The Class Of '98

By RICHARD CORLISS

Katie Holmes flashes her luminous, kitten-on-a-pillow smile and says, "It's a wonderful thing to be 19 and in show business right now." Ain't it, though? Last year she and her mom made a video screen test in the rec room of their Toledo, Ohio, home and sent it to Kevin Williamson, the Scream screenwriter, who needed an ingenue for his new TV series, Dawson's Creek. "I thought it would be just a sweet attempt," he says, "but Katie was amazing. At first she couldn't come meet us because she was in a high school play. Finally she walked in, and she was exactly what I had envisioned for the role."

So you don't have to be Drew Barrymore to become a movie Cinderella. With her Dawson's role as the dewy but sensible Joey and her film debut in the thriller Disturbing Behavior, Holmes could be the hottest multimedia teen since--hey, remember Neve Campbell?

These are indeed the wonder years for young actors with a marketable cuteness, an elfin eroticism, a certain Leo-like or next-Brad charisma. There are dozens of TV shows, like Dawson and Campbell's Party of Five, to employ them--and, it seems, quillions of low-budget movies to exploit their radiance and here-today star quality. Next week brings Halloween: H20, featuring Dawson's regular Michelle Williams. Then the college comedy Dead Man on Campus, with Alyson Hannigan of TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The teenpix parade marches into the fall by the dozens, including Varsity Blues (with Dawson's James Van Der Beek) and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (Party of Five's Jennifer Love Hewitt).

If you're middle-aged and childless, these titles, these "stars," may mean nothing to you. And if you go to teen movies, you may wonder why anyone else would. Disturbing Behavior, directed by The X-Files' David Nutter, has a Stepford-teens premise with slacker appeal (all the well-behaved kids with good grades have been lobotomized on the say-so of their evil parents), and Holmes looks terrif as a Draculette punkster (nose ring, bicep tattoo, a swath of bare midriff). But the film goes haywire with torture scenes reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange. Which makes this a clockwork lemon. Halloween: H20, directed by Dawson's Creek's Steve Miner from a story idea by Williamson, sends Jamie Lee Curtis once more against her masked nemesis, in a retread of John Carpenter's 1978 classic. You loved the original; why not just rent or remember it?

Well, frankly, you don't matter. To Hollywood, kids matter. They are the most avid movie patrons--nearly half go twice a month or more, double the rate for 25-to-34-year-olds--and there are more of them than ever before. "The teenage population is growing faster than any other segment," says Paramount executive Rob Friedman, "and their tastes are more sophisticated than they used to be." They go for hip variations on old themes, flocking to the two Scream films (each earned more than $100 million at the domestic box office) or to a canny thriller like last year's I Know What You Did Last Summer, starring Hewitt and Buffy's Sarah Michelle Gellar (which grossed $72 million on a $17 million budget).

Most teen films don't do this well, and most young TV stars can't guarantee B.O. gold. Movies starring Campbell (Wild Things) and the slightly older Friends cast (Picture Perfect, Fools Rush In, Romy & Michele's High School Reunion) typically bump their heads on the $30 million ceiling. Teen movies still serve an old function: to caulk the crevices in the release schedule and create cheap product that, if it doesn't make a bundle, won't lose one either. Like I Was a Teenage Werewolf and the Elvis films of 40 years ago, they are reliable B movies.

But even if a teen film isn't a big hit, it can make money. This summer's Can't Hardly Wait (with Hewitt) grossed a tepid $25 million, but since it cost only around $10 million, everyone got to see some green. Everyone but the actors. "The teen genre is a godsend to studios, because they can use a bunch of young people in the place of one $20 million star," says Cary Woods, who produced Scream. "And the kids don't get gross percentages, so the studios get nice profits." It's not as if these kids were cobbling Nikes in China--$50,000 to $150,000 is decent pay for a summer job--but young TV stars are the best buy in Hollywood.

And so are teen moviegoers. Gerry Rich, MGM's president of worldwide marketing, notes that a teen movie may cost up to 50% less to advertise than a big summer film. Cost-efficient ads for Disturbing Behavior and Halloween: H20 are blanketing the kid-drams and cable music channels. "When you're marketing a teen movie," notes Bob Weinstein, the Miramax co-chair and boss of Dimension Films, which distributed the Scream epics, "MTV becomes your best friend."

Now teens and Hollywood are on that same intimate basis. "Everything is being cast younger in Hollywood," says Cathy Konrad, producer of Williamson's new black comedy, Killing Mrs. Tingle. "You'll read a script where the characters are 40 years old, and the studio will ask if they can be in their early 20s instead." The moguls also think of how the Amy Heckerling comedy Clueless transformed Jane Austen's Emma into a modern-teen hit, and they dip some literary favorite into the fountain of youthpix. The fall film Ten Things I Hate About You, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt of 3rd Rock from the Sun, is "The Taming of the Shrew in high school." Next year's Cruel Inventions, with Gellar and Dawson's Joshua Jackson, was pitched as "Dangerous Liaisons in high school." Then there's Strike, billed as "Lysistrata in high school." Can a teen Finnegans Wake be far behind?

Fortunately for Hollywood, there are millions of attractive kids with a show-biz bug. "Casting directors used to recruit out of Yale drama school," says Konrad. "Now they go to small towns to watch high school plays." Or they receive a videotape from Ohio. "I'm kind of a fresh-face type of deal," says Holmes, asked to explain her appeal. "It's not that I'm sexy, I know that! Whatever. I know it won't last forever, but I'm glad to be in my teens and doing these things."

To the fans of teen stars, "doing these things" means being part of a close celebrity cluster. "Everyone thinks it is like Melrose Place, that we all live in the same apartment complex and go to the same spots every night," says Hewitt, who will soon star as Audrey Hepburn in a TV mini-series. "That is so not the case. People ask me, 'What is Leo like?' Like I would know. Even at premieres, you go to the movie and the party, you feel uncomfortable, then you go home early and eat macaroni and cheese in your sweats."

For the canniest take on the teen trend, go to a potential teen idol: James Marsden, the talented, feloniously gorgeous star of Disturbing Behavior, who speaks of teens from the remote perspective of his 25 years. "They are a very intelligent generation," he says, "more intelligent than I was. They are cynical, sarcastic. The less a movie tries to cater to them, the more they want to go see it. And their influence is amazing. Why don't you just have 14-year-olds run the studios?"

A teenage mogul. Hmm, where's the downside?

--Reported by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles