US September 1989

They’re not laughing anymore. Costner is a man’s man and a woman’s dream, and his name above a movie title ensures a healthy box office. For Costner, that translates into 1987’s The Untouchables and No Way Out, last year’s Bull Durham and his most recent smash, Field of Dreams. Heady stuff for a two-year span. But don’t be fooled: it only seems as if Costner, 34, made it overnight. In reality, he’s been chasing his own dream for a decade.

Across the street from Paramount Studios in Los Angeles there is a set of nondescript offices housing various production companies. One of these companies is Costner’s own, called TIG Productions, after his grandmother's nickname. It’s ironic, this location, because it is where he began his professional career 10 years ago, at a place called Raleigh Studios.

The son of a utilities worker whose job required several moves (his mother worked for the welfare department), Costner switched schools throughout his childhood. After graduating from Cal State at Fullerton with a business degree and a vague ambition to act ,he married fellow student Cindy Silva. He then accepted an office job but, bored with the nine to five grind, quit after just 30 days.

In 1979, the then 24-year-old was working as a stage manager for Raleigh, a small company that produced commercials and independent films. As such, he was sort of a jack-of-all-trades, doing whatever needed to get done, which involved mostly physical labor. In that same year, a low budget T & A picture entitled Malibu Hot Summer (later changed to Sizzle Beach, U.S.A.) was being cast at the studios. While Costner probably could have walked the few feet over to the director, Richard Brander, and asked for an audition, he chose to mail a picture and a resume. Costner found himself with the second male lead, playing a wealthy cowboy who falls in love with a well-endowed young lady (played by the director's wife, Leslie Brander). The sexploitation flick not only is Costner's film debut, but also contains his first celluloid love scene. Years later, the actor's love scenes in movies like No Way Out and Bull Durham would be called some of the hottest in cinema history.

We always laugh about that," says Sizzle Beach producer Eric Louzil, now a low budget movie director. "He had to do a scene where he's making love to the director's wife, in front of a fireplace. He was real nervous and stiff. He kissed her, but it was like he wasn't into it."

Costner, who wasn't even paid to be in the movie, tells interviewers he did the movie for the experience and "didn't work for six years after that."

But, in fact, for the next five years, the actor did work, albeit sporadically, going back and forth between tiny roles in A-list movies and leading roles in lesser pictures. A casting director at Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios during this period remembers Costner vividly. "Somebody called and told me about this guy who was really nice and good-looking and said we should use him as an extra or something," recalls Jane Jenkins, who cast, among other movies, Willow and License to Kill. "So Kevin came over and he was a big, tall guy who was good-looking and smart. So we put him in Frances”. His role in the 1982 biography of Frances Farmer, starring Jessica Lange, ended up on the cutting groom floor. Apparently, Costner and Frances director Graeme Clifford didn't see eye to eye on the one line the actor had in the movie; the outcome was that Costner refused to say the line.

Another bit part, in Coppola's One From the Heart, was cut out before he wound up with one line in the 1982 smash Night Shift (look at the scene in which some fraternity members invade the morgue; the 1st frat boy is Costner).

A small role as a newlywed in 1983's Table for Five, starring John Voight, was also edited out. Then came his greatest cut of all: his now infamous role as the suicide victim whose funeral brings together a group of friends in The Big Chill. Perhaps thinking that this was finally his big break, Costner turned down a role in War Games in order to work with the likes of Glenn Close, William Hurt and Tom Berenger. By now, Costner's name was getting around town - though not because of his superior acting skills but because he kept getting spliced out of movies. However, he did have leading roles in two shoe string-budget movies: Stacey’s Knights (1982), a movie with a gambling motif in which Costner was thrown over a bridge and drowned: and Shadows Run Black (1984), a murder mystery in which he played the main suspect.

The actor, also tried out for a small part in Testament, the 1983 PBS film about a nuclear holocaust. What occurred at the audition was indicative of things to come. "I was auditioning people in a big office building where there were a lot of secretaries," says casting director Margery Simkin. "And Kevin was just sitting in the waiting room wearing jeans and looking like he hadn't shaved - he just looked like a schlump. But after he left, every woman in that waiting area and every secretary came in and said, 'Who was that guy?!' I've never seen anything like it: they just went crazy for him. It's probably the only time I can think of where that happened. I was never surprised that he became a star."

After 1985, no one could be surprised. Three, count em, three movies starring this heretofore unknown hit the silver screen that year: Fandango, American Flyers and Silverado.

Fandango director Kevin Reynolds had already auditioned some 200 actors for the role of Gardner Barnes, the brassy ringleader of a bunch of guys who get together one last time before heading off into adulthood. Just as Reynolds was getting little frustrated, in walked Costner, "and within 15 seconds after he started reading the lines, I knew he was the guy, " Reynolds says.

While the movie was not a hit, Costner holds Fandango in high regard. "People who see that movie -- it was only out for a week because it ran into political problems [with the studio] - say to me that it's the best coming-of-age movie they ever saw," Costner says proudly. "The thing is, if it's a good movie, whether it does any box office or not, you and I are gonna love it, and anybody who finds the movie five years from now will go, 'Cool movie.” "That happens with Fandango all the time. "

American Flyers cast the actor in a story about two brothers set in the world of bike racing. "He looked like a fireman to me," actress Rae Dawn Chong recalls about her leading man. "I kind of felt Hollywood lucked out because Kevin stood in the wrong line. If it hadn't been a line for an audition, it might have been a job as a fireman." To think of the sandy-haired actor as a swashbuckling fireman isn't farfetched; he is a physical actor, and nowhere was that more

Costner's role in Lawrence Kasdan's Western, Silverado, was yet another physically demanding part. Kasdan, who had also directed The Big Chill, wrote the part of Jake, a goofy gunslinger, especially for Costner, feeling he owed him one. Costner dug in voraciously, again insisting on doing his own difficult stunts. “There is a scene in which his brother (played by Scott Glenn) breaks Jake out of jail and gives him a ride on his horse. Running on a raised sidewalk, Costner tried to jump onto Glenn’s horse several times before the stuntmen were called in to perform. But even they couldn't do it, so Costner corralled Glenn into practicing. "Kevin said to the director, 'Come on, Scott and I can do it. Can't we, Scott? Scott's a good rider and I can jump we'll work this out,' " recalls Glenn. "We would have 15 minutes off at lunch, and Kevin would say, 'Come on, let's try that mount. It’s gonna look great , Scott. It will be great.’ And finally we did it!"

His performance in Silverado has been viewed as the role that showcased his potential as a star. The least-known actor in a cast that included Kevin Kline, John Cleese, Jeff Goldbloom and Danny Glover, he stole the movie. Newsweek noted Costner's "seductive flash," which was sure to "win lot of fans." Executives at Orion Pictures offered Costner the leading role in any of their movies. Unlike in his early days, when he took on just about anything, the actor was now holding all the cards. He turned down everything they had; suggesting instead a script he had read called No Way Out.

The project had been around since 1976. Executive producer Mace Neufeld says it was hard to get a leading man "because a lot of them didn't want to play a role in which they turned out to be a Russian mole at the end of the film." For Costner, playing dual sided naval officer Tom Farrell wasn't a problem. "This is smart writing, the kind of movie I like," he said at the time.

Costner traveled to New York to read with auditioning actors. "Kevin would start to read with them, and if it wasn't going well," says Neufeld, "he'd ask us to give him five minutes, and then he'd work with the actor and read with him again. He was giving them a real chance for the part, which is very unusual for a young actor. "

(According to Sizzle Beach and Shadows Run Black producer Louzil, it was during this period that Costner started worrying about those earlier movies. "Kevin called me and inquired about the possibility of buying the films so as to shelve them," claims Louzil. The actor never did buy the movies' rights, and Sizzle Beach has just been released on video by Troma films.)

Whereas the Tom Farrell role was racy and juicy, Costner's next role, Eliot Ness in 1987's The Untouchables, was somewhat bland and flat. Though the movie made $74.5 million and boosted his career, Costner was a bit rankled by accusations that he was too white-bread in the part.

"A reporter once said to me, 'I think Eliot Ness is a wimp,' and I said, Did you see the movie? What you're saying is that this guy is not a classic hero, but did you see him ever take a step backwards? Ever?' " Costner says somewhat defensively. "You see a guy like that, like Eliot Ness, who has a family and stuff, and it doesn't match up to that archetype of a real strong guy."

But his next role did. Crash Davis, "the player to be named later" in Bull Durham, was everything Eliot Ness wasn't: cocky, verbal, full of bravado and single. Plunging into the part with his usual physical gusto, Costner clinched the role (he was paid $1.5million) after hitting a few with screenwriter/ director Ron Shelton in a batting cage.

While Costner's star had been on the rise for some time, it was Bull Durham that turned him into a leading-man legend. It was a part so seductive that the line was blurred and audiences didn’t know and didn’t care if they were watching Crash Davis or Kevin Costner. When Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) sighs after Crash's speech about "long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last for three days," every red blooded American woman sighed with her.

Costner chose to follow Bull Durham with another baseball movie, Field of Dreams - a risky move. It is not considered a suave move to do two movies in a row that use the same setting, especially a baseball field (remember Eight Men Out?). But as Bull Durham costar and friend Robert Wuhl relates, Costner wasn't fazed by such conventional wisdom. "Everybody thought he was crazy," says Wuhl "He said, 'I wouldn't care if I did 10 baseball movies if they were the 10 best scripts.' And I said, 'Sure, Kevin.' Why not? Whoever said to John Wayne, 'what? Another Western?' Kevin makes his own choices."

As Phil Alden Robinson, writer/ director of Field of Dreams, discovered, once Costner makes up his mind to do something, he will stick by it at all costs. Because it is a movie with no car chases, sex scenes or four-letter words, Robinson and Costner knew that it might be tinkered with to make the film more commercial. Robinson says that Costner took it upon himself to make sure that that wasn't the case: “He said to me, 'Look, you will undoubtedly feel a lot of pressure from time to time to make changes, whether it's from the studio or from yourself getting nervous. I'll be the guy standing behind you, whispering in your ear, 'Don't change a word.'

True to his intentions, Costner (who was now reportedly making $2.5 million per picture) was a stabilizing force on the Field of Dreams set and Robinson's script remained intact. The cast (including James Earl Jones and Amy Madigan) and crew had an exceptionally pleasant experience as well. And considering that they spent a drought-worn summer in the middle of a cornfield in Dubuque, Iowa, that's a tough assignment. The group played baseball, went fishing, played golf and held lawn parties. Like the rest of the cast members', Costner's family (wife Cindy, daughters Annie, 5, and Lily, 3, and son Joe, 1 1/2) was present for most of the shoot - as was his band, Roving Boy.

Yes, surprising as it might sound, the actor is the lead warbler and guitarist in this country-rock quartet. The band, which practiced between movie takes, performed at the cast get-togethers. Last year, Roving Boy even released an album in Japan entitled The Simple Truth, but so far there are no plans for a U.S. debut.

From Field of Dreams, the actor went on to executive-produce and star in a story about love's more destructive side, costarring Madeleine Stowe and Anthony Quinn. "Revenge is a movie that's right on the edge of 'Will people be really satisfied?' " Costner says. "Because this movie ends in tragedy - it's not an 'up' ending - maybe you won't even like me as a character." Audiences will decide for themselves when Revenge hits screens in early 1990.

As his career took off, Costner became Hollywood's darling. He was a prized possession and every studio wanted him. His face stared back from magazine covers, the White House invited him to dinner, and he was asked to present an Oscar. "There's something in my life that's slipping away from me that I'll never have again," he said of the attention. "It's like this threatening thing that's coming to envelop me. "

The Tom Berenger role in Platoon, the Dennis Quaid part in Everybody's All-American, the lead in Costa-Gavras' Betrayed all were his for the asking. The producers behind The Hunt for Red October, the much talked-about screen adaptation of Tom Clancy's spy thriller, reportedly offered Costner $5 million, double his usual fee. Still, he turned it down, and the role went to up and coming leading man Alec Baldwin.

Why would any working actor turn down such lucrative and prestigious films? In Costner's careful world of moviemaking, the answer is these films just didn't meet his criterion. "Whatever genre I enter into, I want them to try to be benchmarks," he explains. "If I do a buddy-buddy cop movie - they've all been done, but I want to do one that sets a standard for the next 10 years. I want to do a Bullitt. If I do an American fable, like It's a Wonderful Life, I want it to represent something." Field of Dreams costar James Earl Jones reveals another way in which Costner chooses his projects. "Kevin says he picks roles in movies where he'd like to play all the roles," says Jones. "He said he wanted to play my role in Field of Dreams and Amy Madigan's role, etc. I found that to be a good sign because it means that he has a healthy appreciation for other actors' jobs, not an ego attraction to the role."

Earlier this year, the actor signed with Michael Ovitz, perhaps the most powerful agent in Hollywood. Though Costner's not saying, it is now estimated that he makes upwards of $3 million per picture, plus a percentage of the gross profits. He also entered into a long-term arrangement with Orion Pictures (No Way Out and Bull Durham) that gives him the freedom to produce, star and/or direct.

For Hs first effort, he is co-producing, starring in and directing Dances with Wolves, a Western written by his friend Michael Blake and currently filming the plains of South Dakota. It can be said with some certainty that Costner, who has never directed before, is either crazy or very sure of himself. "He’s bitten off an incredible project - it's not simple," says the movie's associate producer, Jim Wilson. "It's an epic, a true epic Western about one culture finding out about another." Dances with Wolves involves a costarring cast of about a dozen American Indians, 150 extras, hundreds of horses and even a herd of buffalo.

It seems fitting that a man whose own fife so closely parallels the playing out of the American I)ream is making a movie about a subject that is steeped in Americana. Cowboys and Indians, six-shooters, fast horses - perfect for Costner. As he once said, "If I had the choice of having a woman in my arms or shooting a bad guy on a horse, I'd take the horse." Spoken like a regular guy.