LITTLE ROCK — The Star Machine, by Jeanine Basinger, Knopf, 588 pages, $35Movie stars under Hollywood's studio system were product, Jeanine Basinger says in The Star Machine. At first blush that may sound wrong-headed: Surely films were the product and the stars merely cogs - albeit important cogs - in their production, but in 550-plus pages of entertaining and informative text the author proves her assertion to a fare-thee-well.
"The product was not any individual movie," Mexican-born star Ricardo Montalban put it succinctly. "It was the actor. They created a persona they thought the public would like : it was amazing."
Ah yes, persona. Today we call it the star's "persona." Then, when studios were at their peak (the 1930s through the 1950s), they called it "type," which, Basinger says, is "persona with its hat on." Under either label, it is "the creation of a second self that is believed to be the original self."
We think, for example, that Cary Grant (birth name: Archibald Leach) was "Cary Grant," the guy on the screen we identify with so much that we want to be him. The actor himself said, " Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant."
For the question was not, "Can movie stars act?" The question was, "Are they believable on-screen?" Hollywood's star machine was designed to find people that audiences could believe in when put on celluloid. If they could act, so much the better. It didn't always matter.
"I'm no actor, and I have 64 films to prove it," Victor Mature said, amiably expressing a realization of his limits that a surprising number of stars also admitted.
As a machine, it was much more organized and efficient than people give it credit for being. Basinger, chairman of film studies at Wesleyan University and author of several books about film, sees it as ruthless in achieving its goals.
Studios controlled nearly every aspect of actors' lives. It was a slave system, albeit a highly paid, glamorous slavery with which the public finds difficulty sympathizing. Ann Rutherford said, "Yes, we were really like slaves. You were chattels of the studios. They could buy and sell you."
The work could be long and grueling. Some, like Gail Russell, could not bear up under it: In 1961 at age 35, she was found dead in her apartment, surrounded by empty vodka bottles. Others, like Joan Blondell, never let it get her down.
Those three women, obscure to most readers today, illustrate the book's focus. Basinger concentrates not on over-discussed, legendary names like Clark Gable and Bette Davis, but on less stratospheric yet still high-profile products of the star-making machine, such as Tyrone Power and Loretta Young.
Studios did not hide the machine from the public. Movie magazines such as Photoplay, industry-serving (and sometimes industry-written) as their articles otherwise were, made the sausage-making process quite clear to the consumer.
SEEING STARS
Basinger divides her book into two sections, the first being an objective look at the star-making business, the second a more subjective one at the stars it produced. No machine works perfectly, and Hollywood's was no exception. Chapter titles in the second section alternately describe the ways it broke down - Disillusionment, Disobedience, Defection, Disentanglement, and Detachment - with actor-examples for each category. (ErrolFlynn was an extremely disobedient "bad boy.")
The author, whose enthusiasm for movies is reflected on every page, has a deft way of encapsulating the kernel of an actor's attraction. Jean Arthur had a "delicious warmth" (although she cannot capture the seductive lure of Arthur's odd voice). Ronald Colman (another thrilling voice) was an amalgam of Charles Boyer, William Powell and Errol Flynn - "romantic, foreign, sophisticated, comic, dashing and adventurous."
The Star Machine is studded throughout with scores of photographs. While overall the prose is agreeably nonacademic, occasionally it runs to infelicitous breeziness or to cliches and automatic phrases such as "the film that MGM was built to make."
Today, in contrast to all that, stars are on their own. Studios do not guide their development (or their private lives). They have a freedom that machine stars struggled to achieve, but there is a tradeoff in personal privacy and in the large staffs they must support.
Signs are, Basinger reports, that the business is losing confidence in stars and that audiences are less interested in star-driven films. The business, in other words, is being turned on its head: In the old days, you became a star and hoped the system would let you become an actor. Now, you become an actor and hope the system will make you into a star.
Roger K. Miller, a former newspaper bookreview editor, is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
Travel, Pages 100 on 10/28/2007