Sunday’s issue of “T” — The New York Times Style Magazine — had a characteristically smart piece on actors by Lynn Hirschberg.
Called “Screen Test: Can These TV Guys Make the Leap to the Cineplex?” the article looked at a bunch of current stars of the small screen to see if they have what it takes to become “big-time movie stars.”
TV has been a breeding ground for movie stars almost since its invention, with James Dean and Paul Newman making the leap in the 1950s, James Garner and Steve McQueen doing likewise in the 1960s, and John Travolta becoming a multimedia icon in the 1970s.
It used to be said that there was a wall between TV and movies — that the nature of stardom in TV was different from what paying audiences wanted to see at the movies — but that has never really been true. Indeed, the biggest male star of the modern era, Clint Eastwood, was already a household name from “Rawhide” on TV before he made his first major film, “A Fistful of Dollars” in 1964.
Some of candidates in the Hirschberg piece are Taylor Kitsch of “Friday Night Lights” (above), Eric Dane of “Grey’s Anatomy,” and Joshua Jackson of “Fringe.”
The elements that constitute a movie star seem to differ from person to person and sex to sex. (Hirschberg’s choices skew to a female, beefcake view of male stardom — she sees Kitsch as a “sex god”).
There are stars whose power is derived, for the most part, from being sex symbols to the opposite sex — Richard Gere for women, Scarlett Johansson for men. There are bigger stars who are enjoyed by both sexes — Julia Roberts and George Clooney both fall into this very remunerative category.
If you talk to people in the movie industry, however, a real star is someone whose presence above the title of a film is almost guaranteed to sell tickets. These folks are very rare and most often are not the ones whose faces are on the covers of mass-circulation magazines. Clooney has had as many flops as hits, Meryl Streep is a great and remarkably versatile 59-year-old actress who never had a global box-office blockbuster until “Mamma Mia!” opened last summer.
By the Hollywood measure, Adam Sandler is probably the biggest “star” of our time — a critically reviled, press-shy comic actor whose pictures almost always score big at the box-office (and he has been doing this for well over a decade).
From the mid-1960s through the end of the century, Eastwood’s box-office consistency was extraordinary. While the press and the Oscar voters worshipped at the shrines of Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman, Daniel Day-Lewis et al, Eastwood was a sure-fire ticket seller all over the world.
Like Sandler, Eastwood largely eschewed personal press coverage and was viewed in some circles as a one-note actor, but he was money-in-the-bank for the studios that released his films, whether he appeared in westerns, urban cop pictures or one of those zany orangutan comedies. It is because of all the money Eastwood generated for Warner Bros. and Universal for more than 30 years that he was finally given the power (and the financing) to make off-beat “arty” pictures like “Changeling” and “Million Dollar Baby” in recent years.
