It’s time for another retro flashback as I dig into old issues of Movieline Magazine. For this installment, I went back 20 years to March 1994. Nicole Kidman was the cover story in which she discussed being overshadowed by her more-famous then-husband, Tom Cruise. Stephen Dorff was labeled “The Next Big Thing” (Isn’t hindsight funny?) Reese Witherspoon, Ben Stiller and Brendan Fraser were up-and-coming actors interviewed for the issue.
The article I’m focusing on was titled All The Right Moves. In this article, Movieline played armchair agent and placed 10 young (at the time) actors in roles they thought would be perfect for them. Were they right? How did things play out? With the benefit of 20 years of 20/20 hindsight, I will be answering those questions.
WINONA RYDER
The interesting thing about Winona Ryder is that she is beautiful and she is a movie star and she can act. Those are three very different qualities, and it’s tough for a young actress to find roles that accommodate all of them at the same time–Winona’s big competition on the big screen, Julia Roberts, has only two of those attributes.
When she was still a teenager, Ryder found two ideal roles for herself, in Heathers and in Beetlejuice. Since then, she’s tried various things with varying results, never embarrassing herself (though she came close at points in Bram Stoker’s Dracula). The news that she’s about to play yet another period character–Jo in Little Women, a role she should be able to nail with her eyes closed–makes one really long to see her in a part that exploits, first, her extremely modern spirit, and, second, her dark side, both of which we saw to comic effect in Heathers and Beetlejuice.
Ryder is older now and ready, one hopes, to leave the eye-rolling completely behind and play bad bad, not adolescent bad. Her ideal role right now would be a riveting recession-era femme fatale. She could elect to hip up the role of the dark-haired, ivory-skinned knockout in 1945’s Leave Her to Heaven, for example. Originally played by Gene Tierney (whose camera-kissing closeups, essential fuel for the story, Ryder would have her work cut out to approximate), this is a femme fatale who loves her man with such dysfunctional possessiveness that she destroys every unwitting challenge to his affection–including his unborn baby, which she was carrying. It’s a role blessed with a dose of narcissistic dementia so pure you’d love any actress who brought it off (which Loni Anderson did not do in the lame TV remake). Ryder could give this part a sensational nihilistic ’90s spin that would keep the film from harking back to “women’s pictures” of the ’40s and ’50s.
But as long as we’re talking ’90s, a more interesting alternative ideal role could be found in Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan, a 1993 novel that Mike Nichols has already optioned the film rights to. This story will require some crucial changes if it’s ever to be adapted to the screen, so one of them might as well be to make room for a starring role for Ryder as the Lady Macbeth-type young wife of the lead character, a rural schlemiel who, with his fucked up brother and the brother’s sociopathic friend, finds four million dollars in a plane that has crashed in an empty field. The story follows him as he proceeds to make all the wrong moves. As is, A Simple Plan is the guys’ story, a brother-brother deal with the wife playing a crucial supporting role; on-screen it should be the couple’s story, and the wife would assume cinematic dimension by being rewritten as a young beauty who, having married the best her crummy town had to offer–a stable, hard-working, nice guy–shows her true depth of ambition and lack of principle when the young hubby happens on Temptation. Ryder could bring this off with cold-blooded panache, and with the right co-star (Christian Slater?), turn it into a classic edge-of-your-seat thriller for our make-up-your-own-morality times.
LAURA DERN
While we’ll concede, if we must, the strides that Laura Dern has made in turning around our perception of her–she went from playing boring nice girls Blue Velvet, Mask) to playing hot stuff Wild at Heart, Rambling Rose)–she perhaps ought to have quit while she was ahead, before becoming one of those interchangeable, all-but-faceless female “name” players in films that are jerry-built solely to show off the brawn of heftier co-stars (Clint and Kevin in A Perfect World, the T. rex and raptors in Jurassic Park). If she continues apace in this direction, Dern will doubtless soon carve out a niche like the ones Anne Archer and Bonnie Bedelia occupy in their tent-pole film series–the Jack Ryan and Die Hard franchises, respectively–and thus, like them, be forgotten altogether.
We have a suggestion for Dern that may turn things around for her yet again, before it’s too late: she should look to her parents for inspiration. She is, after all, the spawn of Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, two scenery-chomping co-stars from a vintage Roger Corman biker cheapie called The Wild Angels. Having fought her way to the top of what passes for grade A product in these sorry days, Dern could reinvent herself by diving back into the Corman gene pool. We see her not in a biker-chick movie, but in another genre just aching to return to the spotlight: the women-in-prison flick.
No, we don’t mean the latter-day bores with the likes of Linda Blair and Sybil Danning showing their stuff in the showers; we’re thinking of the hard-hitting, not hard-core, life-behind-bars movies of the ’50s and ’60s, starring tough dames like Ida Lupino, or co-starring even tougher dames like Hope Emerson. Movies like Caged, surefire stories that pit innocent inmates against hardened cons under the watchful eye–and roaming hands–of snarling, butch prison matrons. Playing a slammer matron would give Dern the kind of over-the-top, take-no-prisoners showcase she needs to demonstrate she can still surprise.
What’s more, this type of star-turn is proven Oscar bait–Emerson got a nomination for Caged. C’mon, admit it: wouldn’t you love to see a decidedly unladylike Dern come roaring on-screen like a T. rex instead of playing a lady-in-distress running away from one? If, at heart, this sounds like just a B movie, what of it? There used to be intelligent, provocative films made under that label. Anyway, don’t Dern’s own folks amply demonstrate what long and varied careers are to be had by hammily embracing B material every now and then? If we could get her ear, here’s what we’d tell Dern: “Laura, honey, we’re thinking an uninhibited, unfettered romp like Caged could do for your career what Corman’s Big Bad Mama did for Angie Dickinson’s–juice it up, turn a few heads, keep things fresh. If you don’t believe us, just ask Angie.”
CHRIS O’DONNELL
This guy has the most angelic puss on the big screen right now. It’s as if he’s been eating an apple a day since his baby teeth came in and has never so much as flown over the “inner city” at 30,000 feet. The much younger Leonardo DiCaprio and even Edward Furlong look like confirmed decadents by comparison. That’s why the ideal role for O’Donnell right now would be something that played with and against his looks, something decidedly post-coming-of-age.
The John Singleton movie, with which he may follow up The Three Musketeers, could help bring him into this realm since it’s about interracial college sex–but Singleton deals in screen fairy tales, not gritty detail (after all, he did Boyz N the Hood, not Menace II Society), so this is unlikely to be the most revealing challenge.
The thing for O’Donnell to do, since he has already demonstrated that he can command the screen and seduce the camera, is to prove that he has range. For this task he would ideally take a role that allowed him to begin with the persona we’ve come to identify with him, and then rip it off like a mask and show us what’s underneath.
One film currently being written that would certainly do that is James Toback’s pet project about the ’90s acid renaissance on college campuses. Director/writer Toback, who penned Bugsy, centers his story on a Harvard basketball star who looks clean-cut enough on the surface, but is actually dumping games. As the kid finds himself in danger of getting busted for this trifle of amorality, his real troubles begin: he decides, being hip to the new wave of psychedelic excess at his elite school, to get away from his troubles by taking a heroic dose of LSD–and goes straight to hell in a disastrously long trip that he returns from only after drastic measures have been taken.
Toback is terrific at fast dialogue, so O’Donnell would have a wide playing field to show off his stuff, and while the issues of the film are existential, it’s a story that’s basically plot-propelled. Hollywood is high on O’Donnell right now–unlike critics, the industry took note that The Three Musketeers was his movie and, even though that was a dubious honor, he gave exactly the ultra-lightweight performance the dodo-brained romp deserved. Now he needs to take a risk and show that he can do more than just be a natural. Playing a bad boy on a bad trip would be a good start.
PATRICIA ARQUETTE
Okay. Here comes some heresy. If ever there was a film so perfect and so perfectly of its time that it would be a sin to remake it, it’s 1936’s My Man Godfrey. On the face of it, this fabulous screwball comedy starring the brilliant Carole Lombard and the brilliant William Powell–brilliantly paired–cannot be remade! But inasmuch as Hollywood frequently talks about committing this sin, why not, just for fun, imagine a version we’d like (not, in other words, one resembling what happened when June Allyson and David Niven were paired up in the flatfooted 1957 redo).
In the Lombard role of the glamorously daft younger sister of the rich Manhattan Bullock family, a casting director these days would probably think of Meg Ryan first. Not fresh enough. No, this would be the ideal role for just-emerging Patricia Arquette, whose terrific turn as the sweet, unconventional, sexy Alabama in True Romance is, down to the blonde hair in her eyes, just a ’90s white-trash variation of Lombard’s spoiled ditz Irene Bullock.
Redoing My Man Godfrey ’90s-style is–on paper, anyway–well within the realm of possibility because Godfrey is, after all, that timely phenomenon, a homeless man. Irene finds him in a dump when she’s competing in a scavenger hunt, and she takes such a shine to him, she hires him as a butler to replace the latest in a long series of butlers the family has run through. The out-of-their-minds Bullocks–who, with the exception of the long-suffering father, seldom remember much about the escapades of the night before (throw in a few 12-step jokes to update)–are too nuts to work for, but our man Godfrey, being a reformed-rich-man-in-disguise (an ex-yuppie investment banker who got jilted when merger mania went bust and he lost his job?), effects his magic on the household, saves Mr. Bullock from bankruptcy (by playing foreign mutual funds?) and succumbs to the benevolently air-headed daughter’s affections (and gets her to stop throwing up after every meal?).
If directed well, Arquette should have no trouble with pepped-up screwball timing. (Of course, what director these days can do screwball–Rob Reiner, maybe?) The real question isn’t about Arquette, or even the director, it’s who could bring the necessary precision and dignity to Godfrey. Here’s one suggestion: William Hurt.
WHITNEY HOUSTON
If there’s one thing that Whitney Houston, who’s in the position after the box-office success of The Bodyguard to become Hollywood’s first female black superstar, ought to learn from the mistakes of the previous contender, Diana Ross, it’s this: Do not fail to give the people what they want. Ross’s big-screen career crashed and burned when she followed up the formulaic, and popular, one-two punch of doing a woman-singer-bio-pic (Lady Sings the Blues) and a standard-issue-soapy-romance (Mahogany) with, of all things, a musical classic she had retooled into a find-your-inner-child bomb (The Wiz).
Ross might have saved her cinema status had she elected to then make another standard-issue-soapy-romance called, that’s right, The Bodyguard, but she passed–as did her moment; she never made another feature. What audiences want, as Houston ought to already know from the grosses of The Bodyguard, is unadorned romantic schmaltz, the same old-fashioned cornball claptrap that’s been successful since time began. Houston would now be wise to tackle a can’t-miss tearjerker, so we’re proposing she remake the oldest standard-issue-soapy-romance of them all, Madame X, already filmed in 1906, 1916, 1920, 1929, 1937 and 1966 for the big screen, and in 1981 as a TV movie.
This story’s durable, if unlikely, plot always reduces audiences to tears. It’s the saga of a young bride who feigns her death in order to save her husband and infant son from scandal, then travels the globe drinking unhappily till, many years later, she kills a man (to save her family’s good name, of course), only to wind up being tried for murder–unaware that her lawyer is, yes, her grown son who’s unaware that his client is, yes, his own mother.
Since every version of Madame X tinkers with the details, we’d recommend making Houston a former nightclub chanteuse so she can warble the occasional tune while boozin’ and bar-hoppin’ across the planet–and we’d also borrow, from the 1981 Tuesday Weld TV flick, the updated PC ending in which the lawyer turns out to be the title character’s grown daughter.
Now, if Houston follows our advice and plans after Madame X to make more standard-issue-soapy-romances, she could do worse than to remake Mahogany. And if she feels she must also enter the woman-singer-bio-pic sweepstakes, how about Houston playing Diana Ross?
BRAD PITT
This thirtyish actor has made two films that were ideal roles for him: the larcenous pickup in Thelma & Louise, and the self-destructive golden boy in A River Runs Through It. Those two roles, plus his disastrous turn in the wildly ill-chosen Kalifornia, suggest three things about an ideal role for him.
One: he’s a glorious-looking movie star who should confine his most unconventional impulses to cool cameos like the hilarious one he did in True Romance. Two: he wears clothes so well it’s a crime for him to play badly dressed characters. Three: he’s so sexy and looks so good with his clothes off it’s a crime for him to play characters who never find themselves unclad in bed.
Now, how can these not-very-constricting parameters be met in a film that still allows him room to move? Well, high up on the list of films that should never, ever be remade, there’s Sullivan’s Travels, a film written expressly to be played by the incomparably easy-to-take Joel McCrea. But theoretically speaking, it could be done. Just as Joel McCrea embodied the clean looks and inner decency of the ’40s, and made acting look effortless, Brad Pitt embodies the Bruce Weber looks and self-effacing self-involvement of the ’90s and makes acting look effortless.
Thematically, the rest of the film translates easily into our era: Sullivan’s Travels is about a hugely successful director of film comedies who, because he’s living through, though not experiencing, the Great Depression, gets it in his none-too-profound head that he should make serious movies on tragic topics. When his greedy producers, who quake at the thought of having their cash cow get a conscience, point out he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and has never known anything but success–and hence is not in a position to make films about suffering–he sets out on the road disguised as a bum (read: homeless man) to have the experiences that will turn him into an important director.
Pitt would bring the same foundation of likability and low-key sexiness to Sullivan that McCrea did–and he’s already a proven comedian on screen. He’d also be able to poke fun at his own God-given lightweightedness on-screen while proving, as McCrea did, that there’s plenty going on beneath that facade. In the scenes where Sullivan accidentally gets what he’s looking for and is sent to a prison work camp, Pitt would even have the opportunity to indulge in the grunginess that, judging from Kalifornia and True Romance, he feels compelled to pursue. But after all of that, he would be returned to the gorgeous, spiffed-up girl-getting ending his ideal role demands.
JULIA ROBERTS
The conundrum of performers’ lives is such that on their way up, they dream of somehow getting a movie role that will forever identify them in the minds of the public–for even wannabe actors know this is the timeworn process that “makes” stars, from Mary Pickford to Sharon Stone–yet if they’re actually fortunate enough to have this occur, they then openly deride “typecasting” and wish to destroy the very identification the public has made between them and their signature role.
‘Twas ever thus, so why should Julia Roberts be any different? Since becoming a bonafide star in Pretty Woman, Roberts has sought to establish herself not as the light-comedy champ she appeared she might become, but instead as, ho-hum, an “actress”–and she’s only succeeded at establishing how very similar she seems from film to film, regardless of the part.
Tellingly, Roberts has never again been as good on-screen as she was in Pretty Woman, so we wonder why she can’t just accept the fact that her tough-talking, heart-melting hooker is the role she’s going to be remembered for, and thus face the music to make the sequel virtually every moviegoer everywhere would pay to see, Another Pretty Woman. As for the plot, we’re here to offer two plausible scenarios–plausible, that is, by the standards of Hollywood sequels.
In one, the audience would briefly glimpse Roberts and Richard Gere enjoying the bliss of wealth and wedlock before Gere is suddenly struck penniless and thus suffers a complete breakdown, forcing Roberts to return to the streets to earn another fortune for the couple to live on. As this means a literal remake of the first movie’s plot machinations, someone else would have to be cast in the princely businessman role Gere played in the original (Mel Gibson, maybe?) who, in this installment, not only takes a shine to our Cinderella, but also selflessly helps her return to Gere by the finale (which would find Gere completely recovered once his bank balance is restored). A happy ending, no?
Our other scenario finds Roberts happily wed to Gere but tired of appearing on his arm at fundraisers, so–just for the fun of it!–she starts up her own business without telling Gere and soon becomes a Beverly Hills madam not unlike Heidi Fleiss. When Roberts, like Fleiss, becomes headline news in a national scandal, Gere’s love for her is put to the test, but–as is always true in movies like this–love conquers all.
Hey, if someone as savvy about their film career as Barbra Streisand can find time to make a sequel to Funny Girl, we don’t see why Roberts can’t throw a sop to her fans and make another Another Pretty Woman every few years–if only so that once in a while she can take on a role she’s suited for. Imagine it: Roberts at 45, doing Yet Another Pretty Woman! with gray streaks in her hair. Julia, we’re there.
KEANU REEVES
This actor has already had two perfect-fit roles: the Generation X adolescent in 1986’s River’s Edge, and the good-humored airhead Ted in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Since then he’s grown up and fared better and worse in roles that were not nearly such bull’s-eyes. Last year’s Much Ado About Nothing, however, was an interesting stepping stone for Reeves–not because he came off as a born Bardist, but because he was such a natural villain.
Now, Reeves is too much a movie star to make a steady diet of bad dudes, but any ideal character for him would be one that included a measure of darkness. If James Ellroy’s long-optioned, never-filmed triple-noir The Black Dahlia ever gets to the big screen, the part of the dubious protagonist, cop Bucky Bleichert, could be fashioned to Reeves’s strengths. As Bleichert, Reeves would be able to scheme, obsess, seethe and screw up, all of which he does well. Granted, a good deal of Bleichert, as written, doesn’t suit Reeves. But Ellroy’s story about the gruesome, real-life, late ’40s unsolved murder of a beautiful, trick-turning screen hopeful is so complicated that it would take a substantial makeover to give it commercial potential anyway, and it’s so dark that, even after the streamlining, an appealing young star would have to be cast to make it viable.
The tinkering could just as well be designed to accommodate Reeves. It’s well within Reeves’s range to suggest that underneath the handsome, mask-like exterior he would provide for Bleichert, lie the erotic kinks that fuel this young ambitious cop’s obsession with the murder and its victim. Reeves is not the kind of actor who can fill out an underwritten, middle-of-the-road Hollywood cop character–which is what he tried to do in the dismal, though fun, Point Break. He is the kind of actor who can effortlessly tamp down well- written dysfunctionals-with-saving-graces (as in River’s Edge), and that’s exactly what Ellroy’s brilliant creation Bleichert is. Moreover, one of the reasons Bleichert would be an ideal role for Reeves is that it would allow him to play with Ellroy’s hardball dialogue, which he’s in desperate need of demonstrating the ability to do after all the arch period cadences he’s struggled with of late.
LARA FLYNN BOYLE
In another era, Lara Flynn Boyle would have enjoyed a long, sexy screen career–the studio system, in its noir heyday, knew just what to make of long-legged, cool-blooded comers with Boyle’s flinty beauty. Her inexpressive face would have been perfect to play one villainous vixen after another.
Unfortunately, that deadpan mug–whether Boyle’s cast as a “Twin Peaks” slice o’ pie, a Mobsters moll, a Temptress, or Rookie’s nookie–is not treated as the plus it might be, and so does not come off as an asset. Unless someone steps up soon with a role that could make the most of this seeming deficit, Boyle will doubtless pass out of feature films and into the yawning chasm of made-for-cable movies like so many Virginia Madsens before her.
How to capitalize on what is, at best, a pleasant little talent and a face that suggests it has just been shot with Novocaine? How about a show biz bio-pic that requires such an expression-free visage, say Gene Tierney or Maria Montez? Sanity-challenged Tierney, one of the most beautiful women to ever grace the screen, lived her life as if she was planning to sell the rights to the movies. She romanced Prince Aly Khan, wed dress-designer Oleg Cassini, had a fling with JFK, and gave birth to a retarded daughter–caused, it’s said, by a case of the German measles she contracted, while pregnant, from one of her own fans! Tierney eventually chucked her movie career to check herself into the Menninger Clinic.
Then there’s the saga of Maria Montez: yes, tiresome PC complaints would be raised if Boyle played the Dominican Republic-born Montez, but it’s a comedy part worth taking the heat for. Like the more talented Mae West, Montez was a smart tart who played dumb, shrewdly promoting her own career with pithy remarks to the press (“Each time I look in mirror, I vant to scream I am so bee-oo-tiful”). A convent-schooled good-time gal, Montez married for money in order to travel to America so she could try her luck in Hollywood, where she was certain her blank beauty would mask her determination to make it as a star. She had that right, but she was blithely unaware that with no real job skills–she couldn’t act a whit–it’d all be over just as quickly as it began. Hampered by a pronounced Spanish accent which typed her as an exotic off the Dorothy Lamour assembly line, Montez knew she’d get ahead by posing undraped, first in cheesecake photos, then on-screen in a string of Arabian Nights-style escapist hits that could only have happened during WWII.
An ideal example of the star who’s famous for being famous, Montez had nowhere for her one-note act to go once she’d achieved celebrityhood. Given that, it’s probably just as well that she died of a heart attack while only 31–and really, what better way for any pinup gal to expire than in her bubble bath? The story of this supremely self-enchanted, self-exploiting icon could be a lively comedy about how screwy show biz is, and, as it’s the tale of an actress who never appears to understand the havoc she causes, it’s just the thing for the naturally immobile face of Boyle.
ROBIN WRIGHT
Okay, “lovely” is pretty much the word that comes to mind when one thinks–if one thinks–of Robin Wright. While there is more to this actress than meets the eye, she’s frittering away what could be the best years of her career by giving terribly earnest performances in movies no one sees, like The Playboys and State of Grace.
Of course, unless you’re one of the three people who sat through Toys (we’re the other two), you’re going to have to take our word that Wright’s performance in that monumental turkey was nothing short of a revelation. Working in a vacuum, she created a winning romantic-comedy character, a Southern belle whose honeyed accent, coltish hesitancy and dazzling smile all seemed somehow familiar, and here’s why: Wright was, unless we’re mistaken, doing a deft impersonation of Julia Roberts.
It was more than a parlor trick, however; Wright used Roberts’s trademarked ways better than Roberts does, and created a character more appealing than those Roberts herself has played. This reads not as petty theft but as a sure sign of an actress with more skills at her command than Roberts, and had Toys been a hit, Wright’s irresistible comic turn might very well have made her a star.
We think Wright deserves another chance to win audiences over with this performance–she could shine in a remake of Remember the Night, the 1940 heartrending romance in which lawyer Fred MacMurray falls for thief Barbara Stanwyck during a court’s Christmas-week recess. The movie’s Preston Sturges screenplay could scarcely be bettered, offering as it does tender, touching roles for its two stars; perhaps John Hughes, obsessed as he is with making films set during the holidays, could produce. Who to play the MacMurray role, you ask? How about Jeff Bridges?
So much for Wright’s shot at a sentimental classic–how about also casting her in a sexy melodrama about show biz, directed perhaps by Joel Schumacher or Adrian Lyne? It seems to us that there’s a juicy movie deal in letting Wright play Roberts: since Roberts’s life already reads like a trashy, bestselling Hollywood roman a clef, why not get, say, Jackie Collins to pen an “original” screenplay that’s really just a thinly-veiled account of Roberts’s many misadventures in the screen trade?
Interestingly, Roberts–as a fictional character, you understand–seems not entirely unlike the Neely O’Hara character played by Patty Duke in that definitive movie a clef, Valley of the Dolls: a meteoric rise, love affairs with co-stars, whispered-about problems on the set, gossip about substance abuse, a headline-making marriage, disappearing off the screen, and, natch, a triumphant comeback. So get busy, Jackie! We’ve already found the actress who could play this role to a fare-thee-well. Now, wouldn’t it be deliciously ironic if Wright, aping Roberts in either of these pictures, eclipsed her?
Welcome, traveler from the future! Have the Cubs won the World Series yet? 🙂
lol oops
Actually…
No. But if I told you what I did, it would be even funnier than that.
They missed on Roberts, didn’t they? Thinking she was washed up and then she comes back with Erin Brockovitch!
Well, in fairness, there was a long stretch between Pretty Woman and My Best Friend’s Wedding where they were pretty dead-on. More snarky than necessary, but Roberts was a hot mess in the mid 90s. People forget that because she pulled herself together and staged such an impressive comeback. But she seemed to be a flash in the pan for a while there.
I loved A Simple Plan, it remains a vastly underrated movie. I really loved the novel by Scott Smith, too, it remains one of my favorites. It is a tremendously good novel for a first-time novelist. The cast in the film version of A Simple Plan is spot-on. Billy Bob Thornton received a well-deserved Oscar nom for his role here; everyone is excellent, however I just can’t imagine Winona Ryder in it. Bridget Fonda was terrific as the wife, and if the film had found the larger audience it deserved, her career would’ve gotten a boost from it. Like Lebeau… Read more »
As I have been writing the What Might Have Beens, I have been shocked by how many close calls Fonda had. I always thought she should have been a bigger star. And she would have been if only she had accepted the role of Sarah Connor in The Terminator. Cameron wrote it with her in mind and she turned it down! I bet she kicks herself every day. The impression I got was that Movieline wanted a vastly different movie that focused on the married couple instead of the brothers. It could have been reworked into a vehicle for Ryder,… Read more »
Looking at this and the other articles, it seems Movieline had a deep contempt for actors. It’s almost like the writers really wanted to write about more “serious things”. Too much snarky and snide. “Also, it’s important to note that 1994 was a time when people said things like ‘Maybe Joel Schumacher or Adrian Lyne should direct.’ Dark, dark times.” Well, it was a year after “Falling Down” came out, and that was a very good film by Schumacher. I for one think Schumacher is unfairly demonized. Aside from the two batman films, he’s been pretty good. And even if… Read more »
Movieline was the AV Club before the internet. It was all about the snarky attitude. That was what differentiated it from, say, Premiere. They were both good movie mags, but took different approaches. I actually think Movieline got more in depth and contemplative whereas Premiere tended to be a little more like Entertainment Tonight. Movieline had their favorites and their targets. Roberts was someone they liked to pick on because she was famous, but hadn’t really shown much range. Arguably, she still hasn’t. Also, she was all over the tabloids. She was an easy target at the time. Then they… Read more »
Sarah Connor was written with Bridget Fonda in mind? I’ve never heard that before. Did Cameron know her personally? Because she wasn’t acting in movies at that point yet.
That seems likely. Cameron was from the Roger Corman factory. So was Bridget’s dad, Peter. Bridget has said she grew up around all those people. I’m guessing Cameron figured he would introduce her to the world. She would have been 20 at the time. That would have been a heck of a way to launch her career.
Wow.. that Laura Flynn Boyle article is a doozy!! Referring to a child as retarded and then saying it’s “just as well” someone died in a bathtub at the age of 31.