Acclaimed television creator/writer David Milch’s latest HBO offering, “Luck” should be an easy favorite.

It’s about horse racing and the characters the sport attracts. It’s filmed largely at California’s Santa Anita race track and tells the story of racing from so many potentially fascinating points of view: gamblers, owners, jockeys and trainers. It stars a cast that on paper can’t lose, including Dustin Hoffman, Nick Nolte, Dennis Farina and real-life Kentucky Derby-winning jockey Gary Stevens. The co-executive producer is Michael Mann, who understands light and sound and color as well as anyone in Hollywood.

But that’s on paper. As bettors know, the horse with the winningest record, the best times, the richest purses and the bloodline for the distance doesn’t always win. There’s no such thing as a sure thing.

Stumbling out of the gate, “Luck” turns out to be a one-trick pony. It hurts to write that, because this show has the pedigree of a champion.

“Luck” begins with a peek behind the daily workings at a busy track. There’s the Peruvian trainer Turo Escalante (John Ortiz) described in press materials as “brilliant but disreputable.” And there’s the hard-luck grinder Walter Smith (Nolte), a good horseman and a good man who deserves the big win.

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Ben Stiller doesn’t have to work the boob tube circuit.

The star of those “Focker” films as well as the “Night at the Museum” franchise is a pretty safe bet in box office circles. So why did he just sign a deal with HBO to direct, produce and star in a new Jewish family comedy alongside Alan Alda?

A cynic might say it’s a sign Stiller feels insecure over the weak box office receipts for his last film, “Tower Heist.” Even mega-stars can be as paranoid as screen newbies. Why else would Will Smith sign up for “Men in Black III” after his drama “Seven Pounds” gave him a rare flop?

For Stiller, the chance to oversee his own HBO comedy offers the kind of creative outlet he can’t get with movies. And that’s a sad thing to say about an industry obsessed with remakes, sequels and other too safe bets.

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When Dustin Hoffman’s David Sumner announces at the end of the 1971 version of “Straw Dogs” that he “got ‘em all,” he says it with a sense of triumph.

We know he has changed from a man who fled America because he was too spineless to take a stand on the Vietnam War into someone who takes a stand against some British thugs who have antagonized him and his wife. When they begin to attack his home, Sumner takes a stand to defend it. He begins to understand machismo and responsibility.

In the new version of “Straw Dogs,” lead actor James Marsden utters the same line, but with a very different feeling. We don’t get a slightly sick sense of accomplishment in his voice. Instead we get a voice that is beat after what could only be described as a Pyrrhic victory for the hero. We get the sense that he he has beaten the monsters at their own game and is now spent and ready to move on, not completely changed.

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So, because you all enjoyed that list so much, and because I apparently have a death wish, it’s time for another: The Top 10 Most Overrated Actors/Actresses of All Time.

Unlike last time, I will claim that these are objective facts, not subjective opinions, so that all my critics may have full liberty to attack me (To those same critics who claimed last time that I phrased my opinions in an “objective” manner, this is called being facetious. That means I’m kidding. Also, seriously? That was your criticism?).

Here are my criteria: are they considered great actors/actresses? If not, they can’t make the list (sorry, Rob Schneider). Are they actually great actors? If so, they can’t make the list (sorry, Laurence Olivier). Only those who are considered great actors but are not, in fact, great actors can make this list. Even then, I’m not claiming that these are bad actors unless I explicitly say that I am.

So, here we go. In the words of Han Solo, I’ve got a bad feeling about this …

10. George Clooney: Not a great actor. Not a good actor. Not really an actor. If you’ve ever seen a movie with Clooney where you didn’t say to yourself, “Hey, I’m watching George Clooney” every thirty seconds or so, you haven’t seen a George Clooney movie. You’re mixing him up with Kate Winslet. He’s a D actor. Dull in “Michael Clayton.” Dreary in “Up In The Air.” Dreadful in “Syriana.” Dismal in “Batman and Robin.” He’s not a low-rent Cary Grant. He’s an affordable-housing Robert Wagner.

9. Dustin Hoffman: He turned in some tremendous performances in his early days (most notably “Papillon,” “Kramer vs. Kramer,” and “Tootsie”), then became a caricature of himself. He has not done anything worthwhile since “Tootsie,” in fact. Even in his better performances, he is a bit too mannered for my taste, perhaps an effect of his method acting. Laurence Olivier thought the same thing. When they were working on “Marathon Man” together, Hoffman showed up on set after having not slept for several days in order to get “in character.” Olivier took one look at him and said, “Dear boy, it’s called acting.” (more…)

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You go into the trailer asking yourself if this could possibly be worse than 2004’s “Meet the Fockers.”

You leave the trailer fairly certain the answer is yes.

Pop quiz: what do the following movies have in common?

Gone with the Wind (1939), Star Wars (1977), The Sound of Music (1965), E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), The Ten Commandments (1956), Titanic (1997), Jaws (1975), Doctor Zhivago (1965), The Exorcist (1973), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1939), 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Ben-Hur (1959), Avatar (2009), Return of the Jedi (1983), The Sting (1973), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Jurassic Park (1993), The Graduate (1967), Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace (1999), Fantasia (1941), The Godfather (1972), Forrest Gump (1994), Mary Poppins (1964), The Lion King (1994)

If you said they all made scads of money, bravo — they are the top twenty-five domestic box-office champions of all time (adjusted for inflation, of course).

But consider another similarity: surprisingly few of them relied on established A-list movie stars — the most famous, the highest paid — for their moneymaking prospects. Gone with the Wind had Gable, yes. The Sting had Newman and Redford. The Godfather, Brando.

As for most of the rest, they either featured no A-listers at all, or used them before they became bonafide movie stars. In fact, many of those pictures can take credit for sending now-famous actors into the celestial Hollywood firmament in the first place. Gone with the Wind made Vivian Leigh known to the world. The Ten Commandments did it for Charlton Heston. The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman. The Godfather, Al Pacino. Star Wars, Harrison Ford. Mary Poppins, Julie Andrews. (more…)

The passing of Robert Culp earlier this week at the age of 79 also marks yet another passing, that of a unique style of acting that’s all but dead today. What I call Big Acting, where a one-of-a-kind leading man like Culp could step into the shoes of a character and blow him up into something memorably larger-than-life. Not in a self-conscious, showy way. Not in the way that’s turned Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep into middle-aged parodies of their former selves. No, Robert Culp belonged to a rare club that includes such legendary members as Burt Lancaster, Charlton Heston and Kirk Douglas; all of whom had a magic quality that convinced you it was their characters who were big, not their acting.

That doesn’t mean Culp or the others were always in fifth gear. In fact, it was their range that was most impressive and you could argue that each was at their best when they intentionally tamped down the titan qualities of their personalities and turned them inward. This effectively gave the quiet characters they portrayed a fascinating hair-triggered explosive dimension that always kept you wondering what they were capable of. As Elmer Gantry, Burt Lancaster created an unforgettable icon. But as Labiche, the stoic railway official forced to physical action in John Frankenheimer’s “The Train,” he carried that film with the kind of quiet authority only a Burt Lancaster could possess. Or a Robert Culp.

Though the series lasted only 44 episodes and three seasons, Culp’s work as Agent Bill Maxwell on “The Greatest American Hero” ranks, in my opinion, as one of the all-time great television characters ever created. Right up there with Jim Rockford, Ralph Kramden, Al Bundy, Carl Kolchak, and Fred Sanford. (more…)

In 1999, a few weeks before The Devil’s Arithmetic went into production, I met with stars Kirsten Dunst, Brittany Murphy, and Mimi Rogers in Dustin Hoffman’s Brentwood office. Dustin and Mimi had rescued my script from development hell—a seven year limbo—and were serving as Executive Producers. Mimi was doing double duty as actress and producer.

The Devil’s Arithmetic is a Holocaust time travel drama based on the best selling book by Jane Yolen.

Brittany Murphy, left, and Kirsten Dunst in The Devil’s Arithmetic, 1999.

The script called for authentic Jewish characters and settings.

To aid the two young actresses I brought Offspring #3 to the meeting, a knowledgeable and adorable eleven year old yeshiva student.

Offspring #3’s job was to coach the actresses in, well, being Jewish. Offspring #3 taught the actresses a few Jewish songs, and helped their Hebrew pronunciations.

I watched as Kirsten and Brittany soaked up Offspring #3’s essence. (more…)

The star of Smokey and the Bandit was, of course, Burt Reynolds, a man of great passions, great flaws, and ultimately great loyalty to the people and place he came from. “I love the South,” he emphatically states to this very day. His is a career that — sometimes for worse but more often for better — stands as a testament to that simple heartfelt sentiment.

The man who would become one of the most popular movie stars of the last quarter century was born in 1936, the son of a small-town police chief in Florida. He grew up handsome and tough, randy and reckless — by fourteen, he had lost his virginity to a much older woman, and soon after knocked up the prom queen (his attempts to cajole her into marriage were rebuffed by the girl’s society-maven mother, who forced her daughter to abort the baby). Such antics were an early harbinger of both the charismatic charm and voracious, self-destructive appetites that would define (and sometimes decimate) his later career (a typical joke — Q: Why didn’t Burt Reynolds ever take Loni Anderson out to dinner? A: He made it a rule never to date married women.) (more…)

In what is becoming an annual rite of self-destruction, Broadway has once again chosen to snub many of the big-name stars who have put their film careers on hold to trudge onto the boards eight times a week, take a significant pay cut, and run the risk of being ridiculed for being unable to cut the mustard as a theatre actor  (As Alan Swan famously said before having to appear on live television in “My Favorite Year”:  ‘I’m not an actor, damn you, I’m a movie star!’).  This week’s announcement of nominees for Broadway’s top prize, the Tony Award, was more newsworthy for the names left off the list than for the relatively unfamiliar names singled out for the honor. 

Nathan Lane and John Goodman are selling tickets hand over fist for their revival of “Waiting for Godot” but neither received the honor of a nomination.  Same with David Hyde Pierce, Frank Langella, Mary Louise Parker and Matthew Broderick. 

It was no surprise that Jeremy Piven was included out of the Best Actor category after his famous sushi defense for missing performances in David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow,” but not honoring John Lithgow’s brilliant turn in “All My Sons” in the same category is a crime against humanity!  It ranks up there with the snub of Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman in the 1984 revival of “Death of a Salesman.” Brian Dennehy was honored with the Best Actor award when he did Willy Loman in 2000, but that goodwill did not anoint him worthy of a nomination this year for his turn in “Desire Under the Elms.”  (more…)

 
James Marsden

Here’s one that could go really right, or really wrong.

James Marsden (“X-Men’s” Cyclops) has been cast in a remake of “Straw Dogs,” Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 classic about a mathematician who moves to his wife’s hometown for some country seclusion – and gets very little.

The film is incredibly complex and filled with controversial social commentary. Dustin Hoffman’s timid lead character is forced to confront not simply his social awkwardness but his own impotence as a cat and mouse game with a band of blue-collar locals intensifies.

They flirt with and then rape his wife (Susan George) before attacking his home. Hoffman’s character must face his own passivity and relationship to violence. (more…)

My earlier essay on intentional inaccuracies in the Frost/Nixon movie bemoaned the fact that this sort of quasi-documentary has such dramatic impact-because people actually “see” the invented wrongdoing-that it outweighs any writings constrained by actual fact. 

Perhaps the best example of this comes from the 1976 movie, “All the President’s Men,” produced by Robert Redford and starring Redford and Dustin Hoffman as cub Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.  

The movie was a dramatization of Woodward and Bernstein’s 1974 book by the same name that chronicled the investigative reporting that led to the resignations of Bob Haldeman and John Erhlichman.  The book was a best-seller in its own right-especially after their editor suggested the early drafts needed something more catchy and they hit upon the idea of naming Woodward’s secret source of government information after the recent pornographic movie, “Deep Throat.”  (more…)