Star System
With the rise of the Hollywood film industry in the 1920s and thereafter, the world came to recognize that fame, like American automobiles or hot dogs, could also be manufactured and successfully marketed. In a democratic, officially classless culture, where "personality" provided a vehicle for upward mobility, it came to be increasingly understood that personality required manufacturing and regular maintenance. As a mass movie audience, the anonymous public also began to recognize that many of the most notable people in the world were manufactured, like the movies featuring their close-up faces, in a semi-mythic place called Hollywood. Carefully crafted to complement the technical components of the entertainment industry, the "star system" focused attention of the public onto idealized "picture personalities" that simultaneously embodied familiar social types and represented privileged individuality for their fans.
While American show business, exemplified by early impresarios like P. T. Barnum, Florenz Ziegfeld, and "Buffalo Bill" Cody, had relied upon the promotion of featured "players" throughout the nineteenth century, the construction of a regulated system for the production and promotion of Hollywood stars was designed along the industrial model pioneered by Henry Ford and his Detroit assembly lines. Commercial cinema did not have stars in its early years, not until film producers, perhaps goaded by audiences, came to understand the commercial appeal of specific actors. Among the first "stars" so identified were such as Charlie Chaplin, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, and Clara Bow. As Hollywood's financial and cultural power grew, it came to heavily depend upon the distinctive charisma of specific actors to promote its product to an adoring audience. Working behind the scenes from the mid-1920s through the 1950s, the Hollywood star system relied on a coordination of working parts that both imitated and rivaled Ford's efficient factories: dance and singing lessons; careful decisions about names, makeup, hair, and clothing; the posing of glamour photographs; carefully chosen publicity appearances and constructed gossip. Using these tools, the major film studios groomed and marketed their most visible products, the stars whose weekly secular worship sold millions of tickets, fan magazines, and tie-in consumer goods. Beginning with Motion Picture in 1911 and dominated by the long-running Photoplay, the fan magazine provided the public's key link to the "real lives" of their favorite actors; the construction of an offscreen image for its contract players thus became just as important for the studios as the tailoring of a specific star's screen persona. Fans were hungry for information on the "real" Clark Gable or the "actual" Joan Crawford that supplemented their film roles, and so the star system negotiated a careful balance of identification and adoration. Stars like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney were kids "just like us" who we knew we would never really be.
The underlying tension between studio-controlled information about stars and less-regulated gossip occasionally surfaced when major stars were caught in scandals that threatened to create wide gaps between their onsceen and offscreen images. Shocking trials in the 1920s featuring beloved comedians like Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, and widespread rumors about the sex lives of Clara Bow or Rudolph Valentino, redefined the star system's promotional work as crisis management until the industry adoption of the Production Code allowed the studios to fully enforce "morality" clauses in actors' contracts. As far as the film studios were concerned, there was a direct relationship between a star's public behavior and his or her box-office receipt, so controlling the image of contract players was an economic imperative, even if it appeared under the guise of moral guardianship. Only in later decades would serious ethical questions be raised about, for instance, a film studio's arranging dates and even a sham marriage for Rock Hudson so that his legions of female fans might not suspect that he was in fact a homosexual.
Of course, as a capitalist structure well aware of the quick gratifications of mass culture, the star system also demanded a regular selection of fresh products, so new names and new faces were constantly put before the public even as the careers of older stars were retooled as long as the public showed interest in them. While some stars, like Mae West, Boris Karloff, or John Wayne, were narrowly defined by their iconic star personas, other stars were transformed in attempts to attract changing audiences and reflect shifting fashions. Popular child stars like Elizabeth Taylor or Shirley Temple were or were not successfully redefined for adult roles as they grew up, and performers once closely associated with one genre were reconceptualized for others: the 1930s boy singer Dick Powell reemerged as a screen tough-guy in the 1940s, and Barbara Stanwyck moved with relative ease from women's melodramas and screwball comedies in the 1930s into 1950s Westerns.
The Hollywood star system began to weaken as the studio system itself lost prestige and power in the 1950s, especially after a number of major stars, including Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, declared themselves "independent" by forming their own production companies. In other cases, a star's contracts with studios, once long-term and binding, were redrawn as short-term, profit-sharing deals that linked an actor's salary directly to the success of a specific film. In 1950, James Stewart received half of the profits of his hit western Winchester '73, dramatically revising the industry's understanding of a star's earning potential. With stars, along with their personal agents and talent agencies, increasingly responsible for their own public images and career choices, the control over performers once secured within the studio hierarchy had clearly shifted. By the 1980s, the old Hollywood concept of the "star vehicle," a film specifically tailored to the image and talents of its leading player, was again fully active, but only a handful of stars called the shots that determined which major films were produced and promoted. The self-styled moguls of the studio era had been displaced by their former puppets, the "talent" whose survival skills now included, most significantly, a keen business sense.
Certainly a contemporary "celebrity system" remains visible in the small army surrounding any major celebrity: agents, publicists, managers, and personal assistants all work to secure film projects, recording deals, promotional endorsements, talk-show appearances,and cameo roles for their employers. The earlier star system, however, has merged into a much larger "culture of celebrity" that extends massive fame not only to film stars and professional athletes or pop musicians, but also to the legions of "minor celebrities" necessary to regularly replenish television talk shows, fashion catwalks, award presentations, and "special guest" appearances on weekly sitcoms. The pop artist Andy Warhol's notorious designation of previously unknown figures as "superstars" and his famous allotment of 15 minutes of fame to everyone in a media-saturated world perhaps signaled the real end of any remaining purpose for a coherent "system" that was once constructed to transform mere mortals into minor gods and goddesses.
Further Reading:
de Cordova, Richard. Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1990.
Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London, Macmillan, 1986.
——. Stars. London, British Film Institute, 1979, 1998.
Fowles, Jib. Starstruck: Celebrity Performers and the American Public. Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution, 1992.
Gamson, Joshua. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994.
Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Morin, Edgar. The Stars. New York, Grove Press, 1960.
Schickel, Richard. Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity. New York, Doubleday, 1985.
Walker, Alexander. Stardom: The Hollywood Phenomenon. New York, Stein & Day, 1970.
This is the complete article, containing 1,245 words
(approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).
