Show People

A History of the Film Star

Michael Newton

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781789141566
• eBook ISBN: 9781789141849
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

Show People offers a comprehensive history of the idea of the film star from Mary Pickford to Andy Serkis, traversing more than one hundred years and drawing on examples from America, Britain, Europe, and Asia. Renowned film writer Michael Newton explores our enduring love affair with fame, glamour, and the cinematic image. Newton builds up an expansive picture of movie stardom through explorations of striking and diverse figures such as Ingrid Bergman and John Wayne, Anna Karina and Sidney Poitier, Maggie Cheung, and Raj Kapoor. He celebrates the great performers of the past, and he looks forward to developments in the future, while also illuminating the inner workings of the movie industry and what moves us in a film and in an actor's performance. An encyclopedic, illustrated history of film idols ready for their close-ups, Show People is ultimately a book about cinephilia, the love of cinema, and our complex connection to that celebrated and beleaguered figure, the movie star.

THE SILENT STAR

Mary Pickford before the looking glass, 1920, photographed by Alfred Cheney Johnston.

1

MARY PICKFORD:
THE BIOGRAPH GIRL

Once there were no film stars, there were only people on film. Mary Pickford was one of the very first of the stars, of this new kind of person. For all their resemblance to the theatrical celebrity and the operatic diva, there was something unprecedented and strange about these new arrivals. They were remote and intimate, though rarely seen in person, as much like literary characters as stage stars, rendered glamorous by distance, invited into our lives by their confidential ordinariness.

From the first, the strangeness of how film transforms people disconcerted the viewers of moving pictures. On first watching a film in 1896 the Russian writer Maxim Gorky was perplexed by

the grey silhouettes of the people, as though condemned to eternal silence and cruelly punished by being deprived of all the colors of life. . . Their smiles are lifeless. . . Their laughter is soundless . . . It is terrifying to see, but it is the movement of shadows, only of shadows.¹

Gorky’s vision is an uncanny one, the moving-picture world becoming a kind of Hades as the person on film thins to a spectre.

A slightly later account offers another way of imagining what film does to people, not turning us to ghosts but catching something of a warm, fugitive human essence. In September 1904 Rudyard Kipling published ‘Mrs Bathurst’, a strange elliptical tale of a woman with an indefinable quality, an ineffable but inimitable ‘It’ that marks her out as irreplaceably herself. One of this short story’s narrators goes to watch a moving film at a circus in South Africa, where ‘the pictures were the real thing – alive an’ movin.’ Watching film of London Bridge in the morning, he suddenly glimpses Mrs Bathurst: ‘There was no mistakin’ the walk in a hundred thousand’ and ‘She walked on and on till she melted out of the picture – like – like a shadow jumpin’ over a candle.’ The film transmits the unique ‘blindish look’ she has, preserving in light that something that was hers, while not being her, merely a trace, both a mere picture and a mock-up of the real thing.²

There is some distance between what film theorists have thought that film was doing and what the film-going public believed about their experience. The critics have seen technique or ideology, while audiences have engaged with people. They have glimpsed, as those who adored Mrs Bathurst had glimpsed, something unique in the person on-screen, a quality alluded to there, even as it evades our comprehension.

Mrs Bathurst is not an actor, she’s a passer-by, her trivial moment of being there an accident caught by the camera. As such she is typical of the early presence of persons on-screen. They were puppets, mannequins, and not expected to reveal through their external image a complex inner life. Those early bioscope models were anonymous, subordinate to the piece of film itself; indeed, the earliest films were ‘performed by people who were anything but actors’, sometimes literally just folk picked up in a café.³ Erwin Panofsky remarks that the cast of a prestige 1905 production of Faust are ‘characteristically “unknown”’.⁴

In the USA the film companies that made up The Edison Trust (the Motion Picture Patents Company) were in the business of selling the medium of film itself, and not the actors that appeared on it. Though the facts are disputed, some film historians have suggested that the players’ anonymity was a strategy on the part of the production companies, one designed to reduce the players’ power and influence and so suppress wages (though it seems that in fact only one company, Biograph, actively kept their actors’ names hidden).

In Britain in 1911 one writer suggests that acting in film as a ‘bioscope model’ is a summer employment for unemployed theatrical actors and actresses, including understudies for the more famous, a lucrative sideline for the off-season. The same article suggests that this situation may change as audiences become more interested in those on the screen: ‘Already leading French players pose to the camera in plays more ambitious than the run of animated picture plays of the past, and the probability is that sooner or later personality will count, even in this field of theatrical presentation.’⁵ The use of ‘model’ and ‘pose’ in this article is typical of a cultural moment that saw what was done in film as closer to the static posing of photography than to the engaging representations of the stage.

Yet suddenly in the years between 1907 and 1911, with gathering regularity, there are signs everywhere of a new substantial interest in the life of the individual person on-screen. Personality began to count. The names given to the film process itself reveal much: if the Kinetoscope implied attention merely to what moves, ‘bioscope’ and ‘biograph’ bring the focus to an engagement with life, with the living person in movement to be gazed at, felt with. From 1909 the names of the players began to appear; from around this time the press began to talk of the ‘picture personalities’. By 1914 The Times remarked on the practice of the film companies having exclusive contracts for famous actors, ‘as it is felt that his appearance in a second film, even though the story is totally different, would militate considerably against the success of the first. It is apparently the actor, therefore, more than the story that the picture palace audience goes to see.’⁶ In 1911 the Shakespearean actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree was paid £1,000 to appear in a film version of Henry VIII, the money clearly being doled out to secure the actor’s name and presence in the film.

The advent of the star represented a shift towards a sense that individual performers could sell a film, and that the public would pay to spend time in the company of certain actors. In this way, the first true film star was really Max Linder, the French comic actor and ‘le roi du cinématographe’, a dandiacal rentier with a truly worldwide fame. From 1909 his name was selling his films, a couple of years before Florence Lawrence and Mary Pickford, the two individuals customarily taken to be the first ‘stars’, were established in the public mind.⁷ Crucially, Linder’s fame consisted of the fact that he was seen as being indistinguishable from his screen persona: ‘Max’ was both a recreation of himself and an artful performance. It may not be accidental that stardom should first come to a comic, gifted as such a figure could be with the ability to play versions of the same character again and again in an ongoing series. (In a similar way, in 1914, the film comedian John (Jack) Bunny was reckoned by the Saturday Review to be more famous than any stage or music-hall actor.)⁸ Soon Mary Pickford would reproduce an aspect of this path to notoriety by becoming an icon of herself, someone given to certain kinds of role, most notably her ‘Little Mary’ films for American film-maker D. W. Griffith, although the variation intrinsic in dramatic roles meant that this steadfast adherence to type was always broken up by difference from film to film. (In the early 1910s, however, there were adventure serials that, like the comedy films, featured an ongoing character/actor, such as Pearl White’s The Perils of Pauline films.)

In 1910 Kale and Vitagraph began advertising their actors through lobby cards and posters.⁹ From that year on the stars were promoted using placards and postcards (in imitation of a practice already established in relation to theatre stars), slides of the actors were screened between reels, press interviews began to appear, as did the newly arrived fan magazines. The first such magazines were the Motion Picture Story Magazine, launched in February 1911, and the Moving Picture Weekly, established in January 1913, though periodicals such as Variety and The Billboard had already been covering the film industry since the middle of the previous decade. Motion Picture Story Magazine was at first primarily interested in retelling film stories in prose, and merely took notice of the actors, alongside photographs providing snippets telling us, for example, that Miss Clara Williams, ‘one of the most popular of the picture players’, is ‘an expert horse-woman, and a lover of outdoor life’, or that Miss Alice Jones never acted before her appearance in films, or that Miss Florence E. Turner ‘has won a permanent place in the affections of the picture public’.¹⁰ Such magazines took an interest in the film actors and soon they were firmly enmeshed in the promotion of their personalities to the public, as well as offering readers, on occasion, the possibility to join the ranks of the ‘stars’ through talent competitions and ‘Fame and Fortune’ contests (Clara Bow and Mary Astor found fame in such a way).¹¹

Some critics have badly wanted the emerging desire for the star to originate with the studios and the exhibitors, and not to have come from below, from the audience themselves. Richard deCordova, for instance, has argued that ‘the “picture personality” was the result of a particular production and circulation of knowledge and that studio publicity departments, films and fan magazines produced and promulgated this knowledge’.¹² In this account, the star is really a capitalist dodge. Others have seen the origin of the film star as something determined by the audience’s own yearnings.¹³ Those who see the film star’s emergence as dependent upon institutional practices or marketing techniques may well be right, and there is much evidence on their side. However, they would still leave unanswered the question as to why the idea of the star caught on with those to whom it was marketed. The audience were not suckers; they liked what they liked. Most plausibly, the film star was born from a composite of pressures: from the makers, from the exhibitors, from the magazines, and from the audience themselves.

For it would be hard to determine whether promotion by the film companies of their players stimulated or responded to interest by filmgoers. Either way, certainly the independent producers and the film companies extracted profit from the economic potential of the personality cult. An article in Nickelodeon in February 1910 suggests that the audience demanded ‘a better acquaintance with those they see upon the screen’, while the exhibitors ‘are becoming more and more interested in the personnel of those with whom they have become so familiar in the image’.¹⁴ ‘Personnel’ here is a curious choice of word, clearly touching on ‘personality’, while clinging to a sense of a broader company. Both for the exhibitors and the audience, the key shift appears to have been a growing curiosity, an interest in the actors as persons.

Richard deCordova shows us that there was no interest in acting in the films before 1907, as the emphasis still fell on the technology itself; it was the recording machine itself that was the artist. Then, about 1907, there arose a growing insistence on the work of human beings in the process, whether the director, the cinematographer or the writer. The most obvious trace of the human in the process was that of the people on-screen.¹⁵

At the same moment, around 1907–8, fiction and narrative forms overtook production of documentary forms. The turn towards narrative meant a turn towards acting, and also a turn towards a person understood not only as embodied in an instant, a passing glance like that which falls on Mrs Bathurst, but in the complexity of an unravelling story. As film became ambitious, it depended more on the talents of the players. Companies such as The Edison Company turned to actors from the stock theatre companies, moving away from freelance and occasional models. ‘Personality’ had arrived with the fiction film, with the expansion of the person enabled by narrative.

The narrative film meant more sophisticated acting. The Société Film d’Art, founded in 1908 in Paris, has been seen as the first attempt to make a self-consciously artistic cinema. In the USA their style of acting was touted in the very late 1900s as the mode to follow. Mary Pickford, however, would resist the broad manner of acting imported from the Pathé Company, aiming at something she saw as more natural, more understated. Pickford deemed her own acting style to be a relatively muted one; in contrast to the vogueish French school of ‘pantomime’ on-screen, she decided, as she put it, that ‘I would never overact.’¹⁶ This decision set Pickford somewhat apart. In contrast to later understandings of the difference between theatre and film, in the 1910s there are indications that theatre actors saw film playing as broad acting, as mime and pronounced gesture, and theatre as the place for subtlety and nuance.¹⁷ This may be an instance of theatrical snobbery, however, for early film acting, of which Pickford’s is a strong example, can better be described as both exaggerated and subtle.¹⁸ Acting on film meant making the narrative clear, not bothering with complexity, and drawing upon the necessity to make things understood. While Griffith admired the French, his adoption of close-up also enforced a more naturalistic style of playing; less had to be signalled, as more could just be seen.

The interest in the actor on-screen soon became a fascination with all concerning the real person who was, and was not, shown there. The new notion of the performer depends upon the thought that this person we have seen and suffered or laughed with persists and exists outside the film. Film and its narrative provides evidence of a person elsewhere, in whom one might be interested, whom one might meet. In his short story Kipling’s clubbish men recognize someone they know from life on-screen; around 1912 Mary Pickford was learning to cope with being recognized off it. Suddenly, even in private life, she was identifiably ‘The Biograph Girl’. When this first happened, her instinct was to go to D. W. Griffith and demand a raise.¹⁹

So it was that around 1910 human personality changed. The public was ripe to fall for a star. There was Linder, there was Florence Lawrence, but quickly, more powerfully present than anyone up to this point, there was Mary Pickford. Even if we take on the fact that Pickford was pushed as a star where other actors were not, still a mystery remains about her stardom, about all stardom. Why did fame come to this person and not another? Why, in Cecil B. DeMille’s phrase about her, did Mary Pickford ‘fire the imagination of millions’?²⁰

Mary Pickford, like all the early stars, like all stars ever since, was both the sum of her performances and someone incommensurate, additional, elsewhere.²¹ For the film historian deCordova, the star emerges from the conscious knowledge that there’s a distinction between the public and the private life – the star existing as a sign of that split. Moreover, what makes them mysterious is precisely what is glimpsed on-screen, the fact that the audience may feel that the unseen somehow is seen there.

Young Gladys Smith was a little girl in Toronto with a dead dad, left looking after a younger brother and sister, having been from an early age, in lieu of her grieving mother, the head of the house – indeed, as she once put it herself, ‘the father’. (Her mother shared with young Mary the notion that her dead husband’s features were preserved in her daughter.) Having walked out of the family home nearly three years earlier, her father died in 1898 of a cerebral haemorrhage following a blow to the head. Gladys was five years old; responsibility had come early. Years later her brother Jack told her, while she was in costume as Little Lord Fauntleroy, ‘Mary, you’ve never really lived. And you don’t know how to play.’²² While very young, a lodger staying in the family’s best room introduced her to the possibility of acting on stage. He was a theatrical producer for the Cummings Stock Company of Toronto and he wanted the two Smith girls to play schoolchildren in a production of The Silver King. To win over her hesitant mother, clinging to respectability as she was, the lodger took his landlady backstage to meet the company, convincing her that actors were just ordinary people. The mother was persuaded, Gladys made her debut, and her stage career was launched. Soon she was touring as ‘Baby Gladys’, before stepping, under the aegis of the producer David Belasco, into a Broadway role in The Warrens of Virginia. She was thirteen years old and it was only then that Belasco re-christened young Gladys Smith as ‘Mary Pickford’. She blagged her way into working with the highly successful director D. W. Griffith; on their first encounter, he deemed her too little and too fat; she thought him a tad vulgar. Yet together, while she was still...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• PART ONE: THE SILENT STAR
• PART TWO: THE GOLDEN AGE
• PART THREE: NATIONAL CINEMAS – STARS FOR THE NATION
• PART FOUR: NEW WAVE STARS
• PART FIVE: POSTHUMAN STARS
• Afterword
• References
• Acknowledgements
• Index