Basinger - The Star Machine

T he star-making processlike everything else during Hollywoods studio yearswas contradictory, unpredictable, and ambivalent, but none of that slowed the system down. The moviemaking business knew how to be two-faced. In fact, it might be said that the movie business understood that the best way to operate successfully was to be two-faced: Hollywood embraced the concept. The studios pinched pennies and spent recklessly. They were cautious but careless. Romantic and practical. Honest and dishonest. Male and female. Howlingly stupid and cunningly shrewd. Nowhere are these contradictions more apparent than in the stories about how Hollywood transformed ordinary men and women into the gods and goddesses known as movie stars. Hes too short and pasty pale, but my secretary couldnt take her eyes off him could inspire a snap decision to Get him some elevator shoes, dye his hair, and photograph him so no one gets a chance to take their eyes off him. Although they might later claim We saw her on a soda fountain stool and she broke our hearts immediately with her unique beauty, something closer to the truth might have been Get out there and round up all the good-looking females working in that department store and fix their teeth. Hollywood was a factory. It operated on the principle that if it dropped a lot of nubile young blondes into its star-making machine, at least one of them might come out looking like a heartbreaker. They were gamblers, and some of the biggest long-shot winners in history were the movie stars they created.

Movie stars are fascinating, but I didnt want to write about them. 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. The great star machine story has been overlooked or oversimplified, but its a fascinating tale about a practical business plan that manufactured illusions. I wanted to describe how the machine worked.

It would be nice to report a clear resolution to my story, la the typical Hollywood movie happy ending. It wasnt that simple. Any consideration of the star-making system needed to examine individual cases because the business was making movie stars out of real people. As much as Hollywood would have loved to ignore the fact that movie stars were human beings, it always ended up dealing with their personal situations, things that couldnt be predicted or controlled: anger, breakdown, failure, bad behavior, and disappointment. (And thats before they tried to sell the product to the fickle, even more uncontrollable and unpredictable movie audience.) Sometimes a manufactured product turned out perfectly; other times, it blew up in the shopping cart. Describing only how the machine worked couldnt tell the entire story. Like everything else in Hollywood, the star machine had two faces. Explaining it meant both affirming its process and denying its infallibility. And to do that, I had to write about individual movie stars.

I decided not to write about the eras legendary figures who have already been written about in many types of booksthe Astaires, the Crawfords and Davises, the Coopers and Gables, the Garbos, and the Cary Grants. Some of them werent really machine products to begin with, and in retrospect, we can see that their work has transcended their formative years when they were subjected to the ruthless manipulations of the studios. Since I had grown up going to the movies during the 1940s and 50s, I knew how many non-legendary stars there were back then, and how important some were in their own timesome even more so than todays legends. Although I would have to consider (and refer to) the greats of the past, because they are now our movie star yardsticks, I decided to feature other names, such as Tyrone Power, Deanna Durbin, Ann Sheridan, Dennis Morgan: talents the machine actually