Dennis Quaid Knows Why Kevin Costner's Wyatt Earp Flopped

Dennis Quaid is the movie star who inexplicably never was. The Houston-born hellraiser with the devil-may-care grin flashed palpable leading man potential with his portrayal of the former star quarterback who finds a measure of redemption astride a bicycle in Peter Yates' wonderful coming-of-age sports flick "Breaking Away." This potential turned into a veritable guarantee of future A-list dominance when he swaggered his way through "The Right Stuff" as Project Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper. Who's the best actor you ever saw? You might just be looking at him.

Quaid was almost always great, but the films that were supposed to launch him to superstardom kept underperforming. Wolfgang Petersen's "Enemy Mine," an underrated sci-fi riff on "The Defiant Ones," was horribly mis-marketed by 20th Century Fox, Joe Dante's brilliant "Innerspace" got hung out to dry by Warner Bros. over the 1987 July 4th holiday, and Jim McBride's wild-sexy New Orleans noir "The Big Easy," which paired Quaid with a smoldering Ellen Barkin, failed to become the sleeper hit everyone thought it would be. After that, Quaid's next three star vehicles — "Everybody's All American," "D.O.A.," and the heavily hyped Jerry Lee Lewis biopic "Great Balls of Fire" — flopped. He then had the misfortune to be the lead of Alan Parker's flawed prestige picture about WWII Japanese internment camps, "Come See the Paradise," at which point it felt like Hollywood might just give up on him.

The town stuck with him, though, and for good reason: he was fantastic in all of these movies. Alas, his 1993 was a complete wipeout. Glenn Gordon Caron's offbeat rom-com "Wilder Napalm" (which marked Vince Gilligan's screenwriting debut) and the long-shelved "Undercover Blues" got dumped at the ass end of the summer movie season. Meanwhile, Steve Kloves' "Flesh and Bone," the young filmmaker's follow-up to his superb "The Fabulous Baker Boys," fell flat with critics and was ignored by moviegoers.

Nevertheless, hopes were once again high when Quaid was cast as the mercurial gunfighter, gambler, and dentist Doc Holiday in Lawrence Kasdan's "Wyatt Earp." Having seen what Val Kilmer did with this character a year prior in "Tombstone," people figured Quaid might be an Oscar contender. I think he would've been, too, had the film not bombed. As for why it misfired, Quaid had an explanation.

Kasdan's "Wyatt Earp" was supposed to be one of the biggest hits of the 1994 summer movie season. The epic, 190-minute Western re-teamed him with his "Silverado" star Kevin Costner (who he'd previously cut out of "The Big Chill"), and boasted an impressive cast that, along with Quaid, included Gene Hackman, Mark Harmon, Isabella Rossellini, Catherine O'Hara, and Bill Pullman. The film is narratively aimless and thematically opaque, but it's also visually stunning and consistently watchable if you love Westerns. James Newton Howard's score is reason alone to check it out.

"Wyatt Earp" had the misfortune of sharing its opening weekend with "The Lion King," but that doesn't explain why an event movie headlined by Costner at the height of his popularity finished fourth so far behind "Speed" in its third weekend and "Wolf" in its second. Why did people turn up their noses at Kasdan's movie? In a 2002 interview with Larry King, Quaid, who had lost 40 lbs. to play Holliday, blamed the length.

"My honest opinion is I think the movie is too long," Quaid admitted. "I think the first half of the movie is a history lesson." He joked that the film's commercial prospects were also hurt by the fact that he doesn't turn up until the second half of the movie, but was quick to add that his opinion was no shade on Kasdan. "I thought myself, my taste, I personally thought it was too long," he added. "But I'm also really proud of it. You know, I loved working with Larry Kasdan. I loved working with Kevin."

After starring in another big-budget summer disappointment (Rob Cohen's "Dragonheart"), Quaid's quasi-A-list days seemed to be over. As such, it was immensely satisfying when he scored a sleeper hit in 2002 with "The Rookie," the Disney underdog baseball flick about a high school baseball coach who discovers he still has a major league fastball. So many years later, he's lost none of that zip.