Plot
Esther Hoffman, an aspiring female singer/songwriter meets John Norman Howard, a famous, successful and self-destructive male singer/songwriter, whom, after a series of coincidental meetings, she finally start dating. Believing in her talent, John gives her a helping hand and her career begins to eclipse his.
Writer and director Frank Pierson, in his New West magazine article "My Battles With Barbra and Jon" summarized it this way:
"An actress is a little more than a woman, an actor a little less than a man (Oscar Wilde) ... The woman in our story is ambitious to become a star, but it is not necessary: it can make her happier and richer, but she could give it all away and not be a better or worse person. With stardom she is only a little more than a woman. For the man, his career is his defense against a self-destructive part of himself that has led him into outrageous bursts of drunkenness, drugs, love affairs, fights and adventures that have made him a legend. His career is also what gives him his sense of who he is. Without it, he is lost and confused; his demons eat him alive. That's why he is a little less than a man. And it is not that her success galls him, or that she wins over him; the tragedy is that all her love is not enough to keep alive a man who has lost what he measures his manhood with."
And so the conclusion is measured by the theme. He takes his life in the mistaken belief that he will then not drag her down with him.
Read more about this topic: A Star Is Born (1976 Film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)