Kevin Costner: All That Kevin Allows

Stacy's Knights and Costner went unsung when the movie crept in and out of theaters in 1983. The best a critic could muster about the leading man was to find him "comfortable, engaging." But, says Orrison, who for years was mortified to admit to her involvement with the movie, "What the producers seemed to like most about Kevin was that, compared to other [actors], he was nice, sweet, and easy." Hot guys are a dime a dozen in Hollywood; solid citizens, who also happen to be hot, are miracles.

To Costner, even a non-event like Stacy's Knights represented a career boost, coming as it did a year after his doing a slasher flick, Shadows Run Black, and eight years after his debut in Sizzle Beach, U.S.A. These were movies made, Costner has said, "to show a tit or ass every six minutes, but [they] weren't porn." Porn or not, these surely were not the kinds of endeavors he had in mind for himself when, in 1978 on the return flight from his honeymoon, he introduced himself to Richard Burton and asked not for advice on how to get ahead in the business, but whether Burton "thought it was possible to be essentially a good man and still be in the business." We don't know whether or not Burton was in his cups, but according to Costner, he answered the eager young actor in the affirmative.

Traditional notions about goodness, loyalty, and so on loomed large in Costner's consciousness early on. He had met his wife of 13 years, Cindy Silva, whom he has described as "so beautiful, so decent," at a Delta Chi party at Cal State Fullerton in 1975 (he was studying marketing and finance), and claims to have had "probably...one date my entire high school life."

Costner then moved with his wife to West Hollywood, where he stage-managed at Raleigh Studios, studied acting, and occasionally modeled. Work was scarce for Costner in those days. He modeled for photographer Barry McKinley for a 1982 GQ cover (he got paid $75), but was bumped for Zubin Mehta. Then Adrian Lyne, who turned him down for Flashdance, featured him (for $20,000) in an Apple Computer commercial.

Enter Wallis Nicita, a powerful, well-respected casting director who gave early screen breaks to Kathleen Turner, Kevin Kline, and William Hurt, and has since become a movie producer. She encountered Costner while seeing actors for the 1984 Debra Winger movie, Mike's Murder. "He breezed into my office," Nicita recalls, "absolutely gorgeous, picked up the scene, did a phenomenal cold reading, said 'Thank you very much' with a big smile on his face, and breezed out. I was stunned. What made him irresistible and separated him from a lot of the other beautiful men who cruise through my office was a great sense of humor about himself, self-irony. I walked out to my secretary and said: 'Whoever that guy is, he's a movie star.' " Writer-director James Bridges chose someone else for Mike's Murder, but Nicita recommended Costner to an agent and "he never left my heart or mind." He had his first major league booster.

J.J. Harris, of the William Morris agency, became the next cheerleader. Championed by the well-connected Nicita and Harris, Costner won bits in Frances (uttering one line in an alley] and Night Shift (playing "Frat Boy #1") be-fore finally grabbing the lead in a film that would be his first, albeit small, step out of obscurity. Fandango, director Kevin Reynolds's feature-length version of his USC film school short PROOF, stood a chance of pulling in an audience primarily be-cause it was produced by Steven Spielberg. But the line Costner mutters as he sprawls in drunken disarray and hurls darts at a photo of his ex-girlfriend at the film's opening--"Almost, darlin' "--was to play as a triple entendre, covering not just the immediate scene, but the whole movie and the state of Costner's career as well. Mostly, Fandango was an amiably ramshackle coming-of-age movie that was not helped by the fact that Costner, Judd Nelson, and Sam Robards all mooned twice within the first ten minutes. Costner managed to hold the screen, but his looks hadn't truly come on line yet. Shelved for more than a year, the film eventually opened to good reviews and no business. But the film served at least one valuable purpose--director Reynolds became another of Costner's bonding buddies who would turn up later on.

After Fandango, Nicita helped stir things up again. She sent Costner to Lawrence Kasdan who, at the time, was casting The Big Chill, his follow-up directorial effort to Body Heat. He hired Costner to play "Alex," the brilliant University of Michigan radical whose suicide ignites the reunion that forms the movie's spine. Costner dropped out of a decent role in WarGames to work for Kasdan in just one scene--a flashback to 15 years before the start of the action. It was a plum role in a scene that, says Nicita, "explained and enriched the excruciating relationships of the movie. What's more, everyone talks about Alex for the rest of the movie." Costner looked made, but it was another case of "Almost, darlin'." Kasdan cut Costner's scene from the movie, confiding, "It hurts me as much as it hurts you," and assuring the actor that they would work together again. Oddly, the cut scene in a much talked-about movie enhanced Costner's aura. More-over, Costner took one of his cornerstone lessons from director Kasdan: "Power is a misleading thing. Larry [Kasdan] told me when I was doing The Big Chill that it is important to maintain that power, even if you don't have it at that time. If you think you are special, others will too."

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