Most Unwanted

6. MADONNA

Madonna and Cher are both songstresses with limited musical ability and weird screen careers. Cher's movie career is strange because it turns out she can act and audiences love her. Madonna's movie career is strange because it turns out she really can't act and audiences have never done anything more enthusiastic than tolerate her. "I 'get' Madonna onstage," said one person we talked to, "but on-screen her brassy nerviness drives me nuts. I just think, oh please, how did she get here? And I start getting depressed about the powers-that-be that let her into the movies." Another interviewee exclaimed, "Why does Hollywood keep financing this woman's underwear?"

There was near universal agreement that Madonna cannot act (as one person put it, "If she couldn't cut it when she was cast to type as an underhanded slut in a movie controlled by her boyfriend, she's never gonna cut it"), but that is not what's held against her: "I don't think Goldie Hawn or Kim Basinger or Drew Barrymore can act, but I like them because none of them grabs me by the throat, cracks gum in my face and insists she can act." One person said, "Madonna is simply vulgar, and up there on the big screen, no costume or makeup or dialogue can hide it."

In a similar vein, "Seeing Madonna on-screen is like being in a dubious restaurant where you fear that any minute something is going to skitter up the wall or across the table." The most interesting and complete thesis on Madonna's despicability ran like this: "She's a microcosm of the whole movie industry. She's vacuous and proud of it. She thinks she has 'integrity' because she has knowingly incorporated only the most brazen and campy aspects of femininity. In her brain, that passes for self-knowledge." And finally, one Madonna don't -wannabe suggested, "Maybe someone should give her a scene where she masturbates on the big screen like she did onstage, since, metaphorically speaking, that's what she's doing all the time anyway."

7. ERIC ROBERTS

Here's an actor who really divides the town--you love him or you hate him, and we couldn't find anyone who loves him. Everyone we spoke to seemed to suggest there's a queasy blurring of the on-screen and offscreen Roberts. "He gives me the creeps," said one moviegoer. "I don't care if he was just doing great acting as a disgusting scumbag in Star 80--he convinced me that that's what he is, and now I can't look at him." Someone else cited The Pope of Greenwich Village, saying, "Anyone who can seem sleazier and less agreeable than Mickey Rourke or Daryl Hannah is someone I don't ever want to watch again."

Another non-fan reflected a moment and said, "He's probably played a character who wasn't psychotic, but I can't think of the movie, and that's my problem with him. He registers so strongly as a bad guy, he can't register as anything else at all." Asked for some specifics about what really bugs him about Roberts, one twentyish guy said, "The creepiest thing about Eric Roberts is the way he talks. I mean, it sounds like maybe he's on a low dose of some antipsychotic drug and he has a spoonful of peanut butter stuck to the roof of his mouth." One person who'd seen Roberts's most recent movie, Final Analysis, said, "As usual, he was scummier than the character needed to be, so, even though he was only in the movie to get murdered, I couldn't wait for him to die."

8. GEORGE C. SCOTT

"Why are you even mentioning him?" one person asked, having overheard other people's remarks. "No one takes him seriously." Ah, but we found a lot of people used to. "I have fond memories of him back in the Anatomy of a Murder days," one older moviegoer said, "but I have even clearer memories of the fuss that broke out when he didn't show up to get his Academy Award for Patton. I always assumed that it was simply because he thought he didn't deserve it, and rightly so." Another disagreed with that analysis. "What I think is that George C. Scott has confused movies with reality. In his head he thinks he won World War II for the Allies." One person claimed, "He's the most pompous actor I've ever seen. But what gets me most is that voice of his--it's like listening to rocks get pulverized in a quarry."

Another viewer tried to explain Scott's "superiority complex," saying, "He doesn't even try to hide that he always thinks he's so much better than his material. Someone should explain to him, 'You were right at home in Firestarter.'" "Don't you always feel that he'd rather be somewhere else?" one person asked. "You know, reading great poetry in an artist's garret where he's appreciated? I'd like it if he'd go there." "He's the American Laurence Olivier," another moviegoer said. "They both were at one time quality actors. Both turned into the worst kind of hams."

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Elaine Bailey and Brian Hirsch coauthored "The Six Million Dollar+ Men " in our July issue

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