FROM HALLOWEEN TO THE COSMOS

After five decades on screen, Jamie Lee Curtis is taking control behind the camera, setting a new course with her production company Comet Pictures

- BY H. ALAN SCOTT

ROBBY KLEIN/GETTY IMAGES/IMDB

THERE IS A VERSION OF JAMIE LEE CURTIS’ CAREER that looks like a series of lucky breaks. Halloween made her a star. Everything Everywhere All at Once gave her an Oscar. The rest, in that telling, is fortune and timing.

That version is wrong.

At South by Southwest, the annual festival of tech, film, music and culture, Curtis took the stage at the JW Marriott ballroom in Austin, Texas, for a keynote session titled “If Not Now, When, if Not Me, Who? Pivoting and Manifesting!” What unfolded over the next hour was less a traditional keynote than a master class in how a person builds something real in an industry that rewards the appearance of it.

The throughline was manifesting, a word that can sound like self-help shorthand until Curtis explains what she actually means by it. “How else the f*** am I here?” she asked the crowd. “I manifest,” she roared to applause. For her, that’s not mysticism, it’s a practice: It’s hearing an NPR story about a school bus driver who saved 22 children during the 2018 Paradise Fire in California and calling Jason Blum the next day to produce a movie. It’s meeting Patricia Cornwell at a conference and following up about the rights to her Scarpetta book series to develop it into a TV series. It’s sitting in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s trailer on the set of True Lies, flipping through a Christie’s auction catalog, spotting an art deco sculpture of a woman on a comet and saying out loud, to no one in particular, “When I start my production company, I’m going to call it Comet Pictures.”