Stars and studio magic that made them

“MOVIE stardom,” writes Jeanine Basinger very close to the end of “The Star Machine,” a smart, deeply researched but also chatty and fast-flowing history of the phenomenon, “is still -- and will always be -- half-calculated and half-serendipitous.”

Although Basinger is a longtime professor and the chairwoman of film studies at Wesleyan University, that statement is anything but the usual thesis-maker’s tack. As she states in her introduction, “Movie stars are fascinating, but I didn’t want to write about them. I wanted to write about the system of star making, about ‘the star machine’ that evolved at the end of the silent era and created movie stars in the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s.” She accomplishes her aim, animating that machine with literally hundreds of anecdotes and pointed observations, but with all due respect, she does write about movie stars, and so engagingly that she might as well skip the apology.

Her insights, to choose one almost randomly, sound like this: “If all the tail-finned design forms of the 1950s were molded into their human essence, the result would be Jane Russell.” In discussing the work of Marlene Dietrich in the courtroom drama “Witness for the Prosecution” opposite Tyrone Power (whose tale is the beating heart of this book) and Charles Laughton, she parenthetically notes, “If ever there was a star that could trump any ace, it was Dietrich.” Such observations are reliably grounded in Basinger’s head-on-a-swivel awareness of exactly what both the film industry and the star-making public were thinking at any given moment.

Discussing the 1941 Clark Gable-Lana Turner vehicle “Honky Tonk,” she notes, “It’s supposed to be about American frontier empire building, but it’s really only about sex . . . . Turner, holding her own in the frame with The King, is a sight to behold . . . full of virgin expectation and excitement. The next morning, just like Vivien Leigh [in Gone With the Wind], Turner wakes up happy in bed, luxuriating and stretching her arms. But where GWTW made the audience think about what Gable had done for Leigh, ‘Honky Tonk’ made an audience think about what Turner had done for Gable.”

Basinger designed her book in two sections: “The first is an objective story (how the star machine, a concrete business plan, worked on a daily basis), and the second is a subjective one (considerations of the people it turned into stars).” Well, yes -- but the real hinge for casual readers arrives a little after Part 2 starts, when she concludes a section called “Disobedience: Lana Turner and Errol Flynn.” (It doesn’t take a long plane ride to induce one dive into something billed like that, does it?). By the time she closes out Flynn’s history (“Flynn died on October 14, 1959, at the age of fifty. The doctor who examined him said he had the body of a seventy-year-old man.”) we’ve been on a pretty glorious ride -- mostly with the above-named actors and the many costars, directors and moguls who surrounded them.

Greil Marcus titled one of the sections in “Mystery Train,” “Elvis: Presliad.” Basinger’s long chapter “Disillusionment: Tyrone Power” deserves a similar Homeric reference. “Since no one was ever more perfect than Power, the system found a way to neutralize his perfection,” she writes, describing how producers would “actively motivate the audience to ambivalent responses by having him play a character with a hidden subtext, a guy who was up to no good.”

Such a formulation was of course a product of the studio system she so knowledgeably details. Nowadays -- and we wait for her closing chapter for this discussion -- careers are guided by agents, managers, publicists who formerly were all embodied by the studios that typically signed young screen “types” to seven-year deals and set about remaking their charges, often more than once.

Under that system, Power became “the ultimate male sex symbol of his day . . . the epitome of 1930’s glamour for men.” And yet, as largely the creation of 20th Century Fox boss man Darryl F. Zanuck, Power the man and would-be fine actor was victimized by his success: “The machine process glorified and then stunted him. He was shaped easily and efficiently into his type, and fit it so well that he couldn’t become the serious actor he wanted to be.” Thanks to her vivid and sensual descriptions, Basinger’s recounting of Power’s 1947 romance with Turner makes the reader ache for the liaison in a way that replicates an old-school cinema pairing. It seems inevitable but doomed from the start. Their coupling, which now would be the juice of the fictionalizing tabloids, was initially exploited by the pair’s studio flacks but ultimately worried them, especially Turner’s: “The romance had hurt her reputation, not his.” Of course, the sad tale of Turner and the stabbing of lover Johnny Stompanato by her daughter, Cheryl, was soon to come, and is layered into Basinger’s theme.

Oft-told scandals can make the book sound gossipy, but in fact Basinger’s study of the studios’ relentless spin control makes an instructive prism through which to view long skeins of Hollywood film history -- for example, the 77-year show- biz run of the lovingly depicted Loretta Young (who’s a vision of desirability in her introductory photo, one of many well-chosen pictures illustrating the book). If the volume’s latter half, with its second-tier males like Charles Boyer and William Powell, its row of “Oddities and Character Actors” and a consideration of the modern-day heirs of the tradition, inevitably suffers by comparison to the early chapters, it’s not for lack of perspicacity and exemplary storytelling on Basinger’s part. With due credit to Angelina Jolie, in whom Basinger finds “the excitement of a real movie star,” they’re not making them like they used to.

Fred Schruers writes the entertainment blog “The Hollywood Deal” for Portfolio.com