Interview: Kelli Maroney

Kelli Maroney is the undisputed queen of mallsploitation. Her twin-titan roles both took place in empty shopping malls during the height of the excess-is-best 1980's. In 1984 she
played Samantha, the gun-toting, curly-haired cheerleader fending off the advances of cosmic zombies while looking for love at the end of the world in Night of the Comet. Brought to brilliant, bratty life by the young, enthusiastic Maroney, Comet remains the actress's high water mark. Who else could so effectively pout "Dad would have bought us Uzis!" while taking potshots at mutants in a cheerleader outfit? Two years later, she returned to the mall as Allison in Jim Wynorski's cult favorite Chopping Mall, the unlikely tale of Dalek-ish mall security robots gone awry. Both films are perfect snapshots of the dayglo decade, and remain late night cable TV and weekend movie rental standards, largely because of Kelli's sunny presence.

So where did this heavily armed valley girl come from, anyway? Well, from Minnesota, of course. Kelli grew up in the Midwest, moved to New York while still in her teens, and landed her first acting job at the tender age of 17, playing hot-to-trot lolita Kimberly Harris on soap opera Ryan's Hope. In 1982, she got her first movie role, as the optimistic cheerleader in the landmark teen comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It was her Fast Times appearance that ultimately led her to Comet, Chopping Mall, and enduring cult actress status.

A plucky blonde with an endearing, gum-snapping chirp and a generous smile that could melt a glacier, Kelli's slim-but-substantial resume is rife with memorable B-movie roles, many under the fast n' furious direction of trash maestro Jim Wynorski, who utilized her in a variety of quirky roles, from Angie Dickinson's grand-daughter in Big Bad Mama 2 (1987), to a potentially other-worldly nurse in his 1988 remake of Roger Corman's Not of This Earth. Whatever the role, Kelli always brought her impish charisma and easy grace with her, and the cult of Maroney grew. As the 1990's wore on, she slipped into television roles, doing guest spots on shows like the Pretender and Chicago Hope, effectively leaving the world of killer robots and teenage comet zombies behind her. And then, at the dawn of the next decade, she disappeared from the Hollywood radar completely. At least for awhile. So where did Kelli go, and more compellingly, why did she come back? Well, as the ever buoyant Ms. Maroney tells us, it all started with a maddeningly catchy song.

"It was a literal shock that someone wrote a song about me." Kelli says. Said song, the provocatively titled "Kelli Maroney Don't Exist No More", was written by German punk band Almost Charlie, and spilled the beans about Maroney's defection to Planet Normal. Fearing that she would never break away from her b-movie status, Kelli changed her name to Zoe Kelli Simon and left acting completely for a spell in the early part of this decade. And she thought she got away with it, too. Until the song started making the rounds.
"See, I decided to go off and see if I could do something else with my life besides be an actress. I started out so young that I didn't know if I could do anything else. So I did that, but part of what I had to do was change my name so I didn't have to hear 'Hey, you're that girl from the Comet movie...how come you're not doing that anymore?' wherever I went. So I did that, and the next thing you know, there's this song."

Ultimately, the song drove Kelli back to her first love, but not before she spent a few years outside the crazy walls of Hollywood.
"I went on a spiritual quest." She says. "I just wasn't as successful as I wanted to be as an actress. I tried every single avenue that I could think of, and I just wasn't making a living at it, honestly. And I thought, am I just doing this because I don't know how to do anything else?"

Determined to test the waters, Kelli legally changed her name to Zoe Kelli Simon, and began to work as a massage therapist. "I did well at it", she says, "but the problem was, you don't want to be like, 'Hey, I got a massage from that girl from Night of the Comet! By the same token, you don't want to hire somebody that works in holistic health care to play a part. They don't coexist well."

I suggest that there are plenty of people that would pay extra to get a massage from the Night of the Comet girl.
"Well, see, that would be the wrong reason." She laughs. "So, I tried something else, and now I feel validating acting, because I feel like it's my choice. That song was really the kicker for me. I thought, well, why don't I come back? Who am I kidding anyway? I proved what I had to prove to myself. Honestly, that's what I am, that's what I do Plus, I had to grow into my age range, too. I had a very tough time getting out of that image, you know, 'I'm a teenager and I chew gum', because that's what I was famous for. I was a Lolita on the soaps, then I was the snotty cheerleader, and it was hard for me to grow up."

Kelli is still well known for her days as a torrid teenage soap opera actress, a role that took her by surprise.
"I left home to study acting in New York", she tells me. "Even though I was still very young, I was finished with high school when I got there. I was a smart kid. I was going to conservatory school in upstate New York when I got the job. It was completely unexpected. One minute I'm walking around town, the next minute I'm on television, and it's huge."

Sudden fame was not an easy transition for the young actress.
"Oh my god. People would come up to me in the deli and go, 'You're terrible!', she laughs. "I understand it, though. My character was the pits. It was dreadful. Everyone hated me. And this was my first job! I didn't have the self esteem for that all. Still, I was acting, so that was cool."

Emboldened by her early success in television, Kelli decided to take a stab at the movies.She managed to score a couple of juicy roles, including her wide-eyed cheerleader in Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 1982, and a surprisingly dark character in the obscure 1983 thriller Slayground.

"In Slayground, I play this jailbait hitchhiker", she tells me. When I get picked up, you think that I'm toast, but I'm actually a killer. They play "Bad to the Bone" beneath me. I'm wearing cowboy boots and smoking a cigarette, I was trying to look tough. Trying to give Jodie Foster a run for her money!" She laughs.

Night of the Comet was released in 1984 to little fanfare, but it became a surprise hit. The story's premise is deceptively simple: one night, a comet shows up, and turns everyone in the world into dust, except for a lucky few who happened to be enclosed in metal containers at the time. Two such lucky specimens include 18 year old Regina (Catherine Mary Stewart) and her 16 year old cheerleader sister Samantha (Maroney). The sisters set out looking for survivors, and boyfriends, all the while dodging a sinister governmental agency and the occasional green skinned zombie. Eventually they hole up in an abandoned shopping mall, and hilarity and horror ensues.

Kelli says she got involved in the film because the director had seen her in Fast Times.
"Initially, my character was supposed to die in the movie, so they wanted somebody real obnoxious, like my cheerleader character in Fast Times. I had no idea any of this was going on. I wanted to read for Regina, because I thought it was a cooler part. And they said 'No, you're not doing that.' So then I went back to New York, as I'm wont to do, and I didn't think anymore of it. Then they called me up asking me where I was, because they wanted to start shooting. No one bothered to tell me I got the part!"

Despite it's paltry $750,000 budget, the film still managed to impress, thanks to its achingly funny script and it's effortlessly sunny protagonists. In the original script, Kelli's character Samantha was killed by evil government agents midway through the film, but as the cameras rolled and Kelli shined, Samantha was granted a last-minute reprieve.
"The reason that I didn't die is because one of the producers said, 'If we kill this character, the audience will walk out.' So they changed the script on the spot."

Despite a thumbs-up from Siskel and Ebert and brisk box office business, Night of the Comet had a very brief theatrical run. Still, it became a certified cult classic once it began playing on cable television, and fans have been clamoring for a DVD release ever since. In 2008, MGM finally got around to doing that, but not in the way Kelli might have hoped.

"I would always get these letters on my website no less than five times a week asking, 'When's the DVD? Where's Part 2? And there was some weird thing with the rights every time. Tom wanted to do a cartoon of it, people have always wanted to do a sequel, this and that, and no one could ever get it together. A lot of the letters would go, Can't you do something about it? I thought, why can't I? If nobody else wants to dig this thing up, why don't I? So I lawyered up, we called MGM, and I said I wanted to buy it. Everything was going along, and then a couple days later they called me and up said, 'We're going to release it ourselves.' I was crushed. They released it with no extras, and they didn't have a budget for a DVD launch party, nothing. There was nothing in the budget for publicity or anything at all. They don't even know it's a cult classic. I think when somebody offers to buy back their property it makes them aware of it. I think all I did was tip them off. And they made good money off it. It was in their top 100 sales. At least they released it under MGM-Turner Classics. Chances are, they might do another release with extras, but I don't know what their plans are, they don't share them with me." She laughs.

Two years after her pioneering work in Comet, Kelli was called back to the mall to appear in Chopping Mall, a low-budget slasher directed by Jim Wynorski and produced by Roger Corman, featuring Kelli, Barbara Crampton, an array of bad hair and worse clothes, and a few dumpy garbage can robots with lasers. Low on finances and brains but high on cheese and goofy charm, it remains a guilty pleasure for 80's trash-film fans.
"It was had a blast playing Samantha in Comet, and I guess Jim Wynorski had seen that and tapped me for Chopping Mall", Kelli remembers. "I was all excited to do this movie because Robert Short designed the robots. He also did Darryl Hannah's tail in Splash. He's a huge special effects guy. So I thought this was going to be a really classy movie. So we're doing some dialogue, and suddenly it dawns on me - once again, I'm on a comedy shoot."

Chopping Mall was shot entirely in a shopping mall. Filming was done after hours, which made for a very memorable shooting schedule.
"We had to set that thing back up every morning", she remembers. "They were still using that mall. We couldn't get in there until they shut down all the stores and we had to have it spic and span for them to open it in the morning. That was tough. I don't know how the crew did it. They would go over this place with a fine tooth comb."

Another memorable aspect of the Chopping Mall shoot - also recounted on the DVD's commentary track - was its underwhelming catering.
"It was Mama Cajun's catering company", Kelli vividly remembers. "They're no longer in business." She laughs. "We couldn't tell what it was they were feeding us. We couldn't figure out what was on our plates, we called them possum patties and weasel strips. The one time I hit critical mass on the catering was...you know those little pill cups you get in the hospital? So they were all spread out, like a million of them. They had whipped cream on top, and I figured there was a cookie or a piece of something underneath. Nope. It was just a little dollop of whipped cream in a pill cup. That was dessert. It was a real tragedy. There was one time during filming when Wynorksi had all the air let out of his tires by the crew. It wasn't much of a surprise."

Still, despite the low-budget limitations, Kelli enjoyed working with Wynorski, and they went on to collaborate on several other projects throughout the 1980's.
"He'd call me up when he needed something fast", she says. "He'd say, "I have Traci Lords down here, I want to put you guys in matching nurse outfits, can you do that?" and I'd say sure, and we'd got and do it. So we racked up quite a few films together without noticing it. I always got along great with him."

While Kelli enjoyed her work in b-movies, she continued shooting for the stars.
"If I told you all the things I was almost in", she sighs. "Like, while I was doing Night of the comet, I got cast in a Woody Allen picture, but I couldn't do it, they wouldn't let me go to New York to do it. It was Purple Rose of Cairo. I was going to be the actress in the movie, the Jean Harlow type. I try not to dwell on that stuff, though. That's just the way this business is, either you've got no roles, or you've got three of them."

Frustrated with her lack of A-level success in the movies, Kelli spent the next decade back where she got her start, in television. And it was during one notable guest spot where she finally defined herself as an actress.
"As I got older, people were always throwing me these victim roles. I wanted to scream 'Haven't you seen my work?!' Because they hadn't. Someone would tell them I was in this zombie thing, and they'd make an assumption. The last thing I did before I was hung up my towel the first time was I did Chicago Hope in 1999. Mark Harmon's character had flashbacks of his growing up to explain what his problem was. So I played his mother in black and white flashbacks. And I killed myself because I couldn't take the abuse that was going on in the house. I was a total victim. It really turned me off. I decided I didn't want to act if I had to play victims. I have that unlikely hero instinct, and I feel there's enough people crashing and burning, we don't need to see that. My contribution to this art form is the triumph of the human spirit, not the despair of it."

And so Kelli took her indomitable spirit and left the business. She began working for day spas, got married in 2001, and settled into her new life. And then that damned song showed up, and it all unraveled. These days, she's single again and back to what she loved doing so much in the first place - playing spunky characters in quirky movies.

"I love horror movies." She says. "I love supernatural stuff as opposed to gore. The one I'm doing now, Nightmare Carnival, my dream is for it to be one of those movies that really scares you. One that makes you go, I wish I hadn't seen that, because now I'm alone in the house and I'm scared! Movies like that always involve a mind-twist. It's not just about bloody stumps."
Kelli's other current project is called Shadow Land.
"Shadow Land is very Twin Peak-ish, very X files", she says, with a hint of mystery. "So that's fun. I'm in pre-production on both of those."

Not only is Kelli working again, she's also embracing her fanbase in a way she never has before, from maintaining an active Myspace page to making the convention rounds.
"There was no budget for Night of the Comet, so I started doing some conventions." She explains. "MGM doesn't even give me any DVDs for them, but I wanted to promote the movie. I'm a grassroots actress, and that's my favorite part of it. There's no studio forcing me down anyone's throat. People like me because they want to. Then, some friends suggested I put up a MySpace page. So I did that, and it was like Boom! I had no idea, really. This was right around the time that they started showing my soaps again, and I was invited to do a few chats with soap opera fans. I had no idea there were so many people who still hated me, to this day! But once they realized it was me, they couldn't talk bad about me anymore." She laughs. "But yeah, it's really cool. I had no idea so many people remembered me."

And so, things come full circle, a rare occasion in the slash and burn world of Hollywood. Kelli Maroney is back, and more enthusiastic about life than ever. When she's not acting, she's heavily involved in charity work, from the SPCA to Special Olympics. "I feel very blessed. I have no complaints at all", she says.

-Ken McIntyre

For more, check out Kelli Maroney's official website