Dennis Quaid Knows Why Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp Flopped
Dennis Quaid is the movie star who inexplicably never was. The Houston-born hellraiser with the devil-may-care grin flashed palpable leading man potential with his portrayal of the former star quarterback who finds a measure of redemption astride a bicycle in Peter Yates’ wonderful coming-of-age sports flick “Breaking Away.” This potential turned into a veritable guarantee of future A-list dominance when he swaggered his way through “The Right Stuff” as Project Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper. Who’s the best actor you ever saw? You might just be looking at him.
Kevin Costner’s Sports Movie From 11 Years Ago Is Now On Netflix, Just Months After Plans For A TV Show Adaptation Were Announce
Quaid was almost always great, but the films that were supposed to launch him to superstardom kept underperforming. Wolfgang Petersen’s “Enemy Mine,” an underrated sci-fi riff on “The Defiant Ones,” was horribly mis-marketed by 20th Century Fox, Joe Dante’s brilliant “Innerspace” got hung out to dry by Warner Bros. over the 1987 July 4th holiday, and Jim McBride’s wild-sexy New Orleans noir “The Big Easy,” which paired Quaid with a smoldering Ellen Barkin, failed to become the sleeper hit everyone thought it would be. After that, Quaid’s next three star vehicles — “Everybody’s All American,” “D.O.A.,” and the heavily hyped Jerry Lee Lewis biopic “Great Balls of Fire” — flopped. He then had the misfortune to be the lead of Alan Parker’s flawed prestige picture about WWII Japanese internment camps, “Come See the Paradise,” at which point it felt like Hollywood might just give up on him.
Kevin Costner’s Sports Movie From 11 Years Ago Is Now On Netflix, Just Months After Plans For A TV Show Adaptation Were Announce
