Fame, as we have known it, is over. The Weekend Read examines what we’ll miss about it.
On 28 October, 312, Constantine, inspired by divine vision, triumphed over his rival Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, and became the sole ruler of the Roman Empire. At that point, Rome, which for thousands of years had been a polytheistic entity, left behind its Pagan roots and established itself as a Christian power. The Gods of Olympus — lively, diabolical, fickle, and fascinating— were dead.
On 4 March, 2020, California declared a state of emergency due to the spread of Covid-19, bringing an already battered film and TV industry to a standstill. It’s as good a point as any to mark the end of another kind of religion. For whatever has transpired in the nearly two years since— new protocols, false starts, threatened strikes, virtual premieres, a halting resumption of something like the old way of doing things—there is a prevailing sense that the old gods no longer serve us. Hollywood-branded fame, as the popular religion of a great empire, is in ashes.
Like Rome’s drift into Christianity, this was not an overnight affair. Fissures in the foundations of this fame temple appeared decades ago. Entertainment, as an enterprise, continues because there is a basic human need to be diverted, a yearning that can be sated and monetized in an overabundance of ways. We will always have performers (carbon-based, or artificially generated), and some of them will achieve great renown. But the Church of Stardom, as manufactured and projected around the world by studios and legions of well-compensated image makers, is terminally compromised.
The weakening of that institution began in the last years of the 20th century, and rapidly accelerated in this new one, thanks to technological transformation as enormous as the religious upheavals of the past. The old media pillars that buttressed stardom were corroded from within and without. A democratized celebrity culture killed stardom’s mystique and devoured its most glittering avatars. What lingers are the dying embers of folk belief.
Quite by accident, I began my career in entertainment journalism, which made me an acolyte of a cult in decline. This was obvious, because the celebrities we promoted were aging out and not replaced by new ones who could command the same broad public affection. Because ratings, box office, magazine sales and yes, clicks, were moving in the wrong direction. Because a future in which everybody is famous for 15 minutes is a redlined neighborhood, where celebrity is a junk commodity. Because influence—the coin of the realm in the digital/social age—is weak tea next to the alluring stardom it replaced, which presumed that there was something magical, not algorithmically determined, about the individuals imbued with its qualities. Because too many demographic segments stopped watching the same things. Because immersive media allowed us to become overly familiar with our gods, and familiarity breeds contempt.
Ancient religions are compelling, as anybody who has visited Luxor at dusk can attest. So, let us begin this archeology of stardom by defining terms. Human beings have been fascinated by other human beings from time immemorial, but Hollywood-driven stardom is only about a century old. It rose with the studio system in the 1920s, and flowered during the golden age of the movie business in the interwar period. By the end of World War II, it became a powerful, if homogenized, projection of American values around the world. This new stardom rested on the mythology that an ordinary person could possess something like a divine spark, which upon discovery would lift them above the throng. The cult of stardom was inherently tied up in the American Dream, because above all else it exalted the individual face in the crowd.
With deference paid to Elizabeth Taylor, those faces were seldom defined by idealized beauty. Perfection, after all, is alienating. Hollywood stardom, crystallized at midcentury, was a potent cocktail of ordinary and extraordinary human qualities, which made the possessor, when projected on an enormous screen, relatable to millions. Those stars — among them Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Fred Astaire, Katherine Hepburn, John Wayne, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Sidney Poitier —remain indelible cultural figures for that reason.
As well established, the studio system was smothering, racist, sexist, homophobic and stifling of the gorgeous variety of human difference in ways myriad and insidious. Yet it also protected and nurtured talent. In this, it was aided by the big-spray platforms that transmitted popular culture to the masses. The limited aperture of midcentury entertainment media — a handful of powerful columnists, the trades, a few movie magazines, radio, newsreels —was most congenial to stardom. Yes, there were epic scandals, but these were exaggerated by the fact that unfiltered information about famous people was scarce.
In the 1960s, the studio system collapsed and television had become ubiquitous. But in hindsight, TV was more of an enhancement to traditional stardom than a threat. It brought celebrity into every home, and reinforced certain qualities in American stars — relatability chief among them — that deepened their appeal. By the 1970s, many of the new generation of post-counterculture Hollywood heavy hitters —including Goldie Hawn, Warren Beatty, Jane, Fonda, Al Pacino, Robert Redford, Sally Field, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, and Robert De Niro — were positioned as anti-glamorous, or at least modern in their articulation of glamour. But even if they wore jeans, the old withholding strategy of celebrity promotion still applied. Everyday people knew relatively little about the famous. The pervasive hunger to know more, milked by powerful mass media, heightened the allure of celebrity itself.
That attraction, stoked by People magazine, Entertainment Tonight, Barbara Walters interviews, the global fashion industry, Condé Nast, and E!, among other things, reached its zenith in Hollywood’s corporatized blockbuster years. The stardom of the 1980s and 1990s—of the Brat Pack, Planet Hollywood, AIDS ribbons, and hit NBC sitcoms—fueled massive interest in the red carpet and gossip. Entertainment content became available 24/7, and Americans who had grown up subsumed in popular culture were more knowing and cynical about fame.
The explosion of celebrity weeklies early in the new millennium—the last vigorous expression of print magazine media in the United States—gave voice to that sentiment, as did even harder-edged gossip blogs. Personality-driven coverage, once an embarrassment to more respectable news outlets, became a primary engine and perverter of mainstream journalistic discourse.
This might be called the End of History moment for Hollywood stardom—an apex point when it seemed like there was no cultural force on the planet as ubiquitous and powerful. But it was already collapsing. The Internet 1.0 did not destroy stardom. It was the shift to mobile and the rise of social media platforms that did in the old ways of presenting and protecting stars; the end of passive audience models dealt them a mortal blow. An ever mushrooming array of entertainment options broke the domination of traditional network television and theaters, and audiences splintered into interest cohorts with fewer intersection points. Reality — the last dominant trend in big audience televised entertainment — emphasized common notoriety over singular talent. It was also infinitely cheaper to produce than star projects.
Not every aspect of these trends was negative. The progressive breakdown of the traditional star-making machinery allowed for much more diverse generations of creators to rise. New technologies gave many more people tools to participate in something like an entertainment economy. Liberated from its old network model, television became the most daring and creative storytelling medium. The old metric for measuring success — sheer audience size — began to crumble. Two and a Half Men, for all its millions of viewers, was less important in the cultural conversation than Mad Men, which drew a fraction of those numbers.
To be generous, we might call this the rise of the storytelling or I.P. era in entertainment — when narratives matter more than personalities. With respect to the dazzling array of talent on display in every Marvel movie, it is the franchise itself that is the main audience driver, not individual stars (we’ve already seen the first legal wrangle over that supposition). The same might be said of any number of globally popular story cycles — Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, the DC Universe, and obviously, Star Wars — that are beloved by fandoms. The actors in these projects are memorable, and performance matters. But they are not classic star vehicles.
The entertainment landscape of today — dominated by internationalized tech giants, flooded with content that is consumed on-demand by specific constituencies, with few moments that cross over into something like a cultural main stage—is not kind to stardom. The work honored at the Emmys and the Oscars is better than ever, but it is seen by a diminishing audience. Large segments of the population are indifferent to Hollywood, even hostile to it. A digital ecosystem allows all of us to be bombarded with information about celebrities (often dispersed by celebrities themselves), but it is just as easy to pay no attention at all. The word “star” is attached to virtually anybody with an impressive-seeming number of social media followers, but there’s little expectation that the general public need know who these people are, or that their status conveys any longevity. Like so much else in virtually-driven existence, fame is that much more ephemeral.
All of this has left us at a curious hinge point. The very biggest stars in the world when I began covering entertainment are still those most closely associated with what used to be called A-list status, because they are the last generation to have come of age at a time when the widest popular acclaim was possible. Personalities such as Halle Berry, Will Smith, Jennifer Aniston, Sandra Bullock, Denzel Washington, Reese Witherspoon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Jennifer Lopez, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and Renee Zellweger are all well into radiant midlife. Others have become famous in their wake, but few of these successors can claim anything approaching their 20th century style mega-celebrity, that hold over public imagination that opened movies and spiked Nielsen ratings. Such broadband success is increasingly irrelevant.
A generation ago, people spoke of going to see a new Julia Roberts movie, or a Tom Cruise movie; few today would speak of a Jennifer Lawrence movie, or a Chris Pratt movie. Timothée Chalamet has devoted fans, but he’s not yet a Dean or DiCaprio, and it may be impossible to become one (whether it’s desirable or not is another matter). Zendaya has 112 million Instagram followers, but she will have to create an entirely different career template than Bullock or Meg Ryan. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Hollywood’s most bankable action star, is as close as this era has to an Arnold Schwarzenegger, but Schwarzenegger was famous at a time when fame was more transcendent. Executives continuously try, and fail, to translate the digital metrics of rising personalities into something that looks like the stardom of a bygone era.
This isn’t a commentary on talent—which persists in profusion and can still be leveraged quite lucratively— but on changing habits and distribution platforms. The buzz words of today’s entertainment industry — fandoms, storytelling, content — deemphasize the power of personality. Hollywood, like all American business, has shifted from a centralized, more paternalistic model to one that brutally stresses leanness and hustle. The subtext is that stars are a luxury it cannot afford. (The focus of this column is film and television, but pop music, once a reliable producer of virtuoso performers, has undergone its own splintering.)
Damaging as it was, the old star system did assign power to those lucky enough to attain special status. We are now beginning to see how the new entertainment economy might work against talent. Stars commanded enormous salaries, box office percentages and residuals because they were unique human assets. In this era— metrically driven, Balkanized into fandoms, focused on I.P. and limited episode series—it’s a more tenuous proposition. Nobody should be shocked when the corporations making the bulk of our entertainment content (at great expense) try to revise longstanding economic arrangements with performers based on new realities. The long war between talent and the bank seems to tilt ever more in favor of the spreadsheet brigade.
If there is a silver lining in all of this, it’s that performers who have long said that they want to be known solely for their work may get exactly what they wish for. Stars were public property, because they commanded public curiosity. A world in which all of us are, to a greater or lesser extent, known figures is so clogged with personal disclosure that it hardly seems necessary to pry. The old excesses of the very famous (“When you’re a star …you can do anything,” someone once infamously said) may be curbed. A growing number of our most famous actors have become creative entrepreneurs in ways unimaginable in the studio days, which gives them a new kind of power. The great leveling of the playing field — no real stars, but a cottage industry consisting of hordes of makers—opens the gates to an unprecedented array of talent, no longer forced to play by old rules. When the stage is as broad as humanity itself, theoretically anybody can be a star, and the president of their own entertainment conglomerate, besides. The question is, will there be an audience? Fame, so thinly spread, holds little value.
Show business, as devised in the early 20th century, needed both a rare cohort of stars and massive audiences to sustain itself. The stars held fascination, not because they were exactly like us, but because they were larger-than-life projections of collective values, aspirations and desires. They serviced fantasies, and made millions for a uniquely American industry. They were never the richest among us, but they were the ambassadors of possibility in a ruthless society. If an ordinary person could rise to Olympian heights, becoming America’s Sweetheart or Action Hero, perhaps so could we. Somewhere along the way, we lost our faith. It remains to be seen if Hollywood, as more than a business but the great factory of our dreams, can go on without it.
July 11, 2024
