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Historians have often approached the emergence of the star system in the U.S. via a single event, focusing on the controversial move of the actress Florence Lawrence from Biograph to the Independent Motion Picture Company (Imp) in 1910. This move, accompanied by "the first publicity stunt on behalf of a motion picture star," is seen to thus mark "the beginning of the star system."[2] The story, as told by Terry Ramsaye (1926), John Drinkwater (1931), Lewis Jacobs (1939), Alexander Walker (1970), Richard Dyer (1979), David Cook (1981) and others, looks like this:[3] Carl Laemmle, head of Imp, lured the "Biograph girl" Lawrence to Imp by promising her a higher salary and greater personal publicity. He publicised this by planting a false story of Lawrence's death in the St Louis post-dispatch and this was followed up with an announcement in the trade press denouncing the story as a "black lie" circulated by "enemies of the Imp" - coincidentally announcing that her next Imp film was just about to be released - the appearance of Lawrence in St.Louis, "whole and sound and in person on the stage to let the world know that 'the Biograph girl' is now an 'Imp'."[4] Through this "master-stroke," and "Laemmle's acute sense of popular mentality," the "screen star was born;"[5] Lawrence gave an interview to the St Louis post-dispatch - "probably the first substantial interview given by such a star," Walker claims - and this was "the first occasion that a film actor's name became known to the public."[6]
This narrative of derring-do and of Laemmle's Barnum-like ability to generate publicity was enmeshed, for a number of these historians, with a broader conflict between independent production companies such as Imp and the production companies within the Motion Pictures Patents Company. This was an alliance of manufacturers, including Biograph, who had banded their patents together in late 1908 in an attempt to gain control of the industry. This conflict is seen as central to the emergence of the star system. The Patents Company was allegedly reluctant to publicise actors and concentrated instead on the use of trade names as a basis of commercial exploitation and differentiation. This reluctance has traditionally been seen as a result of a concern that named actors would demand higher salaries (and/or that legitimate actors "slumming" in the movies did not want their names publicised because of the low cultural status of cinema).[7] The Patents Company thus ignored public demand because of financial concerns and is portrayed in many of these accounts - perhaps most noticeably in Benjamin Hampton's A history of the movies - as a structure that opposed progress, creativity and public desire.[8] Laemmle, on the other hand, emerges as both a visionary and as a conduit for public desire, his "master-stroke" in inventing the star part of a strategy of commercial differentiation but also of realising and accepting public demand. The emergence of a star system is thus told as a narrative that would become increasingly common in the Hollywood star-vehicles of the coming years, complete with a focus on the triumph of individual action and creativity (as opposed to the broader economic context) and with the eventual victory of good over evil.
Recent revisionist historians such as Janet Staiger, Richard deCordova, and Eileen Bowser have challenged this narrative in a number of ways, both on the level of detail and at the broader level of its mode of historical explanation.[9] Lawrence, it emerges, had actually been working for Imp for six months before the publicity stunt and had been named and pictured in advertisements from late 1909 onwards. Likewise, the clear division between the stance of the Patents Company and the Independents is also challenged in recent scholarly work, which has demonstrated that the Patents Company had also begun to publicise actor's names by early 1910. For example, the Edison Company publicised the appearance of Miss Cecil Spooner and Mademoiselle Pilar-Morin in late 1909 and Kalem released a poster of its players for lobby display in January 1910. For these scholars, the pertinent question becomes: what broader conditions made it possible - and desirable - for the 'star" to emerge at this moment? These historical accounts register a shift away from nineteenth century models of historiography, and the focus on events as the consequence of individual agents, towards an understanding of cinema as an institution, determined by overlapping and often contradictory economic, technological, ideological and socio-cultural demands. The Lawrence event is thus inscribed into a broader industrial and social context in this work, which utilises an increased access to archival collections alongside models of cultural history to delineate the effect of industrial, textual and discursive transformations on the emergence of the star system.
This article will map out the parameters of this recent scholarly work, suggesting along the way some revisions to these accounts, some shifts of emphasis, and some areas that may well merit further research (principally, I will suggest, the necessity of situating film stardom in the wider context of a culture of celebrity and of linking discourses about film acting more closely to reform and regulatory concerns about cinema that proliferated from 1907 onwards). Alongside the focus here on the emergence of the star system, this paper also begins to sketch in an account of some of the particular star images that emerged through the early teens and early 1920s. Scholarly interest in star images has proliferated subsequent to Richard Dyer's important book Stars, which initiated a semiotic notion that stars should be studied as clusters of signs, as systems of signifiers or texts, that communicate meaning to a spectator. These star texts are highly manipulated and have been fabricated through the work of the star, his or her representatives and other cultural workers (such as gossip columnists); for Dyer, star texts are produced across the categories of promotion, publicity, film texts and criticism and commentary.[10] Work on star images has increasingly sought to contextualise such images within larger discursive structures and within the broader parameters of social history, often taking a lead from Dyer's own subsequent work and in particular Heavenly bodies: film stars and society (1986) where Dyer sought to bring "together the star seen as a set of media signs with the various ways of understanding the world which influenced how people felt about that star."[11] For Dyer and others, stars thus become major definers of ideas about such things as gender, race, ethnicity, work and sexuality at historically specific moments. In this sense, stars are ideological images that work to resolve pressing ideological contradictions and in part to foster images of ideal selves that are promoted as sources of identification.[12]
The shift towards a cultural history of star images initiated by Dyer has recently been pursued by Gaylyn Studlar in her important book on male stars of the 1920s, This mad masquerade: stardom and masculinity in the jazz age. Studlar pursues a reading of star images against the backdrop of the extraordinary transformations of the early years of the twentieth century, situating male stars such as Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino in the context of the periods key social concerns about gender, sexuality and ethnicity.[13] This work can be extended here by a consideration of the diversity of images of femininity in the period from the teens through the 1920s, through analysis of the star images of Mary Pickford, Theda Bara, Lilian Gish, Gloria Swanson and Clara Bow.[14] Such analysis will pay close attention to the specificity of individual star images and to the relation of star images to one another. The star system as a system of differences effectively maps out accepted definitions or "styles" of femininity at this particular moment, visible in the broader representational context and clearly linked to important social transformations in this period and, perhaps centrally, to the changing parameters of public and private space. My account of the key star images of the period concludes with a brief consideration of Charlie Chaplin.
The notion of star images as ideological texts has recently been readdressed in contemporary scholarly work on fan culture, which has begun to investigate more seriously the productive engagement of audiences with stars, moving beyond a critical position on audiences as passive spectators to explore how audiences have used mass media to shape their identities, attitudes, and behaviour. Audiences can, to borrow a term from Henry Jenkins, "poach" star styles, and in doing so "construct their cultural and social identity through borrowing and inflecting mass culture-images, articulating concerns which often go unvoiced within the dominant media."[15] The historical examination of film audiences and their relation to film stars in the early twentieth century has been pursued recently by Kathryn H. Fuller in her book At the picture show: small-town audiences and the creation of movie fan culture, which draws on sources such as surveys, autobiographical accounts, letters, fan publications and other past representations of fans in popular culture.[16] Such work exists on the cusp of film studies and cultural studies, evidencing a further shift in traditions of film history towards engagement with the productive desires of audiences (for example, to know more about Florence Lawrence or to utilise the image of Pickford to construct parts of their own identity).
This article thus seeks to set in place an explanatory framework for the emergence of the star system in America in the early twentieth century, considering the broad context of a wider preoccupation with celebrity before outlining how film actors became enmeshed with this. This is linked with industrial transformations, textual transformations and - I suggest - with reform contestations over cinema. The article sketches in the subsequent development of the star system through the teens and early 1920s, paying close attention again to the industrial, textual and reform context but also outlining the emergence of a participatory fan culture. The final section focuses on popular star images of the period.
The phenomenon of celebrity clearly underpins the star system in cinema though this is rarely addressed in accounts of the rise of the star system. Scholars outside cinema studies have linked the emergence of notions of celebrity both to wide-ranging historical transformations and to more precise shifts in the early to mid- nineteenth century. Leo Braudy in The frenzy of renown: fame and its history, for example, traces the roots of Western preoccupation with fame and the public person back to Roman times.[17] Richard Sennett in The fall of public man argues that the fall of the ancien regime and the formation of a new capitalist, secular, urban culture led to profound changes in personal and public life, principally a lessened social participation and greater psychic absorption. In this context, Sennett argues, the "performer's social rise was based on his declaration of a forceful, exciting, morally suspect personality, wholly contrary to the style of ordinary bourgeois life."[18] Performers became celebrities in a sort of compensatory fashion, so that the phenomenon of celebrity is enmeshed with broader changes in social and psychic life (Sennet, incidentally, also sees the rise of electronic media more generally in this light). More specifically, scholars have suggested that a series of technological developments, economic imperatives and cultural trends all conspired to direct an unprecedented amount of media attention on public figures in the nineteenth-century. The roots of this "culture of celebrity" can be traced back to the 1830s, Charles L. Ponce de Leon has suggested, when the penny press began publishing gossip and brief human-interest stories about local and regional notables.[19] By the 1850s, the interview had become a regular feature of mass-circulation journalism and by the 1880s Joseph Pulitzer had begun to use famous individuals as the focus of stories about complex institutions and issues (a trend followed by early cinema historians, notably as we have seen when writing about the emergence of the star system). By the turn of the century, then, newspaper stories insistently focused on public figures and with the development of wire services and the syndication of feature stories information about celebrities flowed out to provincial newspapers across the country, such that by the 1920s celebrities had become almost ubiquitous.
The notion of celebrity in this sense is broadly conceived, including politicians and other public people. There are though specific developments in the entertainment sphere that led to a focus on entertainers as celebrities. Theatre historian Benjamin McArthur, in his book Actors and American culture, 1880-1920, has argued that the star system in American theatre grew out of the shift from "stock" to "combination" theatre companies in America in the early nineteenth-century.[20] Stock companies had hired thirty to forty actors for a forty-week season, producing a wide repertory of short-run plays performed at a permanent theatrical venue. The star system began to emerge during the 1820s when well-known performers undertook tours in which they played the same role in different cities, with a local stock cast taking supporting roles. McArthur argues that these local star tours transformed American theatre, for by the end of the century the stock companies were gradually replaced by combination companies which toured regional venues with a single play fronted by a star name.
This focus on the personality of the performer was also central to vaudeville, the dominant entertainment form of the late nineteenth century, as Henry Jenkins has shown in What made pistachio nuts? Early sound comedy and the vaudeville aesthetic.[21] Intermedial relations between theatre, vaudeville and cinema are critical for an understanding of how film quickly became enmeshed with this wider focus on celebrity performers. Moving pictures were after all initially principally exhibited in the U.S. as one act in the context of an evening's vaudeville entertainment and this variety context was already centred on a focus on individual celebrity performers. It is no surprise then that early films frequently represented celebrities, particularly initially those of the vaudeville stage - Edison filmed vaudeville and sports stars from as early as 1893 - but also celebrities from the broader sphere of public life (politicians such as Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt and various royal figures in the "actuality" genre that was dominant until around 1904). Film quite clearly offered the opportunity to disseminate these images and star performers (and performances) more widely than was hitherto possible.
However, these figures cannot be regarded as film stars because they were famous for what they did elsewhere; film simply functioned as a kind of photojournalism or as a way of recording theatrical performances and making it available to a larger number of people. These representations did not then mark out the conditions for the later emergence of the film star, but simply participated in pre-existing celebrations, representations and structures of celebrity. A specific focus on film actors as part of this broader culture of celebrity did not emerge until a later moment, certainly until after 1907 when - as Richard deCordova observes - there emerged a gradual focus on the film actor that would lead to the publicity surrounding Florence Lawrence in early 1910.[22] The question that needs to be posed precisely then is this: how did film actors become constituted as celebrities? That it is to say, given that a celebrity culture was already in place, how did this catch up - as it were - with the filmic medium? How was it possible for film actors to be conceived of as celebrities?
The answers to these questions are to be found initially in the work undertaken by early cinema scholars on the reorganisation of the film industry in the U.S. from around 1905 onwards. The emergence of "nickelodeons," cheap moving picture houses, as the dominant means of exhibition from 1905 and their proliferation from 1906/1907 created a great demand for film production, which was partly fulfilled by a shift to the production of fiction films which rapidly began to outstrip the production of actualities because they were easier and often cheaper to plan and produce (in 1908 the percentage of dramatic production increased from 17 to 66).[23] The dominance of fiction filmmaking simply led to an increased use of film actors, further mandated, with the development of permanent stock companies of actors by film companies after the nickelodeon boom. Film acting became salaried employment at this moment, requiring full-time commitment. Prior to this, as Charles Musser has shown, production personnel and non-professionals had taken turns with actors in performing before the camera, a practice which continued until at least 1904.[24] The increased importance attached to acting and the expansion of stock companies was further enabled when the creation of the Patents Company in late 1908 brought a measure of stability to the industry and enabled increased investment in production and exhibition. The upshot of these stock companies and the regularisation of production meant that actors began to appear in numerous films and in turn became recognized by audiences for their regular appearances, leading to audiences forming emotional attachments to these actors in similar ways to those they had with theatre and vaudeville performers (and other celebrities). deCordova quotes from fan letters to Florence Lawrence from as early as December 1908.[25] Lawrence was not known prior to her appearances in films and the interest shown in Lawrence was clearly predicated on these industrial shifts which led to the dominance of fiction filmmaking, the creation of stock companies, and the regularisation of production that enabled actors to appear in acting roles on a regular basis.
For the film industry it became increasingly important to exploit the growing fame of film performers, for both economic and cultural reasons. Catherine Kerr has argued that an industrial focus on individual actors evidenced a drive to produce "personalized" commodities that was more widely visible in business strategies of the period and that the star system provided a way for production companies to differentiate their products from those of other companies and, at a later moment, to introduce different pricing structures based on the star commodity.[26] The discursive focus on film acting was also quite clearly linked to attempts to "uplift" the cultural status of cinema in the face of the concerted reform and governmental concern about cinema that emerged most prominently in early 1907, linked closely to concerns about the effects of the space of the nickelodeons and the representations within them on vulnerable and dangerous audiences. These concerns led to the creation of a Police Censorship Board in Chicago in November 1907, to the temporary closure of nickelodeons in New York City in December 1908 on orders from the mayor, to the creation of a Board of Censorship in early 1909, and to the proliferation of state censorship boards from 1911 onwards. The discursive emphasis on acting from 1907 onwards drew on theatrical intertexts to demonstrate the cultural status of cinema and this reached a certain culmination with the formation of Famous Players Company by Adolph Zukor in 1912, advertised with the slogan "Famous Players in Famous Plays" and initiated with the importation of the first film performance of the famous theatrical actor Sarah Bernhardt in Queen Elizabeth. This strategy persisted in the coming years, when well known actors like James Hackett, James O'Neill and Minnie Maddern Fiske starred in adaptions of films such as The prisoner of Zenda, The Count of Monte Cristo and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Other celebrities such as acclaimed soprano Geraldine Farrar starred in films (bringing what Sumiko Higashi describes as "the aura of high culture patronised by European royalty" to film).[27] The discursive focus on acting as a high cultural intertext was clearly part of the wider "drive for respectability" of the U.S. film industry that has been documented in detail by William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson, who see it as linked both to an attempt to assuage reform and governmental concern and to broaden the audience base to the middle classes.[28]
The emergence of a discourse on acting as a critical underpinning of the star system in American films was thus closely linked to contestation over cinema beginning in 1907 and to the response of the industry in turning to high cultural intertexts to uplift the cultural status of the cinema and to broaden its audience base. Closely linked to this focus on the role of the actor in film and to the industry's attempts to link itself with the theatrical star system around 1908-1909 was a transformation in actual acting style that was most noticeable, Roberta Pearson suggests, in the Griffith Biograph films. In her book Eloquent gestures: the transformation of acting style in the Griffith Biographs, Pearson argues that cinematic acting from 1909 began increasingly to resemble the acting of the Broadway stage, rejecting the codified conventions of an older performance style that had come to be associated primarily with cheap melodrama. This shift from what Pearson terms a "histrionic" to a "verisimilar" style of acting accorded with the strategy of emulating respectable entertainments.[29] Furthermore, it increasingly focused attention on the psychology of characters, thus engaging audiences with characters through structures of alignment and allegiance. These processes of engagement led to audiences becoming increasingly interested in the actors portraying characters and to what theatrical producer David Belasco described more generally as "that indescribable bond of sympathy between the actor and his audiences."[30]
The emulation of stage performance style coincided also with a transition to narratives that centred around a psychological approach to character, a development that further mandated emotional attachments to film actors. The emergence of the star system was then also tied together with transformations in filmic practice that early cinema scholars see as emerging from around 1909, and which are outlined in detail by Kristin Thompson in The classical Hollywood cinema and Tom Gunning in D.W. Griffith and the origins of American narrative film. Thompson suggests that there was in fact a "parallel rise" of the stuttering emergence of the "classical system" from 1909 through to 1917 and the star system.[31]
Prior to 1907, most film narratives were not self-sufficient, leading film manufacturers and exhibitors to employ a variety of devices to effect narrative coherence (for example, sound effects, lectures, the predictability of the chase, or intertextuality such that stories were already familiar to audiences).[32] This system of representation became increasingly problematic in the face of the high demand for product from nickelodeons after 1907, and a new system arose based on strict linear temporality and the subordination of such things as editing, camerawork and composition, to the demands to tell a story. This emergence of what Tom Gunning terms "the narrator system" around 1908-1909 was enmeshed with the presentation of psychologically individuated and internally motivated characters, who drove narratives forward in the production of a causal chain of events.
This growing dependence on character psychology was emphasised in titles and also in a developing tendency to represent mental states visually (dreams, visions, and memories become narrative staples in the teens). The narrator system reveals the motivation and desire of characters to the spectator and thus draws spectators into the unfolding action and intensifies the "bonds of sympathy" between characters/actors and audiences. For Gunning, it is worth noting, the emergence of the narrator system was closely linked to attempts to make cinema respectable in the face of the reform and governmental anxieties briefly sketched in above.
This focus on characterisation led in turn to a burgeoning emphasis on stars whose familiarity to audiences helped the processes of characterisation. David Bordwell writes:
The developing textual system of American film from 1909 through the teens thus meshed with a focus on individuated actors. Indeed, from 1911 screen credits became common.
Expressions of character psychology were further enabled by other developments in filmic discourse, most notably the development of closer shots of actors from around 1909. Prior to this, American films maintained what Eileen Bowser has termed "stage distance," whereby the actors were at least twelve feet away from the camera in compositions that showed part of the floor or ground in front of their feet and the top third of the frame above their heads.[35] This began to change around 1909-1910, when the camera was increasingly moved to within nine feet of actors. This contributed to changes in acting style, for as long as the actors remained at stage distance then broad and stylised gestures were needed to make the spectator understand what was going on. The shift towards closer-views, and, slightly later, close-ups (dated by Bowser to around 1912), literally brought audiences into closer contact with actors. Thomas Bedding, editor of The moving picture world, noticed when reviewing a film in 1909 that when the cameraman "puts his camera near the subjects ... you see what is passing in the minds of the actors and actresses."[36] Alongside the shift to closer views, it was strongly argued from 1909 that actors should never acknowledge the presence of the camera so as not to destroy the voyeuristic pleasure of spectators and the belief that they were "inside" the film world, participating in a real event. The intensification of emotional attachments to characters, and to the actions within the film, were the basis for audiences becoming attached to the actors who played those characters. Florence Lawrence, you will recall, had received "fan letters" from as early as December 1908. Other actors such as Florence Turner, Marion Leonard, Mary Pickford, Owen Moore, King Baggot, Francis Bushman and so on became more widely known, principally from 1910 onwards.
The emergence of narrative codes alongside transformations in acting style clearly led to an increased focus on character psychology and a heightening of the processes of audience engagement with characters and thus with actors. The intensification of discourse around film acting from 1907 onwards that deCordova sees as "the incipience of the star system" was thus linked to transformations in industrial structures, textual production, reform contestations and textual practice.[37] At this stage, it's worth briefly pausing around 1910 to consider further the actors who became well known at that time. These actors differed from the theatrical actors who acted in film, such as Bernhardt, because they were mainly known for their work in film and not the theatre. Lawrence, Turner, Leonard, Pickford, Moore, Baggot, Bushman and others became recognisable because of the regularity of their work in film. Furthermore, as deCordova has briefly observed, these actors were almost invariably a great deal younger than stars of the theatre. The cinema was a central part of a new urban leisure world that historians have suggested was increasingly geared to youth and vitality; the conjunction of the promotion of young actors in this context may well merit further research (it is worth noting that Anthony Slide has observed that "during the 'teens years, there were more children visible on our cinema screens than at any other period in film history").[38] Aside from this, the actors who were promoted most intensely in early 1910 were all women and it is not until late 1910 that male actors began to be given equal attention. Why was that? Could this focus on beautiful women actors be related to the emerging voyeuristic and patriarchal tendencies of cinema? Or might it be linked to the commercial strategy to appeal to women spectators who cinema historians are increasingly regarding as central to the industry in that period (and indeed to efforts to gain respectability)? Certainly it is apparent that at a slightly later moment, as Gaylyn Studlar has noted, women's spectatorship "worked primarily to sustain female stars."[39] It is clear more generally that leading actors were frequently cast in the roles of idealized representations of masculinity and femininity, that actors who frequently played villains were not heavily promoted and, further, that the actors promoted were white (there is certainly some cross-over here, for villainy in early cinema is often racially or ethnically inflected). Stardom was, for quite some time, restricted to white people.[40]
Finally here, is it important to ask the questions: can these actors simply be labelled film stars? Does, then, the star begin in 1910? deCordova suggests not, arguing instead that actors such as Lawrence, Turner, Leonard, Moore and so on are better understood as "picture personalities." There is for deCordova a regulation of knowledge specific to the picture personality which distinguishes it from the star. "Although there was an incredible proliferation of discourse about picture personalities during this time," deCordova observes, "all of this discourse fell within a fairly narrow range, repeating certain patterns, exhibiting certain obsessions, and excluding a number of concerns that would later define the "star"."[41] The most important point to be made is that knowledge was restricted to the textuality of the films the actors appeared in, so "The site of interest was to be the personality of the player as it was depicted in film" and "Differences between actor and character were to a large degree disavowed."[42] For deCordova, the picture personality thus differs from the star, who "is characterised by a fairly thoroughgoing articulation of the paradigm professional life/private life" and where "the question of the player's existence outside his/her work in films entered discourse."[43] This is not clearly visible until around 1913/14 and can again be linked to a series of complex and interrelated developments in textuality, industrial practice, and in discursive practices.
(To return to your place in the text, simply click on the endnote number)
[1]Initially published as "Nascita del divisimo. Stars e pubblico del cinema dei primordi", in Gian Piero Brunetta (ed) Storia del Cinema Mondiale, Turin, 2000, pp.339-370.
[2]Terry Ramsaye, A million and one nights, London, 1926, p.524 and p.523.
[3]Ramsaye, A million and one nights; John Drinkwater, The life and adventures of Carl Laemmle, New York, 1931, pp.139-142; Lewis Jacobs, The rise of the American film: a critical history, New York, 1939, pp.86-89; Alexander Walker, Stardom: the Hollywood phenomenon, London, 1970, pp.19-39; Richard Dyer, Stars, London, 1979, pp.9-10; David Cook, A history of narrative film, New York, 1981, p.40.
[4]Moving picture world, March 12 1910, quoted in Jacobs, The rise of the American film op. cit., p.87; Ramsaye, A million and one nights op. cit., p.523.
[5]Drinkwater, The life and adventures of Carl Laemmle op. cit., p.140 and p.141; Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film op. cit., p.87.
[6]Walker, Stardom op. cit, p.37; Dyer, Stars op. cit, p.10.
[7]See, for example, Jacobs, The rise of the American film op. cit., p.87; Walker, Stardom op. cit., p.36.
[8]Benjamin Hampton, A history of the movies, London, 1932, pp.83-100.
[9]Janet Staiger, Seeing Stars in "The Velvet Light Trap", 20 (Summer 1983); Richard deCordova, The Emergence of the Star System in America in "Wide Angle", 6,4 (1985); deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America, Urbana, 1990; Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915., Los Angeles, 1990.
[10]Dyer, Stars op. cit., pp.68-72.
[11]Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, London, 1986, p.ix.
[12]Though see here also Mark Lynn Anderson's book, Twilight of the idols: male film stars, mass culture, and the human sciences in 1920s America, California, where Anderson links discourses about male stars in the 1920s to broader discourses about "deviance" and subjectivity circulating in the human sciences. I read Anderson's important manuscript long after the completion of this essay but we share an interest in thinking about stars and stardom in relation to the broader contexts of discourses on personhood.
[13]Gaylyn Studlar, This mad masquerade: stardom and masculinity in the jazz age, New York, 1996.
[14]A recent issue of Camera obscura engages further with female stardom in early cinema. See in particular Jennifer M. Bean, Technologies of early stardom and the extraordinary body, and Gaylyn Studlar, "Oh, 'Doll Divine': Mary Pickford, masquerade, and the pedophilic gaze", Camera obscura 48, Volume 16, Number 3 (2001).
[15]Henry Jenkins, Textual poachers, New York, 1992, p.23.
[16]Kathryn H. Fuller, At the picture show: small-town audiences and the creation of movie fan culture, Washington, 1996.
[17]Leo Braudy, The frenzy of renown: fame and its history Oxford, 1986.
[18]Richard Sennett, The fall of public man, Cambridge, 1977, p.27.
[19]Charles Ponce de Leon, "The man nobody knows: Charles A. Lindbergh and the culture of celebrity", in Prospects, vol. 21 (1996).
[20]Benjamin McArthur, Actors and American culture, 1880-1920, Philadelphia, 1984.
[21]Henry Jenkins, What made pistachio nuts? early sound comedy and the vaudeville aesthetic, New York, 1992.
[22]deCordova, Picture personalities op. cit., pp.23-46.
[23]Robert C. Allen, Vaudeville and film 1895-1915: a study in media interaction, New York, 1980, p.212.
[24]Charles Musser, "The changing status of the film actor", in Jey Leyda and Charles Musser (eds) Before Hollywood: turn- of-the-century film from American archives, New York, 1987, p.57.
[25]deCordova, Picture personalities op. cit., pp.55-57.
[26]Catherine Kerr, "Incorporating the star: the intersection of business and aesthetic strategies in early American film", in Business history review, vol. 64 (Autumn 1990).
[27]Sumiko Higashi, Cecil B. DeMille and American culture, Los Angeles, 1994, p.22. On reform concerns about cinema in this period see Lee Grieveson, "Why the audience mattered in Chicago in 1907", in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds), American movie audiences: from the turn of the century to the early sound era, London, 1999. On Zukor see Adolph Zukor with Dale Kramer, The public is never wrong, New York, 1953.
[28]William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson, Reframing culture: the case of the Vitagraph quality films, New Jersey, 1993.
[29]Roberta E. Pearson, Eloquent gestures: the transformation of acting style in the Griffith Biographs, Los Angeles, 1992. Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs have recently offered some revisions to Pearson's account in their book Theatre to cinema: stage pictorialism and the early feature film, Oxford, 1997, arguing that the histrionic style was more nuanced than Pearson allows and that it lasted longer in European filmmaking. This may provide one way in which to start thinking about the different acting practices of America and Europe at that time. Nevertheless, Pearson's detailed account of the transformation of acting styles in the context of broader debates about the cultural function of cinema in the U.S. from 1909-1913 is extremely important.
[30]David Belasco, quoted in Tom Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the origins of American narrative film, Urbana, 1991, p.89.
[31]Kristin Thompson, in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The classical Hollywood cinema: film style and mode of production to 1960, London, 1985, p.179.
[32]See Charles Musser, The emergence of cinema: the American screen to 1907, Los Angeles, 1990.
[33]Tom Gunning, quoted in Uricchio and Pearson, Reframing culture op. cit., p.47.
[34]David Bordwell, Narration in the fiction film, Madison, Wisconsin, 1985, p.157.
[35]Bowser, The transformation of cinema op. cit., p.94.
[36]Thomas Bedding, The moving picture world, 3 July 1909, quoted in Bowser, The transformation of cinema op. cit., p.94.
[37]deCordova, Picture personalities op. cit., p.23.
[38]Anthony Slide, Aspects of American film history prior to 1920, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1978, p.16. On the emergence of a heterosocial leisure world geared to the young see, in particular, Paula Fass, The damned and the beautiful: American youth in the 1920s, Oxford, 1977, and Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin' out: New York nightlife and the transformation of American culture, 1890-1930, Chicago, 1981.
[39]Gaylyn Studlar, "'Out-Salomeing Salome': dance, the new woman, and fan magazine orientalism", in Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar (eds), Visions of the East: orientalism in film, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1997, p.113.
[40]On the links between villainy and ethnicity in early film see Daniel Bernardi, "The voice of whiteness: D.W. Griffith's Biograph films" (1908-1913), in Bernardi (ed), The birth of whiteness: race and the emergence of U.S. cinema, New Brunswick, 1996; on the regulation of films of the black sports star Jack Johnson see Lee Grieveson, "Fighting films: race, morality, and the governing of cinema, 1912-1915", in Cinema journal, 38:1, (1998).
[41]deCordova, Picture personalities op. cit., p.73.
[42]deCordova, The emergence of the star system op. cit., p.10; deCordova, Picture personalities op. cit., p.87.
[43]deCordova, The emergence of the star system op. cit., p.11.
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Section two
Celebrity Culture
Fiction, Acting, Reform
The Narrator System, Characterization, and Picture Personalities
The approach to characterization in the narrator-system asserts its hold on story through an expression of psychology, by which I mean the portrayal of interior states, such as memories or strong emotions, which are then seen as motivation for the action of characters.[33]
The classical Hollywood film presents psychologically defined individuals who struggle to solve a clear-cut problem or to attain specific goals. In the course of this struggle, the characters enter into conflict with others or with external circumstances. The story ends with a decisive victory or defeat, a resolution of the problem and a clear achievement or non-achievement of the goals. The principal causal agency is thus the character, a discriminated individual endowed with a consistent batch of evident traits, qualities and behaviours. Although the cinema inherits many conventions of portrayal from theater and literature, the character types of melodrama and popular fiction get fleshed out by the addition of unique motifs, habits, or behavioural tics. In parallel fashion, the star system has as one of its functions the creation of a rough character prototype for each star which is then adjusted to the particular needs of the role. The most "specified" character is usually the protagonist, who becomes the principal causal agent, the target of any narrative restriction, and the chief object of any audience identification.[34]
Section two
Endnotes
