On Mon, Mar 5, 2018 at 1:36 PM, Kevin M. <drunkbastar...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 5, 2018 at 10:00 AM Tom Wolper <twol...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> >> It's no surprise that the ratings were horrible. It's been known that >> people tune in to see which awards a favorite picture wins and the nominees >> were all fairly obscure. I also think the era of the larger-than-life >> Hollywood Star is over. For the most part the recognizable faces belong to >> stars over 50. From what I watched every time they cut from the stage to >> the audience I could not identify the faces of the young stars. >> > > Charles Nelson Reilly was a dinner guest on the series “Dinner For Five” > years ago and his contention was the newer generation of “stars” weren’t as > memorable because so many lacked a theatrical background. I joked in an > earlier thread that Jennifer Lawrence is neither great nor awful but > common. Many of these child actors who become adult actors skip the step > where they stand on a stage and have to act and emote in such a way that a > guy in the back row of a 2,500 seat theater feels it and connects with it. > If the younger generation does live theater, it is as a stepping stone to a > film career or a TV series, justxas so many young comics are only doing > standup to get on a sitcom. > > There are good young actors out there, but they aren’t the... well... > common ones. > Movie stars are part of the motion picture business plan. Around one hundred years ago the marketing people of the new Hollywood studios realized that publicizing the actors will build demand for new pictures. Telling the public that their new movie will be a Chaplin movie worked much better than trying to sell the film based on the title or plot. As the studios got richer they institutionalized the star system. They stuck deals with the new fan magazines like Photoplay, feeding them stories about the stars which may or may not have been true about the actors involved. Stars became larger than life, living carefree and romantic lives with no hint of drugs or arrest records. Radio, newsreels, film shorts, newspapers, and eventually TV all played along and it carried along for decades. Now it has fallen apart. Unlike Reilly, I don't blame the young actors. They might crave fame, but being a star was never in their hands. I don't believe years spent touring in stage companies or even playing Broadway would have made a difference in their stardom. There are no huge stars today because the PR machinery can't build them up to larger than life and movie companies can't use them to build demand for movies. The movies that came out the last few years built as star vehicles have all flopped. Trying to figure out when and why this happened, I have two factors. Media corporations bought the movie studios and they are now one asset in a large corporation and "studio bosses" no longer have the power the old ones did. Franchise movies don't need to have stars to drive demand and that is what sells now. And in the early nineties the power agents started to negotiate huge backend deals for their megastar clients. Tom Cruise and Will Smith were getting tens of millions for a movie and the corporations wanted to put a stop to it. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tvornottv+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
