Steve Guttenberg and the Fall of the Good Guys

We watched “It Takes Two,” the other night—the 1995 feature film starring the Olsen Twins. One of the great things about writing an anonymous newsletter is that I can say things like “I watched ‘It Takes Two’ this week” and there’s nothing you people can do about it. What are you going to do? Come to my work and make fun of me? You have no idea even what zip code I live in. And what would you do anyway—embarrass me by telling my wife about it? Buddy, she watched it with me. Sometimes these things happen: You’re tired, you just want something to sort of mollify your neural synapses for an hour before bed, so you pick “It Takes Two” because it’s there. It’s not the end of the world, even if it’s the end of a little bit of your dignity. I mean it’s not like you were going to read Chaucer instead, right? Or cure cancer? Be realistic here.

“It Takes Two” is not a great movie nor even a mostly good one, even on its own shallow merits, but it does serve as a sort of surprising anthropological artifact by dint of its leading man, Steve Guttenberg. The depiction of his character, Roger Callaway, is faintly unbelievable: He’s sort of a regular dude, but he made a billion dollars in the early cell phone economy, and now he lives kind of like an English baron, with multiple massive summer houses and an impeccable head butler and a huge staff of formally dressed attendants everywhere. He’s presented as this rather affable American businessman and yet his lifestyle is completely at odds with that image. It’s honestly not clear why he’s depicted as living in this comically opulent way; he doesn’t seem to get anything out of it.

The fulcrum of the movie pivots on his impending marriage to a shallow, gold-digging socialite named Clarice. Her greed and ill intent are cartoonishly obvious. It’s again unclear what exactly we’re supposed to think of this man, who’s apparently smart enough to manage a tech empire and amiable enough to be Mary-Kate’s dad but stupid and facile enough to fall in love with a woman who plainly only wants him for his summer houses.

The film doesn’t resolve any of these tensions and never tries to. It was like that a lot in 90s kid’s movies, where filmmakers often kind of cobbled together a rough list of tropes without worrying about whether any of it gelled in any way. But it still, surprisingly, sort of works. You kind of buy it. And that’s mostly on the merits of Steve Guttenberg himself, whose own workaday geniality comes through regardless. You can forgive a lot of subtractions in a movie if your lead guy is likable enough.

I wrote last month that there are no more Arnold Schwarzeneggers: The high-octane, ass-kicking, prime-target movie stars who were household names at a time when households still had names. But there aren’t really any more Steve Guttenbergs either, are there? This is an odd thing. The film economy today just doesn’t promote very many so-so average actors, guys in modest command of their craft who put in the work and make a few million bucks and enjoy some years of prestige before receding into the background noise. Not very long ago you could think of a half dozen of these guys without trying: Guttenberg, say, or James Cromwell, or Gary Sinise, Danny Glover, Ray Walston, Christopher Lloyd. You can name these guys now but you could also name them then, they were known factors, people at the center of a respectable little sub-industry of the film world who you could generally rely on for a decent evening at the theater or on television. People liked Steve Guttenberg. His films have made well over a billion dollars combined. I know that’s hard to believe but when you’re a decent actor you can really draw people in.

I just don’t even know who you’d put in this category anymore. Who are those guys today? If they’re there at all then it’s mostly the same people who have been working for the past 30 or 40 years. Name one that wasn’t around when Steve Guttenberg was doing his thing. That entire thespian demographic has kind of vanished. I don’t think they even make movies like “It Takes Two” any longer—I mean, mid-budget comedies featuring established stars, basic premises, low stakes, reasonable expectations of return. Filmmakers are too stupidly aspirational these days, too driven by concerns of social media gifs and prestige reviews on second-tier content sites. In the comedy sector, say, you either get “Cocaine Bear,” a movie about a bear who snorts cocaine and turns into a killing machine, or “When You Finish Saving the World,” a bummer dramedy about a mother and son struggling to understand each other or whatever. Maybe you get a remake of a 1980s comedy movie and maybe Seth Rogen puts out another cartoon for adults. That’s basically it. And nobody in these movies is really recognizable in that familiar sort of way that middling movie stars used to be.

I suppose there’s just no more room in film for that kind of gentle ambiguity anymore—that class of actors who you might describe as Good Guys, familiar names and faces in a sort of secondary orbit at the movie theater, not the greatest actors but perfectly good ones who get the job done without offending anyone and who can be depended on in a pinch. Filmgoers do not want that. They just want to watch movies they’ve already seen on Netflix and maybe catch the occasional new dreck about a cocaine bear. And since all the traditional A-list leading men are gone too, we’re left with more or less nothing at either end, a cinematic landscape devoid of familiarity and devoid of most everything else either. Steve Guttenberg is gone and nothing has replaced him and probably nothing ever will. Wait, Steve Guttenberg is not dead. He is still alive. But you know what I mean.