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When Fair Game -- the $30 million Cindy Crawford and William Baldwin film -- opens Nov. 3 after a three-month delay, the world will finally discover whether Crawford, the most distinguished member of the model sisterhood, can make the leap to movie star. No wonder the girls, as they're called, are anxiously clutching their Prada bags.
While Naomi Campbell (Miami Rhapsody) and Elle Macpherson (Sirens) have spent the last year prudently appearing in small roles, Crawford's Hollywood turn is as a leading lady. And on the models-in-acting spectrum, she may veer more toward Brooke Shields than Isabella Rossellini.
Since being bumped from its August release date, the Joel Silver shoot-'em-up about a lawyer and a cop has had major tweaking. ''The early screenings were bad,'' says a Warner executive. ''Cindy was weak but the story wasn't great either.'' Steven de Souza, the Die Hard screenwriter who worked on the reshoots, confirms there were problems. ''What happened was a mystery,'' says de Souza, who mentions flaws such as a failure to ID Crawford's character as a lawyer until ''an hour and 10 minutes into the movie....The scenes were to beef up her part and make it credible.''
Crawford, 29, who lowered expectations for her performance in an August interview (''It's not like I was dying to be an actress,'' she told EW), does have a deal in the works for a new, unspecified project. And, given her teenage-boy following, it's likely Fair Game will open well.
Still, Crawford's trial by fire is the latest in a flurry of hard knocks for models. Lauren Hutton's syndicated late-night talk show is foundering. A Comedy Central Politically Incorrect poll voted the New York City-based Fashion Cafe the theme restaurant people would be most embarrassed to be caught in. And despite unprecedented media clamor, not one bona fide supermodel has emerged in the three years since Kate Moss first wafted into view.
Could the era of the supermodel already be waning? ''The pendulum has swung,'' says Michael Gross, author of Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women. ''Supermodels just got too big for their Manolo Blahnik boots.''
''The concept of modeling was not something people are interested in,'' says Charles Pratt Jr., executive producer of the short-lived Fox series Models, Inc.
Others, like Stewart Cameron, Elle Macpherson's manager, strongly dispute the idea of a mannequin backlash. ''The supermodel craze is as strong today as it was three years ago, if not stronger,'' he says. ''Naomi just completed six episodes of New York Undercover. Elle's in The Mirror Has Two Faces for Barbra Streisand.'' Plus, the presence of supermodels helped Unzipped, the documentary about Isaac Mizrahi, earn a respectable $2.7 million at the box office. A London branch of the Fashion Cafe is due to open in the spring. Predicts RuPaul: ''There will be a new generation of super-duper-models.''
Okay, so maybe models aren't headed for the sale rack. Clearly, though, the explosive growth of the early '90s has hit a plateau. ''A supermodel is a supermodel,'' says CNN's Elsa Klensch. ''It's hard for them to break out.''
