Kevin Costner: All That Kevin Allows

Still. Costner's powerful team of supporters were sure that he was ready to pop. He turned down $1 million to star in Shanghai Surprise for Orion (Sean Penn went on to do that folly) and instead took the studio up on a Robert Garland script, Finished With Engines, a reworking of the 1948 thriller, The Big Clock, which six studios and three networks had rejected more than 100 times according to producer Mace Neufeld. Producer Laura Ziskin said she cast him as the tightly coiled Ollie Northish lieutenant in the project, retitled No Way Out, because, "there was a time when there was Redford, McQueen, and Eastwood, but now there's only Harrison Ford and Kevin Costner." No matter that Ziskin apparently discounted such box-office draws as Mel Gibson or Michael Douglas. No Way Out was the wild card that turned out to be Costner's ticket to stardom.

The spy thriller was no surefire hit. Another actor, less chemistry, and the story's flaws would have overcome its virtues easily. The money scene, the one that pushed the movie into box-office heaven, was the one in which Costner unzips, de-garters, and ravishes party doll Sean Young in a limo's back seat, then says to her afterwards, grinning: "My name is Tom." That's what left audiences panting. It also left Young marveling at her co-star's "deep puritanical strain." And it left Costner wondering "if I was doing things right." Orion sold No Way Out, shot before, but released after The Untouchables, largely on sex icon stuff: in the ads, Costner stared out hotly while Sean Young swooned over his chest.

Costner's career seemed finally to be on lift-off. Orion's then-president Mike Medavoy was actively promoting a liaison between the actor and the studio. Offscreen, the actor was playing it cool--how many times had he been told that this picture would do it for him?--raising his kids and taking de-light in buying his folks a particular Chevrolet truck, a Silverado, for Christmas.

Although Paramount had been willing to kill for a Mel, a Harrison, or a William Hurt to play Eliot Ness in The Untouchables, and felt they were "settling" for Kevin Costner, Costner himself twice turned down the film for which he was to be paid $800,000, calling the role "stiff" and "not the most charismatic character in the movie." Surely he saw from miles off that his co-stars would steal the show--more than one critic would complain that Costner lacked "magnetism"--but in the end, Brian DePalma, whom few would mistake for an actor's director, credits Costner's "innate purity" with allowing Ness to utter with conviction such Mamet-isms as, "I have fore-sworn myself. I have broken every law I swore to defend. I've become what I've beheld and I'm content that I have done right."

No Way Out and The Untouchables, solid hits that exposed Costner to millions, contain some of the actor's least aware, most bottled-up work. But the momentum that Nicita, Harris, Kasdan and others had helped create ushered in a massive wave of press coverage that hailed him as a new American movie hero, a Gable, Cooper, or Fonda come again. Of course, the press since the early Reagan years had been so hot for a white-bread, can-do movie icon that, for an instant, even Sam Shepard (playing Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff) got a send-off. Costner was finally in the right place at the right time. It struck more sober minds, however, that Costner was pretty dull for someone who was garnering all this hoopla. After all, they reasoned, could you imagine Costner holding his own against such old-time movie sharks as Victor Fleming, William Well-man, or Howard Hawks? Or breaking even against a Harlow, Crawford, Bergman, or Loren? Costner struck one as a throw-back, maybe, but a scaled-down, spacier version, a model for the '90s, a raw-boned, screwball hunk closer to Steve McQueen than to the stone lions of the '30s and '40s.

But if Costner's fixed expression and opacity sometimes struck one as dense, maybe soul-dead, there was also this: this actor read on film like a stand-up guy. A woman friend of mine told me, in fact, that she preferred him to any of the other boys of celluloid. "He's got an easy guy charm, without all the bull" (bull being shorthand for bulging pecs, gunplay, and terminal Peter Pan-it is). Costner himself marveled that "guys don't seem to be threatened by me. They say to their girl, 'Hey, this is the guy you liked in that movie.' " Costner may be easy to overestimate, but he's easy to underestimate too. In case you suspect that his loping, slow-hand affability may be clone-able, catch, say, Brad Johnson in Always doing an excruciatingly forced Costner imitation in a role for which Spielberg (who had produced Fandango and also directed Costner in an Amazing Stories episode) reportedly tried and failed to land the real thing.

So Costner finally broke through, looking better now not just because he was slightly weathered (pictures will show you the felicitous change in Costner's appearance as he put on a few years--the blandness gave way to an edge), but because he'd won us over real slow. In the spring of 1987, it was Kevin Costner, not Zubin Mehta, who got the GQ cover. And if the power of bankability didn't guarantee him all the prize parts without a struggle, it brought them around eventually. Kurt Russell had supposedly won the role of on-the-skids ballplayer Crash Davis in writer/director Ron Shelton's lively, literate Bull Durham, but at some point Russell, who had starred in the Shelton-written The Best of Times, learned that Crash had been re-cast in favor of the new box-office heat.

Perhaps coming as close to self-revelation as possible, Costner characterized Crash as "not too good, not too bad, and if you can tap into his loyalty, I think [he] would be a very good friend." Finally in the jeans that would do more for him on screen than a good suit or a naval uniform ever did, Costner, for the first time since Silverado, seemed truly front and center at the event. He laced into Shelton's epiphanies about "the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, good Scotch, and long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last for three days" with a world-weary understatement worthy of Newman, Red-ford, or Beatty at their zenith. Opposite Susan Sarandon's open-hearted acolyte of the church of baseball, Costner steamed. In fact, Shelton credits Costner entirely for inspiring the scene in which the ballplayer gives his woman friend a pedicure--a scene that may one day look as emblematic of the '80s as It Happened One Night's "Walls of Jericho" motel scene does of the '30s. "He even blew her toenails dry," Shelton recalled, "but the scene was too long and I had to cut it."

Bull Durham's surprising $50 million financial success--traditionally, bat and ball movies only draw flies--made Orion covet Costner even more than they had after No Way Out. The in-dependent-minded, often adventurous studio badly needed the kind of hits that an appealing star like Costner would be more likely to deliver than their brainy prize property, Woody Allen. "To a female audience," the studio's president of distribution said at the time, "[Costner] has, and a lot of writers have said so, the same sort of charisma as the Clark Gables of my generation."

With his power rising, Costner sat out most of 1988 on matters of principle. With an increasingly steely grasp of what was and what was not good for him, he turned down Eight Men Out and Everybody's All-American, ensemble scripts which, as it turned out, read better than they played. Losing the latter, in which he and Michelle Pfeiffer were scheduled to star, he called "very painful," but he let it go himself because the film-makers didn't "fulfill their end of the deal. I couldn't back down." He also dropped out of The Beast, directed by his Fandango friend Kevin Reynolds, when "David Puttnam and I didn't see eye to eye on it." (Apparently, Puttnam did not want Costner in the movie, but with Costner, not Steven Bauer, the movie might have been a hit.) "There are lots of people in this business who don't lose sleep over lines not being right," Costner declared during this period. "I can't even sleep when I get a scene right. People are really slick in this industry. They can talk to you all day long about what they want to do, but where you really find out what they stand for is: do they lose sleep over something that doesn't work?" Costner was walking it like he talked it. Mostly that meant walking away.

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