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Helping You Get the Most Out of Your Misery
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Friday, July 22, 2005Let it Go
I read a little news blurbule yesterday in which someone interviewed Lynda Carter. They were talking about the Wonder Woman movie that Joss Whedon is going to direct. Basically, the piece was Carter talking about an internet campaign to get her a part in the new movie. I can't really tell from the blurb if this is something she's seriously interested in doing, but the quotes seem to point that way.
Okay: hands up everyone who has a burning desire to see Lynda Carter cram her thirty-years-older butt into a star-spangled one-piece. This is the dark side of popularity and success, people. I could populate an entire season of Love Boat with actors who were on long-running hit shows; who were fucking icons for a few years and then, once the shows left the air, vanish from our national radar entirely. It happens all the time. Jennifer Love Hewitt was so huge while Party of Five was on that they tried to give her a spin-off. They tried to put her in movies. But the strategy of using TV success to launch a long-lasting movie career only works if you're a good actor, or at least somewhat charismatic. If you're not, you end up turning up in Garfield five years down the road. Feel pity for the cast of Will & Grace. Their time in the sun will soon draw to a close. So what do these actors do when we no longer want to watch them as Shirley Feeney and can't accept them as anything else? Well, the smart ones will have saved up some money so that they don't have to worry about what to do. The others will do low-rent tours of Deathtrap with Elliot Gould. (I use this as an example solely because the last time I saw Cindy Williams' name in print, it was on a marquee in Seattle advertising this very show.) Those that sink lower still will turn to accepting money to turn up at fan celebrations of their shows, where thirty-eight year old men who collect vintage lunchboxes will yell at them to say their famous catch-phrases again. Let me be clear: I don't think that this is that horrible a path to take. These people are getting paid. It's not like they're having to mine coal to put food on the table. They get to see the country. The problem I see stems from the actors' interaction with the fans. Now, I've never been to one of these things. Never been to a Trek Convention. Never been to a car show featuring David Hasselhoff and the car from Knight Rider. And I've certainly never been the "special guest" at one of them. But let's look at this for a minute: The people organizing these events are fans. To say that they like these shows would be a massive understatement along the lines of saying that getting involved in Iraq was "maybe not a great idea." For someone who cares so incredibly deeply about the shows, the actors who were on them are hugely important people. If you spend enough time around people who feel that you are hugely important, I would imagine--to use an almost Spockish logic--that you would start to believe it yourself. And this is where we come back to Lynda Carter lobbying for a part in Wonder Woman. Or Adam West saying--and meaning it--that Tim Burton should consider writing him into the movie as Uncle Batman. Or Ben "Cooter" Jones going on the Today show to bitch about the Dukes of Hazzard movie desecrating the memory of something sacred, then admitting that he'd auditioned for it. Actors who've had semi-deluded fans confusing them with the characters they played come to have an overblown sense of propriety over those characters. So when a movie exec with absolutely no imagination decides to yet again raid pop-culture history for a half-baked idea, the actor thinks, "Well, there's no way they can do a big screen version of Three's Company without me, Joyce DeWitt." But, Joyce, they can. And should. It's not you the audience wants to see. If they want that, they'll order the Complete Season 1 DVD. For the remake, they want Angelina Jolie, Kate Hudson and Owen Wilson. They want movie stars. And you're not one. Let it go.
Comments:
You forgot a whole genre of past-their-prime actors--the ones who show up later in infomercials, hawking makeup or buckwheat hull pillows or rotisserie ovens.
I think those might just be the saddest of all.
What about one of the elder Amazons though? Why not? It's probably not like she wants a major role, maybe something that exposes her....
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