At the high point of her career, Sally Kirkland enjoyed the lifestyle of your average A-list star. In 1988, after more than two decades working in the business, she earned a Golden Globe and Oscar nomination for Anna , an indie drama in which she played a former Czech film star who has relocated to New York City following the Soviet invasion of her homeland, grappling with a faded career, a sense of displacement, and her fading dreams. She contended for the Best Actress Oscar opposite the likes of Glenn Close and Meryl Streep, cementing her reputation as a powerful dramatic actress, as she was whisked from one red carpet to the next.
But this isn’t the part of Kirkland’s story that Sallywood chooses to tell. An award-winning indie drama from director Xaque Gruber , the film examines his real-life friendship with the star, which began when he moved out to Hollywood from Maine to pursue his 20-something dreams and started working as her assistant. Gruber idolized Kirkland — first from afar, and then up close — even in finding her at a professional lull, taking on B-movies to pay her bills and feeling somewhat left behind.
“When I met Sally, I had a fantasy that she lived in a mansion with a butler and a big chandelier, and none of that turned out to be the case,” Gruber tells Deadline. “Then, I learned that she actually didn’t have much in the way of family, was not married, did not have children here. I was alone in Hollywood, and we were these two misfits who .
