The Big Young Hollywood Hangover
3. Take a Look at Halle Berry. Hollywood actresses are viciously enslaved to the process of relentless preening, as much now, despite feminism, as when studios took the hands-on approach to people like Judy Garland and Rita Hayworth. The town's judgments about a young female's appearance are very harsh and they matter every bit as much as young females hope and fear. It's a wonder there's any time for acting when so much attention has to be paid to hair, skin, thighs, etc. With a career lifetime usually shorter than an actor's, and a demand for knockout looks far higher than anything placed on boys, actresses face worse odds than actors in a game they all have terrible odds in to begin with. Now they look out on the weird landscape of after-the-deluge Hollywood. So many of these young women have played Hollywood starlet to the hilt in their off hours (in Hollywood, most hours are off hours if you're not on a series). Hollywood parties in the last five or six years have been overpopulated with cute, underfed, breast-implanted girls in semi-lingerie and stilettos. It's a sad, desperate sight for anyone who realizes the drama of competitive submission that the sexiest practitioners are being wittingly and unwittingly put through. Some of these girls will survive, but most will be pharmaceutically quelling terror before the mirror for the rest of their days with not much to show for it. Well, some of these girls are nitwits and unless they can brand their bimbo-ness a la Pamela Anderson, it's a grim prospect they face.
Think about Halle Berry for a moment, though, and you realize that Hollywood sometimes does hold miracles. For years and years, Berry has had the kind of starlet beauty that is so vivid, so intense, it's the very first tiling people comment on. She had the race issue to contend with, but equally she had the starlet stigma to fight. There was no sign, not even as late as the good, award-winning but hardly revelatory Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, that Berry had Monster's Ball in her. Now here she is with Academy approval, and with the assurance that anyone who actually saw the movie will never underrate her again.
4. Quit While You're Ahead. Scream vet Skeet Ulrich had the big heat on him a few years ago, and there was reason enough for it. He was young, gifted, good-looking and he'd been in a massive hit. He had enough going for him--even though the major prestige event of his career, starring in the Ang Lee film Ride With the Devil, turned out to be a disappointment--that even if his phone stopped ringing for a few weeks he had a basis for hoping for a workable career. Then Ulrich up and moved to Virginia and got married. Word is that Ulrich never liked the life of an actor, which is entirely understandable, and decided to drop out. The wonder is that more people don't do this. There were reports that Kate Winslet had announced her retirement a while back, but she obviously recanted. Nobody seems able to give up the activity of acting once they get paid for it, and even if they could give up the luxury and risk of pretending for a living, they can't give up the unlimited hopefulness and inflated optimism that life in Hollywood fosters. Not even when the bubble has popped deafeningly and their lives suddenly amount to a tap dance done in a slow-motion earthquake. Ulrich should be a hero to his ex-colleagues and many of them should heed his wisdom. Then again, perhaps they're just waiting for him to come back.
5. Remember You Can Recover From Being a Jerk. Nothing leads to stupid, witless, adolescent excess like Young Hollywood success, and nobody is less open to reasonable guidance than an overly successful Young Hollywood actor. Most actors don't quite recover from being the semi-asshole that Hollywood turned them into when they were young, though perhaps they become more stylish in their indulgence and subtler at rationalization. But some do grow up. It's possible. Leonardo DiCaprio got slammed with a far bigger tsunami of success, excess and tabloid press than most, and, being young, he made tactically dumb moves and became famously ambivalent, which is hardly surprising. So were dozens of others less gifted than he. Odds are, though, that after wasting his time on The Beach and earning a reputation for frequenting nightclubs and courting New York City's most beautiful ladies, he'll show us in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York that he was a very good actor before Titanic and he's still a very good actor. Insecurity, arrogance, vanity, ego, anger, narcissism, etc.--nobody in Hollywood lacks in these things. But even if you can't truly grow up in Hollywood, you can get a working grip on the worst of immaturity.
6. Modesty Can Do Wonders. Remember that little scene in Ocean's 11 when Brad Pitt is teaching a bunch of Young Hollywood actors to play poker? The young dudes self-effacingly playing themselves in that scene were Shane West from "Once and Again," Barry Watson of TV's "7th Heaven," Topher Grace of "That '70s Show" and Joshua Jackson of "Dawson's Creek." Any of these young actors could have told himself he was too big to be doing a cameo in anything, but they all came to the conclusion that doing anything for Steven Soderbergh was a good idea and being in a movie with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood wasn't bad either. They were right. The teen craze made leaps from TV to film not only easier than ever before but positively commonplace. But there are leaps and there are leaps. Taking small parts in prestige films is what smart agents and managers tell youngsters to do, and you can see that some of them have taken the advice. "Roswell'"s Jason Behr took a small role in Lasse Hallstrom's The Shipping News and did better than his costar Brendan Fehr, who took a lead in The Forsaken. "Dawson's Creek" darling Katie Holmes has been doing this for years and has worked for Ang Lee, Curtis Hanson and Sam Raimi. Now she has a reputation for being solid and interesting, and she's landed the nice job of starring for Oscar-winning Traffic scriptwriter-turned-director Stephen Gaghan in the thriller Abandon. The high anxiety of a flattened-out Young Hollywood is a lot more manageable when you do what these actors have done.
7. There's Life After Hype. Remember when the lovely and almost completely unknown young actress Gretchen Mol appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair, where stars of the magnitude of Madonna were wont to flaunt their celebrity? It was a big deal at the time because all Mol had to promote was a small role in Rounders as hot-as-hell Matt Damon's girlfriend and a bit part opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Woody Allen's Celebrity--nothing that would warrant this level of hype. Under normal circumstances she would barely have qualified for a place among the actresses who crowd onto the Hollywood issue cover of Vanity Fair. When Rounders came out and tanked, and her role turned out to be minor eye-candy in any case, it was possible to argue that the Vanity Fair cover had done more harm than good. But Gretchen Mol was very gracious about the whole thing, and her publicist made a clever move--she didn't prevent Mol from doing inside stories for small magazines just because she'd been on the cover of Vanity Fair. Mol took the best of the roles she was offered, kept going and a while later was getting respectful notices for her stage work in Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things. Now she'll star for LaBute in the film version of the play, and who knows, she might end up with a legitimate Vanity Fair cover somewhere down the road. All the other young actresses who've gotten much more press than any of their accomplishments would merit, and now face a quieter phone, can take encouragement. You may never work again, but then again, maybe you will. Not buying your own hype makes it easier to take either way.