Ten
Begining to show the legs of a career - Los cimientos de una carrera

While Michelle Pfeiffer was still filming the television series Delta House she managed - through the efforts of her agent John LaRocca - to get a role in a film titled Falling in Love Again. It was a romantic comedy starring Elliot Gould and the British actress Susannah York. Producer-director Steven Paul was just twenty years old when the film was made in 1980. His age showed in what was a sloppy enterprise, 103 minutes of romantic slush as Gould's character flashed-back to his poor Jewish youthful days in New York's Bronx and his courtship of a rich WASP princess Pfeiffer playing the young Susannah York.

For Pfeiffer it was a start. 'Even from the beginning when I was doing junk television I still had this focus. I knew I wasn't going to be doing that forever, that I wasn't going to be like that.'

And she was working. In 1980 she began to show the legs of a career - it looked as though she would run and run. She saw it as tuning up. Acting classes were study, but, as always, she preferred on-the-job education: on Delta House and in 1980 on the short-lived detective series B.A.D. Cats she watched everything. How the camera was set up. Where the make-up people sat. The position of the lighting. The timing of scenes. How the director controlled or didn't control his cast. Who had the most clout. Why a scene worked, and why it didn't. The work ethic was in overdrive.

Michelle Pfeiffer dreamed away many of her schooldays. But when she found her purpose she focused. Hard. As her father had said, when she set goals you had to watch out. Now, it was Hollywood's turn. She had no illusions about Delta House saying, 'It was a shallow no-brainer, and I detested it. But it was exposure so I did the best I could with terrible scripts. I told myself: "There are so many unemployed actors around you should be glad you're working at all."' She was glad. Delighted. This was her education. Her Hollywood education. And she was once again a victim to a Hollywood neophyte.

Jerry Sherlock had worked in the Orient for two decades in the clothing business and considered himself an expert on the Oriental area. He also decided to write and produce a film about his fictional hero Charlie Chan. Peter Ustinov, so well liked in film as Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, was hired to star as Charlie Chan. Angie Dickinson, who was at the height of her popularity playing Sergeant Pepper Anderson in the television series Policewoman, was happy to play against type and be the villainess, the Dragon Queen.

Pfeiffer was cast as debutante at risk, Cordelia Farington III. 'It wasn't what I ideally wanted, but each time I made a choice I made sure it was a little better than the last one,' is how she recalled the film, which in 1981 was one of the most controversial of the year on the streets of San Francisco. Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen involves Chan solving a series of murders, in San Francisco's Chinatown, that are the work of Dickinson's white Dragon Queen. It was filmed on location in San Francisco, and a great many of the Oriental population of the Golden Gate city took offence. Pickets went on, the streets with placards reading: NO MORE RACISM. NO MORE CHARLIE CHAN.

Pfeiffer was playing a chinless deb, a rather dippy charader. It was Ustinov's Chan that got the most criticism, saying that his Charlie Chan was a yellow Uncle Tom. The protests were noisy and the organizers promised a boycott of the film, which opened in cinemas in America in 1981. The boycott wasn't necessary. The film was so dreadful few people were interested in seeing it.

The reaction didn't deter Pfeiffer. This was her education. She had made The Hollywood Knights in 1980, which she rather liked. She enjoyed working with Tony Danza who had been on the television series Taxi and is now a financial Hollywood legend because of the world wide syndication of Who's the Boss?, his successful TV series. The Hollywood Knights is about a group of southern Californian students and their adventures on a Halloween night in 1965. Pfeiffer, still stuck in hot pants, played the carhop, Suzie-Q. For Pfeiffer the best thing is still to regard it as work, to paying her dues.

It was a difficult time. Pfeiffer and her friend Ellen Barkin, who would both later co-star with Al Pacino - Barkin as the incredible sex machine in Pacino's big come back film, the thriller Sea of Love in 1989 - would bitch with each other on the telephone about the lack of meaty roles: 'I remember that I used to get on the phone with Ellen. We were both unemployed. Nobody would. hire us. Every part we wanted, Debra Winger would steal. We could not get a job, and we'd be hysterical for hours on the phone moaning and kvetching.'