Fashion
Luella Bartley
Hui-Hui
Peter Jensen
Katie Gallagher

Entertainment
Alan Ball
Summer Bishil
Dr. Dog
Nima Nourizadeh
Chuck Palahniuk
Anthology Recodrings
Marina Zenovich
Zimmerman/Berg

Artists
Desireé Holman
Corndawg
Matt Furie
Molly Landreth
Matthew Lock
Nikolay Saveliev
Christopher Schulz
Darren Sylvester

Fiction
24 Hours on L16
Nobody Eats Oranges...
Some Mornings

Summer Bishil is weird—in the best way possible. In a culture where her starlet peers (peerlets?) are doted on for dancing on tabletops and burying themselves in mountains of blow in between reality shows and movies-of-the-week, Bishil is at home listening to Nick Drake, or hanging out at the art house movie theater in Pasadena, or dreaming of studying international relations at Sarah Lawrence. “I’m pretty boring,” Bishil claims—but how many other nineteen-year-olds do you know who’ve got two heavyweight Oscar-contender films about to hit the screens, aspire to work for the United Nations, and, in their spare time, write epic screenplays about the quest for individuality?
        It hasn’t always been like this for Bishil, who spent most of her childhood abroad on the tiny Middle Eastern island nation of Bahrain. After her family moved to L.A. in 2003, she quickly found herself an agent and a manager, but her dramatic talents stagnated in the purgatory of daytime TV and cable children’s programming: a quick spot on “Drake & Josh” there, a line on “Hannah Montana” here—there wasn’t a whole lot of range.
        That all changed when Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball came looking for a young woman to carry his new film, Towelhead. “I knew that casting this role was extremely important. The movie is her story--she’s in virtually every scene,” says Ball. “We hired casting directors in London, Australia, New York, and Detroit, where there’s a big Arab-American population. Girls flew in from Texas, from North Carolina, and I thought it was going to be a really, really long, hard search. But Summer came in on the second day of auditions. I first saw her on tape and I just went, ‘Wow.’”
        And the critics have been going “Wow,” too. Her controversial performance as a sexually abused Arab-American girl coming of age amidst the first Gulf War has earned her accolades, and helped her land a role in Wayne Kramer’s star-powered ensemble about immigration, Crossing Over. I ate brunch with Bishil in Los Feliz and found out about her thoughts on summer blockbusters, Jessica Lange, and America’s warped attitude towards sex.

You moved to the U.S. in a time when everyone was “always remembering, never forgetting.” Many Americans were behind the invasion of Iraq without knowing why, and I was wondering if you experienced any discrimination or racism during that time that informed your performance in Towelhead.
Yeah. I mean, it was all new to me. I went to school with people that were from all over the world. I had German friends, I had Indian friends, I had Saudi friends, so I hadn’t really experienced prejudice, and yeah, I tried going to school here, and a couple of the kids were just assholes. My nationality was just easy access to make fun of me with. I don’t even know if they really knew what they were saying half the time, or if they were pulling it out of their asses. But it didn’t overshadow my experience in America—it hasn’t been a theme in my life here, really.

How did it feel to transition into more adult roles—even though you’re still playing young characters? Especially with the risqué elements of Towelhead—was your family nervous about it? Were you concerned about how you might come off?
I wasn’t concerned how I might come off at all, because I knew the film was in the hands of a really great writer. And my parents knew his work too, so they weren’t concerned. They knew that it was going to be in good taste, and that it was going to be an honest screenplay. Towelhead doesn’t try to manipulate you in any way. Had I read that script and felt manipulated, you know, had it been that she was a victim and that the sex acts that happened in the screenplay were just to shock the audience, then I would have had second thoughts about it. My dad, who’s Saudi Arabian, wasn’t worried at all, and he actually loved the film. He was laughing when it was supposed to be funny.

That’s great that your parents are so supportive. Were they been surprised at the controversial reaction in the press—were they prepared for that?
I think they were… I know I was. I mean, when I first read it I was like, “Holy crap, this girl’s thirteen and she goes through all these things,” but as I got more involved in the process and the character, I left that behind. I forgot about being controversial or whatever. And then we premiered in Toronto, and some people liked it, and some people were like “Oh God!”

And people are always gonna do that, cause they’re so fucking uncomfortable with their own sexuality. People in America are so fucked in the head about that sometimes. Like those crime dramas—I saw this one, I don’t even know what it was, where the episode was about this 12-year-old girl giving the football team blow jobs or something. And when a young girl is sexualized on those kinds of shows, they’re never fully formed human beings, they’re always like, the bad girl that everybody hates. And then she gets murdered.

Yeah, that’s the American crime narrative: The slutty girl gets stabbed, and we’re gonna solve the crime! How do you think attitudes towards sex were different in Bahrain?
My friends and I were so young, we weren’t really thinking about it yet. But I don’t remember older kids, like my older brother’s friends who were girls, being so fucked up about it. I came here and I went to high school for one week, and I remember that some of the popular girls were literally selling their virginities on note cards, to the coolest guy who would take their virginity. There’s something odd about that. It would almost be better if they would just go ahead and do it with somebody, rather than that.

Is there anyone who’s inspired you as an actress, and also in terms of a career path?
I really love Jessica Lange, I think she’s an amazing actress. Frances—have you ever seen that? She plays an old movie star that they gave a lobotomy to, and it’s a true story. It’s so good. It’s totally about the fight of the individual.

I don’t really look to anybody’s careers. There’s not a lot of people that are my ethnicity, really, so I don’t have anybody that I can say, oh, that’s a career I can see myself having. I don’t have that. But I want to be a writer, and I want to direct one day--I want to do it all.

Was it strange to work on Crossing Over with Harrison Ford and Sean Penn, or did you adjust to their star power really quickly?
I didn’t even meet them. And I’m kind of glad, cause I would have just shit my pants. I would have been so nervous! I probably would have gotten fired. I did meet Ashley Judd though—she was really nice, and she even gave me tips when I was acting.

Do you think you’re going to keep doing independent movies, our do you seen yourself ending up in blockbuster summer movies?
Probably not. I mean, there’s not a lot of roles, to be perfectly honest. But I’m not complaining, because Towelhead is amazing, and if that was the only film I made in my lifetime, I would be happy. You don’t need to have a prolific career to have a good career, I think. It’s okay if I don’t work for five years.

That’s not to say that quality work can’t be a blockbuster movie, but I don’t want to peruse this career blindly, and endlessly, without even a thought to it, and wake up when I’m 50 and see that what I’ve aspired to my whole life, I don’t believe in. You can either start digging your grave in life, or you can start building a temple, and I want to make sure that I build a temple in my life.

Do you have any field of study that you’re interested in outside of the dramatic arts?
I want to study international relations. To work for the UN would be just ideal, a dream. If I ever have enough money, I want to—well, first I want to get a Toyota Prius—but then I want to open up a shelter in Africa, for young women with HIV and AIDS. There’s a lot of stigma attached to it, and people have been run out of their families because of it. And then I’d like develop some sort of educational program and talk about HIV and AIDS in those places. And hopefully do it here, too, cause not enough people know about it here, either.

Wow, all that and you’re a writer, to boot. Can you talk about the screenplay you’re working on, or are you keeping it private?
Yeah, I mean, I don’t think anybody will give a shit about it, so—it’s about a girl named Marigold who she grows up in Saudi Arabia with her mother and father and she’s half Saudi and she’s half American. And then, because 9/11 happens, she has to move back to California, but she finds out like all this crazy stuff like, she’s not even really her mom’s kid. And her whole life she’s like, “Mom, I’m Arab—I have this disposition in life.” And then she finds out that it was actually her older brother from her mom’s first marriage that, you know, created her. That’s her father and he was a white kid, cause her mom’s married to a white guy before. So she’s actually just this white kid, and his girlfriend was Mexican. And they died in a crash when they were on the way to the airport to meet the Saudi, when she was little.

That’s a pretty awful thing to discover.
Yeah, so her whole life’s kind of a lie.

Is it autobiographically inspired?
Not at all. I guess, living in the Middle East would be the only thing. But I just wanted to show that it’s the individual that matters, and that’s the journey that she’s on—the urge to find the individual in herself. She wants to take the easy way out and find herself by ethnicity, or by culture, or by whatever.