No matter what, there’s always a new day. No matter who you are or what you’ve done, you can always start anew. Whether that’s tomorrow, next week or next year, there’s always a nearby place to start a spiritual rebirth. This decade I’m going to get my ass in gear and finally start applying myself.
One thing that I began to question as I compiled my own decade end set of lists was who in Hollywood had gained and lost the most ground over the course of the last ten years. Naturally, this idea came into my head as I was talking to a member of our editorial staff about Nicolas Cage. “Geez,” I mused, “Has anyone lost more ground than Cage over the course of the last ten years?”
At the end of 1999, Cage was riding an interesting high. He’d won an Oscar in 1996 for his outstanding work in Leaving Las Vegas and immediately followed that by appearing in several very successful action films including The Rock, Con Air and Face/Off. He used his stature as an Academy Award winning actor to grab the lead roles in directors Brian DePalma and Martin Scorsese’s films Snake Eyes and Bringing out the Dead respectively. Cage had positioned himself very nicely for a long run at the top.
That isn’t to say that there weren’t warning signs of things to come, however. Cage starred in the utterly forgettable City of Angels and 8MM, a movie so bad I’m still making jokes about it today.
**NEUMER BITES HIS FIST IN DISGUST AND TURNS AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER WITH A SHARP TWIST OF HIS HEAD**
As soon as the new decade started, Cage unleashed a ten-year run of critical failures that I will pit against any other run in Hollywood history. The films were occasionally successful—see National Treasure, National Treasure 2 and, uh, well, uh, yeah…—and on even rarer occasions, they were critically acclaimed—see Adaptation. Other than that, they were atrociously made, atrociously received and atrociously attended works of cinema that turned Cage from one of Hollywood’s top actors into a something of a running joke.
No one really thinks of picking projects as a talent, but as Cage’s first ten years of the new millennium will show, there truly is an art to it. Otherwise you end up with lead roles in Gone in Sixty Seconds, The Family Man, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Windtalkers, Matchstick Men, Lord of War, The Weather Man, World Trade Center, The Wicker Man, Ghost Rider, Next, Bangkok Dangerous, Knowing and The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call. I’m not cherry picking here either, in addition to the aforementioned three films, that’s ALL of Nic Cage’s projects in the 2000s.
Throw in a dreadful directorial debut in Sonny and a late breaking financial scandal where it became public knowledge that Cage was going Wesley Snipes on us and not only squandered tens of millions of dollars, but also owned the IRS a boatload of cash and you’re looking at a man who had one hell of a bad decade.
It’s tempting to call Cage the decade’s biggest loser in reputation, but after some thought, I realized that there were still several other Hollywood figures that I’d argue had much worse decades than he. Let’s start listing.
#5) Jeremy Piven 
Given the depths to which Eddie Murphy sunk this decade, I feel somewhat guilty and bad that I can’t work him into the top five, but I think I can safely argue that Jeremy Piven’s reputation has suffered more than Murphy’s this decade, which will push Murphy out of the top five. On the surface, this may seem unusual because Piven created one of the most unique, funny and memorable television characters of the decade as Ari Gold on Entourage and Murphy was the face of The Adventures of Pluto Nash, Meet Dave and Imagine That. And while Piven has co-starred in a couple of movies and taken the lead in a handful, he hasn’t done anything professionally that would suggest that he enter the top five here.
The emphasis is, of course, on the word ‘professionally’. Personally, Piven is as abhorred an actor as I can think of. He had a minimum of two publicists drop him as a client because they can’t stand him. He rubs everyone who comes in contact with him the wrong way, including wonderful, classy, Oscar winning actors like Martin Landau.* And there are so many Jeremy-Piven-is-a-selfish-egotistical-prick stories floating around that they are starting to rival Nick Nolte stories in my book. The most famous of these (and one of the few to make it into print) was one where Piven left a DVD of the first season of Entourage as a tip on an estimated thousand-dollar tab at Nobu. What makes the story so entertaining is that the waiter was so pissed off at Piven for this gesture that the NY Daily News reports that the waiter “ran up the stairs and hurled it at [Piven] as he was leaving.”
I’m not saying that the consensus is that Jeremy Piven is the biggest asshole in Hollywood… I’m saying that the consensus is that he’s the biggest asshole in Hollywood by a very, very large margin. How big? My opinion of John Cusack is sinking rapidly because he is friends with Piven. * When I was interviewing Landau in 2009, I made some joke about Piven being hard to deal with and Landau replied, without batting an eye, “I have a policy: if I can’t say anything nice about someone, I don’t say anything at all. And I have absolutely nothing to say about Jeremy Piven.” It was the best non-insulting insult that I’ve ever heard in my life.
#4) Nicole Kidman 
Nicole Kidman started out the decade in fine fashion. She was one of People’s 50 Most Beautiful People in 1999, anchored the Oscar nominated Moulin Rouge, the surprise hit, The Others and won an Oscar for her role in The Hours. Throw in her divorce from Tom Cruise in 2001 and Kidman could not have been flying higher in the first quarter of 2003. She was primed to make a run at being Hollywood’s first $20 million woman and it seemed as though she could do no wrong.
That sentiment could not have been more wrong. After The Hours was released in the fall of 2002, all Kidman did was wrong. She starred in 11 live-action releases that had wide release dates between January 1, 2003 and December 31, 2009 and only one of the films earned more domestically than it cost to make: Cold Mountain’s budget was set at $83 million and it grossed $95 million.
The rest of the movie Kidman made during this time period reads like a list of the biggest bombs and flops of the decade. Australia had a $130 million budget and grossed $49 million. The Stepford Wives had a $90 million budget and took in $59 million. Things were so bleak for Kidman that her second biggest success story during this time period was The Interpreter, which had an $80 million budget and grossed $72 million.
And I haven’t even gotten to The Invasion and The Golden Compass, a set of films whose collective budgets ran north of $260 million and took in $85 million in domestic box office receipts.
The total damage for this period of Kidman’s career was 11 films, combined budgets of $798 million and grosses of $214.5 million. Individually, that breaks down to an average budget of $72.54 million and an average take of $19.5 million. And again, I need to point out that I’m not cherry picking. That’s every live-action film Kidman made from 2003-2009.
Suffice it to say, Kidman’s time atop the A-list has ended. I highly doubt she will ever headline a $50 million plus film without a known male co-star again.
#3) M. Night Shyamalan 
Most people don’t change all that much. Whether it be professionally or personally, the grand majority of people are who they are and remain who they are throughout their life. People who can act well, tend to act well in most situations. Star basketball players may have an off-game here or there, but tend to perform at a fairly constant level throughout their careers. M. Night Shyamalan makes this list because he did a striking about-face during the last decade that completely and totally undermined every bit of credibility and respect he’d previously engendered.
Shyamalan rose to prominence in the late nineties with the enormous critical and box office smash, The Sixth Sense. He quickly followed that with his interesting yet exceedingly dry take on the superhero in Unbreakable. Shyamalan followed that with his slow-paced investigation of crop circles in Signs. Then the bottom fell out.
Shyamalan’s first three major films were The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs. It’s hard to top that. The movies were occasionally slow moving, but this didn’t and shouldn’t detract from the creative works that Shyamalan created. In late 2002, it seemed readily apparent that Shyamalan was the real deal. Critics began comparing Shyamalan to Hitchcock. It didn’t seem that out-of-place either. Both were masters of suspense who were able to generate tension and scares with subtly and grace.
Then Shyamalan went crazy and made The Village. And Lady in the Water. And The Happening. Collectively, the rottentomatoes score for those three movies didn’t come close to reaching The Sixth Sense’s rating.* Not only was The Happening nominated for a Razzie (the anti-Oscar), but Shyamalan’ name became an anchor around the necks of the marketing teams who were working on getting the word out.
When Signs was released in 2002, it was impossible not to known that M. Night Shyamalan wrote and directed it. In the theatrical trailers, Shyamalan’s name and association with the movie was mentioned more often that star Mel Gibson’s. When promoting The Happening, Shyamalan’s name was conspicuously missing and in its place, “From the writer/director of The Sixth Sense”.
The interesting thing is that three films of an extremely comparable quality seems like it would be enough of a sample size to dictate whether a given writer/director is any good or not. In Shyamalan’s case, he made three great films in a row and then three that would make Eddie Murphy cringe. Unfortunately for Shyamalan, Hollywood is a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately kind of business and the last three pictures he’s helmed have left less than a pleasant taste in the mouths of most studio executives.
* The Happening only earned an 18% fresh rating from critics. How bad is that? Nicole Kidman can make fun of that. The Invasion garnered a 19% fresh rating, Bewitched a 25% rating and The Stepford Wives a 26% rating. No filmmaker should ever aspire to get a few more positive reviews so that his project can reach Bewitched’s level of critical success.
#2) Cuba Gooding Jr. 
Cuba Gooding Jr. gave one of the best Oscar acceptance speeches in history when he won in 1997. It was passionate, effusive and as warm a moment as the Oscars could ever hope to produce. Everyone in America loved Gooding. He was America’s (male) sweetheart. Today, there is a whole contingent of kids who knows Gooding only as that guy from those Hanes commercials.
Recapping, Gooding started out the decade as an Oscar winning actor who generated warm feelings in audience members and ended the decade as an Oscar winning actor who agreed to star in a series of low-cost underwear commercials where the joke was that he wasn’t famous enough or socially competent enough to be in the same room with Michael Jordan without pissing down his own leg.
I’ve been in the same room as Michael Jordan previously. I can assure you that it is possible to do so without urinating on yourself or having someone call security on you. Apparently Gooding didn’t get the memo.
Oh yeah, and he starred in Boat Trip, Radio, Norbit, Daddy Day Camp as well as numerous straight-to-DVD titles. When you make 26 films across a ten-year time period and cite Pearl Harbor as the critical gem of the bunch, life is not going according to plan.
#1) Mel Gibson 
It may seem like a lifetime ago, but ten years ago, Mel Gibson was one of the most popular and well-liked actors on the planet. He was an A-lister’s A-lister. He was funny and he was warm. He was the kind of man that guys wanted to hang out with and that women wanted to sleep with. Learning that Gibson was going to be on Letterman was enough of a reason to watch the show. He was that good, that charming and that personable. (Please note there is no one good enough, charming enough and personable enough to merit watching Leno).
Gibson’s movies made enormous loads of cash even when they weren’t particularly good (see: Lethal Weapon 4) and made even more money when they were good (see: Signs). He was married to a woman he couldn’t speak more positively about. They’d met prior to Gibson making it big and he truly loved her.
Gibson has everything one could want: kids, a loving wife, much career success, even more critical success, more money than he could ever spend and even an Oscar. He was living the dream.
What Americans didn’t know was that Gibson also had a severe drinking problem, a supreme intolerance of gays and a hatred directed towards those of the Jewish faith. All of these things came to light during the last decade. So did the revelations that he had thought about committing suicide during his thirties, that his relationship was failing—it ultimately ended in the summer of 2009—and that he was carrying on a relationship with another woman while still married to his wife. To top it all off, while promoting his film The Passion of the Christ, Gibson stated in an interview with The New Yorker that his wife was going to go to hell because she hadn’t accepted Jesus into her heart.
In the span of ten short years, Gibson went from the ultimate Hollywood leading man with the most enviable life in the country to a crackpot, religious alcoholic who was cheating on his wife. Gibson has new projects that are forthcoming, but the American public has an extremely long memory when it comes to allegations of racism, sexism and intolerance… and Gibson hit the trifecta during the 2000s. His fall from grace makes Tom Cruise’s couch dance and subsequent thoughts on prescription drugs appear quaint and light-hearted.
