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Selective Memory can be a fine thing. How lovely it is to look back on the covers well snapped, the quotes deftly captured, the words wisely used, and what we'd like to consider our practically psychic sense of new talent. Regarding our fleeting lapses in judgement, we hope that only those readers with a full archive of Entertainment Weekly will remember them. As for the rest of you, well, we're not about to give you too much ammunition. So here's our collection of the best, biggest, and strangest in entertainment our pages had to offer. Just Your Basic Cover Shot How to get across the idea of Michael Douglas' latest movie, Basic Instinct, in which he starred with then unknown Sharon Stone? Re-create the movie's postulate that, in the hands of this woman, Douglas was vulnerable even when he seemed most in control. To that end, we hired Stone-like model Amy Graham and posed her with Douglas. The actor, who spent the afternoon sitting between the model's knees and puffing on cigars, didn't seem to mind the chore of shaving that day.
Pretty Determined Woman When EW first interviewed Julia Roberts in the fall of 1991, she'd left Kiefer Sutherland and was weathering nasty rumors of drug abuse as well as questions about whether her performance as Tinkerbell in Hook marked the end of her - career. But once she decided to break her silence, she went all the way. ''I can't give a s -- - about some lady in Boise who thinks I made the biggest mistake,'' she said unapologetically of her canceled wedding. ''This is my life.'' Three years later, Roberts was back in fighting form, and back on our cover for our summer 1994 Cool issue. ''If people want me to be fragile...then that's what they'll see,'' she said. ''It has increasingly little to do with me as an actual person.''
Frown and Pout In Beverly Hills Were Luke Perry, Jason Priestley, and Shannen Doherty actually hugging on EW's Sept. 6, 1991 cover? ''They claim no tensions, these fragile egos with soft faces,'' said our first story on Beverly Hills, 90210, then in its second season. Picture-perfect? Hardly. Our next two cast-member covers featured Doherty and Perry, no longer blowing kisses at each other. Priestley and Jennie Garth remained buttoned together last fall on our most recent 90210 cover, but will the show unzip when contracts expire this spring? With CU's sophomores bringing in the highest ratings in three years, and the Priestley/ Perry combo likely to reregister, a 90210 Goes to Grad School cover looks awfully likely.
Power to the People (A Few of Them) With our first Power 101 issue on Nov. 2, 1990-listing the industry's top influence peddlers-we thought we'd whipped up a jokey little gimmick that poked fun at the showbiz pecking order. As it turned out, Hollywood took us with deadly seriousness. If the issues have taught us one thing, it's that power is as shifty as an agent on a cellular phone driving into a canyon: One year you're riding high, the next you're stuck in Where-are-they-now- ville; only 38 people on our 1990 list survived to be part of 1994's top 101.
