By Gayle Jo Carter
USA Weekend
July25, 1997

Can this star jump from TV's Friend-ly confines into a movie career? Audiences will decide this week.

Like many A star before her, including all of her "Friends" on the hit TV sitcom, Jennifer Aniston is treading in treacherous territory. Not even the smartest of Hollywood insiders can explain why some TV stars -- think John Travolta -- make it as movie stars while others -- think Shelley Long -- don't.

In Picture Perfect, opening this week, Aniston, 28, gets her shot. She's the central character in the romantic comedy, backed up by screen veterans Kevin Bacon and Olympia Dukakis. Aniston is well aware of the break she's catching: "I couldn't get a movie to save my life," she says of her pre-Friends days, cozying into a sofa in her summer sublet in New York's artsy (i.e., expensive) Greenwich Village.

Aniston peppers me for my opinions of Picture Perfect, which I saw that morning. "Does anything seem hard to believe? You thought it was real?" Even when I tell her it was a lot of fun, held my interest and could put her on the Hollywood map, she still seems unsure, perhaps afraid I was being nice for the sake of the interview.

Who can blame Aniston, especially after the other "Friends" found the box office less friendly than the Nielsen ratings? Does anyone even remember The Pallbearer (with David Schwimmer) or Ed (with Matt LeBlanc)? "You have to be very careful, because you want to make the right choice. You want to hang around for a while," Aniston says.

Her concerns reflect more than mere TV-to-movie angst. Today's Hollywood produces "disposable stars," says Dukakis, Aniston's when-are-you-getting-married mother in Picture Perfect. "They're so vulnerable, so criticized. You're hearing people say, 'This is a young Julia Roberts.' Now, how old is Julia Roberts? [29] What is that all about?" Regardless, Dukakis believes Aniston has what it takes for the long run. "Stupider people than me know that," she quips.

JUST BACK FROM a bike tour of Provence with her boyfriend, actor Tate Donovan, Aniston -- in baggy sweats, a trademark tight black T-shirt and just-pedicured bare feet -- has landed in New York for the summer to film her next movie, Object of My Affection. Not long ago a struggling actress-waitress, Aniston knows that the to-die-for apartment, the assistant named Heather and the starring movie roles have a price: aggressive paparazzi, tabloid tales of anorexia and breast implants, and the backlash that followed America's initial Friends lovefest.

"We were just doing a job and loving it. It had great success, and we were thrilled. Then it got bigger and bigger, and then, out of nowhere, one day you're reading that people are really annoyed." She couldn't put it out of her mind until Steven Spielberg offered her this advice: "This [backlash] happens to everybody. Don't think you're so special."

But sometimes Hollywood is too much to handle, and the price of fame is high for young stars testing the waters in public view. Possible evidence: Friends co-star Matthew Perry's recent acknowledgement, after months of speculation about his drastic weight loss, of an addiction to prescription painkillers, for which he sought treatment. "I'm sure it's a combination of a lot of things," Aniston says, wiping away tears. "Unfortunately, he's in the public eye, so his experimentation is out there, and I guess it went too far. Matthew is not even a drinker. He's, like, a pure person. He'd almost frown on you if you had one too many glasses of wine and were getting silly."

LIKE MANY of her Gen-X peers, Aniston was shaped by her parents' divorce -- and that may partly explain her sure-footedness so far in Hollywood. "I learned a lot about human relations and emotions at a young age, dealing with adults who were all of a sudden children. It's definitely hard. You deal with them fighting through you. That's a drag."

While her actor dad, John Aniston, was in Los Angeles taping his soap opera, Days of Our Lives, Aniston was living in New York with her mom, a sometime actress-model, and attending the performing arts high school made famous by Fame. Dad did his best to dissuade her from going into show business. "Why trust your kid into that? You try to protect them from all the bad people out there," John Aniston says. In show business, "you get chewed up and spit out."

But it was futile with her family ties -- Dad on a soap, and Telly Savalas as her godfather. Now she says his advice is: "This is a business. Be smart. Choose wisely." He's the one, in fact, who gave her the Picture Perfect script, trying to help her pick the few good movies that come with all the stinkers.

After high school graduation, Aniston headed to L.A. with big acting dreams. Before Friends, her claims to fame were five years of many failed TV shows -- including Molloy, Herman's Head and The Edge -- and the better-to-forget horror movie Leprechaun. With Friends came a better class of movie roles, starting with a supporting part in independent filmmaker Ed Burns' She's the One last summer. Aniston earned good reviews, though some said her character wasn't much of a stretch from Rachel, the coffee server-turned-Bloomingdale's fashion buyer she plays on NBC's "must-see TV" Thursday nights. "Because you're in the spotlight, there's so much pressure on you to see how you're going to do. Are you going to fail, or are you going to do good?"

Friends co-star Matt LeBlanc -- calling from the London movie set of Lost in Space -- colorfully describes it this way: "It's like you're caught naked hanging from a tree branch with the wind blowing."

Picture Perfect director Glenn Gordon Caron, who worked with Cybill Shepherd in television's Moonlighting and Annette Bening in Love Affair, believes Aniston will make the leap to movie stardom, noting that "very few people can be funny and intelligent." Aniston, he says, can. "She's got the chops to be a wonderful dramatic actress."

Yet no one knows better than Aniston how superficial it all can be. It wasn't until she lost 30 pounds, at her agent's suggestion, that she landed Friends. And she worries about the cumulative impact of TV's thin, glamorous stars on young girls. "TV is definitely guilty of putting out unrealistic images of what is socially acceptable. I'm guilty of it, too."

Dukakis points out there's never been a time when actresses' looks weren't an obsession. "It's just that the images today that everybody likes are so questionable," she says of the rail-thin, shapeless look of so many Hollywood women. John Aniston tells me it's not just a woman thing. He calls Hollywood "an equal opportunity deflator" -- and he should know: After 12 years, Days of Our Lives recently opted not to renew his contract.

IN PICTURE PERFECT, Aniston plays Kate, a young ad executive who invents a fiancé to make her promotable in the eyes of her male bosses, who think being single means she can't be depended on. After being thrown into a picture with the video guy at a friend's wedding, she has a Picture Perfect made-up fiancé until he becomes famous and the honchos at work insist on meeting him.

"Her character does things that are not very nice, [but] we forgive her," director Caron says. "That's a quality that's rare among actors. Jack Lemmon had it; we let him sin and then redeem himself. Tom Hanks has it. But women, as a rule, are not afforded the opportunity, or we don't recognize it as quickly in them. It's a great gift that she has."

Still, Hollywood demands more than good acting, Dukakis says. "The staying power is very mercurial. [Stars] have to really keep analyzing where they're at and what's happening and what they're doing and what they should be doing."

Aniston herself isn't clear on the magic formula: "I don't know what it is, why some people will make it in movies and some won't." As for her next steps in Hollywood? "I'm still learning what the rules are. Like, when does your time run out? I'm hoping you get to a place when you are comfortable enough in your body of work that you can look behind you and go, 'This is what I want to do; this feels close to me.' "

As much as she wants a long-term Hollywood career, she also wants a happy marriage and kids -- basically, a life she never had. "I have always been somebody that really wants to be married. And I don't know if that's just so I can do it differently than my parents did and prove marriage does work." That kind of success, she seems to be saying, is well within her control.

Jen on Tate, weight, JFK Jr. ...

"I worry that the media plays a bigger part in your career than your actual work does, which is scary."

Boyfriend Tate Donovan, voice of Disney hero Hercules, "is unbelievably sensitive and funny and warm. He's like a spirit. I don't think I've met one person that doesn't like him."

"I was a girl who would read magazines and go, 'Oh, my gosh -- look how beautiful. Could I be that thin?' The fact is that's not what's important."

"I was born with the hips to make [babies]. ... You can have the baby on one arm and script in the other."

"It's awful the way [Hollywood's power brokers] treat their older actors."

"Somebody's watching out for me. I believe in that. I believe in God. I don't think we are that great that this just happened on our own."

On her fear of flying: "When I flew out here, John F. Kennedy Jr. was on the plane. For some reason -- this is an awful thing to say; I probably shouldn't say it -- but I think, 'Well, John F. Kennedy Jr.'s not going to die in a plane crash.' "

"Who am I to say at this age [28] I will never get a facelift, never have my eyes done?"

Her parents' divorce "made me one of those people who say, 'I'm going to be completely self-dependent, because I don't want a relationship to be based on finances.