You remember her from "Chasing Amy" and "Big Daddy," — but until she played Jennifer Aniston's best friend in "The Break Up" last summer, you haven't seen one-time Golden Globe nominee Joey Lauren Adams in many high-profile roles lately.

Even though you haven't seen her much, she's been busy writing, producing and directing her own movie. The fruit of her labor — "Come Early Morning" — hits theaters this Friday.

It all started seven years ago when the actress found herself, as she says, "becoming self-destructive during my down time between films because I was in the position of waiting to be wanted and of being bored."

Out of boredom came "Come Early Morning," which stars Ashley Judd as a small-town Southerner who buries her troubles by drinking and having a lot of one-night stands until a life-changing connection comes along.

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PASSION OR OBSESSION?

The movie (and Adams will be the first to say it) became all consuming for the first-time writer/director.

"I can't tell the difference between passion and obsession and just a sort of stubbornness," Adams says. "You invest so much time in something, it gets harder and harder to walk away from it. The healthier thing might have been for me, after three years into it and not being able to find the money, to walk away because it wasn't fun."

But she didn't.

Adams spent much of her time raising the $3.4 million she would need to film the movie. Not an easy task for someone wanting to make a Southern, female-driven movie. She said getting the money was one of the hardest things she's had to do.

With the money finally secure, Adams assembled her cast — besides Judd she hired Hollywood names such as Diane Ladd, Laura Prepon and Jeffrey Donovan — last year in her hometown of North Little Rock, Ark., a location she insisted on.

"It took five weeks to shoot what I had spent five years trying to finance," Adams says. "I'm still struggling with that one."

One help was what she found in Arkansas — people obsessively supportive of their hometown girl done good, who was coming back to her roots to make her movie and bringing big stars like Ashley Judd with her. Adams used locals as extras. She attended local charity fundraisers. She even appeared in a statewide advertisement to motivate young voters.

Arkansans love Joey.

In the meantime, back in Hollywood, Adams was taking smaller acting roles in movies like "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" or using her famous lilting voice in "Dr. Doolittle 2" and two episodes of the cartoon TV series "Stripperella." Little roles like these allowed her time to focus on her movie.

She told The Associated Press in 2004 that the break hurt her acting career, but that it didn't bother her.

"I just don't tend to worry about things like that," Adams said at the time. "I'm more interested in writing and directing than on acting right now. I'm lucky to be able to switch careers at my age."

She was 36.

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MORNING COMES

With filming wrapped in spring 2005, Adams headed to California, where she spent long nights preparing her movie. She earned a spot at the Sundance Film Festival this past January and the pressure was on again: this time to find a company to distribute the movie. Her eventual distributor, Roadside Attractions, saw the film at its first Sundance showing.

Now, nearly another year later, "Come Early Morning" has found a home on commercial movie screens. Adams is uncertain about its prospects.

"Of course you want it to make a gazillion dollars," she says. "I'd love for my financiers to get their money back. To make it easier for me the next time I want to do something like this. The whole process has been a series of little battles and I don't know that you ever feel like, 'I've won the war.'"

Seven years of her life — of anyone's life — is a long time to work on anything. This weekend she'll find out how appreciated that work will be. Adams says professionally she won't be able to let her movie go until it's out of theaters and on DVD.

But personally, she's had her move-on moment.

"At Sundance, I had a very existential breakdown," she says. "Going, 'Who am I now that I'm not Joey trying to get her movie made?' I bought a house in Mississippi and I got my first paid writing job, which I can do there. I feel like I've successfully made the transition."

No more acting for the 38-year-old?

"One step at a time," Adams says. "If I'm not in Los Angeles putting all of my energy into trying to get acting work and going on meetings and going on auditions, I don't know how successful I'll be at getting acting jobs. There's not a whole lot going on in Mississippi on that front. I'm more interested in writing, so I'll go and do that and see then after that how I feel."

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Want to know more about the movie? Click here

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Caryn Rousseau is asap's Midwest writer, based in Kansas City, Mo. She first interviewed Joey Lauren Adams for The Associated Press in 2004.

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