Christian Bale (9 page)

How was Christian as a kisser? Keats said: “I would have to rate
Christian's kiss as a 7 or 8. We were both pretty uncomfortable, and I was going out with someone else at the time, so it was a pretty hard scene to shoot!”

Christian was also amused at how jealous his girlfriend, Natalie, was of Keats. Christian told me that at a house party, Natalie actually starting harassing Ele so badly that Keats locked herself in the bathroom.

Christian also argued with Ortega about the ending of
Newsies
. Would Jack Kelly be willing to give up everything to stay in New York in poverty? Not likely, but Ortega stuck to the script at hand.

And, as the critics were happy to point out, in real life, the newsboys' strike was actually a failure, and Pulitzer's publishing empire was hardly damaged. Pulitzer Prize, anyone?

When
Newsies
wrapped, David arranged for a cast party cruise to Catalina Island. (When the tenth anniversary edition of the
Newsies
DVD was released, David was furious when Ortega, in the DVD extras, mentions the Catalina trip but didn't mention who had paid for it.) It had been a tough shoot but Ortega, Christian, and David were confident that
Newsies
would be the big Disney hit for 1992.

By the fall of 1991, Christian had moved on to begin rehearsals in London for his next Disney picture,
Swing Kids
, which would shoot on location in Prague. It would be another big-budget production with dancing but luckily no singing—a drama about the rise of the Hitler Youth before the outbreak of World War II. With a top-notch cast that included Kenneth Branagh and Barbara Hershey, as well as young stars Robert Sean Leonard and Noah Wyle (
ER
), Christian's future was looking bright. He flew back and forth between L.A. and London to finish the ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement) sessions on
Newsies
, and he eagerly awaited its opening weekend.

Released in April 1992,
Newsies
was a huge flop. The critics hated the movie and apparently so did the public at large as
it grossed a minuscule $2.8 million—an astonishingly small amount of money for a major studio release. It seemed that everyone connected to
Newsies
was covered in the stink of failure. Industry insiders joked that
Newsies
(now sneered as
Flopsies
) was the
Howard the Duck
of the 1990s. Indeed, some Disney insiders claimed that two major bombs helped to end Jeffrey Katzenberg's tenure with the Mouse House in 1994. One bomb was
Newsies
.

The other?
Swing Kids
.

David was filtering to Christian the few positive reviews and blamed Disney for not marketing
Newsies
aggressively, but it was very hard for Christian not to take it personally. His first starring movie role since
Empire of the Sun
was an epic dud. As his son's manager and the guy who pushed the script, David was also very disappointed at the reception to
Newsies
.

David had to search high and low for a good
Newsies
review. Typical reviews looked like this:

Disney's great endeavor to revive the live-action musical was over. Later that year Disney returned to more familiar territory—the animated musical—and released
Aladdin
(music by Oscar-winner Alan Menken, the
Newsies
soundtrack composer as well), which would gross $217 million in the U.S., $479 million worldwide. The Mouse had learned its lesson about live-action musicals. It would take another ten years before Australian director Baz Luhrmann would strike live-action musical gold with
Moulin Rouge
.

Why did
Newsies
bomb at the box office? Many other Disney movies have been critic-proof and gone on to box office success. Some industry insiders pointed to the movie's length. It seemed that after Kevin Costner's success with his 1990
Dances with Wolves
, every director—even a first-time director—wanted director's cut.
Newsies'
runtime: 121 minutes. By comparison,
Little Mermaid
's runtime: 89 minutes.
Aladdin
: 90 minutes.
Pocahontas
: 81 minutes.
Newsies
was even longer than Ortega's favorite musical, the 1952 classic
Singin' in the Rain
: 101 minutes.
Newsies
fans take great joy in pointing out the continuity errors, clearly the results of Ortega's struggle to edit down his lengthy movie to two hours.

Movie theater owners prefer shorter movies because they can have more show times during the day. A theater owner needs that time in between screenings to clean up the theater and prep it for the next audience.

Another theory why
Newsies
bombed: Because the movie's story line was about the newsboys' strike, this was an unusually
pro-union labor movie from Disney. Disney movies were typically nonpolitical in theme, comfortably about fairy tales or the environment or the colors of the wind. As a Disney-fied version of
Norma Rae
, parents were probably looking at the scathing reviews, noticing the lengthy running time, and realizing that this was not a Disney cartoon. Pass. What else is playing at the megaplex?

So 1992 shaped up as a tough year for Christian. After the disastrous opening of
Newsies
in April, David went ahead and saddled Christian with the mortgage on the Manhattan Beach house. Christian went with his mother on that fateful trip to Morocco and fell ill—the case of the fecal matter in the food. The release date for his next film,
Swing Kids
, was being continually pushed back. Originally planned as a Christmas 1992 movie, it was now looking like a 1993 release. The retreating release date was not a good sign.

However, there were a couple people who had seen
Newsies
on the big screen who would have a profound effect on Christian's life. Winona Ryder caught a screening of
Newsies
and fell in love with the movie. Ryder would go on to cast Christian in the movie
Little Women
. And by meeting and befriending Winona, Christian would meet her personal assistant, his future wife, Sibi Blazic. And 2,200 miles away from Los Angeles, I caught the movie at the Kingsway Theater on Bloor Avenue in Toronto, Canada, and began to make a connection with the young actor from
Empire of the Sun
.

As fate would have it,
Newsies
ended up being important to the movie universe. In a couple years following its theatrical release,
Newsies
would thrive as a huge hit on video thanks to an army of Baleheads and Christian's well-orchestrated Internet marketing campaigns. It was the beginning of Christian's rule over the Internet.

Director Kenny Ortega, bitterly disappointed by
Newsies'
original box office failure, would begin to get fan mail from people
who loved
Newsies
. One young fan in San Francisco even changed his name to Jack Kelly and started a very popular fan site. In fact, Christian and Ortega received letters from fans around the world who had gotten their high school theater departments or glee clubs to perform numbers from
Newsies
. In 2006, Kenny Ortega would return to the genre and direct all three
High School Musical
TV movies for Disney, launching the careers of a new generation of Disney stars, including Vanessa Hudgens and Zac Efron.

The success of the
High School Musical
movies was one of the influences of the hit 2009 TV series
Glee
. In 2010, Disney quietly registered a bunch of Internet domain names, subtly revealing that they were about to adapt
Newsies
into a Broadway musical. On March 3, 2010, Disney registered newsiesbroadway.com, newsiesmusical.com, newsiesontour.com, newsiesthemusical.com, and newsiestickets.com. Then, on September 15, 2011,
Newsies
opened onstage at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey—a key theater to beta test Broadway-bound productions—to rave reviews. Newsies opened on Broadway on March 15, 2012, at the Nederlander Theatre. Amazingly, one of Disney's biggest bombs is still popular twenty years later. Not bad for a movie that is OFR!

By the way, Zac Efron's first major pre-
High School Musical
role was in the 2004 TV series
Summerland
, in which his character's name was . . . Cameron Bale.

Christian and I sitting around the pool, making plans for world domination!

I
f you want to be a movie star in Hollywood, you have to be “box office.”

It's that simple. That's not cold and that's not cruel, it's just the bottom line. Hollywood is in the business of making money, so stars are the actors who sell movie tickets, drum up movie rentals or downloads, and move DVDs—that's how they are “box office.”

If you ask an agent or a producer, who's the best actor in Hollywood, they're going to go by the actor's box office appeal. In an
artistic and creative world like moviemaking, you might measure an actor's skill by his awards or reviews, but the bean counters go by grosses.

This is the age-old argument about
quantity
versus
quality, movie star
versus
actor
. Ask yourself, what's the best food in the world? Judging by quantity, one could argue that the Big Mac must be the best food in the world. A professional chef in Paris will, of course, gag in his sauce pan, but by sheer quantity, McDonald's has that worldwide “box office” clout that no other restaurant has.

Now ask yourself, who's the best living actor in the world? If you go by grosses, it's arguably Harrison Ford, a movie star who has yet to win an Oscar. His name alone could guarantee that a movie opens at number one at the box office. Will Smith's name could also guarantee a number-one opening, though he, too, has yet to win an Oscar.

So for an up-and-coming actor, the goals are the same. You need to do good work that attracts an audience. And you need to demonstrate to the studios and producers that
your
name in the credits makes them money. If you can attract a large worldwide audience, all the better. No surprise, then, that action movies are the studio's favorites because they translate well worldwide.

When the
Transformer
movies became huge box office hits, you could see the jockeying between the major parties for credit. Was a
Transformer
movie a hit because of director Michael Bay? Because of up-and-coming Shia LaBeouf? Or because of new hottie on the block Megan Fox? As Bay reminded a reporter: “Shia LaBeouf wasn't a big movie star before he did
Transformers
. Nobody in the world knew about Megan Fox until I found her and put her in
Transformers.”

Acting awards are nice trophies for the actor but the studios really don't care about an award unless it helps grosses. Obviously not having an Oscar didn't hurt
Transformers
! But you can
bet that career-minded actors will keep alternating their action franchises with films that showcase their acting for an Oscar win. Christian won his Oscar for
The Fighter
, not
Batman
!