Mr. T

In my public relations class this week, we had wrestler/actor Mr.T as a guest speaker. I admit when our professor announced our surprise guest, I was unsure of exactly who Mr. T was. I knew the name and I recognized his signature look from photographs I've seen but why he was famous was very vague to me. It surprised me that a person could just be known, but I could still be so unaware of why or what I knew him for. But, as he talked about his life and how he got to where he is today, I became familiar with his wrestling and acting careers. Surprisingly, I was incredibly touched by him as a person and by what he talked about. When I looked him up online when I got home after class, a lot of the media represent him as a very tough and rough guy. But, in person, he was an incredibly humble and nice person (and also a self-proclaimed "old-fashioned mama's boy"). He is an example of someone who really puts his celebrity to good use by doing a handful of charity work for ill children and the homeless. I was touched by his determination and perseverance to help those that have less than he does. I thought it was notable when he said that he didn't publicly talk about his charity work through tabloids or press releases because he thought that once you did that, it was like you want people to know that you are a good person. For him, he said that it was enough to just do the work and to know that he maybe made someone's day a bit happier. After he spoke, I was left really satisfied and happy that there are stars out there who are completely selfless and who use their celebrity to help others and to make a difference.

A Throwback to the 1970s

It has been two years since I first got into USC's film school and while I've enjoyed the majority of screenings, they all tend to blur into one vague memory of being in Norris, Lucas, and the cinema library. But out of the dozens of screenings I’ve gone to (and other dozens I’ve fallen asleep to), one stands out. In freshman year, Dr. Fox(y) gave his CTCS190 class a rare treat: a screening of Todd Haynes’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. As Dr. Fox explained, the movie is almost impossible to get a hold of (Richard Carpenter sued Haynes for using the band’s copyrighted material without permission and prints stopped being circulated in 1990) and most of the copies that exist are on bootleg VHS. Haynes is known now for his groundbreaking, more off-beat work as the director of Safe, Far From Heaven and I’m Not There but I think this movie is not only his best but one of the more fascinating films I’ve seen.

The film focuses on Karen Carpenter, lead singer of The Carpenters, who has over time become mythologized as a public figure who died from anorexia (she had gained a substantial amount of weight over a short period of time that strained her heart, which was already very weak after years of weight loss and abuse). Made years after Karen Carpenter’s death, the film is a reenactment of the life of one of the most popular singers of all time, one who was perhaps equally known for her personal battles as her singing. Anyway, I decided to google the film to see if I could get it on amazon and lo and behold, it’s on youtube and google video. I’m posting the film because if you haven’t seen it already, I think it’s worth it because it’s a truly unique representation of a star in both her public and private lives and brings up the question of what happens to a star after his/her death: how should they be represented? Should certain lines not be crossed? How does the dynamic between that star and the audience change?

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story

Reading Response #3, Week 7

During the course of this semester we have discussed the many variations of actors/actresses to their roles as cultural icons and the implications of their status in terms of gender and sexuality amongst other social constructions. The insight of Barry King’s article on stardom, “Articulating Stardom”, comes from a change in perspective on stars as a product from within the industry rather than a cultural phenomenon. For this thesis, King sites various attributes of the production process (repetitious takes, editing, casting) that facilitate the growth of Hollywood stardom; the method of filmmaking itself develops stars as an inevitable side effect of mainstream film engineering. The difference, therein, for King is that the creation of the star actor relies upon not as much on the producers of the film but as a reaction of actors to the tenuous nature of their careers.

King, in making a point about the limits of film acting, discusses the lack of continuity and true relation to a character in film, “the actor as character must play to a character he has never seen or act our the aftermath of an affair that has yet to be enacted” (171): with this in mind, assuming you agree, does film acting necessitate a need to hide from the performance on the actor’s behalf? Does it cater to those actors who can not confront the audience and the character? Or, alternately, does it show a sort of sacrifice of artistic integrity for the sake of mass consumption and immortality (which only film delivers)? Can we say that film actors are inherently more likely to be stars because of their desire to promote themselves over a character or message? It is not that I wholly buy into King’s argument that film production robs the actors of “creative intentions” and, thus, limits the caliber of performers willing to take on the roles. However, it does beg the question of why film is the actor’s chosen medium. Rather than assuming that stars are the tools of producers for film marketability, could it be said that film (and tv more recently) as globally accessible mediums have been used as a catalyst for those who are in the business of self-promotion? While I would not go as far to say that this must be the case, I do believe the question complicates the matter even farther than what we have already discussed in terms of the psychological/ideological implications of celebrity. To look at Hollywood stars, it is no secret that they are considered amongst the upper echelons of society. They are not only idolized as glamorous but revered for their success in business (with exorbitantly inflated salaries and ostentatious lifestyles). They represent, very specifically, the economic system and social hierarchy of an individualist capitalist Western culture.

As to the point of those select truly talented actors, King points to the use of Method in terms of its transformational identity of the actor toward that of the character as being the security from which they maintain their art and career. For these actors, film may be an equally desirable medium to stage because of their ability to live with the character beyond the set and nurture it in the repetition of action while relishing the ability to challenge their skill in capturing those out of sync minutiae that compose their character’s psyche. However, even still, it would be only human for them to assuage their egos with the reward of filmic immortality and mass adoration. In each case, whether persona driven or Method driven, the fact of celebrity remains the same. Actors who choose to go into film must be striving for something unique that the medium offers whether it is their primary or subconscious goal, for themselves or their creative work, to achieve some form of stardom. This brings me back to the idea discussed much earlier in the semester, is stardom something that has always been desired by the social nature of humanity but only actualized within the time that such a medium of universal accessibility as film was developed?

Olivia Everett

Core Response #2

I thought that the King article assigned for reading was very revealing about why screen actors tend to do theater in times when they are not in films. I had never thought about why someone like David Hasselhoff would want to appear in The Producers, but I assume it is for the reasons that King explained; the stage gives an actor more control over the performance and allows them to be live and stand or fall on their own merits rather than those of the editors and directors.
I had actually wondered about why many actors who end up starring in plays would choose to do so, especially when the medium of choice for most actors has seemed to be television. I suppose that to keep a production alive does require a different skill set than to make a movie, but to me it would seem that being immortalized in a film would almost do more to cement credibility as an actor than being in a stage production. A flubbed line or misstep on the night a critic is at the theater might very well be cause for a bad review, even if the play goes off extremely well every other night of the week. A film on the other hand gives an actor the chance to try different versions of the same character and to ultimately choose the one that suits the part. A director obviously will have some control over the final content, but a solid performance can be nearly guaranteed on film. It would seem also, that a film would offer an actor the chance to perfect the character in a way that theater never could, in a theater each night the audience is different, but each night the audience expects the same performance so trying on new personas for a character seems impossible.
While I understand the premise of King's article, I tend to be unsure whether he is correct in the assertion that stage is superior to screen for the reasons that he mentions.

Reading Response

In the Glendhill article, the author explains how the popularization of Stainislavski’s Method acting affected the development of the personas of method actors. The first group of successful Method actors, those of the 1950’s, including Marlon Brando, Montcomery Clift, Rod Steiger and Kim Hunter, came to represent the very characters that they performed as. Their personas became ‘based on the unresolved tension between an outer social mask and an inner reality of frustration’ (225). Melodramatic actors begin to internalize and exemplify social and moral issues, as Glendhill describes it, ‘redefining the terms of the social occult’ (226).

Method actors and their related personas still exist. You know, those ‘specially trained’ actors that seem to exist on a higher plane of being still, to this day, seem to represent the same social malaise and psychological malformation. Some actors try to deny that Method acting is dependent on an abusive childhood or whatever, as Daniel Day-Lewis does in the quote from an interview with EW in this blog (I couldn’t find the whole interview). Regardless, its safe to say that Method actors tend to gravitate toward the same dramatic roles, thereby creating a persona based on past performances—emotionally unstable, tragically dichotomous, etc. I can’t help but name Johnny Depp here, whose constant selection (and mastery) of ‘loner’ roles seem to only contribute to his I’m-too-good-for-Hollywood-drama attitude.

Its so ironic, isn’t it, how the Method was developed to teach actors how to act more ‘realistically,’ when, in fact, it is just as artificial as ever? Even if, as Daniel Day-Lewis says, acting doesn’t necessarily come from a hidden part of a damaged psyche, then it is an artifice, one like those carefully constructed personas mastered by the Studios during the Golden Age of American Cinema. My point, then, is that the manufacturing of star personas did not end with the break up of the studio system or the popularization of Method acting. It just morphed into another sort of artifice, one perhaps more ‘hidden’ by so-called realism.

Actors today, like Sean Penn, whose political activism seems to run hand-in-hand with his selection of roles (think: I Am Sam and Before Night Falls), and Russell Crowe, whose various temper-charged characters (in LA Confidential and maybe 3:10 to Yuma or American Gangster) seem to reflect his own problematic violent outbursts (against reporters, mostly), seem to almost replicate the roles that they select. Thus comes the question of the chicken and the egg, did their star personas develop because of the roles they selected, or do the roles they select only reinforce their image?

The personas of modern Method actors, as I am beginning to understand, are of a much more complicated weaving than one might expect. While they aren’t so clearly formulated by studio executives anymore, they are still responsible for maintaining a persona—one that not only keeps them in the public’s eye, but one that makes them easily cast in whatever generic structures they specialize in (like Daniel Day-Lewis and character-driven historical melodramas—yes, I’m bitter about this if you can’t tell).

Week 7 Reading Response - Stars' Acting: On-Screen and Off

This weeks reading definitely helped me to understand the relationship of acting “methods” to the star system and just how important they are to a star’s image/success. In the King reading “Articulating Stardom,” King explains that there are two basic ways an actor will perform: either as a generic type cast or through the means of impersonation. In general, the article argues that actors are selected for specific roles because they “look the part.” For example, Matthew McConehey is most popularly cast as the lead in romantic comedies because he is suave, good looking, and has a great body (which will inevitably result in him taking his shirt off at some point in the film). But, there are exceptions to this common practice of simply looking the part as some actors prefer an impersonation style of acting, a.k.a method acting. This actors, even if seen to fit a certain character-type will always try to break their mold by playing a variety of different characters. To prepare for the role they will study and learn everything about their characters in order to be the character. An examples of great method actors is Robert De Niro who always is interested in trying new roles and transforming his on-screen persona with every film.
Even with these two styles of actors, both are able to achieve star power, but in different manners. The generic type cast’s on screen persona must match his off screen person because this actor is sell the character-type as a product to an audience, so the audience expects the actor act like his on screen character. For instance, I expect Steve Carrell to be hilarious in real life because most of his on screen characters are awkwardly funny, but how can I really know? The method actor achieves stardom not because he is selling a persona, but instead is selling a talent with his ability to morph from film to film. This doesn’t mean that a cast type actor can not become a method actor, it just depends on how the actor leads his or her career. I feel that these stars are the more respected stars out of the two because audiences appreciate a good performance.
Glenhill’s article “Signs of Melodrama” goes further into method acting as seen in the melodrama. The star in the melodrama drives the film forward by morphing from one form to another often in the film. The melodramas of the 1950s challenged the morals of the Victorian era, as the characters broke the proper molds of women and men’s roles in the family. The stars that played these roles really became the personification of the morals, causing the actor to carry these morals of the film with him or her in real life as well (at least in the public’s eyes). I still feel that this is happening today as actors embody the morals of society rather than the government or the church. For example, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have created a new set of morals for the perfect family as they are unmarried but still are able to successfully raise four children together. They also embody a push for world peace as both are active in world politics. The audience sees the morals that Jolie and Pitt embody, and they will inevitably imitate these morals.
I guess I really didn’t realize how much a star’s on-screen character can affect his or her off screen persona, but it is all part of the game that we call Hollywood.

Week 7 Reading Response #1

After reading Dyer's discussion of star performance in Stars, I could not stop thinking about my favorite actors' lives and performances. Sometimes I could not fully separate the two and other times I could not figure out when or if they even were the same person, the actor and the character. The first of these two situations seems more prominent. Dyer did discuss different types of performance and ways in which actors create the characters on screen, as well as the editor and director, but I think that there are so many cases where the persona and the characters played match up.

Then I spent a little more time thinking about it and looking at parts of the reading again, and I have come to the idea that many stars have created a persona around the roles and types of roles they play or they are casted based on their preexisting persona. As Dyer talked about performances of stars like Paul Muni, Bette Davis and Katherine Hepburn as being able to draw on their theater backgrounds to bring performance I could not think of many actors that are known just for their past and how that formed their acting style now. However, there is credit that needs to be given to actors and their ability to create characters on screen that we all want to watch. From the days of the studio system to today, stars are manufactured. One part of the process is by creating a story that people love or love to hate. I don't know if I am alone in my wanting and thinking that my favorite celebrities are some what like some of the characters they have played. Let me know how you feel about that. I want the cast of Friends to all be real life friends and be really funny, some might be and others might not, but I still want the show that I love to be possible in real life. I think that is where the desire lies, in us wanting what we see to be possible in real life. We all want to be bitchy sometimes, but cannot, or achieve great things like save the world, or meet our soul mate through a seemingly misfortune of events and live happily ever after, so we look to film and television to see someone be that way. The business of publicists and agents and managers is based on making a star image and maintaining that image.

The performance piece is part of how we digest the images on the screen. We want the performance to be natural and real. The actors ability to create a character well is how seamless and unnoticed the actor is in the role. With that, the actor is seen in their role more widespread than they are walking on a Friday with their family, as Annie talked about Tom Cruise, so when we see the actor in other places than the characters they play we want a piece of that to be who they really are creating the tabloids paying big money for shots of Britney Spears not being the pop princess she once was or of wholesome female celebrities sunbathing topless. Once the image is broken there is a whole new fascination created by the downfall, but they fall from the image they created on screen and off.