Take an Active Interest in These Secrets About American Beauty

Do you ever feel like a plastic bag, drifting through the wind, wanting to start again?

In that case, don't worry, 'cause baby you're a firework. But also, the Internet is 100-percent certain that Katy Perry was making a direct reference to the most iconic scene in American Beauty that doesn't involve Mena Suvari and rose petals.

It's been 25 years since Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley) showed Jane Burnham (Thora Birch) the melancholy beauty of a lone plastic bag caught on the breeze, and the darkly comedic tragedy that is American Beauty has been haunting audiences ever since.

Yet maybe it was also supposed to inspire, since Kevin Spacey's depressed suburban dad Lester Burnham does find a new lease on life before he dies.

Which, mind you, is not a spoiler: Lester reveals at the beginning of the film that he's going to be dead in less than a year. (Though he also says that, in a way, he's already dead—but as a metaphor for his malaise, not a Sixth Sense-ian twist.) How he ends up dead is the mystery.

But there are many theories at play—about love, loneliness, connection, sexuality, ambition, the American dream, etc.—in the film, which went on to win five Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director for Sam Mendes, Best Original Screenplay for Alan Ball, Best Actor for Spacey and Best Cinematography for Conrad L. Hall.

Incidentally, it also was yet another year for the Academy to nominate Annette Bening for Best Actress and then not give it to her.

And despite the accolades, if at the time the film seemed kind of outside the box as far as Best Picture winners went, that's because it was.

"American Beauty is in many ways an undeniably strange film," Mendes reflected in 2019 on WNYC's The Open Ears Project. "It's a combination of so many different things coming from so many different directions."

We know you're not obsessed, just curious, so read on for secrets about American Beauty that are neither ordinary nor boring:

The 1992 Amy Fisher scandal planted the seed for American Beauty in Alan Ball's head.

The writer was working at Adweek in New York when then-17-year-old Fisher had a sexual relationship with 35-year-old Joey Buttafuoco and shot his wife Mary Jo Buttafuoco at the couple's Long Island home. Buttafuoco pleaded guilty to statutory rape and spent four months in prison, though not before tabloids had dubbed Fisher the "Long Island Lolita." (Fisher, charged with attempted murder, pleaded guilty to first-degree aggravated assault and spent seven years in prison.)

"Some guy was selling a comic book about Amy and Joey," Ball recalled in a 2012 interview for the Archive of American Television, "and on one side was this virginal-looking Amy and a big leering, lecherous, predatory Joey. You flip it over and then he's all buttoned-up and looks like a good husband, and she's all tarted up...And I remember thinking, the truth is somewhere in between those—and we will never know what it is."

As for whether any aspects of the film were autobiographical or otherwise drawn from his own life, Ball noted that when he wrote the script he was the same age as his main character, 42-year-old Lester Burnham.

"And I drew from the sense of having lost my passion and needing to get that passion back," he recalled. "I certainly drew from my experience at Adweek in terms of depicting his work environment. Aside from that, no." (Though he did have an "unexpected emotional response" to a plastic bag he saw being tossed about by the wind outside the World Trade Center one day in the early '90s.)

In writing his Oscar-winning screenplay, which started as a play, Ball was also "rebelling against the constraints that I felt writing for network TV sitcoms."

And he'd continue to do so, creating the very NSFW Six Feet Under and True Blood for HBO.

Ball's script sold pretty quickly and when it got to Kevin Spacey, the actor could see why.

"There was no question in my mind that it was a special script, unique," Spacey told the Tampa Bay Times in 1999. "It was one of the first scripts I did that didn't go through a major rewrite. The studio believed in the material and didn't want to change a word, didn't attempt to water it down."

Spacey also connected with the role of Lester, a burned-out, middle-aged husband and father who, at some point along the way, lost the thread.

"I read him, and I understood him," Spacey said. "The concept of being at a place in your life where you no longer wish to remain...You wish for nothing so much as to change and move in a new direction."

What breaks Lester out of his life slump, however, is a creepy AF crush on his high school age daughter's friend Angela, played by then-18-year-old Mena Suvari.

Though the plot point may be a catalyst for a greater transformation on Lester's part, it was cringe then and it's even harder to watch now, not least due to unrelated accusations of sexual misconduct against Spacey that arose in 2017 (which he has denied and has been cleared of in criminal and civil court). 

Suvari wrote in her revealing 2021 memoir The Great Peace that, between set-ups, "Kevin took me into a small room with a bed and we laid next to each other, me facing toward him while he held me lightly." Back then, she wrote, "I was so used to being open and eager for affection that it felt good just to be touched."

The actress told Tamron Hall in 2021 that she wasn't calling out Spacey, per se, but rather reflecting on how that older man-younger woman dynamic didn't faze her at the time.

"In retrospect, it was shocking to me that that was such a comfortable scenario for me," she explained. "This book was never about a blame game or pointing fingers...It was really me just trying to express my point of view along the way."

That moment with Spacey, who's 20 years her senior, "wasn't something that I questioned," she recalled. "It was understood, somebody wanted something from me or maybe needed something from me in an emotional sense, I don't know. I still don't know."

For Thora Birch, who played Lester's daughter Jane, learning of the allegations against Spacey was admittedly "traumatic" for her.

"It hurts like hell," she said in 2019 on The Hollywood Reporter's It Happened in Hollywood podcast. "But, it is what it is, and I have to separate that because, at the end of the day, that doesn't really have anything to do with the movie or the script or the characters we were playing—or the experience that we had. It's just a personal matter that's incredibly unfortunate and was handled incredibly poorly."

While the allegations could be seen as "a stain" on the movie," Birch added, "it was an entire community that made this film and we all did it because we loved" it.

Birch, who as a child actress had starred in the likes of Hocus Pocus and Now and Then credited American Beauty with serving as the bridge to the next chapter of her career.

"It gave me a lot of opportunities to do a lot of different things, which I was kind of surprised about," she told Review Graveyard in 2001. "I thought I'd only get offers for very sullen, depressed teens, but actually the opposite happened. A lot of people put emotions in Jane that maybe weren't even there, and they took her to all the extremes. They saw me as being someone very sweet and innocent and young to someone who's very mature and old. So it was a great range of projects that I got to look at. American Beauty became the film that took me from kids' roles to adult roles."

Sam Mendes directed the Tony-winning 1998 revival of Cabaret and had more than a decade of West End theater experience, but he had to convince DreamWorks to hire him for American Beauty. 

In 2000, he became the sixth person ever to win the Best Directing Oscar for his first film, joining Kevin Costner (Dances With Wolves), James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment), Robert Redford (Ordinary People), Jerome Robbins (who codirected West Side Story) and Delbert Mann (Marty).

It was 20 years, however, before Mendes was nominated again, for the World War I drama 1917.

"I think American Beauty was a movie of its time, but I didn’t apply a style to it," he told The Believer in 2009. "The style emerged naturally in both cases. I think I'm not the sort of director that applies my style to a piece; I tend to adjust my style to what the material needs to make it sing."

Thomas Newman's Oscar-nominated score was so him—bright and pleasing to the ear and yet somehow fraught with tension—but it was also inspired by German composer Carl Orff’s Gassenhauer from the 1920s. (Newman, meanwhile, has 15 Oscar nominations for his scores (for films such as The Shawshank Redemption, Finding Nemo and Skyfall in addition to American Beauty) and no wins, a record he shares with the late Alex North.)

"I remember driving around L.A. for the first time in my car, listening to this music over and over," Mendes recalled in 2019 on WNYC's The Open Ears Project, "trying to get myself in the headspace to make a movie about American suburbia—and I'd never spent any time in American suburbia myself. It was completely alien."

The native of Reading, England, added with a laugh, "And here was this piece of European classical music that somehow spoke to a different world and a different environment, and I found it genuinely inspiring."

Music "defies language in so many ways," Mendes continued. "It's one of its joys, that it takes words and direct meaning, narrative out of the equation. It's also the fastest way to generate emotion. Sometimes you don't deserve the emotion it generates. Sometimes it's the quickest way to dissipate emotion."

And listening to Gassenhauer, he added, "I feel strangely nostalgic for a time before I made any films. It was a new discovery."

Mendes made Spacey mixtapes to help him get into character.

The director sent him two tapes, Spacey recalled on the Lex Fridman Podcast in June, "one that he liked to call 'pre-Lester,' before he begins to move in a new direction, and then 'post-Lester,' and they were just different songs."

Mendes also encouraged Spacey to revisit Jack Lemmon's performance in 1960's The Apartment, playing a sad-sack underling at an insurance company who grows a spine after falling in love with the office elevator operator played by Shirley MacLaine.

"I always thought this was brilliant of Sam to use Lemmon, knowing what Lemmon meant to me," said Spacey, who starred with the late actor in 1992's Glengarry Glen Ross. 

As Mendes explained it to him, Spacey said, "What Lemmon does in that fim is incredible, because there is never a moment in the movie where we see him change. He just evolves, and he becomes the man he becomes because of the experiences that he has through the course of the film."

He marveled, "It was just a great direction."

And to further accentuate Lester's evolution, there were toupees.

Spacey had three different hairpieces, he recalled, plus three different wardrobe sizes and altering shades of makeup that created a "gradual shift" aligning with Lester's increasingly rosy outlook.

At the beginning, he had this "drab, dull, slightly uninspired hair piece," the actor said, "and my makeup was kind of gray and boring."

"Then, at a certain point," he continued, "the wig changed and it had little highlights in it, a little more color...The suits got a little tighter."

Finally, the third wig was "golden highlights and sunshine and rosy cheeks," and the suits really fit. "These are what we call 'theatrical tricks,'" he added. "An audience doesn't even know it's happening."

Spacey credited trainer Mike Torchia for getting him in the best shape of his life for what was Lester's final chapter, but also some of the first scenes they filmed.

And Torchia, who also prepped Spacey for 2000's Ordinary Decent Criminal, had his work cut out for him.

"When I got [to his home in Dublin], in the cabinets he had all this pasta and Paul Newman Sockarooni sauce," Torchia told Today.com in 2010. “He was used to having a big bowl of pasta and a half a jar of Sockarooni sauce with cheese on it every night. I threw everything out one day. When Kevin came home, he said, 'Where’s my pasta?' He flipped. 'What am I gonna do?'"

Annette Bening earned her second of now five Oscar nominations for her pitch-perfect performance as Carolyn Burnham, Lester's ambitious Type A wife who may have her shrewish tendencies but, hey, she's dealing with life's disappointments too.

And while Ball's script was undeniable, Bening improvised collapsing with grief into Lester's shirts hanging in the closet after coming home to find him dead. 

"Very rarely do they have time to say, 'OK, you know, improvise, do what you want,' but I do remember that moment and I remember thinking I needed that," Bening told Entertainment Tonight in March. "That I needed that moment for her to, you know, be missing her husband. That was important even though there's all that brutalness about her. That she also really, at heart, she loved him."

Meanwhile, she "just loved" playing Carolyn, Bening added. "She was a little psychotic."

Bening shared an in-your-face but humorous sex scene with Peter Gallagher, who played local real estate broker royalty Buddy King.

And, the actress told Deadline in February, "I was laughing so hard I thought I was going to die. And he was also laughing. You can't really see our faces, so it didn't really matter because it’s sort of from behind. And the fact that made it even funnier was they put up a big sheet, for the light, and the crew were also hiding behind it. Peter is also a very funny person in life. He’s really handsome and really funny, which is such a great combo. I just saw him the other night in New York and we were laughing about that."

Bening guessed that the line that's most quoted back to her, other than the many Sorkinisms from The American President, is real estate agent Carolyn's determined "I will sell this house today."

Wes Bentley's big break was playing Ricky Fitts, the soulful, weed-dealing videographer next door whose age-defying empathy has made him a little misunderstood among the average high school set.

But when he showed up to read for the role, it was hardly in the bag.

Filmmaker Lee Daniels was his manager then, Bentley said on Jimmy Kimmel Live in 2023, and he was the one who encouraged him to try out for American Beauty. But when the 20-year-old went to casting director Debra Zane's office, "they clearly were not expecting me," the actor recalled. "I wasn't on the schedule, they didn't know who I was...It was awkard."

But "they were nice about it," the Yellowstone star noted, "and I got the job a few auditions later."

While obviously the film's title is multilayered—there's all-American teen Angela's literal beauty, the aesthetically pleasing kind of surface beauty in the world, the shaggier stuff (like a plastic bag blowing around) that's bursting with meaning, the glossy shine of the promise of the American dream—an American Beauty is a type of rose.

The flower (a recurring motif in the film) is typically deep pink to crimson with prickly shoots and dark green foliage. It was first bred by Frenchman Henri Lédéchaux in 1875 and brought to America by George Valentine Nash, Head Gardener and Curator of the Plantations at the New York Botanical Garden.

That's Christina Hendricks' hand securing the rose against model Chloe Hunter's stomach on the American Beauty poster.

"I used to be a model, and one of the gigs I got was to go and shoot a movie poster," the Mad Men alum explained on The Rich Eisen Show in 2021. "I had no idea what the film was. There were two models, myself and one other. And we did different versions of her hand and her stomach, and my stomach and her hand, and my hand and both. My hand made it in and her stomach made it in."

She continued, "I did a few gigs where I did some hand modeling. I was a ballet dancer, so I guess I know how to move my hands in an elegant fashion. It was just a plain, ol’ gig. I probably got paid a hundred bucks or something. I was just thrilled to have a job. I didn’t know what American Beauty was going to be. And then I finally saw it and was like, 'Hey, that’s my hand!'"

Katy Perry's "Firework" rang loud and true to American Beauty fans, one of whom set the unforgettable plastic bag scene to the singer warbling "like a plastic bag" over and over.

Because, sometimes, there's just so much beauty in the world it's hard to breathe. Or chat up a girl.

Sometime after the movie came out, Bentley was at a friend's party in Melbourne, Australia, "and I was really feeling myself" during a conversation with a cute girl, he shared on Jimmy Kimmel Live. "I thought I was impressing her...It felt right. And then she looked behind me a little."

Not realizing that she was increasingly distracted by something over his shoulder, Bentley didn't know a plastic bag was blowing ever closer until it wrapped itself around his face.

The actor cracked, "It didn't work out."

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