“COME BACK TO THE FIVE & DIME, JIMMY DEAN, JIMMY DEAN” RESTORED WITH HFPA FUNDING

Cher always considered it her best work in film, still a trove full of her fondest memories as an actress. On March 3rd, 2011, 7:30 pm, at the Billy Wilder Theater in the Hammer Museum, UCLA Film & Television Archive will present the restored version of Robert Altman’s 1982 classic “Come to the Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean”, his big screen adaptation of Ed Graczyk’s play. The film, beautifully polished and re-mastered thanks to the generous funding of Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation and The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, is part of the 2011 UCLA Festival of Preservation. Kathryn Altman will attend the premiere along with Karen Black, who acted in the all-girls cast along with Cher, Sandy Dennis and Kathy Bates, among others. The restoration of Altman’s ode to middle-aged women is just the first step in a longer and larger project to preserve Mr. Altman’s entire body of work and his artistic legacy. “Come Back to the Five & Dime” tells the reunion of a group of friends at the same five-and-dime store they use to hang out in a small Texas town 20 years back, at a time when the young, sexy and already legendary actor – Dean – was shooting “The Giant”, and they founded “The James Dean Fan Club”. The women are now melancholic and jaded about life, passions, aspirations, and Altman skillfully captures their insecurities, their rants for how things turned out, their anger for all the lost opportunities. Cher, who came back as well after many years to the big screen with the musical “Burlesque”, played the same character on stage, before being cast by Altman in the movie adaptation of “Jimmy Dean”. “I loved doing the play and I loved doing the film,” Cher said at the time of release of the movie in her Hollywood Foreign Press conference, in 1982. “I realized that singing on stage is not that different than acting on stage, and very different from television because there is not a lot of depth in television and you don’t have to go very far into yourself. To do the play and to do the film was a lot more gratifying for me because I wanted to see if I could go any further than I had always gone.” More recently she said, in talking about “Come Back to the Five & Dime”: “Altman guided us through the plot and the vagaries of the various characters like a magician wearing a hat full of tricks. His quiet sensibility inspired me, making me wanting to work more in the movies, thus becoming a better actress – a more patient one for sure.”