And the winner of this year’s Jude Law Award is…?
At the Oscars this past year, host Chris Rock’s caustic rant about Hollywood’s overuse of Jude Law may have been a joke (though clearly not to Sean Penn who angrily rose to the defense of his All the Kings Men co-star), but it did call attention to a growing fact of show biz life: the long-held industry taboo concerning star ‘over-exposure’ has become as out-of-date as the phonograph.
It’s not that the studios are any less concerned about popular leads competing against their own selves in different films for ticket dollars, it’s just no longer a surprise to see these A-listers starring in multiple films at the same time. With Columbia and Marvel set to release their $40-million comic book-based Ghost Rider starring Nicholas Cage next summer, you can bet they’re hoping that the two other recently completed Cage vehicles, a remake of the thriller The Wicker Man and the true-life police story September, will both be keeping their distance.
But an over-abundance of Cage may be inevitable. Though scheduling and setting release dates in advance plays a major role in the shooting of movies, the finished film may be held back for a year or longer. Cage’s Lord of War, for example, wrapped in November of 2004, but it wasn’t released until this September, a bit too close for comfort to the actor’s currently under-performing The Weather Man.
The problem is: Cage makes a lot of movies. And he’s not alone. Forget about the days of yore when megastars would be mainly seen lolling beside their Beverly Hills Olympic-sized pools, or dancing and drugged-up at Studio 54. During the last few decades those celeb lead actors, with only part-time devotion to the biz, have left the soundstages, and the workaholics have taken over.
Jude Law, who was in six major releases last year, wasn’t even the industry’s most in-view performer. Ben Stiller established a record of sorts, appearing in seven features while still finding time to guest on several Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes on HBO. This year, neither Law, nor Stiller are even in the running, though Law will surely be a contender in ’06. Not only is his All the Kings Men’s release being held back until then, the actor, along with keeping tabloid readers intrigued, has at least seven current projects in various development stages, including Epstein, a bio of the legendary Beatles manager Brian Epstein, and a remake of the suspense thriller Sleuth, with Law in the old Michael Caine hairdresser role, Caine in the Laurence Olivier role and a script by recent Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter.
Caine, by the way, is one of the exemplars of the nonstop-work school of acting. Since the mid-1980s, he has appeared in an average of three features per annum. The current trio, Batman Begins, Bewitched and The Weatherman, should earn him a place on any list of 2005’s over-achieving performers, but not quite as near the top of the list as Samuel L. Jackson.
Jackson started off the year in the well-received Coach Carter, segued into In My Country, carried on histrionically in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, stumbled and fell in the unfunny buddy comedy The Man–and will be seen as a thoughtful detective in the prestigious film Freedomland, based on Richard Price’s novel of murder and race relations in New Jersey, to be released late December, just under the wire to qualify for the Academy Awards.
Joining Caine and Jackson in on-screen omnipresence is the always-in-motion Vince Vaughn, a smash as a lecherous lout in Wedding Crashers, impressive as a concerned teacher in Thumbsucker, very secondary in the Brad-Angela dominated Mr. & Mrs. Smith and surprisingly wince-worthy as a jive-talking sadistic killer in Be Cool, the unfunny sequel to Get Shorty. Quantitatively it’s an impressive display of face time, considering that much of Vaughn’s year was taken up with promoting Wedding Crashers, filming next February’s feature The Break Up–and posing for paparazzi with his co-star Jennifer Aniston.
Speaking of Aniston, she’s been a pretty busy gal, with two releases as this year ends–the noir thriller, Derailed, and next month’s Rumor Has It, based on characters from The Graduate; also she’s wrapping two roles–The Break Up and Friends With Money (no, not her fellow-famous friends from her TV series, though clearly they qualify monetarily); meanwhile, she’s found time to visit with both Oprah and Ellen, discuss some shortcomings of her over-exposed marriage, and eventually divorce her former mate.
Other usually over-active actresses seem to have slowed down this year. Probably because of those new twins, there has been no Julia Roberts release (the cameo on the Dave Matthews video hardly counts); and, though endless hours of media hype may make it seem otherwise, there has been only one film each from such usual camera huggers as Cameron Diaz (In Her Shoes), Drew Barrymore (Fever Pitch) and Kirsten Dunst (Elizabethtown). Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon and Charlize Theron are stalled at two.
On the other hand, hard-working Keira Knightley increased her rapidly lengthening movieography with a short film in the Stories of Lost Souls anthology, two edgy features–The Jacket and Domino–and in November, the period romance Pride and Prejudice. Jessica Alba appeared in three releases–Sin City, which landed early in the year, and Fantastic Four and Into the Blue; the latter two pics debuted so close one another, that the actress, while visiting the usual talk show circuit to promote Blue, wound up spending a lot of precious minutes answering Four questions instead. Meanwhile relative newbie Michelle Monaghan challenged Sam Jackson’s standing with her back-to-back appearances in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, North Country and the George Clooney thriller Syriana.
Still, none of the workaholics above can match schedules with Will Ferrell. It isn’t just his feature films this year, which include Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda, Bewitched, Wedding Crashers, Kicking and Screaming and come December, The Producers. He has relentlessly: plugged most all of them–even Kicking and Screaming—on every talk show in the land, done shtick on the Golden Globes, shared his hopes and fears with Barbara Walters–and dropped in for the Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice Awards. For proving himself to be as indefatigable as he is entertaining, let us all salute from the comfort of our cushioned theater seats: Mr. Will Ferrell-2005’s Busiest Motion Picture Performer of them all!
