The Death of a Star System

Hollywood has forgotten how to do something it used to do better than anyone else in the world...

For nearly a hundred years, Hollywood had one incredible super power… Superman could fly, Aquaman could breath underwater, Arnold’s Commando never ran out of ammo and Hollywood could make anyone, literally anyone, into a Movie Star simply by deciding to do so.

The lure of this superpower was the reason why generations of young men and women came to Hollywood with, as Brett Michaels sang, their “whole life packed in a suitcase by her feet”… all of them looking to get discovered.

The stories were legendary. You never knew where or when it might happen. Marylin Monroe was discovered while working in a munitions factory. Lana Turner, according to legend, was discovered at a Los Angeles malt shop after skipping out of a high school typing class. It was like the Calilfornia lottery, except you didn’t have to buy a ticket in a seedy convenience store in Montebello.

But being discovered was only the beginning of the process. Once they found you, the process of turning you into a star really began… and it was at this stage that the true nature of Hollywood’s “Superpower” became clear. It happened very much the way Studio Head Woltz, a proto-Harvey Weinstein if there ever was one, described it in THE GODFATHER… “for five years we had her under training, singing lessons, acting lessons, dancing lessons. I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on her. I was gonna make her a big star. …”

The system eventually became so powerful that, according to yet another discovery legend, super agent Mike Ovitz once bet his CAA founding partner Ron Meyer he could turn his personal martial arts coach into a Movie Star… and that’s why, here in 2023, we all know the name Steven Seagal.

But the Hollywood star systen is dead, now. It happened very slowly. It didn’t wink out all at once, like someone throwing a switch. There was no cataclysmic supernova that ended all life on planet Movie Star as we know it. Rather, it happened so gradually that we hardly noticed it was dying at all… until it was gone.

For years I threw around phrases like “there are no movie stars anymore” just like everyobody else. But I never really thought about what that meant until I sat down one night to stream the 2017 remake, sorry the reboot, of FLATLINERS. A movie I had somehow (rolls eyes sarcastically) forgotten to go and see in a theater.

If you haven’t seen it, don’t bother, it’s not very good… just like “updated” versions of WHITE MEN CAN’T JUMP and FATAL ATTRACTION, it is very much the reboot no one on Earth was asking for. But the most striking thing about the reboot, for me, was the cast. There isn’t a genuine Movie Star anywhere in it, not even Elliot Page who was, once upon a time, something very much like a movie star… before he transitioned to Elliot and, like Spinal Tap, made his appeal “more selective.”

Of the remaining cast members, Diego Luna has the best case to make for stardom. Back in the day, they used to say you were a star if “people would show up to watch you read from the phone book.” By that standard, is Diego Luna a “Movie Star”? I think the most charitable answer you can give is “not yet.”

Contrast that with the 1990 original. The actors who played the above-the-title leads, Harvard doctors-in-training who come up with a cockamamie scheme to visit the afterlife and return to tell the tale, is made up of one young movie star after another. Keifer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon and Julia Roberts were already massive movie stars and would be for decades more afterwards. Billy Baldwin was a movie star for half a decade or so post-FLATLINERS. And even Oliver Platt had a long career which featured more than his share of leading man star turns.

That’s five stars in a movie that everyone in the movie business at the time would’ve called “a programmer”… meaning a piece of commercial entertainment designed to make a lot of money, not change the world.

Shall I keep going?

Quick… name the “stars” of the 2011 reboot of THE THING…

I can’t do it… but I can name every star who was in the original, even though it came out 41 years ago… Kurt Russell and Wilford Brimley for sure… but also Keith David, Richard Masur and Donald Moffat who, while they may not have been “Movie Stars”, had long successful Hollywood careers.

You notice something similar with both 1988’s YOUNG GUNS and its 1990 sequel. the original YOUNG GUNS was full of stars, both young and old. Brothers Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez, of course, Keifer Sutherland again, and Lou Diamond Phillips… but also Jack Palance and Terence Stamp, elder statesmen of the Movie Star cadre.

Two years later, when the producers needed to replace the characters who died in the original, something amazing happened. Those two dead “Regulators” were replaced in the sequel by actors who were arguably bigger stars than the ones they replaced, Christian Slater and Alan Ruck. YOUNG GUNS 2 also added Viggo Mortensen and Billy Petersen to an already stellar cast. This despite the fact that Movie Stars used to hate the idea of appearing in any movie with a number in the title, unless they originated the role in the first place.

In the 80’s you could find stars, or at least proto-stars, everywhere you looked. Check out WORKING GIRL, a “stars that shine so bright you can see them from space”, big budget studio romance of the kind Hollywood hasn’t made for decades. The opening credit sequence is a gut punch reminder of time when Hollwyood made movies that made you feel like anything was possible in Amercia.

Even the tiny suporting roles in WORKING GIRL are filled by stars. We all remember Harrison Ford, Sigourney Weaver, and Melanie Griffith, but Alec Baldwin and Joan Cusack are fantastic in supporting roles. And don’t you dare blink or you’ll miss Kevin Spacey and Oliver Platt (again) in tiny roles wherein they make the absolute most of their limited screen time.

You just don’t see that kind of top-to-bottom stardom anymore, and those high-profile reboots of well-regarded movies like FLATLINERS, FATAL ATTRACTION and THE THING are the proof.

“But don’t worry!” Hollywood will say, “we don’t need Movie Stars anymore, we have Intellectual Property now!” And that’s fine as far as it goes, but the IP sword is one that cuts both ways. After all, what makes a piece of IP into something worth turning into a movie? Once upon a time, the answer to that question was “a Movie Star attachment.”

Sylvester Stallone is, perhaps, the greatest example of this phenomenon. Obviously we wouldn’t have FIRST BLOOD without David Morrell’s outstanding 1972 novel, but it was Stallone who turned Rambo into a household name. The number of people who read the novel FIRST BLOOD is absolutely dwarfed by the number of people who have seen a Rambo movie in a theater.

Same goes for ROCKY, an enormous franchise based on nothing but Stallone’s own creativity and his nuclear-powered superstardom. There are six ROCKY MOVIES now as well as a spinoff trilogy, a “Rocky Cinematic Universe” if you will, called CREED. Michael B. Jordan may be as close to a legitimate old school Movie Star as we have now, but the fact remains that there would be no CREED without Sylvester Stallone.

Which brings us to another uncomfortable truth about the death of the Hollywood Star System that no one wants to talk about… it’s been absolutely horrible for the cause of diversity. It is undeniably true that there are a lot of really talented and very popular diverse actors and actresses working in Hollywood today, perhaps more than there ever have been before, and that’s great. But there are very few true “Movie Stars” anymore, of any kind. And certainly there are fewer diverse Movie Stars now than there were in the 80’s, when Hollywood was presumed to be much less Progressive.

For all the #OscarsSoWhite messaging of the last decade, once you get past Dwayne Johnson, Jason Momoa, the aforementioned Michael B. Jordan, and Idris Elba, the list of diverse Movie Stars starts to get very thin, very quickly.

But compare our current predicament to the 80’s and 90’s when Eddie Murphy, Denzel Washington, Will Smith, Danny Glover, Morgan Freeman, Laurence Fishburne, Jamie Foxx, Cuba Gooding Jr., Sam Jackson, Wesley Snipes, Forest Whitaker, Lou Gossett and Carl Weathers (to name just a few) looked triumphantly down at us from movie billboards, magazine covers and theater marquees all over the world. And these men didn’t just star in movies, they shaped the entire culture for the better in all the ways that only Movie Stars can.

If we lose that, we lose a lot more than just a system for making people famous.

Now… since I can already hear the “but what about…” chorus warming up, let me get this out of the way… obviously I’m not saying there are zero movie stars, I’ve mentioned several elsewhere in this essay. What I am saying is that when it comes to creating new movie stars, Hollywood has lost its fastball. This seems obvious to me in an era where a career like Chris Pratt’s, Ryan Reynolds’ or Scarlett Johansson’s feels more like a legitimate miracle than business as usual.

So… how did this happen? There are a lot of reasons, and I could probably write 10,000 words on each of them. Certainly Hollywood’s Leftward lurch has helped push audiences away. Movie Stars used to try and appeal to the broadest segment of the population, but now seem determined to inject themselves into every major political spat, and always on the Left. Michael Jordan’s obeservation that “Republicans buy sneakers too” is a lesson Corporate America in general, and Hollywood specifically, needs to re-learn in a big damned hurry.

But I think the main culprit is the general cheapening of the Hollywood product that has gone hand-in-glove with our headlong rush away from theaters and into streaming. We can play the chicken or the egg game all day and debate whether movies make stars or stars make movies, but for my part I believe that Movie Stardom is a symptom of being a part of something big.

Something special.

That something big and special used to be “The Movies”, one of American Corporate Industry’s grandest and most exciting endeavors. And I believe that becoming a Movie Star was, and is, a function of that powerful reflected glow.

As that glow has faded, so has the era of the Movie Star.

Movies just aren’t as culturally special as they used to be. You can watch almost any new release on your TV now, and you don’t even have to stop surfing social media while you watch it. Movies are just another thing to do, on the same menu as a million other banal options from Twittter, to video games, to regular season baseball games, to Tik Tok videos and streaming re-runs of WKRP IN CINCINATTI. All of it noise, just one big undifferentiated din.

The good news is that Hollywood seems to have realized, at long last, that the streaming model has failed. the major streamers are bleeding subscribers and massive layoffs have followed. The ongoing WGA writers strike will probably be the final nail in the coffin of the stream dream. Streaming isn’t going away, of course, but perhaps we will see a renewed committment to the theatrical model in the years to come as the studios look for new (old?) ways to rescue their bleeding bottom lines.

Because theaters are where Movie Stars have always been made. Not living rooms.

We can only hope that after years spent training audiences to watch movies at home, including during the wholly unecessary COVID lockdowns, it’s not too late to reverse course.