A star is an actor whose persona transcends the total sum of his or hers performances. Their image may be rooted in specific roles, but it extends beyond them, establishing itself in subsidiary forms, in secondary representations of the actor’s persona, such as those found in magazines or tabloids.In the late 1920s, it was estimated that over 32,250,000 fan letters were received annually by stars in Hollywood, portraying their impact on the public.
From the mid-1930s through the early 1950s, over 500 journalists and newspaper correspondents gave Hollywood as their dateline, generating more than 100,000 words per day about the film industry, making Hollywood the third largest source of news information. This portrayed the size of the film industry and the power that the studios and stars held. Stars themselves, inhabit a different world from the rest of us, living by different rules.The film “Singin’ in the rain” (1952) is a good portrayal of the studio system and there stars.
To paraphrase Lina Lamont (Hagen) in “Singin’ in the rain “(1952), stars are not people but rather celestial bodies. Lina explains she is a “shimmering, glowing star in the cinema firmament.” But Lina is not a real star; she does not radiate her own light, but merely reflects light cast upon her by others. She has been carefully fabricated into a star. Partly product of studio press releases, reprinted verbatim by the media and digested without question by both the public and Lina herself.
It also is partly the product of the film technology that functions o conceal her flaws.Though she may look like a star, she doesn’t sound like a star – her lower-class voice lacks refinement, failing to match the glamour and sophistication of her appearance. This was easily avoidable by silent film. The answer to preserving her image comes by another actress, Kathy Sheldon (Debbie Reynolds), whom dubs her, substituting her voice or Lina’s dialogue and even song sequences. However, Linas phoniness is later exposed, as ultimately she is unmasked when the curtains are drawn back to show the public part of the invisible machinery that has allowed Lina to become a star; we see Reynolds, now revealed as the real star, singing the film’s title song in the background as Lina pathetically lip-syncs to her voice.
In the opening sequence of Singin’ in the rain, a radio columnist (Dora) interviews stars attending the premier of the new Lockwood and Lamont picture. Dora’s presence indicates the role the media play in Hollywood’s construction of stars and their stardom, becoming the vehicle for the transmission of Don Lockwood’s exaggerated reconstruction of his past to the listening pubic. Lockwood has concocted a charming to tale that matches the elegance of his onscreen roles. Again the movie exposes the artificial construction of stardom through the mismatch of voice and image.Stars also held power; saving studios because stars sell films. In 1919, when the investment firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Company decided to bankroll Paramount, they did so based largely off the roster of the studios stars, which included Swanson, Fairbanks, William S.
Hart and Frederick. Stars were assets that the studios could take to the bank. Some stars even recognised this and took themselves to the banks, forming their own studio. In late 1919, Pickford, Fairbanks and Chaplin along with director D.
W. Griffith, formed United Artists, to distribute their own pictures. However, between the 1920s to the 1950s the studios largely held the powers, in a sense owning stars with multiyear contracts.As that system of contracts started to crumble in the 1950s and 60s the stars began to assume more power and control in the marketplace, seen in 1969 with the establishment of First Artist Productions Company by Streisand, Poitier and Newman (Later joined by both McQueen and Hoffman).
The power of contemporary stars in Hollywood is reflected in the focus of them in entertainment journalism. They dominated television shows such as Access Hollywood and Entertainment tonight. News about stars is headline information and photographs of stars dominate the covers of weekly magazines.Every year, Premiere magazine publish a list of “the 100 most powerful people in movies.” Though the top 10 tend to be CEOs of production companies and star producer-directors, such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, more than a third of the exclusive top 100 are stars, ranging in 2003 from Tom Hanks (no.
13), to Tom Cruise (no.14), Mel Gibson (no.15), Julia Roberts (no.16), Jackie Chan (no.
94), Halle Berry (no.96), Colin Farrell (no.98) and Kate Hudson (no.99). The power list can get pictures made; their pictures make money; and, because they make money, top stars such as Hanks etc.
can command per-picture fees of $25million as well as percentages of the box-office gross, portraying the sheer level of power that comes hand in hand with stardom.Every star houses several different personalities, though they all tend to coexist graciously with one another rather than each of them battle for control. At the base of the human pyramid known as the star lies an actual person, whose physical attributes and, in some instances, psychological makeup provide the foundation for the construction of the personality of the actor, or actress, who appears on screen. The phenomena of “Cary Grant” thus began with the birth of Archibald Leach, subsequently changing his name due to his adopted persona.
“Judy Garland” can be traced back to Frances Gumm. Archie Leach and Frances Gumm, however, remained inaccessible to us for the most part, as do the real Harrison Ford, Denzel Washington, Michael Douglas, Glenn Close and Meryl Streep.Even if we met them in flesh, our first hand knowledge of them would be only limited to the public persona, information they willing give away and portray, put on for personal appearances. Our knowledge of movie stars is necessarily second-hand; we can only experience screen personalities as personalities. We have contact with them only through the roles they play, and we come to know them as personae rather than persons.
Marilyn Monroe once said, she could walk down a street as Norma Jeane Mortenson, and nobody would recognise her, but she could switch her persona to become the star Marilyn Monroe.The term “persona” refers to the mask worn by a character on the ancient Greek stage. Actors develop a persona out of the personalities of the various characters they play over the course of their careers and also from elements of their personal lives. Actors either use these traits in their performance or audiences impose them on the actors, reinvesting their performances with added significance, as was the case with James Dean, whose accidental death in a highway accident became part of his star legend.
John Wayne’s persona included the inflexible, sometimes violent determination of the Western (The Searchers, 1956) and war (Sands of Iwo Jima, 1949) heroes he played as well as his public political stance as an anti-communist (Big Jim McLain, 1952), a conservative Republican (The Alamo, 1960), and a supporter of the war in Vietnam (The Green Berets, 1968).Even his publicised bout with cancer provided material for his last film, The Shootist 1976. Stars essentially consist of three personalities; the star, the actor and the actual person. Each of these personalities consumes the entity that lies immediately beneath it. The real person soon disappears in the creation of a fictional person. Some actors so, transform their physical features, including their voice and bodily appearance, they give the illusion not only of becoming the characters they play but of becoming different characters from film to film.
They efface themselves not only as persons, but also as actors, this can be seen through Chris Cooper who, as Sam Deeds in “Lone Star” (1996), plays romantic lead, and then, as Col. Frank Fitts in “American Beauty” (1999) is a military martinet. Years later Cooper plays toothless orchid thief John Laroche in Spike Jonze’s “Adaption” (2002).Actors commonly become “typed”, playing similar kinds of characters from film to film, developing a distinct persona, or public image. Charles Chaplin became identified with the tramp, Sean Connery and Roger Moore with James Bond, William Shatner with Capt.
James Kirk and Sylvester Stallone with Rocky Balboa and Rambo. More frequently an actor will play a specific character from film to film.Thus Marilyn Monroe tended to play the dumb blonde or gold digger (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How To Marry A Millionaire, 1953); Humphrey Bogart tended to play hard-boiled, anti-authoritarian, romantically vulnerable tough guys (The Maltese Falcon, 1941; Casablanca, 1942). Many actors also resist typecasting; altering the characters they play on screen. Dustin Hoffman, for example, playing the female impersonator-soap opera queen in “Tootsie (1982)” and Tom Cruise’s autistic older brother in “Rain Man (19988)”.
A stars persona is thus different from that of an actor’s persona. For an actor, the persona provides a primary mask that disguises the real person underneath. For a star, the persona includes the actor’s persona as well as the star’s persona. This secondary mask of stardom covers the earlier one, reproducing and reshaping the original persona and often transforming it in the process. In other words, stardom and stars are constructed not solely by studios or films, but in the larger terrain of mass culture as well.Stardom colours the actor’s persona on which it is based, rewriting the personality in certain identifiable ways.
This can be seen through Elvis Presley, whose stardom continues to thrive in the tabloids, even though he died in 1977. Reported sightings of Elvis testify to the supernatural existence that certain stars enjoy when they transcend the media. Much like Michael Jackson, their fame vastly increases in their untimely deaths. In other words, stars become stars when they lose control of their images, and then take on a life of their own.In my opinion Marilyn Monroe gave the best account of stardom when she declared “only the public can make a star.
. . It’s the studios who try to make a system out of it.” Stars are indeed made, but it is not necessarily at the hands of the studio or press or even the stars themselves.
However, once a star is made, the studios attempt to harness the power of the star and transform it into a system. Monroe’s statement refers, in part, to the attempts of her studio, 20th Century-Fox, to manufacture stars in the same respect as her.They began with the platinum-blonde starlet Sheree North, giving her the same press build-up as Monroe, but she failed to grasp the public’s attention. Fox tried multiple times, but could never achieve the same success as they had with Monroe, seeming to prove her statement true. The most famous attempts to manufacture stars are associated with the studio era, when male producers revealed their obsessions with certain actresses by trying to make them stars.
William Randolph Hearst established Cosmopolitan Pictures in the late 1920s to produce films for Marion Davies; Samuel Goldwyn imported Soviet actress Anna Sten in the mid-1930s, hoping to make her into another Garbo or Dietrich; Darryl Zanuck tried to turn Bella Darvi into a star in the 1950s.All failed due to lack of interest from the public. Although producers may view the public as capricious or whimsical in this regard, there is often method to the public’s madness or a foundation for the fanaticism about certain stars. The star answers a particular need that the public either consciously or unconsciously has at a particular time for a particular figure of identification.
However, the public can make stars but also break them, especially if the stars violate their public image, as comedian Fatty Arbuckle did when he was accused of raping a young actress at a wild party in 1921.Stars are and always will be commodities. Today’s marketplace, although more diverse, is still a marketplace, where an increasing number of star images trade places with one another via the film industry own form of stock exchange, in which images are worth money.In conclusion I believe, stars are not born but made, with the sole purpose to sell films.
The star system took shape around the economic reality into which the unique attractiveness of each star was translated. In this way the star system played a crucial role in the perpetuation of the studio system. After the demise of the studio system, the star system became the most important stabilizing feature in the motion picture industry.Ultimately, stardom becomes a “curse”, with many turning to drugs and alcohol due to the inability to cope with the relentless exposure of fame. This in turn, often causes the untimely deaths of stars such as Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland and Michael Jackson.
The phenomenon of stardom has remained essential to Hollywood due to its ability to lure spectators into theatre. Our delight in stars comes from an appreciation of them as performers, the interplay between the star and character. Ironically, in order to be carried away by a star, we must be fully conscious of the essential artifice that underlies stardom.
