Jamie Lee Curtis revisits "Halloween," "Psycho," and "True Lies" artifacts
On a Thursday afternoon in Los Angeles, California, actor Jamie Lee Curtis stood over two leather-bound books.
Costumes and props provided by the The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Academy Collection surrounded the actress and 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi.
Curtis saw her donated copy of the script for "Halloween," the 1978 horror cult classic directed by John Carpenter that made Curtis the "scream queen" of her generation.
Right beside it was the script for Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" once owned by her mother Janet Leigh, the actress who starred in the groundbreaking 1960 horror film.
"This is beautiful," Curtis said, admiring them both side-by-side.
"I haven't seen this since my mom died," she said, touching the "Psycho" script.
They revisited cinema history as they examined each object, signposts of Curtis' acting career that's still going strong more than 40 years later.
Curtis turned the worn pages of the "Psycho" script to page 52, the iconic scene that shocked audiences around the world.
In the scene, Leigh's character, Marion Crane, removes her robe and steps into a shower, oblivious to the shadowy figure who then enters the bathroom and brutally murders her.
Curtis told Alfonsi the film left a lasting impression on her mother.
"She never took a shower again. She only took baths," she told Alfonsi.
"Psycho" was infamous for its radical subversion of what audiences expected from Hollywood at the time: the star was killed less than halfway through the film.
"What was shocking about it was that they killed the movie star on page 52... not even halfway through the movie," Curtis explained.
"She was top billing because she was the movie star. And that was the whole conceit of [Hitchcock] hiring her."
Also on the table was a clapboard from "Halloween." The film's title was written on a piece of white tape.
Curtis was just 19 years old when she played the starring role. She waited until the last shot of the film to ask for the clapboard, and she kept it as a memento.
Alfonsi asked Curtis if she had a favorite scene from the 1978 film.
"I remember John Carpenter saying to me, 'I want you to be vulnerable'… And I wasn't smart enough at 19 to understand what that meant. And I kind of thought it meant weak," the actress said.
But watching the film in front of an audience on opening weekend cleared up that confusion.
In the film, Curtis' character, Laurie Strode, is babysitting across the street from a house where her friend P.J. is also babysitting.
Laurie is talking to P.J. on the phone when they're suddenly cut off. The audience can see that the killer, Michael Myers, is strangling P.J.
Laurie thinks it's a prank, but walks across the street to investigate after putting the kids to bed.
"And it's inter-cut, back and forth…[me] walking toward the house, and then the house," Curtis told Alfonsi.
"When I saw the movie in Hollywood on the opening weekend…a woman stood up in the middle of the theater during that moment and screamed out loud in the theatre, 'Don't go in there! There's a killer in the house!' Curtis said, imitating the woman's screams.
"I understood in that second that that's what John [Carpenter] was talking about… they cared about this girl, and she was about to walk into mayhem."
In 1994, Curtis starred opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in the action-comedy blockbuster "True Lies," directed by James Cameron.
On display in front of Alfonsi and Curtis were two mannequins wearing similar dresses: one black dress with frills, another without them.
In the film, Curtis' character, Helen Tasker, is duped into a phony spy mission: pose as an escort and plant a listening device on a client who, unbeknownst to her character, is her husband. Later, Tasker performs a striptease.
Cameron's original vision was that Curtis would be completely nude in the striptease scene. But in a meeting with the director, Curtis suggested a different approach.
"I kind of said to him, 'You know, Jim, you're gonna lose all the comedy because you're just going to be looking at my bits,'" the actress told Alfonsi.
She stepped into the director's bathroom, put on a black dress, and stuffed some black tulle she purchased at a fabric store in the neck, arms, and hem of the dress.
Curtis pitched a gradual wardrobe change for her character to Cameron that would take place in three steps.
She would first wear the dress with tulle added. After seeing herself in the mirror and realizing it wasn't going to work for her mission, she would rip the tulle off of her dress.
"'And then I unzip my dress and let it fall to the floor,'" she told the director.
"I was wearing a pair of black panties and a bra. And I said, 'And then I'll be wearing this.'"
Cameron was convinced. A costume designer made multiple dresses for the film based on Curtis' concept, which are now part of the Academy Collection.
And in the film, Tasker catches herself in the mirror before her encounter with the mysterious target and rips the tulle off the dress.
Curtis wore the dress without the tulle for most of the film, including action scenes where she had to run barefoot and dangle off the side of a helicopter.
But the transformation that earned Curtis her first Academy Award came from her incredible performance as Deirdre Beaubeirdre, the auditor from hell in "Everything Everywhere All at Once."
"Jamie Lee Curtis is completely unrecognizable as this character," Alfonsi told 60 Minutes Overtime. "I remember watching it the first time being like, 'Is that Jamie Lee Curtis?'"
For the role, Curtis relaxed all of her muscles, which exaggerated the size of her stomach, creating the silhouette of a sedentary bureaucrat.
She told 60 Minutes no prosthetics were used: what you see on the screen is all her.
"I'm unbridled and I'm ungirdled… and I'm unclenched," she told Alfonsi.
"Everything you see in that movie is me. There is no padding… that is just me releasing all of the things that we've spent our entire lives holding in. Every muscle in my body just relaxed."
"She said she loves those roles where she's, you know, unclenched," Alfonsi told Overtime.
"She talked about the freedom of being able to do that where maybe in the past in Hollywood, particularly with her mother, they were expected to be perfect all the time. Jamie Lee Curtis has really embraced imperfection."
"The loss of vanity means freedom," the Hollywood star told Alfonsi standing in front of her wardrobe for Deirdre Beaubeirdre.
"I want the freedom to be whoever it is [I'm playing]… I'm just trying to be honest and not fake."
The video above was produced by Will Croxton. It was edited by Sarah Shafer.
Thanks to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
