Rainbow
with Egg
Underneath and an Elephant
The Mavericks
14 February 1999,
The Observer, p.2
Cinema: The Mavericks: It's cool outside / Features: Review
ANDREW COLLINS
So how do you get to be a maverick? You could study Brando, or pout like
Penn, while petulance and long bar bills always help.
Last
December, while shooting in New York, Sean Penn announced that he was
giving up acting. `This is it,' he told the New York Times. `I'm not going
to act in movies again.' So make the most of what will constitute his last
three appearances: The Thin Red Line (released here at the end of this
month), the dark ensemble piece Hurlyburly (alongside Kevin Spacey) and an
as yet untitled Woody Allen project. But don't hold the front page unduly
Penn first quit acting in 1994, and he'll no doubt quit again. He's just
being a Hollywood maverick, and that's what Hollywood mavericks do: they
pout and they threaten and they walk off the set; they disappear,
sometimes for days on end, and reappear, drunk, with a tattoo; they binge
and they whinge.
Madonna,
Penn's first wife and founder of a record company called Maverick,
described him as `a cowboy poet'. During their three-year marriage in the
Eighties, they became a special-offer Burton and Taylor for the tabloids,
but it was hubby who cultivated the `bad boy' reputation (one which
stuck). He was like a great white hunter looking to line his trophy room
with photographers' heads he shot at them, punched them, and in the case
of the Sun's Dave Hogan, ran them down in his car. All grist to the
maverick mill, Penn's pugnacious behaviour towards men with heavy cameras
unable to fight back made him a minor legend. Easy, isn't it? Johnny Depp
is an honours student of the Penn school, recently adding to his CV of `mavericity'
by attacking a snapper with a large chunk of wood outside a London
restaurant. But his notoriety skyrocketed when the papers discovered he'd
paid pounds 11,000 for a bottle of 1978 Romanee-Conti. Go to the top of
the class.
There's
more to being a Hollywood maverick than petulance and bar bills, but not
much more. Some might argue that `Hollywood maverick' is a contradiction
in terms after all, what kind of outsider operates within such an
all-powerful institution? The 1970s heyday of the movie brat is long gone,
and today's bad boys are 12-step repentants. True enough, when a recluse
like Terrence Malick can come back after 20 years in the wilderness and
command a $55 million budget for The Thin Red Line, it seems there is
still a market for the wayward genius. . . but not too wayward. The
spectacle of Brad Pitt retracting his negative comments about the lame IRA
thriller The Devil's Own after studio pressure made the maverick
parameters very plain.
The
studio publicity treadmill is enough to turn any actor or director into
processed meat the average sanitised press junket would knock the maverick
out of anyone so respect, as they say, is due to Michael Keaton for
admitting in one interview for his new movie Jack Frost, `I have no idea
why I'm here', and to Devil's Advocate director Taylor Hackford for
declaring to a tableful of European journalists that the studio, Warner
Bros, were `starfuckers'. Sean Penn, ever the best of breed, refused to
publicise The Thin Red Line because 20th Century Fox wouldn't charter a
private plane to fly him to a premiere.
These
days, you have to take your maverick behaviour where you can get it. When
Samuel L. Jackson, left, clearly mouthed the word `shit' at the very
moment he was pipped to the Academy Award for Pulp Fiction, it was as if
he'd firebombed the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Peter Biskind's Easy
Riders, Raging Bulls is a gloves-off account of the rise of the
film-school baby boomers Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg and bearded pals a
pivotal time for Hollywood as it went from post-McCarthy malaise to re-energised
hothouse. Biskind leaves the reader with what can only be described as
Maverick Fatigue. Everybody's at it: Francis Coppola's methods `were so
unorthodox, he always felt his days were numbered'; Robert Altman `had
been a rebel from the word go'; `
Mercifully
for Hollywood the quiet one, George Lucas, blew his old mates out of the
water with the ultra-conventional Star Wars (which Coppola, for one,
hated) and a new age of conformism was ushered in. The Eighties bred a
crop of more career-hungry stars, the so-called Brat Pack (many of whom,
ironically, were introduced in Coppola's old-fashioned teen flick The
Outsiders) and a new generation of bankable directors trained in rock
promos and commercials. Mavericity hit a new low in the greed decade.
When,
in 1988, cancer prematurely claimed
Hollywood's
first true maverick was Marlon Brando, whose square-peg status was
strengthened by a literacy unheard of among movie wannabes in the 1940s
(he studied Kant, Plato and Kafka in New York as well as the `Method'). A
screen sensation from the word go, Brando in turn begat James Dean, an
ambitious bisexual from Indiana who made no secret of his idolatry: from
the set of his movie debut East Of Eden, the young buck actually signed a
letter home as `Jim (Brando Clift) Dean'. `I came to Hollywood to act, not
to charm society,' was his pet disclaimer. He leapfrogged Brando in terms
of cool, egomania and sexual adventure, then sealed his reputation as
ubermaverick forever by crashing his silver Porsche 550 Spyder and
breaking his unconventional neck, aged 24.
Supreme
arrogance call it self-belief is essential to the maverick. Biskind notes
that the young Warren Beatty `thought he was too good for the pictures he
was offered'. This self-importance led him to defy the President of the
United States: in 1962, John F. Kennedy expressed a wish to Warner Bros
that they adapt a book about him for the screen, with Fred Zinnemann
directing and Beatty in the central role. Beatty said no.
Robert
De Niro and Al Pacino, more durable than James Dean though equally cut
from the cloth of Stanley Kowalski's T-shirt, each have their `funny
little ways', but neither qualifies as a copper-bottomed maverick too
quiet. Robert Duvall has an Argentine wife half his age, but like his
compatriot, the once-feisty Gene Hackman, advancing years have sapped his
fighting spirit. Of the Eighties graduates, Christian Slater is proving
more than just `a pocket Jack Nicholson' in terms of acting style the
trail of wreckage behind him (guns, rehab, jail) would shame his
hard-living mentor. And we all know about Robert Downey Jr. But being a
maverick at home is one thing what about at work?
Dennis
Hopper used to turn up at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with half an ounce
of coke in his pocket (way to go!), yet his post-Apocalypse film choices
betray little more than a hack with bills to pay. Hoosiers? Super Mario
Brothers? Waterworld? Or even a pantomime turn in Speed alongside Keanu
Reeves, who, like so many promising left-fielders before him, bowed to
some inner accountant and trousered the action-hero dollar. It is a
delicious paradox that while today's action flick heroes are all, by law,
mavericks (maverick cop, maverick Fed, maverick chef in Under Siege), the
actors who play them must cash in their credibility to do so. `The odds
are against John McClane,' runs the tag line for Die Hard. `That's just
the way he likes it.' Bruce Willis, meanwhile, prefers them stacked the
other way around.
Which
brings us back to that contradiction in terms: Hollywood maverick. You
might as well say Iraqi diplomat or ITV comedy. In the battery-farmed days
of the studio system, only United Artists could be described as a
`maverick studio'. Founded by Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary
Pickford and D.W. Griffith, UA sought to defy Tinseltown orthodoxy and
empower creative talent. By the end of the 1940s, it was losing $100,000 a
week.
So
if you want to know how much of a cowboy poet you are, check your bank
balance. Money is God's way of telling you you're an establishment lapdog,
which is presumably why Johnny Depp is so keen to get rid of his by
pissing it up against the Mirabelle's fire exit. In truth, the very word
`maverick' has lost all meaning it's a chocolate bar, a Radio 2 pub-rock
band, a Dallas basketball team. It's Rhodri Morgan, a `maverick Labour
MP'.
There
is hope. If, as insiders insist, Ann Heche's Hollywood stock nosedives as
a result of her courageous `coming out', then it must go down in movie
history as the most maverick gesture of our time one to shame all the bad
boys in town. And not a single photographer was harmed.
Ten
maverick actors
Marlon Brando
Harvey Keitel
Jack Nicholson
Gary Oldman
Sean Penn
Michael Caine
Johnny Depp
Samuel L. Jackson
Dennis Hopper
Warren Beatty