TWO HOLLYWOOD PRIZEFIGHTERS 'HUNTING' FOR STARDOM PAYS OFF FOR MATT DAMON
Sunday, March 22th 1998, 2:04AM
Matt Damon had no way out. At the luncheon for Oscar nominees a couple of weeks ago, he was trapped between the geezers and the babe.
The geezers fellow Best Actor nominees Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Duvall and Peter Fonda hazed the "Good Will Hunting" star, in a low-key, aging-frat-boy kind of way.
The babe "Hunting" co-star and Best Supporting Actress nominee Minnie Driver wanted to avoid Damon, in a very recent-ex-girlfriend kind of way.
Damon ended up doing what any savvy 27-year-old actor/screenwriter would do. He laughed with the geezers and stayed away from the babe.
Fonda gave his fellow Best Actor nominees silver pocketknives to show "my good will." Get it? Then Duvall collared Damon for a group picture four guys who made their names in the '60s, and the kid by saying, "Hey, Dustin, if you think you're a ladies man, you should see this guy!" Damon seemed to be tongue-tied.
As for Driver, she clearly kept her distance in the photo of all the Academy Award nominees and so did Damon. They can be seen far, far, far apart, unlike last Thanksgiv-ing, when she and he celebrated at his mom's place in Cambridge, Mass.
What a difference four months can make.
Back in November, Damon's first leading role in a major film, a young lawyer in Francis Coppola's adaptation of John Grisham's "The Rainmaker," had not opened. Neither had "Good Will Hunting," starring Damon and Ben Affleck, the best friends from childhood who also wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay. Chances are good that you didn't know who he was.
By December, he was 1997's equivalent of Matthew McConaughey young, talented, cute, hyped. On the cover of magazines like Vanity Fair. Constantly in gossip columns as the romantic interest of first Claire Danes and then Minnie Driver and now Winona Ryder. The subject of endless tirades on the World Wide Web over who is cuter: Leo or Matt? No wonder, back in January when the Academy nominations were announced, Damon said: "It's surreal. I'm stunned."
Of course, movie stardom is impossible to predict, but Damon seems to have an excellent chance to stay hot, because he seems to have a career's worth of movies in the works. This summer, he'll be the title character in Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan," opposite Tom Hanks. Later this year, he'll be seen as an unreformed poker player in "Rounders," directed by John ("The Last Seduction") Dahl. He's now in Pittsburgh shooting Kevin ("Clerks," "Chasing Amy") Smith's "Dogma," in which he plays an angel trying to get back into heaven. And, finally take a deep breath here this fall, he'll be the title character in "The Talented Mr. Ripley," a Patricia Highsmith novel being adapted by Anthony ("The English Patient") Minghella.
The days now seem long past when Damon would lose plum roles to Chris O'Donnell ("Batman Forever," "Scent of a Woman"), Ed Norton ("Primal Fear") and McConaughey ("A Time to Kill").
So, everything is groovy with Damon, right? Well, that's not what his mom will tell you. He has "become a commodity. He's a product and people use him," said Nancy Carlsson-Paige. "He's not a human being anymore." She told The Washington Post, "My beautiful boy is on the cover [of Vanity Fair]; really at some level he's being used to sell the products. Here is an artist, and he's just a cog in the capitalist system."
Strong stuff, but not out of character with the way Damon was raised. His parents divorced when he was 2, and Damon did most of his growing up with his mother, a professor of early-childhood education at Lesley College in Cambridge, and a slightly older brother, Kyle, who is a well-known sculptor in the Boston area. For a number of those years, the three lived with other families in a "community house."
In one interview, Damon conceded that the place was run by "hippies."s
To encourage her sons to be creative, Carlsson-Paige made them play with blocks. She forbade them to use war toys. To keep Matt from becoming too self-absorbed, she wouldn't let him join an organized theatrical group. But she couldn't keep him away from Affleck. They met when Damon was 10 and Affleck was 8.
Affleck's father had worked in Boston-area theater, and Ben was bitten hard by the acting bug, appearing on a locally produced public-TV kids show by the time he was 9. The two boys formed a rock-solid friendship that has survived the ups and downs of life, love and showbiz.
"Matt and I had identical interests," Affleck told the Boston Herald. "So whether we ended up successful or making hot dogs at Dodger games, we knew we'd remain friends."
The staff of Cambridge Rindge and Latin, the public high school from which Damon and Affleck graduated in 1988, remembers the duo as friendly, untroubled kids with major talent.
"I knew some day the magazines would be calling," says Larry Aaronson, a social studies teacher who saved pictures of himself and Damon for posterity. "Matt can act. He can sing. He can dance. And he's good-looking. When I watched `Good Will Hunting' at a screening, sitting between him and Ben, with each line I would grab them and kiss them. They were perfect."
Damon took theater courses at the school for four years, impressing teachers and fellow students by portraying everything from a Blues Brother to Ronald Reagan and John-Boy Walton. In a production of the classic Greek drama "Lysistrata," Damon played a sex-starved soldier with a costume whose crotch he had overstuffed.
When he got to Harvard in 1988, Damon didn't need anything artificial to make an impression. In his first theater course, he did a scene from Sam Shepard's "Fool for Love" and his instructor, David Wheeler, remembers that "it was extremely mature and powerful and a total surprise. What was immediately clear was that he was very, very talented."
Wheeler, now resident director at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, had already worked with many of the major actors of our time including Al Pacino and Robert De Niro mostly with the Theater Company of Boston. In fact, Damon is one of three Best Actor nominees this year that Wheeler has directed onstage. Robert Duvall and Dustin Hoffman are the others. "I think he's right up there with the best actors I've worked with," Wheeler says. "Absolutely. They're all different, of course. But what Matt has shown steadily is the courage to be himself."
For Damon, that meant being self-assured enough to go back and forth between Harvard studies and acting roles the movie "Mystic Pizza" (1988) and the telefilm "Rising Son" (1990). (He is still two semesters short of earning a degree in English lit.) And it meant having enough gumption to keep plugging away with smaller roles "School Ties" (1992) and cable TV's "Geronimo" (1993) until he landed a showcase part in "Courage Under Fire" (1995).
For that film, Damon lost 40 pounds to portray an infantryman so riddled with guilt that he'd become a drug addict. The tortured quality he showed onscreen was impressive enough to jump-start his career.
That performance impressed Coppola so much that he grabbed Damon for "The Rainmaker." And that casting persuaded Miramax to put its money into "Good Will Hunting," a script that Damon and Affleck had been working and reworking for five years.
Certainly, "Good Will Hunting" captures the town-and-gown tension between South Boston working-class Joes and the elitist intellectualism of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Not surprisingly, Damon and Affleck have already begun work on another script set in the Boston area, starring both, but with Affleck in the leading role this time.
Proving that you can go home again in the movie business. In this case, twice.
