Entertainment: Do Stars Deliver?

By RICHARD CORLISS

Kevin Costner is a big star. He dances with wolves, he fields his dreams, he plays Robin Hood in a California accent, and lines form outside the local plex that are longer than the queue of creditors at an S&L. Star quality: people want to watch him on the big screen. Star power: tens of millions of people will pay for the privilege. And keep on paying. His western smash, Dances with Wolves, has been filling theaters for nine months now. Last week more folks went to see it than Return to the Blue Lagoon, which was all of two weeks old.

But even Costner can suffer a total eclipse of the star. Last year Columbia Pictures sent him to Mexico, gave him a pretty woman and a passion to ride after and called the movie Revenge. For Columbia, the only revenge was Montezuma's: the picture went down the commode in a flash. It stumbled to a $15 million gross, less than a tenth of what Dances with Wolves or Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves will have earned in North American theatrical release.

Which proves the twin tenets that feed Hollywood's glory and gloom: 1) there is such a thing as star power; 2) there is no such thing as guaranteed star power.

This summer's films offer support for both truisms. The two megahits are from the two biggest stars: Costner's Robin Hood ($140 million so far) and Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator 2: Judgment Day ($160 million). With City Slickers ($105 million), Billy Crystal has demonstrated that a comedian, savvily shaping projects to suit both him and a large audience, can share the spotlight with two cranky studs. But the season's major flop is Dying Young (a pitiful $32 million), from the former Miss Can't-Miss, Julia Roberts. "They said Julia Roberts could open any film," notes Martin Grove, industry analyst for the Hollywood Reporter, referring to a star's ability to lure sizable audiences on a movie's first weekend. "They said she could open a phone book. Dying Young proved they were wrong."

What Dying Young really proved is that you don't call a picture Dying Young. The last time they made this movie, a romance about a terminally ill cutie, they were smart enough to call it Love Story. Roberts' rapid ascendancy taught Hollywood that she could sell innocence, glamour, pluck. But not even the movies' most reliable female star since Doris Day could peddle leukemia -- particularly not to a summertime audience that wants only the bad guys to die. So Dying Young did just that, and Roberts' pristine rep got terminated too.

Her roller-coaster career curve is hardly unique. With the exception of a macho-arts maven like Steven Seagal, whose films routinely pick up an easy $40 million, nearly every modern star's box-office graph zigzags as wildly as an Axl Rose delta gram. Robert Redford and Clint Eastwood have dominated movies for a quarter-century, but their latest pictures have played in empty theaters. Robert De Niro, the most admired actor in films, went a decade after The Deer Hunter (1978) without a hit. Then he appeared in three commercial successes: GoodFellas, Awakenings, Backdraft. When Bruce Willis flexed his pecs through two Die Hard melodramas and gave voice to the Look Who's Talking hits, he had to be hot; each pair of films grossed close to $200 million. Then he fell off the table with The Bonfire of the Vanities, Mortal Thoughts and Hudson Hawk. Look who's flopping.

For female stars, the returns are lower, but so are the expectations. Women's films exist in a ghetto, and so do women stars, including the most luminous. Everybody knows that Michelle Pfeiffer is a gorgeous star, but they know it from glancing at magazine covers, not from paying to see her films. Jane Fonda's latest projects (Old Gringo, Stanley & Iris) have been noble anonymities. Meryl Streep's name on a movie is like an objet d'art in a mogul's living room: it's there to impress people. Her inevitable Oscar nominations are a springtime balm for the corporate conscience and ego, but she is unlikely to make a studio much money: 1990's Postcards from the Edge is her only black-ink project in years.

Even when his or her ticket sales are robust, a star can be perceived to be in a slump. It's thought that Days of Thunder registered a career dip for Tom Cruise, yet it earned more money than his previous film, Born on the Fourth of July. Eddie Murphy's "disappointing" Another 48 HRS. did better than Harlem Nights. The reason for the bad-mouthing: Days and HRS. were costly pictures that had a hard time breaking even. This is do-or-die stuff for the industry but of no moment to moviegoers. "Audiences don't care how much a movie costs," says Tom Pollock, head of Universal Pictures. "They just want it to work."

The thing about movies is that nobody knows what works. The whole enterprise is make believe: a triumph of fantasy over fact. It's what makes the job exciting. A film out of nowhere, with a nobody star, can send people out happy -- and make the producers of Home Alone rich. Conversely, a blockbuster wannabe like Redford's Havana grossed less in the U.S. than, say, the Italian import Cinema Paradiso.

There will always be more Havanas than Home Alones; there always have been. But in Hollywood 50 years ago, the ceiling was lower and the floor more secure than in today's boom-or-bust industry. Back when moviegoing was a national habit and not an event, pictures would play for a week or two in the studio- owned theaters, and a hit might gross just twice as much as a flop. This even stream of pictures kept stars in their place; they could be signed to seven-year contracts, and if they balked, their bosses could suspend them and replace them with more docile creatures. "Every studio had a farm system," says Art Murphy of Variety. "They would be put in a B picture, and if the public responded to them, they would be put in an A picture. You got a constant transfusion of new blood for $125 to $200 a week per actor."

The farm was really a plantation; stars were slaves, handsomely paid but still indentured. This was bad for actors and great for audiences. "Fans felt loyal to the star," says George Christy, a Hollywood Reporter columnist. "Star power has dissipated, and fan power too, because stars make movies less frequently. Before Warren Beatty comes out with Dick Tracy, he has to go on Barbara Walters to reintroduce himself to the public" because he hasn't made a movie in three years.

Today there is no safety net -- no majority of compulsive moviegoers -- to catch the weaker films. Every star, every studio, stands like a colossus on a fault line. There are also no plantation workers among actors, only independent operatives. If Schwarzenegger wants $12 million a picture, he'll get it -- and he'll earn it. But a few other stars, who deserve a lot less money than Arnold, will be paid only a little less. The B-minus picture boys get A-plus cash.

Ladling out the largesse might once have been acceptable to studio heads, but the palmy days are past. In the current movie climate, when budgets have soared and revenues are soft, moguls get to wondering if stars are worth the worry. This summer's box-office take is down 10% from the same period last year, which was down 8.8% from the summer of 1989. Viewers are seeing more movies, but increasingly, they watch them at home. "Video is becoming a substitute for film going," says Pollock, who notes that studios receive about 50% of the box-office take but only 25% to 30% of video sales. "If you look at picture making as a hurdle race, the hurdles just went up a foot."

And like the owners of baseball teams, movie executives are tired of paying millions of dollars to the uppity help. "With the recession finally hitting Hollywood," says syndicated columnist Anne Thompson, "the policy of putting big stars in weak stories is being called into question."

This is the new Hollywood gospel, and its prophet is Jeffrey Katzenberg. In January, Katzenberg, who runs Walt Disney's movie operations, wrote a staff memo that was passed around Hollywood more quickly and urgently than a joint at Woodstock. In this back-to-basics plea, he ripped the notions of the bankable star. "If this were true," he asked, alluding to Batman and The Two Jakes, "then how can one explain what happened to 1990's vehicle for 1989's 'most bankable star,' Jack Nicholson?" He apologized for the studio's big- budget Dick Tracy and disclosed that he had turned down Beatty's subsequent project, Bugsy. And he urged his minions to build movies around the story, not the star.

Katzenberg had numbers, not just frustration, to back him up. The top three hits of 1990 had been Home Alone, Ghost and Pretty Woman, with nary a bankable star (though Pretty Woman turned Roberts into one). They were simple tales about people who change: the old stuff of drama, and of Hollywood in the decades when its tinsel glistened like gold. Richard Zanuck quotes his father Darryl, longtime pasha of 20th Century Fox, as saying success in movies boils down to three things: "story, story, story." Zanuck is an independent producer who has defied industry logic and made hits without big stars: Jaws, Cocoon, Driving Miss Daisy. As he notes with wry pride, "I'm a throwback and part of the vanguard at the same time."

They -- the bosses -- wish. But the men with the money know they have had to hand a lot out to get a lot more back. And Arnold or Sly Stallone didn't need an Uzi to coax $12 million out of a production chief's pocket. Considering the current wave of penny-pinching promises, Variety's Art Murphy predicts that "smaller will be better. Until a producer overpays a star for a film that turns into a monster hit." And the cycle will continue, as long as people are fascinated by the mystery of charisma and will pay to see it radiate through a rough or pretty face 30 ft. tall.

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CREDIT: TIME Graphic by Joe Lertola

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With reporting by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles