Hugh Hamilton

Shot this back in May for the NY Times. For some reason it didn't get published until December 26th...boxing day for those of you who speak my language. He was really not a comfortable subject. The wall of pictures from his films he grouched that it was his wife's idea and he really didn't like sitting there.

There's a great BBC documentary series about Hollywood whose first episode is entitled The Actor. It looks at the careers of both James Caan and Arnold Schwartzenegger from the mid seventies until the mid nineties....Caan begins with the world in his grasp, an Oscar for The Godfather...nothing but offers left right and center. Arnold is this mumbling over muscled Austrian whose agent loudly proclaims (they actually have the footage!) "We're going to make Arnold the biggest movie star in the world!" Cut to twenty years later and there it is. James Caan has made bad choice after bad choice and can only get work in indie films and Arnold is, yes, the biggest movie star in the world. At the time, in the late nineties, he could have made Hamlet if he wanted to. Thankfully James Caan has made it back to respectability now and hopefully we haven't seen the last of his fine, fine talent.