celebrity gossip, academic style

First, full disclosure: I’m writing under the influence of massive amounts of painkillers and steroids — treatment for a sudden and acute case of jaw pain that may or may not be TMJ. TMJ disorder is basically a messed up jaw joint; many are caused by grinding teeth and stress (and certainly no stranger to graduate students in dissertation) but that’s not the case with me. I just apparently have a weak jaw tendon. And while I wait for it to heal (and to stop taking things that make me feel somewhat as if floating) I’ve been tinkering around with a new format/style for the blog. Turns out altering CSS while doped up is not as difficult as one might think. (It also turns out that this is the weekend for blog alteration, as Alissa Perren has done a fantastic revamp, including a set of indepensible links, over at Media Industries)).

You’ll notice that the blog now has a new URL — http://www.annehelenpetersen.com. You’ll want to note this in your blog readers, etc. as the old URL — http://annehelenpetersen.wordpress.com — will remain active for a short period of time only to redirect readers to this site. Also note that I’m still working through some kinks in old posts as a result of the transfer, but hopefully all posts will be back to normal within a few weeks. If you do have any problems/suggestions concerning the redesign, I’d love to hear from you, either via Twitter or email.

The majority of these last few blurry days have been spent with the blog redesign, but I’ve also been subconsciously thinking through the piles and piles of fan magazines I’ve been reading, scanning, and annotating via dusty microfiche in the university library. And while I still do plan to maintain a relative hiatus from the blog, I think that writing my way through some of these initial ideas might prove beneficial (and, just perhaps, interesting to readers other than my mother).

The first chapter of the dissertation will be dealing with a few overarching changes in the way that Hollywood — and stardom within it — operated following World War II. (For those of you familiar with Hollywood history, I’m going to recite some well-rehearsed information concerning the end of Classic Hollywood, and you can skip to the image of Photoplay Magazine). But for those of you perhaps less familiar, it’s important to go through a few overarching changes in Hollywood following World War II.

First, the big studios of Hollywood were at last forced to divest themselves of their theater holdings in what have become known as the “Paramount Decrees” of 1948. This move had been a long time coming — the Department of Justice had been moving since the late ’30s to attempt and break up the monopoly held by the big studios over production, distribution, and exhibition of films. By forcing the Big Five studios to sell of their exhibition holdings (each held vast strings of theaters — think of the old places in your hometowns named ‘The Paramount’ or ‘The Fox’) the government was essentially forcing a massive reorganization of the way that Hollywood could do business. Without as much pure capital coming in from the theaters — and without the ability to block book lesser films with sure-fire hits — the studios couldn’t maintain the massive movie-making machines that had churned out dozens of films a year with amazing efficiency. The bottom line: the studios slowly but surely transformed into smaller entities, much more focused on *financing* films (oftentimes produced by independent producers) than making them on-set themselves, using their own contracted actors, make-up artists, directors, screenwriters, etc. Put differently, MGM, known for the most lavish of musicals and as the home of the biggest, brightest stars, simply couldn’t afford to keep all of its massive staff on retainer. They simply had to get smaller — and the movies, and the way that stars were used, changed as a result.

Now, keep in mind that none of this happened over night — MGM kept many stars on contract through the 1950s, and Hollywood had its very best year in 1946, pulling in enormous grosses from films like The Best Years of Our Lives and Duel in the Sun, both of which were star-driven.

Importantly, though, both of these films were produced by independent producers in agreement with studios. David O. Selznick was the most important and successful of independent producers in Hollywood, putting together massive hits like Gone with the Wind and Rebecca. In fact, he was more like a little mini-studio, signing stars to contracts and then lending them out at his will, as he did with Ingrid Bergman throughout the ’40s. Selznick was behind Duel in the Sun, while Samuel Goldwyn, another powerful independent producer, put The Best Years of Our Lives together with financing and distribution agreements with RKO. This would prove to be the mode of production that would govern Hollywood until the present day: independent producers putting a film together, with a studio functioning as the ‘green-lighter’ — providing financial backing and distribution of the film. I can’t over-emphasize what a sea-change this would be from the old way of doing things — before, the film was conceived of, staffed, made, finished, distributed, and even often times shown in theaters all under the control and oversight of the studio. Everything was done in-house. Now, all labor became freelance, and every picture became a game of puzzle-piecing together talent, financing, stars, distribution, exhibition.

During this same period, the stars were also fighting for power. In 1944, Olivia DeHavilland, acting on advice from MCA agent Lew Wasserman, won her case against Warner Bros., terminating the practice of placing stars on suspension in order to extend their contracts indefinitely. While her courtroom victory did not end the star system – many stars remained contracted to the studios well through the ‘50s – it marked the first in a series of shifts that would transfer power formerly vested in the studios into the hands of the stars and their agents. Stars began to go ‘freelance,’ relying on their powerful agents to leverage power over the weakening studios.

What’s more, social and cultural shifts strongly affected Hollywood: as patrons moved to the suburbs, the traditional urban picture palaces lost large swaths of their potential audience. Growing families, distance from theaters, and alternative leisure – including the rise of television – functioned to discourage what once were weekly and bi-weekly patterns of movie going.

But I want to be clear: Hollywood wasn’t in freefall. Attendance numbers were certainly decreasing, the studios knew something was up, but people were absolutely still going to the movies — and still infatuated and enthralled by stars. But what it meant to be a star — the labor involved in maintaining an image — was absolutely beginning to shift. You can see this shift in the rise of agents and the specific rise of the monster agency MCA, headed by Lew Wasserman. You can see this in the rise of Confidential, which feasted on the transgressions of the stars, no longer under the watchful eyes of studio fixers. (For more on Confidential — which will be featured extensively in this chapter of the dissertation - see my post from last year). You can see it in the change in ideas of what ‘glamour’ meant — instead of opulence, it became a sort of innate quality to be refined, made visible on live television, when a star’s ‘true’ glamour quotient became visible. (The outside reader on my dissertation, Mary Desjardins, is exploring this idea at length in her forthcoming book, Recycled Stars).

But you can also see this in the mainstream fan magazines — and that’s what I’ve been immersed in for the last week. Photoplay was, without a doubt, the biggest and most influential fan magazine of classic Hollywood. Founded in 1911, it grew alongside the industry, featuring beautiful color portraits of the stars and elaborate, melodramatic, often times first-person narratives of life stories. (e.g. “My Childhood,” by Clara Bow, as told to Adela Rogers St. John).

The magazines boasted a full color cover, almost always a portrait (as opposed to an actual photo) until the early ’40s. The inside was black and white, but replete with illustrations, ads for women’s products, as evidenced below, but also advice columns, fashions, film reviews, and tours of stars’ homes, cars, etc — the stars conspicuous consumption, or, in Richard Dyer’s words, the picture of the way that the stars lived. Photoplay performed a serious amount of discursive labor in constructing the stars as simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary — the supposed ‘first person’ narratives allowed stars to seem intimate and confessional, looks into their private lives and pictures of their children made them seem domestic and approachable….at the same time that photos from premieres, and of their luxurious environs, emphasized their otherworldliness.

Dietrich uses Lux soap just like you….only she does it in furs!

As film historians, we like to limit this sort of unabashed star myth-making to Classic Hollywood. The magazines and the studios were in perfect cooperation: Warners would offer a confessional or inside look at Bette Davis’s home; in exchange, Photoplay would get to boast that they had the exclusive look at her home, or the exclusive scoop on her latest divorce. But in order to keep that ‘scoop,’ they had to toe the studio line, basically regurgitating a clean-cut, coherent, immensely likable star image.

With the rise of the scandal mags, Confidential foremost amongst them, the ability to control this image was compromised. This was one of the first discoveries I made when I first started investigating the history of celebrity gossip, but it’s also one of the most obvious — and in some ways facile. Because even though some images were compromised, causing a tremendous amount of anxiety (basically all of Hollywood sued Confidential publisher Robert Harrison in 1958), the mainstream fan magazines continued to churn out the exact sort of rhetoric for most of the 1950s, with very few exceptions. In fact, the ways in which they attempted to passive aggressively deal with the rise of the scandal mags — and scandal in general — without every naming them….and the changing landscape of Hollywood, without ever identifying it — are perhaps even more illuminating of the state of the nation and its attitude towards stars than the scandal rags themselves.

Let me rephrase that a bit. As counter-intuitive as it might seem, what I’m arguing is that the really scandalous — and even bigger selling, sensational publication, e.g. Confidential — may shed light on what hot-button topics were, but it doesn’t really paint a comprehensive picture of how Hollywood and its public were negotiating what a star should be like. Sure, Confidential focused on the subject that undulating beneath all conversations during the 1950s — sex — but dared not speak its name. But the style of Confidential was so over the top and campy — a purposeful strategy, as Harrison well-realized that things that made people laugh couldn’t, at that time, be considered obscene and thus banned from the mail. Point is, I think that these magazines, while hilarious and fascinating and an ostensibly perfect research subject, actually serve as a distraction. If I really want to understand how the concept of stardom expanded and renegotiated its identity during the post-war period, I’ve got to look to the magazine that had been attempting that very negotiation since the inception of the star system, the selfsame publication that reified and supported the status quo, rather than challenging it.

Think of this in the present: if we want to study current celebrity gossip culture, and look at the predominant attitude towards stars, should I look at something like Lainey Gossip? Or should I actually focus on the magazines like People and US Weekly that attract far broader audiences? Which one is more representative of the overarching treatment and value of stars and celebrity today?

Studying Lainey — or even Perez — is much more interesting. Even more interesting than TMZ. But one thing that I’ve discovered over the course of my preliminary research is that the most interesting media artifacts are easy to write about — they’re sexy, there’s some sort of hook to write about, there’s a potential for transgression, they oftentimes embody the spirit and spark that we, as scholars, love to attribute to the best and brightest of media. But they’re not actually want most people are consuming. Thus the most seemingly banal of objects — the Entertainment Tonights and People Magazines, the Photoplays and Good Housekeepings and TV Guides - demand detailed attention…and attention that doesn’t simply dismiss them as banal. They seem so boring and normal as to be unworthy of comment, but they’re actually fortifying the line which the other products push against and transgress.

This is a familiar argument in media studies, especially in film and television — namely, that we should spend less time gasping over The Wire and more time thinking about Everybody Loves Raymond. But I’ve only recently realized that the maxim holds when thinking about magazines and gossip publications: granted, most would dismiss both Photoplay and Confidential as unworthy of study, but I want to push this chapter not only to think through the ways in which Confidential challenged the 1950s status quo, but how Photoplay, Modern Screen, and dozens of other straight-laced, traditional fan publications diligently, steadily, and quietly countered that discourse. How, exactly, did these publications sustain their popularity? What did and didn’t they alter in their design? What were people yearning for — what image of Hollywood — when they continued to read this magazines?

I’ll address those questions in more detail in my next post, so stay tuned….