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Once upon a time, it was all about that smile. That jagged slash of a smirk; that lopsided knife-wound of a leer. His wasn't just a shit-eating grin. Hell, he looked like he'd eat your whole colon.
Dennis Quaid was all tooth and charm, until that grin ate him. We're not sure exactly when it happened, but somewhere between Gordo Cooper in 1983's The Right Stuff and Jerry Lee Lewis in 1989's Great Balls of Fire, the smile devoured Dennis Quaid's whole career.
He started out as an oddly sexy leading man with a penchant for cockiness and underrated films. Dreamscape? A fine sci-fi confection. Innerspace? Seriously overlooked. Jaws 3-D? It may well be among the top five 3-D killer shark movies of all time.
Then, all of a sudden, he was steaming up the windows of N'Awlins as Remy McSwain in The Big Easy, cavorting with the similarly oddly sexy Ellen Barkin, herself no stranger to quirky facial irregularities. And bang: Dennis Quaid was poised for the big time. Dennis Quaid had arrived. He was, circa 1987, about to become the new Don Johnson. Hell, he'd be bigger than Johnson! He'd be bigger than Dirk Benedict! He'd be bigger than them all!
Well, he is bigger than them all, but not for the reasons that he might have imagined back then.
For this shining moment in Dennis Quaid's career was actually very short, lasting about eighteen months in all. He made a bunch of movies in quick succession: Innerspace, Suspect, D.O.A., Everyone's All-American, and then came that great ball of cinematic fire, Great Balls of Fire! And Quaid had gone from promising, oddly sexy leading man to a sneering, leering, eye-poppin', aw-shucksin', double-takin', hyuk-hyukkin' horror.
Maybe it wasn't his fault. That movie was a terrible mess. (Winona Ryder was also spotted on the set, wandering around in a daze.) Then again, he was awful. And that grin. We never wanted to see it again. It gave us nightmares. He was like the Joker looming over Gotham. Those teeth! Those lips! The horror!
And, almost as quickly as he'd ascended, Quaid slipped from a Hollywood hot property to a permanent resident in the purgatory of second-choices. He stood locked arm in arm with the likes of Jeff Daniels and Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton, waiting for A-listers' cast-offs to come sliding down the chute. He reeled off a pack of forgettable make-work projects like Come See the Paradise, Wilder Napalm, Wyatt Earp, and the ironically named Something to Talk About. Suddenly, he wasn't even the hottest Quaid anymore -- wacky brother Randy had usurped even that meager crown.
By the time he had been reduced to playing caddie to a fire-breathing Sean Connery with wings in Dragonheart in 1996, it seemed like Dennis Quaid had become Hollywood's living version of Everyone's All-American -- full of big promise in the early going, then a heap of big regrets later on.
Then -- just when you thought it couldn't get any worse! -- he showed up in The Parent Trap. A children's film! As reliable an indicator as there is that your career is officially kaput! He went from D.O.A. to...well, D.O.A! As Geena Davis was to Stuart Little, and Charles Grodin was to Beethoven, so Quaid was to The Parent Trap. And it was grim.
So...end of story, yes? A little sad, perhaps, but he was still working, and he had Meg to pay the bills. In fact, replace "Meg" with "Goldie," and you've basically got The Kurt Russell Story.
And yet. Like a vampire, he arose, and career-death had no dominion over him. We're not sure if it was the dissolution of his holy matrimonial bond, as chronicled in the pages of People, or his public cuckolding by the hairy he-man Russell Crowe, but suddenly Dennis Quaid decided to do things differently. Perhaps his epiphany predated l'affair Crowe. Perhaps there was no epiphany. Perhaps a few directors simply thought, Hey, what ever happened to Remy McSwain?
But for whatever reason, Quaid decided to take a few smaller parts in a few better films and, suddenly, wouldn't you know it, look who's back. Look who's playing Catherine Zeta-Jones's shifty lawyer in Traffic. Look who's starring in the sleeper hit, Frequency. Look who's nailing the role of the closeted husband in Far from Heaven. Look who's anchoring the surprise feel-good baseball weepie of the year, The Rookie. Look who's expertly navigating the treacherous route from fading leading man to we-didn't-know-he-had-it-in-him actor of renewed renown.
Good heavens -- it's him! It's...Quaid! No, the other one!
So we'd just like to take this moment to say: we liked him all along. We liked Dreamscape. We liked Innerspace. Sure, maybe we weren't trumpeting his cause and handing out his literature in the line-up outside Gang Related, but then again, there was no line-up outside Gang Related.
But we knew all along that he'd pull himself out. That he'd turn it around. That the smile would return.
Okay, we didn't know, but we're glad he did, and has. Hey, why not? And he's stowed the smile. He used to be all smile, but in Far from Heaven, he hardly flashes it at all, and only then when he's drunk and creepy. For the rest of the film, he's all grim solitude and sobs. And he pulls it off.
Meanwhile, Randy's sitcom, The Grubbs, got canned without even one episode airing.
Oh, outrageous fortunes! Oh, Hollywood!
We just hope that, when Dennis Quaid gets his Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe nomination for Far From Heaven, and then he passes on The Rookie 2: Hardball because the studio won't meet his suddenly outrageous salary demands, so they send the script to Bill Pullman, who signs on to play Reg Bender, a high-school gym teacher who suddenly realizes that he has a wicked slider, that Dennis won't forget where he came from. And that he'll send Bill Pullman a note paperclipped to the sequel's script saying, "Sloppy seconds, eh? I know what those taste like, brother. I know what those taste like." And then the note will slip off of the script and fall into the bottom of the FedEx envelope, and Bill Pullman will never see it, and then he'll run into Dennis Quaid at the Golden Globes and it will be kind of awkward because Dennis Quaid will be expecting some sort of acknowledgement for the note, and there'll be a chilly silence, and then Bill Pullman will say "Well, I should get back to my table," and Dennis Quaid will head off to the bathroom, all miffed, before spotting Russell Crowe at the bar and deciding that he can probably hold it until the next commercial break.
That's what we hope.
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