When Michael Caine was accepting his Golden Globe for Little Voice, his acceptance speech was terrific, and addressed this matter. I can’t quote it directly, but he said something like this:
“Earlier in my career, I was constantly afraid that I wouldn’t be able to get any more work, so I accepted every single script that was offered to me. I made a lot of crap.”
[Big laugh.]
“…and a lot of money.”
[Huge laugh.]
It’s a fairly large gap, but Ben Kingsley surely needs to be on there for eventually following up his Oscar win in Gandhi (1982) with the steaming pile that was Species (1995). It’s not like there wasn’t other trash on the way - 1985’s Harem, 1990’s The Children and the hideously unfunny Dave (1993), although that was only a 10 minute role, but Species definitely takes the cake as his worst role, especially as he was probably paid more for it.
It’s not the worst I can find for Brando. It’s the worst I could find of the movies he was in after he was dead. I noted post-mortem.
I guess I am all hot about some idiot on a bulletin board who takes his nom de plume from one of the dumbest movies in history calling Robert Deniro a whore for making movies that don’t win Academy Awards. While I think Ben Stiller is the least funny person in cinematic history to become a major star and if I were also a star I would never consider being in a picture over which he had any kind of control, I also would not substitute my judgment for Deniro’s. Some ideas seem funny on paper and are just not very well executed. I thought “Analyze This” was about as clever a premise as I had heard in some time and I fully expected it to be excellent. It wasn’t. That makes Deniro a whore? No, but saying it does makes you an idiot.
You might want to take that sentiment someplace more appropriate than Cafe Society. Just a friendly suggestion from “an idiot”.
Stranger
You know, all the dogs you mention coming after [or before the Oscar] all paid the bills.
fuck art, a roof over your family’s heads, food on the table, clothes on the body are better than starving. You take the work. There is no dishonor in working for a living, whether it is the Pound Puppies movie, being a Fruit of the loom grape or playing Hamlet.
Sure. It’s not like an Oscar comes with a cash prize, and anybody who says they wouldn’t accept a multimillion dollar paycheck to appear in some craptastical film about a submarine that flies through the Earth is living in the plastic-ivory tower of a person whose never stood in front of a dumptruck of money. And besides, if you don’t take work, good or bad, it stops being offered; many good actors have knowingly taken crap (or at least jobs they viewed as crap) to pay the bills and keep their name on the rolls. Morgan Freeman has plenty of barely-above-direct-to-video films on his c.v., but he also has name recognition (“Hey, Morgan Freeman…wasn’t he in that shitty scifi movie with Keanu Reeves?”) and he gets calls. Hackman has done plenty of bad films where he’s clearly the best thing in it, which makes him look all the more skillful for elevating a garbage script and bad direction. And Alec Guinness, despite decrying the “awful, banal lines” in Star Wars, made more money from his options on that single film than any other film in his much revered career.
Sometimes you make business decisions to do crap because it’s the smart move, or you want to build up a nest egg and go do funky independant movies, or you need to pay off the back taxes/alimony settlement/rehab bill; other times, you may not realize that it’s garbage until you get on set to find that the directory has been fired and replaced by the producer’s nephew who rewrote the script with his frat house buddies over a drunken weekend. And sometimes, you just take whatever comes along; bearing an Oscar is no guarantee of work.
Stranger
So you figure if I offered Halle Berry a hundred bucks she’d give me a hummer? Hey, it would be work and it would pay some bills - so no dishonor.
Seriously, do you think Nicolas Cage did Gone in Sixty Seconds because he was was three months behind on his rent and was going to lose his apartment? None of these actors were starving. They may have wanted the paycheck but they didn’t need it to survive.
The place to insult another poster is the Pit, not Cafe Society. You can disagree in this forum, but we do require that you stay civil. Please do not do this again.
Calling someone an idiot certainly does not compare with caling someone a whore. as ye sow, so shall ye reap.
If this had been your original post and you substituted Deniro’s name for Morgan Freeman I would not have necessarily agreed or disagreed because, like you, I am not privy to any artistic or financial discussions that take place before an aggreement to make a film is completed. I agree that it is not illogical to draw a conclusion that an actor is motivated more by money than art when he consistently makes movies along the lines of say, “The Towering Inferno.” That is not the case with Deniro in my opinion, but it might be arguable. To say that he is prostituting himself is ridiculous and it strikes me as odd that you can get away with that insult, but I cannot express my opinion about it.
I guess then you also argue that the author of “The Godfather” was whoring himself when he wrote it, since he himelf has said he wrote it only to write a best seller and make a lot of money. When it was successful beyond his wildest dreams he said he wished he had done a better job. I am not clear on where the work ends and the whoring starts.
I know you posted this right after my warning, so I ain’t dinging you for it, but just so you know:
It is not against the rules in Cafe Society for posters to insult–directly or otherwise–actors and other entertainers; and you’re certainly allowed to disagree with the insults. A line is crossed, however, when you insult another poster. So, if you feel a reaping is due to some sowing, ya gotta reap in the Pit and not Cafe Society.
Just to make it absolutely, unambiguously clear, I did not and am not referring to you as a whore, unless, of course, it is the unlikely case that Robert DeNiro spends his idle hours skimming Internet message boards under the nom de guerre denquixote. You can dispense with the appellation of “idiot” in this thread and elsewhere, or at least do me the kindness of expanding your vocabulary and using a rotation of more novel terms rather than repeating the same word over and over like a broken record.
Stranger
I love Dave. It’s one of my favourite films.
No, that was Samuel L. Jackson.
Are you sure? Because I thought it was Djimon Hounsou. Or maybe Harold Perrineau. Or Ice-T or Laurence Fishbourne or Bernie Casey or Ernie Hudson.
Damn, Keanu Reeves has sure made a lot of bad sci-fi movies with black people.
It was because of her preexisting financial relationship between boardmember Crawford and Pepsico that made her appearance in Trog so incongruous. I’ve heard she liked to be in movies and didn’t much care what they were, especially after she aged into the Sea Hag and decent roles had dried up, but still, TROG?!?!?
That wasn’t very far to fall. She got an Oscar for being a movie star, not an actress, and continued to be a movie star in America’s Sweethearts.
Yeah, I’d put the stake in her for Ocean’s Twelve, in which Julia Roberts proved that she couldn’t convincingly play herself.
Shelly Winters as Mary Harris and Estelle Parson as her daughter/Roseanne’s mother Beverly Harris on “Roseanne” were not slumming performances.