Paul McDonald. The Star System: Hollywood’s Production of Popular Identities. London: Wallflower, 2000.
Introduction: Looking at the Stars
To speak of stardom in Hollywood as a system is to draw attention to how the American film business has employed regular strategies for exploiting stars performers in the production and consumption of films. Using the word ‘system’ immediately evokes ideas of stardom as involving an organised interrelationship of elements or features. To study the star system is to look for the standard mechanisms used by the film industry to construct and promote the images of leading performers.
However, the star system is not directed towards producing a uniform category of star: the star system deals in individualism. In Hollywood, stars are represented to moviegoers as distinctively different people and stardom requires moviegoers to be able to differentiate one performer from another. The star system therefore developed through the emergence of mechanisms for the production of popular identities.
As the star system has become an established feature of Hollywood, cinema stars have attracted a great deal of commentary from many quarters. In the press, reviewers and critics discuss the role of stars when evaluating new film releases. Magazine articles will profile stars in their on- and off-screen lives, constructing for their readership an idea of the star’s public and private identity. (p.1)
Outside of popular attention to stars, there has developed a whole body of academic work attempting to understand the social and cultural significance of film stardom. This work has combined many perspectives of economics, sociology and psychology (for overviews of this work see Dyer 1998; McDonald 1995 and 1998). During the 1980s and 1990s, the academic field of film studies in Britain and in North America has tended to see stars in the semiotic framework of reading stars as signs or images. This work has developed from Richard dyer’s highly influential book Stars, first published in 1979. Reading stars as images involve close analysis of the signs presented by stars on-screen in their performances but also the other texts that relate to the star through publicity and promotions. It has been the main concern to see how those images can be seen to relate to the social and historical conditions in which they emerge.
At the stars of Dyer’s book, a distinction is made between stars as a ‘phenomenon of production’ (a part of the economic control of the film industry) and as a ‘phenomenon of consumption’ (the meanings represented by stars to audiences). It is a characteristic of the book and of the research it subsequently influence to priories the latter over the former; when looking at film stars, recent academic study has tended to concentrate on the images of stars without thinking of the industry producing those images. The problem with only following this line of study is to lose sight of where stars come from. As a system, Hollywood stardom is the effect of image and industry. (p.2). The star system must be explored as a component of the Hollywood film business. How the industry set conditions for the production and use of star images (this does not mean displacing the dominance of the semiotic by the economic, either option is inevitably reductive).
Chapter One: thinking about the place of stars in the film business as a combination of image, labour and capital. Chapter Two: place of stars in the American theatre and the emergence of the film star. The place of the star in the studio system of the 1930s and 1940s. Chapter Three: The transformation of the star system after the studio era and the place of stars in contemporary Hollywood.
