Miley Cyrus was born in 1992 in Tennessee to Letitia Jean Cyrus and country music star Billy Ray Cyrus, and has Dolly Parton as her godmother.
The young Miley was desperate to become an actress after she saw a production of Mamma Mia! when she was eight years old, telling her dad: ‘This is what I want to do daddy, I want to be an actress.’ She would begin taking acting classes, and would end up starring in her dad’s TV show Doc, before getting her big break at age 11. She auditioned for the role of a character in a Disney TV series – however, she was told that she didn’t get the part of that character because they wanted her to audition for the lead role instead!
The show was Hannah Montana, and it made her a household name in both the TV and music world. The show is described: ‘Miley Stewart is a pre-teen who just moved from Tennessee to Malibu, and now has to adapt to a new lifestyle. She also lives a secret life as a pop star: Hannah Montana, overseen by her manager and father, Robbie Stewart.’
Conquering both the pop and TV charts, Cyrus signed a four-album deal with Disney and the second season of Hannah Montana premiered on 23 April 2007. Her concert tickets sold out in minutes, with a spokesperson for Ticketmaster saying wryly: ‘Hell hath no fury like the parent of a child throwing a tantrum. People who have been in this business for a long time are watching what’s happening, and they say there hasn’t been a demand of this level or intensity since The Beatles or Elvis.’
Like any TV star it wouldn’t be long before she would try to conquer the big screen as well. First came Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert – a 3D film concert of the best-selling tour. It was a box office smash, as was Hannah Montana: The Movie.
The film’s producer Al Gough said: ‘Miley is one of those rare, incredible talents. She can sing, she can dance, she can act–and she’s funny. To be natural on film is the hardest thing in the world, and she does it without any effort, her instincts are so good. To watch her grow as an actor over the course of making this film has been amazing.’
Her dad said about her success: ‘We both just love what we do. She loves acting, she loves singing, she loves writing songs. For the most part with Miley, I think part of it is staying real and remembering who she is and where she comes from and what she’s all about. As my dad told me when I was a little boy, it’s important to always be aware of your current surroundings and where you’re at, at any crossroads of life, and always looking forward to the future and knowing where you want to go. But, most importantly, to never forget where you come from.’
Desperate to showcase a more grown-up image Cyrus would then star in The Last Song alongside Liam Hemsworth. She told Teen Vogue: ‘In LA, I had so many security blankets, people helping me with everything. I tried to book my friend a flight, and I didn’t know how because I was used to someone doing it for me. I didn’t want a babysitter anymore. I went to film in Tybee Island crying harder than I had ever cried in my life – and I left with the biggest smile on my face.’
Talking about the transition from child star to grown up actress, she remarked: ‘When we were planning when the transition would take place, and when I would leave the show behind and do something else, everyone was like: “Well, this is what we think you should do.” And I thought: “I’ve gone these last five years with Hannah Montana with everyone telling me what to do. Now, it’s up to me and what I think is right in my career, so I’m just going in my own direction.” I have to be careful, in a sense, to not lose who I am, or the Miley Cyrus factor, by going to do other characters. I still want them to know who I am, but I want to extend my audience. I want to continue to do what I love, but also give myself new challenges and not just be the same person, over and over.’
She was delighted to meet Hemsworth, saying: ‘Yeah. I think we’re both deeper than normal people. He’s very grateful for what he has, but he doesn’t let it go to his head. I’m like that too. He’s also a really freaking good actor. And he’s cute!’
However, Miley Cyrus’s good fortune came at a cost for teenager Laura Griffin. She had been Hemsworth’s girlfriend of five years, but would learn that she had lost him to the Hannah Montana star. She told Woman’s Day, ‘He was my boyfriend and my best friend. There is no other reason why we would have broken up.’ She took to Facebook following the news, saying that she was ‘depressed’ and had ‘tears streaming’.
She had met him at school. ‘He was the new boy at school and all the girls liked him,’ she said. ‘He was popular, a bit of a joker and made me laugh. We became inseparable. He tried to teach me to surf, we watched movies, and went shopping. Liam became more than a boyfriend, he was my best friend.’
The Hunger Games tells the story of a group of children having to fight to the death in front of a baying crowd, who are thirsty for blood and eager for the next kill as they watch it unfold.
Boys and girls aged between 12 and 18 battle with each other in a mass arena, forced to use their wits, wilderness training and fighting skills in a bid to win the ultimate prize – to live. The participants consist of volunteers who have been training all their life and those who have rebelled against the government and are being punished for their actions.
The Hunger Games is not the only story to feature a winner-takes-all prize. In 1975, two killer sport films were released – Death Race 2000 and Rollerball.
Talking about Death Race 2000, director Roger Corman said: ‘The original won a poll as the greatest B-movie ever made. I think it won that poll because of the complexity of the story – it had a little bit of political commentary and humour, but was combined with action.’ The film tells the story of society in 2000, being led by the Bipartisan Party following a military coup. To entertain the masses a three-day event is set up each year – a road race, with drivers getting extra points for hitting and killing pedestrians. David Carradine plays the hero, while a then not very famous Sylvester Stallone was the bad guy.
The film was remade in 2008, with Jason Statham as the lead character. Corman said about the remake: ‘It had very little. They asked me to contribute my notes to the script, which is about the only thing I did. I read the first draft and I knew they were going in a direction substantially different from the original. So I had my story editor from then on read the script and give notes, because I knew they weren’t going to pay any attention to the notes anyway. It was just a way to justify the fact that they had given me an executive producer credit.
‘I thought it was a very good action film as it stood. However, the whole point of the first Death Race was the fact that it was a race from New York to the new Los Angeles in the year 2000. We made it in the 1970s, and the drivers were scored on two points: how fast they drove, and how many pedestrians they could kill. And it was very important to me that the concept of killing pedestrians as a sport be in there, because I was thinking of stock-car racing today. They’re really looking for the crashes and the flames and explosions as much as they are for the races, and I was simply carrying that over to include the spectators into the sport.
‘But they dropped that element from the Death Race remake. And it may be that they were right for the kind of picture they were doing, but when I realised they were going in that direction, I felt that there weren’t going to be any notes I could give to bring back the kind of social commentary the previous film had. This was a straight action picture, and I left it to them. And as a straight action picture, they were successful. I thought it was a good job.’
The other 1975 film was Rollerball. It is set in 2018, in a brutal world that features a hugely popular but violent sport that sees teams trying to outscore each other while skating around an oval track.
The sport’s biggest player is Jonathan E, played by James Caan, His huge popularity begins to make the sport’s bosses fearful and, in a bid to prove that no player is bigger than the game, they continually relax the rules until at the final game any violence, including death, is allowed to stop your opponent.
James Caan said about Rollerball: ‘We broke a lot of bones. We were skating 40 to 45 miles an hour. I wound up doing almost all my stuff. It was great fun! The walking and talking were a little overdone. The burning of the trees – that was bullshit.’
He added: ‘I’ve been lucky, really lucky with the critics in my life, they’ve been exceptionally nice to me. But there was one critique of Rollerball, in Women’s Wear Daily, oddly enough, which said: “We saw James Caan the athlete, but where was the actor?” The whole point of the picture was that these guys were state-raised, with no emotion. It wasn’t a picture for crying and screaming.’
Like Death Race 2000, Rollerball was remade in 2002. Unfortunately the film, which starred Chris Klein, was a critical and commercial disaster.
The remake’s plot is described as thus: ‘It is the year 2005. The new sport of Rollerball is hugely popular in Central Asia, Russia, China, Mongolia and Turkey. Marcus Ridley asks NHL hopeful Jonathan Cross to join him playing for the Zhambel Horsemen in Kazakhstan. The highly paid Marcus and Jonathan are teamed with low-paid locals, who are often severely injured in the game, which is an extraordinarily violent extension of roller derby involving motorcycles, a metal ball, and many trappings of the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE).
‘Soon the team’s star and the darling of promoter Alexi Petrovich, Jonathan is thrilled by the high-octane sport, the hype, the sports cars, and his female teammate Aurora. But gradually Jonathan discovers that the cynical Alexi and the opportunistic Sanjay will go to any lengths to manipulate the game in order to provide an ever more gory spectacle and improve the game’s popularity.’
The BBC wrote: ‘Crass and utterly incomprehensible, this new Rollerball does away with the original’s political backdrop, turns the volume up to 11, and makes like it was written and directed by a middle-aged version of Beavis and Butt-Head. Did the film-makers really believe including a few seconds’ worth of Slipknot would be enough to fool anyone into thinking that this was a cool movie?
‘Just to show how bad things have got in the years since Norman Jewison’s controversial original, instead of a macho hard man like James Caan we now get Chris Klein – an actor who usually plays sweet-natured airheads in comedies such as American Pie – as the film’s hero. Klein’s Jonathan Cross is a skateboarder who joins the Rollerball circuit in Central Asia and gradually finds himself at odds with the league’s money-hungry owner (Reno). Or something like that. Frankly, you’ll realise a few minutes into this farrago that trying to follow the “plot” is futile.’
‘I was really disappointed,’ said Klein. ‘It was my first time working on a really big action piece and we all went out there and tried our best. We had John McTiernan directing the movie, and at the end of the day it wasn’t received well. I don’t know… I guess you have to sometimes take the good with the bad. Sometimes what you put out there isn’t going to stick.’
Feeling that too many people compared it to the original, Klein said it was ‘really tough because even though we have the same title it’s definitely a different kind of movie. But the way it was edited and finished, and the scenes that we were trying to bring across to the audience, didn’t quite work I guess.’ Klein denied it hurt his career, but ruefully admitted ‘it certainly didn’t help it either’.
There was also 1987’s The Running Man. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and based on a Stephen King novel, the high-concept plot is of a cheesy style game show with a deadly twist – convicted criminals are forced to fend for their lives from colourful bad guys.
Yahoo.com wrote: ‘The Running Man is a perfect example of an action film where Arnold actually had to have some talent showing emotion. It’s action-packed from start to finish and is one of his famous one-liner films. The film is based, very loosely, on the novel written by Stephen King under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.
‘I find it relatively frightening that we are now dealing with several things that were in this totalitarian society. Cameras everywhere, televised entertainment involving pain, CGI technology that could frame someone quite easily, restricted travel, and even blurring lines between government and media. The most chilling revelation is quite possibly that TV isn’t your end-all-be-all source of information like the vast majority of Americans think. The media will lie to you, or give you a skewed perspective at every possible turn. The story is amazing, and considering how long ago it was written, is very insightful. This may not be one of the best sci-fi films ever made, but it does deserve some credit.’
Named after a genetically engineered bird that Katniss has taken as her symbol, Collins’s third book in the trilogy sees all out rebellion against the Capitol.
The plot is described: ‘Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has survived The Hunger Games twice. But now that she’s made it out of the bloody arena alive, she’s still not safe. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge. Who do they think should pay for the unrest? Katniss. And what’s worse, President Snow has made it clear that no one else is safe either. Not Katniss’s family, not her friends, not the people of District 12. Powerful and haunting, this thrilling final instalment of Suzanne Collins’s groundbreaking The Hunger Games trilogy promises to be one of the most talked about books of the year.’
The film of Mockingjay is being split into two parts. Lawrence seemed to agree with the decision, reasoning: ‘It’s always hard every time you convert a novel into a movie because you have to cut so much out. So in a weird way, it’s kind of a relief because you get to keep everything in there. But it is more work. We’ll probably do them back to back.’
The book was critically acclaimed, with the New York Times saying: ‘Though The Hunger Games trilogy has by now won many adult readers – there are 5.6 million copies of the series in print in the United States and Canada alone – it is the perfect teenage story with its exquisitely refined rage against the cruel and arbitrary power of the adult world. One might think that Mockingjay, in which Katniss is finally saved from the Games and delivered to the revolutionary forces to become their figurehead, would offer some redemption, but it turns out the rebels are just as morally ambiguous as Panem’s leaders. The full-scale revolution is being sold on television to the disheartened and oppressed Districts, in carefully produced spots with labels like “Because you know who they are and what they do”.’
‘Mockingjay is not as impeccably plotted as The Hunger Games, but none theless retains its fierce, chilly fascination. At its best the trilogy channels the political passion of 1984, the memorable violence of A Clockwork Orange, the imaginative ambience of The Chronicles of Narnia and the detailed inventiveness of Harry Potter.