The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  Nevertheless, what stars have traded to achieve this status tends to balance the books. In assessing the astronomical salaries top stars make (the big ones are called “the $20-million club”), people forget that today’s actors have to assemble a mini-studio roster of personnel in order to operate. Stars have to pay for agents, business managers, lawyers, assistants, publicists, security staff, script developers, writers, fashion reps—all employees the old system kept under contract and made available to them. Today’s stars also have to sacrifice privacy on a 24/7 basis. The cocoon the studios wrapped around them is gone, and there is no organized protection against the paparazzi’s often cruel intrusion into their lives and no one keeping them from looking foolish. A modern actor who’s an idiot is revealed to be an idiot. Slow down your car on Sunset Boulevard to talk to a hooker and you’ll have to go on Jay Leno’s show to explain your charitable instincts. Dance on a tabletop without wearing a bra, and photos will capture the failed choreography. Marry in haste, and there’ll be no careful spin put on it by a cooperative studio flack bolstered by a staff of obliging fan magazine writers. When Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez conducted their front-page romance in the late 1990s, they became a laughingstock as the press ridiculed them, dubbed them Bennifer, and gleefully reported their aborted wedding plans.* Internet forums like Bizarre Hatred of Random Celebrities hum around the clock. Those who post to these forums know celebrity has a price, and they are more than willing to help the famous pay it. Brad Pitt described it: “Celebrity is bestial. The worst kind of karma because of the huge solitude it brings. You’re like a gazelle straying from the flock, and your path is cut off by lions.”

  There may no longer be a star machine, but there is hype—so much so that the public has become immune to it. Where Cary Grant had five years to get his feet under him and made nearly twenty-five films to learn his craft, modern actors are frequently touted as stars before the public has had a chance to see their work. Early in her career, Julia Ormond was called “the next Audrey Hepburn.” Despite remaking one of Hepburn’s hits (Sabrina) in 1995, Ormond’s career fizzled. She never became a star at all, much less an Audrey Hepburn replacement. Vin Diesel was hailed as “a sensational new star” before his first leading vehicle reached audiences, and Jennifer Garner—a TV star on Alias—was touted as “the new Julia Roberts” before Roberts herself had gotten old. The pressure on such beginners is extreme, and if the film they arrive in doesn’t live up to box office expectations—and their roles are not outstanding—they are dead before they’ve lived.†

  In the 1990s, Vanity Fair magazine dubbed Matthew McConaughey “the new Paul Newman.”‡ He then appeared in a long list of duds: The Newton Boys (1998), EDtv (1999), U-571 (2000), The Wedding Planner (2001), and Sahara (2005). Cursed by the Newman label, even when he had a hit, such as A Time to Kill (1996) or Contact (1997), McConaughey was not taken seriously as real movie star material. Marked out as a wannabe, he nevertheless stuck with it and developed on his own terms, following the advice of his laid-back character from Dazed and Confused (1993): “Just gotta keep livin’.” McConaughey kept livin’, and ended up surviving a thirteen-year career of ups and downs. Now thirty-six, he’s suddenly a bona fide leading man, even unexpectedly turning up as People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” in 2005.* People’s label is proof of male stardom, and it comes with breathless prose worthy of old Hollywood’s flack system. Calling him “a guy with a twinkle in his eye…a one-man endorphin rush,” People coos: “Here’s a Hollywood star who’s happiest grilling steaks outside his Airstream camper with a can of Miller Lite in one hand, dirt beneath his toes, and his girl by his side.” Lest this should make him sound like too much of a lout, the magazine reassures readers that he’s “fluent in Spanish, cites the dictionary as his favorite book (‘I love to look up new words!’) and calls his mom every Sunday.” (Mom herself gave the magazine the definitive quote on why so many females became his fans: “Those girls liked his butt.”) David Poland, editor of the Hollywood Insider Web site, has a different take on the endurance of McConaughey: “The industry always wants more movie stars, so there’s desperation at all times. Plus we’re in a period where there aren’t that many bankable stars. Matthew is a case where he’s proven he’s very good at doing the lanky, goofy, good-looking guy thing.” In other words, McConaughey made a strength out of not being Paul Newman. He hung out an “I’m an ordinary guy with a beer in my hand—and a cute butt” sign and made the grade. McConaughey survived by returning to the old Hollywood standards: Be a Dennis Morgan, let them write junk about you, do what roles you can.† For him it works, but it isn’t progress. McConaughey is a rare survivor of the “too much too soon” modern system of overhype.

  By December 22, 2006, he was still a cover boy, appearing on the front of Entertainment Weekly alongside a headline that asks SEXIEST MAN ALIVE? OR SERIOUS ACTOR?, and reassuring readers that “the star of We Are Marshall wants to be both: ‘I have more to prove than ever before.’” McConaughey’s survival is a testament to a modern star’s allowing himself to be hyped in an old-fashioned way. His flaws are celebrated as assets. The magazine refers to his “Southern-fried charm,” his “old-fashioned masculinity,” and his ability to “bring the party with him wherever he goes.” Cleverly sliding past his problems, the story asks the key question that has been linked to McConaughey’s career from the very beginning: “Can McConaughey transcend his hunk-du-jour status and become the all-purpose dramatic movie star he was predicted to be?” McConaughey has managed to keep himself alive by walking the line between success and failure, and keeping the issue alive as an asset by constantly talking about the problem. “I feel like now I have more to prove than ever before,” he earnestly tells his interviewer. “Working hard. Creating … and having fun. Want another beer?” McConaughey has found himself a persona. He is currently secure in a second-chance (or maybe third-chance) niche in romantic comedies. The movie star game today is not so much about becoming a legend as it is about not having flops, not falling out of favor, not being ridiculed by critics. It’s managing to just keep in the game, to stay at the table. Today, more than ever, you live to be a legend if you can survive.

  Today’s performers compete in a highly competitive arena. Audiences have many entertainment choices: movies, television, sports, music, regional theatre, the Internet, home formats like DVD, laserdiscs, and videotapes. Moviegoers grab up new talents quickly and discard them even faster. (Whereas it may be easier than ever to become a star because of all these choices, it’s probably harder than ever to remain one.) Would-be movie stars also continue to face the same old business factors that lie outside their personal control. For instance, women still have trouble finding roles as they age, and if an “audience tracking system” tells the business that teenaged actors are hot, any actor who’s not a teenager is out of luck. And even if they are teenagers, they face the age-old issues of whether or not the public likes them and their movies. A teenager cast in a stinker like Ashton Kutcher’s My Boss’s Daughter (2003) is going to flop because teenagers won’t go to a bad film just because another teenager is in it. And if you are a hot teen actor, you’ve got only a small window of time in which you can make it happen for yourself. It’s Deanna Durbin all over again!

  It becomes obvious that, although much has changed for the good, actors in movies are still held hostage to the original concept of movie stardom. As Crawford said, “You’ve got to drag your weight at the box office.” If you can’t draw in the paying customers, you’re dead—and today’s business likes to blame the stars because they don’t own them or have to care about them anymore. Modern stars are out front and easy targets. In an effort to avoid taking the rap for failure, they often loudly eschew the very concept of Movie Star, hoping to disassociate themselves from the inevitable moneymaking responsibilities.* They especially try to avoid typecasting. But although they have the opportunities to avoid it, they become caught up in its entanglements anyway. The fact is that audie
nces like their types, and they want movie actors to “mean” something specific on-screen.*

  Audiences have always had basic types they want to see. Once there was Pola Negri, exotic foreign beauty, and then came Garbo, Dietrich, Hedy Lamarr, Sophia Loren, and now Zhang Ziyi and Gong Li. Rudolph Valentino, Latin lover, brought many imitators in his own day, but also gave rise to “foreign” lovers like Charles Boyer, Ricardo Montalban, Fernando Lamas, Rossano Brazzi, Omar Sharif—and Antonio Banderas. The emotional singer who can act—a Barbra Streisand or a Madonna—was born out of Judy Garland. Eastwood came from Henry Fonda and Gary Cooper. Ronald Colman hovers over David Niven and then James Mason and then Peter O’Toole and now Jude Law. The teenagers Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff, the young guys “making their way” (Jake Gyllenhaal, Zach Braff), the action heroes, the sex symbols, the “theatrical” actors—all these were types established when the movies were born. Today’s stars are not really different from those basic models. What’s worse, they have to live up to and compete with them. The originals have not gone away, thanks to easy access to old films on video, DVD, laserdisc, and television.† Both audiences and critics play the game of comparison: new stars to old. (Tom Hanks is “like Jimmy Stewart,” and Susan Sarandon is weighed against Bette Davis.) No actor escapes this historical scrutiny. A case in point is Jeremy Irons in his Oscar-nominated role of Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune (1990). As Bulow, Irons is sly and elegant, projecting a muted ironic humor. He gives an impeccable performance, but some critics said he was doing a Cary Grant. It’s true that over his von Bülow hovers the shade of Grant—but it’s Grant without his good humor, his attractive touch of self-doubt, his loose acrobatic movement. (Irons’s von Bülow is Cary Grant only if Grant had put Katharine Hepburn into a coma when he socked her at the beginning of The Philadelphia Story [1940].) Irons is not Gary Grant—he’s Irons. And yet one scene in Reversal of Fortune shows clearly why the connection is made. Von Bülow shares a meal with a group of loud, hunched-over young law students who are rudely shoveling Chinese food into their gullets. By contrast, von Bülow holds himself aloof and eats in a neat, upper-crust manner, conveying a sense of rigid intolerance of the behavior around him in the most gentlemanly way possible. Irons’s eyes glitter with a well of hidden malice. His von Bülow’s manners are too good to allow his real disgust to show on the surface, but nevertheless it’s clear he more than disapproves. He’s quietly appalled.

  It’s that soupçon of distance—of contained disapproval—that triggers audience movie memories. Suddenly it’s Cary Grant among noisy teenagers, trying to win a potato sack race in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947), it’s Grant critically prowling the wedding-decked halls of the trivial rich in Philadelphia Story, it’s Grant pulling back in sudden understanding of the cruel machinations of the spy system in Notorious (1946). It’s Cary Grant in all his glory, quietly telegraphing the viewer that he stands apart, the stranger at the feast, but the one—the only one—who sees the truth about the situation. Irons is a terrific actor, and he owns Claus von Bülow, but he’s facing the curse of the modern movie actor: comparison with the legendary stars of the past.* The ghost of Cary Grant, of course, is one no movie actor can live with.

  There are former stars whose shadow doesn’t have to become a shroud, such as Tyrone Power. As has been said, Power was an actor with real talent whose stardom (and glamour) prevented him from fulfilling his acting potential. If Tyrone Power came along today, what would be different? At first, it might seem a useless comparison because the business no longer tries to turn beautiful young men who look good in tuxedos into “movie stars.” However, movies still hire beautiful young men, and some of them still become what we call stars, and some do it by wearing tuxedos. In fact, we have five Tyrone Power look-alikes in the movies today: Pierce Brosnan, Brendan Fraser, Colin Farrell, Antonio Banderas, and Johnny Depp. The death of the star machine means that each of these men has the freedom that Power lacked. Are they free from his concerns and disappointments? Pierce Brosnan broke into show business strictly because of his looks. And his looks, like Power’s, are fabulous. Brosnan says he began his career “as a male ingenue opposite Elizabeth Taylor” in 1980’s Agatha Christie adaptation, The Mirror Crack’d. (It was a bit part as her lover in a movie-within-the-movie. In other words, he started out by playing a movie star.) Brosnan then found fame on television as a character called Remington Steele. Steele was a joke—a façade used by a clever female detective who found that no one would hire her because she was a woman. She solved her problem by hiring Steele as her front man. Brosnan’s looks were thus the very point of this role: He could wear clothes well and look suave à la Tyrone Power, but—at least initially—he was only a good-looking clotheshorse, with the female detective providing the brains. Brosnan’s looks were used to make a joke about good-looking guys and their images.

  When Brosnan left television to enter films, he remembered what he had learned from Remington Steele. He didn’t let himself become locked into “pretty boy” roles. He never let his Powerish good looks limit him. He played a Russian villain in Fourth Protocol (1987), a British colonial in an adaptation of a Joyce Cary novel, Mister Johnson (1990), an FBI bomb expert in Live Wire (1992), and the good-looking “schnook” other man à la Ralph Bellamy in Mrs. Doubtfire (1993). Perhaps his most bizarro performance was in the virtual reality film The Lawnmower Man (1992), where he was seen as a scientist conducting experiments in drug therapy and computer instruction. All in all, not a Tyrone Power filmography! Brosnan became a recognized face, but not quite a real star, until he was offered the glamorous lead in the James Bond franchise (and he was forty-two). His first Bond movie, GoldenEye (1995), elevated him to a true international stardom. Brosnan stepped into Bond’s shoes and was instantly at home there, easily displaying both the grace and the glamour required for the role on screen. From 1995 to 2005, he was James Bond: In addition to GoldenEye, he made Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), The World Is Not Enough (1999), and Die Another Day (2002). In 2005, however, he was unceremoniously dumped from the role. What might have been a career-ending disaster for another actor, Brosnan accepted with a shrug. “I thought, F—it!” he said. “I can do anything I want to do now. I’m not beholden to them or anyone. I’m not shackled by some contracted image…I feel this wonderful sense of liberation.” (Tyrone Power would have loved to say these words around 1946.)

  Brosnan’s cavalier attitude was possible because he’d been smart. And the system had allowed it. If he had played nothing but Bond during his decade of success in the role, he might have suddenly found himself out of work at fifty-two. Instead, while he was riding high as the supercool superspy, he had wisely proved himself in other glamorous roles (the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair in 1999), but also as a viable name actor for serious independent movies such as Evelyn (2002). In Evelyn he was an Irish father without an elegant wardrobe or a sassy sex appeal, just an ordinary man trying to unite his family—and he was good. He was confident about letting go of his Tyrone Power–like handsome leading man self: “I created the stereotype,” he said. “I can destroy it. This is my destroying period.” And he wasn’t kidding. One has only to view him in his 2005 “departure” film, The Matador, to realize how far he’s willing to go. “Now that I’m becoming an old lion,” he said, “I can shake the cage a bit and stretch.” “Stretch” barely covers it for Matador. Brosnan had always been willing to let himself be used as an object of humor—from Remington Steele to James Bond, his glamour had always contained an amused tone. In Matador, a hilarious send-up of his own looks and style and Bond persona, he’s a boozy old hit man who’s lost his need to care about much of anything. In the midst of his performance, Brosnan, playing hungover and distracted, walks across a hotel lobby wearing nothing but his underwear and a pair of cowboy boots in a showstopping moment that finally puts to rest any hint of Tyrone Power’s ghost. Brosnan has been able to do what Power longed for: be glamorous in some roles, but a serious actor in others
. His looks have never become his limitation. Still young and handsome, Brosnan has nevertheless appeared on-screen looking old, scruffy, dragged out, and deglamorized—something the studio system would never have allowed with Tyrone Power. (Even when he was being tortured, Power looked well-barbered.) In looks and style, Brosnan is a definite link to the movie stars of the past, but he’d never be thought of as “today’s Tyrone Power.” He’s shown us his Power—but also his Cary Grant, his Errol Flynn, his Sean Connery, his Ralph Bellamy—and he’s working on his Claude Rains.

  Brendan Fraser is a good-looking guy who, if he had come along in 1938, would have been snapped up by 20th Century–Fox as a Tyrone Power clone or perhaps a John Payne type (assuming that Payne himself wasn’t a Power clone). Fraser’s fate would have, in fact, probably been much like that of John Payne. The system would have taken him only at face value, appreciating his looks, his breezy air, and his comfortable sexuality. Without bothering to develop him any further—why would they?—they would have given Fraser a solid “second tier” stardom like that of Payne and Dennis Morgan. Like them, he would have been useful in different genres—musicals, comedies, adventure films, westerns—and his type would have been simply defined as “handsome hunk leading man.” The fact he could have done more would not have interested the system, who didn’t need him to be more.