SUMMER STARS

It happens every year. Certain summer films give certain actors a chance to bloom. But what happens once the warm weather ends? We checked in on a decade’s worth of summer stars to see what’s happened since.

1979: CHRISTOPHER MAKEPEACE IN ‘MEATBALLS’

The young Canadian got his acting start as the lonely 14-year-old camper who strikes up a friendship with counselor Bill Murray in the sweet-natured comedy “Meatballs.”

“It got my foot in the door,” said Makepeace, who went on, the following summer, to play the new kid at school who’s victimized by tough guy Matt Dillon in “My Bodyguard.” Afterward he and Dillon were targeted by the heartthrob-hungry teen magazines. “There’s a certain amount of respectability I had to build up,” he said. “So I kept a low profile, and after awhile they stopped bothering me. Matt would take his T-shirt off and pose.”

Makepeace, 21, is finding it difficult to make the transition from wimp to romantic lead. “I thought I should just do roles that would display me as a leading man and people would realize that’s what I wanted.”

“I was in the running for ‘Karate Kid,’ but I pulled myself out because the role was so similar to ‘My Bodyguard.’ I’ve turned down tons of stereotypical sex-romp teen movies.”

Instead, its been ‘The Last Chase,” “Mazes and Monsters,” and “Mysterious Stranger” for TV, “Falcon and the Snowman,” the Disney Channel’s “Undergrads” and “Vamp.”

In “Vamp,” he’s one of the college students who hire a stripper (Grace Jones) who turns out to be a vampire. “Normally I’d not be associated with a horror film, but my character gets to grow up and take control of the situation. I’ve got to take a risk every now and then. Hopefully it will pay off.”

Two risks didn’t: “Oasis,” about people struggling for survival after a plane crash in the desert, is still on the shelf; “Hanauma Bay,” a youth film set in 1959 Hawaii, “is basically incomplete.”

“In a way, ‘Hanauma Bay’ was a curse. I didn’t work for more than a year after I finished shooting it. I moved to Los Angeles for six months to try to rustle up some work. As soon as I moved back to Toronto, I got ‘Vamp.’ ”