Movie Stars
America is a country with no aristocracy, no landed gentry, and ostensibly no barriers to rising in society. Of course, the paradox of American culture is that the above is true while at the same time being utterly false. If social differences are more fluid than in, say, Great Britain, they are still undeniably real. Yet even the most egalitarian of societies needs its heroes, as it needs the pageant of history to provide context, and in the twentieth century movies, and the movie stars who inhabit them, fulfilled that vital function, substituting for the heroes and villains once found in books. Onscreen and in anecdotal form (Hollywood history is told most often via the anecdote) movie stars comprise a class that is as close to Olympian as any collection of individuals has ever been. "Once there were no film stars," writes film historian Ronald L. Davis. "In the early days of silent pictures studio heads didn't advertise the names of actors, were resistant to the idea of creating stars, realizing that fame would bring pressure for higher salaries. For the first year or two of her film career, Mary Pickford was known simply as 'The Girl with the Golden Curls."' It was the Edison Bund (Thomas Edison's early film production studio) that suppressed Mary Pickford's and Lillian Gish's identities, even after the public clamored for their names, and due to their intransigence, they soon lost control of the industry itself.
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