In a career that is now in full ascension, Kevin Costner has slowly and deliberately made all the right moves, and has skillfully survived some wrong ones.
___________________
Kevin Costner is not the most powerful person in Hollywood. He's not even the highest-paid actor. But right now he is the undisputed Prince of Tinseltown, glowing with natural beauty and preternatural confidence, surrounded by a loyal retinue of creative cohorts gathered over the years of struggle, celebrated by colleagues, adored by fans, free to star in or direct virtually anything he wishes. And all this must be all the sweeter to Costner because he surely knows that his phenomenal success has surprised the hell out of Hollywood.
It's reasonable enough--as many Costner observers had been predicting for almost a decade--that eventually, an amiable handsomeness, tipsy grin, raw-boned physique, and slowpoke, mid-America-friendly charisma would get a guy noticed by mass audiences. But, when Costner finally hit at the box office (after doing flashy turns in movies nobody saw, and getting cut from one everybody did), becoming gold playing a sexy military whistle-blower in No Way Out and a sexy gangbuster in The Untouchables, he really hit. By the time he played a sexy ballplayer in Bull Durham, he was in a powerful enough position to be advising on the final cut. And after his appeal turned the sleeper Field of Dreams into a surprise hit, he had not only become moviegoers' heart-throb of choice, he had won a studio's confidence to the point where they were ready to back his directorial debut. Then, even more remarkably, Dances With Wolves--a three-hour revisionist Western with subtitles, for Pete's sake--won Golden Globe and Oscar recognition and over $100 million at the box office, turning Costner overnight into a filmmaker to reckon with. To round things out, he's about to be unveiled as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves in a $50 million swashbuckler that knocked two other Robin Hood movies out of com-mission the minute he said "yes" to the $8 million offer.
At awards shows, as Costner clutches statuettes and calls out halting, plain-spoken gratitude to people whose names are unfamiliar to most people outside of the business--those "Sure-I'm-king-of-the- world-but-I-remember-who-helped-put-me-here" speeches--he sounds just the right note of humble pride. Had the cameras captured the reactions of the parties Costner named--casting directors, agents, directors, studio bosses-- they might have wiped away our memories of a similarly touching speech by "Eve Harrington," the fearsomely ambitious, conniving heroine of All About Eve, who throbbingly thanked the very people on whom she had stomped to reach the top. Unlike Eve--or dozens of real-life actors and directors who use up people like Kleenex--Costner rose to the top apparently leaving few grinding their axes, fewer still questioning his loyalties or his ethics. "I know that whatever I want, I get," he asserted four years ago in an interview. "But I think how my career has gone is a mystery to people."
Exactly. And perhaps that's how he prefers to keep things. "Likable," he once described himself, "but full of secrets." Given to genial and well-man-aged, though hardly confessional, inter-views ("It's an Indian thing," he explained to a Time journalist trying to dissect his appeal. "I try not to get into my medicine at all."), Costner declined to talk for this story. But the themes that characterize Costner's rise to success are really not hard to spot. He operates out of powerful conviction about what's worth doing and how it ought to be done. He builds working relationships and friendships with people that continue from one project to another (instead of chewing people up and spitting them out, a Hollywood norm). He holds out for what he wants and never doubts that he deserves it.
To retrace the trail that ends in Costner's auteurship of an $18 million Indian epic, one must leave the golden land of healthy ambition, shrewd career engineering, deep interconnectedness, and brilliant luck to enter a far less lofty sphere where such movies as Stacy's Knights are made by folks on the hustle. That movie, eight years old now, is about a pair of gamblers, each with a system. If you're intrigued by Costner's scuffling days, you can rent the thing from your video store. But the story behind the story tells much more about how one actor got to be king of the hill. It started with a screenplay, Double Down, commissioned by young, would-be movie-maker Jim Wilson (persuasive, ambitious, from a moneyed background) and written, for $400, by bright, barely-making-it ex-G.I. Michael Blake. Wilson and his then-girlfriend, JoAnn Locktov, a first-time producer, pitched the project to various young, willing-to-work-cheap collaborators. "The promise was: work on this for free," recalls production assistant Katherine Orrison, "be-cause we're going to make money and go on to do more movies together. Why? Be-cause we've got this hot guy in the lead. We hear a lot about this hot guy."
Although still green, Costner--the hot guy Wilson and Blake found at an open casting call to play "Will Bonner"-- was tall, rangy, and, best of all, available for $500 a week. Orrison recalls that the budget was so tight that only essential crew members trekked to Reno locations, from which the news, right to the end of the shooting, was bullish: "The leading man is dynamite." During postproduction, Locktov and Orrison were lunching at Taco Bell when, Orrison recalls, "This nice, pleasant guy joined us and chatted awhile. When he left, JoAnn said, 'Isn't he dreamy?' I answered, 'Not particularly.' She told me that was our star. I said: 'We're sunk.' "
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."
Having played a supporting part in the no-nukes nightmare movie Testament in 1983, Costner then endured the insult of having his biggish role in the Jon Voight movie Table for Five reduced to the level of "Newlywed Husband." That is the last slight of its kind in Costner's career. Perhaps taking Kasdan's advice more to heart, Costner, Harris, and Nicita began stumping for such prestigious showcase stuff as The Killing Fields and Mask, and when producers offered The Ice Pirates and Grandview, U.S.A. instead, Costner held out.
"The amazing thing about Kevin," recalls casting agent Johanna Ray, "is how everyone talked about him, how he was on top of everyone's list, before anyone really knew who he was. J.J. Harris did a fantastic job for him because there was this incredible mystique."
Indeed. When, for instance, Costner was called to discuss a role in the 1984 sci-fi movie Dreamscape, he and his representatives were apparently offended to learn it was not for the lead, for which Dennis Quaid had already been hired. "He is very, very special to us," a producer recalls being told by Harris and the Morris office, "and we're very carefully guiding his career."
Costner's first major starring role came in 1985 when John Badham cast him in American Flyers, a would-be Dark Victory meets Breaking Away meets Brian's Song. The director, who had helped launch John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever and Matthew Broderick in WarGames, said that his would-be star did so much questioning, self-examination, and tinkering--often to the benefit of the material--that "it was almost a relief to get him on the bicycle." Costner never had a prayer in this one. The script was undercooked and he was playing such a walled-up, interior guy, that when this character started to wither away on screen, audiences just didn't care. Moreover, no one in Costner's corner did him the favor of telling him he looked all wrong in that moustache. But the bottom line was that Costner himself didn't have the focus, the heft, to galvanize a way-ward movie. Almost again, darlin.'
Nicita again set Costner up with Lawrence Kasdan, who was hot, for the role of wiggy, flaky Jake, the hotblood in the director's big Western project, Silverado. At the time, Kasdan de-scribed Costner as "untamed... just like a movie star," and said: "I think I wrote [Silverado] for him." But Nicita recalls the director bending over backwards to avoid the appearance of simply handing the role to Costner as a consolation prize for what happened on The Big Chill. "Kevin had to read for the role against the top young actors in L.A.," Nicita asserts. "When it was over, Larry just said: 'Hey, he's great.' "
Although starring amidst such heady, hands-on actors as Kevin Kline, John Cleese, Danny Glover, and Linda Hunt, Costner knew he had the firebrand sexpot role, virtually a certain star-maker. Everyone on the shoot seemed to feel it, too. Costner's time had come. The Untouchables production designer Patrizia von Brandenstein remarked, "I'd seen him jumping in and out of saddles and I'd think, 'He's cute, but Jesus, he must be hard to handle.' But I must tell you: That was acting, that was the character." Another crew member recalls her parents visiting the set and, as she watched in astonishment, her mother "fell totally in love with him. He just bowled her over."
For the first time in Costner's career, he became the target of public scrutiny. Movie sets are notorious incubators for bad behavior for which everyone later forgives themselves. But Costner exhibited at this early point what became characteristic of him--unusual, gentlemanly discretion. He was not only refreshingly professional in his capacity as an actor, he was professional in his personal dealings as well. Silverado crew members, who praise Costner's allegiance to wife and family, recall gossip that sprang up when he spent occasional spare moments between takes chatting with an attractive woman crew member. One day, he reportedly told her, laughingly, that everyone in the crew was accusing them of having an affair. And from that point on, he kept a wary distance from her.
Costner wouldn't give the gossips an inch, but he knew how to give the broader press a mile. When he sauntered up to the mike at Silverado's premiere, he gazed out over the red carpets, searchlights, and hungry paparazzi, and said that he wanted the public to know he wasn't "too cool for all this." He might have been Gary Cooper in Meet John Doe.
The industry buzz had it that Silverado would be huge and Costner would be launched. The expectation was there. The heat was there. But the audiences weren't there. Silverado died at the box office. "I've had this nagging thing," Costner admitted in 1987, "that I'll never be in a hit."
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.
When Costner finally made his move, it was to exec-pro-duce and star in an adaptation of Jim Harrison's lean, hungry novella Revenge, about a pair of machos destroying a woman. In so doing, he was pursuing a project that had previously gone badly for him, and one that would go especially badly for him later as well. Costner had earlier been considered--and summarily dismissed--for Revenge by director John Huston, who had been thinking along the lines of such ballsy leading men as Jack Nicholson. (According to Huston biographer Lawrence Grobel, the director assailed producer Ray Stark: "I've been in the business 50-odd years and you are telling me that I've got to work with this little guy?" Reminded by Stark that Costner was "important to Columbia," Huston called the producer "a cocksucker," and departed the project.)
Costner persisted and brought in Michael Blake (remember Stacy's Knights?) to write the screenplay. But at producer Stark's request, Costner forfeited total control over the screenplay in order to attract director Tony Scott. Then things did not go well. Finally, when Scott, Costner, the Stark organization, and Columbia were still bickering over the project only weeks be-fore the movie was to go into production, the actor fled the Sturm und Drang to do another movie about which he had strong convictions.
There were lots of reasons for Costner not to sign on for Shoeless Joe, writer-director Phil Alden Robinson's cornball tale about a guy who hears voices telling him to build a baseball field in the middle of the heartland. It was post-Vietnam, Reagan-era mush, with a Norman Rockwell-inspired sense of nostalgia, about errant sons coming to terms with their daddies. And it was another baseball movie coming right on the heels of Bull Durham. But Costner's instincts were sound. Critic Pauline Kael may have judged the finished product, now titled Field of Dreams, "a crock--a kinder, gentler crock," and chided Costner for succumbing so soon to "American-hero acting in which only good thoughts enter the hero's mind and moonlight bounces off his teeth." Still, Costner, whom producer Larry Gordon believes "doesn't do anything he doesn't fully believe in," put over the new age mysticism/old-hat conservatism with the absolute conviction of, say, Ronald Colman searching for Shangri-La in Lost Horizon. That conviction was largely responsible for making Field of Dreams a surprise hit, and for giving Costner the opportunity to demonstrate his ability to open and sell a film on his own.
It was a good time for a demonstration of Costner's box-office clout, because the misbegotten Revenge was about to suggest the opposite. It would have been best for Costner, perhaps, if Revenge had just faded away--but too many powerful people wanted to see it made, and made with Costner in it. Costner, apparently feeling less than "protected" by the William Morris agency, retained lawyer Eric Weissmann, and left J.J. Harris, who had been one of the architects of his career. Now, mighty Michael Ovitz of CAA would go to the mat for him. No Way Out screenwriter Robert Garland reworked Revenge, presumably to make it more palatable to Costner, but, if there was any improvement it's hard to imagine what it might have been.
In the finished film, Costner came off as bimbo-ized--all mousse and bronzer, backgrounded by wind-stirred sheer curtains and flickery candles--making Revenge his first full-on career calamity. Part of the reason Revenge didn't set Costner's quest for glory back much was that it was little seen and it followed two popular hits. But it was strategically important for Costner to come back from Revenge with a successful film. Two flops in a row threaten anyone's star status in modern Hollywood. So when Costner's next project was announced as a Western(!) that he would star in and direct(!!), the naysayers were out in droves. And the naysayers had logic on their side. First of all, not only were Westerns devoid of box-office appeal, Costner himself had failed spectacularly in the one big attempt to bring the genre back. And second, few actors turn out to be good directors, especially when they're forced to carry the picture as star as well as director.
But with Dances With Wolves, just about everything Costner had learned and many of the crucial relationships he had developed were about to pay off in synergy. Costner had created his production company, Tig (it's his grandmother's nickname|, and produced the movie with his partner, Jim Wilson (of Stacy's Knights days), with his brother Dan acting as the company's investment counselor. The novel and script about a dissident Union officer living among a Sioux tribe were by Stacy's Knights scripter Michael Blake. Mike Medavoy, who had much to do with bringing the actor to a production deal at Orion, championed the project when others declined.
Perhaps the great harsh lesson Costner learned from Revenge was how important it is to use one's power to ensure control. He hired six scholars to sweat the period details, set aside a month for Indian language rehearsals for the actors, demanded final cut to avoid having to butt heads with studio bosses over the movie's length and subtitles, and financed it independently. "I wasn't looking for 'attaboys,' " he has said. "I wasn't looking for 'very good first effort,' or 'shows promise.' I want to go for a home run." When he went over schedule and over budget, and the press rushed to dub the enterprise "Kevin's Gate," Costner put his money where his mouth was. Two-thirds of the way through the movie, Costner voluntarily froze his $5 million salary.
When Dances With Wolves opened, some critics treated Costner like Orson Welles reborn. Harvard's Hasty Pudding Theatricals Group had earlier in the year hailed him as Man of the Year but the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Nation went one better and adopted him in a traditional Hunka ceremony. Newsweek observed that Costner had "fused countercultural sentiments with Bush-era conservatism."
Not everyone supported the canonization of Saint Kevin. Times reviewer lambasted Costner's spending "all that time alone on the screen, looking swell and acting noble, in a movie that runs three self-indulgent hours." If Hollywood has packaged Costner as the new American icon, Europeans have been slow to buy, perhaps because they are immune to the joys of baseball. Still, one would be hard-pressed to find a more forceful, more admired star in American movies today. "He can do anything he wants now," believes Wallis Nicita. "And it couldn't happen to a person with a more developed sense of personal honor and dignity."
In the face of Costner's golden boy image--he drives a 1968 Shelby Mustang, lives with his wife, daughters (ages six and four), two-year-old son, and a golden Labrador, not far from his parents' and brother's homes--national tabloids have moved in for the treatment. The Globe, for example, hinted at, but did not elaborate upon, "rumors of illicit affairs." Observes a long-time Costner associate, "Kevin is that rarity: a fundamentally principled human being. But he also has been hit with so much success, which has brought many women pursuing him, who wouldn't be turned around?" In 1988, the actor said of his marriage: "We aren't perfect. Some days are harder than others. Certainly, she's struggled with stuff that most women shouldn't have to put up with. Like being paired with some of the most beautiful women in the world, being made to appear that you are the quintessential couple and to have that regurgitated in front of you can't be easy. Simply, if the shoe was reversed, I don't think I could do it."
Now 36, Costner, who believes he has had "more exposure than anybody has a right to have," has apparently chosen to let his work do the talking. With China Moon, a Costner-produced gritty thriller starring Ed Harris and Madeleine Stowe tentatively scheduled for release late in the year, and his Robin Hood movie (directed by Kevin Reynolds of Fandango) out this month, he is at a crossroads. To those who insist that his future is in filmmaking, China Moon may prove or disprove his smarts for stirring together creative elements. Appropriately, considering Costner's sense of loyalty, its leading lady is Madeleine Stowe, with whom he survived Revenge; its director is John Bailey, the talented cinematographer of The Big Chill and Silverado, who was earlier let go as director of The Long Walk Home.
To those who see in Costner our best hope for an all-purpose leading man, his Robin Hood, a role as ripe for unintended giggles now as it was when Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn took it decades ago, may be an acid test. The omens are mixed. Kevin Reynolds reportedly went two weeks over schedule shooting on over 30 locations in England and France. A star of the film called Reynolds, who signed to direct the movie with less than six weeks' preparation time, "suicidally brave." Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Costner's Maid Marion, called the making of the massive movie "anarchy. The right hand never knew what the left hand was doing." And co-star Christian Slater, who has kind personal words for Reynolds, openly clashed with the director over his interpretation of the role of the rascally Will Scarlett.
Whatever fate befalls Robin Hood, Costner can whistle his own tune from here on in. After playing New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone's film about the Kennedy assassination, said to top Costner's agenda are The Bodyguard, an old Lawrence Kasdan script which he and Whitney Houston have rescued from development limbo since such actors as Diana Ross and Clint Eastwood failed to get it off the ground in the early '80s, and another period piece based on the life of Irish revolutionary Michael Collins. He has also been talked up for Random Hearts, from Warren Adler's novel about a romance between the spouses of two secret lovers killed in a plane wreck, a role Dustin Hoffman once coveted.
Costner has two roads to choose from, and his next moves will prove telling. He's Hollywood's man of the hour, in the position that co-stars Paul Newman and Robert Redford were with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Both parlayed that golden moment into directing careers, too, but each pursued his subsequent career differently. Newman just kept at his grind, a leading man making movies, hits and flops alike, with the good-natured assurance that in time, as he aged, his audience would age right alongside him. Redford, on the other hand, came to resemble Warren Beatty in his hyper-selectiveness (read: fear), only deigning to make an occasional film every few eons, and only then with a phalanx of technical assistance to try desperately to preserve the illusion of his youth. It should prove fascinating to watch what Kevin Costner does with the power he's accumulated.
__________
Stephen Rebello, the author of Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, wrote our March cover story on Robert Downey, Jr.