Beyond Teen Tricks

By Jess Cagle

By now the audience knows what to expect from a teen movie: Cameron Diaz using man-made hair gel, Tom Green molesting an elephant and lots of jokes about testicles. No surprise that the audience, more and more, is keeping its distance from youth-oriented flicks unless they are of the action-adventure variety, with plenty of noise to drown out the script. Perhaps that is part of the reason Hollywood is trying to improve on the genre with Crazy/Beautiful--a romantic drama starring Kirsten Dunst as a rich, white high school senior rebelling against her limousine-liberal father and falling in love with a Latino jock from the wrong side of the tracks. No one eats anything disgusting, and nothing blows up in this refreshingly straightforward tale of adolescent angst and sexual awakening. Of course, it does involve teenagers, so don't expect total honesty.

"It was a little more honest and open before the M.P.A.A. ratings board got their hands on it," admits John Stockwell, who was midway through directing the movie last year when Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman launched their congressional assault on the entertainment industry for marketing adult product to children. Filmmakers around Hollywood who had been courting teen ticket buyers soon felt a chill. "The whole mood at Disney changed," says Stockwell, who was ordered by the studio to tame Crazy/Beautiful's R-rated script and deliver a PG-13 movie. In the final version of Crazy/Beautiful, opening this week, the heroine will no longer smoke pot onscreen, the F word will be used only once (the limit for a PG-13 movie), and no one will say "three-way."

Crazy/Beautiful's most powerful appeal to teens, however, is likely to be the real erotic charge between Dunst--a promising 19-year-old actress--and newcomer co-star Jay Hernandez. Their moving, brown-and-white romance (sex scenes have been trimmed but not omitted) could end up being a shrewd come-on for the target audience. Last spring teenagers turned out in force for Save the Last Dance, another PG-13 interracial love story from MTV Films and one of the few flicks to score with that demographic at the box office this year. "The young audience is much more color-blind than their parents," says MTV Productions president Van Toffler. "It's reflected in the television they watch and the music they listen to."

But the movie's secret weapon is Dunst herself, who went for the role of Crazy/Beautiful's bad girl because "I was so ready to play a part like that. I don't want people to just see me as the cute, sweet girl." She needn't worry. Although her biggest success so far came last year as the chirpy cheerleader in the surprise high school hit Bring It On, Dunst (known as Kiki to friends and family) has shown impressive range in a career that began with a Kix cereal commercial at age 3 and spans three dozen movie and TV roles. At age 12, she appeared as the creepy little girl in 1994's Interview with the Vampire; she spent her adolescence learning her craft in diverse movies like Jumanji, Wag the Dog and The Virgin Suicides. After seeing footage of Dunst's strung-out scenes in Crazy/Beautiful, Disney executives called Stockwell to make sure their star wasn't actually partaking at work. "Before I would say, 'Action,' she'd be Kiki--perky and bright-eyed," recalls Stockwell. "Then cameras would roll, her eyes would glaze over, and her voice would change. She became this moody, depressed, dysfunctional girl."

Dunst's youthful fan base and cool cache landed her a role as co-host (alongside Saturday Night Live's Jimmy Fallon) of this year's MTV Movie Awards, but like her fans, she has grown tired of the high school genre. "I'm over doing those kinds of movies," says Dunst, who graduated last year. She campaigned diligently--and successfully--for the role of Tobey Maguire's love interest in Sony's upcoming big-budget, highly anticipated Spider-Man. Despite reports that she is also Maguire's leading lady offscreen, both say they are just friends. And she recently finished starring as William Randolph Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies, in director Peter Bogdanovich's The Cat's Meow, a fact-based, murder-on-a-yacht film set for release this fall. "I play someone who's 27, so hopefully they'll see I can do other roles," says Dunst. "I'm just on that edge." Despite the growing pains, Dunst is maturing quite nicely. If Crazy/Beautiful is any indication, the same can be said of teen movies.