STARS BEHAVING BADLY

This may or may not have been a great year for movies, but it’s been a lousy year for moviemakers.

Box-office revenues were down compared to last year for nearly five straight months, until last weekend. There have been no surprise hits like “The Passion of the Christ” or “Fahrenheit 911,” no juggernaut like last year’s “Spider-Man 2.”

But it has been a busy year for personal publicists, and an enormously profitable one for gossip rags.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie – “Brangelina,” in the usual tabloid shorthand – have been the subject of magazine covers for months. Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes – aka “TomKat” – have been kissing for the cameras so often they seem to be seeking a lip-balm endorsement.

And whenever those couples have relinquished the spotlight for a moment, it’s been seized by Lindsay Lohan and her personal dramas of rapid weight loss, public fainting, fluctuating bra sizes and feuding relatives.

Or Russell Crowe, throwing phones at hotel clerks. Or Cruise solo, railing against everyone from Carl Jung to Brooke Shields.

And what has been the result – not in terms of newsprint wasted, or supermarket racks filled, but in the box-office dollars beloved by Hollywood?

Well, Crowe’s populist “Cinderella Man” – at one point the centerpiece of Universal’s summer strategy – stumbled badly with audiences, with at least one national chain pleading with people to buy tickets.

Lohan’s “Herbie” kid movie had its advertising quickly retooled, with the original posters – which once had the subtitle, “Fully Loaded,” springing from a winking Lohan’s chest – quickly replaced by ads that emphasized the car.

Holmes’ “Batman Begins” has done well, but not as well as expected. It missed some opening-weekend projections by $10 million, leading studio executives to grumble that Cruise and Holmes’ spotlight-hogging distracted audiences from the movie. (Not coincidentally, perhaps, Holmes has not been signed for the sequel.)

Meanwhile, boyfriend Tom’s “War of the Worlds” had a solid $113 million six-day opening. But the Web site Hollywood-Elsewhere.com reports that some Paramount executives hoped for a $140 million debut.

And two separate, previous Internet polls had about a fifth of respondents vowing to boycott the movie because of Cruise’s peculiar pronouncements on psychiatry and post-partum depression.

Forget the old press agent’s motto. Apparently there is such a thing as bad publicity.

“It definitely affects the box office, but I think it’s demographically based,” says AOL/Moviefone founder Russ Leatherman, whose firm often tracks audience expectations. “I don’t think the teenagers care. I think some adults do.

“Russell Crowe throwing a phone at someone – that’s generally not considered to be acceptable behavior. Tom Cruise talking against psychiatrists – you know, if I was someone who was on Prozac, I’d be offended, personally. … And I might just be a little less likely to give him my $10.”

Sometimes, though, the bad publicity doesn’t seem to matter. When Pitt’s marriage to Jennifer Aniston ended – and rumors of him having an affair with Jolie began – some industry insiders feared it might affect the box office of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”

Instead, the silly movie became an undeserved hit.

“In this case, I think the stories about them actually helped the movie,” says Paul Dergarabedian, founder of the box-office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations. “Because the relationship seemed to parallel what was onscreen.”

Context, clearly, is crucial. “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” stars two top-of-their-game sex symbols in a story about a couple who are crazy in love; any suggestion that this dangerously uncontrolled passion continued offscreen merely helps market the movie as a heated, high-risk romance.

What might be only a two-day story for one star can turn into a crisis for another. Ben Affleck can talk about going into rehab, or Jane Fonda can reveal her past eating disorders, and they’re applauded for speaking out; Lohan appears in a picture with a pack of cigarettes, or looking surprisingly thin, and the horrified rumors run for days.

In an earlier time, Fatty Arbuckle and Errol Flynn both were tried for – and acquitted of – rape, but it was Arbuckle’s career that was ruined.

Fonda and Donald Sutherland both took uncompromising stands against the Vietnam War, but Sutherland is now the avuncular voice of Volvo; Fonda had a protester spit in her face.

“A lot of it had to do with the fact that I was privileged,” she said earlier this year, explaining why she thought she had first become a focus of some people’s anger.

“And there was the fact that I am a woman and was a pinup. I was supposed to go over with Bob Hope and the USO. And so that made it a double betrayal.”

In rare cases, though, scandal can help a career. Robert Mitchum was a capable young lead in the ‘40s, but his arrest at a “pot party” gave him a bohemian rebelliousness that helped turn him into a true star.

Hugh Grant was mired in stammering nice-boy parts until he was arrested with a prostitute in 1995; it provided just enough of a bad-boy edge to allow him to move on to far more interesting cads in movies like “Bridget Jones’s Diary.”

Before her sex tape, Paris Hilton was just a vulgar, air-headed heiress; now she’s a vulgar, air-headed star.

Decades after establishing the movie star as the symbol of the American motion picture, though, studios are beginning to realize that continually relying on that sort of brand-name loyalty carries a risk.

Fueled by an ever-increasing array of picture-driven gossip rags, audiences have unparalleled access to every minute of their favorites’ lives. They don’t always like what they see, and just as a vague fondness for an established star can bring fans to their movies again and again, a sudden antipathy can just as quickly undo a career.

“You’re basically paying to watch people perform,” AOL/Moviefone’s Leatherman says. “And if they become unlikable on some level, you’re going to keep your money in your pocket.”

Although they’re rarely accused of foresight, the people who make movies feared this kind of volatility from the beginning. That’s why, back in the nickelodeon days, performers weren’t credited. Studios gave them different names from film to film, or billed them only as types – “the girl with the golden curls.”

But then, in 1910, Carl Laemmle, then the owner of the Imp Studios, hired away “The Biograph Girl.” And found himself with a problem: What was the use of paying money for the right to sell a product if everyone only knew it by your competitor’s trademark?

So Laemmle planted an anonymous story in the St. Louis newspapers that the Biograph Girl had died in a streetcar accident. He then took out full-page advertisements decrying this “black” and “cowardly” lie – explaining that the Biograph Girl was now the Imp Girl, and working for him, and that her name was Florence Lawrence.

It was the first time that a movie actor had been publicized by name, and it was the first time that a performer’s private life – real or imagined – had been used to sell a film.

And although it brought no lasting happiness to anyone – Laemmle lost his business during the Depression, and Lawrence eventually committed suicide by eating ant poison – the events it set in motion are felt to this day.

The Imp was out of the bottle at last. And no matter of hard work would ever put her back.