The title needs help. What I’m after here is where a name star will have appeared in multiple (say at least three) movies with another less-well-known player, to the point that there appears to be some sort of special deal or special chemistry going on.
If I give a few examples, maybe you can think of a better title for this thread:
Steve McQueen and Don Gordon were in Bullitt, Papillon, and The Towering Inferno and some other ventures
Clint Eastwood and Geoffrey Lewis were in at least eight movies together
Burt Reynolds and Ned Beatty appeared in at least nine movies together
Some of these pairings are obviously well past accidental. John Wayne, Ward Bond and maybe another four or five were in almost every John Ford western.
And there would be no point in listing the deliberate sidekicks from sitcoms and B Westerns where hundreds (dozens anyway) of joint ventures could be listed.
Somewhere in the middle of these pairings that don’t have the same characters being recreated is the group I’m hoping we can have some fun listing.
Aside from IMDB’s search feature that lets you get a list of “joint ventures” if you key in the names of two people, do you know of a site or a feature of a site where you can get some sort of listing of “joint ventures” without having to specify the people involved? I feel pretty sure that I must have seen such a list, but I have forgotten where and under what circumstances.
I’d like to avoid the star-star pairings like Paul Newman and Robert Redford, and even the Marlon Brando and Karl Malden type. I might feel a little better with a Brando-Robert Duvall list.
I would like to exclude the franchise movies where the two actors play the same roles in several movies, like the LOTR franchise and the Star Wars and Star Trek set.
Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany have been in two movies together (so far) where Bettany’s character was a sidekick to Crowe’s (A Beautiful Mind and Master and Commander). The movies and characters are otherwise unrelated.
I can’t think of a good example offhand, but I’m pretty sure there are male-female sidekick relationships among actors that aren’t playing lovers, spouses, partners, etc. I imagine those relationships (at the actor level as opposed to the male-female level) might be harder to sustain over the years. Still, I hope we can name a few of those, too.
It’s so tempting to start with all the cowboy sidekicks and sitcom sidekicks. But I will try not to.
It may be just me but I see Joan and John Cusack and Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor as having pretty close to the same “star status” as each other. Maybe John and Joan a little less so than Gene and Richard. But still, which is the sidekick in those cases?
John Cusack is a pretty big star. Joan is a supporting actress with very few leads to her credit.
Gene and Richard are a pair of leads with Gene just being the bigger star. Part of that is racial as Richard Pryor was too black to get roles like the Sheriff in Blazing saddles, even though the role was written for him. I agree that theses two are not sidekicks.
Excellent additions. Sandler and Schneider remind me to add Farley and David Spade.
Humphrey Bogart appeared six times with both Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre.
Dick Powell made five films with Guy Kibbee, including the classics 42nd Street, Golddiggers of 1933, Dames and Footlight Parade. Not truly sidekicks – they didnt have a lot of scenes together – but they were part of the Busby Berkely stock company.
Woody Allen cast Tony Roberts with him in six films.
How has no one mentioned Chris Farley and David Spade yet? Spade was definitely a sidekick, because his career tanked from movies to TV sitcoms after Farley died.
Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson have acted together in Zoolander, Starsky and Hutch, and Night at the Museum. Oh, yeah, and don’t forget Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers, as much as I’d like to. :rolleyes:
Owen Wilson also played the sidekick role in **Shanghai Noon ** and Shanghai Knights , with Jackie Chan.
Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson are members of the “Frat Pack”, a collection of male actors who tend to get cast in movies together in varying combinations.
Oh, and another thing that Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson were both in was episode 14 of the very short-lived Ben Stiller series (it only had one episode, episode 14) “Heat Vision and Jack,” starring Jack Black.
I’ve seen Paul Gross and Leslie Nielson get paired off in at least two cases (Leslie Nielson guested on a number of episodes of Due South, and he and Paul Gross starred in “Men With Brooms”). Actually, there seems to be an unofficial rule that anyone who had a role on Due South gets to be in a Paul Gross movie. One of my favorite examples is “Murder Most Likely”, where Beau Starr, who played a Police Lieutenant on Due South, played a mob boss, without significantly changing how he played the characters. (also, in both cases, Paul Gross played a Mountie)
, look two posts up.