Paul McDonald The Star System, Hollywood's Production of Popular Identities (2006)(1)

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.(1987: 10)This power was evident with Pickford's first UA release, Paul Powell'sPollyanna (1919) in which she reprised her little girl image in the title role.Pollyanna was produced through Pickford's own company and distributedby UA.Whereas the established business practice in the exhibition sectorwas to lease prints from distributors for a fixed fee, Pollyanna was madeavailable only on the basis of both a guaranteed base rental fee togetherwith a percentage split of box office income.Despite complaints,exhibitors agreed to UA's terms, transforming the business model fordealings between distributors and exhibitors.During the 1920s, Pickford's career would experience rises and falls inthe star's critical and financial status.Despite taking more adult roles, themovie-going public were reluctant to let Pickford shed her child-womanimage.From its inception, United Artists experienced decades of financialcrises, the cause of which has been partly attributed to the company's starmanagement.When Pickford eventually sold her UA stock in 1951 to Arthur37SHORT CUTSB.Krim and Robert S.Benjamin, partners in the law firm Phillips, Nizer,Benjamin and Krim, she described UA as 'sick unto death' (quoted in Balio1976: 9).At the height of her appeal however, Pickford had clearlydemonstrated the wide ranging power that the star could wield across allsectors of the film industry.Pickford's significance is not limited to thesilent era.She exemplified many of the trends that would develop theHollywood star system in future decades.In particular, Pickford showedhow the star could have the ability to use his or her popular status asleverage to demand from producers rapid rises in salary payments.Hercareer also paved the way for stars to participate in box office earningsfrom the films they appeared in and represented the benefits to be hadfrom stars choosing to form their own independent production companies.These trends would all become key characteristics of the star systemfollowing the decline of the vertically integrated studio system thatdominated Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s (see the following chapter).Pickford was therefore not only a product of the star system in the cinema.She showed how it was possible for stars to find ways to work that systemfor their own gain.The Foundations of Hollywood StardomThe star system in American cinema developed through the detaileddivision of labour, the redefinition of performance space in narrative film,and the widespread distribution of knowledge about individual filmperformers.Tracing the emergence between 1907-1922 of different typesof discourse about film performers, Richard de Cordova not only providesan early history of the star system in American cinema but also identifieslevels of knowledge relevant to reading and understanding star images atall stages of cinema history.While the discourse on acting reveals thegeneral labour of film performance, the naming of picture personalitiesmakes known individual performers through their on-screen professionalexistence.Naming enables the construction of the personality's imageand identity across films, but also in other media such as newspapers andmagazines.38THE STAR SYSTEMDe Cordova reserves star discourse to describe the extension ofknowledge about film performers beyond on-screen appearances and intothe off-screen lives of performers.With the star scandal, a star's privatelife becomes further divided between a publicly controlled private-imageand a hidden secret private-image.From de Cordova's study, a generaldefinition emerges of the star 'as actor (professional manipulator ofsigns), as picture personality (as a personality extrapolated from films),and as a star (as someone with a private life distinct from screen image)'(1990: 146-7).Although the discourses of actor, personality and starbecome levels of knowledge, with each seeming to add a further degree ofdepth to a star's image, these levels do not operate separately but worktogether as what de Cordova calls 'collapsing levels of identity' (p.111).As the example of Pickford shows, the Hollywood industry and thestars themselves were quick to exploit the value of star identity as apersonal monopoly.Naming is essential to making that identity into acommercial and legal entity and the star system would develop throughthe use of such mechanisms to construct star identities and to use thoseidentities as a means of promotion in the public domain.Subsequentphases in the development of the system would therefore be marked bytransitions in the film industry as a whole which influenced this controland use of star identities.393 CONTROLLI NG THE SYSTEMWith the star system in place, Hollywood worked hard to find effectivemeans to exploit the identities of popular performers.By the end of the1920s, economic control of the American film industry was concentrated inthe hands of five leading companies: Paramount, Warner Bros., the FoxFilm Corporation (Twentieth Century Fox after 1935), Radio Keith-Orpheum(RKO), and MGM, the film production studio of the exhibition conglom-erate Loew's Inc.In this period, the star system operated under thegeneral direction of these studios.The studio era of the 1930s and 1940swas a period in which Hollywood worked actively to make and market itsstars.Stars became a vital asset in maintaining the hegemony of themajor studios over the whole domestic film industry, with the effect thatcontrol of the film market required the strong control of its stars.Thischapter will look at the structural conditions that enabled the Hollywoodstudios to dominate the film market in the United States and the ways inwhich those studios created, sold and controlled their stars.American Cinema in the 1930s and 1940sThe power of the 'Big Five' studios, as they became known, was based onmaintaining subsidiaries that engaged in the production, distribution andexhibition of films [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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