Robert Redford: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

3. Warren Justice - Up Close & Personal (1996)

Of all the roles open to an individual in Hollywood, being a screenwriter is perhaps the most unrewarding. You can craft the best screenplay in existence, but as soon as a producer, executive or another writer gets hold of it, it can quickly turn into an awful mess. Sometimes the finished product is such a departure from the original story that it could be called offensive - and that brings us to Up Close & Personal.

Directed by John Avnet (Righteous Kill), Up Close & Personal centres on the relationship between Miami local news director Warren Justice and aspiring reporter Sally 'Tally' Atwater (Michelle Pfeiffer). Having hired her on the basis of a homemade audition tape, Justice guides Tally to having her own anchor position, all the while falling more in love with her. Things come to a head when Tally is trapped inside a Philadelphia prison during a riot, and Warren has to guide her through covering the story on national TV.

Up Close & Personal started out as a biopic of troubled but popular news anchor Jessica Savitch, with the first drafts being from Alanna Nash's biography of her. But the studios felt Savitch's arc was too downbeat for American audiences, and so watered down the script into the frothy, third-rate melodrama that remains.

Redford has very little to work with, but he still manages to screw things up, turning in a performance that borders on self-parody. If the film had been a satire like Broadcast News, this could have worked, but as it is it's downright embarrassing.