LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH:
The Marginalizing of James Woods
“James Woods, the Oscar-nominated actor, said he was retiring from the industry. Woods tweeted this summer that he had ‘accepted the fact that’ he was blacklisted from Hollywood because of his views. He has said being conservative has made it tough to find work”
–Fox News, 10/8/17
***
While reports of his retirement were premature, the narrative coming from James Woods is clear: “I’m no longer welcome in Hollywood.” I wasn’t even aware he was still working, and I don’t say that to be cruel. His Twitter feed has become obnoxiously right wing as the Trump months have ticked by, a product of Woods sharpening his 20-year transformation from northeastern liberal to paleo-conservative doctrinaire. I fully thought he was sitting somewhere in Laurel Canyon with a girlfriend 40-years his junior, thumbing through social media on his phone, recapitulating Daily Blaze articles.
For a guy who’s never really left our sight, he sure seems to have vanished. Woods was first employed in a Richard Kiley and Joanne Woodward TV movie called “All the Way Home” back in 1971, and worked steadily until the mid 2000s. He always managed to mix menace with vulnerability, creating one of the more interesting careers out there. His beady eyes, his wiry frame, his waxy skin, his pocked cheeks — nothing about Woods would suggest a conventional leading man, which is why he’s lucky he came up in the 1970s. There was plenty of room for skinny weirdos to make a killing in film, working for filmmakers like Sydney Pollack (“The Way We Were”), Arthur Penn (“Night Moves”), and Harold Becker (“The Onion Field”).
Do I have to mention “Video Drome”? Long live the new flesh, indeed — it’s perhaps the film Woods will be the most remembered for. He figured out how to best use his body and intensity to serve David Cronenberg’s specific vision, and well as his own bold career aims. I’d argue he did what Jeff Goldblum managed to do in “The Fly,” only without 30 pounds of latex prosthetics.
I always say when an indelible actor dies (or ages out of the industry), Who Is the Next One Of Those? We have an inexhaustible supply of Margot Robbie ingénues, bug-eyed Buscemi weirdos, and grumbling foreign Bardem-alikes, but we don’t have too many versatile goblins on par with James Woods. On the recent episode of James Hancock’s Wrong Reel podcast about Woods (https://wrongreel.com/podcast/wr339-talking-james-woods-bill-scurry), I highlighted Taylor Hackford’s 1984 sunshine noir masterpiece “Against All Odds” as a passing of the torch between Woods and Richard Widmark, an actor who worked a lot of the same unhinged headcase territory in the 1950s that Woods inherited in the early ’80s. The assembly line of blond actors from Reseda and Torrance doesn’t make an allowance for the type of sketchiness Woods was encouraged to cultivate back in the day.
However — the reaction to the podcast dropping on the cinephile world was immediate:
“After he’s dead, I am totally up for this discussion! Until then… problematic.”
“Not enough money in the world to ever watch this hateful man again. PASS.”
“That would be a no.”
To be fair, there were warm and positive reactions, but the sentiment was predictable. Woods has worn out his welcome in many camps.
(For the record, I don’t agree with Woods’s politics. I find his flavor of middle-aged white man tone deafness and entitlement reprehensible. He’s taken potshots at every politician and political movement I care about. He gives aid and comfort to an abhorrent chief executive on a daily basis. He’s long abandoned his working class New England roots in favor of siding with powerful and cruel interests.)
“The movies, especially the big action movies, are so programmed. Just because of political correctness, the bad guy always has to be the middle-age white guy. I’ll turn down millions of dollars not to play some asshole in a suit, because I’m not interested in that.”
–James Woods, on joining “Scary Movie 2”
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James Woods was one of those performers I noticed when I became aware that movies don’t just make themselves — and that actors put a lot of thought into their craft. Cross-referencing the aforementioned “Against All Odds” with “Salvador” and “True Believer,” I saw a livewire performer making interesting every project in which he was cast interesting by being in it. I was also spoiled because he was ubiquitous in the 1980s; we could accept that Woods was like wallpaper because of his presence in so many films. His salad days seem to kick in around 1980 with “The Onion Field,” and you could make a case for a decent twenty-five-year run which cools off around 2005, just in time for him to play himself into self-parody on “Entourage.”
There are things Woods can do at 70 which he couldn’t do at 30. In the Woods survey I undertook in preparation for the Wrong Reel podcast, I sampled a healthy amount of his films and was struck by the slim pickings in the latter half of his career. Beyond Sofia Coppola’s “Virgin Suicides” (1999) and the Polish Brothers’s “Northfork” (2003), there haven’t been too many meaty roles in his CV. I would actually count his DC Comics animated feature “Crisis on Two Earths” on that short list because he plays a dark version of Batman, suggesting a different path where he was asked read for Bruce Wayne in Tim Burton’s 1989 “Batman” instead of Michael Keaton. (Imagine a parallel earth where Woods is cast as the Dark Knight, and his one-time fling Sean Young sticks her landing and nails the Catwoman role!)
There seems to be a path-of-least-resistance for Woods which would have enabled him to sail into old age on film and compete with the Bill Murrays and Willem Dafoes of the world. Wes Anderson uses fascinating ensembles to tell his stories; young buck directors like Jeff Nichols and Jeremy Saulnier have been putting actors of his ilk to great use. In the What Could’ve Been department, It’s worth mentioning that Woods never worked with Steven Spielberg: I bet there could have been a spot in the sprawling roster of “Lincoln” for him.
This is the time I conjure the departed Ron Silver, another actor who should be categorized under the rubric of We Didn’t Get Another One of Those. The vacancy created by Silver’s premature death at age 62 in 2009 should have freed a number of roles up, the types of slots James Woods was always competing to play. How many brazen lawyers, a la Silver’s Alan Dershowitz in “Reversal of Fortune,” has Woods essayed — and how many were to come?
Instead, he’s talked many potential collaborators out of hiring him by preemptively calling their scripts “douchebag” and “feminist,” so I guess he’s just as happy to play poker semi-professionally. His reputation as a gender terrorist poisoned his relationship with female creators circa the Sean Young tabloid debacle of 1988, and his penchant for dating women fifty years his junior is more off-putting than ever, cementing the impression he’s not exactly a safe figure. He’s left with a handful of appearances on Showtime’s original series “Dice,” with Andrew Dice Clay, and his regular voice-acting slot on “Family Guy.” The man’s career ends with a whimper, not a bang.
“Learn this. Libel me, I’ll sue you. If you die, I’ll follow you to the bowels of Hell. Get it?”
–James Woods, on pursuing litigation against a deceased Twitter account
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I knew pitching the topic of Woods on Hancock’s show wouldn’t be a tough sell to the host, but we also knew that some listeners would balk. How can I convince people to give “Against All Odds” (one of my favorite films) a chance now that Woods’s presence has become so toxic? Other casualties of the embargo: Harold Becker’s amazing “The Boost” (1988); John Badham’s buddy cop comedy “The Hard Way” (1991); and Michael Ritchie’s underrated con-man ensemble “Diggstown” (1992). Woods’s obvious grab at Oscar gold, Rob Reiner’s “Ghosts of Mississippi” (1996), was a prosthetic-and-cornpone-accent affair to be sure, but he was obviously hungry for peer recognition. He’s been nominated for two Golden Globes (“The Onion Field” and “Ghosts of Mississippi”) and two Oscars (“Salvador” and “Mississippi”). There’s little chance Woods wouldn’t have been motivated to try for more — but maybe it’s better we’re spared that outcome, what with how pedestrian Academy Award strivers usually play out.
We don’t have a replacement warming up in the wings to take the baton, the way Woods did with Dick Widmark. Am I supposed to be excited about Colin Farrell and the irrepressible singsong of his Irish lilt? Was Sam Rockwell once intended to be a screw-loose leading man with laser focus, before he opted for more obscure features? This would be the perfect moment for an actress to break (or perfect) the mold: I think Tilda Swinton is pretty much there, having made many interesting correlative choices, such as “Michael Clayton” and “Snowpiercer.” I would give it to character actors like Regina King, Tessa Thompson, Carrie Coon, and Amy Seimetz to acquit morally conflicted heroes and villains — IF they had the option of eschewing the usual anodyne choice of roles. Women aren’t usually deputized to work with the same career impunity as men, after all.
When Woods is gone from Hollywood, it will be more for his own doings as well than the vagaries of the industry. His acting limned the stories of many flawed men, broken heroes and brazen villains with often only a thin membrane separating one from the other. There was no doubt about it, the man knew how to do the job.
And I’ll think: Why didn’t he shut the fuck up in 2010 and just do the work?
