AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

At a time when the business model of the Hollywood studio seems to be making as many headlines as the movies they distribute, here’s a review of a new book that examines the way it used to be, the Star Machine, by former AFI Trustee Jeanine Basinger

“Movie stardom,” writes Jeanine Basinger very close to the end of “The Star Machine,” a smart, deeply researched but also chatty and fast-flowing history of the phenomenon, “is still — and will always be — half-calculated and half-serendipitous.”

Although Basinger is a longtime professor and the chairwoman of film studies at Wesleyan University, that statement is anything but the usual thesis-maker’s tack. As she states in her introduction, “Movie stars are fascinating, but I didn’t want to write about them. I wanted to write about the system of star making, about ‘the star machine’ that evolved at the end of the silent era and created movie stars in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.” She accomplishes her aim, animating that machine with literally hundreds of anecdotes and pointed observations, but with all due respect, she does write about movie stars, and so engagingly that she might as well skip the apology.

Her insights, to choose one almost randomly, sound like this: “If all the tail-finned design forms of the 1950s were molded into their human essence, the result would be Jane Russell.” In discussing the work of Marlene Dietrich in the courtroom drama “Witness for the Prosecution” opposite Tyrone Power (whose tale is the beating heart of this book) and Charles Laughton, she parenthetically notes, “If ever there was a star that could trump any ace, it was Dietrich.” Such observations are reliably grounded in Basinger’s head-on-a-swivel awareness of exactly what both the film industry and the star-making public were thinking at any given moment.

READ MORE of this LA Times review