Page 217 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

STEPHEN HINERMAN

Popular actresses and actors pre-sold pictures to a considerable degree, assuring
built-in audiences and revenues for the film companies and their financial
backers. Furthermore, stars as professional actors were generally depend-
able. They could be counted upon to show up for work, deliver first-rate
performances, and work efficiently within a budget.
The type of star chosen for a particular role also helped to move production
along smoothly. Stars often achieved fame via particular genre roles. Studios
routinely placed stars back into movies of the same genre, thereby enhancing
predictability and audience loyalty (Dyer 1982: 53). Stars also made it possible
for the studios to promote films by developing an entirely new enterprise,
‘publicity’, around the star. Consumers could be enticed back into the theater
because they were interested in the life of the stars outside their character roles.
In fact, the very distinction between the public life of a star and the private life
of the actor developed when stars were first used as the main means of mer-
chandising films by their companies (DeCordova 1991: 26). King elaborates on
the central importance of stardom to film production:

Not only is it possible to point to the fact that the star is central to the
raising of finance, as the least problematic advance guarantee of a cer-
tain level of audience interest. It is also relatively easy to detail the
various ways in which stars stabilize the process of representation itself
by focusing a disparate range of specialisms and narrational inputs
around a relatively fixed nucleus of meaning, which is given in advance
of any specific instance of narration or, for that matter, context of
production. Likewise, the mobilization of publicity and advertising
around the moment of consumption of film itself – not to mention the
consumption of derived commodities such as fan magazines, fashions,
and consumer goods – relies on the star as cybernetic monitor which
returns all efforts to the same apparent core of meaning.
(King 1987: 149)

Stardom is the perfect vehicle for cultural production in a mass-mediated,
modern world. What better lure than consistent, recognizable, attractive,
marketable commodities available for public display that can ensure relative
predictability in a business that is historically unpredictable? Stars deliver
desired production values while they nearly guarantee a profit. Stars function
instantaneously across media technologies and genres to introduce, glamorize,
focus, and stabilize new cultural commodities, as well as media and cultural
production itself. Many definitions of stardom take this anchoring function
into account. For instance, Ellis’s definition of a star as ‘a performer in a particu-
lar medium whose figure enters into subsidiary forms of circulation, and feeds
back into future performances’ reflects this idea (Ellis 1982: 91).
To look solely at the production side of stardom, however, misses a vital
component of popular culture. We know from countless failed examples that it

206