Career Advice for Young Hollywood

JULIA ROBERTS's career raises the difficult question: Has any other star in memory ever risen so far so fast without making even one truly good movie? What sets Roberts apart from her peers is not just her natural vivaciousness and that infectious grin, but the fact that she's actually making a career out of rising above mediocre material. For the most part, it's a long list of one by-the-numbers potboiler after another, from heartbreak-of-showbiz Satisfaction to life-after-death Flatliners to heartbreak-of-diabetes Steel Magnolias to damsel-in-distress Sleeping with the Enemy to heartbreak-of-nursing Dying Young, and so on. The exception to this rule, the phenomenally successful, phenomenally thin Pretty Woman, suggests that Roberts's real chance to realize her potential lies in old-fashioned charm vehicles where she'd have to abandon the pretense of Acting and instead accept the mantle of Movie Star. Of course, abandoning all of one's faculties, as in Hook, is perhaps going too far.

Our Advice: First of all, movies aside, we advise Julia to refrain in the future from extolling the virtues of nitrous oxide in any interview in which she earlier states she has never touched a drug in her life (as she did last fall in Entertainment Weekly). That said, we advise Julia to get her highly touted agents to puts calls in to, say, Steve Martin and Rob Reiner. She should demand to know, "Where is my Roxanne? Where is my When Harry Met Sally... ?" Since she plays best in conventional Hollywood product, she might try doing a remake--like Bell, Book and Candle, which didn't really work so well the first time they tried it, or Barefoot in the Park, which did. She should definitely lighten up, but not necessarily all the way up into the air on wires. And perhaps she should get back into Gere. One thing is for sure: She should do something. Having nothing in the can after an anemic performance in Hook is not healthy.

CHARLIE SHEEN falls squarely into that spot midway between his opaque actor brother Emilio Estevez and his sensitive actor father Martin Sheen: No, it's not No Man's Land, it's Leading Man's Land. Handsome and stalwart (though by even his own accounts a good deal more exciting offscreen than on), Sheen follows in a long line of men who look--who are--perfectly comfortable embodying traditional male types, whether in buckskin (Young Guns), uniform (Platoon), or designer suit (Wall Street). The movies are always in short supply of this most essential commodity, so Sheen should have a long career that could easily outlast all his competitors (after all, where are the other lads who were hot when Michael Douglas was starting out?). But Sheen is ultimately more flexible than this suggests. He's very good in the silliest sort of comedy, which was evident long ago in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, reiterated in Major League, and driven home last year in Hot Shots!

Our Advice: There's little doubt that Sheen's already on the right track; with his traditional looks and that straight-arrow demeanor (well, onscreen, anyway), he'll continue to be offered parts that require just that. But with his considerable flair for funny business (he must have gotten it from his mother's side of the family), Sheen's light-years ahead of such earlier generations' straight men as Lloyd Bridges, Leslie Nielsen and Robert Stack--they only turned to comedy after their other options ran out. The trick now is for Sheen to get into comedy in a big way, and demonstrate that these gifts are no fluke, thus making himself attractive to a better class of comic director.

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Rebecca Morris and Kevin Hennessey peer into crystal balls professionally, and can be found most weekends hawking their psychic wares on the Venice Beach boardwalk.

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