TREAT WILLIAMS
Treat's movie career started in the late 1970s and at the time he seemed poised to be a good looking character actor who just might break through to become a movie star. He was fantastic hamming it up as the heavy in Steven Spielberg's infamous flop
1941 (1979) and that same year steals Milos Forman's earnest but belated adaptation of
Hair (1979), singing and dancing and smiling his way through the movie's best moments. He was rewarded with two starring roles in 1981: as the enigmatic thief in
The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper with Robert Duvall and more importantly in Sidney Lumet's latest corrupt cop saga
Prince of the City. Despite Treat's charms,
D.B. Cooper is a dull mess of a flick that misses the opportunity to have fun with the great unsolved 1971 robbery. And while
Prince of the City is typical Lumet class all around, for whatever the reasons (perhaps the nearly three-hour running time put people off or that it didn't have a star like Pacino in the lead?) it doesn't connect with the audience at the time and is all but ignored come Oscar season.
Sometimes you only seem to get one shot with the Studio brass, and it would appear the box office failure of those two movies in the same year may have done it to Treat. He's actually quite good as the boxing legend Jack Dempsey in the made-for-TV biopic
"Dempsey" (1983) and I like him a lot in support of Leone's epic
Once Upon a Time in America (1984). But doing well in a TV movie doesn't generally make a Studio rush to star you in an expensive theatrical property - they figure you've found your level. And Leone's film is notoriously butchered for its initial U.S. release and even when properly screened divides critics and never comes close to a mainstream audience. He's fine again though facing the impossible task of removing the indelible impression of Brando in an ABC TV production of
"A Streetcar Named Desire" with Ann-Margret as Blanche and Beverly D'Angelo as Stella, but again nothing that is going to get him on the Studio's A-list.
In 1985 Treat Williams gets the film role of his life in
Smooth Talk, adapted from a Joyce Carol Oates story, with Laura Dern as a teenage girl coming to terms with her own sexuality. It's a subtle, literate, well-acted, interesting piece with an unconventional ending. But while it gets good notices at the Toronto Film Festival, this pre-dates the independent film movement getting decent distribution in the early 1990s and is unceremoniously released in the U.S. on a couple screens in February of 1986 and quickly disappears, despite champions such as Roger Ebert.
That was really Treat's last, best shot at becoming any sort of movie star. He continued to get good, steady work in television and in 1988 decides to take one last leap at the mainstream in what was never designed to be a prestige project but hopefully a boxoffice genre smash. The movie is
Dead Heat (1988), a mishmash comedy/action/buddy-cop/zombie movie where Treat and the already floundering
"SNL" alum Joe Piscopo star as two big city cops who get killed but come back as zombies to fight undead baddies. I'm sure the pitch of
Beverly Hills Cop meets
Dawn of the Dead sounded good to some cocaine-addled producer at some point, but the resulting movie is unwatchably embarrassing: it ain't funny, it ain't scary, it ain't fun. It is a critical and financial disaster, and Treat's hopes for movie stardom were officially dead...not to be resurrected.
He's had a nice second half of his career as a character actor usually in supporting roles, my favorite by far being superagent Michael Ovitz in the well-made HBO movie
"The Late Shift" detailing the behind-the-scenes chaos of NBC's Leno/Letterman decision after Johnny Carson's retirement. He'll still headline a straight-to-video level genre hunk of junk now and again, such as the monster on a boat flick
Deep Rising (1998), the made-for-cable sequels
The Substitute 2 and
3 (1998 & 1999) and the USA Networks cheap-o take on
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1999), but usually when you see him in a movie now it's a small supporting part. And thank goodness for television. He spent four seasons as the star of the overly earnest WB drama
"Everwood" (2002-2006), which did land him two Screen Actors Guild Award nominations as Best Male Actor in a Drama Series (losing to James Gandolfini and Kiefer Sutherland)...but at least it paid the bills and was a steady gig.
Treat Williams is a showbiz survivor, but had
Prince of the City been a big Oscar hit and
Smooth Talk gotten any kind of distribution, he could have been a big star. Could have been.
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