Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Hollywood — The Stars to steal a bite from their popularity by trying to imitate them. The quality of uniqueness is lacking from the planetary stars, no matter how eminent they may be for the moment. In spite of the apparently devastating catastrophe of Valentino's death, in spite of the suicides on his account, the films have not missed him. His pictures are not revived repeatedly, as are the films of Chaplin, Jannings, or Fairbanks. A dozen new beauty boys are ready to take his place. This is especially true when women stars are considered. Hardly one is sufficiently outstanding to leave a definite gap were she to disappear. The film heroes and film heroines, the world's pictured lovers, are only types, they are seldom real characters. Among the men we have the brutal type, the dashing type, the Adonis, the picaresque, the country bumpkin, and so on ; among the women there are the smart, the coquette, the siren, the coy, the simple, the girlish, the minx, etc. ; all these can be substituted. If Miss X. is not available Miss Y. will do as well. What the movies cannot substitute is real character, and in the dramatization of this lies the supremacy of the better comic actors — Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd — and of the few who deliberately build up stories psychologically dependent upon and logically coherent with their physique, such as Jannings, Von Stroheim, and, in a more romantic and sentimentalized degree, Fairbanks. The fixed stars, then, are characters ; the planetary stars are types. Hollywood pays for character. This is further illustrated by descending a stage to the place where there really is room. Recently we noted an article stating that there was a marked dearth of men capable of earning £2000 a year. Magnates there were many, for given the opportunity it is easier to earn £5000 a year than £1000. One finds many a man who can earn up to £800, the hard [171]