LOS ANGELES: Television is increasingly opening its doors to Hollywood stars, as Monday’s Emmy Awards will attest, but TV royalty still struggle to make the transition to the silver screen. Seasoned actors Matthew McConaughey, Kevin Spacey, Jon Voight, Jeff Daniels and Woody Harrelson are all nominated this year for Emmys after having built much of their careers in film.

McConaughey, a favourite to win a lead actor Emmy for his role in HBO crime drama True Detective, is riding high after winning an Academy Award for last year’s Dallas Buyers Club. House of Cards hero/villain Spacey already has two Oscar statuettes. Voight, nominated for Showtime’s Ray Donovan, won a best actor Oscar a generation ago, while Harrelson (True Detective) is a two-time Oscar nominee. For them, having a go in a successful broadcast or cable series adds gritty prestige to their glittering careers.

But cross-pollination in the other direction has proven more difficult. Heart-throb George Clooney, who shot from the show ER into the Hollywood megastar firmament, “was the last one who really did it”, said Glenn Williamson, a professor at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television.

In contrast, though Jennifer Aniston parlayed her “girl next door” appeal from hit show Friends into several big-screen roles, the 1990s comedy’s other stars have had stunted success in the transition.

The same holds true for stars of more recent TV mega-hits like Desperate Housewives and Lost. Some stars have thrived on television without ever becoming bankable in Hollywood: Julianna Margulies, David Duchovny and Robin Wright are among those who earned numerous film roles but never won the accolades there that came with TV.

Kerry Washington, praised as much for her role in Quentin Tarantino’s movie Django Unchained as for TV’s Scandal, is in that small clique of actors comfortably navigating between the two worlds.

With blockbuster series Mad Men and Breaking Bad coming to an end, it remains to be seen whether their respective stars Jon Hamm and Bryan Cranston can successfully make the jump.

“No matter how well known, a feature film role only lasts a little more than two hours,” said Ellen Seiter, a professor of television at University of Southern California. “By comparison, successful television series roles last for dozens of hours,” sometimes over years, meaning “actors become inextricably linked to those roles in the eyes of the audience,” she added.

Tom Nunan, a UCLA film professor, said comedians often make a better switch to film, like Tina Fey from Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock, who is good value in Hollywood. Steve Carell, Amy Poehler, Mila Kunis and Chris Pratt also came from comedy TV to see their movie careers take off.

US studios typically revolve around movie franchises, which traditionally are action, comedy or superhero-focused.

“Studios aren’t making dramas anymore,” he said. Those are mainly reserved for independent or foreign film-makers.

That leaves small-screen producers — for web series, cable, video on demand and broadcast TV — to pick up the slack.

The result, many argue, is high-quality television. “It’s no surprise that you see movie stars of the calibre of Kevin Spacey or Matthew McConaughey,” he added.—AFP

Published in Dawn, August 24th, 2014