Zac Efron “looks like something a gay guy designed in a laboratory.” That’s how Seth Rogen puts it in Neighbors, when he looks out his window to see a tank top–clad Efron moving his fraternity into the house next door.
It’s true, right? The perfect body, the beautiful face, the Paul Newman-esque blue eyes. But for most of his career, Efron has been something that a teenaged girl designed in a laboratory: that same beautiful face and body, but with an equally beautiful heart. Efron — and the characters he played, whether Troy Bolton (High School Musical), Charlie St. Cloud (Charlie St. Cloud), or Logan Thibault (The Lucky One) — were sensitive pieces of man meat who really just wanted to respect, cherish, and maybe, just maybe (and totally only when you’re ready!), have a single kiss and/or very lovingly take your clothes off.
Efron wasn’t the first to blend the beautiful face and generous heart — that’s provenance of the matinee idol, whose lineage goes all the way back to Wallace Reid and Rudolph Valentino. But Efron’s career struggles are the result of the impossible contradictions of total masculinity and total sensitivity we ask of our aging teen idols. There’s a reason that so many of them “bro out,” sometimes fatally.
There’s an impossible ideal set out for female stars — it’s constantly discussed, whether in memory of Marilyn or in reference to Britney. Male stars supposedly have it easier: They get to play sexy for longer; they get good, meaty roles well into their sixties, and since teenage boy tastes run Hollywood, they get roles that rotate around them and their interests.
In reality, though, Hollywood’s only actually good to male stars who can play a very certain type of hetero hero. That hero is also straight, virile, and designed, above all, to be someone whom 1) men want to be and 2) women want to have sex with. Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Brad Pitt — the only way you can get around that imperative is to be funny, in which case you can be someone, like Will Ferrell, whom men want to be friends with and women find adorable.
The former teen idol, however, can’t really be either of those things. Even as he grows up and maybe grows a beard, his image is forever bound by his status as a fetish object for teen girls. And it’s not just that he’s “cute” — he’s a very particular type of cute. Truly and exquisitely beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that most could’ve grown their hair and passed as teen girls. They’re enormously attractive to pubescent girls not because they’re sexual, but because they’re not.
When a girl is first confronting her attraction to the other sex, it’s terrifying. The thought of the sexual act itself, all that physical action and mess, is terrifying. What you do want to think about is romance — a guy who thinks you’re special, who wants to do nice things for you, who wants to hold your hand. Teenage boys who already look like men are threatening, but teenage boys who look not that dissimilar from your best girl friends — only they want to be your boyfriend… that’s comforting. Thus: Robert Pattinson, Justin Bieber, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Davy Jones, ad infinitum.
But first there was James Dean. Because in order to have a teen idol, you had to have teens — and before the 1940s, there wasn’t such a thing. Before the Depression, there were two ways of being a person in the world — first, you were a child, and then, when you were old enough to bear children and work on your own, you were an adult. But the lack of work during the Depression made it so that thousands of teenagers who would’ve otherwise transitioned into adulthood were able to go to high school, not get married right away, and, gradually, establish themselves as a separate demographic, a distinction further ratified when the United States entered World War II. You were a teen or you were a soldier.
And advertisers knew a promising new market when they saw it. The first teen magazine, Seventeen, published its first issue in 1944, and over the decade to come, the teenager became king. So much of what we associate with ‘50s pop culture — the poodle skirts, Elvis, sock hops, The Twist — was all teen culture. From that point forward, the culture industries (film, television, music, fashion) would begin marketing primarily not to the median, but to the demographic with the capital, and the lack of other financial demands, to purchase it freely. Teenagers!
Dean was the perfect star for the budding teenage market: young and pretty, reckless and wounded, and he was super sensitive — he cried! All of which made it all the easier to really fall for him when, at all of 24 years old, he died in a fiery car crash. The fervor around Dean’s death was unprecedented: Sure, women supposedly had attempted suicide in the streets after Valentino’s death in 1926, but he was established as the biggest male star in the country for years. By contrast, Dean had been in a single film (East of Eden) at the time of his death, with just two more (Rebel Without a Cause, Giant) to be released in the months to come, which only helped sustain the general frenzy among girls between the ages of 12 and 19 for years to come.
It makes sense, then, that entertainment executives all over Hollywood began working themselves into a frenzy creating new teen idols. It also made sense that these new idols were a bit less James Dean (volatile and unpredictable) and more along the lines of Ricky Nelson, the clean-cut star of the smash hit Ozzie and Harriet. Ozzie and Harriet offered a cookie-cutter, totally palatable, somewhat boring portrait of the ‘50s ideal, complete with a totally cute, totally vanilla younger son.
In some pictures of Nelson, he looks like the popular guy from your high school who was probably named Chad or Brad. There’s a certain future Business Leader of America quality to him, something more Biff from Back to the Future than Marty McFly. But take a look at him singing his No. 2 hit, “A Teenager’s Romance,” on a 1957 episode of Ozzie and Harriet.
Nelson’s a horrible performer — the way he awkwardly shuffle-dances right around the one-minute mark — but his inability to look the camera in the “eye” is pure bashful teenager. He had the Dean-esque bouffant and the rolled-up shirt sleeves, but he was performing for his mother, who promised to provide “the down beat.” Crucially, this wasn’t some actress playing his mother — it was his real mom, and that was his real dad and real older brother who step into the frame to watch him, authenticating his goodness and sincerity.
Pabulum, sure, but coupled with Nelson’s fresh good looks — and the fact that you could watch him on ABC every week — it transformed a semi-talented kid into one of the biggest stars of the decade. Suddenly, he was usurping the traditional stars on the cover of the fan magazines — the first television star to do so — a move that signaled the rise of a new generation of media consumers. Elvis may have been sexier and more exotic — those hips! — but you could get your parents to buy you a Ricky Nelson record. Wholesome, white, straight, safe, plus he looked great as a cowboy in Rio Bravo, a film that cemented his popularity.
Nelson also set the business model for teen idols to come: He acted, he sang, he appeared in movies. He could be cross-promoted across all spheres, exploiting teen girls’ desire to own as much of their object of affection as was made available to them. His appearances on Ozzie and Harriet turned into de facto music videos, and between 1957 and 1962, Nelson had an astonishing 30 Top 40 hits. Dozens of teen idols — most notably, Donny Osmond and Davy Jones — followed this strategy, and it served as the slightly altered foundation for Disney’s reboot of its own teen franchise, The Mickey Mouse Club, in 1989.
We all know the talent that came out of The All-New Mickey Mouse Club over its six-year run: Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, JC Chasez, Keri Russell, and Ryan Gosling. Young potential molded to sing, dance, improvise, and be charismatic on cue.
The All-New Mickey Mouse Club also coincided with Disney’s reboot years, when, along the renaissance of Disney animation, the company was remembering how to successfully exploit its new product across media in a way that Walt had pioneered with Mickey, Disneyland, and thousands of other Disney products. Disney owned everything these kids did with MMC in the early 1990s, but they weren’t playing the long game: When the show ended in 1995 and at least four of the Mousketeers went on to tremendously lucrative singing careers, Disney’s name wasn’t on any of it. (Which is part of the reason these stars could go on to major careers: no one cared when Gosling’s first major film role, for example, was as an anti-Semitic neo-Nazi.)
It took another decade — and the massive success of Hilary Duff — for Disney to fine-tune what would become its own “studio system” of young stars. By 2006, it had the infrastructure in place; starting with Miley Cyrus, Disney would never let an opportunity to cross-promote pass it by again. The new “class” of Disney talent was almost entirely “raw” (new to entertainment, unshaped) and ready to be molded into franchise lynchpins. Hannah Montana was a massive hit, but so were Wizards of Waverly Place and The Suite Life of Zack & Cody; together with a slew of Disney Channel original films, they helped The Disney Channel overtake Nickelodeon in ratings for the first time in years.
For Disney, this was much more than a ratings game. It was what a growing swath of cross-media properties could mean for the conglomerate at large. Put differently, it wasn’t just that Hannah Montana was a hit; it was that the soundtrack to her show, her concert series, her Disney Channel movies, and the ever-unfurling spirals of merchandise were generating incredible profits — upwards of $1 billion by 2007. But Miley was only half of Disney’s success strategy. The other half became a veritable phenomenon: High School Musical.
High School Musical is a perfect reverse-engineering tween product. If tweens want little more than to experience high school, then Disney offers that experience — only frames it as one in which all matter of stereotypes (jocks, cheerleaders, artists, nerds) can eventually leave behind their self-consciousness and social roles to collaborate in the name of music.
Unlike other kids' products — SpongeBob SquarePants, say, or Pixar — there’s no second meaning available for adult audiences. HSM plays it completely straight — in both meanings of the word — and is wholly bereft of irony. The purity of emotion, coupled with its marketing toward tweens and young teens, helped turn it into a phenomenon: Sure, parents thought it was cheesy, but who cared, so long as every kid from 8 to 13 was buying the soundtrack and participating in the Disney-branded productions at their own schools.
HSM was filled with would-be stars: the all-American Ashley Tisdale, the affable Corbin Bleu, around whom Disney would later try to build another franchise. But the true prizes were the star-crossed lovers in the lead roles: Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens. Efron was a bright-eyed, floppy-haired jock; Hudgens was the ethnically ambiguous mathlete. Societal expectations tried to keep them apart, but musical theater brought them together! Their relationship was completely chaste, the musical numbers were ridiculous, but with those blue, smizing eyes, Efron was a teenage dream: all heart, no libido.
Like Ricky Nelson, Efron couldn’t really act in HSM — but he didn’t really need to. He was what, back in classic Hollywood, they’d call a “trouper” — someone who could passably sing, dance, and perform on demand. And like all Disney Channel product, what matters isn’t the talent, but the ability to look and act like something that tweens would like to become and/or spend their allowance on reproducing on their backpack.
Off screen, Efron’s actions fit the on-screen image. Trained, undoubtedly, by the Disney publicity team, he became an expert at reproducing the banal tidbit: “I was always the shortest kid in school,” he told People. “Plus, I had a huge gap in my teeth. I got teased more about my gap than anything else.” He couldn’t live without his skateboard and kept a poster of Tyra Banks above his bed. “I’m good at Hacky Sack,” he explained, and, “I consider myself a pretty good kid. There are always little slipups, but I try to work hard at my job.”
Whether or not Efron was, in fact, a “good kid” matters less than Disney’s ability to make sure that their images remained as such. It’s one thing when you’re a twentysomething appealing to an adult audience — if you show up drunk on TMZ, it’s not the end of your career. But these stars’ livelihood was rooted in a very specific, very wholesome appeal to supposedly impressionable tween kids: What they did off screen absolutely mattered.
From January 2006 to October 2008, that was the guiding logic of Efron’s off-screen career. But he — or someone at Disney — knew that the most effective way to amplify his star (and HSM) was a tried-and-true one: Make the on-screen romance come to (real) life.
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Rumors of Efron and Hudgens’ flirtation thus began to circulate in summer 2007. Paparazzi caught them holding hands on the beach, but Efron was tantalizingly cagey in press for Hairspray, his first non-Disney film. High School Musical 2 debuted on Aug. 17, 2007 — coinciding with a Rolling Stone profile titled “The New American Heartthrob,” with a perfectly bronzed Efron removing his shirt on the cover.
When asked whether a ring on his finger is a “commitment ring,” Efron “turns red” — “I’m not going to say who it’s from,” he says, “This is just a ring from a friend that I got. ‘Commitment’ is way too weird a word for me right now. I’m wearing it for a friend … It is a female friend, but I can’t say who, because then it would be chat-room pandemonium and teen magazine hysteria. Yeah.”
Which is precisely what happened when, just days later, People magazine debuted a cover featuring “Their Real-Life Romance!” promising the details of how “America’s hottest teens fell for each other.” And so “Zanessa” was born: the couple that got to kiss (although very carefully out of sight) even when their on-screen counterparts couldn’t, and had to deal — very, very, carefully — with the revelation of Hudgens’ nude photos, which were quickly framed as a) a “mistake” or b) taken solely for Efron, which, as her one and only, diffused the sexual explicitness. The relationship would last for five years, but the acceptance of the photos were one of many events that trumpeted Efron’s willingness to toe the Disney publicity line while ignoring the overarching Disney publicity line.
He’d bailed on the High School Musical tour in order to film Hairspray, in part because, as he readily admitted, it wasn’t his voice on the soundtrack. And even though Efron was a passable singer, he resisted the dozens of offers for a music contract — “I didn’t want to do what everyone else did,” Efron told Entertainment Weekly. “I thought to myself, What can I contribute to the music industry? I can’t say that I would be proud of the work that I put down.” He was cagey about whether or not there’d be a High School Musical 3, and after accepting a role in the remake of Footloose — which would clearly replicate his High School Musical image — he backed out.
Efron ended up doing HSM 3, which, like the first two, was a smash hit — and even gave Efron a chance for an out-of-focus kiss with Hudgens, performed in the classic Hollywood style that I like to refer to as “fish kissing,” aka no tongues allowed. But before he could even finish publicity, the conversation had already turned to the difficulty of transitioning out of teen idolhood. Amid the revelation of his relationship with Hudgens, he’d ironically been “phased out” of the tween demo: As Leesa Coble, editor of Tiger Beat and Bop, explained, “When people are on the cover of Rolling Stone and in People, that’s sort of a sign for us that the peak has happened for our readers… You don’t want to like what your parents like.”
An article for EW declared “navigating the perilous journey from teen phenom to grown-up actor is a full-time job”; USA Today did an entire piece on failed teen idols in order to talk about Efron’s potential future. But Efron (or his agent-publicist) had a game plan. He was set to star in 17 Again, which seemed like a perfect transitional film; he was to play a teenage version of Matthew Perry, who, through some murky movie magic, wins a chance to redo his senior year in high school. Efron opened the film in a basketball uniform — a clear visual throwback to his tenure at HSM — and danced to “Bust a Move,” but the moonfaced sincerity was (almost) gone, replaced by genuine comedic timing. The way we feel about Lindsay Lohan in Freaky Friday, that’s how we should feel about Efron in 17 Again: It’s like a revelation of actual talent. Just look at the way he defends his Ed Hardy T-shirt.
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