protests. Sam counters: "How many times are you going to cry
about your drunken mother? It's boring!"

Below the comedy, "Ellie Parker" suggests the real
psychic toll of all those acting classes and sense-memory
exercises. Anguished sensitivity summoned on command to
impress dispassionate judges in the Hollywood meat market
can leave you agitated and confused about what you really
feel. As Ellie drives from one audition to another, using
her car as a dressing room and rehearsal studio while
undertaking a metamorphosis from Southern belle into
foul-mouthed junkie prostitute, you feel the strain.

What's left of yourself once you have drained away your
emotions in pursuit of an authenticity that, if you're
lucky, will probably be squandered on a bit part in a
second-rate television series?

The visually crude, digital-video "Ellie Parker"
originated as a 16-minute short that was first shown at the
2001 Sundance Film Festival, before Ms. Watts became a star.
It was shot sporadically over four years in the breaks
between her higher-profile projects. For Ms. Watts, it is a
small, brave acting tour de force.

Ellie Parker

Opens today in Manhattan.

Written and directed by Scott Coffey; directors of
photography, Mr. Coffey and Blair Mastbaum; edited by Matt
Chesse and Catherine Hollander; music by Neil Jackson, songs
performed by Built Like Alaska; produced by Mr. Coffey,
Naomi Watts,
Mr. Chesse and Mr. Mastbaum; released by Strand Releasing.
Running time: 95 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Naomi Watts (Ellie Parker), Rebecca Rigg (Sam),
Scott Coffey (Chris), Mark Pellegrino (Justin), Chevy Chase
(Dennis) and Blair Mastbaum (Smash).

Los Angeles Times review

LOS ANGLES TIMES

MOVIE REVIEW
'Ellie Parker'
Five years in the making, Scott Coffey's labor of love with Naomi Watts is a
fresh take on the plight of a struggling actress.


'Ellie Parker'
By Kevin Thomas, Times Staff Writer

Five years ago, actor-director Scott Coffey shot a 16-millimeter film with
Naomi Watts in which she plays an aspiring actress struggling to hold on to
her sense of identity as she hurtles from one audition to the next. They
then developed it into a feature-length film, "Ellie Parker," shot on a
digital camera, over the next four years. During that time, Watts has
achieved the recognition that proves so elusive to Ellie.

"Ellie Parker" is a funny, fractured valentine, celebrating the
incandescence of Watts' blond beauty and shimmering talent. Ellie's story is
as old as Hollywood, but Coffey brings to it a fresh, frenzied and often
painfully raw vision in which Ellie begins to feel that her personality is
as fragmented as life in Los Angeles can be. Ellie encounters a few kind
souls, but mainly she runs up against that impersonal quality that
characterizes many L.A. people and places. "Ellie Parker" is at once
hilarious and harrowing, and in being so, seems right on target.

Ellie has a high-intensity personality, and her readings for the heroine of
a dreadful Civil War saga and for a junkie prostitute, another trite part,
bring to them a passion and conviction beyond what they deserve. In the
meantime, she catches her rock-star boyfriend (Mark Pellegrino) two-timing
her, seeks shelter with her seemingly more stable actress pal (Rebecca
Rigg), with whom she attends an acting class that seems more like primal
scream therapy, and has an encounter with an aspiring cinematographer
(Coffey).

And when she tells her wise and sympathetic agent (Chevy Chase, in a nifty
change of pace) that she wants to quit acting, she's taken aback when he
doesn't try to talk her out of it. The people and events in Ellie's life
conspire to isolate her as she strives to get a grip on herself and her
life. There's an honesty, as painful as it is comical, about Ellie and her
story that lingers long after the lights go up.

'Ellie Parker'

MPAA rating: Unrated

Times guidelines: Language, some drugs, adult themes

A Strand Releasing presentation. Writer-director Scott Coffey. Producers
Naomi Watts, Coffey. Cinematographers Coffey, Blair Mastbaum. Editors Matt
Chessé and Catherine Hollander.

People Magazine review

PEOPLE MAGAZINE

ELLIE PARKER

Naomi Watts is ferociously good in an astute little comedy about the misadventures of a self-involved, scatterbrained actress from Australia who’s trying to make it in Hollywood. Shot in a faux cinema verite style, the film is knowing about what it takes to fake it ‘til you make it.

Three out of four stars.

Star magazine review

STAR Magazine


What it's about: An aspiring actress (Watts) must cope with the pressure of demeaning auditions, a career that's lost its spark and an unfaithful boyfriend (Mark Pellegrino) in this mock-documentary gem of dark comedy.

Star power: Sure, everyone is going to be talking about Watt in King Kong — but the title role here is some of the rawest, realest acting she's done since 21 Grams. She's a great sport, working without vanity or fear for writer-director Scott Coffey, who shot the whole thing with a small digital video camera over a period of five years. She captures the desperation of someone struggling with her own identity while trying to lose herself in his acting roles. And look for Chevy Chase in a briskly funny cameo.

Long story short: Naomi takes a comic risk — and it pays off

Boston Globe review

Ellie Parker Movie Review
Watts channels her inner struggling actress
By Ty Burr

Boston Globe
Published: 12/16/2005
Ellie Parker is who Naomi Watts would be if Watts weren't smarter or more famous. The actress might even argue that Ellie Parker is who she used to be, before David Lynch's 2001 ''Mulholland Dr." catapulted her to fame and into the paws of a certain CGI gorilla currently stomping through movie theaters. ''King Kong" may provide Watts with massive global stardom -- and she's good in it, too -- but ''Ellie Parker," made for 0.001 percent of the catering budget of ''Kong," proves she's one of the nerviest actresses around.
A few days in the life of a struggling Hollywood actress, ''Parker" is as indie as they come: shot on video, hand-held camerawork, found sound. Writer/director/costar Scott Coffey is an acting friend of Watts's who made a short version of this film around the time they both appeared in ''Mulholland"; a successful screening at Sundance gave him the momentum to turn it into a feature. Watts stuck around, and good thing she did.
''Parker" opens with an audition sequence reminiscent of the one that took ''Mulholland Dr." and Watts's career to an entirely new level, but here it's played for desperate film-biz comedy. Ellie channels her inner Scarlett for a bored young director named Smash, then jumps into her Honda and drives to the next tryout: just another actress barreling down the 405, singing along to Blondie and rehearsing a New Jersey junkie-whore accent.
Ellie has a loser musician boyfriend (Mark Pellegrino, ''National Treasure") and a tart actress pal named Sam (Rebecca Rigg of TV's ''The Guardian") who's both savvier and less principled than her friend (she makes up childhood traumas for their method-acting class). A series of unfortunate events forces Ellie to confront her inner emptiness: ''I don't know who I am," she sighs with touching dim-bulb sincerity.
What she doesn't realize -- but what the film has great sport with -- is that no one here knows who they are. Lack of identity is the normal Hollywood state of being; that and a sense of biding time for the big role you haven't yet read for. Ellie's car gets rear-ended by a neurotic romantic interest named Chris (Coffey), and even he isn't sure whether he's gay or straight, a cinematographer or his own epileptic twin brother.
Chevy Chase turns up in a cameo as Ellie's agent, drolly rewriting the story of his recent marital breakup. Even stardom doesn't ease the pain; Ellie and Sam go to hear a band and who's onstage but Keanu Reeves, playing at being a grunge-rocker. They all live in a world of constant, nervous improv.
Eventually the energy of the original short runs out and the movie coasts on fumes, but it remains surprisingly enjoyable for all that. The industry in-jokes are wicked and the psychic weariness fully felt -- ''Parker" is made by people who know their business. That includes Watts, who jumps into her character's skin as if she were revisiting the old neighborhood. There's a frisky lack of vanity to her playing: Ellie makes dopey decisions, gets zonked on Vicodin, acts her little heart out (the joke is that she has talent), and at one point, for perfectly sane reasons, vomits blue. Then she heads for another audition, certain there's a role out there better than the one she's living.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
Ellie Parker Showtimes
Movie Showtimes for Friday, December 16
Purchase Tickets from MovieTickets.com by clicking on a linked showtime.
Kendall Square Cinema
1 Kendall Square
Cambridge, MA

Vogue magazine review

VOGUE MAGAZINE
By John Powers

You’ll seldom see a flashier star turn then Naomi Watts’s work in ELLIE PARKER, a bitingly raw comedy about the travails of making it in Hollywood. Written and directed by actor Scott Coffey, alumnus of such John Huges masterworks as SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL, this shot on video film has the amorphous shape of a struggling actress’s life. Watts is extraordinary throughout, but the opening sequence – which finds Ellie auditioning for the role of a wailing Southern belle, then getting into her car and driving through L.A. while changing clothes, talking on her cell phone, and rehearsing lines for and audition as a tough-talking New York hooker – is a tour de force.

Ebert and Roper At the Movies review

EBERT & ROEPER
TRANSCRIPT OF “ELLIE PARKER” REVIEW
TAPE DATE: 11-16-05
AIR DATE: 11-26-05

ROGER EBERT: Our next movie stars Naomi Watts in a day in the life of a would-be Hollywood actress named Ellie Parker. We have seen this sort of backstage material before, but rarely this raw, revealing and in a way actually courageous I think. Watts plays a woman who is pretty, smart and has talent, and is being ground down by a system that treats people as interchangeable commodities. Her own bad habits don’t help her any. Here she is auditioning for a movie that is obviously doomed, and obviously being produced by idiots.

CLIP

ROGER: In the car on the way to her next audition, she puts on different makeup and practices obscene dialogue to play a hooker and then she gets rear-ended in a reality based version of a Meet Cute.

CLIP

ROGER: That’s Scott Coffey, the film's director and writer, playing the careless driver. The movie covers an around-the-clock existence of auditions, drugs, parties, clubs, romance, despair, theory, psychoanalysis and exhaustion. Watts is at the center of every scene, in a performance that perfectly suits the hand-held, improvised tone of the film. “Ellie Parker” reminds you that every good performance is kind of a miracle, since it has to survive this kind of obstacle course. This isn’t a documentary, but it feels like one – it feels like a good one.

RICHARD ROEPER: Yeah thumbs up for me as well Roger. You know there was a movie earlier this year called “Dirty Love” with Jenny McCarthy and she threw herself out there in ways that defy description and it was awful. This has some certain elements that reflect that but it’s done in such a better way. I mean the Naomi Watts character, I mean, she gets drunk, she gets high, she has embarrassing sex, she throws up. A lot of the things that happened to the Jenny McCarthy character happen here but it’s just played in a more authentic level. And I really think her performance carries this film because it does look pretty; it looks like it was made for a buck and a half, you know?

ROGER: Yeah I think it was actually made over a period of years as they got money or time to do it. But what she does here is really create this character somebody who is brave and who is out there and who is trying…

RICHARD: Yeah.

ROGER: …and who has the talent actually to be good if she ever gets the chance but will she ever get a chance in this world that surrounds her?

RICHARD: Probably not. And there’s a nice cameo by Chevy Chase…

ROGER: Yes. He is great here.

RICHARD: …as her manger.

**************************************************************************************
THE CRITICS’ JOINT COMMENT FROM THE PROGRAM SUMMARY

RICHARD: Okay, recapping the movies on this week's show:
Two thumbs up for “RENT.” Two thumbs way up for Naomi Watts in “ELLIE PARKER.” Two thumbs down, way down I would say…

ROGER: Way down.

RICHARD: … for “JUST FRIENDS.” Two thumbs way down again…

ROGER: Way down.

RICHARD: … for “YOURS, MINE & OURS” which is bad on all levels. Two thumbs up for “THE ICE HARVEST.” And two thumbs up for “DUANE HOPWOOD” it’s opening in selected markets and look for it.

ROGER: Yes. And also in theaters this weekend is “IN THE MIX” starring the singer Usher. But unfortunately the studio decided not to show this movie for critics and therefore it gets the dreaded wagging finger of shame.

RICHARD: They keep doing this, I don’t know why. We’d love to show you the Usher. Lot of the kids they love the Usher. They love the music of the Usher but we can’t show you the Usher’s movie.

ROGER: No Usher.

********************************************************************************************

LA Weekly review

LA WEEKLY
ELLIE PARKER


This fun, scattershot Hollywood spoof by writer-director Scott Coffey evolved from a 20-minute Sundance short back in 2001, before its star and co-producer, Naomi Watts, had made her name in Mulholland Drive. Playing slyly off the intensity that has set her up as the go-to girl for falling-apart roles, Watts shows off an engagingly self-mocking side as a young actress with more guts than talent, striving to make the leap from soaps and commercials into serious film. Watching Ellie drag herself from one lousy audition to another (“I love the script,” she parrots with diminishing conviction), from primal therapy to primal acting class, from her best friend’s pseudo-avant-garde art gallery and home to her guitar-strumming deadbeat boyfriend, you want to load up the U-Haul and send her home to Mom for a hot meal. Though it relies perilously on movie-within-a-movie bits of business we’ve all seen many times before, Ellie Parker bounces along on Coffey’s deadpan capture of the no-exit, Hollywood Hills periphery of the movie industry. If you still want to make it in the business after seeing this, you’re a very sick puppy. (Ella Taylor)

Salon.com review

Beyond the Multiplex
What's Naomi Watts doing in a micro-indie like “Ellie Parker”
By Andrew O'Hehir
Nov. 10, 2005 | When is a Hollywood star not a Hollywood star? And what is a movie starring Naomi Watts doing over here at Beyond the Multiplex world headquarters, where our normal realm of expertise is slow-motion films in Serbo-Croatian and documentaries about the Paraguayan cement industry?
People, I can tell you this: Scott Coffey's "Ellie Parker" is an indie film if ever there was one, Naomi or no. Coffey was an aspiring actor, writer and director who befriended Watts when she was pretty much the character she plays in this film, a young Australian émigré bouncing across the City of Angels from one audition to the next, one drama-school accent to the next, one bad-news boyfriend to the next. In fact, Coffey's short film, also called "Ellie Parker," attracted some attention at Sundance four or five years ago -- and then his undiscovered star locked limbs with Laura Elena Harring in "Mulholland Drive" and was visited by a little girl from hell in "The Ring" and became, you know, Naomi Watts.
Watts could have just quit taking Coffey's calls after that (no, your first guess is wrong: they're not lovers), but this is an up-with-people story with an ending to match. Instead, she signed on as his producer, and one presumes he didn't test her friendship too severely, since "Ellie Parker" is one of the most proudly and genuinely low-budget features I've seen in a long time. It's shot vérité-style on real locations with an off-the-shelf digital camcorder, and Coffey turns out to be one of those filmmakers who can turn these restrictions into advantages. Watts gives a funny, brave, self-mocking performance, and even if the movie is partly about the fact that acting, by definition, involves not being yourself, her fans will be fascinated by this up-close-and-personal all-Naomi access. (Sorry, lads, the rumors that this movie involves frontal nudity are not correct -- but we do see Watts change from pants to a miniskirt while driving a car, which is even more impressive.)
ELLIE PARKER
Written and Directed by Scott Coffey
By Andrew O'Hehir
SALON . COM
"Ellie Parker": A star is born -- but not necessarily overnight 
When aspiring Hollywood thespian Ellie Parker (Naomi Watts) is sitting in her agent's office lamenting her languishing career -- the agent is an almost unrecognizable Chevy Chase -- we see a movie poster on the guy's wall. It's for "Living in Oblivion," the semilegendary 1995 Hollywood satire that made director Tom DiCillo a hero to an entire generation of film-industry misfits. "Ellie Parker" is a completely different movie, but like "Living in Oblivion" it was made by someone who has survived the ridiculous Hollywood wars with his essential faculties intact. Not only that, the subtle note of homage made me feel, even more than I did already, that Scott Coffey, the director, writer and costar of "Ellie Parker," is a stand-up guy.
At first, "Ellie Parker" seems artless and chaotic. As I wrote above, Coffey shot it with an ordinary, consumer-level video camera, and for most of the film there's no crew, just him and Naomi Watts (or him, Watts and a cameraman, if Coffey is acting in the scene). So the visual vocabulary mainly consists of the close-up, the extreme close-up and -- every once in a while -- the medium shot containing two or three people, which in this context looks like a vast, wide-screen vista. As Coffey is aware, the film looks like reality TV, so it takes you a while to figure out that it isn't improvised or unscripted or a quasi-documentary about Watts' life.
It isn't any of those things. Instead, it's a tightly structured comedy about a plucky, likable young actress trying to make it in the perverse wonderland of Hollywood, without receiving any clear signals that she's going to. Ellie's neither a dumb-ass nor exceptionally bright; she's talented, but has a mile-wide hambone streak; and like most of us she vacillates wildly from confidence to rampant insecurity, from determination to self-pity, from tough-minded decisions about her life to reckless and stupid ones.
What makes this movie work, both as satire and as pathos, is the obvious intimacy and trust between director and actor. Watts gives a big and fearless performance, showing us Ellie weeping copiously through a mouthful of glazed doughnut, barfing up a bunch of blue-green sherbet after discovering her doofus guitar-hero boyfriend in bed with one of her so-called friends; indulging in splashy bathtub activities with the same doofus boyfriend; and, later, lying in bed with another guy who announces, right after they have sex, "Well, I'm definitely gay."
Ellie also has to change her clothes, apply makeup and practice her Brooklyn accent ("Yeah, I sucked his cawk. I sucked it good! I sucked them all!") while driving from an audition for some trashy Southern gothic to another for an even trashier Noo Yawk scunge-fest. The director of the film is named Smash, looks and dresses slavishly like Jim Jarmusch, and has one of those transatlantic accents you can't quite place. Is he German? Estonian? From Ohio, and faking it? The director of the scunge-fest is "in Vancouver," and Ellie has to do her scene into a video camera, with a 50-year-old woman reading the part of the dude whose cawk she has presumably sucked good.
All of this, along with the acting class where the students have to "practice their animals" while the hard-ass instructor in a poofy sweat suit disappears into the bathroom to do some blow, is pretty funny. But to anyone who has spent even a little time amid the dingy lives and corrupted dreams of the Los Angeles waitron population, it's also disturbingly accurate. I wonder if the secret to successful satire is to pile up the details but never make any individual detail less than convincing. Coffey's script doesn't spare Ellie, either (or himself, as her maybe-schizo, maybe-gay second-string boyfriend): When Ellie and her Aussie pal Sam (Rebecca Rigg) engage in a bitchy acting contest in the car to see who can cry the most "honest" tears -- and then break it off at the sight of a cool secondhand store -- you see that the second-rateness and self-indulgence of the whole enterprise have gotten inside them like a virus.
Does it ruin "Ellie Parker" that in fact its star -- a relative unknown when she began working with Coffey in 2000 -- defied the odds and became the success story that Ellie Parker never will? I don't think so; that's just a functional paradox that allowed the film to be finished and distributed. "Ellie Parker" is the sharpest, most authentic portrait of Hollywood life made in the last several years. (As a movie about contemporary Los Angeles, it's approximately 617 percent better than the monumentally bogus "Shopgirl.") If Scott Coffey now gets to make a movie with a budget larger than what he can find in the dryers at the Silverlake Boulevard laundromat, he better not forget how he got there.

"Ellie Parker" opens Friday in New York, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Calif., and Seattle; Nov. 18 in San Jose, Calif.; Dec. 2 in Dallas, Houston and Washington; and Dec. 9 in Austin, Texas, Boston, Chicago and Miami, with more cities to follow.