In 1979, Sally Field was coming off her first Oscar win for playing a factory-worker-turned-union-organizer in Norma Rae. Looking for some quality bonding time with her two small sons, she started taking them to L.A. Lakers games, and it soon became a family tradition.
“I was a single mother and needed a way to communicate with my boys. We watched young Magic [Johnson] play the game, and Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar]. We were there when Kobe Bryant first came on board and walked on. By then, my youngest son was going as well. This was a huge part of my parenting existence.”
So when Field was approached to join the cast of the new HBO series Winning Time, which chronicles the meteoric rise of the Lakers during the 1980s, she was ready to sign on without even reading a script. “I saw the pilot that [executive producer] Adam McKay did and it was really, really good.” Field plays Jessie Buss, the eccentric mother of Dr. Jerry Buss (played by John C. Reilly), who purchased the Lakers in 1979 for $67.5 million dollars and would revamp the team into a global phenomenon.
But beyond being an avid Lakers fan, Field was attracted to the story Winning Time is telling. “It’s about culture in LA in the late ’70s, both the Black culture, the business culture, and the pressure of these young talents that are taken out of their families and thrust into a big arena. It also takes a look at the whole machinery behind what this is.”
BAZAAR.com caught up with Field via Zoom to learn how she researched playing Jessie Buss, what it was like to be a working actress in 1979, and why she believes streaming networks are a boon to independent film and shows like Winning Time.
There isn’t too much information online about Jessie Buss. What kind of preparation went into playing her? What was she like?
She came to Hollywood and took her son with her because she wanted to be a movie star and that didn’t work out, so she became an accountant. She was a single mother, and they had a very tight bond. Hollywood was this magical world of reaching out for something bigger than yourself, and I think that was instilled in him.
I thought there should be a reflection somewhere in Jerry as to who his mother was, and you see it. She’s a bigger-than-life personality, slightly narcissistic, and he’s a bigger-than-life personality. Very narcissistic, not pathologically so, but charismatically strange. That had to have come from somewhere. So we figured it had to have been from Jessie.
The series begins in 1979 when Jerry Buss buys the Lakers. What was it like being a woman and a working actor in Hollywood at that time?
By the time I got to 1979, it was a lot easier than when I started in 1964. I started in situation comedy television which at the time, was impossible to get out of, especially if you’re a woman. You were forever branded as “lesser than” so I had to work really hard and study, to get out of it and get an opportunity to even audition. By the time I got to ’79, I had begun to make that transition, as hard as it was. Norma Rae was my first lead role in a film, and it was a real turning point in my life.
Winning Time doesn’t shy away from talking about the sexism in the workplace as experienced by Claire Rothman and Jeanie Buss or the racism faced by the Black members of the Lakers. How do you think Hollywood has changed since you entered the industry?
Well, we still have work to do. We need to bring more women to the table on a global level so that we can have a more balanced voice all across the board, whichever arena you’re talking about.
There’s definitely been a change since I started in the industry—there was never a single woman in the crew or on the set. You would think it would be the script supervisor, but many times the script supervisor was a man. Great guys, I remember them well. Many times you would have a man in makeup department.
Now when you go on a set, it’s not quite even, but there’s a whole lot of women working in all levels of the crew and behind the camera, and people of color coming in as directors and cinematographers, and that didn’t exist before. But that really is more of a recent change as you know, when people got mad at the award ceremonies asking, “Where are the people of color?” I think it also went hand in hand with the #MeToo movement because people were looking at all of this misbehavior all over the place.
As you mentioned earlier, you started in television, transitioned to film, and have kept a foothold in each during your career. What are your thoughts on the kinds of films and TV series being produced with the rise of streaming platforms like HBO Max, Netflix, or Amazon?
I think it’s very interesting, what is happening to the world of storytelling through streaming. The pandemic caused some big changes because people couldn’t go to the theater. HBO has been, I think, one of the frontrunners in making quality product: stories that could have been a film at one point, but now you’re breaking it down so you can tell a more in-depth story over ten episodes, and then over several years. It’s a different kind of storytelling than you were able to do when television used to be this sort of episodic world.
It seems to me that the films being made are the big-budgeted comic book films, and the smaller films are the ones that are nominated this year. If you look at CODA, Power of The Dog or Tick, Tick… Boom!, they had tiny budgets where basically everybody’s working for free, and that’s going to have to change because people can’t continue to work for free—they have to do comic book movies to make a living. But we can’t totally lose the ability to tell a little human story.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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Sally Field on Hollywood Sexism and the L.A. Lakers
Source: Filipino Journal Articles
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