1. Belton, Chapter 5, pp. 87-121

3. Making Stars
 Exposed Artifice: Singin’ in the Rain
 Early film viewer idolized actors and actresses of the silent film
industry
 Advent of sound exposed imperfections of talkies, artifice that
had once been easily concealed
 Stars, Fans, and Profits
 “The industry that makes motion pictures also manufactures
movie stars, with the aid of the press and other media—movie
stars who have played and continue to play a crucial economic
role…” (89).
 provide studios with a tangible attraction, a marketable image

4. Star Power
“Stars can save studios
because stars sell films”
(90).
entertainment journalism
Tom Hanks: A Case Study
American everyman
Emerges as the “moral
compass” in modern
morality plays

5. Persona: A Variety of Masks
Essentially, stars consist of three personalities—the
star, the actor, and the actual person (95).
actor
Stars consist
of three
personalities
actual
star person

6. Stardom and Mass Culture:
From Persona to Star
The Role of the Media
Actors
✮construct personas, few become stars
✮persona masks the real person
Stars
✮secondary mask reproduces and transforms original persona
✮uncontrolled persona recirculates through media, acquires new
meanings
“A star is an actor whose persona transcends the sum total
of his performances.”

7. Mickey Mouse: A Case Study
purely imaginary form of existence
could consider him a star without ever being an actor
based on wide circulation of image.

8. Stars, the System, and the Public
 Marilyn Monroe: A Case Study
 “Only the public can make a star…It’s the studios who try to
make a system out of it.”
 Marilyn Monroe’s account of stardom, challenged studio
attempts to manufacture a replacement (she was known to push
the limits, defiance, resisted strict demands imposed by studios-
arrived late, walked off set in mid-production)
 Stardom and Public Acceptance
 Stars function as “sociocultural barometers, giving expression
to and providing symbolic solutions for specific
fears, desires, anxieties, and/or dreams that haunt popular
consciousness”
 Fans as intelligent agents! Fans are aware of the fantasy involved
in stardom; public has the power to “break stars” when they
violate social norms (100).

10. The Early Years
 The First Stars United Artists was founded by, from left, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin
and D. W. Griffith.
 Prior to motion pictures, star system thrived in theater, vaudeville and the music
hall, and the opera throughout the 19th century.
 Late Victorianism
 Stars were transitional figures for audiences in the 1910s and helped bridge social
transformation, namely rural/agricultural  urban/industrial
 women gained new freedoms as they entered the workforce.
 Pickford, Fairbanks, and Chaplin
 Pickford: Victorian ideal of woman amid profound social changes
✮ Onscreen: “America’s Sweetheart”
✮ Offscreen: modern working/businesswoman.
 Fairbanks
✮ Onscreen: double image of hardworking male in an emerging corporate America and frustrated
individual coping with Protestant work ethic ideologies.
✮ Offscreen: pleasure, relaxation, leisurely pursuit of athletics
 Chaplin: The Tramp persona = old-world aristocratic values of Victorian society +
the new-world egalitarianism of the impoverished immigrant and defiant opponent
of all arbitrary authority-especially policemen.

11. Exoticism, Eroticism, and Modern
Morality: Stars of the 1920s
 The Jazz Age
 Atmosphere of Sexual Liberation: SEX sells; sex plays a major role in the
construction of stardom
 New World innocence of Valentino and Garbo
 Women’s movements: suffrage/voting rights in 1920, temperance impact on
institution of Prohibition in 1919
✮ Roaring Twenties: “flappers” and “jazz babies” expressed sexual liberation and defended their
actions in terms of a modern morality (104).
✮ Victorian Puritanism replaced by explicitly confronting female desire and behavior;
however, endings often returned to traditional virtues, sexual fidelity, marriage, and family.
 Having “It”: Clara Bow and Rudolph Valentino
 “It” = having beauty, being desirable: pretty/handsome, sexy, fun-
loving, impudent, worldly-wise.
 Valentino: “foreign-born screen idol” appealed to American women, cast in roles
ranging from misogynist, brutal romantic, passionate bullfighter, Latino lover
 Greta Garbo: From Divinity to Humanity

12. Depression/Repression: The 1930s
 New Realities, New Images
 The transition to sound ushered in a new breed of movie star
made up of actors and actresses from the theater, vaudeville, the
recording studio, and radio.
 Working class stars of the 1930s
 All-American Kids: Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney, and
Judy Garland
 Hollywood’s response to audience demands/interest in less
fantasy, more realistic stars; more human/accessible stars
 Clark Gable: Populist Hero
 The most representative star of the 1930s
 the all-American guy, projected a no-nonsense honesty

13. Sex, Censorship, and Star Images
 “Sex continued to play a major role in the construction of
stardom in the 1930s” (110).
 The Production Code of 1934
 resulted from protest by civic organizations (mostly religious
 prohibited depictions of crime, violence, and sexual themes such
as adultery; scenes of passion, seduction, or rape; sexual
perversion, and miscegenation
 sex films  screwball comedy
 Sexual self-censorship made actors more desirable, drove
sex underground-repression during war years led to
explosive resexualization of Hollywood in postwar years
(e.g. sexually explicit themes, film noir).

14. World War II and Its Aftermath
 A New Generation
 Postwar transformation of stardom
 performers pushed the limits of classical social, sexual and
psychological behavior.
 Transformations
 stardom changed during and after the war; performers pushed the
limits of “classical social, sexual, and psychological behavior”
 Rebellious/revolutionary nature of American female sexuality
revealed briefly empowering women who embraced it (111).
 The Darker Side: Psychology and “the Method”
 Postwar realism—emphasis on imperfections, focus on flaws;
training method based on personal experiences/emotional
histories (e.g. Marilyn Monroe).

15. Stars and Anti-Stars
 Resisting Tradition: Nicholas, Eastwood, and Their Peers
 by-product of 1960s counterculture
 Resistance, reluctance, refusal to cooperate with the
press, publicity avoidance
 Anti-stars: Television as Training Ground
 Since the breakup of the studio system, contemporary stars have
entered Hollywood from a variety of other media, developing
star status outside of motion pictures that they translate into
stardom in Hollywood.
 Stars’ Children: Déjà Vu
 Emergence of 2nd generation stardom
 “contemporary stars enable us to see the ghost of Hollywood
past in the faces of Hollywood present” (116).

16. Different Faces: The Rise of Black Stars
 From Sidney Poitier to Blaxploitation
 Sidney Poitier: first black star to achieve success at the box office, attracted
white spectators
 1970s Blaxploitation movement aimed to attract growing population of
black moviegoers, films dramatized crime, addressed lower-class concerns
 Fame in Other Fields: “black actors from noncinematic backgrounds
because Hollywood had never invested in the development of black stars”
(117).
 60s and 70s: Hollywood capitalized on the celebrity of African
Americans, cast former fashion models, football stars and other athletes.
 The Eddie Murphy Generation: 1980s increase in minority acting careers;
black actors cast regularly (e.g., Denzel Washington in The Siege, 1998
among others) by liberal white executives who grew up during the 1960s, a
decade marked by the emergence of “racial sensitivity” (119).

17. Economics and Contemporary
Stardom
 Essential artifice emerges in the economic context of film
industry where images are worth money: “Stars are and always
have been commodities…not born, but made with a purpose—
to sell films” (119).
 Phenomenon of stardom is essential to the reproduction of
Hollywood motion picture production; presence of stars
equates profit; stars play a role in stabilizing an otherwise
unstable industry
 Stars provide unique pleasure to audiences who appreciate
stars as performers; we derive appreciation from the interplay
between star and character.
 Ever been disappointed or shocked by a particular star’s
behavior or appearance in public? What might your response
to negative publicity suggest about prevailing ideologies?