Abstract
When Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America was published over thirty years ago, it was part of a wave of revisionist historiography dedicated to rewriting received wisdom about early and silent cinema. Steeped in extensive archival research that focussed on trade journals, Picture Personalities provided a diachronic taxonomy of the changing status of performers as the film industry matured during the pivotal transitional years of 1907–1920. Sadly, the book’s author, Richard deCordova, died at the age of forty, only six years after the publication of Picture Personalities; still, the influence of his model of the star system’s development persists to this day, and defines the project of and the challenge to Andrew Shail’s The Origins of the Film Star System: Persona, Publicity, and Economics in Early Cinema.
Few would dispute that prevailing academic models deserve (some would say demand) interrogation, and, if warranted, amendment and even dismantling over time. Expanded access to research resources, shifting frames of reference, and the declining intellectual fortunes of once-favoured methodologies all but guarantee that one generation’s revision will ultimately face recasting by the next. Even so, the case of Picture Personalities is a distinct one, with deCordova’s untimely passing rendering any attempt to question his findings a delicate operation. Shail’s approach, while respectful, ultimately means to overturn much of what defined deCordova’s achievement: The Origins of the Film Star System does not constitute an amendment to the assertions of Picture Personalities so much as an all but comprehensive overhaul, questioning the earlier work’s logic of causality, its emphasis on occurrences within the United States, and, ultimately, its fundamental understanding of stardom itself. It is a testament to Shail’s devotion to both the minutiae and the broad sweep of his topic that he manages to achieve much of what he sets out to accomplish, and to supply his reader with an account of how and why the star system emerged that is historiographically sound and conceptually convincing.
One of Shail’s correctives is evident in his book’s subtitle: to counterbalance deCordova’s emphasis on the discourse of acting and stardom, Shail foregrounds the economic forces leading to the star system’s emergence. Citing Foucault and Benveniste, deCordova saw the changes he charted as discursively dictated; Shail is far more willing to see human agency (operating within capitalist frameworks) playing a role in the establishment of stars, insofar as industry leaders chose when to deploy stardom as a promotional tool. Economically motivated choice not only trumps discursive determination in Shail’s account, but he goes to great lengths to prove that the mere existence of a discourse of acting did not provide sufficient conditions for the emergence of a star system, leading him to conclude that key economic variables had to be in place. Here is where enhanced research resources allow Shail to advance his argument on the grounds of superior historiographical method: unlike deCordova, Shail has had access to a broad range of digitized newspapers, and beyond that, sources that extend beyond North America. A deeper pool of resources (including key treasure troves of posters and other forms of publicity) provides Shail the opportunity to demonstrate conclusively how Pathé deployed performer names in its promotional strategies prior to the date deCordova settled on as the start point of IMP’s exploitation of Florence Lawrence.
For Shail, demonstrating that the star system originated in France possesses several key benefits that will extend throughout his book. But at the outset, a central advantage rests in the fact that Pathé functioned differently than its American counterparts. Being vertically integrated, the French company sold directly to its customers and its production methods favoured reliance on a recurring stable of performers. These conditions facilitated a move away from the company brand identification that had defined the preceding years; as long as product distribution favoured interchangeable units of similar entertainment, producers would see little advantage in promoting star identities as a distinct production value (especially when such promotion would inevitably raise the cost of performer salaries). But Pathé recognized that in an increasingly competitive marketplace, an exploitable star could not only function as a unique company asset but also spur moviegoers to buy goods aligned with the star, which would generate revenue that could compensate for any increased salary outlay.
Identifying Pathé as the originator of star-based publicity (via the figure of Max Linder) not only helps Shail argue that economic factors provided the sufficient conditions for stardom, but also allows him to refashion the causality behind the emergence of IMP’s campaign to promote Florence Lawrence by name. Shail tracks IMP founder Carl Laemmle’s travels in Europe to late 1909 (exactly when Pathé’s promotion of Linder was in full swing), allowing Shail to advance the theory that Laemmle was moved to push Lawrence by name once he’d seen a successful version of the strategy in France. The fact that IMP chose to wait many months after securing Lawrence’s services to pursue this approach, and did so only after Laemmle’s return to North America, gives credence to Shail’s claim. Moreover, Shail insists that IMP’s promotion of Lawrence cannot be discerned exclusively through trade press advertising; examining newspapers provides evidence that efforts to publicize her name pre-existed trade-based ads.
Shail could have rested content in proving that France originated the star system with Linder, and that the influence of Pathé’s efforts helped convince Laemmle to launch Lawrence. But the primacy of France in Shail’s account leads him to an even bolder claim, that the selection of Linder and Lawrence as the first stars was not arbitrary, but linked to the fact that each had already gained fame as ‘identifiable transtextual fictional characters’ in recurring series, a filmic phenomenon that has gone undetected as a key contributing factor in the emergence of the star system. In the second part of his book, which Shail labels ‘Another Run at the Story,’ he elaborates on why and how the series and its ‘branding-via-personhood’ (p.253) promoted the star system.
What could have emerged as a difficulty for Shail—that film series were far more prevalent in Europe and the U.K. than in America—proves less problematic once he has established that the star system originated in France. Moreover, it allows him to devise a concept of early stardom that elides the precise progressive stages of deCordova’s taxonomic model, a model that had interposed the picture personality as a successor to theatrical stars on film and a precursor to the movie star. For Shail, the series produces a ‘parallel system of filmic personhood,’ (p. 322) wherein a figure like Linder fashions an ‘extra-filmic self out of the cloth of his fictional characters’. (p. 336) Analyzing the exploitation of series characters such as Lieutenant Daring, Shail finds that the rhetoric of publicity encourages constant slippage between the name of the fictional character and that of the actor playing him (in this case, Percy Moran). This is a variation on the circumstance where an actor becomes tied to a recurring character who shares the actor’s first name, as one finds with Charlie (Chaplin) and Mabel (Normand), to take two famous examples. And in extreme cases, actors could find themselves acquiring their character monikers as part of their actual names, viz. Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle.
The merging of the identities of series characters and stars leads Shail to his penultimate chapter, a consideration of ‘The Ontology of Film Stardom,’ and the ultimate aim of the book, a reconsideration of the nature of the star. Having established a close link between series characters and early stars, Shail posits that the very fictionality of the former aligns with the operations of stardom: ‘film stars’ extra-filmic public personae are both performed and received as overtly fictional’. (p. 349) Another way to understand this assertion is that star personae never really moved too far away from what deCordova deemed the ‘picture personality,’ a version of stardom where the star is the sum total of what is provided to us onscreen. What Shail adds to this formulation is the notion that stars merely add an additional role to their collective filmed repertoire of characters: that of themselves as extra-filmic fictions. This is a bracing set of ideas, and at this juncture Shail broaches the question of how the public understands the offscreen performativity of stardom, adding a dollop of social science research to the mix. But coming as it does a few pages before the conclusion, and at the 360-page mark of a book that weighs in at over 400 with bibliography and index included, the final graphic representation of the research data emerges as not enough of a good thing in a work that has already offered a surfeit of evidence and argumentation.
It bears noting that Picture Personalities was a slim volume whose index ended at page 160. Coincidentally, I reviewed the book as a grad student; summarizing my reservations in the pages of The Velvet Light Trap, I suggested that ‘most of my complaints concerning the book are directly attributable to its brevity and indicate that deCordova’s expert account of the star system would only have increased in impressiveness had its scope been expanded.” (p. 105) Finding myself coming full circle with Shail’s weighty volume, I am inclined to the inverse as a conclusion: there is probably enough material in The Origins of the Film Star System for two books, and its bifurcated structure confesses as much. Readers will be excused if they find themselves caught between wanting less (demonstration through evidence) and desiring more (the conceptualization of stardom). That caveat aside, Shail has provided a fresh account of the emergence of the star system, impressively systematic in its argumentation, that could easily become the new standard for the next thirty years.
