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’s movies through his new memoir, One Helluva Ride—one of the few of its kind that actually needed to be written—I 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.
It was his widened producer’s view, focused less on his own role as an actor than on his forecast of the audience’s experience. Douglas was intense and unexpectedly funny, never morally vain. He could scare us or seduce us, or—best of all—do 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.