Movieline

- Joshua Mooney

Scott Caan, son of tough guy movie stud James Caan, grew up with his macho dad's ambivalent attitude towards acting. "When I was a kid, I used to hear how all actors were like, quote,. 'fags, sissies', whatever - always crying about this or that," the 24-year-old actor says. "But most of the actors I meet are just good guys, doing their thing. They're cool cats."

The younger Caan looks a hell of a lot like the old man, and he'd go the same cocky charisma his dad showed as The Godfather's Sonny Corleone. He's been honing his Hollywood profile with sharp turns in a range of films, from Tony Scott's thriller Enemy of the State to the teen jock hit Varsity Blues (in which he so memorably walked down the road buck naked with a cowboy hat covering the family jewels), and he's got two films coming out that could nudge him from supporting to lead roles. First he costars with Giovanni Ribisi and Ben Affleck in Boiler Room, a sort of millennium Wall Street tale of young men getting sucked into illegal underground stock selling. Then, in Gone in 60 Seconds, he hooks up with Ribisi again, along with Nicolas Cage and Robert Duvall, for an action drama about car thieves.

The senior Caan's advice to his son - "he told me to stick to baseball and play shortstop for the Yankees" - and seems to have been way of the mark, especially since Caan has struck gold as an actor and as a screenwriter. He's sold his first script, Chasing The Party, to megaproducer Jerry Bruckheimer for half a million dollars. It's a comedy about two guys desperate to get into Hugh Hefner's biggest party ever at the Playboy Mansion - familiar turf or the son of party-hound James. "My dad used to go to Hef's a lot - so who better to write this than me, right?" During Caan's formative years, in fact, his dad was as well known a bar brawler and womanizer as he as an actor. The younger Caan looked like he might be headed down the same path after an arrest for a bar fight in 1998, but these days he's a committed professional. "I've been working so much, I've become antisocial, I don't like to drink or do drugs. Now that I write, my high is sitting at my computer. I'm trying to get where I want to be careerwise. I'll have fun later"

© Movieline