Leonardo DiCaprio - The Biography. Douglas Wight
slot before, so I know the price,’ said Raimi’s producing partner, Rob Tapert. ‘I’m sure TriStar knows best.’
Tombstone, Kevin Costner’s epic on the gunfight at the OK Corral, particularly concerned the studio, who feared the three-hour length feature would cause box-office takings to drop and sour moviegoers on Westerns for some time to come. This aside, there was also the issue that Gene Hackman featured in too many of the genre. Indeed, the French Connection star played Wyatt Earp’s father in the Costner movie and also starred in the studio’s Unforgiven.
Meanwhile, Stone herself was suffering something of a credibility crisis around the time the movie had originally been slated for release. One source on the project said: ‘Her last two movies [Sliver and Intersection] haven’t performed well. The word is TriStar wanted to wait and see how The Specialist [an action film pairing Stone with Sylvester Stallone] will do. If it does well, TriStar is hoping the success will bleed over for Sharon into this picture.’
Even before the movie was released, Stone was still not happy. She demanded a love scene be cut before distribution because she felt it wasn’t in keeping with the rest of the tone. A second smooch with Leo was also left on the cuttings floor.
Eventually the film hit cinema screens in February 1995 and although it took over $6.5 million on the opening weekend and over $18 million overall – considerably more than any of Leonardo’s previous movies – it was branded a flop. Raimi blamed himself for the poor showing, saying: ‘I was very confused after I made that movie. For a number of years I thought, “I’m like a dinosaur. I couldn’t change with the material.”’
Reviews on the whole were mixed but some did not hold back in their criticism. Associated Press described The Quick and the Dead as ‘an amazingly bad movie – so bad that not even the extremely talented Gene Hackman can save it.’ Of Leonardo, it said: ‘DiCaprio, a talented newcomer with much promise, seems lost in the role of the Kid and plays it like he’s seen too many Bonanza reruns.’
Jay Boyar, film critic on the Orlando Sentinel, also savaged the movie, saying it was ‘the first jaw-droppingly-awful movie of 1995.’ Sparing none of the actors, he added: ‘No one in Q&D gets very much acting done. Attempting to ape Eastwood, Stone turns into the Woman With No Personality. Hackman resurrects his little Lex Luthor laugh, a sign that he may consider the entire project beneath contempt.’
He did, however, reserve some sympathy for Leo: ‘I think I felt sorriest for Leonardo DiCaprio, who follows up his brilliant work in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape with the role of the Kid in this godawful mess.’
Among those with kinder words was the Boston Globe, who described describing the film as ‘a sly, savvy Hollywood send-up of Sergio Leone Westerns [Spaghetti Westerns].’
And the pitfalls of doing a more commercial film – despite its relatively poor box-office showing – became increasingly apparent when Leonardo felt even more of his private life being eroded in the wake of the publicity surrounding him. Already he was lamenting the limitations that his sudden fame put on his life. Journalists began quizzing not only the actor himself, but his family and friends, old school pals and neighbours, in trying to track down his former loves and scandals. As would soon become customary with his leading ladies, he was linked to Sharon Stone.
There seemed little truth in the rumours, but more substance appeared to exist in reports that he was interested in a hot young model called Bridget Hall. The 5ft 10.5in Texan was the most in-demand cover girl during New York Fashion Week in April 1995 and had clearly caught Leo’s eye.
‘We’re just hanging out,’ she muttered coyly of their relationship, although she blushed as she said it. Despite her picture being on the front of all of the leading glossy magazines, she revealed Leo didn’t even recognise her when they first met because ‘I don’t look like my Guess pictures.’
That the press were interested in who Leo was dating was an indication of how his star was on the ascent. Reports also suggested that he had a soft spot for Alicia Silverstone, at the time the most talked-about young actress in Hollywood, with some even claiming they were engaged. Two years younger, Alicia had burst onto the scene with a stunningly knowing performance in Clueless (1995). Unlike Leo, however, she had accepted a part in a superhero franchise – appearing as Batgirl in Batman & Robin. The link and friendship were genuine, the romance it appears not.
‘Alicia and I did our first movies at about the same time,’ Leo explained. ‘We’ve known each other for years. I’m sure she was asked this question [about them being engaged] and she thought it ridiculous.’
In addition to the speculation about his love life, fans routinely pestered him and while he never publicly objected to the attention, the constant interest was clearly getting to him.
He said: ‘I want to be a jerk like the rest of my friends, and have fun and not care about the consequences, but I can’t now.’
Leonardo, it seemed, was right in his early suspicions that this latest work might not be best for his career development. Whereas he had been lavish in praise of his most recent films, he was quick to distance himself from this turkey. ‘It’s not my favourite film in the world,’ he admitted. ‘I guess it was not that good. It was alright, you know. I had a good time doing the character.’
Luckily for Leo, he had another project released hot on the heels of The Quick and the Dead, one that would restore any lasting damage to his reputation as a serious actor.
When MTV asked River Phoenix what he wanted to do after being nominated for an Oscar for Running on Empty (1988), he pulled out a battered paperback edition of The Basketball Diaries from his pocket and said: ‘I want to play Jim Carroll.’
He wasn’t the only one. In the 15 years that followed the controversial memoir’s publication of 1978, several big names had coveted that role. Matt Dillon, Weird Science star Anthony Michael Hall, Eric Stoltz, Ethan Hawke and Stephen Dorff all joined Phoenix in believing they could be the one to bring Carroll’s story to the big screen. It was the perfect role for any ambitious, talented young star able to play conflicted, charming yet ultimately doomed characters.
Carroll was a New York teenage basketball prodigy and heroin addict. Since publication, the book was optioned many times but either the project or timing was wrong or it didn’t fit with the political climate (in the early- to mid-nineties, heroin was seen as being cool). Suddenly Leonardo found himself in the right place at the right time.
It was director Scott Kalvert who finally got the project off the ground. He toyed with the idea of setting the film in the period of Carroll’s trials but it would cost too much to put everyone in costume and so he decided to make it in the present day. Plus, he figured, Carroll’s descent into drugs was a universal story that transcended the generations.
Despite the title, The Basketball Diaries is only fleetingly about basketball. It covers three years – 13 to 16 – in the life of Carroll, an athlete who at 6ft 1in tall could score 40 points in a game. What set him apart from most other athletes of the day was that he was doing this while hooked on almost every drug known to man. Yet, as the diary progresses, the focus switches from the hoops to the hooked. By the end of the book, all that Carroll has left is an ability to eloquently document his own decline.
Carroll’s tortured yet poetic memoir began life in the sixties when extracts started to appear in The Paris Review and downtown New York literary magazines when he was still a teenager. When he wasn’t doing drugs or playing ball, he was hanging out around Greenwich Village and the St. Mark’s Place poetry scene. He made himself known to Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, but preferred Randall Jarrell to the Beats. In 1980, he branched out into