We took Michael Douglas for granted. I know I did. I mistook the pulpy hot-bloodedness of his best work for the reliably professional Hollywood product the industry used to wholesale every week. But looking back, re-encountering Douglas\u2019s movies through his new memoir, One Helluva Ride\u2014one of the few of its kind that actually needed to be written\u2014I can see clearly that he was their throbbing artery. Through the 80s and 90s, he proved he knew how to pick, for us, the juicy tales of lust, greed, rage. <\/p>\n
It was his widened producer\u2019s view, focused less on his own role as an actor than on his forecast of the audience\u2019s experience. Douglas was intense and unexpectedly funny, never morally vain. He could scare us or seduce us, or\u2014best of all\u2014do both at once. Add to that the most personally assured and underestimated Hollywood directors of the era (Adrian Lyne and Danny DeVito among my favorites) and I can appreciate how we came by all those mischievous, R-rated Friday and Saturday nights adults used to have.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We took Michael Douglas for granted. I know I did. I mistook the pulpy hot-bloodedness of his best…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":923074,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[99800,64,63,490710,369629,447,10691,490711,253346,134,440219,156127,59987,490712,144803,201982,57956,490713,243707,13819,6317,136401,172086,490714,490715,490716,490717,490718,1491,490719,354928,490720],"class_list":["post-923073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-adrian-lyne","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-barry-lyndon","tag-basic-instinct","tag-celebrities","tag-danny-devito","tag-dog-day-afternoon","tag-don-rickles","tag-entertainment","tag-falling-down","tag-fatal-attraction","tag-frank-sinatra","tag-gordon-gekko","tag-gregory-peck","tag-janet-leigh","tag-jaws","tag-karl-malden","tag-kirk-douglas","tag-michael-douglas","tag-nashville","tag-oliver-stone","tag-one-flew-over-the-cuckoos-nest","tag-one-helluva-ride","tag-romancing-the-stone","tag-streets-of-san-francisco","tag-the-china-syndrome","tag-tony-curtis","tag-wall-street","tag-war-of-the-roses","tag-william-hurt","tag-wonder-boys"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=923073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/923074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=923073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=923073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=923073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}