Born in the summer of love, Cally’s a cool 17 when Melissa Painter’s Wildflowers finds her in 1985. During the Reagan years she’s traded a classic hippie childhood on a Bolinas commune for adolescence on a Marin houseboat with her dreamer father, Wade. The location of Cally’s counterculture mom, however, is a mystery. She’s vanished into the underground for reasons Wade won’t discuss.

Cally is a tough kid, but when she spots the ethereal Sabine, a mystery woman in her thirties, dancing at a Fillmore rock show her wary heart cracks instantly. Sabine, however, is obviously evading someone or something, so, instead of introducing herself, Cally decides to spy on her, sensing Sabine’s past may provide clues to her missing mother.

"The ’60s had a radical impact on family structures and the choices people made about how to raise their children," says Painter, who grew up in Mill Valley. "Every teenager makes an attempt to pick their own parents, and for girls that’s often a defining experience."

Clea Duval, who starred in How to Make the Cruelest Month, plays Cally, and Daryl Hannah is Sabine; also in the cast are Peter Coyote and John Doe.

Painter got her MFA from NYU’s film program in 1995 and premiered her thesis short, Jump, at the New York Film Festival later that year. By then she’d been the associate producer for two classmates’ first features, Clean, Shaven and The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love. She found Duval, then entirely unknown, through casting director Sheila Jaffee in ’96 and brought her along to Sundance when the film was workshopped at the Filmmakers’ Lab that June. Painter says she’d always imagined Hannah as Sabine, and when she realized that two of her Sundance lab mentors, Sally Field and Wesley Strick, had worked with the actress she enlisted them to help get her the script. She also got Christine Vachon to sign on as executive producer. With Vachon in back-to-back production on Happiness and Velvet Goldmine last year, Painter moved ahead with Tom Garvin, a key indie attorney and facilitator based in L.A., to raise financing through foreign presales.

Wildflowers’ five-week shoot rolled August 3 in North Beach; the film’s many locations include Bolinas, Muir Beach, fabled bookstore City Lights and key sequences on a houseboat and old commune. The film’s cinematographer is Paul Ryan, whose credits include Box of Moonlight and second unit on A River Runs Through It. Rights are available through Garvin.

Cast: Clea Duval, Daryl Hannah, James Gandolfini, John Doe, Richard Hillman, Sheila Tousey, Peter Coyote, Robert Hass. Crew: Producers, Zachary Matz, Tim Bird, Tom Garvin; Executive Producers, Christine Vachon, Daryl Hannah; Screenwriter/ Director, Melissa Painter; Cinematographer, Paul Ryan; Production Designer, Andrea Soeiro; Costumes, Chris Aysta; Editor, Brent White. Contact: Tom Garvin, Garvin, Davis & Benjamin, 9200 Sunset Blvd., PH 25, Los Angeles, CA 90069.Tel: (310) 278-7300, Fax: (310) 278-7306.t

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