Decline of The Star System
From the 1930s to the 1960s, it was somewhat regular for studios to arrange the contractual exchange of talent (directors, actors) for prestige pictures. Stars would sometimes pursue these swaps themselves. Stars were becoming selective. Although punished and frowned upon by studio heads, several strong-willed stars received studio censure & publicity for refusing certain parts, on the belief that they knew better than the studio heads about the parts that were right for them. In one instance, Jane Greer negotiated her contract out of Howard Hawks' hands over the limp roles he had been foisting on her. Olivia de Havilland and Bette Davis both sued their studios to be free of their gag orders (Davis lost, de Havilland won). After completing The Seven Year Itch, Marilyn Monroe walked out on 20th Century Fox and only returned when they acquiesced to her contract demands. The publicity accompanying these incidents fostered a growing suspicion among actors that a system more like being a free agent would be more personally beneficial to them than the fussy, suffocating star system. The studio-system instrument Photoplay gave way to the scandal-mongering Confidential. In 1959 Shirley MacLaine would sue famed producer Hal Wallis over a contractual dispute. This suit was another nail in the coffin. By the 1960s the days of the star system were numbered.
The conspiratorial aspect of the studio system manipulating images and reality, eventually began to falter as the world and the news media began to accept the dismantling of social boundaries and the manufactured virtue and wholesomeness of stars began to be questioned; taboos began to fall. By the 60s and 70s a new, more natural style of acting ("the Stanislavski Method") had emerged, been mythologized and enshrined; and individuality had been transformed into a treasured personal quality. With competition from TV, and entire studios changing hands, the star system faltered and did not recover. The studio system could no longer resist the changes occurring in entertainment, culture, labor, and news and it was completely gone by 1970.
Read more about this topic: Star System (filmmaking)
Famous quotes containing the words decline of the, decline of, decline, star and/or system:
“My opposition [to interviews] lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“Never tell me that not one star of all
That slip from heaven at night and softly fall
Has been picked up with stones to build a wall.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“When the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions; in which, though the old cities and dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)