Hope Davis loves her Brooklyn neighborhood, but she’s already seeing signs of the economic downturn on the Smith Street shopping strip. “Even the little spa on my corner is advertising 50 percent off facials. Everybody’s suffering; it’s going to affect everybody,” Davis told us at the Cinema Society screening of her film, Synecdoche, New York. She’s also certain that the economy will temper the area’s skyrocketing real-estate values. “It’ll have an effect on the real estate there. It has to! And there’s some correction needed,” she admits. And while the American Splendor star says she doesn’t spend extravagantly anyway, she and her husband and two young children are not buying clothes or going out to dinner as often, and she’s already lost a job in the belt-tightening. “The movie that I was supposed to start making in three weeks collapsed,” she told us. “Half of the financing just pulled right out last week,” she said, adding that she expected the news as the markets tumbled. She says that indie films financed by people who make their money in the stock market will continue to feel the chill. And that’s already trickling down. “We’re hoping to do solar panels on our roof; now we have to wait,” Davis says. “We have to see what’s going to happen, and I have to wait until I get another job.” But she still has, well, hope: “Now I get to stay home, though.”
