Why aren't actors like Jon Bernthal, Oscar Isaac and Walton Goggins currently “the biggest movie stars in the world?” someone recently asked on social media, comparing their talent to that of Robert De Niro and his colleagues within the Nineteen Seventies.
Hollywood has weathered changing tides because the dawn of cinema, but it surely's only recently that fame as a pop-cultural force has taken such successful. Still, the query got me pondering. What are we missing out on when actors we admire aren't “the biggest movie stars in the world”? What are the actors themselves missing out on?
Perhaps audiences are craving for a time when the world around us, even ideas of fame, seemed simpler. What is the difference between a famous actor and a movie star anyway? I are inclined to think it has something to do with the aura that forms around an artist after they achieve a certain level of economic and artistic success. It also has something to do with their personality – a charming force of nature – each on screen and of their private lives.
Fame has its benefits. Kevin Bacon recently said Vanity Fair that he appeared disguised as an experiment, experienced the anonymity and was not impressed: “People were kind of pushing past me and not being nice. Nobody said, 'I love you.' I had to wait in line to, I don't know, buy a coffee or whatever. I thought to myself, 'This sucks. I want to be famous again.'” But even Bacon isn’t considered a world movie star.
There is an infinite difference between notoriety and recognition and a star being the only real reason audiences flock to the flicks. If you take a look at Bernthal, Isaac and Goggins, they’ve all been successful within the essential skilled metrics. How far more stardom do you wish from them? They appear to be doing quite well, with no shortage of opportunities, nominations or financial stability. Perhaps it’s healthier for actors as people to not wear the mantle of movie stardom?
Either way, the importance of cinema has declined. Movies don't engage us the way in which they once did. If an actor's fame continues to be measured by ticket sales, it's price interested by which movies was once the highest-grossing. In the '70s, it wasn't just the popcorn movies that made money (although they definitely did that). It was also movies that offered something aside from spectacle. Stories that gave the leading actors room to develop their talent were often among the many top earners: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, A Star Is Born, Kramer vs. Kramer (the latter was the largest box office hit of 1979; try to assume a movie about divorce and single parenting achieving that today).
Hollywood has done its best in recent times to weaken the ability movie stars once had, relying as a substitute on mental property and the franchising of big-name titles. But because it seems, that only goes up to now. Now those self same industry executives are embracing the movie stars that also exist, from Will Smith to Tom Cruise to Denzel Washington, but they continue to be at a loss as to find out how to create a everlasting system for newer, younger actors. Look at how hard Glen Powell's team is trying and… it's proving difficult. If you're wondering why people like Bernthal aren't considered major movie stars today, you furthermore mght should grapple with the incontrovertible fact that non-white actors have been experiencing the identical frustrations for years.
“Maybe this is controversial, but I don’t think we live in a very glamorous era,” says Izzy Custodio in a recent Video for Be Kind Rewind, her YouTube channel about Hollywood history. The lack of Hollywood glamour extends to a subject which will surprise you: the Muppet often called Miss Piggy. But Custodio calls her “the ultimate reflection of Hollywood's ambition, obsession and glamour run rampant.” Some facets of the character are timeless, but it surely was difficult to adapt her to today's era because “a lot of the references that originally made her so popular” — her distinctive movie-star ambitions and airs — “are not really relevant anymore.”
We don't often hear stars speak about how they cope with it psychologically. We all have a public self. But with celebrities, it's exaggerated and intensified – a conscious and calibrated performance in and of itself.
“In many of my films, the clothes made a statement,” she says. , that also appears to be missing in the meanwhile. She also talks about Steve McQueen, who was her co-star in 1968's Thomas Crown Affair. The pair had a “wonderful chemistry,” she says, “because he was an actor, of course, but he was also… He had a personality that perhaps defined him more than this so-called acting.”
Perhaps an actor like Austin Butler comes closest to that in the meanwhile. But what Dunaway is describing is a larger-than-life quality that used to have a literal meaning: Projected onto an enormous screen, movie stars were larger than life. Today, we often see them on our TV screens and iPads, which have shrunk them back to their original size.
In Sunset Boulevard, a Fifties film concerning the vicissitudes of fame, Norma Desmond, a grande dame of silent film who’s past her prime, talks to a screenwriter who doesn't recognize her at first – after which suddenly recognizes her. “You used to be big,” he says. “I am big,” comes the reply. “The pictures have become small.” A great line However, this has been proven false within the second decade of the twenty first century.
When Hollywood is unable to draw recent stars, AI corporations prefer to use this to their advantage by revival old stars – from Judy Garland to James Dean to Burt Reynolds – for the fashionable age. At least their voices. The possibilities are infinite. And scary.
“They took the idols and smashed them,” is one other line from “Sunset Boulevard.”
“And who do we have now? A few nobodies.”
Originally published:
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