Actor made project real for restaurateur
ATLANTA —
Kelsey Grammer is a legendary figure in TV, film and stage, his role as comically neurotic Frasier Crane on “Cheers” and “Frasier” now indelibly etched in sitcom history. At age 66, Grammer still has plenty of sway in Hollywood.
Besides rebooting “Frasier” next year for Paramount+, he single-handedly took a script by an Atlanta restaurateur with no Hollywood connections or experience and helped turn it into a movie.
Grammer’s embrace of “Charming the Hearts of Men,” a light romantic drama set in 1964, opened doors for Susan Derose she otherwise may not have cracked. (The film, shot in Georgia in 2019, is now available on demand in several places such as Amazon, Vimeo and Redbox.) “I liked the story,” said Grammer in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-constitution. “It tells me something I didn’t know before. That’s the key thing for me. It’s something I hadn’t done.”
Grammer plays a kind, single Virginia congressman named Worth who shows up at a funeral reception for an old friend whose daughter is Grace Gordon (Anna Friel), a glamorous, educated, feisty 40-yearold double divorcee. She returns to her small Virginia town only to find out her daddy left her broke. Her options for work in 1964 are limited and she begins seeking a man to help keep her afloat with both resignation and humor.
“I’m about to sell myself like a pound of meat,” Grace says at one point. “I think I can sell myself as prime.”
Grammer’s character, based very loosely on an actual Southern Democratic congressman named Howard W. Smith, is her most obvious potential love interest. In this fictional movie account, Grace convinces Congressman Worth to lobby his peers to add women to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which is in a sense why the movie title is “Charming the Hearts of Men.”
“Without women, this country does not exist,” Grace tells Worth. “It’s past time for women to pursue their own happiness, their own liberty under the law.” The congressman, enthralled by Grace’s graceful argument, relents quickly. “You’ll be remembered for being noble,” she says. “I’ll be remembered a fool if I’m remembered at all,” he replies.
Derose ― the 71-yearold owner of three Atlanta mainstay restaurants OK Cafe, Bones and Blue Ridge Grill ― spent decades dealing with sexism as an American Airlines flight attendant and a female restaurant entrepreneur. But she said that addition of gender in this monumental bill helped women and she wanted to acknowledge that fact in film.
Grammer, first enchanted by Derose’s script, became enchanted with Derose herself once he spoke with her. “Susan is extraordinary,” Grammer said. “She has a very interesting point of view and she’s so smart. She knows this inside and out. She has a direct connection to that culture and place.”
Derose lived in Japan and Washington, D.C., as a child but spent summers in Athens. Her father died fighting the Korean War when she was just 3 years old. “I grew up in a matriarchal family,” said Derose, who rarely does interviews but was willing to have lunch at the OK Cafe with the AJC and discuss her passion project.
“My grandmother was part of The League of Women Voters.” Many of the recipes at OK Cafe are her grandma’s. “I was 14 when they passed the civil rights act,” she said. “My grandmother said to me, ‘You’re in. Now see what you can do.’ It altered the way I thought.”
The film was sparked after her longtime life and business partner Richard Lewis saw an article about Congressman Smith. Derose knew Smith was a segregationist at heart and observers at the time accused him of inserting gender into the civil rights bill as a way to scuttle it. (Smith was friends with suffragist leader Alice Paul.)
But Derose decided in her movie to change the character’s motivations. “I say he did it for the love of a woman,” she said. It took her nearly two decades to finish the script. In 2014, she hired different agents who sent it around to the major movie studios. Nobody wanted it. But once the script landed in Grammer’s lap, she was able to move forward.
Derose and Lewis were the primary funders of the movie, which cost about $10 million. She also directed the film with zero experience. “She did not walk in unprepared,” Grammer said. “She knew what she was doing. It’s a real gift. She’s just one of those people who knows how to succeed. We visited her apartment in London. It was just impeccable. Her taste is extraordinary. Her understanding of what people like is loaded into the movie.”
Not that she didn’t have help. She credited Gavin Struthers, a cinematographer who has worked on “Downton Abbey” and “Black Sails,” with making the film look sleek and lush. “He understood the tone of it,” Derose said. “He was always by my side making sure it was right.” She sought a British actress to play Grace and fell in love with Friel, who to Derose, “was the reincarnation of Vivien Leigh,” the British actress who played Scarlett O’hara in “Gone With the Wind.”
And she was also able to nab Sean Astin of “Lord of the Rings” and “Rudy” fame for a smaller role as a pawn store owner who she said “bears witness” to what was happening.
The film isn’t subtle about the blatant sexism of the era. A male banker calls Grace “useless.” A racist white man at a diner tells her: “You keep your place like women are meant to!” One potential employer seeking a secretary makes Grace twirl around and lift her dress up so he could leer at her exposed leg.
Ironically, Derose is credited in the film as S.E. Rose, obscuring her gender like “The Outsiders” author Susan Hinton did in 1967 by calling herself S.E. Hinton. But Lewis said Derose wasn’t trying to downplay the fact this film was created by a woman. “She likes to do quality things but she has never liked the spotlight,” Lewis said.