"Coldheart Canyon (preview edition)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive - Coldheart Canyon)

required to turn in a performance. Smotherman didn't make movies that required
actors, only breath-taking physical specimens. And Todd was certainly that. Every
time he stepped before the cameras, whether he was sharing the scene with a girl or
a fighter-plane, he was all the eye wanted to watch. The camera worked some kind of
alchemy upon him; and he worked the same magic on celluloid.
In life, he was good-looking, but flawed. He was a little on the short side,
with broad hips; he was also conspicuously bandy. But on the screen, all these flaws
disappeared. He became gleaming, studly perfection, his jaw-line heroic, his gaze
crystalline, his mouth an uncommon mingling of the sensual and the severe. His
particular beauty had suited the taste of the times, and by the end of that first,
extraordinary summer of coming-to-fame his image, dressed in an immaculate white
uniform which made poetry of his buttocks, had become an indelible piece of cinema
iconography.
Over the years, other stars had risen just as high, of course, and many just
as quickly. But few were quite as ready for their ascent as Todd Pickett. This was
what he'd been polishing himself for since the moment his mother, Patricia Donna
Pickett, had first taken him into a cinema in downtown Cincinnati. Looking up at the
screen, watching the parade of faces pass before him, he'd known instinctively (at
least so he later claimed) that he belonged up there with those stars, and that if
he willed it hard enough, willed and worked for it, then it was merely a matter of
time before he joined the parade.
After the success of Gunner, he fell effortlessly into the labors of being a
movie star. In interviews he was courteous, funny and self-effacing, playing the
interviewers so easily that all but the most cynical swooned. He was confident about
his charms, but he wasn't cocky; loyal to his Mid-Western roots and boyishly devoted
to his mother. Most attractive of all, he was honest about his shortcomings as an
actor. There was a refreshing lack of pretension about the Pickett persona.
The year after Gunner, he made two pictures back to back. Another action
blockbuster for Smotherman, called Lightning Rod, which was released on Independence
Day and blew all former box-office records to smithereens, and then, for the
Christmas market, Life Lessons. The latter was a sweetly sentimental slip of a
story, in which Todd played opposite Sharon Campbell, a Playboy model turned actress
who had been tabloid fodder at the time thanks to her recent divorce from an
alcoholic and abusive husband. The pairing of Pickett and Campbell had worked like a
charm, and the reviews for Todd's performance were especially kind. While he was
still relying on his physical gifts, the critics observed, there were definitely
signs that he was taking on the full responsibilities of an actor, digging deeper
into himself to engage his audience. Nor was he afraid to show weakness; twice in
Life Lessons he was required to sob like a baby, and he did so very convincingly.
The picture was a huge hit, meaning that both of the big money-makers of the year
had Todd's name above the title. He was officially box-office gold.
For most of the following decade he could do no wrong. Inevitably, some of
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Barker, Clive - Coldheart Canyon
his pictures performed better than others, but even the disappointments were
triumphs by comparison with the fumbling labors of most of his contemporaries.
Of course, he wasn't making the choice of material on his own. From the
beginning he'd had a close relationship with his manager, Maxine Frizelle, a short,
sharp bitch of a woman in her mid-forties who'd once been voted the Most Despised
Person in Hollywood, and had asked, when the news had reached her, if the awards