The “real risky” box office flop that saved Michael Keaton’s entire career
Michael Keaton‘s future as a Hollywood star was cemented between 1988 and 1989. This was, of course, when he played the two iconic characters he would become synonymous with forever in the eyes of moviegoers: Beetlejuice and Batman.
Prior to these megahits, though, the comedian-turned-actor’s career was in a fragile place after a succession of flops, and he worried that the industry had already turned its back on him.
Indeed, between the release of Mr Mom in 1983 and Beetlejuice in 1988, Keaton could scarcely buy a hit movie. Johnny Dangerously, a gangster comedy set in the 1930s, was a box office disappointment and was met with a critical shrug in ’84. To Keaton’s horror, he realised he was already on the back foot after only one flop, and his manager Harry Colomby told The Los Angeles Times, “Now there was a cloud hanging over [him]. He had to prove himself again.”
In ’85, Keaton reunited with Ron Howard, the man who made him a movie star in Nightshift, for Gung Ho, and it proved to be a modest hit. However, that was followed by Touch and Go, which fizzled, and The Squeeze, an unmitigated disaster. Colomby recalled that Fox, where Keaton had been signed to an almost exclusive contract, stopped fielding his phone calls, and when that contract expired, neither side was keen to renew it.
“Life is short in Hollywood,” Colomby admitted. “You’re either in a buy position or a sell position. Half a year ago, we were on the sell side.”
Conventional wisdom would dictate that Beetlejuice, which followed eight months after The Squeeze, saved Keaton’s career, and proved he still had the juice – pardon the pun – to be cast as the Caped Crusader in Tim Burton’s ’89 blockbuster. This is true, in some ways, but Beetlejuice isn’t actually the movie that Keaton believes truly rescued him in his time of need, and proved to Hollywood that he had the chops to do just about anything on screen.
Michael Keaton’s career turning point
Instead, that movie was Clean and Sober, a harrowing drama released less than five months after Beetlejuice. In this brilliant film, which sank at the box office but received the best reviews of Keaton’s career by far, the multi-talented star played Daryl Poynter, a self-destructive real estate agent who checks himself into a drug rehabilitation programme to escape the law and the bosses from whom he embezzled $92,000. Over time, Poynter is forced to admit that he is an addict in the throes of a debilitating dependence on drugs and alcohol.
Keaton initially turned down Clean and Sober, admitting, “I thought there was nothing redeemable about this guy. There was nothing likeable about him.”
However, he soon realised the huge opportunity he had been presented with to take a calculated risk and prove his worth to an industry that had already pigeon-holed him as a comedy star. It truly was a gamble at the time, too, because few actors known for comedy had been able to transition successfully to drama. Bill Murray even tried it in ’85 with The Razor’s Edge, but he experienced one of his biggest flops and a critical evisceration for his trouble.
Despite the fear of something similar happening to him, Keaton came to believe starring as Poynter was “real risky and absolutely right.” He figured there was no sense in continuing to do what the industry expected him to do. After all, that hadn’t been working for him either.
“At a time when I should have been playing it as safe as I possibly could, I said, ‘These parts are just what I want to do,'” Keaton noted. “What was my next movie going to be: another script that starts, ‘He’s young and handsome in an offbeat way?’ Two of those make me bored.”
Thankfully, Keaton’s risk paid off, and critics raved about his nuanced, heartbreaking turn in Clean and Sober. It showed there was more to him as a performer than many would have given him credit for, which set him up to become a celebrated star whose dramatic roles are often as beloved as his funny ones.
