We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Perhaps the symbols are too obvious: Chaplin at the beginning of his career, tremulously eager, awaiting a gift from the sea; James Mason in the 1954 remake of A Star is Born wading into the same sea to commit suicide. Playing a fading star in a fading industry, Mason, in this scene from a romantic and sentimental film — pure Hollywood — provides the coda to our study of that most peculiar of democratic social institutions, the movie star. As institutions go, it has had a short life.
There will be, doom-sayers to the contrary, at least another fifty years of stars. Individuals will dominate the screen as dictatorially as any in the past. They will attain those heights of celebrity which, in our democratic fashion, we so mightily deprecate and envy. But these stars will not be stars of the movies alone. They will exercise their talents (or, if they have none, their primal appeals) in a wide variety of media. They will, as never before, be the masters of their own fate and, with studio system virtually destroyed, it will be less possible to fabricate a personality for a beautiful dope. Tastes being what they are these days, stars may even have to do more acting, in the conventional meaning of the term, than they ever did.
The late Buddy Adler saw doom in. the naturalism which has been creeping across Hollywood in the last fifteen years. "We're dealing in illusion," he said, "and when the Elizabeth Taylors and Marilyn Monroes start to think and want to live normal lives like everyone else, soon we won't have any illusions left to sell." But Adler reckoned without democracy, especially as we have known it since 1932. Your true democrat is more interested in processes than in product, enjoys being privy to illusions. Somehow, the knowledge that it is all done with mirrors makes him even more eager to surrender his disbelief at the box office. The democratization of movie stardom is a long-term trend, and it will continue. There will, in future, be fewer of them, but they will continue to exist. We need them.
THE END
282