The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  Gibson has been one of the few neo-stars to emerge with a strong cinematic vision as a creator. Only George Clooney stands as a potential rival to Gibson in this regard. (Kevin Costner also attempted to direct, but after a successful start with Dances with Wolves [1990], he overreached and sank his career.) As early as 1993, Gibson directed himself in The Man Without a Face, the story of a disfigured former teacher wrongly accused of child abuse, and in 1995 he helmed Braveheart, the story of Scottish rebel William Wallace. Both projects, with their themes of unjustified yet redemptive suffering, turned out to be rehearsals for Gibson’s personal Great White Whale, The Passion of the Christ (2004). With unswerving commitment, Gibson labored for years to bring his intense personal vision of the Christ story to the screen. The box office success of the project stunned Hollywood, caused controversy, and incited whispers of sadomasochism for its blow-by-blow depictions of physical torture. But anyone who had ever paid any attention to Gibson’s career over the years should have seen it coming from as far back as the apocalyptic Mad Max. Gibson proves that the intensity that actors had always had to summon to become stars could do more than just sell tickets for other people’s projects. It can also form visions of its own, bringing all its latent threats and promises into concrete form. What passionate projects might we have seen if actors such as Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Davis, and Stanwyck could have been neo-stars?

  Brad Pitt also harks back to the old style of movie star in that much of his appeal does come from his angelic looks. If a plastic surgeon could create the perfect modern face for a man, it would be Brad Pitt’s. He is the ultimate in contemporary male beauty, which is actually the great thing about his stardom. Movies, after all, are supposed to be fun. It’s a tough job (as Tyrone Power could attest), but somebody’s got to do it.

  Brad Pitt as a neo-star has not branched out into Broadway, other kinds of theatre, or television. His allegiance is strictly to the movies. He has shown no ambition to direct or produce in any serious way (beyond possessing his own obligatory production company), but has instead remained an actor first and foremost. Where he has exercised his freedom is in choosing projects that might never have gotten made in the old studio system. These include the profoundly homoerotic Interview with the Vampire (which also represented a daring choice for his co-star Tom Cruise) in 1994, the graphically violent Seven (1995), and the gloriously schizophrenic Fight Club (1999). Like most long-lasting neo-stars, Pitt has balanced these edgy choices with easier fare, like the 1998 romantic comedy Meet Joe Black (in which he played a very good-looking and sexy Death), the thriller Spy Game (2001), the sophisticated comedy Ocean’s Eleven (2001), and the prestige pictures Seven Years in Tibet (1997) and Troy (2004).

  It’s a startling list of unusual films for a star who was first noticed on-screen because he was a hot-looking hitchhiker, a real down-and-dirty drifter (Thelma & Louise [1991]). Pitt was cut out to be a sex symbol, and that is what he would have been in the old system. With the freedom of a neo-star, he’s been able to make other choices. Originally a bad-ass type, he was “cleaned up real good” to become a more noble, romantic hero, muting his sex appeal to domesticate him for a higher fame.

  It is interesting to note, however, that many of these “safer” choices have actually been among the worst failures of Pitt’s career. Seven and Fight Club, by contrast, were huge hits. Pitt is thus one of the few neo-stars whose star persona is located in, rather than denied by, his edgier projects. He is also one of the new breed of neo-stars who maintain their fame somewhat separately from their box office returns. Everyone considers him to be an enormously profitable star, but his movies haven’t always been moneymakers. The Devil’s Own (1997), Seven Years in Tibet, Meet Joe Black, Fight Club, The Mexican (2001), Spy Game, and Troy all performed under expectations. (Ocean’s Eleven, one of his hits, was not a star vehicle for him, but an ensemble piece, and even its sequel, Ocean’s Twelve, was not a big success.) Pitt’s 2005 action comedy, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, however, was huge, partly because of the offscreen gossip it generated when he left his wife, Jennifer Aniston, to take up with his co-star, Angelina Jolie. Pitt has had many box office failures—too many, it would seem, for a star of his magnitude. Yet by expertly handling his public relations, he has continued to generate buzz. So far, he has proved willing to live publicly in order to maintain his fame. However, he has recently begun to look as if he genuinely hates what celebrity has done to his personal life. Time will reveal whether he will want to make further use of the options modern stardom offers him.

  Keanu Reeves is the clearest example of a neo-star who has used his freedom to branch out as far as possible. But then, he came into movie fame from far left field, finding his first success in the nihilistic indie project River’s Edge (1986). He next found prominence playing comedy roles in two surprise hits, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) and Parenthood (1989). For him, these two films were excursions into mainstream star persona. They were negative experiences because people believed that he really was the slacker “whoah” dude. They made fun of him, calling him stupid and insisting that he couldn’t act. To this day, he is still haunted by his stoned, dudely performances in these roles; every contemporary actor who essays a stoner invokes Reeves. Refusing, however, to be limited by this, he made the action movie Point Break (1991), played a bisexual hustler in My Own Private Idaho (1991), and did the costume drama Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). In retrospect, it is easy to see that Reeves was thinking strategically and laying the groundwork to refuse any kind of typecasting. He has maintained that goal, appearing over the years in action movies (Speed [1994]), science fiction movies (The Matrix [1999]), romances (A Walk in the Clouds [1995]), romantic comedies (Something’s Gotta Give [2003]), and even a horror film (The Devil’s Advocate [1997]). Besides those varied projects, Reeves has worked extensively onstage and has also chosen to play supporting roles or even cameos in a number of offbeat films such as Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Freaked (1993), The Last Time I Committed Suicide (1997), Me and Will (1999), and Thumbsucker (2005). He has also gone seriously against type by playing a serial killer in The Watcher (2000) and a thuggish wife beater in The Gift (2000).

  Reeves is a neo-star fighting the concept of stardom itself, working steadily against persona to the point where no one has a clear idea of who Reeves is on- screen anymore. This has hurt him, but it has also allowed him to maintain the versatility that means more to him than fame. In the old studio system, Reeves would have been forced to go on playing his slacker dude for as long as it made money. His career would have been limited, and thus short-lived. Instead, he has used his freedom to move on and slowly force audiences to accept him as a real actor.

  It’s clear now that at first everyone underestimated George Clooney. He perfectly embodies the opportunities open to neo-stars if they have vision. He made Oscar history in 2006 by being nominated for Best Director, Best Writer (both for Good Night and Good Luck), and Best Supporting Actor for Syriana.* Never before had someone been nominated for directing one film and acting in another in the same year. This achievement shows the degree to which Clooney, who rose to fame playing a hunky television doctor on ER, has emerged as a serious artistic player in Hollywood. That Good Night and Good Luck and Syriana are both ambitious political films about the United States shows that Clooney has the focus of an auteur.

  Clooney is similar to Harrison Ford: He seems to be a grown-up, masculine type who has a quietly sarcastic take on the events that happen around him. He lacks Ford’s intensity, however, and Ford’s lurking ability to go quietly berserk if pushed too far. He’s likable, but he has no moral outrage. He’s always going to be on the sly side. Clooney has played this shrewdly by tending to choose dry, sophisticated projects such as Out of Sight (1998); Ocean’s Eleven; O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000); and the romantic comedy Intolerable Cruelty (2003). The ghost of Cary Grant at his most urbane and devil-may-care looms gently over each of these choices, but Clooney holds his own; he come
s in second to no one. He makes perfect use of neo-stardom.

  Russell Crowe represents an important aspect of being a neo-star, which is the freedom to act like a jerk. (“I’m just a bloke…a little furry animal.”) Although Crowe’s publicists try to put a positive spin on him, Crowe has broken out of their control, using the freedom to steal a page from the old Romantics and present himself as an artiste, a purely creative soul who neither wants nor needs to make any concessions to convention. In the old days, there was a certain amount of room for troubled stars (Robert Walker), but in general, studios sold movie stars as happy, grateful creatures. Acting itself was not supposed to be a source of agony or plumbing one’s greatest depths or going to Method extremes. For Crowe, however, that is what acting is. He’s an outcast nineteenth-century French painter of an actor, and as long as he pulls his weight at the box office, he can get away with living out that image as much as he wants.

  Crowe’s ability to play anything could have been either a problem (no type) or an asset (he could have been Paul Muni) in the former star system. He has, with the freedom of neo-stardom, been able to prove himself to be a versatile and sensitive actor in many different types of roles. However, he appears to have used up some of his credibility in Hollywood with his offscreen antics. (Many believe he lost the Best Actor Oscar for A Beautiful Mind [2001] because he had alienated so many in Hollywood.) Crowe is a classic case of the pros and cons of both systems.

  For today’s female neo-stars, the story is not unlike what it was for the great females of the past: It’s harder to last at the box office. In early 2006, the top ten movie actresses ranked by the salaries they could command were, from the highest ($20 million per film) to the lowest ($9 million) were 1. Julia Roberts; 2. Nicole Kidman; 3. and 4. tied, Reese Witherspoon and Drew Barrymore; 5. Renée Zellweger; 6. and 7. tied, Angelina Jolie and Cameron Diaz; 8. Jodie Foster; 9. Charlize Theron; and 10. Jennifer Aniston. (Within weeks of the posting of this list, Reese Witherspoon won the Oscar for her role in Walk the Line and negotiated a $30 million paycheck for her next announced film, Our Family Trouble, and moved herself ahead of Roberts and into the number-one position.)* Witherspoon, who entered films in 1991 with The Man in the Moon, rose to the very top in 2005, and she has a reputation in the business for hard work and super-seriousness on her sets. (“I’m not passing margaritas out in my trailer after work,” she admits. “I’m not frivolous and carefree.”) She’s more like her predecessors, Davis, Crawford, Stanwyck, in her determination and focus. She could end up being the one who stays in the business for the long haul.†

  The paychecks available to the top females seem huge, but when the overall box office listings are studied, it is still dominated by male stars. The top ten rankings for 2005 were: 1. Tom Cruise (who had won the annual poll seven times); 2. Johnny Depp; 3. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (tied); followed by Vince Vaughn, George Clooney, Will Smith, Reese Witherspoon, Adam Sandler, and the previous year’s number-one-spot winner, Tom Hanks.‡ There are only two women on the list: Jolie, who’s linked to Brad Pitt through their offscreen romance and on-screen hit, Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005), and the newcomer Reese Witherspoon—a thin representation of the top moneymaking female stars. Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, Sandra Bullock, and Angelina Jolie make good representatives for the situation for actresses in movies today. They, too, need their own type and have the opportunity for “departure”—a neo-stardom—but their time span is shorter and the opportunities for change harder to find.

  Part of the problem for female stars today is that the filmmaking process no longer gives primary consideration to how often the audience is shown a beautiful woman (or man, for that matter) in luminous backlit close-ups. Such shots were once basics in the grammar of movie language—now they are rare. In a 1930s movie like The Crusades, Loretta Young was ethereally lit to suggest purity, radiance, desirability, and, of course, to showcase her uncommon female beauty. Not only did her close-up enhance her star power, it also supported the meaning of the story in which Young does, in fact, play a virtuous queen whose noble self-sacrifice makes a better Christian (but more important, a sexier man) out of King Richard (Henry Wilcoxin). Women like this are not fashionable today, and neither are the stories they enhanced. Even the highly erotic female close-ups of the 1940s are rare. Rita Hayworth in Gilda or Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice or Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity—all were shot in erotically glamorous close-ups, each one moving in on a man to lure, seduce. No one who saw these images—or sees them now—discounts their power. Turner and Hayworth are luscious, lips parted, eyes flashing, every inch the Hollywood star. Stanwyck plays it more remote, colder, reflecting her proper status as an actress rather than a glamour queen. Stanwyck’s close-up presents her almost as a character actress. Such cinematic attention to building the female image, and to linking the audience (both male and female) to her, does not occur in the same way today.

  The biggest female star of the recent era is Julia Roberts. Unlike many others, Roberts has endured. She has risen higher than any of her competitors, from onetime strong contender Michelle Pfeiffer (who has not only stopped working but been completely forgotten) to more recent pretenders such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Halle Berry, two former Oscar winners who faded fast. Roberts has outlasted them all, and unless she decides to end her career in order to raise her children, she may well outlast another generation of actresses, too.*

  Although Roberts does not invoke any specific golden era star, she has become our only modern female legend of their wattage. Also like them, she grows into who the audience wants her to be over the years as her career unfolds and her persona becomes bigger than any vessel created to contain it. Like the mature Joan Crawford or Lana Turner, Roberts now completely dominates any film in which she appears. At first, she was a sweet ingenue in Mystic Pizza (1988) and Steel Magnolias (1989), and then a hooker with a heart of gold in Pretty Woman (1990). She rapidly segued into a plucky-career-girl phase with Flatliners (1990), The Pelican Brief (1993), and the unsuccessful I Love Trouble (1994), taking time out along the way to make her mark in relationship dramas by playing a runaway battered wife (Sleeping with the Enemy [1991]) and the nurse of a dying man (Dying Young [1991]). She moved around the chessboard from betrayed wife to meddling friend to intruding stepmother (Something to Talk About [1995], My Best Friend’s Wedding [1997], Stepmom [1998]) and also essayed two unsuccessful period pieces, Mary Reilly (1996) and Michael Collins (1996). She learned from those later failures and took it upon herself from that time forward to become “the Contemporary Woman” (her type). Thus, she is successful because she has found the neo-star zen point between type and variety: She basically makes only one film—a story about a contemporary female experience with an emphasis on relationships—and plays only one character, her contemporary female. But within that territory, she has astonishing range. She can play cute, icy, daffy, sexy, ballbusting, and jealous, upscale, downscale, without becoming defined by any one of them. In a sense, Julia Roberts, the ultimate modern female star, is possibly the ultimate modern female actor. She has displayed a flexibility from film to film that Meryl Streep can only envy, playing the formerly fat, overshadowed sister of a movie star in America’s Sweethearts (2001), and the movie star herself in Notting Hill (1999). For most actresses, one or the other of those roles would be “going against type,” but anything contemporary is Roberts’s type. Never drawing attention to herself as an actor (she made only one deliberate—and successful—bid for an Oscar by playing the crusading Erin Brockovich [2000]), Roberts has nonetheless proved herself to be one at a very high level. Oddly enough, however, Roberts the neo-star has created a career for herself that is exactly like the career she would have probably had under the studio system. Her career illustrates how things may have changed artistically for men, but not necessarily for women.*

  Nicole Kidman suggests Grace Kelly in her pale thinness, hauteur, and seemingly inbred sense of class. Although she is thought of as a ver
satile “great actress” (she put on a false nose to win an Oscar for The Hours [2002]), she has usually stuck to playing upper-class, sheltered, or highly professional women. The screenwriter Simon Kinberg notes, “Something feels a little brittle about her, and in an interesting way.” Some of her “brittle women” are naturally reserved, some are high-strung and sensitive, some are repressed, and some simply don’t have time for anything but fighting the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the post-Soviet era (as with her Dr. Julia Kelly in The Peacemaker [1997]). Her women are not spontaneous. The less sympathetic ones are controlling and even calculating (as in To Die For, where she plays a woman who seduces teenage boys and manipulates them into murdering her husband).* They all tend to have an air of superiority. Indeed, the remake of The Stepford Wives (2004) hinges upon Kidman’s ability to outshine Matthew Broderick as her husband, thus causing him to punish her by having her turned into a robot. In general Kidman’s characters, almost like those of a similar male “blond god,” Robert Redford, do not reveal all their secrets. (George Cukor once said that when it came to real stars, “there’s always something about them that you’d like to know.” In other words, some little secret you feel only you will locate.) Audiences like Kidman’s ladylike stance, sensing that her real story lies elsewhere. She keeps her own counsel, and thus, like Roberts, has a neo-stardom that is actually no more than a single old-fashioned type that puts on different hats (or noses) to go all serious when necessary. Kidman takes few real chances with her stardom.