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When movie studios ruled Hollywood
Studios carefully created, and controlled, stars in the early days.
By David Walton, Special to the Times
Published November 25, 2007
Movie stars are fascinating, but I didn't want to write about them," film historian Jeanine Basinger tells her reader. "I wanted to write about the system of star making, about the 'star machine' that evolved at the end of the silent era and 'created' movie stars in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s." A fascination with stardom - as separate from a fascination for a particular star - is many people's guilty pleasure, and books about Hollywood filmmaking are legion. But Basinger's book is different. The Star Machine focuses on names that flourished under the studio system and whose legends faded with it: Tyrone Power, Lana Turner, Loretta Young, Norma Shearer, Errol Flynn. Their stories prove to be a good deal more interesting than most of their movies are today. Their lives are, like morality plays of the middle ages, illustrations of the rewards that discipline, hard work and obedience paid the stars, and the punishments they suffered from disillusionment, disobedience and desertion. Then, the studios were seven in number and together kept under contract only about 500 performers, only a few dozen of whom could be called "movie stars." Theirs, by Basinger's account, was a peculiarly luxurious form of serfdom. Despite their wealth and popularity, the stars were employees under contract, with almost no independence or bargaining power. Their hours were long, all day, six days a week. "They promised me a rose garden," Joan Crawford said, "and they gave it to me . . . acre by acre." The star of The Star Machine is Dorothy Lamour, who grounded the Hope-Crosby Road pictures, "a center of cheerful gravitas" leavening their "essentially disrespectful" humor. "Lamour was on top of things," Basinger writes in one of her indispensable footnotes. "She understood how the business worked and was known as 'the girl who never made an enemy.' Today her sarong is in the Smithsonian." David Walton is a writer in Pittsburgh. The Star Machine By Jeanine Basinger Knopf, 608 pages, $35
[Last modified November 21, 2007, 12:55:57]
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