Here you go.......
Star Power: Boulder Creek woman helped put Jesus in ‘The Passion’
By PEGGY TOWNSEND
Sentinel staff writer
Pamela Cole grew up in the mountains of Boulder Creek, riding horses, reading books and acting in high school productions of "Finnean’s Rainbow" and "South Pacific."
All of which wouldn’t seem to portend this moment in 2002, when Cole is sitting in the ancient, stone-walled basement of a restaurant in Italy eating dinner with actor/director Mel Gibson — both of them part of what would become one of the biggest money-makers in movie history.
Except that, in a way, it does.
Cole, 39, is a Hollywood agent whose client, Jim Caviezel, starred as Jesus in Gibson’s film, "The Passion of the Christ," and as she talks it starts to come clear: The things Cole learned in that close-knit, mountain community where she grew up had everything to do with her being in that room in Italy that day.
That the five-bedroom house with the verandas she owns along with the 20-acre ranch, and her weighty client list, and the name she has in a town that is all about names — all of that had its roots right here in the San Lorenzo Valley.
Come on, listen.
It’s a heck of a story.
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Leaving for L.A.
Cole was one of those kids you noticed in school.
She was pretty and smart. She rode horses, worked on the yearbook and played on the softball team at San Lorenzo Valley High.
"She was very beautiful, but also so intelligent and down-to-earth," says her longtime friend, Beth Hollenbeck.
"She was an excellent student," says her mom, Judy Pawlak. "She excelled in a variety of things."
But like a lot of high school kids, Cole had no idea what she wanted to do with her life.
So when an aptitude test said she would be good in communications, she headed south, enrolled in Pepperdine University and decided she wanted to be in the movie business. She got jobs working off-camera on TV commercials and films like Ron Howard’s firefighter drama "Backdraft" and the low-budget thriller "Far From Home" starring Drew Barrymore.
But she learned that hard work isn’t always enough in Hollywood. That mostly you had to have money or connections if you wanted to be a producer like she had planned, so she shelved her dream and decided to try a different track.
She got a job in a Hollywood talent agency.
So there she was at 25, working in the mailroom at Triad Artists — a not-so-glamorous job that had her mother wondering if her daughter’s Pepperdine education would ever pay off.
But there’s one quality Cole has in abundance, says her friend Hollenbeck, it’s perseverance. It took only two months for Cole to be promoted and find herself working as an assistant to one of the agents.
"I became a phone connoisseur," says Cole, a tall blond with blue eyes and a fine fashion sense.
She learned how to deflect an actor without deflating their egos, how to slip a person off the phone with the grace of a magician’s assistant.
"Actors are unique in and of themselves because they are up against a lot of personal rejections every day," Cole says. "There is a certain way to make them feel good about what they did, even if they didn’t do well in the (audition) room that day."
It was a talent that made people notice her — that and the fact Cole possessed something else:
Instinct. Nose. Gut.
Whatever you want to call it, she had it.
Once, as an assistant, says Cole, she was asked to read a script for a movie being proposed for two of Triad’s clients, Patrick Swayze and Melanie Griffith.
"I said, ‘Oh they should do it,’" Cole remembers saying, but both of the stars passed on the offer.
The movie?
"Sleepless in Seattle."
Another time, Cole was asked to read a script for a TV pilot for actor Tom Skerritt.
She thought it was a good fit.
It turned out to be the successful David Kelly show, "Picket Fences" and Skerritt became its star.
Hollenbeck thinks Cole’s ability to know what will fly comes from growing up in the San Lorenzo Valley.
"There were so many different personalities and backgrounds, we kind of grew up learning to see the beauty in everyone... and the potential in everything." Hollenbeck says,
Cole’s father Ed Pawlak says, growing up, his daughter always surrounded herself "with quality people. I think she can find quality," he says.
Cole just shrugs her shoulders, and says it’s something inside, something you just feel.
"Like women’s intuition," she says.
Whatever you call it, a few years into her assistant’s job at Triad, Cole met a handsome, blue-eyed actor named James Caviezel, and even though no one at the agency wanted to sign him, she remembers thinking he was an actor who had the potential to be a star.
When Cole got a job as an agent a little while later, Caviezel was her first client.
Which is how she came to be in that restaurant in Italy, eating ribs and sipping wine with Mel Gibson.
From surfing to Jesus
Her dinner with Mel began with a phone call from Steve McEveety, Gibson’s longtime business producer who worked with him on films like "Braveheart" and "We Were Soldiers."
He told Cole he was doing a surf movie called "Mavericks" and wanted to talk to Caviezel about starring in it.
But the only waves at the lunch that day came from what Gibson was proposing.
He started talking about his faith and Jesus to her client, says Cole.
"You want me to play Jesus, don’t you?" Caviezel said.
"Well, yeah," Gibson said.
"Right then, Jim felt compelled to do it," Cole says.
The next day, Gibson phoned Caviezel to make sure.
"This could be a career killer," he warned the 33-year-old actor.
"I’ll carry that cross," said Caviezel.
A devout Catholic himself, Caviezel was so committed to the project he agreed to do the film for no up-front money.
He accepted the minimum wage that an actor could be paid. Then, in what seemed like an act of faith at the time, Caviezel took bonuses for box-office results.
Cole says she agreed with the decision even though her fee would be equally low.
"Whether the movie would ever see the light of day except in film history classes, I still wanted to be part of it," says Cole, who grew up attending the Evangelical Free Church in Felton and still attends church regularly.
The world was at a crossroads, she believed. People wanted movies with hope and answers. She didn’t care that she might not profit financially from it.
On the Monday after the film opened, Caviezel got a check for his deferred salary and box office bonuses.
It, Cole says, totaled in the millions of dollars.
And for her?
Well, she’ll have to wait until the end of the year to see what her bonus will be.
But it’s probably safe to say she won’t have to worry about paying off that ranch.
The agony, ecstasy
"The Passion" was not an easy film for Caviezel, according to Cole.
He was accidentally whipped across the back during the scourging scene, leaving a 14-inch scar. He got a lung infection and hypothermia from his scene hanging on the cross in Italy in the dead of winter.
During a reshooting of the Sermon on the Mount scene, the man who played Jesus was also struck by lightning.
Caviezel was standing under an umbrella next to a young assistant director when a bolt came out of the sky and the air turned pink around him.
Miraculously Jim was OK, Cole says.
Gibson reportedly tells the lightning story with a wink, evidence, he says, that a major VIP visited the set, according to People magazine.
Cole likes to tell the story too, along with accounts of other miraculous things that happened — the daughter of someone on the set who was cured of her daily seizures, the rain that came to drought-striken Italy during filming, conversions that happened.
The movie, she says standing outside the Vineyard Church in Scotts Valley on a recent Sunday, is converting Hollywood too.
Right now, she says, agents and directors are dusting off scripts they once shelved, looking for more "spiritually-based" films.
And although no one can argue with success (the film is expected reap over $1 billion worldwide), it still takes a certain amount of courage to be a Christian in Hollywood, she says.
It was a courage that showed in her willingness to have her client star in a movie like "The Passion," says her mother — just like the courage Cole showed when she rode horses competitively as a young girl.
Among the 65 agents at the United Talent Agency in Beverly Hills where Cole works, she’s known as "the moral minority."
"But that’s the path I want to be on," says Cole, who teaches Sunday school and regularly attends church in Los Angeles.
"If I’m not out partying until 2 a.m. with the boys and the hip ones, that’s fine by me."
A good life
At the Vineyard Church, Cole is talking to her family, hunting down the pastor to give him a personally signed photo of Caviezel, and keeping an eye on her kids.
She’s a blur of blue jeans, heels and Ray Ban sunglasses.
"When you meet Pam, it’s like a hurricane just went past you," says her friend Hollenbeck.
Cole asks her husband, Cliff, to watch their son and daughter for a minute and heads outside to talk.
Caviezel will next be seen as the title character in the golf biopic "Bobby Jones, Stroke of Genius," due in theaters April 30.
Right now, she says, Caviezel is pondering two scripts — one a Western and another a Depression-era drama.
Both of them are good, she says. Both of them pay tribute to the fact Caviezel is on the verge of being a star with the drawing power of, say, Russell Crowe or Tom Cruise — a guy with "juice."
And "juice" is the gasoline of Tinseltown.
But success doesn’t Cole can sit back and relax.
She reads three to seven scripts every week, sneaking them in on her 6 a.m. spin on the Lifecycle or after her children have gone to bed, she says.
She power lunches most days, practically lives on the phone and has a host of other clients to watch out for. Claire Danes ("The Hours"), Rachel Griffiths ("Six Feet Under"), Ryan Phillippe ("Igby Goes Down"), Nick Stahl ("Man Without a Face") among others — along with a new kid she just signed because, she says, he has "it."
It?
"He came into my office, shook my hand and looked me right in the eye, the way Tom Cruise does," Cole says. "The way Tom Cruise will come up and shake your hand and say, ‘Hi, I’m Tom.’"
That, plus the fact he comes from a family of 11, worked his way through Harvard, majored in Latin, went to England to study acting and already got a part in Gwyneth Paltrow’s next movie, "Proof."
His name is John Keefe and "he’s the next Matt Damon," she says.
Which leads Cole to a conversation about the trouble with fame, and how she makes time to pick up her children from school every day, and her new ranch, and her husband who is a contractor and real estate developer.
Her words rev to red-line because an agent’s life is full of conversations, of keeping an ear to the ground, of keeping a finger on the pulse, and of knowing things like which hapless star turned down a big movie for one that fell flat on its face.
But friends here say even though Cole’s running at full speed, she always has time for them, and Cole says she always has time for her family.
Which all leads back to that dinner with Gibson.
"There I was," says Cole, "having dinner with Mel Gibson in a restaurant in Italy and my client’s in one of Mel’s movie and I thought: ‘Life couldn’t get any better than this.’"
Contact Peggy Townsend at ptownsend@santacruzsentinel.com.