{"id":28918,"date":"2016-04-26T22:15:10","date_gmt":"2016-04-26T22:15:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/?page_id=28918"},"modified":"2016-04-26T22:27:37","modified_gmt":"2016-04-26T22:27:37","slug":"the-pop-of-king-no-stars-sorry","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/king-family\/columns-king-uit-entertainment-weekly\/the-pop-of-king-no-stars-sorry\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pop of King: No Stars, Sorry"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
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Some bad habits are hard to break. Making stupid cell phone calls while driving on the turnpike. Snack hunting in the fridge after 10 PM. Scanning USA Today\u2019s Life section for the inevitable postmortem on how last night\u2019s American Idol contestants did.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s believing in movie stars. The Hollywood elite were less than charmed when Chris Rock took after this myth in his Academy Awards monologue\u2014the most amusing result was Sean Penn\u2019s impassioned defense of Jude Law\u2014but I thought Rock was right on. At last someone pointed out the obvious: The emperor is strutting around in his birthday suit.<\/p>\n

Maybe the closest thing we have to a bona fide movie star these days is Will Smith. USA Today officially crowned him in that purple Life section of theirs after Hitch scored $43.1 million in its opening weekend. The Hollywood trades have preened over him; so has this very magazine. But while no one disputes that Hitch has had a terrific run, and Columbia Pictures has every reason to be delighted (as does Will Smith), let\u2019s not get carried away.<\/p>\n

Hitch was powered by a charming trailer and opened on the single biggest date-weekend of the year. The chief competition was a panned horror movie (Boogeyman) in its second week. So tell me\u2014are you really surprised that Hitch blew the doors off the competition? I\u2019m taking nothing away from Smith, an incredibly charming actor who has also been incredibly savvy about choosing his projects, but I mean\u2026 a romantic comedy that doesn\u2019t insult the twentysomething moviegoer\u2019s intelligence and opens on Valentine\u2019s Day weekend? Come on.<\/p>\n

Did people really go to see Will Smith just because he was Will Smith? Sorry, don\u2019t think so. I think they went to see Smith\u2019s character teach the fat guy (beautifully played by Kevin James) how to dance and kiss. To get the girl, yeah, sure, but mostly how to dance and how to kiss. It was sweet, it was charming, and it was simple. Too simple for most studio execs, apparently, who can\u2019t believe such sweet simplicity works unless you\u2019ve got a 20-million-dollar man like Will Smith toplining the show. But in fact it did work, more than 20 years ago, when a virtual unknown named Kevin Bacon starred in a similar movie called Footloose.<\/p>\n

Star power is a myth, but story power exists. Filmmakers consistently turn away from this fact, and that\u2019s why filmgoers so seldom get what they\u2019re more than willing to stand in line for. Story power is why Boogeyman, with no so-called \u201cstars\u201d (except for its producer, Sam Raimi, and its shrewd PG-13 rating), can do $19 million on its opening weekend, far exceeding industry expectations. It\u2019s why Diary of a Mad Black Woman opened with a jaw-dropping gross of $22 million. Man of the House, starring Academy Award winner (and acknowledged \u201cstar\u201d) Tommy Lee Jones, opened on 939 more screens the same weekend, but grossed a third as much. Why? Moviegoers wanted to see what happened after the Stinking Lawyer kicked out the Faithful Wife, that\u2019s why. The same way they wanted to see what happened when the Troubled Young Man finally went back to confront his childhood fears in Boogeyman. Never mind the mostly negative criticism these films generated; like The Passion of the Christ, which also featured a no-name in the starring role (Jim Caviezel), these movies had stories people were willing to line up to see. The Texas Ranger and the Jiggly Cheerleaders, on the other hand? Been there, done that.<\/p>\n

The way Will Smith has chosen his roles suggests a man who understands he is not a star, but instead a bankable actor who can greenlight a project almost single-handedly. And how long will that state of affairs continue? As long as Smith continues producing successes like Hitch; I, Robot; Bad Boys; and Men in Black\u2014the kind of movies that allow play-it-safe producers to believe in a magic-bullet movie world where stars can deliver big box office even if the movies themselves are just the same dumb old dreck. It\u2019s not the Will Smiths and Tom Cruises of the world who are stupid; far from it. In fact, they\u2019re the ones who every so often save the really stupid guys from their worst excesses\u2026 can you say \u201cHeaven\u2019s Gate\u201d?<\/p>\n

Sorry, no stars. The myth of star power may seem pretty, but the statistics prove it is nothing but a lie. For every high-budget, starring-vehicle flop you can name\u2014a King Arthur with Clive Owen or an Alexander with Colin Farrell\u2014there\u2019s a string of low-budget, no-star flicks that found multiplex success in spite of studio indifference. They had the only thing that audiences really care about: story. I\u2019m thinking of Cary Elwes in Saw; Sanaa Lathan in Alien vs. Predator; Jon Heder in Napoleon Dynamite; Because of Winn-Dixie, with Annasophia Robb; and, of course, Kimberly Elise in Diary of a Mad Black Woman. In Hollywood, studio execs are even now sitting around asking themselves, \u201cWhy didn\u2019t we do that?\u201d The answer, of course, is because Halle Berry was too busy doing art films like Catwoman.<\/p>\n

Banking on stars isn\u2019t truly safe, because there really aren\u2019t any stars\u2014only stories. \u201cI am big,\u201d Norma Desmond proclaims near the beginning of Billy Wilder\u2019s great (but hardly blockbuster) Sunset Boulevard. \u201cIt\u2019s the pictures that got small.\u201d
\nAh, but she was crazy, of course.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some bad habits are hard to break. Making stupid cell phone calls while driving on the turnpike. Snack hunting in the fridge after 10 PM. Scanning USA Today\u2019s Life section for the inevitable postmortem on how last night\u2019s American Idol<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":4585,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-28918","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28918"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28928,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28918\/revisions\/28928"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}