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The advent of the feature film from around 1912 intensified the practices of audience engagement with characters. These longer films permitted more leisurely characterization and in turn engaged audiences for longer (and arguably more deeply); the increased use of classical stylistic devices through the teens such as eyeline matches, shot/reverse shot and point of view constructions helped guide audiences through the film and served in part to optically align spectators with characters and thus with the actors playing them. The fact that feature films were exhibited for longer spells than one-reel films, which often changed daily, meant that they could be advertised more prominently and that there was thus a focus on individual films in advertising discourse. Much of this advertising would be linked to the actors playing in them.
The star-led feature film also had profound implications for the rationalization of studio production practices. Says Tino Balio:
This "ballyhoo and hokum" included buying advertising space in newspapers and the first press-books (guides for exhibitors), which emerged around 1913.[45] Producers and distributors realised that they could use the guaranteed appeal of star vehicles in forcing exhibitors to take a series of less attractive films alongside those of - for example - Mary Pickford, a practice called "block-booking." The movie star product thus became the focal point for production and distribution strategies through the teens and beyond. By 1917, Benjamin Hampton has suggested, fewer than 5 percent of films did not feature stars.[46]
The commercial importance of the star performer in this period can be simply illustrated by the rise in Mary Pickford's salary. Pickford started off at Famous Players in 1914 on $20,000 a year, which quickly became $1000 a week. In 1915 the contract was renegotiated to $2000 a week and half of the profits of her productions. In June 1916 a separate production unit called the Pickford Film Corporation was set up so that in essence Pickford became an independent producer and partner to Famous Players-Lasky. Pickford was to gain numerous bonuses, further control over the filmmaking process, $10,000 a week and 50 percent of the profits. In late 1918 Pickford moved to First National, where she was granted a salary of $675,000 a year to make three films of her choosing, along with 50 percent of the profits.[47] These excessive star salaries could actually function to the benefit of studios, for they constituted a "barrier-to-entry" into the film industry and thus buttressed oligopoly control. "Producers trying to break into the system," Kerr notes, "had to either exceed rival offers or create their own stars - an expensive proposition given the huge start-up costs of orchestrated nationwide promotional campaigns."[48] Moreover, studios could pass these increased production costs on to the exhibitors in the form of increases in fees, and exhibitors could in turn raise box-office prices.
The growing commercial importance of film stars and their increasing control over the filmmaking process through the teens led to the creation of United Artists in 1919, a distribution company set up by Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W.Griffith, to fully exploit and market their own feature films. These stars, later joined by Constance and Norma Talmadge, Gloria Swanson and Buster Keaton, maintained complete autonomy over their work, not only in the creative stage of production but also in the exploitation stage of distribution. The formation of United Artists is described by Tino Balio as "the apex of the star system;"[49] in the ten years from 1909 to 1919 actors had moved from the periphery of the industry to a position of absolute centrality.
Concomitant with the centrality of star performers to industrial strategies and developments through the teens was an intensified focus on the private lives of actors. "In a very short period of time," deCordova observes, "the journalistic apparatus that supported the star system became geared toward producing an endless stream of information about the private lives of stars."[50] This development was closely linked to the growth of fan magazines and recent scholarship has begun to pay more attention to these magazines, seeing them as mediating forces between the movie fan and the screen and star and as central to the emergence of movie fan culture.[51] The primary focus of fan magazines, Gaylyn Studlar suggests, was in "selling stars" and scholars have thus begun to pay attention to them to discern how stars and ideal identities were "sold" to readers principally through discourses of romance, marriage and sexuality - functioning in many ways like Hollywood films - and in turn how readers responded and at times reworked those identities, "poaching" star styles to construct alternative cultural and social identities through movie fan culture. By the late teens and 1920s fan magazines were also quite clearly directed principally at female readers and thus offer a privileged site for understanding the historical and theoretical complexity of women's reception of cinema, issues that have historically been of central importance to feminist work on cinema. Much more work can clearly be undertaken on these fascinating historical documents, which offer one of the few extant sites of audience engagement with cinema in the 1910s and 1920s. Such work will perhaps inevitably operate at the borders of traditions of film studies and cultural studies, mediating questions of ideology, power and resistance.
The first fan magazine was issued in February 1911 and entitled Motion picture story magazine. Its success was testament to the growing interest of audiences in film stories, filmmaking and film actors and it paved the way for Photoplay in 1912, Picture play and Motion picture classic in 1915 and a series of titles throughout the 1920s (including Screen secrets, Screen play, Screenbook, Film fun, Screenland and others). Motion picture story magazine was set up by J. Stuart Blackton of Vitagraph, initially principally as a short-fiction magazine based on film story lines. The magazine began though to publish a photo gallery of actors in April 1911 and interviews with actors, principally at this stage concerning their professional activities, and an "Answers to Inquiries" column in August 1911 which became, in Kathryn Fuller's words, "a forum for active fan readership." "By 1912," Fuller contends, "Motion picture story magazine became a lively, interactive colloquium for the sharing of movie fans' knowledge and creative interests," encouraging readers to contribute poems and drawings and to take part in contests and polls for favourite stars and films.[52] There were limits on what kind of knowledge was allowed regarding film actors, and the "Answer Man" of the "Answers to Inquiries" column initially declined to answer readers questions about actors marital status and personal habits. Likewise, the "Answer to Inquiries" column in Photoplay told readers in 1912 that "Information as to matrimonial alliances and other purely personal matters will not be answered. Questions concerning the marriages of players will be completely ignored."[53] This quickly changed, as the magazines began to focus increasingly on the private lives of stars. In February 1915, for example, Photoplay initiated a series of articles entitled "Who's married to who in the movies" and in 1917 "Who's whose - when the lamps are focused on the dinner tables instead of the sets."
As scholars such as Studlar, Fuller, and deCordova have suggested, this focus on the private lives of stars revolved in the main around discourses of romance and marriage and frequently allowed glimpses into the happy domestic lives of film stars by showing them at their ("dream")home with their partners/children/parents. In her classic study Hollywood: the dream factory, anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker observed this in the context of suggesting that stars function in much the same way as totemic heroes in other societies:
The function of detailing or fabricating the private lives of stars was also taken on by the studio-publicity departments that emerged through the 1920s. This mechanism of fabrication might be regarded as a process of "making up people," to borrow a phrase from the philosopher Ian Hacking - of presenting people in certain ways to tap into both the broader currents of myth and of concurrent debates about personhood.[55]
This focus on domesticity in the discourse of the star "worked to assert," deCordova suggests, "that the cinema was, 'at its source', a healthy phenomenon,"[56] that it was indeed moral and respectable (and thus of course it need not be externally regulated). Fan magazines frequently featured stars offering advice to readers about romance and etiquette and positioned stars as ethical exemplars, as the embodiment of ideal selves that would in turn enable audiences and readers to shape their own conduct and identity in line with prevailing norms of morality. This is apparent in articles like Screen secrets "Why not get married: happy husbands of Hollywood answer the bachelors" and Picture play's "Love makes the man." This role as ethical exemplar was at times consciously invoked by the stars themselves. Mary Pickford wrote a newspaper column and, later, two religious books. In Why not try god? she writes:
Likewise, Douglas Fairbanks wrote a series of self-help books, telling readers the right way to live. For example, Fairbanks instructed readers in "Building up a personality" in his book Laugh and live and in Making life worth while stated that "recreation, a good appetite, a healthy body, and the proper amount of sleep are positive requirements in making life worth while."[58] The star as an ethical exemplar could function as a guide to readers/viewers in negotiating the complex transformations of social and moral order of the first decades of the twentieth century, in particular in relation to the negotiation of shifts in gender relations attendant upon women's entrance into the public sphere around the turn of the century.
Scholars have also suggested that stars functioned as role models for consumer behaviour on the screen, in advertisements, and in articles in the fan magazines, coaching fans in the use of the new consumer products that proliferated in the early years of the twentieth century. Lary May has argued that stars were a privileged site for the promulgation and solidification of new consumer ideals, vividly demonstrating the idea that satisfaction was not to be found in work but in consumption and leisure.[59] Advertisements specifically attempted to appeal to women, who were seen by many as the principal players in the new culture of consumption. Female movie stars were paid to endorse mascara, face powders, skin bleaches and other beauty aids, products that promised to lend the consumer the glamour and physical beauty of film stars (Pickford, for example, advertised Pompeian Skin Cream regularly from 1916 to 1921); articles like "How to keep girlish figures" proliferated and it is clear that stars, and consumer culture more generally at this moment, disseminated ideals of beauty and bodily perfection. The images of stars went on to become commercial objects in their own rights, with the proliferation of photographs, posters, dolls, cigarette cards and so on. Charlie Chaplin dolls and comics, for example, were produced as early as 1915.
The positioning of stars as ethical exemplars was profoundly problematised in the early 1920s however, when a series of scandals involving stars suggested to many the immorality and debauchery of both stars and Hollywood more generally and initiated a new round of reform concern about cinema. The scandals included Mary Pickford's divorce in 1920 and quick remarriage to Douglas Fairbanks, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's alleged murder of Virginia Rappe in 1921, William Desmond Taylor's mysterious murder in 1922, and Wallace Reid's death by drug overdose in 1923.[60] These events were only the most visible signs of a more general shift in the representation of stars, deCordova suggests, which increasingly began to focus on the "darkside" of stardom and on the disreputable lives and morally suspect personalities of films stars in line with Sennett's view of the role of the public performer more generally. This shift in representation, it should be noted, took place principally in tabloid newspaper gossip columns, for Studlar's research has suggested that the fan magazines largely ignored the scandals.[61] These events and the growing emphasis on the immorality of celebrity life in Hollywood strengthened censorship efforts, with critics of the film industry now suggesting that audiences engagement with stars was deeply problematic. For example, in a Congressional debate about censorship:
The crisis engendered by the star scandals contributed to the creation of The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, more commonly known as the Hays office after Will Hays, the Presbyterian elder who had been hired to "clean-up" the industry (and to counter the threat of governmental intervention). Hays urged the banning of the distribution of Arbuckle films and supported the industry's initiation of "morality clauses" in star contracts that permitted the dismissal of any actor whose conduct hurt the studio or the actor's own marketability. The star, discursively willed into place around 1907 in part as a response to mounting reform concern, had by the early 1920s become an object of reform concern, a contested site around which debates about the morality of cinema revolved.
The rise of public performers and celebrities, Richard Sennett's work has suggested, was linked to broad shifts in the configuration of identity such that the celebrity exemplified the imagination of individuality.[63] Public performers and celebrities participated in the process of what I am terming "making up people," linked for Sennett to broad transformations in public and private space. Within this broad schema, a more precise account of the function of stars and individual star images in the early twentieth century can emerge if linked closely to the important body of social historical work carried out on this period. Such work has focused on the effects of the increased presence of women in the public sphere of work and leisure, the emergence of a heterosocial leisure world increasingly geared to the young, the changing complexion of middle-class economics to consumer values, and the emergence of a bureaucratised (and feminised) white-collar workplace.[64] Star images of the period must necessarily be contextualised in relation to these historical shifts and in relation to the discourses that accompanied these transformations, read in part as responses to the myriad transformations that are associated with these years of industrialisation, urbanization and immigration.
This stance underpins Gaylyn Studlar's work on male star images of the period, which begins with the premise that the transformations of the early years of the twentieth century deeply problematised pre-existing definitions of masculinity and that the male stars of the period thus participated in a wider redefinition of masculinity in a society in transition. This is exemplified for Studlar by the figure of Douglas Fairbanks, whose films frequently presented themselves as lessons in the attainment of manhood just as Fairbanks would himself in the series of self-help books he wrote in the late teens and early 1920s. "Fairbanks's stardom," Studlar suggests, "became Hollywood's exemplar of an idealized, boyish masculinity that cheerfully reconciled felt tensions between many of the era's contradictory impulses."[65] Fairbanks's films through the 1910s and early 1920s frequently overtly emphasised the reconciliation of "opposites," with Fairbanks most often playing a young man of a certain patrician quality and privileged Eastern upbringing who "ran, jumped, punched and smiled his way into and through a vigorous, 'red-blooded' manhood,"[66] thus joining notions of East and West, class, and of the rural and urban environment. Fairbanks's film The mollycoddle (1920) exemplifies this. Richard Marshall V (Fairbanks) is the son of a Sheriff who had won the West. Marshall though has had a European upbringing and has become an effete molycoddle (mistaken even for an Englishman!). Through a series of events Marshall is slowly transformed, ultimately ending up in Arizona in cowboy clothes, "regenerated by a spell in the American West" (this notion of the regeneration of masculinity in the West was of course a wider trope, central also to the star image of William S. Hart).[67] Fairbanks promoted the "revitilisation" of a masculinity troubled by urbanization and industrialization, insistently valourising stamina and bodily strength. Such a valourisation of the physicality of masculinity became more apparent after The mollycoddle and through the 1920s, after Fairbanks had participated in the setting up of United Artists and after he began to produce and star in a series of "swashbucklers" such as The mark of Zorro (1920), Robin Hood (1922), The thief of Bagdhad (1924), and The black pirate (1926). These films evidence a nostalgic evocation of a time when traditional gender arrangements ruled and - as the introduction to The three musketeers (1921) stated - "When life was life, and men were men." Fairbanks functioned then, Studlar argues, "as an appealing mediator between America's nineteenth-century past and its twentieth-century future, between the body and the machine, wilderness and urbanization, intensified social control and a nostalgic desire for a mythically free, childlike past."[68]
Fairbanks' assertion of an increasingly defensive ideal of normative masculinity can be regarded as a response to a growing cultural preoccupation with apparent changes in female sexual and social identity and their effects on masculinity in the 1920s. This preoccupation is perhaps most visible in the stardom of, and controversy surrounding, Rudolph Valentino. The Italian born Valentino was presented as a threat to traditional sexual relations and American ideals of masculinity, in part through his associations with dancing and "tango teas" (afternoon dances where women hired male escorts to take them through dance routines). Miriam Hansen has suggested that Valentino "inaugurated an explicitly sexual discourse on male beauty" and destablised "standards of masculinity with connotations of sexual ambiguity, social marginality and ethnic/racial otherness" and Gaylyn Studlar has similarly shown how the positioning of Valentino as a star for women audiences led to reactions within popular discourse, where Valentino was described as a "'pink powder puff,' a 'wop,' and ... the most influential instructor in Hollywood's effeminate 'national school of masculinity'."[69] Valentino's films clearly played on these controversies and this is exemplified by The four horsemen of the apocalypse (1921), with its mixture of scenes of tango dancing, aggressive sexuality (with Valentino frequently semi-naked), seduction, rejection and reconciliation. Valentino effectively functioned then as the polar opposite to Fairbanks, as an example to many of the dangers besetting masculinity in the period and of the effect of transformations in gender relations in turning the (frequently semi-naked) male body into an erotic object of contemplation. The extension of the sexual gaze to women spectators was visible also in relation to "matinee idols" like John Barrymore but the fact that with Valentino this gaze was directed at a "foreign body" was deeply troublesome to many in this period of heightened nationalism and of the proliferation of notions of racial purity.
The distinctions drawn between the star images of Fairbanks and Valentino suggests that stars function as part of a system of differences - in relation to discourses about stars, performance strategies, audience identifications and tastes, production strategies - and in turn as part of a broader mapping of the possibilities of identities and personhood at particular moments. Furthermore, Studlar's analysis has suggested the importance of broader contextual factors in relation to gender, sexuality, ethnicity in the early years of the twentieth century in understanding the production and dissemination of certain star images. This approach might profitably be extended to consider female star images of the period, about whom there is a surprisingly small amount of scholarly work.
Such a project would of necessity engage with the extraordinary popularity of Mary Pickford, whose centrality to a series of important industrial transformations I noted above. Pickford's image has been fixed for modern audiences and scholars as an archetypal image of Victorian femininity, the child with golden curls, partly because - as Richard Koszarski notes - the poster art for the film which solidified this image, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917), was widely reproduced in the 1970s.[70] This image was never complete and certainly took time to develop. In the first eight years of her filmmaking career, at Biograph, Imp and Famous Players, Pickford played a wide range of roles: in Tess of the storm country (1914) she faked a pregnancy to save someone else, in Heart's adrift (1914) she had an illegitimate baby, in Fate's interception (1915) she lived with a man out of wedlock, and so on. During these years, Lary May observes, Pickford "played a female role which made a fundamental break from the past" and which "expanded the perimeters of respectable female behaviour far beyond their nineteenth-century coordinates," suggesting that Pickford's image and popularity can be situated in relation to the real transformations in the role of women documented by scholars such as Kathy Peiss and Joanne Meyerowitz.[71] Tess of the storm country exemplified Pickford's expansion of respectable female behaviour. Pickford played a rebellious and energetic mountain girl who raises the child of the daughter of the sheriff to save her from paternal wrath. She ignores religious disapproval to baptize the baby herself and also leads a group of farmers and tradesmen in a fight against repressive game laws. For May, then, Pickford functioned in a way similar to Fairbanks: reconciling a series of opposites that were pertinent to the historical moment, in particular by "merging the virgin to the harlot, and moving beyond the spheres which had divided the sexes in the nineteenth century."[72] This similarity to Fairbanks can perhaps be pushed further, for Pickford did increasingly come to portray normative images of femininity in the little girl roles that became dominant after The poor little rich girl in 1917 and which include Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917), Heart o' the hills (1919), Pollyanna (1920), Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921) and Little Annie Rooney (1925). Despite various attempts to break out of this role it proved enormously popular with audiences, suggesting perhaps a sense of nostalgia for a moment of innocence that was increasingly seen as historical, and that Pickford thus functioned as a mediator of the intense "tension between modern and traditional modes of thought and behaviour" that social historian Paula Fass discerns more widely across the 1920s.[73] In this sense the films in which Pickford played a little girl mirrored the historical epics of Fairbanks. The two stars would in fact marry in 1920 and become commentators on the "art" of marriage, widely positioned as examples of the successful merging of work life and romantic and domestic happiness.
The contradictions kept in play in Pickford's image are in fact visible more widely in the period's representations and debates about femininity and the "New Woman". Lilian Gish, for example, extended notions of spiritual purity that were always a part of Pickford's image (both had worked initially with Griffith). For example, True Heart Susie (1919) features Gish in a nostalgic pastoral where her sacrifices for the object of her affection go unnoticed and her opponent is an uncaring city "vamp." The figure of the "vamp" was in fact represented and debated widely in this period. By 1900 the vamp had, Bram Dijkstra observes,
Such a figure clearly responded to concerns about the growing presence of women in the workforce and the public sphere and to perceptions that young women were deviating from traditional notions of morality. The vamp figure emerged on the screen most notably through Theda Bara, seemingly the first entirely fabricated star. Casting about for an unknown actress to star in A fool there was (1915), director Frank Powell came across Theodosia Goodman. William Fox, the producer of the film, set press agents at work and they invented a name for Goodman - Theda Bara was, they claimed, an anagram for "Arab Death" - and a history: she was, they claimed, born in the shadow of the Sphinx, played leads at the Theatre Antoine, distilled exotic perfumes as a hobby, was well-versed in black magic and was identical to the character she played in the film. This latter suggestion was certainly in line with the tradition of picture personalities, where the real life was in line with the reel life, but here the aim was to present Bara as just as immoral as the character in the film. The film was based on a stage play that had been inspired by the Burne-Jones painting The vampire (exhibited in 1897) and the Rudyard Kipling poem of the same name, and in it the character played by Bara destroyed males and turned a cold shoulder to the pleadings of abandoned wives and children. Bara's image, like Valentino's, drew on a tradition of associating sexuality with ethnic otherness, and certainly played up to concerns about the changing roles of women.
Bara thus participated in the redefinition of femininity and can be positioned as the polar opposite of Gish and, in the late teens and 1920s at least, Pickford, in the topography of accepted "styles" of femininity at this moment. Bara's image can be linked to the emergence of the "flapper" in the late teens and 1920s, most clearly visible in the career of Clara Bow but also associated with Louise Brooks (though only subsequently: Brooks was mainly a supporting actress and certainly not a major star in the period and her lead roles in Pandoro's box (1929) and Diary of a lost girl (1929) were not widely seen). The figure of the "flapper" emerged through the teens as a response to the real transformations in women's lives in this period. For many commentators the flapper was a figure who had rejected traditional conventions and normal moral order though she was also clearly an ambiguous figure. As Kathy Peiss observes she was "at once an independent wage-earner, making her own way in the world, and a beautiful, romantic girl, seeking marital fulfilment."[75] These contradictions underpinned the star image of an actor like Clara Bow. Bow played a number of sexy, liberated women who were also searching for romance, most notably in Mantrap (1926) and It (1927), and subsequently became embroiled in a series of off screen scandals.[76] She also perhaps underpinned the very ways in which knowledge about female stars was structured, for these stars were visible sites for discourses about women's role in the public and domestic spheres (the focus on the domestic life of stars that worked to assert the morality of cinema more generally was particularly acute in relation to female stars: time and time again discussions of Pickford, for example, would focus on her marriage and home). The star image of Gloria Swanson is clearly important here also, for in a series of Cecil B. DeMille pictures such as Male and female (1919), Don't change your husband (1919), Why change your wife (1920) and The affairs of Anatol (1921) Swanson fused the traditional virgin or vamp image with what Alexander Walker has called "the playmate wife."[77] Female star images of the period clearly responded to, and were shaped by, broader contestations over the role of women in this period for star images so often function to resolve ideological contradictions, a process that seems to work in individual cases and across the star system as a system of differences sensitive to pressing social concerns.
Finally here, it is clear that no account of star images of this period could get by without talking about Charlie Chaplin, who - in Richard Koszarski's words - dominated "this period as both a creative force within the industry and a cultural icon of unparalled visibility."[78] Chaplin's star image has been extensively analysed in Charles J. Maland's important book, Chaplin and American culture: the evolution of a star image. Maland's exemplary account of Chaplin's star image seeks to inscribe it, and its transformations from 1913 to the 1970s, in relation both to industrial conditions such as the emergence of United Artists and the coming of sound and to the broader cultural and political history of the United States. Within this, Maland documents the gradual construction of the Chaplin image, in particular the fusing of the figure of the tramp and the gentlemen, and suggests that Chaplin emerged as a bona fide star around 1915 when extra-textual discourse increasingly focused on the man Chaplin as opposed to the screen persona of Charlie (this accords with deCordova's wider analysis of the emergence of the star system). Much of this discourse followed a rags-to-riches narrative, talking about Chaplin's rise from a "penniless immigrant" to "highest paid movie actor," suggesting that Chaplin functioned as a highly visible image of a broader American myth of success.[79] Such a narrative of uplift was increasingly visible in Chaplin's self-presentation, Maland notes, for his self-directed films shifted away from the anarchic slapstick of the Keystone period of 1914 and increasingly focused on heterosexual romance at the same time that the extra-textual discourse surrounding Chaplin focused on his interest in high culture and thus on his status as a serious artist (solidified with Chaplin's dealings with the intelligentsia through the 1920s). For Maland, and in particular for Charles Musser in his essay Work, ideology, and Chaplin's tramp, Chaplin's image as a gentlemen tramp was closely linked to the economic context of the late nineteenth century that had seen a massive increase in homeless travellers. Musser suggests that Chaplin's image was part of a "radical populism" that produced films where "working-class audiences in particular could see their anger and frustrations recognized, transformed, and liberated."[80] For both Maland and Musser then, Chaplin's star image was linked closely to broader debates about class.
The new medium of projected moving pictures was quickly utilised as part of a broader focus on celebrities that animated the wider culture and was particularly clear in the realms of theatre and vaudeville. It became possible to conceive of film actors as celebrities after a complicated series of industrial, discursive and textual transformations: the emergence of the nickelodeon, the dominance of fiction films, the industrial invocation of discourses of acting in response to regulatory concerns, and transformations in textual practice that led to a focus on individuated characters carried through increased dissection of screen space and a shift to a verisimilar mode of acting. The film star became increasingly economically important to the film industry and increasingly important to audience pleasure and there developed an intense focus on the private lives of stars. Star images can be examined in relation to the social historical work carried out on this period of extraordinary transition, positioned as exemplars of certain configurations of identity (of ethics, morality, of notions of romance, gender, ethnicity and so on).
Future research on the area of stars and audiences in early American cinema will perhaps address more clearly the broader configuration of celebrity that I have sketched in here. Work on star images of the period will also necessarily begin to address more clearly star images that have faded through time - what could we say about the star image of, say, Francis Bushman or of John Gilbert or of Norma Talmadge? - and should I think continue to outline the relations amongst individual star images and the wider system of differences set in play in the production and promotion of divergent images of stars. Such work might well also begin to pursue more overtly questions about racial and ethnic identity and about class identity, following on from, and extending, the work on Valentino and Chaplin. Such a stance is visible in Donald Kirihra's recent essay on Sessue Hayakaya and the overt policing of images of black performers is addressed in my own essay on the regulation of the boxing pictures of the African-American boxing champion Jack Johnson. Although not strictly a film star, for his fame stemmed from his boxing, the regulation of images of Johnson was symptomatic of a broader injunction against casting actors with "distinct" ethnic or racial features in leading roles in fiction films.[81] This work could also quite clearly include further consideration of representations of white ethnicity.
Alongside such a focus on star texts it might also be possible to begin to address more precisely the agency of stars (and of those associated with stars: producers, agents, promoters, casting directors). Such a stance is visible in Maland's work on Chaplin and in Peter Kramer's important recent work on Buster Keaton, which seeks to situate the agency of Keaton and entertainment entrepreneurs such as Joseph Schenk within broader industrial conditions and transformations in entertainment institutions.[82] The huge biographical and autobiographical literature on stars will be important in this context and needs to be addressed by cinema scholars who, well-versed in post-structuralist thought, have been understandably reluctant to tackle questions of agency head on. These questions will need though to be addressed in the context of a thorough understanding of the broader structures within which individuals operate, both in relation to industrial and discursive structures but also in relation to broader patterns of social history. Such work will necessarily continually push at the borders of the discipline of cinema history.
(To return to your place in the text, simply click on the endnote number)
[44]Tino Balio, "Part II: Struggles for Control: 1908-1930", in Tino Balio (ed), The American film industry, revised edition, Madison, Wisconsin, 1985, p.106.
[45]See here Jane Gaines, "From elephants to lux soap: the programming and "flow" of early motion picture exploitation", in The velvet light trap, no.25 (Spring 1990).
[46]Hampton, A history of the movies op. cit., p.194.
[47]Tino Balio, "Stars in business", in Balio (ed), The American film industry op. cit., pp.157-162.
[48]Kerr, Incorporating the star op. cit., p.407.
[49]Balio, "Stars in business". op. cit., p.153.
[50]deCordova, Picture personalities op. cit., pp.101-2.
[51]See, in particular, Jenkins, Textual Poachers op. cit.; Fuller, At the Picture Show op. cit.; Studlar, "Out Salomeing Salome" op. cit.
[52]Fuller, At the picture show op. cit., p.138.
[53]Fuller, At the picture show op. cit., p.141; Photoplay, March 1912, quoted in deCordova, Picture personalities op. cit., pp.105-6.
[54]Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood, the dream factory: an anthropologist looks at the movie makers, Boston, 1950, p.249.
[55]Ian Hacking, "Making up people", in Thomas Heller et al (eds), Reconstructing individualism: autonomy, individuality, and the self in Western thought, Stanford, 1986.
[56]deCordova, Picture personalities op. cit.,p.103.
[57]Mary Pickford, Why not try god?, New York, 1934, p.2.
[58]Douglas Fairbanks, Laugh and live, New York, 1917; Douglas Fairbanks, Making life worth while, New York, 1918, p38.
[59]Lary May, Screening out the past: the birth of mass culture and the motion picture industry, Oxford, 1980, in particular pp.96-146.
[60]On Reid, see Mark Lynn Anderson, Shooting star: understanding Wallace Reid and his public, in Adrienne L. McLean and David A. Cook (eds) Headline Hollywood: a century of film scandal, New Brunswick, N.J., 2001.
[61]deCordova, Picture personalities op. cit., pp.117-147; Sennett, The Fall of Public Man op. cit., Studlar, "Out Salomeing Salome" op. cit., p.111.
[62]Congressional Record, June 29 1922, quoted in deCordova, Picture personalities op. cit., p.130.
[63]Sennett, The fall of public man op. cit.
[64]See, for example, Paula Fass, The damned and the beautiful op. cit; Lewis Erenberg, Steppin' Out op. cit; Kathy Peiss, Cheap amusements: working women and leisure in turn-of-the-century New York, Philadelphia, 1986.
[65]Studlar, This mad masquerade op. cit, p.12.
[66]Ibid, p.12.
[67]Walker, Stardom op. cit, p.113.
[68]Studlar, This mad masquerade op. cit, p.86.
[69]Miriam Hansen, "Pleasure, ambivalence, identification: Valentino and female spectatorship", in Cinema journal 25, no.4 (Summer 1986), p.32; Studlar, This mad masquerade op. cit., p.153.
[70]Richard Koszarski, An evening's entertainment: the age of the silent feature picture, 1915-1928, New York, 1990, p.265.
[71]May, Screening out the past, p.119 and p.122; Peiss, Cheap amusements op. cit.; Joanne Meyerowitz, Women adrift: independent wage earners in Chicago, 1880-1930, Chicago, 1988.
[72]May, Screening out the past op. cit., p.96.
[73]Fass, The damned and the beautiful op. cit, p.5.
[74]Bram Dijkstra, Idols of perversity: fantasies of feminine evil in fin-de-siecle culture, Oxford, 1986, p.351.
[75]Kathy Peiss, Making faces: the cosmetics industry and the cultural consumption of gender, 1890-1930, in "Genders", no.7 (March 1990), p.153.
[76]On the scandals surrounding Clara Bow see Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon, 1986, pp.137-144.
[77]Walker, Stardom op. cit., p.129.
[78]Koszarski, An Evening's entertainment op. cit., p.263.
[79]Charles J. Maland, Chaplin and American culture: the evolution of a star image, Princeton, New Jersey, 1989.
[80]Charles Musser, Work, ideology, and Chaplin's tramp, in Robert Sklar and Charles Musser (eds), Resisting images: essays on cinema and history, Philadelphia, 1990, p.48 and p.62.
[81]Donald Kirihra, "The accepted idea displaced: stereotype and Sessue Hayakawa", in Bernardi (eds), The birth of whiteness op. cit.; Grieveson, Fighting films op. cit., 1998.
[82]Peter Kramer, "The Making of a Comic Star: Buster Keaton and The Saphead," in Henry Jenkins and Kristine Brunovska Karnick (eds), Classical Hollywood comedy, London, 1995; Peter Kramer, "A slapstick comedian at the crossroads: Buster Keaton, the theater, and the movies in 1916/1917", in Theatre history studies, vol. XVII (1997).
10,000 words
Section one
Feature Films, Stars, Fan Magazines and Scandals
The star system affected the economics of the industry by becoming the prime means of stabilization. Producers discovered that the unique personalities of certain actors could attract a large and faithful following through the use of advertising and publicity, including ballyhoo and hokum. A star become a production value unto himself, a trademark enhancing the prestige of his producer and an insurance policy guaranteeing success at the box office.[44]
The relationship of fans to their stars is not limited to seeing them in movies, any more than primitive people's relationship to their totemic heroes is limited to hearing a myth told occasionally ... In our society the identification of fans with their movie heroes may be equally intimate, but for different reasons. Fan magazines give details of the star's domestic and so-called private life, with pictures of his home, his garden, his swimming pool, his family, his dogs and his cats. The columnists in the daily paper expand this with what type of underwear he wears, whether he prefers noodle soup or tomato.[54]
I found out about the power of right thinking. And my discovery has brought me so much joy and given me so much spiritual light in the hardest hours of my life that I want to share it with all who care to try.[57]
At Hollywood is a colony of these people where debauchery, riotous living, drunkenness, ribaldry, dissipation, free love seem to be conspicuous ... These are some of the characters from whom the young people of today are deriving a large part of their education, views of life, and character forming habits. From these sources our young people gain much of their views of life, inspiration and education. Rather a poor source, is it not? It looks as if censorship is needed, does it not?[62]
Star Images
come to represent woman as the personification of everything negative that linked sex, ownership, and money. She symbolized the ... sterile lust for gold of woman as the eternal polyandrous prostitute.[74]
Conclusion
Section one
Endnotes
