<i>Platoon</i> in 1986 was Charlie Sheen's high point and it drew a line between his and his father's work.
<i>Platoon</i> in 1986 was Charlie Sheen's high point and it drew a line between his and his father's work.
Remember when Charlie was great? Jonathan Bernstein looks back.
Charlie Sheen has led a charmed life. Until now. The actor whose name has for so long been synonymous with unapologetic excess and debauchery appeared earlier this week on America's Today show and admitted to being HIV-positive. He made the confession in order to end blackmail attempts that, he claims, have cost him tens of millions of dollars.
Viewed uncharitably, it might seem as if Sheen's status is a cautionary end to the story of a privileged Hollywood scion whose atrocious behaviour was rewarded and encouraged by the entertainment industry, the media, and a rabid fan base who regarded his lifestyle as aspirational.
But there's another way to view Charlie Sheen's decline. What if the past few tumultuous decades have been an extended howl of frustration? What if the cheerfully hedonistic persona that won him his greatest fame and made him, at his 2010 peak, the highest paid actor on television, also destroyed any chances of him ever becoming the sort of actor he wanted to be, and once, briefly, was?
"How does ... Francis Ford Coppola, one of the greatest directors of our time, see Keanu Reeves's work and say, 'That's what I want in my movie'? How does Bertolucci see that and say, 'That's my guy,' and I don't get a shot at that? Oh, and Leo DiCaprio with his Oscar nomination and all his ... James Dean bullshit? Shit, some of these punks got no f****** respect."
This was a voluble Charlie Sheen interviewed in 1994, wrestling with an uncomfortable reality: a decade into his career, his best days were behind him. He was already being shoved aside to choke on the dust of an undeserving new generation of callow pretty boys.
Even though his 80s were peppered with the commercially viable likes of Major League and Young Guns, not to mention memorable roles in the teen-aimed Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Red Dawn, and Lucas, only two movies matter to Charlie Sheen.
In 1986, Oliver Stone selected him to play the pivotal role in Platoon. For Sheen, whose first on-set experience was accompanying his father to the Philippines for part of the filming of Apocalypse Now, starring in Stone's Vietnam movie drew a generational line between the two actors.
Sheen's first on-set experience was accompanying his father Martin to the Philippines for part of the filming of <i>Apocalypse Now</i>.
Reunited with Stone in 1987's mirror of the times, Wall Street, Sheen played a naive stock trader seduced and corrupted by Michael Douglas's demonic Gordon Gekko.
When Oliver Stone stopped calling, the quality of movie work offered to Sheen took a drastic dip. Audiences were less interested in duds like Navy Seals and Men At Work than they were in his real-life escapades. America's hungrily devoured supermarket gossip tabloids were endlessly fascinated by Sheen's revolving door of wives, girlfriends and porn stars. They were all agog at his on-set hookups, his car wrecks and epic benders.
In 1991, a year after a month-long stint in rehab, the actor displayed awareness of the reality that no one was taking him seriously anymore by signing up to star in Hotshots, a Top Gun spoof by Flying High co-creator Jim Abrahams. The movie was successful enough to spawn Hotshots Part Deux (co-starring Jon Cryer who would go on to serve time with Sheen on Two And A Half Men). Once again, his follow-up movies were overshadowed by the events in his real-life.
In 1995, he testified in the trial of Hollywood madam, Heidi Fleiss, admitting to spending over US$50,000 on the services of some 27 prostitutes. Sheen's post-trial demeanour was candid and unrepentant. He was a wealthy celebrity who made movies to finance his sybaritic lifestyle and he wasn't hiding the fact.
If anything, he had become a Brat Pack Dean Martin, a performer defined by his persona. A seven-year black hole of projects seen by few and loved by less ended with Michael J. Fox's illness.
Fox was unable to cope with the rigours of producing and starring in his long-running sitcom Spin City, while medicating for Parkinson's disease. In 2000, Sheen was lined up to replace Fox. Viewers were familiar with the boozy, brawling train wreck tabloid mainstay but Sheen possessed the attributes that make an actor into an acceptable mainstream sitcom star. He was likeable, relatable and familiar. Spin City lasted two more seasons but Sheen was suddenly perceived as a hot small screen property.
Sheen with his <i>Two And A Half Men</i> co-stars.
Two And A Half Men, which debuted in 2003, was a buddy comedy, drawing laughs from the disparate lives and attitudes of mismatched siblings, Alan (Jon Cryer) the uptight one, and Charlie, the opposite of the uptight one. The show, created by Chuck Lorre, the man who might be network TV's last sitcom tycoon, was an enormous and immediate hit. It was also rancid, misogynistic, obvious and unfunny. Few were more aware of this than Sheen.
Spending eight years and 22 episodes a season playing a boozing, commitment-phobic scumbag rammed home to Sheen how he was perceived, and how far he had drifted.
There's a case to be made for Charlie Sheen as an underrated actor, but it's not much of a case. What he had was a kind of self-aware charm and, by the end of his run on Two And A Half Men, at which point he was being paid US$1.8 million ($2.8 million) per episode, that charm had almost entirely dissipated. When he was fired from the show in 2011 after three failed rehab attempts, his gleefully unhinged salvos of hatred aimed at Chuck Lorre, the "AA Nazis" at Warner Brothers, and his hapless co-star Cryer, elevated Sheen into a demented legend.
The increasingly deranged star was rewarded with endless media coverage, with concert promoters vying to offer him the fattest cheque for an unrehearsed, ill-defined live tour (the one event for which Sheen admits shame), and with networks racing to sign him up for another show.
The otherwise prestigious FX cable channel won his services for the Anger Management sitcom. A sizeable, curious audience tuned in with sufficient regularity to maroon Sheen in another poorly-written, horribly-acted, jokeless excuse for a show that he quickly found he hated.
Charlie Sheen says his hedonistic days are behind him but the media may not let him clean up his act so easily. Photo / AP
"My partying days are behind me. My philanthropic days are ahead of me." So said Charlie Sheen this week in a statement accompanying his HIV disclosure. Could this be true? Could the consequences of a reckless, thoughtless life finally give Sheen a long-awaited wake-up call? Doubtful. Publishers and producers are probably right this very second adding endless zeroes to enormous cheques in order to win the rights to tell his story. Once again, Charlie Sheen seems likely to end up, to use his most overused word, winning. And, once again, he'll find some way to screw it up.
