July 2001
When 22-year-old Josh Hartnett got a leading role in Michael Bay's $135 million war epic, Pearl Harbor, he also got a truckload of scrutiny - and advice - from Hollywood veterans. With the highest planned budget ever and a cast that includes Ben Affleck, Kate Beckinsale, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Alc Baldwin, the movie had blockbuster written all over it. Was this kid ready for the media onslaught? The hordes of screaming teens? Halfway around the world, on the Moroccan set of Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down, Bruce Handy found Hartnett confronting every actor's dream - and nightmare.
"It will change your life," his producer Jerry Bruckheimer told him last year while they were making the film Pearl Harbor. His director, Michael Bay, told him the same thing. So did his costar Ben Affleck. What they meant by "it" was: starring in a movie they hope is currently well on its way to becoming a worldwide blockbuster, a movie that will not only mint money but also latch onto the global consciousness with a death grip, dictating the dreams of ticket-buying mobs from Kansas City to Seoul to Carcas (though perhaps not Tokyo). A movie that will virtually overnight make an international movie star out of a comparative unknown - who, in this case, would be Josh Hartnett, a kid whose dark good looks are of the type usually referred to as brooding, and whose eyes, though squinty, can read on film as having profoundly soulful depths. Which is a true, inexplicable gift, like perfect pitch or the ability to multiply 13-figure sums in your head.
"It will change your life." The 22-year old actor heard these words again and again, which must have been annoying and daunting, and, of course, exhilerating. At the time, Hartnett had made a grand total of seven films, only four of which had then been released, dating back to 1998's Halloween: H20. His agreeable performances in that film - in which he gave a flirty spin to lines such as "Run!" - and in The Faculty, another teen horror movie released the same year, prompted Seventeen magazine to name him "the unofficial Hottie of Horror," despite the fact that he appeared in both pictures with a chunky bowl haircut out of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.. To audiences above the age of 25, he was arguably best known before Pearl Harbor for his role in The Virgin Suicides, the 1999 film in which his portrayal of the coolest, cockiest, sexiest kid in a suburban high school, not to mention the way he filled out in a red velvet tuxedo (the film was set in the 1970s) made him something of an arthouse pinup boy. The director, Sofia Coppola, even gave him a campy movie-star entrance, leaning him against a muscle car and slowly panning up from his black cowboy boots to his puka shells, orange-tinted aviators, and Bobby Sherman wig. On the soundtrack was Heart's "Magic Man". "We had to make him an icon," says Coppola, who likens the scene to a "bad commercial." The brilliance of Hartnett's performance was that he played the part as if he were playing a movie star, full of vanity and fear.
But there is stardom and then there is stardom. "What was it, the teenager movie he did?" is how Michael Bay - not the most politic of interview subjects - unintentionally sums up Hartnett's career to date. Bay was the director, previously, of such blockbusters such as Armageddon and The Rock, movies that look like good, slick, very expensive commercials. His Pearl Harbor is a wartime epic, as hokey as it is spectacular, with an original price tag of $135 million - the highest budgeted-for budget in movie history. It aims to be Titanic with Japanese Zeros taking the place of the iceberg: Hartnett's and Affleck's characters, childhood friends and fellow fighter pilots, are caught up in a tragic love triangle with a navy nurse played by the English actress Kate Beckinsale. The film, which also stars Cuba Gooding Jr. and Alec Baldwin, was released by Disney's Touchstone Pictures on Memorial Day weekend; if all goes according to plan, by the Fourth of July, Josh Hartnett will be a product-moving, culture-bridging heartthrob on the order of Leponardo DiCaprio, or thereabouts.
"I guarantee you this kid will be a movie star with this movie," Bay told me before its release. One should note that he had a vested interest in saying so, but also that if he didn't believe it to be true he wouldn't have hired Hartnett in the first place. According to one source, the actor tested higher with preview audiences - particularly girls - than any of his co-stars. Perhaps this is partly because in Pearl Harbor he finally has a decent haircut. Unfortunately, neither he nor the rest of the cast have much in the way of characters to play: more telegraphed than written, the romantic story line lacks even the pulpy energy that made Titanic work. But, when not overshadowed by the hunks of exploding battleship and fighter plane that continually fly toward the camera, Hartnett finds what humanity he can playing the part Ronald Reagan would have once played. He doesn't grab the audience so much as draw it in, a welcome pool of stillness amid the expert whizzing and smashing and flying apart.
"There's a sensitivity about him, and a nobility," says Jerry Bruckheimer, who doesn't do Hartnett any favors by likening him to a cross between Gary Cooper and Montgomery Clift. Some burden, that. "I kept telling him," the producer continues, "'When this movie comes out, it will change your life.' He said 'I know, I know.' But he doesn't really know. He has no idea what he's in for...There'll be girls and people wanting his autograph running after him. I remember once with Cruise" - Tom Cruise, who starred in Top Gun and Days of Thunder with Bruckheimer - "we went to a movie in Westwood, the two of us, and I'm telling you, there was a throng of people that were chasing him. It was unbelievable. I've never seen anything like it. We had to duck and hide in a parking lot. It gets scary. That's going to happen to Josh. He's going to be really sorry," Bruckheimer adds with refreshing honesty, given that he makes a living putting people in that position.
"I remember what the tidal wave of publicity that accompanied Good Will Hunting did to my life," writes Ben Affleck via E-mail. "Simply put, Josh will get very famous very quickly and runs the real risk of becoming a sort of one-man embodiment of the Backstreet Boys to hormone-crazed 15-year old girls from Minnetonka to Tarzana. He is particularly at risk for this as he is so very pretty. I suspect he'll find the prospect of this (as well as that of becoming a pinup in prison cells everywhere - which is, I'd say, the 'downside') somewhat overwhelming. It's great and heady, but a little weird to say the least.
For good or ill, hormone-crazed girls were in short supply this spring in Morocco, where Hartnett had gone to shoot Black Hawk Down for director Ridley Scott. Based on the book by the journalist Mark Bowden, the film will recount the 15-hour battle that took place in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 after several units of elite U.S. troops attempted to capture aides to a warlord who had run afoul of the U.N. Pinned down by militiamen, the Americans suffered 18 dead and more than 70 wounded; three American corpses were dragged through the city's dusty streets, images that were replayed endlessly on CNN. (Lest we forget, hundreds of Somalians were also killed). If the film is faithful to Bowden's gruesome, minute-by-minute account of the battle, it will be something like the 25-minute D-day dequence in Saving Private Ryan expanded to feature length and well-nigh unendurable. Bruckheimer is producing this one, too.
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