The era of Hollywood's big studio system may have long ended, but the star-making model has not changed dramatically. Behind every rising star, there's a team — usually an agent, one or two managers, a lawyer, and a publicity officer — who work as hard as they can to make the client the next Johnny Depp, Tom Cruise, or Will Smith.
As one of the most promising young male stars in the film industry, Channing Tatum is no exception. Tatum, 31, was a striptease man who became famous a few years ago, but in 2012, with the help of his team behind the scenes, he took a heroic step, not only was selected by People magazine as the sexiest man of the year, but also by The New York Times Magazine as the most memorable actor, and in the top ten hottest movies of 2012 announced by Facebook, he starred in three of the top ten hottest movies of 2012 (namely "Magic Mike" ranked third, "Oath" ranked fourth, and "Dragon Tiger Junior Team" ranked sixth). Among them, the comedy "Dragon Tiger Junior" is a careful choice made by Tatum and his two joint artist agencies (Johnny Depp is also an artist of the company): his original fans are young women flocking to romantic romance films like "The Oath", and the film aims to expand his male fan base.
Tatum did not go to acting school, nor did he come from a literary family, and the greatest wealth left to him by his parents was a handsome face and a strong fitness board. His first impressive role was in the 2006 independent film The Saint's Guide, a street thug who only believed in his fists. The New York Times compared his temperament to that of marlon Brando in his youth, while Tito Montiel, director of The Saint's Guide, described him as a "real guy": "Many actors live in bubbles; but Tatum is real." He's been beaten in real life, and he's beaten up others. These can change an actor's attributes. ”
Breaking through the "Pretty Boy Problem"
Hollywood's star production is undergoing a major change – the success rate is falling rapidly. Over the past decade, the industry has failed to create a heavyweight new face, the kind of actor who can keep securing blockbusters at the box office for long periods of time. Today's list of Hollywood's top male stars includes Denzel Washington, Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and Adam Sandler, all of whom have proven themselves in fifteen years or more.
Daniel Craig is perhaps the closest male star. The role of James Bond made him a superstar six years ago, but almost all of his films outside of 007 failed at the box office (Cowboy vs Aliens, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Over the past decade, Orlando Bloom, Eric Barner, Edward Norton, Jack Gyllenhaal, Josh Harnett, Ryan Philip, Stephen Dolph, Garnett Hedland, Toby Maguire, all of whom have sprinted to the top of the pyramid, have all failed.
Ryan Reynolds went downhill after making Green Lantern; Zach Efron is still trying to make a comeback from 2010's "Charlie's Life and Death." Other male stars, including "Twilight Werewolf" Taylor Lotner and "Transformers Boy" Shea LaBeouf, are all unaffordable Ah Dou – losing their appeal once they leave the series that has become popular. As for "Batman" Christian Bell, he is more like the "golden supporting character" Claude Raines than the "popular lover" Clark Gable.
Is it possible for Chanin Tatum to rush to the top? The Alabama-born "blue-collar" handsome guy sprinted hard in 2012 and blossomed on multiple lines. In January, he starred in Steven Soderbergh's "Winning a Blow", which had a poor reputation from the audience and was quite praised by film critics. In February, he played a husband in the romance film "The Oath" who tried to bring his wife back into his arms again, which grossed about $142 million worldwide. In March, he starred with comedy star Jonah Hill as a secret cop who blended into a high school campus with comedian Jonah Hill in Dragon Tiger Junior (the 1980 TV series of the same name was Johnny Depp's famous film, in which he also made a cameo appearance). In June, "Magic Mike", based on the experience of Tatum's stripper, was even more topical. The film was produced by Tatum, helped raise funds, and was directed by Soderbergh.
For Tatum's team, the restrictive comedy "Dragon Tiger Junior Team" has an innate theme advantage, and it is expected that the box office may be a big hit (and this is the case); "Magic Mike" is more risky, but Tatum has won many female fans through "Dance Out of My Life" and "Breakup Letter", wearing thongs and dancing, which should be very attractive to them. Next year, Tatum also has a sequel movie, "Special Forces 2: Revenge", which should also continue to perform miracles considering that the first "Special Forces: Rise of Cobra" grossed $300 million in 2009.
However, Tatum is well aware that the most important thing in Hollywood is young and handsome men with good figures, and most of them can't complete the leap from sexy boys to superstars. "Of course I've thought about it, but all I can do is shoot hard and make wise choices on the advice of senior people." "The challenge is that the industry has changed now," Tatum said. There was a time when you could star in a lot of interesting movies as an actor. ”
When you ask industry veterans why it's so hard for Hollywood to create a supermassive superstar today, the answer usually has to do with the circumstances of the movie itself. People like Matt Dimon, Russell Crowe, and Tom Hanks have all built their fan bases through mid-size plays or comedies that have now been almost abandoned by Hollywood. Hollywood now prefers to make films that focus on special effects, because the overseas box office eats this set more. Even the best actors are caught up in this craze, and it's hard to play this kind of film because it's just a green screen that interacts with them.
Jenny Basinger, chairwoman of the Film Studies Division at Wesleyan University, described it as the "pretty boy problem." In the golden age of the big studio system, the male protagonists were very distinctive, such as Clark Gable, Gary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, and Jimmy Stewart. The previous generation of superstars also included the more eccentric genres like Johnny Depp and Robert Downey Jr.
"What we're seeing now is a bunch of similar-looking young men," Bassinger said, "and the audience has come to terms with that, and they don't need to pay attention to one of them." If you don't catch this bus, there will be a next bus. Production companies should focus more on the performance than on the abs. ”
Some studios felt that Tatum only had a good appearance, and they bet on more gloomy actors like Taylor Ketch, who debuted on "Midnight Light on the Weekend" and starred in last year's "Alien Battlefield" and "Super Battleship" super blockbusters. The studios have also recently embraced Jeremy Renner, starring in "The Avengers" and succeeding Matt Dimon in "Spy 4." Many executives' views on Tatum remain stuck in a January 2010 quote from Details magazine: "The judges still have questions about how good Chanin Tatum is as an actor, how good he can be in the future, and even whether he can meet the requirements of a green screen film like "Special Forces." ”
Can hold a gun, kiss girls, tell jokes
There are also those who insist that Tatum is different from other male stars. "He has the charm of an old-fashioned movie star," said Amy Paso, vice chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Tatum's "The Oath" and "Dragon Tiger Juniors" were both produced by Sony, "but it's more than that." He's proven through several films that he can hold a gun, kiss girls, and tell jokes. Most male actors are lucky to be able to do one of these things. ”
Soderbergh said: "I certainly wouldn't classify him as the kind of young actor who got the role just because he was good-looking. Although he also said that Tatum's performance in the 2006 independent film The Saint's Guide did not particularly impress him, "every of his choices are well thought out, but he does not take himself too seriously, which is refreshing." ”
Industry supporters of Tatum say he is attractive to women, but that attraction doesn't feel inaccessible. At the same time, his pragmatic attitude, mixed with a hint of immaturity, helps male audiences see them as brothers rather than lovers. "When I first met Channing, we went out for a beer together and got drunk, and he got drunk and climbed up the billboard," said Red Caroline, the screenwriter of Magic Mike and Tatum's business partner. ’”
Privately, Tatum is surprisingly humble and honest, qualities that are almost hard to find in Hollywood. He was very self-aware, but not unguarded. "I know I'm not the best actor, but I love the profession and I'm improving with every film." He said. He can admit that he did not play well on the comedy show "Saturday Night Live" or hide the fact that he was turned away by Alien Battlefield.
Tatum was also defenseless against the media, having shared a photo of his burns with a detail magazine reporter. Here's the thing: When he was shooting the film Lost: The Ninth Eagle (2011) in Scotland, there was a scene in which he was asked to cross the river in ice water — despite wearing a high-tech wet suit, it could only withstand a few minutes of cold. "The only way to stay warm is to pour warm water on your body first." Tatum recalled, "When I finally finished filming the scene, a staff member asked me if I wanted to warm up before I left. I thought at first, forget it, and then I thought, why not? As a result, he forgot to add cold water to the boiling water, so I was poured a bottle of boiling water. I struggled to take off my hot clothes, but the more the boiling water went down, the more it almost burned the skin of my lower body. ”
Tatum was immediately taken to the nearest hospital — another hour's drive away. He was lying in the back of the car with an ice pack on his body, driven by a former Special Marine.
Tatum said to him, "You have to knock me unconscious, because I don't know if I can stand it any longer." Grab something nearby and knock me on the head. In an interview with Details magazine, Tatum proudly showed reporters photos of his burns at the time. The reporter himself was shocked, not because of the content of the photo, but because of the young male star's directness. "Tatum is so unguarded that I'm a little uneasy." The reporter wrote.
"There's not a hint of vanity in Channing," said Amanda Seyfried, the actress who worked with Tatum in the romantic romance "Parting Letter.", "That's what impressed me first."
When I saw this kind of handsome boy, my first reaction was that he must be a little vain. But he wasn't at all. He doesn't mind embarrassment, he's not afraid of going out of the way. One of the reasons he became a good actor was that he was fearless. “
Stripper man "rises to fame"
Born in Alabama, Tatum had a learning disability from an early age, and doctors gave him Ritalin and nerve stimulators. He enrolled at Glenwell State College in West Virginia on a football scholarship, dropped out of school a year later, returned to Florida to start working, building a house, working as a perfume promoter in a department store, handling loan applications, and dancing striptease.
Talking about the experience of the stripper now, Tatum's attitude is vague. At the age of 18, he spent 9 months as a stripper in a nightclub in Tampa, Florida. After becoming famous, Tatum communicated with his agent many times, believing that he should take the initiative to make the experience public, "people will know sooner or later." Sure enough, in 2009, a very vague video of him dancing went viral on the Internet. But unexpectedly, the video not only did not damage Tatum's career, but made him "famous". Some famous directors, such as Steven Soderbergh, suggested that he make the experience into a movie. As a result, there was the 2012 North American hit "Magic Mike", which cost only $6 million and grossed as much as $158 million.
After quitting from a strip club, Tatum was spotted by a model scout and became a model for Abercrombie Fitch, America's number one casual brand. Later, Tatum danced as an accompanist on Ricky Martin's She Bangs music tape in 2000. He became famous for a $12 million dance film, Dance Out of My Life, which grossed $114 million and spawned three sequels.
"I remember telling him how to do career planning in Hollywood," said Anne Fletcher, the director of Dance Out of My Life, "and I said to him, 'Let your train move, and as long as other people put emotions into you, they'll follow you wherever you go.'" Since then, Tatum's train has never stopped.
"Breaks create problems because today's audiences have Attention Deficit Disorder (the main symptom of which is frequent, unconscious wandering)," he says, "and they're going to forget about you very quickly and they're going to get tired of you doing something over and over again." You have to be there all the time and grab their attention. ”
So, in the past five years, Tatum has made a total of 16 films. His physical advantage allowed him to often appear as a soldier, the male protagonist of romantic romance films, such as "Refusing to Fight Again", about young veterans of the Iraq War, and the Roman costume film "Lost: The Ninth Eagle Regiment", and the latter category had "Parting Letter" and "Oath". In movies, he often shows his bare arms and shows off his muscles, and he doesn't mind starring in these kinds of films: "I make these kinds of movies to learn. I want to learn from the heroine Rachel McAdams through The Oath, and I want to learn from director Lysé Holstrom through The Breakup Letter, who has directed The Cider House Law and Different Skies. I didn't go to acting school, so my understanding of the story, the filming, and the characters came from the set and learned it now. ”
Many male actors complain about the promotional activities that the company has arranged for them, but Tatum believes that today's entertainment industry requires constant interviews and innovative interactions with fans on social networks. For example, he is the co-owner of a website that provides a platform for people from all over the world to watch movies together while chatting while celebrities host such web screenings and answer fans' questions through webcam during or after a movie screening.
Tatum said he is now in a "period of suffering" and will maintain such high film rates in the years to come. After a few years, he would slow down his filming and concentrate on grinding a few serious roles. "You know, you can't be afraid to make decisions about our business," Tatum said, "and once you're afraid, you're out." ”