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VANITY FAIR
A COOL BREEZE By Jesse Kornbluth. Photos by Helmut Newton. May 1989
Six years after he started calling himself an actor, Kevin Costner still hadn't won the speaking part that would qualify him for membership in the Screen Actors Guild. People said, "Hey, just do a commercial." He'd reply, "It's not that easy,." And nobody knew what he meant.
Hollywood found out what Kevin Costner was driving at when a casting director took a shine to him and hired him as an extra on Frances, the nightmare biography of Frances Farmer. A great many young actors were getting their first lines-and their SAG cards in this film. Costner, who'd been hired to play actor Luther Adler, seemed certain to be among them. One evening director Graeme Clifford uttered the magic words, "Kevin, come up and say good night to Frances." "No," Costner said. "Why not?" "He wouldn't do that." ”What”?" "Luther wouldn't do that. He's in this play with Frances every night. They come out the stage door, he's going one way, she's going the other. He's got no reason to say good night." At this point, there was a roar from the crew. To Costner, it sounded like "Just say the fucking words!" So, with the camera rolling, Costner stepped out the door. Jessica Lange, as Frances Farmer, turned to him. And then he moved off-in silence.
"You've got to say, something," the assistant director reminded him. On the next take, Lange did something different-she waved. Costner felt that was really good. He also felt her gesture necessitated that he say nothing. So he waved back. Value-for-value acting, he thought. This time, the crew went crazy. When the fourth take ended in yet another astounding silence, it was decided that Costner would wear a body mike. Even then, he spoke so softly that he was practically inaudible. But at four in the morning, the sound man confirmed, Costner had indeed said, "Good night, Frances. "I walked to the bus-the extras' bus-and sat there, all by myself, and I felt like a complete asshole," Costner recalls. "I felt like crying. I said, What is wrong with you'? What was so fucking hard about saying that line?"
"I knew Henry Fonda wouldn't have said anything, and Paul Newman wouldn't have. Because it didn't mean anything. It wasn't right. "
The scene was cut from the movie. Then came his big break, The Big Chill. This time, when the filming was finished, his entire character was cut. (He was the suicide whose funeral sparks the old friends' reunion-his only scene was a sixties flashback with William Hurt. Glenn Close. and the others preparing a Thanksgiving dinner wearing long hair, headbands, and bell-bottoms.)
Once again, Kevin Costner pondered the right course of action. What he decided was to say nothing. "There was a feeling after I was cut out that it would all pass me by." he explains. "But I had confidence that my career wasn't dependent on The Big Chill. And I knew what a real American hero would feel: Look, I'm not in the movie, I don't want to get mileage out of that. Two years from now, if I emerge, it will be an interesting story."
In a profession of proportionate values, this kind of self confidence might be regarded as rectitude. In Hollywood, the world capital of self-promotion, Costner's refusal to exploit his fate on the cutting room floor is a monument to restraint. In his case, silence was widely heard. Indeed, it's earned him that rarest of Hollywood accolades-to filmmakers and executives known for their discernment, he's a cool breeze.
Lawrence Kasdan, director of The Big Chill, gave birth to the Costner cult when he made up to his excised actor by writing a crowd-pleasing character for him in Silverado. Then the baton was taken by Eric Pleskow, the chief executive officer of Orion Pictures, who has helped his various employers take home a dozen Best Picture Oscars. "In Silverado, Kevin jumped off the screen," Pleskow says. "He was a refreshing new face and an exciting presence." Orion offered Costner any film on its slate. Typically, he liked none of' them. But he had read a screenplay about a young, naval officer assigned to the Pentagon. He recommended it to Orion-and the studio agreed he should star in No Way Out.
Art Linson, searching for an actor to play crime buster Eliot Ness in the Untouchables also noticed Costlier in Silverado. He arranged a meeting. "Kevin walked in wearing a leather jacket, looking like Steve McQueen," he says. "I immediately thought he was a pasionate young man who could look good with a gun.
Two vears after The Big Chill, exactly as predicted, Costner had the opportunity to tell interviewers an interesting story about The Big Chill. He left something out. though. "it wasn't his fault, but his character had to be cut-he was so unlikable that you wondered why all these people were mourning him, one survivor of a screening of the uncut version of The Big Chill says. If they'd kept him in, he would have sunk the film."
By then, though, Costner had more than a good anecdote-he had a body of work. Even better, his roles had earned him a special position among, young actors alone of his Generation, he reminded both filmmakers and audiences of Gary Cooper and Jimmv Stewart.
This spring, he follows his role as a fading minor-leaguer in Bull Durham with an unprecedented second baseball tinged movie, Field of Dreams. This summer, he delivers an image-shaking performance in the torrid, violent Revenge. The choice of these roles will confuse audiences who have come to anticipate straightforward romance and matinee-idol heroics from Costner. In Field of Dreams he plays a happily married Iowa farmer who follows the commands of an unseen voice that tells him to plow up his corn and build a baseball field; the film is curiously literary and undramatic, and will probably disappear quickly. Not so Revenge, an R-rated shocker about love's power to destroy lives. It sounds like a high-voltage vehicle tailored to deepen the sighs of Costner's female fans and increase the admiration of men. Whatever its fate, a movie like this sets its star up to cash in.
But, at thirty-four, Costner is still the outspoken perfectionist who didn't want to speak to Jessica Lange. At the height of the first peak of his celebrity, with some of the finest directors in the business offering him A-list fees to take on their best roles, he is putting himself on the shelf as an actor for hire for an entire year. On Lt. Dunbar, his next film, he will not only be the lead actor, he will also be the co-producer-and the director.
Kevin Costner has never directed before. The videos he makes of his two daughters and baby boy are, by his own testimony, awful. "What scares me the most," he says, "is when I'm watching a good film and I play leapfrog, with the director, trying to guess where he'll put the camera next, I'm never right. The problem is, wherever the camera goes in the movie I'm watching, I always like it."
"That's the reality of film. Somebody believes it has to be speeded along. Or that the audience gets restless. And I don't feel that. I think people get restless when they don't enjoy the characters or if the story doesn't hang together. And there's the argument. Can you, by going, longer, hold the storv together more?"
This passion for more-more story, more emotional punch, more of the special communion that some audiences can have with some movies didn't begin for Costner when he decided he wanted his name above the title. At the end of the filming of No Wav Out, his first film that actually seemed as if it would be properly released, there was no money left to shoot a daring rescue at sea that Costner believed was essential. Another actor might have badgered the producer. Costner personally appealed to executives of Orion Pictures. And they wrote another check.
After The Untouchables established him as an actor who could hold his own with Robert De Niro and Sean Connery, the logical move would have been to star in another $20 million film, Costner chose instead to make Bull Durham, a low-budget baseball movie, with Ron Shelton, a first-time director. The studios were less than enthused. "Ron and I showed the script around town like a couple of Santa Monica hookers," Costner recalls. "Everybody was saying, 'He's going to end up without a movie again.' I knew Orion was doing another baseball film, but I took the script to them anyway. This was on a Thursday. And I said, 'You have to make a decision by noon tomorrow.' They said, 'Give us until Monday.' I said, 'No, I've run the course. I need to get on with my life.' And, I swear to God, a minute after noon on Friday, Mike Medavoy called and said O.K." A wise decision-Bull Durham grossed $50 million, significantly more than Orion's other baseball film.
Costner could have gone on to the William Dafoe part in Mississippi Burning, Orion's biggest 1988 release. He declined, sensing, that his film relationship with Mississippi Burning star Gene Hackman-his co-star in No Way Out would be too similar to his relationship with Sean Connery in The Untouchables. And he could have had the lead in the Costa-Gavras film Betrayed. Instead. against all advice, he took on Field of Dreams, from W. P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe. The title change makes him wince. That aside, he sees the film as an irresistible throwback to the golden days of movies. "I think this could be our Generation’s It's a Wonderful Life, " he says.
It's not-by a lot. Shoeless Joe Jackson and other long dead baseball players do drift out of the cornfields to play on the farmer’s baseball field, but in a film that seems to go on for a lifetime, they never come to life. Neither does Costner's character, who, along with Burt Lancaster and James Earl Jones, makes portentous speeches when he could have been punching out his lines. Costner can't be faulted for starring in an honorable clinker; the best baseball players in history hit safely only four of every ten at-bats. Still, there's something unsettlingly headstrong about his appearance in this movie-for the first time in his career, the actor who insists he'd make five baseball films in a row if he liked the scripts has been blinded by noble themes and good intentions.
When Kevin Costner goes astray, he certainly does it wholeheartedly. What he mostly wishes for Field of Dreams is that it were longer: "I guess they felt people would get restless and say, '"Hey, Kev's not throwing a rake at anybody, he's certainly not fucking, so what do we got here, a Care Bear movie?' " But, from the beginning, a Care Bear movie is what he seemed to want. At their first meeting, he gave Field of Dreams director Phil Robinson a ringing endorsement of the leisurely, literary approach. As Robinson recalls it, "Kevin told me, 'You may feel a lot of pressure from the studio. I'll be your rock. I'll be behind you saying, Don't change it.'
Revenge is a very different story. It was a legendary project long before Costner came aboard: Newly hired Columbia chief David Puttnam had recklessly sent a message to its producer, eternally powerful Ray Stark, that he wasn't exactly eager to make this film. War was declared. In the end, Puttnam left, Stark stayed. In the middle of the battle, though, Costner thought Stark might drop the option-allowing him to buy it and, for a modest budget, direct it. Tony Scott, who directed Top Gun and Beverlv Hills Cop II, had a similar fantasy. But Stark had a firm grip, and the first meeting between the two prospective directors took place in his office.
For Costner, the key was the flier's fall from grace. "This is a guy who's liked and respected by other men," he says. "He's not a fighter jock with no background who sees a beautiful woman. " But draft after draft failed to reflect Costner's suggestions. "What I found is, as each writer comes on, part of his getting credit and money depends on his rewriting everything," Costner explains. "And so great moments were being thrown away. And the movie got pushed back. Finally, while I was shooting Field of Dreams, I called up and said, 'This is the most awful script I've ever been connected to. It's equally as good a story as I've ever been part of.' I couldn't stand that shit, so I brought my friend Michael Blake out, and in twenty-one days, working between shots and on the way home in the car, we did a new script."
The Costner-Blake revision was not used. But it had an effect. "Directors always resent when an actor wants to make changes-especially a few weeks before shooting," Tony Scott says. "But when Kevin pushed for lean and mean changes, he was right."
Costner, however, is still worrying about the film. "There's a scene that's cut out-l'm not even in it-that I miss. The wife asks Quinn for a baby and he gives her the Anthony Quinn deaf ear. The crudeness of that scene, that macho Latin hold on the woman-I care about that. A lot of people said it was vulgar. And I'd say, 'Why do you keep making my point'?' And the end-- look, this is one of the first movies about violence, how swift and mean and ugly it is, and how it spills over and affects a lot of other people. And in the end of that movie, the woman should die. Well, they shot it two ways. That's a fucking tragedy-the movie's a tragedy, and it's a tragedy that we shot it two ways. The film may still work, but those decisions screw around with the andience's confidence. I mean, the only way to know if you've seen a movie is if all the elements are there."
He catches himself, scratches his stubble, and laughs. "Listen to me-I sound like a big crab apple. I'm not. But those things are worth fighting for, they're not worth stopping the movie. I mean, it's not like 'Fuck you. I'm so far into this movie, everybody can walk. We'll see who wins.' I know the only power I have is the power of a good argument. I try to use that. The unfortunate thing is that a good argument is sometimes lost on who's got the guns."
Nothing in his past suggests that Kevin Costner was going to be a man who'd be wrestling with the big guns over movies, or even that he'd be an actor. When he was a child, his acting experience was limited to the school play and a few Christian musicals. And at a pivotal point in his adolescence, he hit a jarring series of disruptions-his father, an employee of the electric company, was promoted annually when Kevin was in high school, so he went to four schools in four years. In that time, he had perhaps three dates, two of them dances for which the girls did the asking.
Costner had no great academic ambitions-his childhood fantasy was to play professional baseball-and when he went to Cal State-Fullerton, he settled into a marketing major "because I was a pattern person, glad to fit in, happy to be somewhere that felt permanent. " So when he met Cindy Silva, a young woman "with an interesting aura," at a college party, he didn't think she noticed him. That night, he went on to try to pick up another coed. "It took me a month," he says, "just to figure out that Cindy might want to be around me." Once he got that straight, all other women disappeared.
They married after graduation. Then Cindy started at Delta Air Lines-"She could have gone as high there as any woman is allowed"-while he took a job in marketing. Thirty days later, he quit and gave himself totally to acting. "I felt the true joy of discovering what I wanted to do with my life," he says. "It may have put a huge weight on everybody else, but it was a huge weight off me." To support himself while he studied, he stage-managed and framed houses. "I'm a blue-collar worker, a laborer," he says, confirming the view of his film crews, who don't find him at all condescending when he asks to join in their impromptu football games.
Because he took acting work where he could get it, his debut was in an exploitation movie called Sizzle Beach. "It was shot on weekends, with my acting teacher as the director," he recalls. "My scenes were with his wife-so I had zero conception of what was really going on. But that experience helped me. I suddenly knew what kind of an actor I really wanted to be. And acting became holy to me. For the next six years, until I was twentyeight, I never went out with an eight-by-ten or tried to get an agent. So when I got The Big Chill, there was this sense of 'Here are nine great actors and one unknown-maybe we should meet him.' People wanted to cast me in something big, but the best script I read was Testament, about a nuclear holocaust. Everyone said, 'No, no.' I said, 'You don't get it.' And from then on, I took control."
Costner fudges a bit here. In those six years in the wilderness, he may not have sought work as an actor, but a glossy of his strong-featured face did reach a modeling agency-and he did appear in a Gianfranco Feffe tuxedo ad. What's more enduringly important, though, is an acting group he founded during this period with Jimmy Wilson, who's now his co-producer on Lt. Dunbar, and Michael Blake, who wrote the script at his suggestion. "I'm very dependent on my friends," he says. "And I'm very protective of them. You can't change my mind on people and projects I think are good. Things don't fall out of fashion for me. That could be interpreted as independence-I call it loyalty."
Perhaps. But most Hollywood pulse stirrers don't live in Pasadena, work hard at their marriages, or tell you that their greatest ambition is to stay alive until their youngest child (Joe, now aged one) is eighteen years old. Costner knows he's different. He also knows why women find him so desirable.
"If that's the truth, it goes back to the movies I've been in and the confidence people have in them," he says. "It's not just about my character, it's everybody in the story. I mean, in Bull Durham, Susan Sarandon is a real woman. That helps me."
What also helps is the way Costner has maintained an impeccable silence about his private life. "I'm in this place where people not only like my movies, they've got this idea that I'm not too pretentious, not too big a prick," he says. "And what goes along with that is the notion that I've got my marriage together, I've got these kids, I've got this perfect life. But I'm very leery of holding myself up to be America's couple. I won't accept it, I won't have it, I won't perpetuate it. I mean, I just don't want the weight of that."
Standards like this can cost. Last year, Costner was invited to present an Academy Award with Sean Young, the woman he beds in the steamy limousine scene in No Way Out. Young has acquired a reputation as an actress with a more than professional interest in her leading men. Costner denies reports that he had to backpedal-"We didn't have a problem," he insists-but is blunt as a bullet about the Academy's willingness to exploit the situation. "The people at the Oscars said, 'We're doing couples this year,' " Costner recalls. "I said, 'Guess what? I'm not a couple. My decisions are about me, not about who's across the table. So let me know what the award is.' And they didn't let me know, and when they finally came back, they were taking a hard line with me to get me to make a speech that Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey ultimately made -about almost fucking on the podium: And I said, 'Guess what? I've got a TV, I can watch it, you know what I mean?' So I probably won't be going back to the Academy Awards."
Standards like this can also be handsomely rewarded. When Larry Gordon finished Field of Dreams and moved on to a more commonplace action movie, the studio suggested Costner as the lead. "You'll have to buy him," Gordon said, "because this isn't his kind of film." The executives understood-and authorized Gordon to offer Costner more than double his usual fee. (in my estimation, this means $5 million.) "I called Kevin and said, 'You can forget worrying about money for a long time,' " Larry Gordon tells me. "Kevin turned me down flat."
In his office at the out-of-the-way film studio where he was once a stage manager, Costner explains why. "I want my movies to stand for something. See, actors have been role models for me. They've taught me how to live. It's not that Henry Fonda was good as the men he played, but in his great movies, his characters dealt with dilemas. The Jimmy Stewarts and Burt Lancasters-they do mean something in the scheme of things. So I believe in my business. I believe in the romanticism. I believe movies have made me a better person. You watch Jim Thorpe, All-Americn-I'll tell you what that shit's about. "
And that, he says, is why he feels he has to try directing: "I want the story of my movies to be whatever the story is. I'm not sure when I start a film what its length should be. Not every one of us has the ability to hit the magic two-hour number so the film can play in the fucking mail four times a day. I happen to want to be generous with the moments of my films. I don't feel the need to pull the trigger so quickly."
Investors, take note-Kevin Costner wants a few things from you. And all of them are about keeping out of his face. "I don't want to be limited, going in, by a predetermined length," he explains. "I say to investors, 'I'm not sure I can be so clever for you that I know what you don't want to see two years before you don't want to see it.' Now, it's possible I'll make a film and eight companies will want it-but not at two hours and forty minutes. At that point, I'll let the marketplace dictate. But I don't want my partners to make that decision for me."
For that matter, he won't allow his partners to cover their downside by pre-selling the foreign and video rights. "I can do that myself," he pointedly notes. "You see, there are lots of people who say they'll gamble, because that's easy conversation. It's like at Christmas, over cocktails, when people stand around and tell you the kinds of films they want to make-when it comes time to move, maybe that's not what they want to do. I don't want to be cavalier with other people's money, but I don't want people to be cavalier with me, either. Because if it's just another deal to them, they walk on to the next deal. If it falls apart for me, I don't have a film. It's not just a deal to me-I invest my soul in my work."
And soul, for Costner, is not something to be trotted out only when the camera is close up on him. "In rehearsal for Field of Dreams, Kevin would say, 'I need my props'-and Props would pick up and have them ready the next time," director Phil Robinson recalls. "If carpenters would hammer, he'd say, 'I need it to be as quiet in rehearsal as it is when we shoot,' and everyone suddenly got very sharp. Then, in his performance, he'd lift the level in other ways. There's a moment when his daughter says, 'Daddy, there's a man in the field.' He's just snapped at her. But on the way to the window, he stops and pats her shoulder. That's not the script. That's not me. That's Kevin, making it clear, in a little touch, that it's important to be a good father."
This appreciation for the fundamentals is not something Costner feels comfortable talking about. It was quite obvious, though, on the afternoon we spent together. In that time, he took only two phone calls. One was from Michael Ovitz, head of Creative Artists, an agency which does not represent Costner. This call was an invitation to a Laker game, a show-biz perk roughly equivalent, in the new Hollywood, to a dinner invite to the White House. The other was from Costner's older brother, setting up a weekend visit. Cindy was taking one daughter to a birthday party, Costner said, leaving him to baby-sit the other two children. Best, he told his brother, to come right after lunch-"so you can see the kids before I put them down for their naps."
There are millions of other fathers who have love and pride in their voices when they talk about their children. It's hard to name another actor, though, whose offspring produce as much enthusiasm as a call from Michael Ovitz.
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