career until his lack of height (he’s 5'9") forced him to reset
his goals. He began to act again in the early 1960s but with-
out much success, until the latter part of the decade when he
began to receive favorable reviews in films such as The Inci-
dent (1967), For Love of Ivy (1968), Gaily, Gaily (1969), and
The Landlord (1970). Winsome and convincing, the actor dis-
played a youthful vulnerability in these films, but despite
good notices, few were successful at the box office. Although
he appeared in fine movies such as Lovin’ Molly (1974), he was
soon being cast in supporting roles in vehicles for other stars,
most notably for Richard Pryor in Greased Lightning (1977),
Dick Van Dyke in The Runner Stumbles (1979), and Sally
Field in Norma Rae (1979).
During the 1980s, he often appeared in TV movies as
well as in feature films. He can be seen in movies such as Love
Child (1982), Heart Like a Wheel (1983), and The Hotel New
Hampshire (1984), to name just a few. Beau Bridges played
Nixon in Kissinger and Nixon, winning an Emmy Award in
1996 for his performance. Among his other television
appearances were Without Warning: The James Brady Story
(1991) and the CBS television series The Agency (2001–03), in
which he played the director of the CIA. He has won three
Emmy Awards and two Golden Globes.
Meanwhile, Beau’s younger brother, Jeff, has had an elec-
tric career that began almost from his first performance.
After his film debut in Halls of Anger (1970) at the age of 21,
the taller and more rugged looking Bridges boy gained
national recognition in Peter Bogdanovich’s sleeper hit, The
Last Picture Show (1971). Nominated for a Best Supporting
Actor Academy Award for his performance in that film as a
charming bad boy, he continued to enhance his likable wise-
guy image for a good many years to follow.
Although not all of Jeff’s subsequent movies were hits, a
surprisingly large number of them were favorably received
and had cult followings, among them John Huston’s Fat City
(1972), The Last American Hero (1973), Rancho Deluxe (1975),
and Hearts of the West (1975).
Jeff Bridges is a strong actor who proved that he could
hold his own with Clint Eastwood in Thunderbolt and Light-
foot (1975). His reputation as an actor and as a potential major
star were such that he was later given the lead role in the ill-
advised remake of King Kong (1976). He survived that deba-
cle and went on to solidify his acting credentials in films such
as Stay Hungry (1976), Somebody Killed Her Husband (1978),
and Winter Kills (1979). Then he appeared in yet another dis-
aster, Heaven’s Gate (1980), but that bomb didn’t destroy his
career either. Several years of flops during the early 1980s,
however, nearly did the trick. Cutter and Bone (1981), Kiss Me
Goodbye (1982), The Last Unicorn (1982), Tron (1982), and
Against All Odds (1984) were all box office duds. It wasn’t
until he gave a charming and effective performance in the sci-
ence fiction/comedy hit Starman (1984) that his career began
to soar again.
In more recent years, he has been in several critical
and/or box-office winners such as Jagged Edge (1985),
The
Mor
ning After (1986), Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: A Man
and His Dreams (1988), and The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989),
with brother Beau. During the 1990s, Jeff Bridges appeared
in several films, the most notable of which were The Fisher
King (1991), the American remake of The Vanishing (1993),
Blown Away (1994) with his father, Walter Hill’s western Wild
Bill (1995), Ridley Scott’s sea adventure White Squall (1996),
the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski (1997), and the political-
paranoia thriller Arlington Road (1999). In 2000 Jeff Bridges
earned an Oscar nomination for his role in The Contender,
plying the president of the United States. This was followed
in 2001 by Ian Softley’s peculiar alien visitation film, K-PAX,
and a galloping good performance in Seabiscuit (2003).
Broadway The relationship between the American the-
ater and Hollywood goes back much further than the much-
ballyhooed talent raids made on the stage with the advent of
the talkies. Since the mid-1910s, the American theater—par-
ticularly Broadway plays and (later) musicals—has been a sig-
nificant source of story material, writers, directors,
producers, and actors for the movies.
Originally, during the years of the nickelodeons, the
legitimate theater and the movie industry had little in com-
mon. Plays had rather complex plots and were geared toward
an educated, affluent audience. Movies that were no longer
than two reels in length were limited in their storytelling
ability and appealed to the poorer masses who couldn’t afford
the price of admission to a play. This division between the
theater and the movies was changed forever when
ADOLPH
ZUKOR
bought the rights to show the French production of
the filmed play Queen Elizabeth (1912), starring the renowned
Sarah Bernhardt. He premiered the movie in Broadway’s
Lyceum Theater and made a fortune. His movie company,
Famous Players, with the motto “Famous Players in Famous
Plays,” began the successful Hollywood onslaught into the
domain of the legitimate theater.
Feature-length motion pictures that told intricate stories
competed directly with the theater. Their lower admission
price was a considerable advantage. Theater road shows were
severely affected by the new competition as large, new movie
theaters (as opposed to nickelodeons) and ornate movie
palaces were built across the country. Robert McLaughlin
reports in his book Broadway and Hollywood that in 1912 there
were 205 road-show companies on tour in the United States.
By 1918, that number had dropped to 41, and by the mid-
1930s, the figure fell to an average of 20 road shows, a num-
ber that has remained relatively constant up to the present.
Producing plays without a guarantee of significant road-
show income made the financing of plays a good deal more
difficult. Enter the motion picture companies, which realized
that Broadway was no longer their competition but a rela-
tively inexpensive proving ground for future film stories and
talent. During the 1910s and 1920s, a great many hit plays
were purchased and filmed with reasonably good box-office
results, and stage stars such as the Barrymore clan were lured
to the coast in great abundance. To be on the inside track of
new plays and new stars, film studios had representatives at
opening-night performances of virtually every major (and
most minor) Broadway plays. By the early 1920s, many stu-
dios began to put up their own money to produce plays in
BROADWAY
58