Leaping from X-Rated Films to The X-Files Patton (aka Ashlyn Gere) lands in Space: Above and Beyond
Take
a chance. That's the guiding principle of the Artificial Intelligence
Silicates - the robotic villians of the Fox science fiction television
series, Space: Above And Beyond but it could also apply as the
motto of Kimberly Patton who plays the recurring character of Feliciti
OH, leader of the Silicates and the most sultry automation you'll find
on prime time. Throughout her career - which includes five years
as Ashlyn Gere, a stellar draw in adult film entertainment - Patton has
risked a myriad of gambles to insure her longevity as an actress.
Recently announcing her retirement from the X-industry, Patton's goal
is to plunge back into the mainstream.She fell in love with acting at the age of four. "In pre-school, I did a little rendition of "Me and My Shadow" Patton recalls. "When you wlk out there on stage and feel that big spotlight hit you, you remember it all your life. It gets in your blood and the audience and the clappng is something that you can't leave behind."
She attended the University of Nevada (Las Vegas), where she earned a bachelor's degree in theatre. Cruising to Los Angeles, Patton - often billed as Kim McKamy - landed roles in low-budget fare; sample the likes of LUNCH MEAN (1987), ANGEL III: THE FINAL CHAPTER (1988), HOUSE OF DREAMS (1990), STREET ANGELS (1992), and Pia Zadora's 1983 career crippler, THE LONELY LADY.
One movie, she fondly remembers, is Emire Entertainment's CREEPOZOIDS (1987), directed by David DeCoteau and starring B-movie icon, Linea Quigley. "It was wonderful to work with Linea," recounts Patton. "She had been on so many different things, and this was after her big role in RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD." One privilege tagged to the production was the hiring of a stunt woman for Patton, even though CREEPOZOIDS "was a very, very, very , low budget take off of ALIEN. We got bitten by huge special effects rats, and a few of us turned into zombies. A little take-off there from ALIEN, but more or less the same thing, with one great big alien having a baby."
CREEPOZOIDS was Patton's second movie with DeCoteau, who had directed her the year before in the direct-to-video DREAMANIAC, a slasher flick mired in wretched acting, directing and editing. Patton (again credited as Kim McKamy) played the protagonist's girlfriend, the only one with enough spunk to get out of the house after her party guests turn up murdered. "I drill my boyfriend's head off!," Patton chuckles. "Unfortunately, it was so low budget they forgot to buy two dresses, and I was in a white one this time. My entire face got sprayed with blood, my entire white mini-skirt dress got sprayed with blood, so I sat for nine hours, because my first shot was in the morning and my second shot was, of course, when the sun went down. That Karo syrup leaves a lot to be desired!"
Although she was working, Patton's career dallied in limbo. Attributing her descent to poor management, she eventually introduced herself to the adult industry. "It's really who you know. Or luck, and I had some really bad agency things," Patton relates. "One day my agent sent me to a photographer for PENTHOUSE, and I got right in. And from there it was progression into the the adult films, because I really am an actress. There was a script in front of me. It was a big decision. I took about six months to decide because I had always heard that Hollywood looks down on someone who's done adult films. But not wanting to be a hypocrite in my life, I thought, 'I'm an actress, I can have a script in front of me, I can go to work, I can get paid for it.' There are some major budgeted adult films out there. When they found out I could act, I got roles that were specifically written for me. Yes, they included sex but I was an actress going to work, getting paid to play a character who has sex. I had an entire role and characters to create from that script. So I opted for acting in the adult industry, instead of becoming a waitress. My goal was to keep acting and working. Every day, that's what I live for. And that waws one way for me to be able to do it."
Tallying lead roles in 70 of her approximately 75 adult films, Patton eventually became the most awarded actress in the business. "I got handed very large parts usually written for me, which I'm proud of. It was working. I am an actress. I was a character plaaying that part. And I had a wonderful time and I enjoyed it."
Her memories of this period in her life are overwhelmingly positive, partially because Patton had final approval over her X-rated obligations. "The women in adult film have complete control over everything you see them do," she avows. "First of all, they couldn't make the movies without us. We are able to tell the producer or the director who we will and will not work with, what kind of scene it will be, whether or not the man wears a condom. The actress chooses the men, she chooses the women, she chooses the positions, she chooses everything. If you get a script and you don't like it, you can change that too. I was never approached to do something that I didn't want to do. It's a very small family and people usually know what you will and will not do. I was not a sex performer; I was an actress playing a sexual person. People usually called me when they had a lot of money to make a big project..."
CHAMELEONS, directed by John Leslie, was produced on a budget that bought a 40-person crew, security and fire marshals and the importation of European actors. "The quality of the acting is much better because we took the time to have rehearsals for that movie," explains Patton, who played a partygoer sexually overwhelmed by gender-switching aliens. "That doesn't happen very often, unfortunately, in the adult business. The director approached it as an actual acting fee. It was a regular, big budget movie for the adult industry. It won Film of the Year, and I won Best Actress."
Director Leslie, enthuses Patton, is "wonderful. He started out as an actor and he knows how to communicated with you and bring about what he wants from you as an actor. I was grateful for that. And I was also grateful because I met him on an interview and, although he didn't cast me for the movie that I met him for, he specifically wrote the part in CHAMELEONS for me."
Patton also notes that the X-industry, unlike mainstream Hollywood, offers women the opportunity to work behind the camera as producers, directors an crew. Though she co-directed a play in college and produed a few adult films, Patton declined to helm productions for Vivid Video, "because my first love is acting. When I can no longer memorize a script or something like that, I might thing about it. But as of right now, no."
Asked to comment on the objections of women's rights groups to the X-rated media, Patton takes a live and let live attitude. "Everybody's opinion is worth something. What I would say to them is I chose to do that career because it was a way for me to act. If they want to make a certain judgment call on it, that's definitely their perogatvie. They should have their opinions, and certainly should be heard, but I don't think you should push anything upon somebody else.
"Sex has been used to sell everything from cars to milk, from hairspray to jeans. It's a staple marketing tool. Someone who looks down on the adult entertainment business as something other than using sex to sell videos, games or movies today is not fully aware of the society that we happen to live in. In some ways I look at myself as a feminist. If I can do the job that a man can do, I want to be hired for that same job."
While working in adult films, Patton continued to receive occasional offers for mainstream roles; her resultant credits include 1991's FATAL INSTINCT, a "film noir" spoof with Sean young and Sherilyn Fenn, and INDECENT PROPOSAL, which begged Demi moore to choose between Robert Redford and Woody Harrelson.
"People still contacted me to work on the other side," she says, adding that her adult film work was not concern to conventional filmmakers. "DARK AND DEADLY [directed by Nick Celozzi, who also appears as Patton's husband] would be the most recent example of that. That was a low-budget movie I made in Chicage before my contract was up with Vivid Video. It is a psychological thriller starring myself and Tom Riley, who used to be on C.H.I.P.S. We were on a few different locations in and around Elmhurst, Illinois, and we had a wonderful time."
Patton was cast as a housewife "tormented" by a mysterious stalker. "It's come to the point where it's brought trouble to my marriage and I'm going to move from that town, give up my career, go back to teaching and literally move out of town. And on one dark and deadly night, before we have moved out of town, my husband goes out for something and doesn't return in time. The suspense really begins from there."
Upon abandoning the hardcore trade, Patton realized that she was courting unemployment. But the actress faced a hardcore reality: the industry tends to stress a preferability for (under 30) ingenues. "It's a wonderful business but it's geared towards youth, I think. I'm a very realistic person. I went as high as I could go. I worked for the best company you could be with. I retired from the biggest contract company in the market and I had achieved all that I could achieve there. There was no more growth for me as an actress and I needed to move on."
Patton's entry into television came from a chance meeting with X-FILES writer/co-executive producer Glen Morgan in the spring of 1994. By coincidence, THE X-FILES was one television show she routinely watched, her initial interest piqued by the series' name. "It had to be fated that this happened," Patton laughs. "I started watching it and they had such a unique idea for the story. I thought, 'Oh this is fabulous! Everybody's got to watch this! This is wonderful!' "
Patton never dreamed she'd be on the show but one day, when she was visiting a Los Angeles club to meet a performer, she felt a tap on her shoulder. The man trying to get her attention was the aforementioned Glen Morgan, who had recognized her and had immediately thought of casting her on the show. Suspecting a ruse, Patton insisted on Morgan producing a business card. Morgan admitted a card wasn't instantly accessible, so Patton reluctantly handed over one of hers. Upon arriving home in Las Vegas, she was surprised to find a call on her answering machine. "It was his work number, please call da-da-da-da, so I immediately picked up the phone. It was the Fox lot, and the recording said, 'I'm sorry, we're only open until the hours of...' and I said, 'Oh my God, I can't believe it, I couldn't give the time of day to the producer of the X-Files!!' But Glen was so nice and he realized how it must have looked to come up and tap me on the shoulder, and then have no business card in that kind of atmosphere. Since then, it's been a running joke. We have gotten along great and I'm so thankful to him and James Wong for giving me a chance. I really appreciate it."
Morgan and Wong finally wrote a part for Patton in the third episode of THE X-FILES' second season. Entitled BLOOD, it centered around a series of spree killings in a small Pennsylvania town, with the perpetrators apparently set off by a heightening of their phobias to a point that drove them mad with fear. Patton (this time billed as Kimberly Ashlyn Gere) played a woman named Bonnie McRoberts whose phobia, ironically, was a fear of rape. "Glen and Jim bring a lot of slight innuendos into all of their characters," grins Patton. "You really have to know them to understand a lot of their writing and pick up on it. They're actually very funny, so for me to play a character whose fear was the of being raped, was their way of being a little catty. I had a fabulous time."
Tense when she arrived on the set, Patton acknowledges, "My nervousness worked great. The director, David Nutter, said, "Take a deep breath, it's okay, your nerves are going to be fine, that's how we want you to feel here.' And I thought, 'Okay, that's exactly how I feel!' "
Patton's second scene required her to be interrogated by series' star David Duchovny. Then she had to go beserk, stab Duchovny's arm (for authenticity's sake, a real blade was utilized for tighter shots), and leap on top of the actor. "I was thinking, 'Dear God, don't let me get him with this knife.' It's so techinical when you get to that point. The crew was saying 'Oh, you're not going to really see David. You could jump onto one of these pads they have for stunt people.' And David immediately said, 'Oh no, that's okay, she can fall on me!' He was really great."
Patton
got on so well with Morgan and Wong that when they departed THE X-FILES
in early '95 to create another Fox network series, Space: Above And Beyond,
they immediately thought of her to play Felicity OH. In this tale
of war between Earth and a mysterious alien, the wild card is the Artificial
Intelligence Silicates (called AI's for short), a race of walking,
talking computers created to serve humans but then secretly altered by a
renegade scientist with a virus that programs the AIs to always "take a
chance." And even though Feliciti is killed off by the end of her
first hour on the show, hundreds of Feliciti models are in existence, which
meant Feliciti - and Patton - could come back whenever the producers wanted
her to. "The AIs started a war with the humans on Earth," clarifies Patton. "We were the first build to serve them. Then there was a virus put in us, and now we are computers that love to gamble, and take a chance at everything we do. That's the only thing we respect in a human being, if they're willing to gamble or take a chance at whatever it may be, including their lives. We have every intelligence that a human has and even more so, but the point is we were created by a human. So we can always, in my mind, be stopped by a human.
"We know what humans are afraid of, and we are wiling to act on that - whether it is through their dreams or through some fear that they have. We are very adept at picking up on it. And that is how we can manipulate people."
Patton loves playing a villain, and she uses stylized movements to convey her character's mechanical origins. "I'm a human playing a computer, and you still have human movements but you have to restrict them a little bit," she elucidates. "Slight, slowness of speech once in a while. Not in monotone, but I have a deep, throaty voice and I really take it down a few notches a few times, just to give it an undertone of slight bitchiness. Just that slight twist instead of a very robotic staccato. I don't know what you would call it. Glen and James and I talked about it before I did the part. It all comes out fairly, but they wanted an underquality of a bitchto my character. And since I'm the commander of the AI's, I get to be a little bitchier than everyone else!"
Patton has appeared so far in three episodes of Space: Above And Beyond, and hopes to do more. Meanwhile, she continues to seek work in studio films and network television. "My goal is to do major motion pictures, but I love television because it's something new everyday. It really hones an actor's ability. Your technique is always on top. Acting class is fabulous, but until you're on the set and you're using what you learned in that acting class, you're still an out-of-work actor. So give me a job and let me work every day."
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