You know these guys are respected actors. You know their names lend prestige to the projects they sign on. And you know that you'd rather go bowling or just stay home than see one of their movies.
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James Woods
Would you rather see a movie about a crazed weasel fraught with moments of con-science, or a movie about a conscientious guy fraught with moments of crazed weaseliness? What? You say you'd rather just stay home and do your taxes? Well, that's why James Woods isn't a movie star. Woods himself never lets you doubt that he's a brilliant guy. I don't think many people doubt he's also a very good actor. And you can see for yourself that he's an arresting presence on the screen.But life is short and there's only so much time you can devote to watching crazed weasels--the moviegoing public has an uncanny wisdom about this.
In the right role, in the harness of the right director, Woods can really amuse you for a while. In Oliver Stone's Salvador, for example, your human sympathy outguns your impulse to reach for your Valium and Woods comes off as a fun, virtuoso sleazoid.
In David Cronenberg's Videodrome, the hideous scale of Woods's freakout short-circuits your gut protest and you can have a good time. But more often with Woods, we get something like The Boost, a movie that has the potential to become a camp classic not just because this was his fateful pairing with Sean Young, but because he hilariously undercuts the cautionary tale about drug abuse by flying all over the frame in the first 20 minutes so that when his character actually starts snorting coke you don't notice any difference. Woods has been beefing for years now that Hollywood's unfairly pigeonholed him, that he can do a hell of a lot more than play speedy nutcases.
But when he finally won the right to grab his chance to go mainstream after receiving a Best Actor nomination for Salvador, he didn't score--just check your local video store for Bestseller or True Believer, among others, if you don't believe me. He even went so far as to play the ideal father for an adopted child (!!) in 1989's Immediate Family.
Woods is right that Hollywood does not know how to deal with him (did his mother?), but he is fatuous and arrogant if he thinks he's a versatile leading man. It would be great if Hollywood could come up with the occasional picture ingenious enough to handle Woods as its star--that would be to Hollywood's credit.
But Hollywood is Hollywood.
And Woods is Woods.
--Rebecca Morris
Gene Hackman
Few actors have made as many good films as Gene Hackman: Bonnie and Clyde, The French Connection, The Conversation, Under Fire, to name but a few. Of course, few have made as many bad films either: Doctors' Wives, The Poseidon Adventure, Lucky Lady, Split Decisions, Full Moon in Blue Water, Loose Cannons--the latter trio in the last three years alone. In short, it's the rare Oscar-winning leading man who's so overexposed that he's knocked himself out of the lofty realm of Bankable Stars.
Hackman, in a 30-year career, has thrown his craggy but vastly talented mug up there on screen over 50 times. Audiences today can't help but be underwhelmed by news of the latest "Gene Hackman film"--odds are it'll be a perfunctory vehicle in which Hackman's the best thing. With ticket prices what they are, and with so many fine Bruce Willis or Patrick Swayze or Macaulay Culkin films to choose from, is it any wonder that Hackman's last seven films' combined grosses total just over $30 million (not counting Postcards From the Edge, in which he had a cameo)--about one week's take for Home Alone?
Sure, the comparison's unfair--except to Hollywood studios, where it's as relevant as life itself. Hackman was the seventh choice to play Popeye Doyle in what would be his breakthrough film, 1971's The French Connection, but his talent and Everyman appeal proved the perfect combination in the gritty, reality-based cop thriller (the kind they used to make in the early '70s), and he won the Oscar. Hackman proceeded to take just about everything he could get in the years that followed--sometimes indiscriminate choices in what he later candidly admitted was an attempt to make as much money as possible.
By 1978, after15 more films, he realized that audiences were tiring. And when he saw silly Christopher Reeve in his silly cape on the set of Superman (Hackman was cast as the silly villain Lex Luthor), he realized he was tired too. Three years later, he was back--he's an actor, after all--and was soon seen in Superman II. He worked steadily--again--and in this phase of his career won fine notices for more character-oriented, supporting roles (the lecherous Secretary of Defense in No Way Out), while his Everyman appeal appeared undiminished in sleepers like Twice in a Lifetime and Hoosiers.
Hackman capped this era with a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his tough Southern cop in Mississippi Burning,which was hardly a blockbuster. But-shades of the '70s--he was soon grabbing at anything, occasionally winning good notices in critical fave/box-office duds like Woody Allen's Another Woman, but seemingly all too eager to play variations on his Popeye Doyle persona, in money-losing military "thrillers" like The Package.
How low can he go? The $5 million-grossing, dim-witted cop comedy Loose Cannons has got to be it. But with any luck, we'll one day be able to walk up to a marquee with Hackman's name on it and boldly plunk down our money once again.
--Lamar Petersen
Christopher Walken
The French aren't right about much (e.g., Jerry Lewis, Mickey Rourke), but they're right about Christopher Walken. They like him. And indeed, this living noir actor is almost unfailingly interesting. He exudes baroque eccentricity through a physicality that, were it not the location of his frightening nervous system, would be exotically beautiful.
"Chris," you want to ask, "whatever happened to the sweet kid Nicky who went off to Vietnam in The Deer Hunter?" But obviously, the post-Russian-roulette Nicky was closer to Walken's heart than the angelic pre-war boy. And so, gradually, through a series of plugged-in performances (The Dogs of War, Heaven's Gate, At Close Range, The King of New York), Walken has attained the status of an actor whose presence in a movie is a prime indicator that the movie will die at the box office, deservedly or not. Perhaps it is because any movie that can house Walken is by definition one that upsets an audience in a way that precludes megabucks.
Once he was in a James Bond picture which made money, but that doesn't count. He was also in the $43 million-grossing Biloxi Blues, but you'd have to say that film pretty much survived him (and casting directors should know better than to put lion Walken in the same frame with pussycat Matthew Broderick ever again). It's not that Walken didn't earn his partial typecasting as a borderline psycho--he's got a set of tics that would laugh at L-Dopa--but it's a pity that screen audiences aren't as flexible as theater audiences, who've seen Walken (fundamentally a New York stage actor) do everything.
Take a look at Pennies From Heaven for Walken's show-stopping song and dance and you'll see the film world's only glance at an actor stage audiences discovered long before The Deer Hunter. Then, of course, you might take a look at 1989's Communion, in which Walken, perfectly cast, plays a guy who sees little blue men for real. (I could not help noting that the plot failed to exploit the possibility that these aliens had mistaken Walken for one of their own.) Not surprisingly, this picture wasn't box-office gold. But then, Hollywood just doesn't make movies that can accommodate Christopher Walken and also make money, though it would be a better, more interesting place if it did.
--R. M.
Ed Harris
1989's undersea adventure The Abyss was risky film making. Not because, at $50 million, it was one of the most expensive films ever made. Not even because cast and crew labored for weeks in gigantic underwater tanks. No, director James Cameron's biggest gamble was the casting of Ed Harris as the film's hero. The actor's previous six films had combined box-office revenues of less than $15 million.
It's not that Harris isn't talented. He certainly is. It's not that he lacks presence--even his brief appearance can throw an entire film off-balance (witness his turn as a crackpot mercenary in Under Fire). He's got a look--blonde hair (well, what there is of it), chiseled features, piercing grey-blue eyes. But audiences have never warmed to Harris. He's not a "movie star," like, say, Bruce Willis, who can't touch him, talent-wise. Would Willis have been as convincing as the leader of the doomed underwater rig in The Abyss? No way! Would audiences have liked the movie better? You bet. With Harris, The Abyss pulled in only $54 million--far less than they needed to break even.
Years ago, Harris was offered the psycho role in a Dirty Harry film. He knew better than to take that, but in many ways he's chosen to fall into milder versions of that trap ever since. In 1983, he made the cover of Newsweek, in character as astronaut John Glenn in the much-ballyhooed The Right Stuff (a box office disappointment), but he was perhaps too successful at capturing the self-righteous piousness that made real life all-American hero Glenn such a creep.
He went on to be too successful at portraying unsympathetic supporting characters in earnest little films like Swing Shift and_ Places in the Heart_. And then he was really convincing beating up Patsy Cline in Sweet Dreams. When Harris did get to play leads, they were largely unsympathetic, and they were in films so grim (Louis Malle's Alamo Bay; the Vietnam vet saga Jacknife), or so awful (Alex Cox's abortion Walker) that few bothered to seek them out. Because, for better or for worse, this is simply not a world in which people say, "But it's an Ed Harris film!"
In last year's non-profit-making Irish gangster saga State of Grace, Harris played a psychotic hoodlum willing to kill his brother to get in with the Mob. Here he was so nasty that he had to die at the hands of Sean Penn. Harris is reportedly no picnic to work with--par for the course for many a serious performer--but off-screen he's loaded with charm. The problem is, he just refuses to exploit this charismatic side of himself in tried-and-true leading man fashion.
--L. P.
Robert Duvall
Robert Duvall is a great actor with a face like a killer--you know, one of those guys who ups and murders his wife and kids one day because they looked at him funny. In short, he looks like an accountant, or maybe an attorney (and was thus more or less convincing as a WASP lawyer surrounded by cold-blooded killers in the first two Godfather movies). But with that slash of a mouth and those cold blue eyes, he usually reads" time bomb"-- and generally has just that effect on the box office. It's a tribute to the sheer force of his gift that some of the time he's been able to turn his face into something more to be pitied than feared. Take Tender Mercies, for which he won the Best Actor Academy Award; he tore your heart out as the burnt-out country singer Mac Sledge (even though, deep down, I swear I thought he was gonna up and murder Tess Harper in her sleep one night--and c'mon, admit it, don't you wish he had?).
Duvall had a percolating career going for a while, starting with his role as the dim Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, and going on to Network, the Godfathers, Apocalypse Now, and The Great Santini, among others. It was after winning his Oscar in Tender Mercies that Duvall pretty much stopped making movies that brought audiences into theaters, with a few exceptions like The Natural, which was a modest success, and Days of Thunder, an even more modest success.
Unfortunately, he seems to have sworn off working with Francis Coppola, whose movies offered him some of his best roles and highest visibility. Instead he's shown a real flair for finding projects that were all doomed, each in their own way: schlocky boys' movies like Hotel Colonial and Let's Get Harry; movies in which he could indulge his secret desire to go over the top, like his dapper southern psychopath in The Lightship or the commander of the forced fertility corps in The Handmaid's Tale; very, very small movies that needed to be translated into English, like Behzaire the Cajun; and depressing movies in rural settings, like The Stone Boy.
Some of these box-office failures were unwarranted, the result of poor marketing and distribution, but a great many of them were downright lousy. In all cases, either bad luck or bad judgment was clearly a factor. Duvall's an ace character actor who might have done better had he not been propelled into leading roles--call this the Gene Hackman syndrome. There's no doubt he can act, just as there's no doubt his lack of starry charisma has kept audiences away in recent years.
Give 'em what they want for free, however, and it's another matter: when Duvall moved into TV last year with "Lonesome Dove," he had the biggest success of his career. While this added some much-needed lustre to his standing in the industry, it seems to have impaired his judgment: Duvall reportedly sat out The Godfather Part III because Francis Coppola wouldn't pony up sufficient millions. (On second thought, maybe Duvall's judgment isn't that bad.) --Maggie Amberson
Gregory Hines
It's sad but true that there are still too few meaningful lead roles for black actors in high-profile films. Indeed, Gregory Hines's first four major roles had him sharing that star spot with presumably better-known, more bankable names. But Hines outshone Richard Gere in The Cotton Club, Baryshnikov in White Nights, and Willem Dafoe in Off Limits, and he managed to hold his own the wildly popular funny man Billy Crystal in Running Scared.
Hines is a good actor and a great dancer who's divided his leading-man screen time between playing cops and playing dancers, failing in both capacities to become a star. The problem for Hines's box-office career is that his cop movies just aren't very good (Off Limits, Running Scared, and Eve of Destruction), and modern audiences don't go in for dancing movies, unless they have some kind of Patrick Swayze hunk-factor. And tap-master Hines, who's danced in The Cotton Club, White Nights, and Tap, is no more of a hunk than Fred Astaire was.
When it comes to dancing, Hines simply has no screen peers. He was the obvious choice for The Cotton Club, the film that might have made him a big star and brought dancing back to the screen, if it hadn't earned an early, unshakable rep as yet another Francis Coppola" disaster." In his ninth film, 1989's Tap, Hines finally got to go solo (indeed, a tap dancer, which is what Hines has been since childhood, is by definition and training a soloist). He played an ex-con struggling with the complications that ensue when he puts his tap shoes back on in this overly sentimental film which dealt with the demise of tap in American culture--and the box-office returns concurred that, indeed, tap was in pretty dire straits.
What to do next? Another cop film, of course, though this time out he got to go it alone, tracking down a female android run amok in Eve of Destruction (the android was a sexy blonde; looks like Hollywood doesn't quite trust Hines on his own yet). The film, despite the success of the Barry McGuire song of the same name 26 years ago, had nothing to offer but another capable performance by Hines, and it got little in return.
If TV's "Cop Rock" had been a hit instead of a dismal failure, the stage would have been set for a new kind of box-office sure thing: the dance-musical cop caper. And that film would have starred Gregory Hines. This man wants to make a couple of dancing films every year, and he could probably pull it off, too. Instead, he got to do his own stunts in Eve of Destruction.
--L. P.
Gary Oldman
Gary Oldman movies frighten audiences away because people correctly sense that Oldman is never more than an instant away from vomiting, wailing, rolling in the mud, killing, or being killed. This gifted and highly trained young actor simply has no scruples about emoting, and most of his directors have no scruples about letting him. Not for nothing was he cast as the vicious Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy, the homosexual murder victim in Prick Up Your Ears, the demonic-son-lover conjured in an alcoholic nightmare in Track 29, the shell-shocked wacko in Chattahoochee, and the unwashed, psychotic gangster in State of Grace.
This guy can act, dammit, and he's hell-bent on rubbing your nose in his talent. One of the subsidiary reasons Oldman movies fare badly with the masses is that they tend to be very small films (nothing wrong with this) which must bear up under his Big Performances (there's the rub]. But even in last year's big-budget bomb State of Grace, Oldman so hysterically unbalanced the proceedings that Sean Penn was made to seem quite sedate. Still, histrionics may not be the core factor behind Gary Oldman's box-office poison.
A friend of mine stands by another explanation altogether: It's his hair. Now that Mickey Rourke appears to be cleaning up (he sports a short, spikey 'do in his upcoming Harley epic), Oldman has picked up the anti-shampoo banner--the gooey, stringy stuff on his head in State of Grace outdoes anything in Barfly. And even in Criminal Law, in which Oldman plays a relatively sane lawyer (who nevertheless sees homicidal killer Kevin Bacon's face when he looks down at his girlfriend as he's violently screwing her), the actor appears in court with hair that is clean, but inexplicably swept up in a style reminiscent of Lana Turner.
Oldman needs to remember that Hollywood isn't like that land of real actors he comes from, England. Here, hair counts.
--R. M.