The stars (1962)

prohibit the full enjoyment of the film. Nowhere is this more apparent than in serious discussions of the role of the movie star in film history. As we shall shortly see, the star stands at the very center of movie economics (at least in America, which has no tradition of the art film ) and it is to his public image that all movies, no matter how high their professed artistic aims, are tailored. Yet one can read essay after essay, book after book, and find nothing about stars more pertinent than brief discussions of performances, couched in the inapplicable terms of the stage. Serious and semiserious discussions all revolve around the question of whether X is a good actor, or whether he is an actor at all. The position of this book is that the question is irrelevant. Movie stars are not usually, or necessarily, actors; they are . . . movie stars. The two occupations are entirely different, although they are sometimes compatible. Further, the importance of the star to the movies has changed the very nature of the individual film product. "The growth of the film personality," says Frank Getlein, "meant the death of the movie as one of the fictional arts. The two ideas are in violent opposition; the personality eliminates the director and substitutes the publicity man as the guiding force in film making; and the creation and merchandising of daydreams is a direct contradiction of the art of fiction." Obviously the theories of film aestheticians, which revolve around the skill of the director in creating art works to be judged by the conventional standards of fiction, are rendered meaningless in this context. The social psychologists concentrate too heavily on film content, too little on the nature of the personalities which shape that content. This book is an attempt to redress that balance. Generally speaking, the author devotes the greater share of his effort to extracting from films the essence of the personalities for which they were vehicles rather than to the content and intent of the vehicle itself. In these essences, I feel, lies a great deal (but not all) of the truth about the non-art of the movies. The book takes no moral position about whether American movies would have been better or worse had they not succumbed to the cult of personality. All we can say for certain is that they would have been different. It may comfort those who regard the star system as a sin and a shame to know that it was created by popular demand, over the objections of the pioneering movie moguls. Stars apparently answered a deeply felt human need, but these needs were not in the beginning and are not to this day exploited with any great cleverness by the movie makers. Star quality being such an elusive and ill-defined thing, film producers have always operated on a cafeteria basis, placing before the public any number of tasty morsels, then sitting back to see which of them the public hungers for most deeply. One of the surprising things anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker discovered when she investigated Hollywood was that "there is rarely a well-thought-out program of how a studio could make a good star." Selection is usually — but not always — left to chance, and more often than not the movie men themselves are surprised by its workings. They were similarly surprised, in the beginning, by the potential of the star system, by the strength of the bond that was created between stars and audience. In the beginning, there were no such things as stars. In the Nickelodeon Era, when the production end of the industry was located in New York, it was almost impossible to get stage actors of any kind, stars or not, to work in the movies. Salaries were infinitesimal, prestige non-existent. Those crude geniuses of fast-dollar finance who controlled the infant industry found a style they considered suitably broad and a refreshing eagerness to work for five or ten dollars a day among unemployed bit players and vaudevillians. They became the backbone of an industry determined to maximize profits by producing on the cheap. Hangdog, the actors crept, under the cover of assumed names, out to Fort Lee, New Jersey, there to sit uneasily on horses during the production of Westerns, or to the wilds of the Bronx or Brooklyn, or to downtown Manhattan, where the comedies and dramas of social conscience (usually about the perils of drink or of the evils which might befall the innocent working girl) were shot. The public for these films was a gloriously innocent one, made up chiefly of immigrants and other members of the lower economic orders. For them, lack of sound and the resulting lack of subtle ideas were a positive boon. For once they could relax in comforting darkness and abandon their struggles with that most intractable of tongues — English. In an atmosphere redolent of sweat and cheap perfume, for the price of a nickel, they were able to participate in fantasies of the most satisfying kind. Since it was obligatory that the endings of these little films be happy, with the man or woman of the people emerging triumphant over the uniformly sappy representatives of privilege, a curious phenomenon began to take place. The canaille began to identify with both the sufferings and the triumphs of their screen counterparts. And by 1910, letters addressed to "The Waif" or "The Man with the Sad Eyes" began to trickle into the studios. 10