Alec Baldwin: A Star Emerges : Small roles in big films lead to top billing in ‘Red October’

As Alec Baldwin explains it, his has been a “blink-and-you’ve-missed-him” movie career.

Take, for example, his small but juicy role last year as Michelle Pfeiffer’s husband, Frankie (The Cucumber) DeMarco, in Jonathen Demme’s “Married to the Mob.” The critics thought he was great--that is, if they overlooked the fact that he died in the first 15 minutes.

“I can’t tell you how many friends of mine who went to see the movie said, ‘God, I couldn’t find a place to park. And then I sat down and the next thing there’s a priest standing over your coffin,’ ” says the 31-year-old actor, sighing audibly.

Or consider the pronouncements of the reporter who interviewed him in Memphis last winter while he was playing the young Jimmy Swaggart in “Great Balls of Fire.”

“So this guy says to me, ‘I think this is really fabulous how you seemed to have just sort of accepted this niche for yourself doing the small roles in films. Do you think you’re going to be able to maintain a career this way? Do you see yourself as a young Paul Henreid?’ ”

Baldwin takes a moment to consider a lifetime of playing the cuckolded “Casablanca” sidekick to Rick and Ilsa. Or, in his particular case, the friend, or the boyfriend, or the husband of the stars, from brooding bad guy (Kevin Bacon’s friend in “She’s Having a Baby”) to friendly ghost (Geena Davis’ dead husband in “Beetlejuice”), from square guy (Dennis Quaid’s preachy cousin in “Great Balls of Fire”) to tough guy (Michelle Pfeiffer’s hit-on hit man/husband in “Married to the Mob”), from yuppie-of-the-year (Eric Bogosian’s power-playing producer in “Talk Radio”) to sleaze-for-a-day (Melanie Griffith’s blue-collar boyfriend in “Working Girl”).

No wonder his ice-blue eyes suddenly reflect real fear.

“You know,” he says in a husky voice that’s perfectly suited to a leading man’s love scenes, “for a long time it didn’t bother me. You get offered work, and you could do the lead in a movie, but it’s a lesser movie. So I have just opted to do the smaller role in the better film. Because when a good script comes down the pike, you can’t believe the competition to do those leads. I mean, I would read a script and I’ll say it’s absolutely marvelous and I’ll do this movie for free.

“And then I’m told that Dustin Hoffman, Robin Williams, Kevin Costner, Dennis Quaid, Mel Gibson, Michael J. Fox, and Sean Penn have all seen it, too. And it’s, like, everybody’s being considered for this screenplay and all of them will do it.”

Or, at least that’s the way it was. Because Baldwin has just wrapped his first Leading Man role in a Major Motion Picture, with all the perks that Paramount can provide this New Yorker, including billing equal to Sean Connery’s and a charming Hollywood Hills home the studio found for him during shooting. But that’s to be expected because Baldwin, as CIA analyst Jack Ryan, is the undisputed hero of the John McTiernan-directed film, “The Hunt for Red October,” based on Tom Clancy’s pre- glasnost best-selling novel and set for release in March.

The film’s producer, Mace Neufeld, is used to working with above-the-title virgins such as Baldwin; after all, it was Neufeld who gave Kevin Costner his big break in “No Way Out.” “And I would love to take credit for discovering Alec for this role. But, actually, Paramount brought him to McTiernan’s and my attention quite early in the game,” Neufeld explains.

Indeed, finding and then keeping the “next” Kevin Costner is one of the most challenging tasks facing studios today. After all, Paramount may have been the first to showcase Costner in “The Untouchables” (Orion’s “No Way Out” was filmed earlier but released later to take advantage, Neufeld says, of the Paramount publicity machine), but it is Orion that recently signed him to a multipicture deal.

And without the old “star system” in place to develop leading men with budding careers, it’s left to the executives to pick through what’s out there and find one or two seedlings who will ripen nicely over time. “Paramount particularly takes that position,” says Neufeld. “They like to build a star and then protect him. In this particular case, we have Connery and such a terrific ensemble cast (Scott Glenn, James Earl Jones, Sam Neill, Richard Jordan) that it becomes a perfect slot to make a star out of an actor.” It was Gary Lucchesi, president of production for Paramount’s Motion Picture Group, who lined up Baldwin as the first actor in place on the film. “I’d seen Alec in ‘Working Girl’ and ‘Married to the Mob,’ and I thought he was terrific. Sure, if we were casting a role for a man in his 40s, those superstars have already been discovered. But there is always an opportunity with a younger role to follow your instinct and to bet on someone’s abilities. So it didn’t scare me at all to cast a wonderful young actor like Alec to play a lead if he’s really appropriate. And he seemed completely right for the ‘Red October’ part.”

Still, Lucchesi didn’t have that much to lose. The studio already had a well-known novel that had sold 5 million copies, a star that was a state-of-the-art nuclear submarine, plus a director still riding the critical excitement over “Die Hard,” in which Bruce Willis played second fiddle to a building.

Finding a studio nod already in place for Baldwin, when most producers usually have to fight for a relative newcomer, Neufeld naturally went along for the ride. “I even had sort of a deja vu with respect to my first meeting with Kevin. I just had this instinct that with the right part he was going to be a major star.”

Neufeld talks about Baldwin like a shiny new piece of machinery bought especially from the star-making factory. “He has all of the equipment to be a very big male leading man. He’s good-looking without being pretty. He’s very facile with dialogue. He’s very analytical. He’s got great eyes. And, this occurred to me several times during the course of production, he’s got a very interesting voice. And most big stars are the subjects of Rich Little impersonations because they have a very distinctive vocal style.”

But can Baldwin compare with Costner? Sure, they’re both easy to work with, they both have a very natural style of acting, they both like to do their own stunts (Baldwin dangles from a helicopter cable in “Red October”) and they’re both drop-dead gorgeous.

But while Costner is more Gary Cooper, Baldwin is decidedly Tyrone Power, Neufeld assesses. “Kevin is very introspective and internalizes his performances. But Alec is more of an extrovert. And Alec is much more verbal. He has a terrific capacity to get a lot of dialogue out in a short time. Or, as they say, he has terrific chops.”

Indeed, Baldwin’s articulateness is almost intimidating in a business where major stars still do monosyllabic interviews. Baldwin, by contrast, is a born raconteur who will tell a story so completely that he even imitates the principal characters.

(“Ask him to do his Connery impression,” says an assistant director for “Red October.”)

(“No,” says another crew member, “ask him to do Helmut Newton.”)

So when you sit down on a down-filled couch next to Baldwin, a Frank Sinatra album playing gently in the background, you get the feeling that you are catching him at just the peak of freshness.

Because the truest sign that he’s a novice at the Leading Man game is the way he’s more than glad to tell a story at a studio’s or a director’s expense.

In other words, he’s not famous enough for circumspection to have set in--yet.

For instance, he rails against “She’s Having a Baby” for leaving his pivotal scenes on the cutting room floor--from sexy stuff in which Baldwin seduces Elizabeth McGovern to raw emotion when Baldwin finds out McGovern is pregnant. “These were some of the best scenes I ever did in my life, and I had this great speech, and then Kevin picks me up and throws me through a china closet. But all this stuff was cut. Because they tested the movie and audiences hated Elizabeth’s character because she had slept with me. So they had to make it simple.”

He pauses, remembering the pain he felt when he got the news that “hey, you’re out.”

“I was outraged and indignant. But what are my options?”

He also rages about “Great Balls of Fire,” saying nobody truly wanted his character’s infusion of conscience to mess up the upbeat story line about Jerry Lee Lewis’ troubled life. “No, the attitude was, ‘This guy is an alcoholic, drug-addicted maniac. But we’re going to make it work! ‘ “

And he assails “Beetlejuice” for giving him the biggest movie role he had played thus far, but then dropping the ball. “When Michael (Keaton) came in, he was great. Everything he did worked out far better than anybody had hoped. So the whole mentality of the movie became, ‘Well, let’s put every frame of Michael that we have on the screen.’ So I didn’t get to do what I wanted.

“But I was not in any position to start saying, ‘This is what I want to do or I’m outta here.’ I was just like going along and getting along with everyone.”

Still, he points to obvious pluses--like the experience of working for first-rate directors Mike Nichols, Oliver Stone, Jonathan Demme and Tim Burton. “I’ve been grateful for the connection I’ve had with the people that I’ve worked with in these smaller roles, even if you learn pretty quickly that you’re not the No. 1 priority here. Films are intense, and you don’t have time to be there for everybody all the time. And the director always reserves his special relationship for the person with the lead in the film. So you take what you can get.”

With that, Baldwin smiles broadly.

“Now I’m the one who has the director’s ear all the time, and I’ve benefited immensely from that.”

On the “Red October” set, outfitted in his Navy uniform, crouched in a corner of the elaborate high-tech sub interior and clutching a revolver, Baldwin looks every inch the Leading Man. But he admits that taking on the related responsibilities also means giving up some freedom. “I’ve actually had people say to me, ‘Are you afraid you can’t carry a movie?’ But,” he says, almost wistfully after a long, long , shooting schedule, “it’s nice to come and punch the clock and just get a couple of scenes in and then leave.”

And that meant a change in acting method for Baldwin: Less chameleon, more Alec. Neufeld again compares Baldwin to Costner. “Kevin has a very specific style as an actor, even though he varies his performances. That’s what we call star quality. But Alec up to this point has always played a role, so he took his performances from the characters he was playing and sort of dug into them by doing a dialect or affecting a swagger. Now I guess it’s more of Alec’s own personality that’s coming through in playing Jack Ryan.”

But Ryan, unlike Baldwin’s other roles, is the quintessential “white-bread” straight-as-an-arrow hero in a classic tale of East-West espionage. The story in “The Hunt for Red October” centers on a Soviet nuclear submarine captain who wants to defect, submarine and all. Both the Soviets and the U.S. military chiefs race to get hold of the submarine first, and Ryan plots the Pentagon’s quest.

“I have a tremendous fear,” confesses Baldwin, “that people are going to watch this and go, ‘He’s boring as hell.’ But then again the character is not the movie.”

The last time Baldwin played a boring character was three decades ago when he was a “five-towns” kid growing up in Long Island. Born in Amityville, N.Y., and raised in Massapequa, the son of a schoolteacher and a housewife, and the eldest of six kids, Baldwin by birthright should have been an accountant or pharmacist. Instead, he felt like there had been some birth certificate mix-up, that he should be “taking an oath of office or standing on the deck of a ship about to attack the Spanish fleet.” So he took up acting.

After studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and attending New York University, Baldwin launched a career that reflects what has become the star system of today--starting out in soap operas (“The Doctors”), then working as a TV series regular (CBS’ “Knots Landing”), landing the lead in a mini-series (CBS’ “Dress Gray”).

In Los Angeles, he had an agent, a manager, a publicist and a hot TV name. No, make it sizzling TV name. “And I would sit in rooms and listen to people saying, ‘My hair is singed from the heat on you. You’re so hot I have to wear an asbestos suit around you.’ And they told me how much they wanted me to feel I had a home at fill-in-the-blank studio or network. And then I actually had somebody at the network say to me, and I’ll never forget this, that ‘We want you to be the next Bill Bixby.’

“And not to put anyone down, but what I really wanted was to get into movies because that’s where the work was being done that was most interesting to me, other than the theater. But when it came time to get down to what it was I was going to do, the projects were less than I desired. And that’s when I realized that if I continued to live in Los Angeles, I would fold.

“Because how often can you say no to $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 a week in a TV series? It was like getting sucked into the Bermuda Triangle. So I said I’m not confident enough in my ability to fight that off, and the answer for me is to leave.”

He moved back to New York. Three weeks later, “as a gift from God,” he was cast as the lead in the 1986 Broadway revival of Joe Orton’s black farce “Loot,” which earned him a Theatre World Award. He followed it by playing the ruthless power broker in the short-lived Caryl Churchill play “Serious Money,” produced by Joseph Papp. And then he began to get offered small roles in big movies because now he was a serious actor.

He still lives in New York, in a Manhattan townhouse decorated with Persian rugs and Mission furniture, and in a three-bedroom beach house in isolated Amagansett, Long Island. It’s typical of Baldwin’s perversity that just as the press was starting to play up his persona as Hollywood’s latest hunk, he agreed to play the randy, bald author Henry Miller with a shaved head in Philip Kaufman’s much-awaited film biography. (Baldwin backed out of the project last week, apparently to pursue other projects coming his way.)

Or that, just as he’s about to be identified as a hero in “Red October,” he stars as a convict in the Jonathan Demme-producedfilm “Miami Blues,” with Fred Ward and Jennifer Jason Leigh, which will be released this fall.

Meanwhile, Baldwin admits his current “fantasy” is that “Red October” is a big enough hit to merit sequel I, II, III and IV. Not just because he wants to play the Ryan character again “to see him much more adept at what he does.” But because “then I can sit there and say, ‘Well, I’ve gotten that leading man thing out of the way’ so now when I go and meet people there’s not that fear of it and they will offer me things and there won’t be any barrier and I won’t have to wait in line for actors A, B and C to say no to a project.”

Still, there’s nothing like on-the-job training when it comes to understanding the power of a star. Like the time during “Red October’s” filming that Baldwin and Connery had a scene together, and Baldwin’s character is handling a gun for the first time in years.

“I was told by McTiernan, ‘I want you to really play this moment, and to think about how did this happen to you and how did you get here.’ So I do a take and John immediately yells, ‘Cut!’

“ ‘You’re too confident. You’re too comfortable with the gun,’ he tells me. And then with Sean standing there, John whispers, ‘It’s not you-know-who.’ He never actually said the name James Bond because I guess we just knew that was some ghost of Sean’s. But it was very funny. We never said the B-word with Sean around.”

Now that , Baldwin learned, is what it’s really like being a Leading Man.