MICHAEL DOUGLAS
CINERAMA
ACTOR SHINES BRIGHTEST AS HUMANITY COMPROMISED
SFF(B) 2023 NOMINEE MICHAEL DOUGLAS (CINERAMA)
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
M
ichael Douglas had a long haul from an early life riding Walt Disney’s backyard train to doing odd jobs on movie sets during visits with his famous actor father, but when Michael hit the mark in front of the director’s camera, he always shown.
Douglas could always play straight character acting with that Hollywood look and that ability to move through dialogue as easily as walking through sets and flashing that bright smile with twinkles of stardust in his eyes.
The character actor eventually found a suitable filmography that ranged from brutal reality pictures of a nuclear power plant melt down in Kansas to the fantastical search for buried treasure in Columbia, and everything else in between.
Douglas initially found success in feature films as a producer of a film project his father, Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas, could not move as much as he could not move the elephant out of the room.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1977), directed by Milos Forman, was a commercially and critically acclaimed masterpiece about the systemic inequalities embedded in society’s institutions. The film earned Douglas his first Oscar, winning the Best Picture Oscar as a producer, with the film winning four more Oscars, including Best Acting Oscars for Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Cuckoo’s Nest is considered one of the greatest American films ever produced, being given a spot at number 20 on the American Film Institute’s 100 years…100 (greatest) movies list issued in 1998 and then 33 on the list released in 2007.
At the time, Douglas had a starring role with Karl Malden in the popular television series, Streets of San Francisco (1972-1977). The policer followed two Bay Area street detectives working the crime wave ripping through major American cities.
Malden was a well established Hollywood A Lister appearing in supporting roles to such acting icons as Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront (1954) as a priest, and Steve McQueen in The Cincinnati Kid (1965) as a card dealer for private games, and George C. Scott in Patton (1970) as a United States army general.
The police show was compelled as much by the music score as the acting and crime stories, as well as guest appearance by popular actors such as Robert Wagner, and the wild street chases with Douglas and Malden in the biggest gold and bronze American police ghost cars the world has likely ever seen, or ever will see again.
The weekly television show also features big 70’s hair that now seems as out of place as the big American cars over the rolling streets of San Francisco.
The popularity of Douglas’s character acting just got bigger and bigger, culminating in several blockbusters, with substantial film roles every second year at first and then every year, as his bankability as an actor and producer became assured.
Douglas though does not just work success at the box office. Instead, the talented actor with that genuine smile and honest enthusiasm for the script, picked roles more often than not dealing with pressing social issues, such as the safety of nuclear power, the dark justice of star chambers, the adrenaline charged moments of a sex addiction, Wall Street greed, and drug trafficking.
In Coma (1978) costarring Genevieve Bujold, the leading characters run a secondary narrative about the gender wars looming within intimate relationships as part of the women’s liberation movement.
The Oscars were eventually kind to Douglas again, awarding him his first acting Oscar for a role that was out of his character zone, playing that greedy, ruthless brokerage house chief executive in Wall Street (1987).
This intimate portrait on a particular brand of capitalism was part of director Oliver Stone’s Americana film series that included films about the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War and Watergate.
The film costarred Charlie Sheen and Daryl Hannah as Douglas dons the metaphysical mask of hubris to play the ultimately unethical American Wall Street high roller making millions off of illegal insider information.
Douglas reprises the role in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) depicting a bad man character who just will not change his moral fiber even after spending several years in prison for his part in the first film.
That same year as Wall Street was released in theaters, Douglas plays a copyright lawyer with that perfect American family composed of a beautiful wife and happy daughter, a house and garage for the cars.
Fatal Attraction (1987) costars Anne Archer and Glenn Close.
The opera score in the background foreshadows the upheaval about to occur in the serene suburban home life as the otherwise loyal conservative authoritarian figure has a major slip by having an affair with a work colleague.
Douglas is clearly peaking as an actor. And he could have easily won a second acting Oscar that same year as his Wall Street Oscar for the role in which he performs a range of emotions of a morally compromised individual fallen to the national addiction to sex in general and extra marital sex in particular.
The film also has some self-reflective moments in store for Douglas as he has a butterfly moment and eventually moves on from roles of morally inferior people back to that genuine good guy that walks around with a bit of flawed humanity stuck to his side, like a rose thorn pressing into his ribs.
In Traffic (2000) the moral compass is sent sideways when Douglas plays a conservative judge appointed for his views on drug trafficking. Robert has to deal with the discovery that his daughter is doping up at parties with her rich high school friends, in the bathroom at home and comatose in her drug dealer’s apartment, while being put into the public spotlight as one of America’s leading minds in the war against drugs.
Costar Catherine Zeta-Jones plays a character in conflict with her real life husband’s character.
Douglas and Zeta-Jones were married in 2000 after meeting in 1998. The happy couple have two children together. But the actors find themselves on opposite sides of the film script in Traffic.
Traffic also costars Benicio Del Toro as a Mexican drug enforcement officer who earns his position of importance.
Douglas has a streak of honor and loyalty that would make anyone envious. After meeting Danny DeVito at the Eugene O’Neill Foundation Theatre during the summer of 1966, the pair of acting students shared a dormitory and would again become roommates in New York City while gaining acting skills and auditioning for parts on Broadway, long before their respective acting careers began in earnest.
Douglas eventually cast DeVito in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and then costarred with him in three of Douglas’ most commercially successful films.
DeVito went on to become a successful actor in his own right. After the supporting role in Cuckoo’s Nest, next to Jack Nicholson, DeVito landed a popular role as a taxi dispatcher in the television comedy, Taxi (1978-1983).
The comedic actor would costar with Nicholson three more times as part of a successful filmography. And as an aside, Nicholson played the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) while DeVito played the Penguin in Batman Returns (1992) costarring Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman.
Nicholson was already a well respected accomplished actor when winning the Best Actor Oscar for his performance as R. P. McMurphy in Cuckoo’s Nest, but he went on to become an even bigger star as one of Hollywood’s greatest and most popular leading actors.
In Romancing the Stone (1984) costarring Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito, Douglas has an intertextual moment to the Streets of San Francisco when the tiny South American made car bumps and lunges over the hills through the Columbian bush, like a kind of parody to the big cop car getting airborne to the music score over the rolling streets in the Streets of San Francisco.
Douglas often shows a comedic side, starting in the opposite direction of the dark character put together three years later in Wall Street. Jack Colton is a free spirit plying his trade in lawless Columbia when an American romance novelist, Joan Wilder, ends up stranded in the Columbian jungle.
Jack initially only intends to help Wilder to a phonebooth so she can make a rescue call, but when he finds out there is treasure involved, the American profiteer and opportunist comes to the surface a bit. Turner plays Wilder as a city dweller overwhelmed by the violence and untamed natural environment of South America.
The costars play the many comedic lines dead pan with DeVito adding an extra dynamic as the meddling troublemaker, Ralph. The three actors costar again in the sequel, Jewel of the Nile (1985).
Turner, DeVito and Douglas team up a third time for The War of the Roses (1989). The film narrative follows a divorcing couple trying everything short of murder to get the other person to leave the house.
Douglas also adds a personal element to the scripts with several self-referential and intertextual moments evident throughout his filmography, such as his love for cars making street chases more interesting and the love bite all the more enthralling when his vehicle gets vandalized.
As a college student, Douglas lived on a commune in the hay day of the hippie era. And this cultural experience is reflected in many of the film characters being free spirits in public and in private, which are also public because they are shown on the film screen.
Jack gets all excited about finding a cargo hold full of dope and the pilot’s whiskey cash in a jungle plane wreck in Romancing the Stone, while the sex addiction requires a bit of vitriol in Fatal Attraction.
This fabled character actor began early on when the young son, Michael, accompanied his father, Kirk, to the house of Walt Disney where he was filmed riding on Disney’s backyard train set featured on Sunday’s Walt Disney Show. Disney was one of the most iconic film producers in the world at the time.
Then jobs as a set gofer on his father’s monster sword and sandal blockbuster, Spartacus (1960), costarring Laurence Olivier, eventually led to a small part in the hero epic, Cast a Giant Shadow (1966), about Israeli General Mickey Marcus.
As much as Douglas made his own way and proved his credentials for acting and producing with his own film projects, the talented actor and filmmaker seems to have been anchored to his family-made Hollywood lore of which heroes are made.
The hero theme becomes endemic with Douglas working the room within the genre by playing roles as cop hero in Black Rain (1989) to the anti-hero in Romancing the Stone to the compromised hero in Traffic to the vigilante hero in Falling Down (1998) and the villain in Wall Street.
This tactile acceptance by Michael of his public image shows up in those self-referential and intertextual moments, as if the son of a legend decided to just take his father along with him for the ride as he added to the family’s film lore.
But in the end, through the process of self-discovery, sometime making more mistakes in his personal life than his acting characters did on film, Michael has become more of an American icon than a Hollywood legend.
Michael Douglas, by Marc Eliot, New York, Rebel Road, Inc, 2012.
Michael Douglas, Out of the Shadows, by Andy Dougan, London, Robson Books, 2001.