The Wrap‘s Brent Lang doesn’t understand why Taylor Lautner is being paid $7.5 million to star in Universal’s Stretch Armstrong when other young bucks of the forest — Robert Pattinson, Shia Labeouf, Zac Efron — made do with less when they were in Lautner’s starting-out position.
The consternation is due to the fact that while Lautner may be cute, he’s never opened a film. And the stats show that so far Twi-harders haven’t supported movies that Twilight costars have appeared in off-campus.
I explained the Lautner problem (or complication or what-have-you) in a 7.23 Comic-Con piece. In a nutshell, he’s not that deep and he has a weird upturned dog nose.
“Lautner is clearly the most ambitiously press-friendly among the three New Moon cosytars,” I wrote. “While Stewart and Pattinson did their usual usual — i.e., giving answers that suggested they’re a lot more complex and aloof and thoughtful than their participation in movies based on the Twilight series might suggest. It’s the age-old ‘I’ll do this but only if I can answer questions like Marlon Brando‘ routine.
“But Lautner, who has a kind of Cyrano nose in a bee-stung mode, exhibited the personality of a publicist or a glad-hander. He clearly enjoys smiling and wants everyone to like him. He could be the next Regis Philbin if he wanted to go there.
“If I was Lautner I would have the schnozz re-shaped. I’m sorry but it’s an On The Waterfront longshoreman’s nose — Elia Kazan might have cast him as one of Johnny Friendly‘s henchmen if he were heavier — or a nose belonging to a Russian wheat-farmer. If Lautner had come up through the ranks of old 1930s Hollywood studio system the moguls would have said ‘cute kid but fix the nose.’ If he’d arrived in the ’50s he would have been relegated to character parts — they’d never let him kiss Doris Day or Janet Leigh with that oddly-shaped growth in the middle of his face.
The fact that no one else in the universe has even mentioned this, not even as an aside, shows what an (d)evolved multi-cultural world we now live in. A guy with no real inner force who looks like a serf from the Ukranian wheat fields can now be a major marquee draw.
