Film and TV Fame: Sometimes It Fades

Near the end of his life, Kirk Douglas had a Twitter account. He modestly introduced himself to this new medium as someone who used to be a movie star, as if it were hard to believe. But even the memory of Spartacus can fade.

We know the legend of Ozymandias, a mighty tyrant, confident that his reign and his fame would last forever. Now, all that remains of his memory are his boastful words on the ruined base of a vanished statue. Glory is fleeting, even for today’s movie star pretenders to the throne of Ozymandias, and the eternal illusion of permanent fame that only Hollywood can provide. The public confers fame. The Academy confers immortality.

Of course, we need to define: how brief is “fleeting”? 10 years? 50 years? A century? You also need an honest, if purely subjective, estimate about the level of fame involved. You can remain famous but no longer be “bankable” in Hollywood terms. Even if you keep your fame, it can outlast your top-rank earning ability. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Julia Roberts, and Jim Carrey will all be famous right to the end of their lives, but none of the three can command $20 million a picture anymore.

At the end of 1978, New York Magazine ran a snarky article called Farewell to the Seventies: One Year too Early and not a Moment Too Soon. It confidently predicted that shortly, no one would ever remember Saturday Night Fever or Saturday Night Live. You don’t know what will last. Valerie Perrine or Betty White? Debra Winger or Mr. T?

With exceptions, fame fades in a graceful drooping line over time. There are some prominent cases of non-linear fade, sometimes due to public disapproval, more often due to a change in the culture. One example is Glenn Ford, who just about came out of nowhere to become one of the biggest movie stars of the Fifties, but he didn’t sustain it. There was no scandal, no special reason why. He’d become typecast, and his square-jawed Fifties type was increasingly out of fashion in the Sixties. As early as 1970, Glenn Ford was a cautionary example of the surprising impermanence of stardom.

Three decades earlier, a misconstrued example was John Gilbert, the silent era screen Romeo, whose star is (incorrectly) thought to have plunged in early talkies because his voice recorded as too high toned and “fruity”. It wasn’t so; he was in a bunch of early sound films whose soundtracks prove it. But what Gilbert did suffer from was a sudden cultural change towards Depression-era realism that made his florid, flapper-era “Great Lover” mannerisms suddenly a laughingstock. Gilbert hung on for a couple of years in smaller roles. He died of drink. It wasn’t all Gilbert’s fault; if Rudolph Valentino hadn’t died a year before talkies took off, it’s very likely the same thing would have happened to him.

Something slightly similar once happened, interrupting the stardom of John Travolta. It’s hard to recall now, but in the first two years of Travolta’s film career, after he left Welcome Back, Kotter, he was instantly one of the biggest movie stars in the world. Studios bet on his staying power. In 1978 he was offered a king’s ransom to play the lead in The Godfather Part III and turned it down. But by 1980, audiences laughed and cheered when the airplane in Airplane! knocked down the broadcasting aerial of WZAZ, “where disco lives forever”.  The Saturday Night Fever poster on the walls of millions of teenage girls became a social embarrassment. Travolta gamely went on to be a character actor before his stardom was triumphantly resurrected by Quentin Tarantino, a skilled recycler of the formerly-more-famous. (Later, he worked similar magic for Pam Grier, a different kind of Seventies movie icon.)

Film stardom has generally been more esteemed than the TV kind. Yet Kojak and Columbo are as remembered today as Popeye Doyle or Dirty Harry. Most postwar actors worked in both TV and film. A few have been able to leverage the lead in a television series into the lead role in feature films, and to movie stardom—Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood were the biggest. Over the years, many other TV stars tried but didn’t quite make the grade—Pernell Roberts, Robert Vaughn, Harry Hamlin, Erik Estrada, David Caruso, Jimmy Smits. Most were good actors who continued to work.

Luck will always be an element in fame. For actors, the most elusive luck is being cast in the right role. James Gandolfini had prominent supporting roles in feature films like The Grifters and The Last Castle, but no one remembers him for that. Michael Chiklis as The Commish was a snooze, but his next police role, The Shield, was electrifying.

A fair chunk of my career was boosted by being aware of the upcoming anniversaries of significant films, the willingness of their surviving cast to participate in public events, and the exploitable potential thereof. With feature films, only two intervals really count, scaled to a human lifespan: 25 and 50 years. (There are also added anniversaries based on the year a futuristic film is set in: 2001. Back to the Future’s 2015. Blade Runner’s 2019.)

Most popular films tend to star attractive, usually young actors in scenes of drama, action, comedy and romance. Whether it’s Maria in West Side Story, Kevin Bacon’s character in Footloose, or Elle in Legally Blonde, these iconic characters are played by actors young enough, even a quarter century later, to carry off still looking like their earlier selves on the red carpet of anniversary events.

At the 50^th, relatively few people in the live or onscreen audience will remember the era when the original film or TV show came out. Gone With the Wind looked different by 1989. No actors are expected to look like they did half a century ago, and faded stardom is a given. The 50^th is purely and simply a celebration of survivors, and a final verdict on a film on its way to critical Valhalla.

It seems hard to believe, but as time goes by after your most recent hit picture, fame slowly decays, like uranium giving off reassuring warmth while it turns to lead. Twenty years ago or so, I used to see Warren Beatty from time to time each summer because our kids went to the same theater day camp. Circa 2004-’08 he still looked and acted the star, in a distinctive L.A. it’s-the-weekend-and-I’m-just-folks style.

As late as pre-#metoo-era 2013, he was able to put together financing for a Howard Hughes film from Clinton-era playboys Steve Rattner, Steve Bing and Ron Burkle. But then Beatty’s, it seems fair to say, final motion picture, Rules Don’t Apply, came out in 2016.

With a cost of $31 million, marketing and ad costs of another $20 million, and a theatrical gross of $3.9 million. It’s far from the most amount of money that Hollywood has ever lost on a film, but as a percentage loss, it was so scary that two days into the theatrical release, TV was briefly flooded with new ads for Rules Don’t Apply, ones that dispensed with subtlety to blare, “From the star of Bonnie and Clyde! Shampoo! Heaven Can Wait! Reds! Bulworth!”

That’s one of the saddest things about stardom: if you have to insist that you still have it…you don’t.

Not many years ago I saw Billy Crystal on a talk show. His big movies are now many years in the past, but maybe it was a forgivable humblebrag to proudly mention that when he was in Africa, even in a remote town, they called him “Mister Oscar”.

His smile fell when no one laughed or reacted. The host, if anything, made it worse by gently, condescendingly explaining that Billy used to host the Oscars. But that was mostly in the 90s, and it was a young crowd who didn’t know who he was. That’s no great knock on Crystal, but it was a poignant moment.

Tom Cruise’s career had a stroke, or a coronary, in 2005. Few stars recover, but he did, working doggedly to regain his full stature as a movie star. Supposedly, jumping on Oprah’s couch almost did him in. But that’s not quite true, and it’s not quite fair to Cruise. For me, the most interesting account of the incident was by a Chicago stagehand who worked the Oprah show for decades. He and the rest of the crew shrugged it off; big star guests were always pulling silly stunts to get the audience laughing and excited, and this was no different. The show was astonished that it turned into a big deal.

The reason was something new: YouTube, and similar online video sites. If someone went a little over the top to get laughs in 1990, unless the national news repeated the clip it essentially disappeared. Even if you happened to be recording it as it aired, there was no real way to reach many people with your VHS tape. But in 2005, that Oprah clip was watched millions of times by people who didn’t see the show. You’d think it was the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination. The world had changed, and no one, least of all Cruise, anticipated it.

There’s also a hidden reason: By the late Nineties, Tom Cruise had one of the most lucrative contracts in Hollywood. Stars took full advantage of studios’ needs for their services. Over the past quarter century, those numbers were squeezed downwards, and Cruise in 2005 was vulnerable. Paramount helped make the “Oprah incident” into a cloud over Cruise’s career, until he renegotiated a less extortionate deal.

In the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, they include the long tracking shot that begins A Clockwork Orange. One forgets how long the pause is before the narration begins. “There was me, that is Alex…”  The filmmakers use the long pause to overlay a few well delivered, rueful lines spoken in Malcolm McDowell’s present-day voice to the effect that every actor, if he is lucky or unlucky enough, will find the role that marks him in the public mind forever.