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OT: Hitchcock Favorite Burt Reynolds in "The Last Movie Star"

posted 6 years ago by ecarle (14979)
19 replies | jump to latest

I've been seeing quite a few movies and "streaming" TV series this summer, I feel that I can't really flood this board with OT observations, though, in certain ways, they all connect to Psycho. Or Hitchcock.

I thought I would pick this one for now.

A friend clued me in to "The Last Movie Star," a small indie film starring Burt Reynolds, who is now 82 years old and looks older. Unlike his even-older compadre, Clint Eastwood, who has aged rather naturally into his 80s, Reynolds has some odd things going on -- black bushy eyebrows against a white beard and hair, for instance. Also, he walks with a cane throughout "The Last Movie Star," and I think its because he really has to(Reynolds was a football player and stunt man, those hits come back to haunt you.)

"The Last Movie Star" plays out the conceit of Burt Reynolds pretty much playing himself -- a superstar of the 70's and 80's who crashed and burned and is old and unmarried and broke and nearly forgotten. The premise of the film finds "Vic Edwards"(Burt Reynolds) getting an invitation to the "Nashville International Film Festival" to pick up a Life Achievement Award. He reads that previous recipients include Clint Eastwood, Robert DeNiro and Jack Nicholson. Urged on by his Hollywood has been buddy "Sonny"(played by Chevy Chase, to whom time has also been unkind), Vic/Burt accepts the invitation and makes the trip to Nashville.

Vic/Burt finds out in short order that (1) He is booked middle-seat tourist class on the plane(no first class); (2) No limo picks him up at the Nashville airport(its a Goth girl with piercings driving a junker car; (3) His hotel accomodations are low-rent(Motel Six, not Four Seasons) and the film festival is a joke(about 50 fanboys and girls in the back of a bar, Vic's movies projected on a sheet.) It turns out that Clint, Bobby, and Jack never came to the festival in past years. They were just given the awards "in absentia."

Tell you the truth, I found the premise unbelievable. Burt Reynolds may make a lot of straight-to-video stuff now(though QT just saved him), but I'm sure he has handlers even to this day who would check out this "film festival" and its perks as low-rent and a fraud.

Still, the movie survives on the courage of its subject: Burt Reynolds himself, who confronts(as a fictional movie star) what he did wrong as a real movie star: "Bad choices," he says. I was a big Burt Reynolds fan in the 70's and I know of what he speaks. He started making silly movies with Dom DeLuise like "Cannonball Run 1 and 2." He turned down a role WRITTEN FOR HIM , in Terms of Endearment, and watched as Jack Nicholson got a comeback Oscar with it(Burt had chosen instead, Stroker Ace, a racecar comedy with Loni Anderson.) And then h he made "City Heat" with Clint Eastwood and got bashed in the jaw with a chair during a fight scene and spent years recovering from the pain(as his career tanked.)

Even before the "bad run" in the 80's, I recall Burt in Smokey and the Bandit 2(not 1, which is a good movie and a blockbuster), lamenting ON SCREEN, his new life as a superstar. It was egotistical vanity and it set Burt on the course to ruin. (Arnold Schwarzenegger did exactly the same thing by inserting himself AS himself as a guest star in his bomb, "The Last Action Hero.")

"The Last Movie Star" knows all this, but avoids detail. We merely have Burt/Vic noting that "I made bad choices" and his acknowledging that "Pacino, DeNiro, Nicholson" always chose well in their films. (In real life, Burt rather rightfully complained in the 70s that those other guys had prestige reputations, he did not, so he never COULD get cast in important movies like they did. Except for Deliverance.)

Back to the movie: once Burt/Vic realizes what a fraud this film festival is(even though every person in the room, young and old, LOVES him), he yells at his fans, calls them basement dwelling losers, and tries to escape. He has the Goth girl drive him to the airport, and then he instructs her to "take a right turn to Knoxville." He's going to revisit his past.

And the movie does something fascinating -- the whole reason FOR the movie.

When Goth girl makes that turn -- suddenly we see a clip of that sporty car spinning out in Smokey and the Bandit(1, the good one.)

And we're in the car in 1977 with Young Burt Reynolds at the Top of His Stardom. Young, moustachoed, macho, charming, hat on his head, red shirt...."we go home again."

And Old Burt Reynolds(82 years old, today) is IN THE CAR WITH HIS YOUNGER SELF.

Its good CGI, and it is terribly , terribly moving. 82-year old Burt still has a great voice(if cracked with age) and some charisma -- but there he is, young and virile and at his peak, driving that car. And old Burt tries to WARN Young Burt: "Slow down...its not all going to be this good...you're going to make terrible choices."

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Later in the film, they do it again, and the effect is even more meaningful: they put Old Burt in a canoe with Young Burt in "Deliverance" (1972.)

The Burt Reynolds of Deliverance is five years younger than the Burt of Smokey. Its 1972 and Burt is just breaking free from a TV series career("Dan August") and there's no moustache and he's pretty damn serious -- very macho, very charismatic. And Old Burt tries to bond with muscular Young Burt, and even says, "Man are you good looking."

Its the stuff of light tears...a rumination not only on how movie stars eventually get old...but on how all of us do.

And yet the movie takes up Vic/Burt's efforts at redemption and making a better life "going forward" as an older man, and so we older folks(even if well younger than 82) can feel good.

I can't say that "The Last Movie Star" is a good movie all by itself -- it is rather predictable and "easy." But Burt Reynolds WAS The Number One Star for 6 years, and those old images of him remind us of what he had.

Which allows me this digression:

One big 70's fan of Burt Reynolds was...Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock loved The Longest Yard -- that comic-violent 1974 tale of a prisoners-vs-the-guards prison football game. (Hitchcock often loved movies that didn't compete in his genre.) On the basis of The Longest Yard, Hitchcock offered Burt the villain role in Family Plot(Arthur Adamson, played eventually by William Devane.) Burt declined the role, but Hitchcock cast other Longest Yard actors in Family Plot -- three of them, led by Bald Villain Ed Lauter.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

In 1977, Hitchcock wrote Burt Reynolds a fan letter -- Hitchcock LOVED Smokey and the Bandit and thought Burt had real star quality (Burt was doing somewhat of a Cary Grant cool guy thing in his late star period...less macho, more suave and funny. See especially: Semi-Tough.)

And in 1978, Hitchcock again tried to interest Burt in being in a Hitchcock movie. It was never made, but it was called Unknown Man 89, and it was from a novel by tough guy crime writer Elmore Leonard(Hombre, Jackie Brown, Get Shorty, Out of Sight.)

I've always been interested that Hitchcock tried to get an Elmore Leonard movie off the ground in the late 70's. (He also sought Steve McQueen for the project if he couldn't get Burt.) Much as Hitchcock had done his horror movie with Psycho, here we have Hitchcock obviously trying to do a tough guy movie in the Don Siegel(Dirty Harry/Charley Varrick) tradition. I expect Hitch had watched the careers of Burt and Clint and Bronson with interest. I'm sorry we didn't get this Hitchcock movie. Hitch was too old and too unwell to get it launched.

But back to Burt Reynolds and his movie. Its a little trifle of a movie , but Burt Reynolds was not a little trifle of a movie star. He self-destructed on ego and neurosis, but at 82 and humiliated I think he deserves some recognition for how he was when he WAS on top. If Hitchcock wanted him, you can figure that Burt Reynolds had what it takes as an actor and as a star.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

@ecarle. Thanks for the heads-up on TLMS. One question that the title raises for me that you don't address: by what right or in what sense is Burt Reynolds (or his avatar in TLMS) the last movie star? Lots of things have changed about movies and about celebrity-hood since the 1970s or even the 1990s, and maybe true stars are thinner on the ground, but I think it's pretty hard to maintain that The Rock isn't about as big as stars get right now. He's Schwarzenegger 2.0 but quicker and smoother with a dash of a multi-cultural version of Reynold's good-old-boy-jock charm. And as we've discussed here QT certainly believes Leo and Brad are Newman and Redford redux, and he's probably right.

So, while I gather that TLMS may be worth a ticket for reflections on Reynold's career, etc., does it ever broaden out to reflect on the industry as a whole thereby earning its title. If not then various No Country lines hove into view: 'You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.' 'You can't stop what's coming. It ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity.'

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Oh, and some anti-recommendations from me: I've doggedly pursued both Westworld and The Handmaid's Tale to the ends of their respective 2nd seasons... and can report that both have spectacularly imploded. The Handmaid's Tale used up its (not obviously sequelizable) novel source material in Season 1 and simply has not found a way to convincingly continue. Just watch the first season. [Compare with Homeland whose brilliant first season was based on an Israeli mini-series, and which gradually decayed away, always losing viewer goodwill after that. I stuck with it for 3 more seasons before bailing, but looking back it's clear that only Season 1 is fully recommendable and why.]

Westworld's first season wasn't as strong as The Handmaid's Tale's but it had its moments and the finale delivered. The second season committed ever more strongly to the show's tangled time-lines and ultra-convoluted back story, all in the service of ever more stupefying twists and head-scratching moments. My recommendation: watch the patience-taxing First season if you're intrigued (it's not a must-see masterpiece but it's good enough if it sounds like your sort of thing), and stop, i.e., on pain of being driven slowly mad by heightened versions of all of the First Season's worst tendencies.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

One question that the title raises for me that you don't address: by what right or in what sense is Burt Reynolds (or his avatar in TLMS) the last movie star?

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swanstep, its nifty that you should zero in on that title, for a coupla reasons. One is that this was not the title of the movie for quite some time. I believe it actually got one film festival showing under the title "Dog Days"(which tells us nothing)before someone figured out that more "iconic" title. So hah -- a bit of a possible backfire, there.

The second reason is: you raise a fair question, of course.

IS Burt Reynolds the last movie star?

And if so, are there no more? Any more?

I find it a tickle of a topic because: of COURSE there are movie stars still. But of COURSE, the "movie star" title in general has been made somewhat defunct.

There are several points I'd like to make in response here, because quite frankly the whole idea of the movie star has fascinated me pretty much for my entire movie-going life.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I'll jump in here:

Hitchcock had two great big major movie stars in Torn Curtain -- Paul Newman and Julie Andrews. At the time(1966) she was coming off of Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, (and an Oscar for the former). You don't get any bigger. Newman was pretty much the Number One young guy -- with McQueen and Connery circling him and Duke Wayne up there, too. But anyway, big stars.

And then Hitchcock made three more movies over ten years -- and never got a big star again. He BARELY got any second tier stars.

Topaz: Frederick Stafford as the lead. John Forsythe as the biggest name.
Frenzy: Jon Finch. Barry Foster. Alec McCowen. 'nuff said. (Well, perpahs Anna Massey was a name, from Peeping Tom.)
Family Plot: FINALLY some names. But Karen Black wouldn't be a big name for long, Bruce Dern held on as a quirky character man, William Devane went to TV and Barbra Harris remained a rarity on screen.

As we know, Hitchcock offered roles in those movies to all sorts of name stars: Sean Connery again(Topaz), Michael Caine, Richard Harris, Richard Burton, Glenda Jackson(Frenzy) and...in some sort of last ditch Hail Mary to get SOME stars into Family Plot...Nicholson, Pacino, Redford, Dunaway, and ...Reynolds.

No go.

Hitchcock made excuses about not getting stars. His one saving grace was that HE was true star of a Hitchcock picture, but we all know had some big stars done those final three films , they would have felt more like major films, more like hits.

One thing Hitchocck said around the time of Frenzy was that he didn't cast stars because "now there are so few of them." In the early 70's, he was kinda/sorta right. Few women stars to be sure(Streisand was a specialty act and Dunaway struggled for years -- Goldie Hawn was rather the biggest for awhile.) A fair amount of men, but the top guys were hard to get -- Newman, McQueen, Nicholson, Pacino.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I recall finding it rather odd that Burt Reynolds turned Hitch down on Family Plot because Reynolds wasn't really making terribly major movies in the front end of the seventies. He was doing White Lightning and WW and the Dixie Dancekings and Hustle -- I could see Nicholson and Pacino turning Hitch down, but not Reynolds. Likely Reynolds didn't want to play a villain and didn't want to share the movie with three co-stars.

You see, even back then -- and even when Burt had Deliverance and The Longest Yard as his classic hit calling cards -- even I didn't see him as quite a true movie star. He was too self-referential, in too many small movies, too "on" in TV interviews -- to quite seem like the star he professed to be. And yet Family Plot didn't draw him.

The first Golden Era movie stars(I'll go with the men for now) were templates for those who followed. Reynolds was compared to Clark Gable(in his rugged roles) and Cary Grant(in his comedy roles), and he was a touch of both. Of course, he looked a lot like Brando in the beginning, which hurt more than helped(too close in time, clone stars don't work.)

I'd say that Spencer Tracy begat Gene Hackman, Walter Matthau(in House Calls with Glenda Jackson in the Hepburn part) and George C. Scott.

Nicholson was compared to Cagney(cocky, in The Last Detail) and Bogart(a wounded private eye in Chinatown).

Clint Eastwood was compared to John Wayne, but said he preferred James Stewart in Westerns(and he was probably a knockoff of Coop and Henry Fonda). But of course, Clint forged his own, R-rated style: much meaner, much colder , than the cowpokes before him. A true loner. A true outcast. Needing no one.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I like to make the point that I think Bogart is the epitome of what a movie star was: he was in the most classics(in the shortest amount of time) of any male movie star; people came not for the effects or the action, but "to see Bogie in action." He wasn't a beauty, but he got the dames, so men could use him as an easier role model than Cary Grant or Tyrone Power.

And came the 60's, Bogie got a whole new fan base of independent, rebellious youth.

THAT's a movie star.

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I think the slow erosion of movie stardom came with TV, as too many "greats" ended up doing sitcoms and cheapie Movies of the Week and the whole idea of the "movie star" became negotiable. James Stewart was a movie star who ended up with two cancelled TV series: The Jimmy Stewart Show and Hawkins(a lawyer show.) Some star.

One of Henry Fonda's movies before "On Golden Pond" was "Tentacles."

James Cagney retired for 20 years, came back wonderfully in Ragtime...but devalued himself with one final TV movie at the end.

Come to think of it, Bogie died too young(57 in 1957) to ever be tested with TV work. Cary Grant never did it, and retired on top. Grant could be the Last Movie Star, when you think about it. No TV.

But of course, we've cycled through quite a few new movie stars since Cary retired in 1966. Generations already. Nicholson and Hoffman got old. Connery and Hackman retired. Young guys of the 80's like Hanks, Willis, and Costner are in their 60's now(and still stars, in one case, maybe two.)

We seem to have plenty of movie stars today, so The Last Movie Star indeed seems a mistitled title...except...

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

except...

As one critic wrote not too long ago:

"Movie stars have never been paid as much as they are today...and never been less important."

Its a good analysis for SOME stars.

Take Chris Pratt.

By winning the leads, Pratt got Guardians of the Galaxy and Jurrassic World as "meal tickets" which will pay him a LOT of money just by being the lead. A movie bound to make $500 million worldwide can afford to pay its lead $15 million. And thus Pratt is rich. He quickly divorced wife(TV's Anna Faris) and said that his new pick up line is "Do you like money?" Fair enough.

But is Chris Pratt a star? Well, they tried. The Magnificent Seven(McQueen to Denzel's Yul Brynner.) Passaengers(with J-Law, a she/he top star match-up that didn't make it.) Anything else? I haven't heard.

But I think Pratt is ALMOST a star. He's doing better than the other Chrises(Evans, Hemsworth and Pine...who just signed for a TV mini-series.)

What Chris Pratt is , is: incredibly rich and incredibly famous (the whole world knows Guardians and Jurassic.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

and maybe true stars are thinner on the ground,

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They seem to be. I saw a new young star named Miles Teller in person a few weeks ago, and at short range, he looked like a rather average young man. Modest features, modest frame. But he will be in Top Gun 2 with Tom Cruise, and he's already been in some other movies I've seen and I guess -- he's a movie star. He certainly makes a lot more money than me.

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but I think it's pretty hard to maintain that The Rock isn't about as big as stars get right now. He's Schwarzenegger 2.0 but quicker and smoother with a dash of a multi-cultural version of Reynold's good-old-boy-jock charm.

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That's all there. The key phrase for this century is, I think, "multi-cultural." The Rock's parents are African-American(wrestler Rocky Johnson) and Samoan(the daughter of wrestler Peter Mavia, who fights Connery's Bond early on in You Only Live Twice) and his looks are practically ANY culture's. (He's also pointed out that he looks like Rob Schneider on steroids, but who remembers that "makin' copies" SNL vet?)

But for all The Rock's achieved stardom, his last two vehicles worry me. Rampage was based on a video game. This new one, Skyscraper is a pallid re-do of the modern classic Die Hard -- with no Alan Rickman in sight. In short, The Rock is getting the highest star pay on earth to appear in fairly B vehicles(the stuff Arnold did BEFORE hitting it big). Yes, Jumanji was giant and he'll get his Chris Pratt payday from that one but....The Rock has to get better material to survive.

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And as we've discussed here QT certainly believes Leo and Brad are Newman and Redford redux, and he's probably right.

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They've lasted, and I consider them star. But each one gets a "but." With Leo, its that his perfect childhood features have swollen out and he doesn't much look like a star to me. But he gets the big movies, he got an Oscar...he's in.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Pitt's different. Earlier on, he got "Robert Redford heat" and they starred in a movie together(Spy Games) and RR directed Pitt in A River Runs Through It.

But despite Pitt's beauty, he just couldn't catch that big star part for the longest time. It seems to have been an "integrity thing." He wouldn't play action cops(though he played a great tragic cop in Se7en.) He wouldn't do big spy action or MCU type movies(or Batman type movies). About ten years into his career, someone wrote on Brad Pitt that he had no "big movie" like Top Gun or Forrest Gump or Lethal Weapon or Die Hard on his resume -- each of which made its star a superstar.

But the same writer wrote way back then that Hollywood was BANKING on Pitt to BECOME a star. He had the goods.

I say it happened in 2001, when Pitt got a "Butch and Sundance" pairing with George Clooney in Oceans 11. A few years later(like, 10!) he really killed it as a Redford-like star in Moneyball(my favorite movie of 2011.)

And in 2009, I thought he was funny and great in Inglorious Basterds for QT --but barely in 1/3 of the movie!

Right now, I think Brad Pitt IS a big star, and he looks it with Leo in the new QT. I don't know if this is the plot, but to me, the joke is that BRAD looks like a TV series star, not Leo(who has been cast as one.) I'd figure the movie will make fun of Leo's fake macho in favor of Brad's real macho.

BTW, for all of the comparisons of Pitt to Redford, I think Redford's features(circa The Way We Were and The Sting) were much more accessible, intelligent and warm than Pitt's as a youth. Pitt had a reptilian facial quality that lent itself to the villains of Fight Club and Kalifornia(where he plays a greasy mangy stone psychopath killer.)

But it is evening out now for Brad Pitt. He has aged(like Leo and Matt Damon) into a manly star, not a boyish one. And he's better looking than those other two guys. And more cool.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

A little bit more on modern stardom:

Since we know that the billion dollar profits are driven by MCU, DC, Star Wars and Pixar, we also know that there isn't much room for movie stars to make a Humphrey Bogart star career anymore.

Tom Hanks hangs on. Bill Murray was great but is now kinda woulda/shoulda.

But the man who evidently ranks as a real honest-to-goodness star is: Denzel. Washington.

What he does is: action for one movie of the year(The Equalizer, The Mag 7); Oscar-bait for the other movie of the year (Fences, that lawyer movie.) And he is a great, charismatic actor in both formats. He's 60-ish now, so maybe gets only another decade of action roles ,but...maybe more. Harrison Ford will play Indy again in his 70s!

I've also read that Denzel earns his star pay back with profit better than any other star.

Movie stars fascinate me.

One other thing: back in the imdb days, I amused myself by posting essays on my favorite stars -- Grant, Holden, Mitchum on up to Newman, McQueen, Redford, Nicholson. It was different than posting on Psycho and Hitchcock all the time. And..one day imdb wiped all those posts clean.

I think they thought I was movie star blogging....

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Something a bit ON topic about movie stars:

As he begun production on Torn Curtain, Hitchcock wrote a friend: "I will be working with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews on this film. The studio insisted on it, as I didn't use stars in my previous three films."

Hmmm....cat out of the bag.

I expect Hitchcock knew which stars were paid the most, and he certainly knew which ones had been in classics.

Henry Fonda(The Wrong Man), James Stewart(Vertigo), Cary Grant(NXNW): stars.

But, according to Hitchcock in his letter, these folks were NOT stars:

Anthony Perkins!
Janet Leigh!
Vera Miles(well, he WANTED to make her a star.)
John Gavin

Rod Taylor(yeah, he was second-tier).
Tippi Hedren(well, he WANTED to make her a star)

Sean Connery(not quite a star yet; only at Roger Moore level; Goldfinger -- right after Marnie -- made him a star.)
Tippi again.

One has to concur with Hitchcock's verdict even though it is said that Janet Leigh in Psycho was "a big star killed early in the film." Well -- big enough -- but not Liz Taylor or Audrey Hepburn or Doris Day in 1960.

No less than David Thomson wrote of Anthony Perkins, "he was never a star," but actually, he WAS. From Friendly Persuasion(1956) through Five Miles to Midnight(1962), says I. Over the title billing . High pay. Big promotion.

And in Psycho, Anthony Perkins certainly LOOKS like a star. Look at him in the Arbogast sequence, in Perkins' own favorite black crewneck sweater and white shirt. A beauty. With a great soft voice. And a thin frame. Most people don't LOOK that great.

I suppose you might say that even lesser stars like Anthony Perkins became BIG stars in Hitchcock classics.

Hell, I even see Jon Finch and Barry Foster as stars -- charismatic, good looking, great voices -- in Frenzy. (I would like to note that after years of getting awful VHS and DVD covers with Anna Massey screaming and looking unfairly ugly; Frenzy now has a first rate DVD cover with Finch and Foster, both handsome.)

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

But for all The Rock's achieved stardom, his last two vehicles worry me. Rampage was based on a video game. This new one, Skyscraper is a pallid re-do of the modern classic Die Hard -- with no Alan Rickman in sight.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Ha, I appear to have spoken too soon about the Rock: Skyscraper has opened relatively weakly (behind both a tepid animation sequel - Hotel Transylvania 3 - and Antman 2 in its 3rd week). I'd definitely bought the hype that Skyscraper was going to be huge confirming The Rock's personal pulling power. It ended up making only half of what San Andreas (2015) made in its opening weekend.

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Hard to tell what went wrong. SA(which I saw) had the tidal wave action and the earthquake action, perhaps...Skyscraper is a bit more "self contained."

One wonders if Die Hard cast too long a shadow. The movie is 30 years old this summer(!), but gets so much cable airplay (particularly at Xmas) that it feels like part of our lives. (And interesting: only the original IN A SKYSCRAPER seems to have much hold on the memory. The many sequels were literally all over the place.)

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SA was forgettable garbage (who even remembers it now?)

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I saw it, but I can't remember it, other than SF seemed like a quick helicopter jaunt from LA and the movie seemed to squish one big state into two sequences

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but somehow the Rock made it very likeable/watchable at the time (with, if I'm honest, an assist from Allesandra D'addario's incredible chest!).

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My penchant for saluting the sexual/sensual side of movies seems to be taking effect. I just think it is a part of the movies that keeps getting lost over time.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Truly SA for me completely short-circuited my usual critical faculties - star power/charisma like sexual stimuli can do that.

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Well, it is always fun watching a star take shape, and The Rock did it from a very questionable platform -- professional wrestling. Which also earned WWE owner Vince MacMahon billions and indirectly helped put Trump in the White House -- its more influential than you'd think, this "fake' sport.

BTW, pro wrestling also gave us Dave Bautista, who has tremendous presence and is a one of those MCU stars now(Guardians.)

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Anyhow, Skyscraper's under-performing suggests that The Rock may have passed his peak. Or maybe this weekend was confounded by The World Cup or other one-off factors. We'll see.

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Possibly the World Cup sank everything. It was on everywhere I looked, in public.

Right now, at a minimum, The Rock(his attempts to bill himself by his real name, Dwayne Johnson, aren't much working) is a star like Chris Pratt: a franchise star. He has Jumanji right now and coming next year is another franchise based on a Disney ride: "Jungle Cruise." (Recall how Pirates of the Caribbean with Depp hit big but The Haunted Mansion with Eddie Murphy did not.)

In this modern era, being a franchise star keeps an actor rich(see: Depp, RDJ...Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible -- hey, THERE's a huge star who has nonetheless gone to franchise work for coin.) Can The Rock go beyond that somehow?

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

People forget that Arnold Schwarzenegger burned out rather quickly. James Cameron made him a star and gave him three major vehicles -- two Terminators and the entertaining True Lies. Arnold branched out successfully into comedy(Twins, Kindergarten Cop) but soon flailed and failed as he made too many flops(The Last Action Hero, Batman and Robin, Jingle all the Way), his budgets went down and Cameron moved on. I've written elsewhere on this thread of the Burt Reynolds' collapse, but Arnold had one too, and The Rock risks it. Why? Because like Burt and Arnold, The Rock can't get any "serious" roles (see: Pacino, Nicholson, DeNiro) to go with their box office "Bs."

This said, The Rock operates in a new world. He has several cable TV projects, a general "streaming" presence, AND movies. He generates charisma and he has the "international ethnic look" to play well all across the world.

[–] funkychicken (613) 6 years ago

Nice insights. Thanks for the details about Hitch re: Burt

I really enjoyed TLMS, it was cool to see Burt get one last hurrah 😎

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Thank you for reading, funkychicken.

I'm also glad that you enjoyed the movie. I did.