It’s tough being a movie star these days.
Unless you’re in one of those franchises — “Spider-Man 12,” for instance — work in Hollywood is spotty.
And if this summer is any indication, things may soon get worse: The supposed blockbusters — “The Lone Ranger,” “Pacific Rim,” “After Earth” — are all duds.
But Tinseltown’s travails are a boon for Broadway, because they mean more A-list stars and directors are going legit.
I hear that Steven Soderbergh is so fed up with the movie business, he’s focusing on theatrical projects, including “Magic Mike,” “Behind the Candelabra” and “The Library,” a new play about the Columbine massacre that he’s directing later this year at the Public Theater.
I also hear that Tom Cruise’s “people,” as they call ’em in the movie business, are on the hunt for a play for the aging action hero to star in on Broadway.
He’s been inspired by the success Tom Hanks enjoyed in “Lucky Guy.” Though he didn’t take home a Tony, Hanks had a great time doing the play and pocketed about $2 million for a few months’ work. And if he were so inclined, he could keep filling his coffers: Russian and Japanese producers are offering him ridiculous amounts of money to do the play in their countries for just a week or two.
A new business model on Broadway: A star launches a play in New York for 14 weeks, scoops up a couple of million, takes a little hiatus and then picks up millions more doing the show in Moscow.
“The Russians will pay anything for a star,” says an industry source. “These are going to be some serious paydays.”
Agents and producers should study the Hugh Jackman model. After Jackman became a sensation in “The Boy From Oz,” he took a chopped-down version of the show to Australia and performed it in arenas and stadiums.
An Australian producer tells me, “We made obscene amounts of money.”
Colin Callender, the very smart producer of “Lucky Guy,” is, I’m told, trying to develop a series of star-driven vehicles. Among the A-listers he’s talking to about doing a play is Jim Carrey.
What Callender should do is line up three plays with three big stars and then book a prime Broadway playhouse — The Schoenfeld or the Jacobs, say — for an entire season and put on the productions there, one right after the other. A sort of movie star repertory company.
(That’ll be $250, thank you very much!)
I bet the Russians would offer him tens of millions of rubles to then ship the Superstar Repertory Playhouse to Moscow for a month.
(If there’s a dud in the batch, send it to Siberia.)
The star-in-a-play model has been pioneered, in an informal way, by Scott Rudin. The producer has enjoyed tremendous success with Denzel Washington in “Fences” and Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Death of a Salesman.” This fall he’s got Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz in “Betrayal,” and in the spring he’s got Washington in “A Raisin in the Sun,” with Diahann Carroll and Anika Noni Rose.
Rudin hasn’t toured any of these star-driven vehicles, but I had dinner the other night with a producer who runs a major theater in the Midwest who said her board of directors would strike any deal to have Washington do “A Raisin in the Sun” there for even a couple of weeks.
“I guarantee you, we would sell out every single performance and we could charge Broadway prices,” she said.
Since her theater seats more than 3,000, that’s a lot of money to be made in a very short period of time.
So forget Hollywood and Vine.
The new crossroads of the entertainment business are Broadway and Seventh.