 Starring: Ewan McGregor, Billy Crudup, Albert Finney, Jessica Lange, Helena Bonham-Carter
Director: Tim Burton
Year Of Release: 2003
Plot: Will Bloom returns home to see his father, Ed, on his deathbed. The two have a difficult relationship, due to the fact Ed likes to tell tall tales and his son doesn’t feel he’s ever known his real dad. The film shows Ed’s fantastical life, which takes in everything from Chinese conjoined twins to evil witches, as father and son try to reconcile before it’s too late. |
Today I’m going to cheat. Sorry about that, but it’s just the way it is. Instead of writing a new article, I’m going to reprint something I wrote a while ago, well before Movie-A-Day started, as Big Fish is a good example of what it talks about. Basically it argues that directors and actors shouldn’t be allowed to have kids, because the moment their first child is born, their films get a lot less entertaining.
Big Fish, which Burton directed while Helena Bonham Carter was pregnant with their first child and which premiered just after his son’s birth, shows what happens. Indeed everything the famously kooky director has made since his first kid was born has been for a family audience, and a lot wetter and less edgy than what he made before. Anyway, take a look at the article below to see how it’s not just Tim Burton’s problem...
It’s been one of my pet theories for a while that having children is not a good idea for anyone who’s made it big in Hollywood. This isn’t out of some sort of evil malice towards those who’ve found success in Tinsel Town but because of the realisation that having children is one of the best ways to screw up a successful screen career.
I’m sure that each and every child of a Hollywood star or director is a perfect bundle of joy, but that doesn’t mean they’re not destroying their parents’ careers. Well, it’s not really the kids, it’s the changes they bring about in the adults.
Kids Will Make You Soft
It’s not surprising that having children changes the way a star looks at the world, but unfortunately that new outlook can turn the edgiest, most interesting people into purveyors of utter drivel. If you need proof of this, take a look at Eddie Murphy. Between 1982 and 1988 he had an almost unbroken run of hits including 48hrs, Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop 1 & 2, Coming To America and The Golden Child. After 1989 he made, in a row, Harlem Nights, Another 48hrs, Boomerang, The Distinguished Gentlemen, Beverly Hills Cop III and A Vampire In Brooklyn. It was an incredible run of crappy movies that pretty much destroyed his reputation. So what happened? Well, you might blame bad judgement, an overinflated ego or various other things, but it’s rarely noted that Murphy’s first child was born in 1989.
It could be a coincidence, but before 1989 he lived on the edge and took risks, making interesting movie choices that paid off because he was utterly fearless. However after this time the movies he made became softer, as if he was censoring himself, suddenly worried about what others might think about what he was doing. It’s difficult not to wonder whether suddenly becoming a father, and therefore a role model, caused that change in the movies he chose. Sure they were still adult films, but they were no longer fearless.
Or what about Tim Burton, the unique visionary who made such movies as Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, Batman and Ed Wood? Can you imagine him having made such a wet and safe version of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory if he hadn’t become a father a couple of years before? Or would action man Arnold Schwarzenegger have made us suffer through Jingle All The Way if he hadn’t got a seven-year-old kid at home?
Other People Are Already Making Movies For Your Kids
Actors and directors suddenly wanting to make movies for their own offspring to watch is the main problem with people in Hollywood having kids. Instead of thinking about the movie choices that’d be best for both their career and the audience, as soon as many big name actors and directors have children they start wanting to make films they’d like to show their little pride and joys (after all, they don’t have to take whatever job comes along just to pay the bills and so can afford pursue their whims). While that sounds rather noble, the result is rarely good for either their career or the cinema audience.
While childless stars might pick a family movie because it seems entertaining, offers a particularly good role or has an interesting edge, a parent is likely to be thinking of themselves as a role model for their own children. More often than not, the result is a boring movie because they don’t want their kids to see them doing anything that might prompt awkward questions (“Mummy, why were you kissing the man who wasn’t Daddy?” or “Daddy, why did the man stop breathing after you shot him?”).
Some actors are quite open about making certain movie choices based on their own kids. Jodie Foster appeared in Nim’s Island because she hadn’t ever made a movie suitable for her children to watch. The result was pretty much the only movie of Foster’s career with nothing to recommend it. Likewise Adam Sandler has suggested his decision to make the godawful Bedtime Stories was partly down to the fact he’d just become a father.
Eddie Murphy is also guilty here, as with his career in the shitter he started making an endless succession of family friendly flicks, and despite occasional successes like The Nutty Professor and Shrek, we’ve mainly had dross like The Adventures Of Pluto Nash and Daddy Day Care.
And we really should blame these people, as it’s unlikely the studios would have agreed to make these rubbish family films at all if it wasn’t for the star talent attached.
When Kids Take Over
Probably the worst example of what having a kid can do to someone in the movies is Robert Rodriguez. He went from being the cool, edgy director of El Mariachi, From Dusk Til Dawn and Desperado to the helmer of the cringe-inducing Spy Kids trilogy. He was very open that he was making these movies for his kids, but unfortunately decided to make the rest of the world suffer as well. Even more unforgivably, he then went on to make The Adventures Of Sharkboy And Lavagirl, which wasn’t just for his children, but was based on a story by his eight-year-old son, Rocket. Now everybody likes to do nice things for their kids, but most people wouldn’t spend millions turning their pre-teen’s story into a movie and then inflicting the results on children across the globe.
Sometimes it can work the other way around and people who did make great family friendly films suddenly get more serious and boring when they become parents. For example, while Steven Spielberg’s change from creator of popcorn masterpieces to a more serious-minded director in the early 90s may have resulted in a couple of incredible film like Schindler’s List and Saving Private, it also gave us tedious movies like Amistad. Even his more populist later flicks such as Minority Report, War Of The Worlds and AI are notably less fun than before.
He’s previously said that the change came about not just because of the encroachment of middle age, but that having growing children made him think about life more seriously and wonder about the world they were becoming a part of, and this made him want to make movies that talked about that world. It didn’t make him a bad filmmaker, but it certainly made his movies a lot less fun to watch.
Interestingly his return to producing unabashed popcorn flicks like Indiana Jones 5 and Tintin has coincided with his youngest kid, Max, reaching his 20s. A similar thing happened to Tom Hanks, who went all serious with the likes of Bonfire Of The Vanities and Philadephia just as his eldest child was coming into his teens, but has generally gotten far more lighthearted again since his children hit their 20s. It may well be that once these people have realised you can make movies and be a parent without the world collapsing, they suddenly lighten up again.
Raising The Next Generation
There are also those stars whose careers fade due to a conscious decision to spend more time being a parent and less time making movies, which is fair enough. While Jodie Foster may have made only one film suitable for her kids, she generally only makes one movie every two years so she can spend most her time being a mother.
Likewise Julia Roberts went on a self-imposed career sabbatical after the birth of her twins in 2004 and still makes comparatively few films. Interestingly she also says she is consciously not telling her children that she’s an actress, because she feels knowing what their mother does would destroy the magic of the movies for them. However, an interesting byproduct is that it frees her up from having to worry about the effect the movies she’s in might have on her kids when she does decide to act (although it can’t be a coincidence that her first post-motherhood role was as the voice of the eponymous spider in the insanely cutesy Charlotte’s Web.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s film output has also gone down significantly since the birth of her first child, while Gremlins actress Phoebe Cates pretty much gave up acting altogether in 1994 so she could be a full time mother.
Sterilisation Is The Only Solution!
If you’re an accountant it’s not really going to make much difference to your clients whether the birth of your first child has completely altered how you look at the universe, but if your job is to make entertainment for other people, it can have a profound impact on the quality of the films that you make. Getting to the top in Hollywood takes a special sort of single minded determination, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the some actors and directors take off their eye off the ball when they have children.
Because people in Hollywood will insist on having kids, we’ve been put through some truly hideous movie experiences, had some of our most talented stars pretty much disappear from view and watched other promising careers crash and burn, seemingly as a result of passing on their genes.
It really does seem that there’s little that can have a worse effect on anyone in Hollywood than having a child. Sure, it probably makes them happy, but who cares about that when it makes the rest of the film loving world more miserable? Maybe the answer is for the studios to put a sterilisation clause into all contracts for actors and directors. I’d imagine few would be willing to sign up for this, but maybe for the sake of the movie going public, they ought to think about it.
TIM ISAAC
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