Public Appearances > Appearances in 2010 > August 29th – Warren Easton Charter High School In New Orleans

For more information about the school and to donate to ongoing efforts, go to the Warrant Easton Charter Foundation.

Magazine Scans > Magazines in 2010 > EW – September 10, 2010

Sandra Bullock wasn’t buying the hype. Speaking to EW last fall, weeks before the opening of a little heart-warmer of a movie called The Blind Side, the actress – who had reemerged earlier that year from a two-year hiatus with her biggest hit ever, the romantic comedy The Proposal – predicted that her newly reinvigorated career would soon cool down again. She brushed off The Proposal’s success as a cosmic fluke: “I don’t pump my fist in the air. I don’t want anything karmically crashing down on me.” She dismissed the idea that she might score an Oscar nomination for The Blind Side: “The stuff that I migrate to isn’t the stuff that wins awards.” And she vowed that she would be off the public’s radar again in no time, holed up at home, with Hollywood at a comfortable distance. “Trust me, people are going to be like ‘Get her away,’” she said. “And I will go away. I’ll be quiet again after this.”

Bullock had always been known for light, slapsticky romantic comedies, and many of her earlier forays into drama had flopped. “I member right after Crash, I was pitching Sandra Bullock to a studio for another dramatic role and they went, ‘I don’t know, America doesn’t think of her this way’.” says Crash co-writer/ director Paul Haggis. “Now those same people want her for everything. It’s hysterical.”

But for the moment, there’s a bull market for all things Bullock. “Every movie you hear of and every script I see, they say, ‘We’re going to go after Sandra Bullock for the woman,’” says Ben Affleck, who costarred with Bullock in 1999′s Forces Of Nature.

Studio executives and film producers are courting her for every remotely suitable starring role available, in projects from a Disney family fable called The Odd Life of Timothy Green to Our Wild Life, a drama about an elephant orphanage. “Sandra Bullock is the golden girl,” a top film agent says flatly. “She’s getting offered all the scripts that matter. Everyone is rooting for her. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Whether by design or by accident, Bullock’s choices signaled a new clarity of purpose, and Hollywood was ready to take her back. “Everyone loves a story of someone who redeems themselves from crap,” says one veteran industry exec. “In Hollywood, everyone’s worked on crap, so it’s like, ‘Oh, look! This woman who made all these crappy movies can come back! So even though I swim in a sea of crap, I too can come back!’”

The fact is, thanks to the intangible chemical reaction that creates stardom, Sandra Bullock has always had a knack for making audiences fall in love with her. “From the minute we saw her in Speed, she just had this quality that people want to be around,” says Bradley Cooper, who costarred with Bullock in All About Steve. “It’s like being around a source of light.”

Now, with the Oscar, two big hits, and a massive outpouring of public support buoying her, the question remains where Bullock will go from here. She has stated on many occasions that she doesn’t want to do romantic comedies. As she told EW last fall, she just doesn’t have the stomach for them anymore: “We all know relationships don’t work that way,” she said, laughing. “It’s a lie! It’s a lie!

Speaking to EW last October as, unbeknownst to her, the roller coaster of her life was tick-tick-ticking up the crest of a hill, Bullock sounded philosophical. “You have really high peaks and you have some valleys,” she said. “The nice thing is that something like The Proposal gives you is you get to say, ‘Okay, I’ve done it. Something wonderful happened.’ But you can’t always have wonderful things, one after the other so just be happy with what you’ve got and that’s it.”

Much has been made about Oscar winner Sandra Bullock’s ties to the college town of Austin, Texas, where the star has retreated to avoid the paparazzi’s glare since her divorce from Jesse James. But on Tuesday (August 31), Bullock appeared on the “Today” show to discuss her love for New Orleans, where she has found another home.

Bullock, in her first televised interview since her split with James, told host Matt Lauer that the Big Easy has always been a comfortable place for her, somewhere she has gone often to visit, ring in the new year and most recently, the place where she finalized her adoption of son Louis.

But the reason she was there this week was to celebrate the successful rebuilding of the Warren Easton Charter High School, which suffered more than $4 million in damage five years ago this week during Hurricane Katrina. She sat next to Arthur Hardy, a New Orleans Mardi Gras expert and Easton board member, who said he laughed when Bullock called with an offer to help help, thinking someone was pulling his leg.

“She found us … [and] called me on a Sunday afternoon,” he said, laughing.

“I like to cold-call people, people who I think are outstanding community members … how you doin’?” Bullock joked.

Hardy said because he’s in the Mardi Gras business, “I deal with crazy people every day. So when she said, ‘This is Sandra Bullock,’ I said, ‘This is Clark Gable,’ and I was about to hang up.”

Hardy said once Bullock met the kids of the school, it cemented her decision to help out however she could.

Bullock helped raise funds to rebuild the school, which has its own health clinic and close to a 100 percent graduation rate, and she spoke about how Katrina exposed the cracks in New Orleans society around the issue of poverty. “It opened up something that I don’t think people knew about or maybe didn’t want to see,” she said. “But right here under this roof, there are souls and spirits and young people who don’t come from any money but carry this extraordinary spirit to override that, suck in every ounce of education that the school provides and get out of here and create a life for them that is beautiful and fulfilling … let this school be an example of how we don’t need to leave anyone behind.”

With her adoption of Nola-born Louie, whom she calls her “little Cajun cookie,” finalized, Bullock explained the relief she felt to finally have him all to herself. “It felt like it was time,” she said of the long process of adoption, noting that she did not cut any corners or ask for favors based on her fame. “It was nice to have someone say, ‘I think you’re a fit parent.’ ”

She also talked about his “healthy” poop schedules, the shift in priorities a child brings to a parent’s life and the secret of how she kept Louie’s adoption, well, a secret. “It takes good people with integrity,” she said, explaining how she was able to hide the bombshell from the prying press even as she was basking in an Oscar win for “The Blind Side.”

“Human beings exist that have integrity, that know how to keep their mouth shut. That know the bigger picture, that don’t sell out their friends,” she said. “Everything passes, they know if they screw up, they’re not coming up on the next vacation, I’m not gonna babysit their kids … I will cut them. I will take them down … I have friends and family that are filled with massive amounts of integrity. It shouldn’t be an oddity.”

Though Jesse James and the divorce did not come up and Lauer kept the questions mostly benign, Bullock pointedly used the word “integrity” several times in the interview, perhaps as a not-so-coded statement on her feelings of betrayal in the messy divorce caused by James’ multiple infidelities.

Source: MTV.com

The actor and jazz pianist gushed about the Oscar-winning actress as he discussed her relentless commitment to his beloved home city of New Orleans, devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

When asked by talk show host Larry King about Bullock’s recent traumas over the breakdown of her marriage, Connick Jnr – who is happily married – seemed to send out a stark message to her cheating soon-to-be-ex-husband Jesse James.

“I think Sandy is an incredible woman and she doesn’t need my prayers, she’s so strong,’ he said, during Friday night’s special episode to mark the five-year anniversary of the deadly hurricane. ‘I pray for her and I send her emails and tell her I love her and I hope she’s doing well‘.

‘That woman is one of the fiercest, strongest most dedicated people I know. It’s sucks, man. Let’s put it this way, if she was my wife I would be on my knees thanking God that I had a woman like that. Everybody’s different but I know her pretty well. Like my wife now, I wouldn’t screw that up for all the money in the world, for anything.‘

Pointing to his own wedding ring, he added: ‘This means a lot. It’s a pretty serious commitment, I’m not passing judgment on anyone but whoever ends up with her (Bullock) for good is gonna be one lucky son of a gun‘.

‘I know her son doesn’t even know how lucky he is.‘

Source: Dailymail

NBC announced Wednesday that the Oscar-winning actress will sit down with “Today” host Matt Lauer on Tuesday.

The interview will take place at Warren Easton Charter High School in New Orleans. Bullock will discuss the opening this month of the school’s on-campus health clinic that she helped fund.

Bullock had spent time in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina with former husband Jesse James. She has adopted a baby who was born there.

Warner Bros. and Paramount are eyeing Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks for the feature version of post- 9/11 drama “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” with Scott Rudin producing.

Warners, the lead studio on the project, indicated it has made offers to the thesps but is not yet in formal negotiations. And the studios have not yet greenlit the project. The Jonathan Safran Foer novel, set in 2003, centers on a 9-year-old boy who finds a key in a vase that belongs to his father — who perished in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — and searches to find the lock that goes with it. It was one of the first American novels to incorporate the Sept. 11 events into the plot.

Rudin has been developing the project since 2005, when “Extremely Loud” was published. Eric Roth has adapted the novel and Stephen Daldry is attached to direct.

Should Bullock sign on, it would be her first role since “The Blind Side.” Hanks will next be seen opposite Julia Roberts in U’s comedy-drama “Larry Crowne,” which he also directed and produced.

Source: Variety