Phone Call from L.A.

PAUL MORRISSEY

shoots the stars with Brooks Peters

VANITIES

Are movie stars back in business? As a director I never use them in my films—I prefer unknowns. Yet as a fan of movies, I think they might well be.

As recently as the fifties, the studio system still recognized the tremendous importance of people with great faces and lots of personality. To it we can be grateful for the likes of Reynolds, Eastwood, and Newman. (No females survive.) The history of the movies was once the history of great faces. For too long now the absence of personalities has been revered—the screamers, the criers, and the wimps have been getting all the attention, and the roles.

As much as I like Sylvester Stallone and especially what he stands for in his Rambo films (i.e., America, Freedom, "Let's not surrender to Moscow just yet," etc.), I wish he'd smile once in a while and make a few less faces. I much prefer the Rocky and Cobra characters because of their humor and the inevitable result of that humor, a kind of charm and likability. Actors like Bogart, Wayne, Cooper, or Tracy would never pull their faces into grotesque contortions, or launch into hysteria for dramatic emphasis. This peculiar change in the arsenal of actors' gestures has been pretty heavy weather.

There are still some dinosaurs from our prehistoric past who linger in our midst, like Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, and Gregory Peck—actors who by the sheer tone of their voice command respect. No facial twitching for them. Peck once made a really silly film called Spellbound, in which he's a victim of a neurotic psychological thing. He goes around holding his head in his hands quite a bit, but he never breaks down or cries, never grovels for sympathy or asks for somebody's "love" or makes those awful faces that were rightly considered weak and stupid and just bad acting way back then.

That kind of actor has been pretty scarce in the last few years. Why? It's always seemed to me that the source of all this face pulling is the screamed fascist hatred, the whining, the complaining, the vocal hysteria of the media's favorite sacred cow—rock 'n' roll. All this contrived brutality, this false energy, has been deliberately injected into movies the way rock stars automatically shoot up for their concerts. Success is based on who screams the loudest, who's the most off-putting, who has the most problems (i.e., drug problems), and who doesn't comb his hair. This vomiting out of emotions is a tradition that doesn't derive from anything vaguely Western European.

But pendulums swing both ways. Recently it seems that a lot of these lost qualities are resurfacing, especially in young actors like Matt Dillon, Molly Ringwald, and Tom Cruise, who luckily have gotten starring roles immediately after high school and have not had to wallow in the ludicrous pathology of acting class, endlessly rehearsing their "private moment." Freshness, humor, and spontaneity are replacing the fraudulent "mooding it up" that passes for fine acting. And, horror of horrors, these young performers actually have good appearances! There must be some mistake.