Ever watch an old movie or TV show, maybe even one you’ve seen before, then suddenly sit up and point, “Oh my God! Look who it is!” I still get a thrill out of seeing what a star did before they were a star. But there is something even cooler than that. What about movies and TV shows that had a BUNCH of stars before they were stars?
They are in what I like to call “Rosetta Stone movies” or better put, easy ways to win the Kevin Bacon game.
I’m going to examine six movies/TV shows that fall into that category, one from each decade from the 1950s through the early 2000s. Each one just so happens to have an unusual amount of future star power.
In 1957 a little-known British noir action drama called Hell Drivers premiered. The movie is fun, essentially revolving around a group of truck drivers who bend to the will of their de-facto leader Red, that is until a new guy comes along daring to challenge the status quo. Fights ensue, so do cool truck stunts, and it has one of the best “you’re in my chair” scenes ever filmed.
While none of this is entirely unique for this small cult film, what is utterly amazing who’s in the cast. The leader of the pack C. ‘Red’ Redman, is played by none other than Patrick McGoohan, who would go onto international fame as both John Drake in the Danger Man (Secret Agent Man in the US) TV series, and as Number 6 in the ultimate cult series, The Prisoner. The boss of the shop in Hell Drivers, Cartley, is played by William Hartnell who would six years later debut as the very first Doctor on the still popular Doctor Who TV series. Perhaps the most unique casting goes to the character of Johnny Kates, one of Red’s loyal drivers, who is played by a positively baby-faced Sean Connery. Hell Drivers has Secret Agent Man, Doctor Who, and James Bond all in the same movie. An interesting bit of trivia, McGoohan was offered and turned down both the roles of James Bond and, later on, Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings films, but did rock his performance as King Edward Longshanks in 1995’s Braveheart.
In 1961 came another Rosetta Stone movie, War Hunt. I profiled this movie extensively in my piece on the late John Saxon. War Hunt is an exceptional sleeper film about a power struggle amongst American soldiers during the Korean War with early appearances from Saxon, Robert Redford, Tom Skerritt, Gavin MacLeod, Sydney Pollack, and, in an uncredited role as a truck driver, a young Francis Ford Coppola.
War Hunt has three future Best Director Oscar winners (Coppola for The Godfather Part II, Redford for Ordinary People, and Pollack for Out of Africa) all working as actors. Pollack and Redford would go on to make seven films together all of which can be traced back to their time together on War Hunt.
Sometimes films themselves aren’t the biggest predictor of future star power. Television has launched many a future star’s career. But in the wake of the dying studio system and clear division of the TV vs. film talent pools, becoming premium stars out of the TV market wasn’t by any means a sure thing in the 1970s.
Later on, episodic dramas like the extremely popular Miami Vice often showcased the talent of tomorrow, especially in episodes like season three’s “The Afternoon Plane” with a yet-undiscovered Vincent D’Onofrio and John Leguizamo, and “Red Tape” starring a young Viggo Mortensen, Lou Diamond Phillips right before his breakout performance in La Bamba, and future Oscar winner Annette Benning a full four years before her breakout role in Stephen Frears’ The Grifters. But when it comes to sheer star power nothing compares to a little-known episode of the Dan August cop drama called “The Manufactured Man.”
“The Manufactured Man” has so many stars it seems unbelievable to list. First of all, the show’s lead Burt Reynolds, while a known commodity, had yet to fully become the Burt we would all come to know. This series was before his breakout dramatic role in Deliverance in 1972, and a few years before he’d begin perfecting different versions of his sarcastic Southern charmer with the Smokey and the Bandit (1977, 1980) and Cannonball Run (1981, 1984) franchises. But even if we don’t count Burt, the rest of the cast of this episode would later generate collectively over a billion dollars for the entertainment industry in several different mediums.
This single episode had in supporting roles David Soul, Anthony Geary, Gary Busey, Billy Dee Williams, and wait for it, Harrison Ford. Both David Soul, who would go on to play Hutch on the wildly successful Starsky and Hutch TV series, and Anthony Geary, who would go on to smash daytime soap opera records as Luke on the still running General Hospital, are undoubtably television royalty. Gary Busey would go on to carve out a multi-decade career that includes his Oscar-nominated performance in The Buddy Holly Story (1978) and later on make big splashes with character roles in films like Lethal Weapon (1987) and Point Break (1991), to name a few. But it’s the last two stars in this episodic that would meet again eleven years later onscreen in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) that most Star Wars fans would focus on.
“The Manufactured Man” is the first documented work that has both the future Lando Calrissian (Williams) and Han Solo (Ford) sharing a screen, although technically they share no scenes together. While Ford would go on to international fame at age 34 with the release of Star Wars in 1977, it’s worth seeking out the nearly fifteen year career he had prior to this if you can find them.
When it comes to the 1980s there are some obvious examples. Most people would instantly point out Coppola’s The Outsiders (1983), starring Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Diane Lane, and Tom Cruise, or the movie TAPS that came out a couple years earlier in 1981, starring Sean Penn, an even younger Tom Cruise, Evan Handler, and future Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul villain Gus Fring, Giancarlo Esposito. Timothy Hutton, the lead in TAPS, while still young, was already a bona fide star having won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Ordinary People the year before. But for my money the movie in the 1980s that produced the highest amount of future star power was a movie from across the pond also from 1981, Excalibur.
Excalibur, John Boorman’s violent re-telling of the King Arthur legend, was chock full of future talent. Besides stalwart actors like Nicol Williamson as Merlin, and Helen Mirren as sexy temptress Morgana, the film boasts actors who would later go on to play devils, starship captains, and men with a certain set of skills. The knights of the roundtable in Camelot consisted of young actors including Liam Neeson (Schindler’s List/Clash of the Titans/Taken/1/2/3), Ciaran Hinds (Harry Potter/Game of Thrones), Patrick Stewart (Star Trek the Next Generation/X-Men franchises), and as Arthur’s father Uther Pendragon, Gabriel Byrne (The Usual Suspects/Miller’s Crossing/End of Days). It’s worth noting Pierce Brosnan (another future James Bond) auditioned for a role in Excalibur but sadly didn’t make the cut.
By the 1990s ensemble pieces didn’t always fair as well in the talent-of-tomorrow department with one very notable exception.
School Ties, written by none other than future mega-producer Dick Wolf only two years into his Law and Order juggernaut franchise, was a new take on an old tale. It was about a boy at an exclusive prep school who needed to hide the fact he was Jewish to fit in. The lead, Brendan Fraser, would go on to become one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars with leads in both The Mummy and Journey to the Center of the Earth franchises. But putting Fraser’s future star power aside, it’s interesting to note two of the supporting players in School Ties became arguably the biggest stars in the world for many years. Five years before their Oscar win for Best Screenplay for Good Will Hunting (1997), Ben Affleck and Matt Damon play two of the prep school kids at war with Fraser’s character David Green. In addition to Affleck (Justice League/ Batman vs. Superman/Armageddon) and Damon (Jason Bourne franchise), Chris O’Donnell (future Robin in the earlier Batman franchise), Anthony Rapp (future Tony Award winner and Broadway star of Rent), and Cole Hauser (currently seen on Yellowstone as the hard-nosed character Rip Wheeler) round out an extremely impressive cast of actors.
A year later, Affleck, Rapp, and Hauser would also play supporting roles in Richard Linklater’s ode to teenage life in the 1970s, Dazed and Confused (1993). While not as trailblazing as School Ties, Dazed and Confused also helped launch the careers of future stars Milla Jovovich (Resident Evil franchise), Parker Posey (Lost in Space TV series, Superman Returns) and Academy Award winning actor Matthew McConaughey who immortalized his signature phrase in this film.
By the 2000s it is easy to say Hollywood was looking for star power to carry ensemble pieces without upstaging the story. War films, like Saving Private Ryan (1997) and The Thin Red Line (1998) were so stuffed with stars it was in some cases downright distracting. Although in Saving Private Ryan people like to point out the first Private Ryan was played by a then-unknown Nathan Fillion who would later go on to helm the sci-fi cult series Firefly, the wildly popular Castle, and the current cop drama The Rookie, the sudden appearance of actors such as Ted Danson and Paul Giamatti often drew laughs when they were surely unintended.
In The Thin Red Line, George Clooney, at the time so recognizable for his role on the enormously popular NBC drama ER, saw his scene relegated to the dead-end of the movie to avoid the same kind of unwanted attention. This wasn’t anything new. Well-known disaster movies of the 1970s like the Towering Inferno and Airport films utilized this same formula: stuff it with stars and people won’t question the plot too closely. This is still the case with Gary Marshall’s star-heavy romantic comedy films like Valentine’s Day (2010), New Year’s Eve (2011) and Mother’s Day (2016).
But in 2001, the adaptation of the hit Mark Bowden non-fiction book Black Hawk Down did a good job not to welcome the same kind of distractions. This was certainly a double-edged sword when it came to telling this particular story, which revolved around a disastrous American military incident in Mogadishu, Somalia. On one hand, while big recognizable names often distract, casting all newcomers can often confuse the viewer as to who’s who, especially when they are all dressed alike with military haircuts. However, watching this movie today has a much different effect on the viewer than it did in 2001. Today you’d watch it and shout at the TV, “Oh my God that’s Jamie Lannister! There’s Venom! Is that the dad from Modern Family?” It was, by the way. But back then it looked like a real group of soldiers fighting a battle that still remains controversial to this day.
Black Hawk Down is a film that’s unflinching and brutal. It stars future comic book heroes Eric Bana (The Hulk) and Ioan Gruffudd (Fantastic Four/King Arthur); comic book villain Tom Hardy (Venom/The Dark Knight Rises/Mad Max); serial killer hunter Hugh Dancy (Hannibal TV series); hero helper Ewen Bremner (Wonder Woman); sitcom dad Ty Burrell (Modern Family); brash Hollywood agent Jeremy Piven (Entourage); someone who always pays his debts, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Game of Thrones); pirate and master archer Orlando Bloom (Pirates of the Caribbean/Lord of the Rings); and crazy old wizard Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan Kenobi series, Star Wars prequels). This is not to mention a bevy of veteran actors that range from the always good Sam Sheppard to the vastly underrated Ron Eldard. It’s safe to say if you put the money later generated by the actors in this film end-to-end it would most likely reach the moon and back using hundred-dollar bills. Ridley Scott got the casting on this one right for sure.
For as many times as Hollywood guessed right, they’ve missed plenty of times, too. But even given a shaky track record these six examples are exceptional in their future pedigree and are well worth checking out.
- Hell Drivers 1957
- War Hunt 1961
- Dan August “The Manufactured Man” 1970
- Excalibur 1981
- School Ties 1992
- Black Hawk Down 2001
All of these movies, with the exception of Hell Drivers, are available on DVD in the US. Although Hell Drivers is available on DVD in other countries, it often streams on Amazon Prime. The entire run of the Dan August TV series is available as a box set on DVD.
Fred Shahadi is an award-winning filmmaker, playwright, and television writer living in
Los Angeles California. He is the author of the cult sci-fi JFK conspiracy novel Shoot the Moon.
