Nipped in the Bud Part II

Earlier this week, I took a nostalgia trip back to 1990 with a Movieline article about actresses whose careers were “nipped in the bud”.  Some of the actresses who were included in that article did manage to comeback after 1990 for at least a little while.  Many are still working in some capacity today.  However, their careers as movie stars were in fact cut short as the magazine article suggested.


A couple months after the first article, Movieline ran a follow-up about 9 actors whose careers were “nipped in the bud”.  Here it is for your reading pleasure.
We were surprised and hurt at your charges of sexism in response to our brutally honest critiques of the careers of eight actresses who failed to make the grade. To prove just how fair we are, we’ve now asked three writers to tell us what went wrong with the careers of eight actors (and Steve Guttenberg) who didn’t become the next Brando.


sean penn - 1990 - state of grace

SEAN PENN

Sean Penn’s the only man thus far to make the cover of People magazine twice for divorcing his wife once: Sean and Madonna separated, reconciled, then divorced for good between ’87 and ’89 and People was all over them like a cheap suit. Penn, one of the most talented of the 30-and-under Hollywood actors, is today better known for marrying–and losing–the Marilyn Monroe of the ’80s than for any acting he’s done. In the beginning, they were calling him the next De Niro…


But when De Niro emerged as the heir-apparent to Marlon Brando, he did so with a twist, eschewing the limelight Brando, in his heyday, could not avoid. Penn seemed to steer himself right down Brando’s dubious collision course with bad publicity. He even got sued for assaulting reporters and photogs. Still, Penn’s current career crisis can’t be blamed on the press–it’s the public that’s been avoiding his films for five years. Taps, Penn’s first film, won him good reviews as the only normal, likable cadet at a rebellious military academy. He looked like another actor altogether in the comedy hit Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and his hilariously on-target portrayal of lost surfer dude Spicoli made him a star. Bad Boys, a surprisingly powerful little teens-behind-bars saga, wasn’t big box office, but prompted Newsweek to crown Penn “Son of De Niro.” Then in 1984, Racing With the Moon failed to ignite (the film’s producers blamed the failure on Penn’s refusal to do press and he became a “difficult” actor over night).


From then on, Penn’s good acting tended to occur in little-seen films like At Close Range, while the abysmal Shanghai Surprise, made with spouse Madonna, earned him his first negative reviews. Of the films that followed, only Colors was anything like a hit, and director Dennis Hopper, not Penn, got the good reviews. The failure of the turgid, unfunny comedy We’re No Angels, in which Penn and his idol De Niro were accused of trying to out-mug each other, must have been particularly painful. In Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War, Penn so inflated his personal mix of Brando and De Niro mannerisms that he became a one-man parody of Method Acting. His latest film, the grim, soulless State of Grace, finds him in De Niro’s New York for the very first time–the film’s a veritable homage to Scorsese’s Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. Unfortunately for Penn, Gary Oldman gets to play the over-the-top De Niro role, while he’s called on to be the hero. Well, no one said it would be easy. But if talent has anything to do with scrambling back to the top, Penn should be up there again.

Lamar Petersenmickey rourke - gq -1990
MICKEY ROURKE
Lately this once very gifted actor’s screen technique has been limited largely to the manipulation of his cheeks. In the silly and abominable soft-core porn flick Wild Orchid, he had his cheeks astonishingly puffed up through what one suspected were some grievous, artificial means, and that, combined with either an otherworldly sunburn or unusually bad makeup, gave him the look of a scalded chipmunk. Then, in Homeboy, Rourke’s own straight-to-video pet project about a brain-damaged (at least I hope he was brain-damaged) boxer, he had his cheeks sucked in so tight one could not help thinking that his character’s taciturn style had a physiological foundation. Suffice it to say, the we have seen lately is a surreally awful distortion of the young actor who stole his one scene opposite William Hurt in Body Heat and displayed in Diner an array of cohesive, unexpected assets–a lilting voice with a counterpoint street accent, an alternately angelic and angry face, and mannered but believable body language.

Rourke read as an original, despite visible influences (i.e., Brando). Coppola played him as such in the super-stylish Rumble Fish, but it was a film all dressed up with nowhere to go. The Pope of Greenwich Village, a Mean Streets clone, sandwiched him between ultra-geek Eric Roberts and a landlocked Daryl Hannah (a nightmare duo of co-stars for any actor). Then came Michael Cimino’s Year of the Dragon, a film that caused a ruckus with Asians (they were upset about racial stereotypes, not the casting of an Asian model who couldn’t act), and with critics, who hated it. This is about the point in Rourke’s career when he began to seem really nuts.


It is redundant to say that many actors tend to be screwed up. Rourke, however, sets a fast pace even in this crowd. Doesn’t it seem that when a guy who has come to stardom quite literally from the street begins to get hostile with the powers that be, with the press, and with his audience (Homeboy is audience abuse), there just might be a substantial self-esteem problem at work? A discomfort with the disparity between internal and external circumstances? (Watch his recent Johnny Handsome as a disguised autobiography.) Rourke was okay until he became a star, whereupon anything that crossed him turned him back into the boxer he used to be.

Unfortunately, the critics had incentive to egg him on: 9 1/2 Weeks was no place for an actor of Rourke’s avowed seriousness; and Angel Heart, an inflated voodoo doll of a movie, was one more film in which a good Rourke performance was a waste of his and our time. Moreover, the over-the-top sex in that film, added to his romp with Kim Basinger in 9 1/2 Weeks, began to give Rourke a ludicrous, narcissistic edge. How could anyone willing to look like shit on screen, as Rourke is (e.g., Barfly), be thought narcissistic?

Well, the whole business of movie stars deliberately making themselves ugly on the big screen is narcissism–an inverse version of the garden variety. Supposedly, they’re so brilliant they can eschew their customary beauty and still thrill us. Uh-huh. These days, Rourke is a big star in Europe (then again, so is Stallone), but he’s on shaky ground here. And because he’s personally such a nightmare, what with his motorcycle entourage, his love-hate thing with publicity, the impingements of his personal life (a while ago he swore off actresses because they’re too neurotic; he was moving on to something healthier–models), it’s hard to believe that filmmakers all over town are dying to work with him. His buddy Cimino tapped him for the remake of The Desperate Hours. Let’s hope we see the old Mickey. He’s never going to be the star he might have been. But he might yet be the actor he was born to be.

Rebecca Morris


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STEVE GUTTENBERG
It isn’t always talent, or timing: sometimes it’s just plain dumb luck. What else can the career of Steve Guttenberg possibly be attributed to? His looks and ability led a friend of mine to observe, “I always thought he seemed like a nice Jewish dentist from Long Island.” Exactly: the New York-born Guttenberg was, in fact, attending UCLA as a pre-dental student when Allan Carr decided to give him a big break–along with the equally talented Valerie Perrine, Bruce Jenner, and The Village People– in the 1980 disco musical Can’t Stop the Music. By all rights, the film’s belly-flop (and Guttenberg’s charismaless performance in it) should have ended the whole matter of his career right there. But–lucky Steve–Barry Levinson put him into the well-regarded Diner. Sort of a personality-free Elliott Gould, Guttenberg at this point basically became someone who got hired only when a lot of better-known players turned down a part, in movies like The Man Who Wasn’t There. It seemed clear he’d be better off back in dental school, but instead he elected to go the low-budget, low-brow route, and he got lucky again: Police Academy 1 and 2 both hit big with juvenile humor fans.


This was as far as Guttenberg would have gotten, had Ron Howard not cast him as the colorless straight man amid scene-stealing senior citizens and aliens in Cocoon, the monster hit of 1985. His performance in this film is nothing more than amiable, but that’s more than can be said of his work in Bad Medicine and Short Circuit (another hit, thanks to a cute robot). Returning to the surefire, puerile formula of Police Academy 3 and 4, Guttenberg kept working past such 1987 flops as Surrender and The Bedroom Window. The last contains his best work to date–playing an adult for once, he’s not bad–but instead of trying to play a second grown-up, he signed to be one of the trio of Peter Pans in Three Men and a Baby, another amiable-at-best performance, another runaway hit. Has any one actor, ever, had less to do with the success of the films he appears in? (No.) Stinkers like High Spirits, Cocoon: The Return, and Don’t Tell Her It’s Me would, and do, sink other actors’ careers, but other actors don’t have Guttenberg’s sheer luck. At year’s end he’ll be back in Three Men and a Little Lady. Just our luck!

Kevin Hennessey


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JUDD NELSON
In the 1985 New York magazine article that coined the expression “The Brat Pack,” Judd Nelson was labeled “the most overrated” member of the clique. The comment went unheeded–Nelson had just achieved popular and critical success in the role of his life, the obnoxious tough guy in John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club. The same year, he joined with the Packers in St. Elmo’s Fire, a money-making portrait of the kind of trendy yuppie lifestyle that would not survive the decade. Nelson peevishly disdained the very label that gave him any kind of identity at all as an actor. After all, this guy acts with his nose: his flaring nostrils indicate a wider range of emotions than the rest of him has so far been able to project. Apart from this, he seems to believe drama is largely a matter of decibels: when tension or emotions in a scene flare up, he switches from loud to LOUDER. He’s got two acting modes, glowering and sarcastic (yes, he can mix them), and called upon both to little effect in Blue City, his first solo star vehicle in which he plays a young man out to avenge the murder of his father. It’s widely regarded as one of the worst films of 1986, thanks partly to Nelson’s utter failure to act–even a little bit–even with his nose.


Next, in From the Hip, he played a hot-shot young lawyer whose obnoxious (read: loud) courtroom antics, far from getting him disbarred, make him an unlikely media hero–a case, perhaps, of art imitating life. Here, as in St. Elmo’s, he’s a yuppie who worries about compromising his values in his quest for success. (Nelson fails to convince us that he or his characters have values worth compromising.) Neither of these critical bombs made money, so Nelson, like many in the new “New Hollywood,” became a champion of “causes.” Flying off on “fact-finding missions” to the Soviet Union isn’t a bad way to avoid the spectacle of your own sinking career if you’ve got the cash–because Lord knows you have the time. Work-wise, Nelson’s next (and inevitable) journey was to the not-so-exotic world of TV movies, portraying Joe Hunt, the charismatic yet reprehensible leader of the “Billionaire Boys Club,” and getting it only half right. Nelson has emerged from TV-land only once in three years, to play a psychotic killer in a B-thriller aptly titled Relentless, in which, with white pancake on his face and huge, dark circles under his eyes, he resembles no one so much as Cesare the somnambulist in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Can Nelson get beyond his nose at this point? He doesn’t have the raw acting skills of a Karl Malden, or the popular appeal of a Jimmy Durante. Nor has anyone ever heard him sing like Barbra Streisand. Although it’s clearly time he tried.

L.P.

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TOM BERENGER
The question here is, does this guy ever turn down work? Not only has Tom Berenger made a lot of movies over the last 13 years, he’s made every kind of movie and has played every kind of character, even an ugly guy, which is a stretch. In fact, Berenger has so completely avoided typecasting that he has failed to develop even an amorphous persona. And that, not a failure of talent or charisma, is why he has lost his chance at the Big Fifteen Minutes.

Berenger has indeed had his little 15 minutes, but from now on he will probably be the second or third choice for leads in okay movies, and his high points are likely to come in character parts in ensemble pieces (witness this year’s Love at Large). There was a time when Berenger looked to be the next hunk movie star. He’s no slouch now, but a decade ago his beauty was such that he was cast as the young Paul Newman in the big deal prequel to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He’d caused a stir on TV as the prizefighter who did it with his mom (Suzanne Pleshette] in “Flesh and Blood”; and if Butch and Sundance: The Early Days had panned out, he might have had a direction to head in. But it didn’t, and perhaps stung by the memory of his humiliating experience as a love object in 1978’s In Praise of Older Women, he decided to put on different hats. (After all, he had debuted as the deranged, homosexual murderer of Diane Keaton in Looking for Mr. Goodbar.) So he played a tough soldier in The Dogs of War (1980) and the best-friend foil to Michael Pare in Eddie and the Cruisers, both duds. Then he gave a sharp performance as the embarrassed TV star in the box-office smash The Big Chill (1983), but the bellyflop of the hyped musical Western parody Rustler’s Rhapsody (1985) took the wind out of those sails. Then came Fear City in which he plays stripper Melanie Griffith’s booking agent!


Platoon in 1986 again reminded us how good Berenger can be. He brought texture and believability to the archetypal bad dude Sgt. Barnes. But he must have lost his compass again because he went on to do straight-to-video Last Rites, a sublimely awful film that reads as some misbegotten Catholic wetdream (he plays a priest duped by whore-in-madonna’s-disguise Daphne Zuniga, whom he has sex with, then murders, no kidding). Since then it’s been a grab bag: the underwritten, overshot Someone to Watch Over Me, the play-it-with-your-eyes-closed Shoot to Kill, the self-important, nonsensical Betrayed (in which he was superb), and Major League, the Bull-Durham-for-ldiots. Tom Berenger could have been a movie star in the old days, when a studio would have staked out his territory for him. Now he’s just a good actor we all like but know better than to plunk down seven bucks for without doing research first.

-R.M.

treat williams - dead heat
TREAT WILLIAMS
When the Broadway musical Grease launched several careers–including those of John Travolta, Richard Gere, and Barry Bostwick–no one seemed a surer bet for stardom than Treat Williams. Three of the best movie directors certainly thought so: Milos Forman offered him Hair, Steven Spielberg offered 1941, and Sidney Lumet offered Prince of the City.

Williams took all three, and therein lies a sad tale. While no one came out of the Spielberg fiasco ahead, Williams gave a star-making performance in Hair: sexy and funny, he could also really sing and dance. But the movie flopped, so no one saw what he could do. Versatile enough to land the coveted lead in Lumet’s three-hour study of corrupt cops–a part that called for a young De Niro–Williams turned in a solid performance there too. But when that movie wasn’t a hit either, all the advance hype Williams had received for it backfired on him in a way that really had nothing to do with him.


Suddenly Hollywood was no longer offering him A-level scripts (call this the “Three Strikes, You’re Out” Syndrome). Had Hair come after Prince of the City instead of before, the last view of Williams before he began slipping into B- movies would have been different: he might have been given romantic comedy parts, and perhaps have climbed back into the major leagues. But the Lumet legacy–and Williams’s own desire to be seen as a serious actor–led not to becoming the next De Niro, just co-starring with him (in yet another three-hour flop, Once Upon a Time in America). Then, in an ever-spiralling descent, he began to do second-hand Brando, playing Stanley opposite Ann-Margret’s Blanche in the TV version of A Streetcar Named Desire. (Had the pair come along earlier in Hollywood’s history, they would have been teamed up in musicals.) In movies like The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper, Flashpoint, Smooth Talk and The Men’s Club there’s little sign of Williams’s gifts–he’s just another competent dramatic actor. By the time he reminded the industry of his musical skills–in a 1987 TV special “Happy Birthday Hollywood”–it was too little, too late. Williams is now trapped in talented actor hell, making movies that barely open, and cable TV movies you’ve never heard of. At 38, he’d be smart to abandon starring roles in bad material in favor of trying his hand at smaller character roles in better films. That’s the path that could, with luck, get him back where he belongs.

-K.H.

andrew mccarthy 1990
ANDREW McCARTHY
Given two photographs to examine, no Martian would ever be able to distinguish any difference between James Spader and Andrew McCarthy. For that matter, no media-deprived New Yorker would either. But there’s a big difference: Spader’s the one who played second fiddle to McCarthy for years, then took over the career McCarthy fans thought would be his. The lesson here is that actors who play leading boy parts in movies aimed at teenage girls seldom make the leap into adult stardom. McCarthy, like Troy Donahue before him, is one example of why this is so. He has the seductive blankness–a facade uninterrupted by quirks or details of character–that puts sexually unsure young girls at ease while at the same time arousing their curiosity about a faintly advertised something that’s going on underneath. It isn’t just a matter of being expressionless, which McCarthy is; it’s the ability to suggest what’s being withheld–fill in the blank according to your fantasies.


Girls know that McCarthy will do to them what Robby Benson wouldn’t. The trouble is that this provocative vacancy seldom plays past 25. McCarthy started out his career in Class playing a different sort of blank, the tabula rasa older woman Jacqueline Bisset wrote all over in elevators and other places. It wasn’t a hit, but his next picture, St. Elmo’s Fire, pushed all the buttons of an entire generation’s collective psyche and established his place in the Brat Pack. A year later, along came another bull’s-eye in Pretty in Pink, in which his character, the rich, ineffectual Blane, was so perfectly keyed to the contradictions of girl-teens’ libidos that the original ending, in which Blane loses Molly Ringwald to Jon Cryer, had to be changed. Bingo again in 1987’s Mannequin, a stupifying film whose box office testified to McCarthy’s appeal. (Older moviegoers who saw that film were astonished to learn that McCarthy did not play the title role; they were not surprised a couple of years later in Weekend at Bernie’s, where McCarthy barely kept pace with the stiff.) Less Than Zero (1987) was the turning point for McCarthy. Here, in the lead role of Bret Easton Ellis’s scandalous, celebrated novel of teens whose personalities coagulated around brand names instead of character traits, McCarthy had an opportunity to show that his blank-ness had a depth beyond study hall daydream requirements. But real blankness, which real actors know cannot be portrayed by simple blankness, proved well beyond McCarthy’s extremely limited repertoire of facial tics. Given yet another chance to show the existence of life behind a Waspy reserve, this time in the pseudo-erotic Fresh Horses, McCarthy came up wanting again. After having been one of the hottest young actors in Hollywood just two years ago, McCarthy is poised on the edge of oblivion into which lots of other actors with similar heat have fallen. His next film is with Claude Chabrol–certainly a departure, and a sign that McCarthy himself understands that he must reinvent himself as an actor or there will be no more acting jobs.

-RM.

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TIM HUTTON
By winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his first film, 1980’s Ordinary People, 20-year-old Tim Hutton eclipsed the entire career of his father Jim, a popular light-comic leading man of the ’60s. But Tim’s portrayal of a sensitive, suicidal teen in the somber, intelligent drama has turned out to be the highlight of his career, his only critical and commercial triumph. His subsequent projects–other somber, intelligent dramas, for the most part– have resulted in a vastly diminished profile. Hollywood simply has little patience for somber, intelligent dramas. But more debilitating to Hutton’s career is the fact that, at 30, the talented actor still possesses a boyish face and naive screen persona that makeup and false beards can’t hide. When he isn’t given a screen father to play off of, it always feels like he needs one. And ironically, while real dad Jim spent years trying to break out of light comedies, Tim has the opposite problem: he projects introspection and utter humor-lessness on screen. This worked for him in the beginning. He carried his Ordinary People Oscar charisma with him into Taps (1981), in which he again personified disaffected youth, this time as the son of an army man, who leads a revolt at his military academy.


Suddenly he had two films, two hits. But in the end, it’s been more of a curse than a blessing that Hutton got off to a fast start, and avoided the Brat Pack label. He escaped having to prove himself in mindless, youth-oriented entertainment, because he was the one they chose for heavier fare. Trouble is, the box-office explosions in the early ’80s were set off by lightweight stuff, so Hutton escaped box-office success too. He was the title character in the tedious Daniel, playing a brooding young man with major family problems (his parents were accused of selling secrets to the Russians and were executed). In the flop Iceman (1984), he was finally cast against type as a scientist (with no father in evidence), but his full beard, ostensibly to protect against arctic blasts, merely looks like a futile attempt to age him. Hutton finally exhibited some of his early passion in The Falcon and the Snowman (1985) as a troubled son who gets his own shot at selling secrets to the Reds, but he’s overshadowed by Sean Penn as his dope-head partner, and Hutton’s just plain unconvincing in Alan Rudolph’s romantic fantasy Made in Heaven (Hutton senior might have brought the necessary graceful charm to the Capra-esque whimsy, but Tim isn’t light or airy enough to play an angel).


In Taylor Hackford’s uninvolving Everybody’s All-American, Hutton played second fiddle to Dennis Quaid and Jessica Lange, and when critics noticed him at all, it was to gleefully critique the unnatural and ever-changing facial hair he’d been saddled with–a far cry from the boy-wonder accolades of eight years before. Hutton is still young–and still talented. But does today’s Hollywood of larger-than-life sex symbol heroes and comedians-turned-dramatists have room for a quiet, deadly serious male star in need of a father figure? This year’s Q & A, a flop, did not suggest that such a trend is in the making.

L.P.

keith carradine - 1990
KEITH CARRADINE
At first, in movies like Emperor of the North and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, he seemed to be just another energetic, callow young actor. But during McCabe, director Robert Altman saw something else in Keith Carradine: he was an odd mix–equal parts sensitivity, self-involvement, sex appeal, and star-sibling (brother of TV star David “Kung Fu” Carradine). And he was a songwriter, to boot. Only Altman, with his skewed perspective, would have seen Carradine as a romantic leading man, and only in the mid-’70s would Altman have had the resources to pull it off. In a trio of movies–_Thieves Like Us_, Nashville, and Welcome to LA–Altman and his protege Alan Rudolph captured with breathtaking clarity the passive-aggressive manchild of that era, and turned Carradine into the least likely of stars. There he was, in all his shy-guy glory, the very archetype of the pained-but-available ’60s survivor–singing “I’m Easy” on the 1975 Oscars (and he won, too, for Best Song).


A slew of good filmmakers came calling: in Ridley Scott’s The Duellists, Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby, Michael Ritchie’s An Almost Perfect Affair, Walter Hill’s The Long Riders and Southern Comfort, Carradine was cast, time and again, for the very laid-back qualities that Altman had minted. But ’80s movies wanted action heroes who were buffed, not brooding (unless, like Tom Cruise, they’re both), and so Carradine’s had considerable trouble losing his mellow mantle. His best work in the past decade, in Rudolph’s Choose Me and The Modems, can only be called variations on a familiar theme. To make the transition, Carradine’s been turning increasingly to TV to get the chance to play other kinds of parts. Happily, miniseries like “Chiefs” and “Murder Ordained” show that he’s surprisingly effective playing cons, cheats, and killers–a nasty streak of character acting ability no doubt inherited from his father, actor John Carradine.

-K.H.

_________________

Kevin Hennessey, Rebecca Morris, and Lamar Petersen are all graduates of Loyola/Marymount Film School where they collaborated on a short film called Miracle on Olvera Street.

November 1990

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Nipped in the Bud Part II

Earlier this week, I took a nostalgia trip back to 1990 with a Movieline article about actresses whose careers were "nipped in the bud".  Some of the actresses who were included in that article did manage to comeback after 1990 for at least a little while.  Many are still working ...
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Shemp
10 years ago

“Q&A”: An excellent movie too few people saw.
“The Men’s Club”: One of THE WORST MOVIES I’ve ever seen — while I enjoy much of the works of David Mamet and The Three Stooges, this movie combines the most extreme aspects and worst excesses of BOTH. Stilted, over-ripe, who-the-hell-talks-like-this dialogue meets uninspired, awkward slapstick (I’m talking Joe Besser-era Stooges here, folks). Hear how Harvey Keitel declares his love to hooker Jennifer Jason Leigh: “Iii’mmm not MASTURBATIIIING! I’m in love with you!” And the conclusion makes so little sense that David Lynch would be jealous.

Dar
Dar
10 years ago

Poor Guttenberg. Even then he can’t get no respect.
Otherwise, the article comes across as a bit mean-spirited in a way that the previous female one didn’t, even though, aside from Guttenberg, all these men can act circles around any and all of the other article’s actresses.
Thank you for posting them both.

Mastro
Mastro
10 years ago
Reply to  lebeau

Definitely some Gute backlash- but- his deal with the devil had to end at some point.

jeffthewildman
10 years ago

Agreed on Q&A being an underrated movie. I hope it gets the criterion treatment at some point. Appropriate that both Treat Williams and Tom Berenger were listed close together. After the original Substitute Berenger declined to do a sequel. So Treat Williams took his place in not one but three sequels and all of em went directly to video. The thing about those two is that despite attempts at trying to break into leading man roles, they were always primarily ensemble and supporting players. As for Judd Nelson, he was never able to shake the image of the brooding asshole.… Read more »

Mastro
Mastro
10 years ago
Reply to  lebeau

Was just thinking of Treat Williams – he played the DA in Echoes in the Darkness- a movie about a murder in my neighborhood. So by 1987(?) he was doing a movie of the week. Granted- it did have Peter Coyote and Robert Loggia play the murderers.

RB
RB
10 years ago

Back then, looked forward to more from Tim Hutton and Andrew McCarthy. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Damn fine bone structure though.

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