by Christos Zabounis

The downside to making difficult career decisions for any of us is that these may not have the expected results. This is exactly what happened to the popular, otherwise, Kevin Costner, when he decided to stop his participation in one of the top TV series of the last years, “Yellowstone”. Notably, he was paid an astronomical $1.5 million per episode in season 5, so you can do the math considering he’s been starring in it since season 1, even if he was paid less to begin with. So what got into him and he did not accept to continue something that critics and the public deified, choosing the lonely path of personal ambition, or vanity if you prefer? We will all agree, I think, that it is preferable to have the final cut of a work of art, a motion picture in this case. It’s one thing to have a screenwriter to write for you what to say, a director to indicate how to say it, and a producer if you’re going to say it, and another to undertake all three, or rather four, in the case of you also acting in it. “It’s time to do something of my own,” the two-time Oscar winner, three-time Golden Globe Award winner, two-time Screen Actors Guild Award winner, and, of course, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, would have thought. He reportedly invested nearly $100,000,000 to bring a trilogy set in the American West to the big screen. The result, as we watched it in a summer cinema in Athens, of the first part was uneven, to even boring. Although, when it premiered at the Cannes International Film Festival, the audience respectfully applauded it for ten minutes after the screening, the relentless US box office forced him to postpone the planned premiere of Part 2, with the diplomatic explanation of the opportunity to give the public time to discover Part 1. Sic transit Gloria mundi. Thus passes the worldly glory, as our Latin friends used to say.