Fame takes a walk

PITY, for a moment, George Clooney. In recent months, he’s been on virtually every magazine cover except “National Geographic,” quoted at every industry event, his ubiquitousness parodied even on the comics page. Part of this is simple marketing -- the man has two movies out: small, politically challenged films, one of which he co-wrote and directed, that mark his determination to be more than a potential casino owner and Hollywood glamour guy.

But part of it is the disturbing fact that in this year’s awards season, he’s the only player with any kind of real “It” factor.

“I am, as you know, a huge star,” he deadpanned to an audience gathered for a recent screening of “Good Night, and Good Luck” at the Writers Guild Theater.

True, and if the entertainment industry isn’t careful, he may be the last one. This year’s Oscar hopefuls are littered with terrific male leads, but no one is going call Philip Seymour Hoffman, David Strathairn, Joaquin Phoenix or Heath Ledger a big movie star. And with the exception of “Walk the Line,” this year’s acclaimed films were notable for, if nothing else, their lack of female leads. So, heading into Oscar season, George Clooney, who probably won’t even be up for an acting category, is pretty much the Man.

And it isn’t just the Oscars. In 1995, two actors (Toms Cruise and Hanks) made the top 10 of Premiere magazine’s annual Hollywood Power List. Now there are none -- Cruise was Premiere’s top thespian in 2005 at No. 14, followed by Mel Gibson and Hanks. Not until No. 18 did a post-baby boom actor (Will Smith) get a nod.

Who killed the movie stars? Conversations with dozens of Hollywood insiders result in a forest of pointed fingers. Certainly, the entertainment media are blamed for their obsession with tearing down talent as fast as it blooms, but so is the death of the midlevel movie, the dismantling of the studio system, competition from television and the Internet, the enormous paydays with their just as enormous expectations, not to mention the sometimes questionable behavior and talent of the young stars themselves.

But most agree that Julia Roberts, Hanks and Cruise were among the last able to hit those magical marks -- big box office, critical acclaim and the larger-than-life mystique once required of true stardom.

“If you ask someone to name a real movie star, most of them would be old,” says producer Dean Devlin. “We don’t have enough real movie stars because there’s been a devaluation of craft on all sides.”

That’s precisely what veteran bad guy Christopher Lee said recently when he took to the British airwaves to condemn the new generation of “stars” as no more than disposable pretty faces. The fact that, at 84, he was recently named by USA Today as the star with the biggest box-office take in 2005 surprised Lee not at all. “There are quite large numbers of very young men and women ... [who] are playing very large parts in huge films,” he told UKTV, “and they simply, through no fault of their own, don’t have the background and the experience ... to pull it off.”

This is a problem. During the last year, the entertainment industry has run around like baffled participants in a multibillion-dollar game of Clue trying to figure out what went wrong at the box office, blaming everything from the proliferation of iPods to the price of popcorn.

They seem intent on overlooking the fact that although some people will navigate parking at the cineplex to compare the gore factor of CGI-enhanced battle scenes, most are there to see a good story played out by movie stars -- those larger-than-life, light-up-the-screen actors who make it worth $10 and two hours. Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Berman, John Wayne. Or more recently, people like Robert Redford, Paul Newman, John Travolta, Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, Barbra Streisand and Jane Fonda.

Some of those folks are still working -- once upon a time, being a movie star, like being a Supreme Court justice, was for life -- but they aren’t considered young enough to play leads. Unfortunately, the folks who were supposed to replace them haven’t shown up yet. Some come close -- Sean Penn, Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman, Johnny Depp, even the two halves of Brangelina -- but most are over 40 and few seem nascent icons.

Meanwhile, the marquees are beset by an ever-changing Parade of Young People -- Jude Law, Jake Gyllenhaal, Josh Lucas, Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Gwyneth Paltrow -- attempting to juggle box-office clout and poignant performance, familiarity and overexposure, personal lives and professional images.

“It isn’t that there aren’t any movie stars,” says veteran publicist Dale Olson. “There are. It’s the longevity that is the issue. What happens today is that there are a handful of stars who get everything they want for a short period of time and then kind of disappear.”

Casting director Avy Kaufman, who worked on 11 films in 2005 alone, including “Brokeback Mountain,” “Syriana” and “Capote,” cautions against the seduction of hindsight. “I don’t know if in the ‘70s or ‘80s people were aware of the caliber of stars they had,” she says. “And remember, there was only one Cary Grant, one Gregory Peck even when there was Cary Grant or Gregory Peck.” But she concedes that there does seem to be a gap among the younger generation. “I am casting a film that calls for a male lead in his mid-to-late 20s,” Kaufman says, “and the list is not very explosive. Or very long.”

Director Jonathan Mostow recently had a studio shelve one of his films because executives felt it needed a powerhouse young male lead “and there were only four guys on the list and none of them were available.” For Mostow, who is about to begin work on “Tonight, He Comes” with Will Smith, the disappearing movie star is not so much a box-office issue as a creative one. “I came of age watching Redford and Hoffman and McQueen, and those were the movies I wanted to make,” he says, “movies driven by big male characters. When I’m thinking of a script, I have to wonder: Where are those guys?”

Not everyone agrees, or at least not completely.

“Oh, there are plenty of movie stars,” says veteran publicist Stan Rosenfield, who reps Clooney and Robert De Niro, among others. “There’s just more of everything else.”

A different era entirely

PROOF, if any were needed, of the devaluation of the movie star was provided by Isaac Mizrahi on the red carpet of this year’s Golden Globes. There, in the pre-show coverage, the fashion designer asked female nominees, including Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman, questions like “Are you wearing underwear?” or “Are you carrying condoms?” Can you imagine anyone asking Bette Davis if she were wearing underwear? She would have clocked them with her gold lame clutch.

But today’s young stars have come of age in the era of US Weekly and Defamer.com, when paparazzi stalk new mothers, Paris Hilton’s bodily functions are news, and Associated Press can, with complete earnestness, run a story in which a cosmetic surgeon posits that the child of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt will be beautiful.

“What used to be a focus on leading actors has turned into a focus on celebrity,” says veteran publicist Eddie Michaels, voicing the opinion of many. “There is no magic, no mystique -- we are saturated with the stories of these people’s personal lives.” There is also an increasing desire, it would seem, to see stars, especially women, looking their absolute worst -- yelling at their kids or stumbling into Starbucks.

The entertainment media also have a tendency to blur what was once a hierarchy of stardom -- the “stars” of a reality-TV show will grant more access and offer more outrageous stories, so they get as much, or more, play as the actors in whatever movie is opening. “There are so many forms of entertainment competing for attention, and all of them have ‘stars,’ ” Rosenfield says. “Now you have to compete ... based on behavior rather than talent.”

“The superstars of the past were superheroes,” says Kennedy. As an original MTV veejay and now reality-TV host, she has an up-close and personal relationship with modern celebrity. “You wanted to be near them and the closest you could get was on the big screen. Now they’re everywhere and people are far less concerned about their acting methods than their birth-control methods.” The stars, she adds, play right along.

“Look at Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes,” she says. “Marketing their movies with their personal relationship. Celebrity isn’t saved for talented people anymore. I mean, Peter Sarsgaard -- he’s a great actor, but name recognition? Probably zero.” In the new business model of the studios, name recognition almost always trumps talent when it comes to casting decisions.

Cultivating talent is always a dangerous topic; everyone has their own ideas about what can be taught and what cannot. But certainly the various structures that guided actors in the past -- from the concrete career paths enforced by the studios in their heyday to the fealty later generations swore to mastering the stage before tackling the screen -- are gone. And in their place is ... nothing.

“It’s hard to become a movie star today,” says longtime director and producer Gil Cates. “Without the studio system, everyone’s an entrepreneur.” Many of the true movie stars of the last generation came out of the theater, studied acting until it came out of their ears, took their lessons to extremes -- Streep and her thousand accents, De Niro and his silent rage, Hoffman and his refusal to be typecast.

“Now, you’re 21, you get a supporting role or a leading role in some Sundance film, where you are swallowed by a big powerful agent,” Mostow says. “So you come to L.A. saying, ‘I’m repped by the same guys who rep the big stars.’ They get exposed too soon. They never learn their craft.” So it’s not surprising that many actors now look back at the studio system with a certain amount of longing.

“You were taught how to do the things you needed to do,” says Norman Lloyd, who, at 91, has worked with almost every generation of filmmaker from Orson Welles to Curtis Hanson. “Dance, speech, fencing. They groomed people. If you were in a film and the script wasn’t working for you, they brought in screenwriters and fixed the scripts.” Now, he says, echoing Christopher Lee’s criticism, young actors are expected to carry pictures that are too big for them rather than grow through a series of films. “Everyone’s looking for who’s hot,” he says. “What about looking for who’s good?”

Scott Wilson arrived in Los Angeles just as the studios were losing their stranglehold. Working on films including “In the Heat of the Night” and “In Cold Blood” (in which he played Dick Hickock), he watched as the nature of stardom changed. And as actors were forced to find their own way, self-promotion became a bigger part of the package. “And some did very well,” he says. “The ones who were maybe not as good at selling themselves, the ones who were more introverted, had a harder time.”

Other veteran filmmakers look back on the golden era with a more jaundiced eye. Yes, the studios “protected” their people from bad publicity, but they also controlled them.

“The studios don’t make stars,” says Shirley MacLaine. “Great movies, great scripts make stars. I never had a chance to grow through my roles, I never had an acting class in my life. What the studios had were visionaries who cared about the movies, about making good movies.”

Many people decry the attempts in recent years to run Hollywood as if it were just another business, arguing that studios now put more energy into demographic research and cost analysis than into finding and cultivating great stories. To prove how the business has changed, director Mostow says three words: “Kramer vs. Kramer.”

“I was an usher when that movie came out,” he says. “It was electric. Lines around the block, sold out every night for weeks. All those Oscars. And I guarantee you that movie would not get made by a studio today.”

The death of the mid-level studio movie has been the talk of the industry for years.

“When ‘The Poseidon Adventure’ or ‘Earthquake’ was made,” says Mostow, “they were not normal movies. They were spectacles. The normal movies were ‘All the President’s Men’ and ‘The French Connection.’ Now people aren’t going to see movies, they’re going to see spectacles.”

So, oddly enough, it may be money that killed the movie star.

“I’m not sure Redford or Newman guaranteed the kind of box office they’re credited with,” says actor and director Tony Bill, who produced, among other films, “The Sting.” “They certainly didn’t guarantee the kind of box office they would have to now.” But Bill thinks the problem is one of quantity rather than quality. “I don’t think there’s a shift in talent. I have no doubt Clooney or Pitt could shine with the same luminescence. But in the old days, stars appeared in several movies a year, so the public formed a relationship with them as performers.”

Now, stars with “buzz potential” are, as Lee pointed out, often slapped in high-budget films in the hopes of creating another “Titanic.” Whether the movie is a hit or a flop, the actor’s price tag goes up, taking him off the lists of more modest films for which he or she might be better suited.

“The pool is shrinking,” says producer Chris Bender. “When a film’s budget is high, it’s very, very difficult to sell them on someone new.” For “Red Eye,” he says, the original casting was Julia Roberts, but she was pregnant and unavailable. Persuading DreamWorks to go with Rachel McAdams took some doing. “It made [the film] a very different model.” Now, between her performance in “Red Eye” and “The Family Stone,” McAdams is considered one of the young actors with real star potential.

He hopes she keeps her wits about her as the publicity mounts, as it’s sure to. “It’s an interesting choice stars have to make -- when to blitz and what makes them overexposed. There’s very little nurturing and grooming for actors these days,” he adds. “They’re pretty much on their own.”

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As good as it gets

Defining a movie star is a subjective art. According to the Quigley Publishing Co.’s annual poll of movie exhibitors, Tom Cruise is still the brightest, followed by Johnny Depp, Brangelina (yes, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie tied for third), Vince Vaughn, George Clooney, Will Smith, Reese Witherspoon, Adam Sandler and Tom Hanks.

Over at IMDbpro.com, top actors on the ever-shifting Starmeter are Joe Pichler, Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Joaquin Phoenix and James Franco, while the hottest actresses include Scarlett Johansson, Kate Beckinsale, Witherspoon, Jolie and Rachel McAdams.

In conversation with many Hollywood insiders, here are some of those under 50 who most often filled the “Well, what about ... “ blank:

* Matt Damon

* Johnny Depp

* Jake Gyllenhaal

* Scarlett Johansson

* Angelina Jolie

* Gwyneth Paltrow

* Sean Penn

* Julia Roberts

* Will Smith

* Vince Vaughn

* Reese Witherspoon

* And of course, George Clooney