Look Before You Leap!

CASE HISTORY #4:

THE MOTHER OF REINVENTION

Not since that trio of long-distance runners--Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford--has any female star so repeatedly and success-fully reinvented her own image to suit changing times and tastes as Sally Field. Consider her Emmy, two Oscars, and this astounding tidbit; she's embarking on her fourth decade as a household name. Field's ambition to break out of typecasting of any sort was fueled by her lengthy indentured servitude in four ultra lightweight TV series --"Gidget," "The Flying Nun," "Alias Smith and Jones" and "The Girl with Something Extra." The sum total of these shows gave her sky-high TVQ, but resulted in her acting being taken about as seriously as, say, Tori Spelling's, Field, who is, like Spelling, the product of a showbiz upbringing, imagined a feature film career for herself and--despite utter disinterest from the movie crowd--began a career-long, tireless commitment to reshaping popular and Industry perception of her. The number of actors who have backed up their talent with this kind of determination and guts is exactly equal to the number of actors who have done what Field has done.

Field started her journey from TV idiocy to big-screen kudos with fightin' words, by doing nudity in Bob Rafelson's arty little Stay Hungry (the title could double nicely as Field's mantra). Naturally, this move from "The Flying Nun" raised eyebrows, as intended; it also won her some good notices, though no further film offers. So Field went back to TV, not with a safe part, but as the multi-personalities Sybil, which won her a deserved Emmy and shattered her sweet-young-thing image a second time. Still, it was only TV. Movie studios offered no more than the opportunity to star with fellow TV survivors Henry Winkler, in the bomb Heroes, and Burt Reynolds, in what turned into a bizarre hit, Smokey and the Bandit. As cheesy a redneck comedy as Smokey was, it became 1977's monster smash and propelled Field into her hottest role yet, as then-studmuffin Reynolds's real-life girlfriend.

Finally famous as a movie star of sons, Field took a long hard look at her future (three more dreadful Reynolds flicks comin' at ya) and grabbed a role no one else wanted. Her performance as blue-collar union organizer Norma Rae won her an Oscar and immeasurable cachet, which in turn gave her the strength to walk away from the then still red-hot Reynolds. It didn't, however, keep her from such obvious career missteps as Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, Back Roads and Kiss Me Goodbye. But then Field came up with her smartest, gutsiest image-retooling ever, transforming herself into the plain, hard-scrabble farmer in Places in the Heart. It was another Oscar win. Seeing the light, she then voluntarily took to playing an unglamorous older woman (Punchline), a vain, neurotic over-the-hill actress (Soapdish), and the mother of a grown daughter (Steel Magnolias)--three gambles which must have hurt her vanity, but opened up a wealth of possibilities as a character actress. Field gambled again when she took two roles where she knew she'd be overshadowed by a male star's show-boating, and was rewarded with massive hits for her troubles: Mrs. Doubtfire and Forrest Gump.

Having consistently done the impossible, and done it so long and so well, Field proceeded to do what few who've escaped TV would so blithely do--return to TV acting, on her own terms, in the classy mini-series A Woman of Independent Means.

CASE HISTORY #5:

GOOD BET, BAD CHOICES

The smart line on Tom Selleck used to go, "He was George Lucas's and Steven Spielberg's first choice to play Indiana Jones. If only the producers of 'Magnum, P.I.' had let him out of the series to make Raiders of the Lost Ark, he'd be Harrison Ford today." Actually, in retrospect, it looks as if he'd have become the new Mark Hamill, not the next Ford. Still, for more than a decade, Hollywood studios threw money and more money at Selleck, trying their damnedest to launch the TV icon as a movie star. Whose fault was it that he stayed stuck in neutral? With all due respect to the mysteries of why one handsome face and not another can compel couch potatoes to follow it to the big screen, surely Selleck shoulders considerable blame for picking, three times out of three, a trio of scripts which together make up nine of the worst films ever made. Only once did he score at the box office, and then it was a fluke.

Selleck had made movies (Myra Breckinridge, Daughters of Satan), TV movies (The Concrete Cowboys, Superdome) and series ("The Young and the Restless," "The Rockford Files") before finally finding his niche as TV's Hawaiian eye "Magnum, P.I." in 1980. Both that show and its star bore more than a passing resemblance to "The Rockford Files" and its star, James Garner: Selleck seemed to have learned from the master how to combine the folksy charm of an affable screwup with the tall, dark and handsome looks of a heartthrob. And Selleck looked like a good bet to jump to the big screen just as Garner had done after "Maverick." When he couldn't get free of "Magnum" to play Indy, Selleck bided his time with the occasional TV movie, looking for a feature that could do for him what Raiders of the Lost Ark might have. 1983's High Road to China, as bad an Indy knockoff as Richard Chamberlain's King Solomon's Mines, made insiders wonder what Lucas and Spielberg could possibly have been thinking. A change up to the suave jewel thief in Lassiter only demonstrated that no one would be replacing Cary Grant anytime soon. Runaway, a low-rent Blade Runner, confirmed that Selleck was no Ford. Luckily, he'd kept his day job.

Three years later, out of left field, came the fluke hit--a big one, 3 Men and a Baby, Selleck's at-best sitcomish charms suited the at-best sitcomish vehicle. Hollywood again was interested, so, after his series ended in 1988, Selleck chose three mote loud thuds: An Innocent Man, Her Alibi and Quigley Down Under, The evidence that Selleck simply didn't have the thing which marks a movie star was mounting. 3_ Men and a Little Lady_ helped offset the losses, but the next three films nailed the lid shut on the coffin of Selleck's big-screen career. Christopher Columbus--The Discovery, Mr. Baseball and Folks, were simply unforgivable.

Unsurprisingly, Selleck has since been seen in TV films like Broken Trust, and has guested on "Friends." It's said he wonders whether it's too late to bring "Magnum, P.I." to the big screen. Probably not, Tom--as long as someone with marquee lure plays the leading role.

CASE HISTORY #6:

BELIEVING YOUR OWN PUBLICITY

While the history of showbiz is one long parade of stars deluded enough to believe their own publicity and make career moves based on this self-deception, TV celebs who've done so make for particularly showy flame-outs. Consider Farrah Fawcett. When "Charlie's Angels" hit the airwaves 20 years ago, the big-hair, big-teeth beauty with teensy features and teensy talent was the first female star in a decade to capture the imagination of every man in America. Like the earlier Raquel Welch, she became an icon with a best-selling pinup poster. Although no one had even noticed her on earlier TV series that toplined her then-mate Lee Majors, "The Six Million Dollar Man" and "Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law," Fawcett failed to see her luck for what it was, and instead let the avalanche of "Angels" publicity proclaiming her a love goddess go straight to her head.

The movie offers that poured in for Fawcett fueled her dormant desire for big-screen immortality (she'd already been found wanting in features like Logan's Run and Myra Breckinridge). In a decision that made headlines around the world, she showed the tensile ambition under her fluffy 'do by breaking her "Angels" contract at the end of the show's first season and setting out to be the new Marilyn Monroe. What Fawcett didn't anticipate were the consequences of being so of-the-moment. Today's blonde can be replaced so easily. By the time she'd done herself serious damage with leads in dogs like Somebody Killed Her Husband, Sunburn and Saturn 3, and lost a legal wrangle that forced her to return intermittently to "Angels." Fawcett found that pinch hitter Cheryl Ladd had usurped her position as media darling. Her one box-office hit, The Cannonball Run, came too late to undo the industry perception of her as a joke; when a sequel to the dubious The Cannonball Run was filmed, she was nowhere in sight. By 1981, she was back where she'd begun, appearing opposite Majors on one of his TV hits, "The Fall Guy."

There her story might have ended. But Fawcett, no doubt royally pissed, turned her career around by letting her rage show. Taking the off-Broadway route, she won favor in Extremities as a woman who turns the tables on her rapist. The following year, she scored a hit on TV as a wife who turns the tables on her abusive husband in The Burning Bed. Dropping her twinkle and letting her toughness show, Fawcett established herself as the queen of TV movies. Network honchos lined up to offer her fascinating characters to play on TV (among them, Margaret Bourke-White and Barbara Hutton). But movie moguls had long since stopped caring--a shoestring film version of Extremities and supporting roles in See You in the Morning and Man of the House testify to that. Latter-day Fawcetts (are you listening, David Canuso?), take note.

CASE HISTORY #7:

CHARACTER ACTORS ARE MISCAST AS MOVIE STARS

After knocking around TV in series like "Benson" and "Somerset," Ted Danson found his way in 1981 into Body Heat and The Onion Field, giving two fine performances in character parts. He might have gone on to become a screen character actor par excellence, but once he was cast as the lead player on the TV series "Cheers," his path was forever altered. Thereafter, when he made movies, he played star parts. It's a shame, for when cast against his Aramis-cologne-poster-guy looks (as, say, the incestuous father in the TV film Something About Amelia), he was electrifying, while in conventional dramatic leading roles, he was at best conventional.

Danson's big-screen venture with Margot Kidder, Little Treasure, was aptly named; A Fine Mess confirmed that Danson and Howie Mandel were not the new Laurel and Hardy; in Just Between Friends he was so low-voltage it was hard to believe he could carry on one love affair, let alone two. In his single hit, 3 Men and a Baby, he was one of three boring dream-boats--all of whom seemed cut out for TV, in this early example of Hollywood's brain-dead campaign to turn movies into big-screen TV.

The success of 3 Men earned Danson the lead in Cousins, where he gave his best account of himself--in large part because this motorcycle-riding, adulterous nonconformist was his least conventional movie part. But it didn't find an audience, so it was more of the same old stuff (3 Men and a Little Lady, Dad), and more of the series. As "Cheers" wound down to its finish, Danson tried his hand at three offbeat romantic roles, all as unconventional fathers-- Made in America, Getting Even With Dad and Pontiac Moon--but no one much cared. Certainly, the three pictures combined didn't get him a tenth of the media attention his decision to appear in blackface at a roast for then-girlfriend (and Made costar) Whoopi Goldberg did. After splitting from Goldberg, Danson married Pontiac Moon costar Mary Steenburgen, with whom he'd teamed for a popular, Emmy-nominated miniseries, Gulliver's Travels, and then again for a can-lightning-strike-twice? series, "Ink." Guess Danson won't be tackling character parts anytime soon--but who can blame him? If that was the condition of a TV-to-movies transition, it was too high a price. Once tasted, star billing, salary and perks are so difficult to do without.

CASE HISTORY #8:

OUT OF THE SOAP PITS

Although in the beginning, TV soap operas were the burial grounds for former screen queens from Joan Bennett to Joan Crawford, in recent years many stars have started on soaps and then blasted their way into movies. Some-thing about the daily drudgery of soapdom gives the newer breed real get up and go. Despite the occasional lapse back by per- formers who shouldn't have been out of soaps in the first place, lots of these cases never go back to TV except for an awards show or a Tennessee Williams play. Think Demi Moore. Think Meg Ryan. Oh, you'd forgotten she spent two years on "As the World Turns"? You can bet she hasn't.

After escaping Soapland, Ryan at first was cast in one prime-time TV series after another ("One of the Boys," "Charles in Charge," "Wildside"), and looked headed for an eventual sitcom of her own. But she got a small role in a hit, had the smarts and talent to make the most of it, and overnight was considered the movies' Next Big Thing. The success of Top Gun was enough to erase the memory of her previous career (including Rich and Famous, Arnityville 3-D and Armed and Dangerous), and she grabbed everything that looked like it would help her upward climb: Innerspace, Promised Land, D.O.A. and Presidio. When Harry Met Sally... made the difference between promising sparkle and full-blown star, earning her enough goodwill to carry her through Joe Versus the Volcano (fo-gettable in three roles), The Doors _(forgettable in one role). _Prelude to a Kiss (forgettable in a cameo), and Flesh and Bone (forget we even brought it up). But then came Sleepless in Seattle, which somehow made it seem like she'd just breezed her way to the top--the illusion of onscreen grace is such an essential part of movie stardom. Not all of Ryan's romantic comedies (roles the public expects to see her in) hit big--_IQ and _French Kiss were disappointments--but Ryan has learned from experience that a Harry or Sleepless will eventually come along to put things back on course. She also insists on occasionally stepping out of expectation prison to do drama, as in When a Man Loves a Woman and Courage Under Fire, both worthy efforts. Powered by an ambition that is absolutely disguised by her amiably charming prettiness, Ryan is unlikely ever to return to the small screen. Anyone who watched her long ago in her soap world has to be forgiven for not seeing her promise, but she knew what the TV cameras were not yet "seeing." Having been spectacularly vindicated, she won't soon give TV cameras another crack at dissing her again.

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Kevin Hennessey and Elaine Bailey are freelance writers who occasionally contribute to Movieline.

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