So 1992 shaped up as a tough year for Christian. After the disastrous opening of Newsies in April, David went ahead and saddled Christian with the mortgage on the Manhattan Beach house. Christian went with his mother on that fateful trip to Morocco and fell ill—the case of the fecal matter in the food. The release date for his next film, Swing Kids, was being continually pushed back. Originally planned as a Christmas 1992 movie, it was now looking like a 1993 release. The retreating release date was not a good sign.
However, there were a couple people who had seen Newsies on the big screen who would have a profound effect on Christian’s life. Winona Ryder caught a screening of Newsies and fell in love with the movie. Ryder would go on to cast Christian in the movie Little Women. And by meeting and befriending Winona, Christian would meet her personal assistant, his future wife, Sibi Blazic. And 2,200 miles away from Los Angeles, I caught the movie at the Kingsway Theater on Bloor Avenue in Toronto, Canada, and began to make a connection with the young actor from Empire of the Sun.
As fate would have it, Newsies ended up being important to the movie universe. In a couple years following its theatrical release, Newsies would thrive as a huge hit on video thanks to an army of Baleheads and Christian’s well-orchestrated Internet marketing campaigns. It was the beginning of Christian’s rule over the Internet.
Director Kenny Ortega, bitterly disappointed by Newsies’ original box office failure, would begin to get fan mail from people who loved Newsies. One young fan in San Francisco even changed his name to Jack Kelly and started a very popular fan site. In fact, Christian and Ortega received letters from fans around the world who had gotten their high school theater departments or glee clubs to perform numbers from Newsies. In 2006, Kenny Ortega would return to the genre and direct all three High School Musical TV movies for Disney, launching the careers of a new generation of Disney stars, including Vanessa Hudgens and Zac Efron.
The success of the High School Musical movies was one of the influences of the hit 2009 TV series Glee. In 2010, Disney quietly registered a bunch of Internet domain names, subtly revealing that they were about to adapt Newsies into a Broadway musical. On March 3, 2010, Disney registered newsiesbroadway.com, newsiesmusical.com, newsiesontour.com, newsiesthemusical.com, and newsiestickets.com. Then, on September 15, 2011, Newsies opened onstage at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey—a key theater to beta test Broadway-bound productions—to rave reviews. Newsies opened on Broadway on March 15, 2012, at the Nederlander Theatre. Amazingly, one of Disney’s biggest bombs is still popular twenty years later. Not bad for a movie that is OFR!
By the way, Zac Efron’s first major pre-High School Musical role was in the 2004 TV series Summerland, in which his character’s name was . . . Cameron Bale.
Christian and I sitting around the pool, making plans for world domination!
[5]
Christian Fail
“Now, before I was a movie star, I had other jobs, you know, low-paying, menial jobs. And I can tell you the best job I ever had was being a professional movie star. Because, as a movie star, I get paid a ridiculous amount of money and I don’t have to work that hard. So, to sum it all up, being a movie star? High reward, low effort.”
—Mel Gibson, SNL monologue
PETER MÜLLER: “You’re turning into a fucking Nazi!”
THOMAS BERGER: “Oh, so what if I am?”
—Swing Kids
If you want to be a movie star in Hollywood, you have to be “box office.”
It’s that simple. That’s not cold and that’s not cruel, it’s just the bottom line. Hollywood is in the business of making money, so stars are the actors who sell movie tickets, drum up movie rentals or downloads, and move DVDs—that’s how they are “box office.”
If you ask an agent or a producer, who’s the best actor in Hollywood, they’re going to go by the actor’s box office appeal. In an artistic and creative world like moviemaking, you might measure an actor’s skill by his awards or reviews, but the bean counters go by grosses.
This is the age-old argument about quantity versus quality, movie star versus actor. Ask yourself, what’s the best food in the world? Judging by quantity, one could argue that the Big Mac must be the best food in the world. A professional chef in Paris will, of course, gag in his sauce pan, but by sheer quantity, McDonald’s has that worldwide “box office” clout that no other restaurant has.
Now ask yourself, who’s the best living actor in the world? If you go by grosses, it’s arguably Harrison Ford, a movie star who has yet to win an Oscar. His name alone could guarantee that a movie opens at number one at the box office. Will Smith’s name could also guarantee a number-one opening, though he, too, has yet to win an Oscar.
So for an up-and-coming actor, the goals are the same. You need to do good work that attracts an audience. And you need to demonstrate to the studios and producers that your name in the credits makes them money. If you can attract a large worldwide audience, all the better. No surprise, then, that action movies are the studio’s favorites because they translate well worldwide.
When the Transformer movies became huge box office hits, you could see the jockeying between the major parties for credit. Was a Transformer movie a hit because of director Michael Bay? Because of up-and-coming Shia LaBeouf? Or because of new hottie on the block Megan Fox? As Bay reminded a reporter: “Shia LaBeouf wasn’t a big movie star before he did Transformers. Nobody in the world knew about Megan Fox until I found her and put her in Transformers.”
Acting awards are nice trophies for the actor but the studios really don’t care about an award unless it helps grosses. Obviously not having an Oscar didn’t hurt Transformers! But you can bet that career-minded actors will keep alternating their action franchises with films that showcase their acting for an Oscar win. Christian won his Oscar for The Fighter, not Batman!
Both David and Christian’s agent believed in the old Hollywood advice that any actor yearning for a career of longevity and substance had to follow the rule: “Do one for the studio, then one for yourself.” Essentially, do a studio film to make the studio money, so you have the freedom to do an indie film of your choice to show off your acting skills.
Initially in 1991, Christian’s career was looking pretty good. He had a three-picture deal with Disney, so that took care of his big studio obligations. After shooting Newsies, Christian found a small project he wanted to do, Prince of Jutland. Most British actors consider Shakespeare’s Hamlet a true test of acting mettle, and here was an oddball indie film that was going back to the source legends that served as Shakespeare’s basis for Hamlet.
Prince of Jutland was an independent film. By comparison, studio films—financed and produced by a major studio—have their own distribution network. A simplified definition of an “independent film” is a film without studio funding and seeking a distributor, presumably after making the tours of film market and festivals.
On paper, this looked like a very prestigious project. Gabriel Axel, an Oscar-winning director, was at the helm, the interpretation of Hamlet was inventive and fresh, and the cast was chock-full of impressive British actors. Christian starred as young Prince Amled. His love interest was a very young Kate Beckinsale (Underworld) with whom he’d reunite many years later in Laurel Canyon. His costars included: Helen Mirren, Brian Cox, Gabriel Byrne (his future Little Women costar), Tom Wilkinson, as well as future stars Ewen Bremner (Trainspotting) and Andy Serkis (The Lord of the Rings).
Unfortunately, Gabriel Axel was seventy-six at the time and in poor health, so, disappointingly, the final cut of Prince of Jutland seemed unfinished and uninspired. As a result, the film couldn’t find a distributor for a theatrical release in North America. For Christian’s fans though, it’s an important film, as it featured Christian’s first nude scene.
“Yes, it’s true,” Christian said. “Set foot on Danish soil and clothes seem to become a burden. Almost everyone in the film had a go at a nude scene.”
The good-nature
d production helped Christian relax for his scene where, at night in a barn’s rafters, he crawls nude through the hay, bare bubble butt in full view, to hit a prying Steven Waddington on the head with a stick.
Christian recalled: “Axel kept yelling to me: ‘No pee-pee! No pee-pee!’ So I kept my chest and stomach down and ended up all scratched up by the coarse hay. I had red marks on my body for weeks.”
Director Axel also had a laugh at Christian’s gestures in a scene with Brian Cox when Cox presents Christian with a foot-long wooden shaft. While the two talk, Christian absentmindedly begins to stroke the upright shaft until Axel had to yell: “Cut! You look like you are playing with your pee-pee!”
Prince of Jutland failed to find a distributor and languished for years until Christian’s fans—the mighty Baleheads—campaigned to get Miramax to release it on video, heavily reedited with a new title, Royal Deceit.
Prince of Jutland was Christian’s first experience with an independent film and all its distribution challenges. And after seeing the uneven work, Christian was happy to add this title to his Omitted From Résumé list.
What a difference twelve months can make. By 1992, Christian Bale’s career was looking a little shaky. American producers, if they had heard of him at all, only vaguely knew him as the former child star of Spielberg’s biggest bomb, Empire of the Sun. By April, Christian was also known as the teen star of Disney’s biggest bomb, Newsies. His European indie film, Prince of Jutland, couldn’t find a distributor. In some Hollywood circles, he had earned the nickname “Christian Fail.” Fortunately, Christian thought, he had his next big studio film coming out soon—Swing Kids!
Shot in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Swing Kids was not released until March 1993. Swing Kids was another pricey big production for Disney under their Hollywood Pictures label. Like Newsies, Swing Kids was also loosely based on a true story. It was about the growing power of the Nazi party and the creation of the Hitler Youth—sort of a Boy Scouts for fascists. In pre-World War II Hamburg, a group of swing kids—German teenagers who loved American big band swing music—defied the Nazis and the peer pressure of the Hitler Youth until they were either beaten and imprisoned or converted into polka-loving Aryans. Nazi Germany eventually banned American jazz music.
It was a terribly flawed movie. Robert Sean Leonard played the defiantly idealistic swing kid, while Christian got to play his first dark character, Thomas, a former swing-kid-turned-Nazi who betrays his family and friends. Kenneth Branagh was rumored to be so unhappy with the final cut of the movie that he requested his name be removed from the credits.
Christian fondly remembered the days before he was a star, when he could wander around Prague during the Swing Kids shoot. He told a reporter: “There’s a great feeling of being completely anonymous, knowing that I can walk around the city and I’m not going to bump into anybody that I know, at all. It’s sort of quite liberating, and you do silly things. I do remember, like, in Prague, for instance, my girlfriend coming up to visit me. We all went to this club. And, you know, we’d all been, the other actors and me, we’d all been going down to these clubs. So we get down there and just act like we always have done each time. Which is like complete and utter knobs. Completely aware that we’re in a city that sort of—there aren’t really consequences to what we do, that we’re gonna be leaving, so it doesn’t matter.”
Making his big-screen directorial debut, Thomas Carter was best known for his work as a director of the television series Hill Street Blues. Though Carter would go on to score a hit with the 2001 dance movie Save the Last Dance, he had his hands full dealing with Christian shooting Swing Kids.
David recalled dealing with faxes and phone calls from Carter as the director struggled to communicate with Christian: “I had to talk to Thomas Carter about Christian and explain that my son was not rude. He listens but does not necessarily acknowledge. Christian doesn’t like unnecessary verbiage.”
David tried another tact. He remembered pleading with Carter to help Christian be a better actor: “I asked him to encourage Christian to be emotional and passionate and expressive. He had to understand that my son came from an English background of restraint and repression!”
Christian worked very hard on Swing Kids, mastering a light American accent but more importantly, he learned how to swing dance. It looked as if his childhood dance training and Newsies experience would come in handy.
“We had a couple weeks of dance rehearsal,” Christian recalled. “For Swing Kids, we did the Lindy Hop, named after Charles Lindberg’s trans-Atlantic flight.”
Christian remembered studying the 1941 film Hellzapoppin’, which featured the Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, one of the most famous swing dance troupes.
Unfortunately, like Newsies, the critics hated Swing Kids.
Wrote Roger Ebert: “There are moments here where the movie seems to believe Hitler was bad, not because he mapped genocidal madness but because he wouldn’t let the Swing Kids dance all night.”
Washington Post’s Rita Kempley declared: “Swing Kids is a bad idea whose time has not come. It’s Cabaret as Col. Klink might have envisioned it, a nutty anti-Nazi a-go-go for teenagers, set to American music.”
“It’s Footloose Loose In The Third Reich and, even with your expectations kept knee-high to a kindergarten, you might have at least hoped for some finger-poppin’ music and a few great dance scenes. Sorry. Here, too, things come up short,” declared the Globe and Mail.
And, like Newsies, Swing Kids was a huge bomb for Disney’s Hollywood Pictures subsidiary, grossing just $5.6 million. Christian Fail was getting a reputation as box office poison.
Variety, the pulse of Hollywood, analyzed the movie: “A fascinating footnote of Second World War Nazi Germany is trivialized and sanitized in Hollywood Pictures’ odd concoction of music and politics known as Swing Kids. It has precious little to entice audiences into movie theaters. It will probably replicate the commercial performance of the company’s near-catastrophic Newsies.”
Critic Leonard Maltin summed it up nicely in his annual movie and video guide: “This year’s Newsies, and poor Bale is in both.”
It was little consolation that Swing Kids’ retro soundtrack preceded the swing revival of the late 1990s.
Devastated by his second big studio bomb for Disney, Christian decided that one common factor was that he could not work with inexperienced directors again. Both Newsies and Swing Kids had been helmed by first-time movie directors. Christian vowed not to be anyone’s guinea pig again.
The proverb “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan” is never more true than in Hollywood. Though David agreed wholeheartedly with his son’s assessment that inexperienced directors were to blame for the two Disney bombs, producers would look at the only apparent common element—Christian Bale. Was Christian Fail truly box office poison? Did this mean that Christian’s career would begin to backslide from leading man to supporting roles? It was time to rethink Christian’s career strategy.
As Christian’s manager, David was anxious for Christian to improve his marketability by broadening his skill set. He made plans for Christian to take a number of skill-building lessons like scuba diving, Spanish, martial arts, stunt work, supercross, and tennis. Of course, these plans depended on Christian’s actually being in Los Angeles, but Christian was difficult to schedule as he continued to split his time between England and the U.S.
Ask any actor and they’ll tell you it’s important to have sports skills or a command of dialects and languages when you’re looking for work. The more skills you possess, the better your chances of a casting director leaning your way. When Christian was a child, he had landed a small part in Land of Faraway because David had assured the casting director that Christian could ride a horse. In the two weeks before starting that shoot, David made sure Christian learned how to ride a horse!
While David was all about positive reinforcement and optimism, he also had to protect Christian’s sensitive psyche. Thanks to the tr
auma by publicity chores for Empire of the Sun, Christian abhorred the business and marketing side of movies—something essential for an actor to understand and appreciate if he wanted a Hollywood career. And with two additional box office bombs under his belt, Christian needed a change of luck.
Though David was concerned about Christian accumulating skills that would make him more marketable as an actor, he was beyond overprotective. Most struggling actors who arrive in L.A. get jobs as waiters. It’s the perfect job to expose an actor to different people and personalities; an essential skill of acting is to convey a range of human conditions. It’s also a job that allows an actor to learn new skills and schedule auditions and workshops throughout the day.
But Christian could not legally work in the U.S. without a work visa, and David didn’t think Christian needed to go to acting classes because he had already been educated by his work experience with Spielberg, Heston, and Ortega. “Christian’s talent is natural!” David would argue. “He has no need for classes. Acting coaches are just failed actors anyway.”
David didn’t want Christian to worry about anything except his career. “Stay focused on acting,” David would say to Christian, “and Dad will take care of the rest.” Christian trusted his father implicitly—had he not been a financial advisor back in England?
So the House of Bale in Manhattan Beach had an odd dynamic. Father David was on a visitor’s visa and could not legally work. Sister Louise was on a student’s visa and could not legally work. Everyone depended on the fortunes of an eighteen-year-old boy. Unintentionally or not, Christian was surrounded by enablers—a troubling fact of life for a child actor whose career had mutated the traditional roles of parent and sibling.
Balancing being Christian’s father, manager, and dependent, David created an unusual atmosphere at 3101 Oak Avenue. David was like Mr. Collins around Lady Catherine de Bourgh from Pride and Prejudice. Christian was the absolute young lord and master of the house. Christian often went out in the evenings until the early morning hours and didn’t wake up until after noon. When he was sleeping upstairs, everyone had to be quiet. David shushed and silenced himself whenever Christian spoke. Father and son arranged an elaborate way of communication; each step of stairs leading up to Christian’s bedroom had neat piles of scripts with David’s notes and the railing was feathered with yellow and blue Post-it sticky notes. The notes pointing up on the banister required Christian’s attention. When Christian wrote replies, he would point them down.
Christian Bale Page 7
