As a child, she played an extra in a Martin Scorsese film and had to eat an ice cream cone on camera. It took 19 takes. Scorsese told her mother that if she could eat that much ice cream without throwing up, she was destined to be an actress.

Her mother was Diane Ladd, her father Bruce Dern. She grew up on sets, still mostly known as their daughter. Then, in her teens, Laura Dern carried a small film that went largely unnoticed, but has since become a minor classic.

SMOOTH TALK (1985) follows a fifteen-year-old named Connie through the last summer of her childhood. Dern plays her drifting between home and the mall, testing the edges of a grown-up world she does not understand. For most of its length it looks like a gentle coming-of-age film.

Then a man comes up the driveway. Arnold Friend, older, all smiling charm, played with slippery menace by Treat Williams. He stands outside while she is home alone and simply talks, toying with her, a predator coiling to pounce on her innocence. The Joyce Carol Oates story the film was based on was drawn from a true magazine account of a man who preyed on teenage girls.

Smooth Talk was the debut feature of documentary filmmaker Joyce Chopra. It won Sundance's top prize, then all but vanished, grossing under twenty thousand dollars. Chopra was hired to make Bright Lights, Big City, one of the first women trusted with a picture that size. Producer Sydney Pollack quickly fired her over creative differences and replaced her with a studio veteran.

The trades ran her name in every headline as the woman who got fired. In her writings, Chopra noted that the press turned her into a cautionary tale for other female directors trying to enter mainstream studio filmmaking.

She has since spent decades in television, and only lately, with a memoir and a Criterion disc, has the world opened its eyes to what Joyce Chopra made here.