TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=89TT1690> <title> June 26, 1989: Kevin Costner:Pursuing The Dream </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989 Cover Stories June 26, 1989 Kevin Costner:The New American Hero </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> SHOW BUSINESS, Page 76 Pursuing The Dream </hdr> <body> Sexy, straight-on and ambitious, Kevin Costner is a grownup hero with brains By Richard Corliss <qt> <l>The movie hero's ten commandments:</l> <l>1. A man stands alone.</l> <l>2. A man stands by his friends.</l> <l>3. A man protects his family.</l> <l>4. A man loves doing his work well.</l> <l>5. A man is at home out of doors.</l> <l>6. A man shares and plays fair.</l> <l>7. A man speaks his mind.</l> <l>8. A man hoards his smiles.</l> <l>9. A man follows his dreams.</l> <l>10. What he's got is what he is.</l> </qt> Kevin Costner is the man of the moment and a star out of his time. What other actor would think to achieve rampant movie fame by playing a Soviet spy and two baseball fanatics? For Costner, though, the improbable risk was a good career move. As Eliot Ness in The Untouchables, he played the straightest arrow in Prohibition-era Chicago and made saintliness sexy. As Tom Farrell, the cryptic intelligence officer in 1987's No Way Out, he brought devious modernity to a character right out of a '40s suspense novel. As Crash Davis, the bush-league catcher in 1988's Bull Durham, he found charm in cynicism and anchored the first hit baseball movie in a dozen years. And as Ray Kinsella in the current Field of Dreams--the Iowa farmer who hears spectral pleas of pain, builds a ball park in his cornfield and follows the voices back to his childhood heart--Costner, 34, has touched filmgoers with an E.T. for adults. Both Bull Durham and Field of Dreams echo with the American and Hollywood past. They blend hip showmanship and a vigorous Saturday-matinee innocence. But they work for an audience because Kevin Costner is in them. Virtually unknown three years ago, he is one of the few actors people will consistently line up to see. Men like him, women love him; when he walks into a room or a movie, the wistful lust of female fans sticks to him like decals. His name above the title guarantees quality; each of his hit movies is honorable and ambitious. And each gains a magnificent credibility from his presence. No matter how predictable or implausible the plots, his rugged face doesn't lie. You simply have to believe Kevin Costner. "Kevin can do it all," says Casey Silver, president of worldwide production for the MCA Motion Picture Group. "He can carry a gun or a woman in his arms. He can be tough or add a sweet comedic touch." The surprise is that an actor so versatile can be so focused. Ask Phil Alden Robinson, the writer-director of Field of Dreams. "You can't force him to do something that's false," says Robinson. "He marches to his own Walkman." Or maybe to his own Victrola. For Costner is both a harbinger of the postimperial American male and a throwback to heroes of Hollywood's grandest days. Today, when movies are not so grand, male icons come in two models. The comics (Bill Murray, Tom Hanks, Eddie Murphy) trade in hip facetiousness, in sitcom-size emotions, in the suave hustling of attitude. The hunks (Harrison Ford, Sylvester Stallone, Clint Eastwood) go crusading for the Grail, the heavyweight title, the urban psycho, but have few communal roots; they are loners, in quest only of the quest. Suspended between these two types is young Tom Cruise--a certified star in search of an enduring identity. Costner is something else: a grownup hero with brains. He's modern and classic. He thinks fast and shoots straight. He has city reflexes that help him beat the big boys at hardball. Yet he stokes memories of the lone man on a horse, silhouetted against the craggy horizon and setting sun of Old West values. He has the requisite danger for big-screen stardom--the stubbornness in pursuit of ideals, the slow anger when pushed, the threat in a face that can mask its intentions--even as his actions inspire trust. He could be a husband, a lover, a chief of state. And now Costner is poised to tote the ten commandments of frontier heroism into an anxious new decade. He is the hard-riding scout bearing the movies' message of what America thinks it was and hopes it can be again. Of course, that's just casting. And acting. As well as any performer, Costner knows that his eminence is a happy fortuity of timing and talent. And he doesn't mind being this year's hot ticket. The $5 million salary he could command for each picture is a perk. Nor has Costner complained about making movie love to Susan Sarandon in a bathtub (Bull Durham) or Sean Young in the No Way Out limo--the window-steaming sex scene that earned Costner his first priapic appeal. And for an outdoorsman who was a fine athlete in school, there can be few tangier pleasures than playing baseball in Bull Durham and Field of Dreams or playing a cowboy in Silverado. Even in the Nitti-gritty Untouchables, where he earned his first star billing as Eliot Ness, Costner got to lead a posse to a varmint's hideout. Now he is wielding his clout and testing his fans' expectations. In his next movie, Revenge, he plays an unlikable cuckoldder. Last week he began scouting locations for Dances with Wolves, a drama about the Sioux nation, in which he will star and make his debut as a director. Still, it makes him itch that his recent roles have earned him a Hunk-of-the-Month label. "I have the same problem with stardom that I have with royalty," he says. "They're judged not by the quality of their ideas but by their birthright. I didn't set out to be a star. If you do, you engage in manipulation. You do stuff to be liked. I didn't want to be endorsed; I wanted to be listened to. I had ideas about things." To be a new star in Hollywood is to be pegged as the reincarnation of some old star, and Costner watchers have their candidates. "Kevin fulfills many of the same ideals that a Jimmy Stewart or a Gary Cooper did for their generation: the little guy against the system, the pure guy vs. evil, the strong man in a time of trouble," says Tom Pollock, chairman of the MCA Motion Picture Group. "It's hard to think of any other leading man in his 30s who can play this variety of roles--action hero, romantic lead and family man." James Earl Jones, who co-stars in Field of Dreams, was at first skeptical of Cooping up Costner. "But watching Kevin on the monitor on location," he says, "I had to admit: it was Gary Cooper. For one thing, Gary Cooper was always looking to spit. He and Kevin have the same pucker in the mouth." For his part, Costner wouldn't mind going back in time to get back in the saddle. "I'd have loved to spend five or six years in the studio system," he says, "doing all those cowboy pictures. I was born 30 years too late for the kind of cinema I'd like to do." Here he is plastering rouge on the Old Hollywood corpse. In the heyday of the studio system, few stars were given the chance of controlling their cinematic fate. Lawrence Kasdan, who directed Costner in The Big Chill (where his substantial role was cut to a few cameo shots as a corpse) and Silverado, compares the actor with Steve McQueen. "Like McQueen," Kasdan notes, "Kevin has a real sense of what he can do. He has always known what's really important for him, rather than what others think is important." Costner knows his strengths and limitations. "I can't fix my car," he says, "though I play characters who can. I can't work my computer. I don't understand certain financial things, though I'm really good with the bottom line. I flunked geometry twice. My mind just doesn't work like that. But I'm completely comfortable in this medium. I put in hard days, but I love every bit of it." He's also sensitive about what he considers his own physical limitations. "I don't think of myself as classically handsome. I've been told that the camera is really good to me, but sometimes when people meet me, they're baffled. That's why I hate to be photographed out of character." Costner knew how to project and protect himself--knew acutely who Kevin Costner was--long before anyone in Hollywood cared. "He had total self-confidence from the beginning," says J.J. Harris, his agent from 1984 until this year. "I'm sure he's had it forever. He's a bigger-than-life person whose presence fills a room, though not in an ostentatious way." Yet he was often willing to torpedo his career to make a point. In Frances, one of his first movies, he risked not getting a Screen Actors Guild card when he balked at saying what he deemed an inappropriate line of dialogue. When Oliver Stone asked if he wanted to play the Tom Berenger role in Platoon, "I didn't even meet with him," Costner says, "because my brother Dan had been in Viet Nam, and I was reluctant to do a film about something that had such impact on his life. In a way, I regret not doing it; it was a wonderful film. But my consciousness was with my brother." Family is important to Costner. Dan, 38, who received a Navy and Marine Corps medal for heroism in Viet Nam, is in charge of finances at Kevin's company, Tig Productions, named after their grandmother. To take the job, he left a corporate vice presidency. "You wouldn't do this unless it was your brother," Dan says evenly. "And you wouldn't do it unless your brother was Kevin." Kevin's wife Cindy, his college sweetheart, left a good job at Delta Air Lines when the Costners began a family, which now includes Annie, 5, Lily, 2 1/2, and Joe, 1 1/2. "She's active, she's involved," Dan says of Cindy. "She doesn't want to be a Hollywood wife." The couple seem close, considering that one of them is a screen stud with a gypsy work schedule. In April, Costner took his wife, children and parents to the gala opening of the Disney/MGM Studios Theme Park. "Finding a balance between personal and professional is an ongoing struggle for Kevin," Harris says. "He's a movie star now, and the demands on him are staggering." Costner is aware of the challenge. "I know I can do better with relationships with my family, and I have to figure out how," he confesses. "There's just not enough time for the people I care about. I'm a good dad--when I'm at home. But when I'm away, my motel-room walls aren't lined with pictures of my family. Maybe something is wrong with me, but I separate things in order to keep exploring who I am. It's a high-class set of problems that cut into my creativity and my family life. I don't want to stop what I'm doing, and I don't want to lose what I have." The Costner clan has always been on the move. "This is a Grapes of Wrath family," explains brother Dan. The Costners, of Irish and German descent (with a hint of Cherokee blood), moved West when they lost their Oklahoma farm. Kevin's father Bill recapitulated the Okie migration, moving from one Southern California town to another in various jobs for Southern California Edison. "From Day 1, Kevin was his own person," recalls Bill, 60. "Once he decided to take charge of organizing a parade at his school. I figured it was too big a job for an eleven-year-old and said, `Kevin, you can't do that.' And Kevin said, `Dad, never tell me I'm not able to do something.' He went ahead and organized the parade." From early days, Kevin loved most of the things he learned to use later: family, sports, conflict, movies. The young jock wrote stories--he tried to compile a book based on letters and tapes Dan sent back from Viet Nam--and went to the movies. "Great heroism, great love stories sent chills down my spine," he recalls. "I was particularly intrigued by `dilemmas.' To me, drama is dilemma--the fight not to do something. A dilemma is wanting to kiss a woman and not doing it. Once you do it, it's `action.' Action is fine. I understand what it's about. But you have to understand where it comes from." And you can guess where the kissing dilemma came from. Kevin, only 5 ft. 2 in. as a high school sophomore, was shy about meeting girls; he claims he never dated. By the time he entered California State University at Fullerton, Kevin had grown into an athlete's tall, poised body. "I think I like sports because of my father," Costner says. "He never insisted I play with him, which made it even more attractive. He's my ideal of how a father should direct his son." Clearly, Kevin's ball park was a field of dreams with few anguished undertones. "Sports, besides the obvious competitive aspect, is about sharing and being fair," he notes. "And I've always liked to roll in the dirt. When I was little, I wasn't `it' very often in tag. You can translate that into acting. I don't get caught lying very often. I make sure that difficult scenes come off." The Costners were no kind of show-biz family. "I always figured that people on the screen were intended to be there" Costner says. "Acting was something other people did." Then, in the middle of a boring accounting class for his business major in college, he saw an ad for a production of Rumpelstiltskin. "The moment I decided to be an actor, I never looked back. I never breathed an easier breath. I relaxed. Then all I had to do was learn." It would be a tortuous road to prominence, potholed with the usual odd jobs and rejections--and films he rejected. He auditioned three times for the role Nicolas Cage snagged in Raising Arizona; he said no to the Jeff Bridges part in Jagged Edge and the Mel Gibson role in Mrs. Soffel. But Costner knew he was destined to do the work he loves doing well. "The doubt of success crept in--I was the kid in the backseat asking, `When are we going to get there?'--but I never questioned being on the right road. That's the fun part. If you're obsessed with your destination, you miss 80% of the point of acting: the ride there, the people you meet along the way. Mind you, I'm still not `there,' because I've never been sure what I was after. I'm the rat going forward on the treadmill. From the outside, it might look like I'm going in circles, but I feel I'm going like hell." By 1987 his career was going full blaze too. In The Untouchables and No Way Out, both released that summer, Costner was the young man on the move, trying to show his elders that he was as smart as he looked. In the first film, he was as pure as Galahad and got shouldered off the screen by Robert De Niro and Sean Connery; in the second, he was as devious as Kim Philby and held his own. But in both, he suggested a steely, all-American ambition that synced smartly with the mid-'80s American work ethic: get it done, whatever the cost. And there is a cost. To beat Al Capone, Ness must match the gangster's brutal efficiency. In No Way Out, his character is brilliantly compromised: good guy, bad guy; our spy, their spy. It is a film about acting on the global scale, about convincing the world that you are what you are not. In Bull Durham, Costner is a catcher trying to stave off retirement while he snarls baseball wisdom into the ear of an A-ball phenom. In this fable about the triumph of star quality over talent, the nice thing is that the movie is on the side of the losers; the funny thing is that Costner's Crash Davis, in baseball terms, is the loser, but he wears his grievances stylishly. And for all its locker-room ribaldry, Bull Durham was Costner's kind of movie. "The common thread in each of my films is poignance," he says, "`narrative' in a movie world that thinks audiences won't sit still for it. All the camerawork in the world can't disguise that there's no story. The cards of narrative have to keep flopping. There must be tremendously careful construction and attention to detail. My movies can't be salvaged by a car chase." Enter director Robinson with Field of Dreams, a movie with plenty of narrative and poignance, about baseball as the tree house of the American male. "To grow up male in this country," Robinson says, "is to have a special place in your heart for playing catch with Dad. It's a longing for a more innocent time, for easy connections that grew complicated with the years. We live in cynical times. We're all jaded. A lot of our heroes have turned out to have clay feet. I don't believe in astrology, crystals, reincarnation, heaven, hell. I don't believe dreams come true. But it's a primal emotion to want to make the bad good--to hope things will work out in the end." In Robinson's adaptation of the W.P. Kinsella novel Shoeless Joe, Ray is a New York boy, reared by a father he loved, resented and finally escaped from, who has brought his wife (Amy Madigan) and daughter to an Iowa farm. One night a voice whispers, "If you build it, he will come." Inexplicably moved, he builds a baseball diamond on the farm, where his father's old baseball idol, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta), soon materializes. Another message--"Ease his pain"--propels Ray to Boston to corral a reclusive novelist, Terence Mann (James Earl Jones), and a third mystic entreaty--"Go the distance"--sends them to Minnesota for an encounter with the ghost of another major leaguer, "Moonlight" Graham (Burt Lancaster). And, finally, for a trip back to his fungo Fatima and a game of catch with the one man he has been dreading and dying to meet. "Any class in film writing," says Charles Gordon, who produced Field of Dreams with his brother Lawrence, "would teach that this story contained the three elements you should never make movies about: fantasy, baseball and farming." Most studios turned it down flat. But film executive Pollock, according to Robinson, "said he'd make it even with an unknown. `This is the kind of movie you make only if a voice tells you to,' he told me. And I said, `If you make it, they will come.'" But could Robinson make it? "It was a 64-day shoot," Robinson says, "and 64 times I said I'd never direct again. I had industrial-strength angst." Often, though, the film seemed blessed. The scene where fog rolls in over Shoeless Joe was no special effect but the only five minutes that summer that fog touched the ball field. Says Chuck Gordon: "It was magic from Day 1." Field of Dreams is a movie to make a grown man cry. "Arnold Schwarzenegger called to tell us that he couldn't stop crying," says Lawrence Gordon. "Ron Darling, who pitches for the Mets, told me it was the only time he had cried in a film. He said he was so inspired, he went out and pitched a shutout." Some men, with dryer eyes, have other ideas. Iowa Governor Terry Branstad hopes Universal will allow him to use the line "Is this heaven? No, it's Iowa!" in a tourism campaign to plug his state. Others are enjoying a kind of agricultural celebrity. "I built it, and they're still coming," says Don Lansing, whose farm, just outside Dyersville, includes part of the playing field. "Hundreds of people, from all over." His neighbor Al Ameskamp, who decided to plow his part of the baseball diamond to grow corn again this year, says, "The only voices that I've been hearing out there are saying, `Al, it's dry.'" There are a few dry eyes as well. Some viewers find the film smug in its visionary fervor. And baseball mavens find it odd that Joe Jackson and his infamous Chicago Black Sox, bribed by gamblers to help throw the 1919 World Series and the 1920 pennant race, should be lauded for their innocence--as if, years from now, some movie should dream of bringing Ben Johnson back to sprint for that elusive Olympic medal. Bill James, the baseball writer and sultan of sabermetrics, says Field of Dreams is "about people who love baseball but leave Fenway Park in the fourth inning. Why does Jackson bat right and throw left, instead of the other way around? And where is his famous black bat? But Costner is great, and I'm happy we have the movie." Love the movie and damn all those who don't as soulless swine. Hate it and call it Field of Corn. But appreciate the care and assurance with which it was made. And grant this, that in a time when movies and politicians win approval by dodging the big awful issues, Field of Dreams engineers a head-on collision with things that matter: the desperate competition between fathers and sons, the need for '60s idealism in the me-first '80s, the desire for reconciliation beyond the grave. In a dialogue between Mann and Ray as they approach the ball park, Field of Dreams provides its own pan and rave. "Unbelievable!" exclaims Mann, and Ray replies, "It's more than that. It's perfect." Costner defers credit for the film's success to Robinson: "He's the star of Field of Dreams." But there are moments the star is proud to claim. "When Ray is throwing to Shoeless Joe, he gets so excited that he glances back to the house to see if his wife is looking. When Ray is walking toward his dad, picking at his hand, and, realizing that his dad is doing the same thing, he quickly puts his hands down. And his run to the mound isn't a completely athletic run. It's a little funny. There's some English on it. Those things are mine and nobody else's." In Bull Durham, Crash says, more or less, "Never mess with a winning streak." Costner is too restless to take that advice. If moviegoers are embracing him only as a sanctified jock, maybe they should brace themselves for Revenge, scheduled for release early next year. This violent drama may upend--or just end--Costner's current image as a Goody Two-Cleats. "Revenge is shocking, vulgar, a bit of a fall from grace," Costner says. "But I have no problem playing a man who isn't likable, as long as I understand him. Revenge is strong medicine; you won't come out feeling good. That's O.K. too. You don't have to have a snow cone at the end of every movie. Right now, I don't know how this one will do. I don't make broad claims on the playground, and I don't do it with movies. That's beyond my control. I just go in believing in the story." Now he is believing in Dances with Wolves. "You know how Americans setting foot in another country sometimes feel totally at home?" he asks. "Well, for me, a country road has always felt really right. The notion of a man on a horse, carrying all his possessions on his back, totally self-sufficient, is really romantic to me. When I was 18," the actor boasts, "I split L.A. and built a canoe, which I paddled down the rivers that Lewis and Clark navigated while they were making their way to the Pacific. So it's not surprising to me that I'm making a movie on this theme: about America and Americans. Directing isn't an exercise in control, not a growing-up or a breaking-out phase. Of course I'm anxious. I'm not sure I'll do a good job. It's not that I'm worried about the people around me. I just want to make sure that my camera tells the story." The safe bet is that no matter how suicidal his selection of projects may seem on paper, Hollywood will go on believing in Costner. "Everyone respects power in this business," says James Earl Jones, "and Kevin's is a unique brand of power. It's not predictable. He's not after megamillions or making sure his ego is fulfilled. He isn't macho; he's pure male. If you press the wrong buttons, the man is dangerous. He won't explode--that's counterproductive--but he will set you straight real fast. He's got away with things that a lot of up-and-comers couldn't have." And how long will the system let Costner get away with it? "Hard to say," Jones says. "It has to figure him out first." With Costner, that shouldn't be hard. "If you say what you mean in this town," he once noted, "you're an outlaw." Now he's the sheriff but still living proof of director Kasdan's law: "You know you're on the right track if Hollywood finds you an enigma." And Costner is pleased to fold that aura into his current radiance. "People look at me and think they see everything," he says. "But what they see is one moment frozen in time. I've come from somewhere to get to that point. There's stuff in my back pockets, up my sleeve that they don't know anything about. I don't offer up everything there is, onscreen or in life. It's not guile. But conversation is supposed to be a two-way thing, and generally people want to know more about me than they want to reveal about themselves. So of course I hold back. I'm not dying to tell people my story." In some ways, he has already told it, in cinema code. The adventure hero, the family man, the tenacious idealist are aspects of Costner--sportsman, husband and father, daredevil careerist--enlarged and illuminated on the big screen. Unlike the sabermetrician or the grouchy critic, moviegoers do not sit in the dark and gaze at the light in search of documentary; they want mundane facts transformed into pulp poetry. They may not be looking for a fax of an old-time movie hero either. No Kevin Cooper, thank you. Kevin Costner suits them fine. They hope to follow the fellow who follows the dream. And they will be curious to see if he follows Field of Dreams as scrupulously as he has observed the commandments of movie heroism. Now he has the power to create his own dreams. </body> </article> </text>