TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/082691/0826200.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.2 KB | 223 lines

                                                                                BUSINESS, Page 38

ENTERTAINMENT

Do Stars Deliver?


Arnold and Kevin can still pack 'em in like old-time idols, but
most other leading lights suffer from fickle fans and outrageous
fortune

By RICHARD CORLISS -- Reported by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles


    Kevin Costner is a big star. He dances with wolves, he
fields his dreams, he plays Robin Hood in a California accent,
and lines form outside the local plex that are longer than the
queue of creditors at an S&L. Star quality: people want to watch
him on the big screen. Star power: tens of millions of people
will pay for the privilege. And keep on paying. His western
smash, Dances with Wolves, has been filling theaters for nine
months now. Last week more folks went to see it than Return to
the Blue Lagoon, which was all of two weeks old.

    But even Costner can suffer a total eclipse of the star.
Last year Columbia Pictures sent him to Mexico, gave him a
pretty woman and a passion to ride after and called the movie
Revenge. For Columbia, the only revenge was Montezuma's: the
picture went down the commode in a flash. It stumbled to a $15
million gross, less than a tenth of what Dances with Wolves or
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves will have earned in North American
theatrical release.

    Which proves the twin tenets that feed Hollywood's glory
and gloom: 1) there is such a thing as star power; 2) there is
no such thing as guaranteed star power.

    This summer's films offer support for both truisms. The
two megahits are from the two biggest stars: Costner's Robin
Hood ($140 million so far) and Arnold Schwarzenegger's
Terminator 2: Judgment Day ($160 million). With City Slickers
($105 million), Billy Crystal has demonstrated that a comedian,
savvily shaping projects to suit both him and a large audience,
can share the spotlight with two cranky studs. But the season's
major flop is Dying Young (a pitiful $32 million), from the
former Miss Can't-Miss, Julia Roberts. "They said Julia Roberts
could open any film," notes Martin Grove, industry analyst for
the Hollywood Reporter, referring to a star's ability to lure
sizable audiences on a movie's first weekend. "They said she
could open a phone book. Dying Young proved they were wrong."

    What Dying Young really proved is that you don't call a
picture Dying Young. The last time they made this movie, a
romance about a terminally ill cutie, they were smart enough to
call it Love Story. Roberts' rapid ascendancy taught Hollywood
that she could sell innocence, glamour, pluck. But not even the
movies' most reliable female star since Doris Day could peddle
leukemia -- particularly not to a summertime audience that wants
only the bad guys to die. So Dying Young did just that, and
Roberts' pristine rep got terminated too.

    Her roller-coaster career curve is hardly unique. With the
exception of a macho-arts maven like Steven Seagal, whose films
routinely pick up an easy $40 million, nearly every modern
star's box-office graph zigzags as wildly as an Axl Rose delta
gram. Robert Redford and Clint Eastwood have dominated movies
for a quarter-century, but their latest pictures have played in
empty theaters. Robert De Niro, the most admired actor in films,
went a decade after The Deer Hunter (1978) without a hit. Then
he appeared in three commercial successes: GoodFellas,
Awakenings, Backdraft. When Bruce Willis flexed his pecs through
two Die Hard melodramas and gave voice to the Look Who's Talking
hits, he had to be hot; each pair of films grossed close to $200
million. Then he fell off the table with The Bonfire of the
Vanities, Mortal Thoughts and Hudson Hawk. Look who's flopping.

    For female stars, the returns are lower, but so are the
expectations. Women's films exist in a ghetto, and so do women
stars, including the most luminous. Everybody knows that
Michelle Pfeiffer is a gorgeous star, but they know it from
glancing at magazine covers, not from paying to see her films.
Jane Fonda's latest projects (Old Gringo, Stanley & Iris) have
been noble anonymities. Meryl Streep's name on a movie is like
an objet d'art in a mogul's living room: it's there to impress
people. Her inevitable Oscar nominations are a springtime balm
for the corporate conscience and ego, but she is unlikely to
make a studio much money: 1990's Postcards from the Edge is her
only black-ink project in years.

    Even when his or her ticket sales are robust, a star can
be perceived to be in a slump. It's thought that Days of
Thunder registered a career dip for Tom Cruise, yet it earned
more money than his previous film, Born on the Fourth of July.
Eddie Murphy's "disappointing" Another 48 HRS. did better than
Harlem Nights. The reason for the bad-mouthing: Days and HRS.
were costly pictures that had a hard time breaking even. This
is do-or-die stuff for the industry but of no moment to
moviegoers. "Audiences don't care how much a movie costs," says
Tom Pollock, head of Universal Pictures. "They just want it to
work."

    The thing about movies is that nobody knows what works.
The whole enterprise is make believe: a triumph of fantasy over
fact. It's what makes the job exciting. A film out of nowhere,
with a nobody star, can send people out happy -- and make the
producers of Home Alone rich. Conversely, a blockbuster wannabe
like Redford's Havana grossed less in the U.S. than, say, the
Italian import Cinema Paradiso.

    There will always be more Havanas than Home Alones; there
always have been. But in Hollywood 50 years ago, the ceiling was
lower and the floor more secure than in today's boom-or-bust
industry. Back when moviegoing was a national habit and not an
event, pictures would play for a week or two in the studio-owned
theaters, and a hit might gross just twice as much as a flop.
This even stream of pictures kept stars in their place; they
could be signed to seven-year contracts, and if they balked,
their bosses could suspend them and replace them with more
docile creatures. "Every studio had a farm system," says Art
Murphy of Variety. "They would be put in a B picture, and if the
public responded to them, they would be put in an A picture. You
got a constant transfusion of new blood for $125 to $200 a week
per actor."

    The farm was really a plantation; stars were slaves,
handsomely paid but still indentured. This was bad for actors
and great for audiences. "Fans felt loyal to the star," says
George Christy, a Hollywood Reporter columnist. "Star power has
dissipated, and fan power too, because stars make movies less
frequently. Before Warren Beatty comes out with Dick Tracy, he
has to go on Barbara Walters to reintroduce himself to the
public" because he hasn't made a movie in three years.

    Today there is no safety net -- no majority of compulsive
moviegoers -- to catch the weaker films. Every star, every
studio, stands like a colossus on a fault line. There are also
no plantation workers among actors, only independent operatives.
If Schwarzenegger wants $12 million a picture, he'll get it --
and he'll earn it. But a few other stars, who deserve a lot less
money than Arnold, will be paid only a little less. The B-minus
picture boys get A-plus cash.

    Ladling out the largesse might once have been acceptable
to studio heads, but the palmy days are past. In the current
movie climate, when budgets have soared and revenues are soft,
moguls get to wondering if stars are worth the worry. This
summer's box-office take is down 10% from the same period last
year, which was down 8.8% from the summer of 1989. Viewers are
seeing more movies, but increasingly, they watch them at home.
"Video is becoming a substitute for film going," says Pollock,
who notes that studios receive about 50% of the box-office take
but only 25% to 30% of video sales. "If you look at picture
making as a hurdle race, the hurdles just went up a foot."

    And like the owners of baseball teams, movie executives
are tired of paying millions of dollars to the uppity help.
"With the recession finally hitting Hollywood," says syndicated
columnist Anne Thompson, "the policy of putting big stars in
weak stories is being called into question."

    This is the new Hollywood gospel, and its prophet is
Jeffrey Katzenberg. In January, Katzenberg, who runs Walt
Disney's movie operations, wrote a staff memo that was passed
around Hollywood more quickly and urgently than a joint at
Woodstock. In this back-to-basics plea, he ripped the notions
of the bankable star. "If this were true," he asked, alluding
to Batman and The Two Jakes, "then how can one explain what
happened to 1990's vehicle for 1989's `most bankable star,' Jack
Nicholson?" He apologized for the studio's big-budget Dick Tracy
and disclosed that he had turned down Beatty's subsequent
project, Bugsy. And he urged his minions to build movies around
the story, not the star.

    Katzenberg had numbers, not just frustration, to back him
up. The top three hits of 1990 had been Home Alone, Ghost and
Pretty Woman, with nary a bankable star (though Pretty Woman
turned Roberts into one). They were simple tales about people
who change: the old stuff of drama, and of Hollywood in the
decades when its tinsel glistened like gold. Richard Zanuck
quotes his father Darryl, longtime pasha of 20th Century Fox,
as saying success in movies boils down to three things: "story,
story, story." Zanuck is an independent producer who has defied
industry logic and made hits without big stars: Jaws, Cocoon,
Driving Miss Daisy. As he notes with wry pride, "I'm a throwback
and part of the vanguard at the same time."

    They -- the bosses -- wish. But the men with the money
know they have had to hand a lot out to get a lot more back.
And Arnold or Sly Stallone didn't need an Uzi to coax $12
million out of a production chief's pocket. Considering the
current wave of penny-pinching promises, Variety's Art Murphy
predicts that "smaller will be better. Until a producer overpays
a star for a film that turns into a monster hit." And the cycle
will continue, as long as people are fascinated by the mystery
of charisma and will pay to see it radiate through a rough or
pretty face 30 ft. tall.