Fashion Rocks - Fall 2007

Fashion Rocks - Fall 2007

754
Intermediate Jenology
754

    Aug 27, 2007#1

    Ok, I've never even heard of this magazine, but hell, Jen's on the cover so I bought it. It's just talkin bout EC and what it was like to work with Marc after Gigli and JG.




    Time apparently waits for no celebrity, not even Jennifer Lopez, and the staff at Webster Hall, a downtown New York nightclub, is threatening to close down the Annie Leibovitz photo shoot-featuring Lopez and her husband, Lationo pop royal Marc Anthony-if the team isn't finished within half an hour. All around Lopez tensions are starting to run high: Everyone nonessential has been asked to leave the space where Leibovitz is still working, and assistants are scurrying around looking nervous.

    Maybe Lopez has a hunch that the management at the club isn't actually going to throw her out into East Elleventh Street no matter how late it gets, or maybe she thrives under pressure. Either way, as Anthony poses for some solo shots under the lights-"Close your mouth, baby," she calls out-and she stands alone at the bar, watching, she's a picture of contentment. Out of nowhere, and to no one in particular, she sings a snippet of a song in Spanish, swaying back and forth in time. It's a bit of nervous energy on display, the good kind you feel when things are going well and you hope it keeps going that way. For the shoot, the two are in character and in costume, sestaging the scenes loosely based on a project Lopez has long lovingly championed, El Cantante, a biopic of seventies-era salsa pioneer Hector Lavoe.

    Not only does Lopez star in the film, playing Lavoe's wife, but she's produced it, her first, and she seems to be relishing the photographic tribute, which reflects the aesthetic of the film: simultaneously lurid and glamorous. "Looking good, babe," she tells her husband. "Not as good as you," he shoots back.
    It's decided that Anthony's hair is too neat for teh shot, and someone playfully asks Lopez if she'll go muss it up. Lopez, whose hair own hair is tied back tightly in a bun, oblingly buries her hand in his hair, gives it an expert shake, and steps back to appriase her work. "See?" cracks Anthony. "She does everything."

    Even compared with her fellow megacelebrities, Lopez has led a career in overdrive, offering up more than the minimum required does of tabliod drama and charging forward in every venue, it sometimes seemed-music, movies, prefume, food, and fashion, branching into high and low couture long before Madonna inked her deal with H&M. Increasinly, she appears to be transitioning into yet another role-the boss. Working with Simon Fields, her partner at Nuyorican Productions, she's started producing both films and television programs like Dancelife, an MTV reality-TV based on the lives of dancers. "Lopez's talent as a producer is that she doesn't get rattled," says Fields. "She has a vision, she sticks to that vision, and even though she is realistic about some of the production changes that need to be effected, somehow she preserves the original vision."

    In addition to El Cantane, Lopez has produced a movie called Bordertown(which will be out this fall) about a journalist seeking to protect a community of women whose members are being murdered at the border. Both films represent a leap from the romantic comedies she's starred in(with mixed success) toward a more serious, gritty performance- a sound career move, in any case, for an actress in her late 30s who's long past ingenue, no matter how doe-eyed her look, and just cresting out of the age bracket for the part of the girlfriend.

    But from the first shot of El Cantante, it's evident that Lopez's motivation for making the film wasn't some calculated bid for celebrity; its too raw for that, every shot is miraculously free of the fingerprints of handlers, managers, and public-relations strategists. The movie opens on Lopez looking as she never has before:beautiful, yes, but also hard, and aged. Lopez plays Nidla Roman Perez (who goes by the nickname Puchi, pronounced like the designer), the charismatic but clutching, volatile wife of Lavoe, tumultuous, drug fueled 20 years of stardom.

    "We were always asking ourselves, 'Why are we making this movie?' " says Lopez. She and Anthony we watching some footage of Lavoe, she says when it hit her. "It's the music." Lavoe ws one of the key Latino performers who created salsa in New York City, improvising a kind of jazz/merengue/mambo fusion that became the sound track of Nuyorican life. "People need to know about that time in music history," says Lopez. "He was the leading singer of that moment and a tragic figure-that was our Motown."

    The film aslo provides Lopez with a role unlike any others she's had. If the last time you saw her act was on a small screen in some airplane as she played Cinderella to Ralph Finnes's handsome prince in Maid In Manhattan, or took a series of pratfalls at the hands of Jane Fonda in Monster-In-Law, Lopez's performance in El Cantante, angry, untethered, and utterly convincing-will come as something of a shock.
    Knowing she'd had that in her, surely Lopez must have been longing for the opportunity for sometime now. "Yea," she says, sitting in front of a vanity mirror after the shoot, Anthony close by. But she catches herself quickly and switches cource. She takes a breath. "I've been very lucky...I've had alot of great moments. But It's all about stretching yourself-it's always about wanting that better part, a part that's going to challenge you. I remember saying to Marc, 'Are you a little scard of this?' And he was like, 'Yea but we think thats good.' "

    It wasn't that they were unsure of their acting abilitly, she says. "We were emotionally nervous." Despair, loathing, betrayal, greif-never easy emotions to evoke-could be hard on a couple commited to evincing them with each other. In one scene, Lopez as Puchi, punched Anthony so hard that she cut her hand on the rings on his hand. "There was blood everywhere," says the film director, Leon Ichaso. "We had to cut right there."

    Under the best of circumstances, working together as a couple, they knew would have its challenges. "Oh I got calls," says Anthony. "Just friends, you know, giving me the heads up about working with your partner. 'Hey congradulations, I hear you guys are woking together...You know just keep in mind...' I thouhg jeeze, that's like the fourth call I got in a month! What are they preparing me for? I thought it was going to be World War 111, when, in fact it was Club Med."

    Not that there wasn't some healthy tension, says Ichaso-just enough to keep the energy up between Lavoe and Puchi. "Jennifer used to correct him on his lines," he says. "But it was to the bennifit of the relationship between the characters. the line would be like, 'Oh, man, the sky is blue,' and she would say [his voice takes on an exasperated tone], " ' No! The sky is gray!' And we would all laugh. It was never aggressive. It's just who she is: pushy, like Puchi in that sense. But Jennifer is also superprepared, superprofessional-it was incredable how prepared she was. She knew everybody's dialouge. She'd come to me and say, 'That woman's outfit, is that really seventies?' That eye for detail. It was all important to her, because she was the producer."

    And, of cource he goes on to say, a lot was on the line, paricularly because Lopez has a history of costarring with her real life significant other to disastrous results (see Gigli and Jersey Girl, both of which featured Lopez and her former fiance, Ben Affleck). "We all knew the guns were poining," says Ichaso. "You know, her and another partner, what are they going to do now? Let's watch them fall on their ass...Here we go again."

    If Anthony was known to show up late occasionally, Lopez was always on time. He sometims worked of cue cards; Lopez spent hours-on their vactions, at home, between recording sessions-listening to interviews of Puchi, who died in 2001, trying to iternalize her character and learn as much as she could about Lavoe from her, as the script was taking shape. If Anthony has been known to spend time on photo shoots smoking and drinking a beer out of a can, Lopez spends hers checking her BlackBerry or inspecting images as they come along on the Mac. And yet to see them interact as a couple, one doesn't have the sence that she's in control, calling the shots but rather that she admires him as an intuitive artist, like Lavoe, a free spirit with God-givin talent-in a word, cool. Lopez talks about preperation; Anthony talks alot about inspiration.

    "I told this to Marc, this is sort of my vision: I see Lavoe as one of those artists who's like a sacraficial lamb," she says before cutting herself off and looking at Anthony. "What? Are you going to laugh at me?" she asks shyly. He smiles and waves her on. "Where the music was born from," she continues, "Lavoe's lyrics, everything he wrote about was from his life, every song written for him, was about people who lived right there with him, and understood, and he was the one who delivered the material-it's like he was destined."

    If the relationship works, it may be in part because there's no tension over whose star is rising and whose is falling (as might have been the case with, say Affleck). Not unlike Lavoe, Anthony is a lifelong star of the Latin music scene: unshakable, confident, accustumed to fame (and its costs). He can afford to take some risks and apparently has encouraged Lopez to do the same. Lopez's first all-Spanish album, Como Ama Una Mujer, was release this spring with less than spectacular sales. Nonetheless, she considers it some of her best work and says it's influenced ever her more mainstreem music, like pop album she has coming out this fall, as yet untitled. "Como Ama Una Mujer, is a really good dance album, and I was able to take the experiance of what I got out of the Spanish album and put that into the music I was making on my next album. I think you will hear that."

    Anthony, she says has helped her as an artist and vise versa. "We have high standards for each other; I know what he's capable of, and he knows what Im capable of, even more than we know oursleves," she says. "So when you see the light and the shine and all that someone's capable of, you want that person to achieve that. And I think he wants the same thing for me."

    At that, Anthony, his face still made-up in a black eye for the shoot, stands up, leans over to Lopez, takes her face in his hands and gives her a kiss. "So cute," he says.

    It's the kind of private moment that invariably plays a bit cloying with a third party present; in this case, at least, it helps that Lopez's sincerity about her work-to her, it's always her art, not her work- is, in fact endearing. The singing, acting, the designing, the disire to create something-has been with her since childhood, she says. It's not that insperation comes from suffering, as she belives it did for Lavoe. It's just that, as an artist, "you do feel things on a deeper level," says Lopez. "Like I remember a teacher saying to me when I was 11 years old-I was crying at gradutaion so much that it was unnatural-and she was like, 'You feel things so deeply, on a differnt level.' I didn't understand-I was just a little girl crying over the fact that friends were going away and that I wasn't going to see these people anymore. It destroyed me inside, I felt it so much. and I had to let it out, and I express myself that way-that's how I was born."

    As Ichaso puts it, "It's no secret she's had her ups and downs with love." It's that kind of energy that likey fuels the emotionally grinding performance Lopez gives as Puchi. For the very first day of shooting she and Anthony needed to rise to a profound level of sorrow to play parents grieving for their young son, who accedently shot and killed himself with Lavoe's gun. Anthony met Lopez at her trailer, and by the time up on the set, the first time they'd be meeting most of the cast and extras, the two actors were already in character sobbing with grief. "And they were just looking at us like-" Lopez makes a wide-eyed face. "We knew some people were probably thinking, Wow, they're really going for it. But what it said to the rest of the cast was, you better go for it too. We're here to tell the story the best way we can, and it sent a message from the very beginning."

    And there it its, in a single moment-Lopez the artist, all the emotion;and Lopez the boss, all demanding expectation. For each of those roles, she's a natural.

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    46K3,605

      Aug 27, 2007#2

      Great, thanks!

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        Aug 28, 2007#3

        Thanx;)

        754
        Intermediate Jenology
        754

          Aug 28, 2007#4

          Ok, well, I've looked and can't find a link so I guess I'll type it up again! lol. I wish I could get the pics out of it. There's a GORGEOUSSS one of Jen in a red dress, with her Puchi hair, and Marc is resting his head on her. Its so cute, Jen is gorgeous! then there's another of her sitting on a stool, and her hair is slicked back in a pony tail, and she's in a white suit. Real classy! But, right now, I have to go clean, so I will try and type up the interview for you all tomorow.

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            Sep 02, 2007#5

            Phew, thanks!! I'll move it up to the first post.

            754
            Intermediate Jenology
            754

              Sep 02, 2007#6

              JenRox wrote:Phew, thanks!! I'll move it up to the first post.
              Pheww is rite!! I went threw 2 CD's typing that! But mostly cuz I had to get up and sing and dance to some of the songs....

                Sep 02, 2007#7

                BTW, I just bolded my favorite parts of the article. Its nothing that was in the mag.

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                  Sep 02, 2007#8

                  moneytrain212 wrote:
                  JenRox wrote:Phew, thanks!! I'll move it up to the first post.
                  Pheww is rite!! I went threw 2 CD's typing that! But mostly cuz I had to get up and sing and dance to some of the songs....
                  But, of course!! hehe

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                    Sep 03, 2007#9

                    Thanks! That was an interesting read.
                    Twitter: @timmylovesjlo

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                      Sep 03, 2007#10

                      thanx!

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                        Sep 03, 2007#11

                        cool i liked it thanks!

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                          Sep 08, 2007#12

                          thanxs

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                            Sep 15, 2007#13

                            Thanks can some one scan this mag???

                            754
                            Intermediate Jenology
                            754

                              Oct 05, 2007#14

                              No prolem guys and gals!

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                                Dec 04, 2013#15




                                credit: lovelylopez.net

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                                  Dec 06, 2013#16

                                  that middle pic w/Marc :love2

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                                    Dec 07, 2013#17

                                    Great. I have not seen the last two ever before :D

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                                      May 30, 2016#18

                                      thank u for posting