Working in a video store has opened my eyes to a few little Hollywood oddities. One of these is what I had thought might be some kind of blacklisting. I know that Steven Seagal puts out a bunch of crap and I understand why. Seagal is a bad actor who thrives in the realm of low-budget action flicks that go straight to DVD. He's never been much more than that.
Some other actors currently find themselves in that sort of limbo when I thought they'd be on a different career trajectory ten years ago. Val Kilmer, Christian Slater, and Cuba Gooding, Jr. are three actors who enjoyed considerable success in the '90s but, now, are heavily into the straight to DVD thing. You might be surprised, just browsing through the Action section of my store, how many times these names pop up on movies you've never heard of.
I strongly considered, for a time, the possibility that these actors were blacklisted at some point. Maybe they had just pissed off the wrong people or pulled a couple of Mel Gibsons along the way that I hadn't caught wind of. But I think, maybe, they just made some very bad career moves.
I think, in the case of Cuba Gooding, Jr., the problem was with hubris. I remember watching the movie A Murder of Crows on some movie channel. I only watched because it was partially filmed in New Orleans. Turns out that this movie was Gooding's first foray into film production. It was a horrible career misstep. The movie had a very "made for TV" feel to it and was a chore to watch. Gooding was the star and I'm sure its failure put out some red flags. His star continued to decline as he continually associated himself with bad projects.
Val Kilmer was HUGE at one point in the '90s. His Jim Morrison in the Doors sort of cemented him as a force in Hollywood. Then there were missteps that probably looked like good moves at the time: The Saint, Batman Forever. Apparently, Kilmer had a high-flying lifestyle because he's in the news more these days for how much money he owes and problems he's having in selling a ranch he owns. In the past few years he has made a string of straight to DVD releases apparently just to get a paycheck and he continues to dilute his stock.
Christian Slater might just have been too much Christian Slater for his own good. These three actors, however, have been putting out tons of films and you can find at least two of the three together in several of the titles.
Adrian Brody, I predict, will be added to this list soon. At one point this year, on the new release wall of my store, he was in five titles. It's only a matter of time before the viewing public grows weary of seeing the same person in every other movie they view.
Moving on .... another gripe with Hollywood.
Movies are like little companies that pop up for a period to produce a product and then go away. A production company will hire a slew of workers, all with highly specialized roles, to pull the whole thing off. One type of worker they hire will be in charge of props, one in charge of continuity, the people who make sure an actress is wearing the same shirt from shot to shot and that sort of thing. Mostly these people are put in charge of paying attention.
I recently watched the film RED and was surprised to find that parts were filmed in my hometown of Mobile, Alabama as well as in New Orleans and Pensacola, Florida. I was horrified when one of the stars, Mary-Louise Parker, pronounced the word Mobile as MO-bul, the way you would pronounce the word if it were a piece of art suspended from a ceiling. Just a pet peeve I guess. The proper pronunciation is mo-BEEL. Bob Dylan famously took a swipe at this pronunciation by over-emphasizing the pronunciation MO-beel in his song "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again". I just don't see how people can be around a bunch of other people saying a word one way and just ignore it and say it another way. Reference nuclear vs. nuke-you-ler in a previous blog.
Similarly, last night I watched the movie Secretariat which was great. Highly recommended feel-good story. I remember the Secretariat phenomenon quite well from my childhood. So, my gripe, there's a scene in the movie set in a hotel ballroom prior to Secretariat's final race at Belmont in 1973. There's a band playing in the background, sort of a wedding band looking act in white dinner jackets. All's good unless you know anything about musical instruments. The guitarist is playing what appears to be an Ibanez Roadstar guitar that couldn't have been made prior to 1979. I made an attempt to find out more about that band but was unsuccessful. It gripes me that this could happen on a couple of levels. First, the guitarist in question should have known the date setting of the movie and at least borrowed a period-appropriate guitar. Second, the director, prop-master, somebody should have picked up on the anachronism. It's just sloppy.
I guess I envision myself as being able to do the job better. It always makes me wonder how the person in charge of a gaffe like that got their job in the first place and I always expect some sort of nepotism. I know that's horribly cynical and maybe it's a glaring character flaw, but it seriously messes with me.
I remember seeing the movie The Mummy in the theater. Though I thoroughly enjoyed the film, one scene screwed it all up for me. In the scene a group of Egyptian assassins appears, all of them carrying British made Sten guns. The film was set in 1926; the Sten gun was invented in 1940. I know that this was lost on the vast majority of movie goers and, big picture, it's not really a big deal. What irked me so much was that somebody was in charge of providing guns to the actors and they chose to provide them with a prop that was, at best, 14 years out of step with the film. This anachronism was such a glaring oversight that I thought about it for the remainder of the film. I had to look it up when I got home to make sure I wasn't in error and the discrepancy really floored me when I found out just how off it was.
So, I guess if anybody wants to hire me as a consultant on their movie project, I'm available and cheap and, although I'm not your nephew, I'll make sure that you have the right props on set.
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