Emma Stone: Star on the Brink
A few weeks back, David Poland, industry observer and long-time writer/analyst/blogger for Movie City News, tweeted something to the effect that being around Emma Stone is incredibly exciting. Not because she’s gorgeous, because she’s not, not exactly, or even because she’s funny, which she definitely is, but because she has a certain energy around her, eminating from the fact that she is about to become the next big American movie star.
I can’t find the Tweet, but I can rest assure that he posted it, as I immediately had to go to the Google machine to figure out exactly who she was. I mean, I knew the name, I had a vague idea, but she’s by no means household. With the picture, ah yes, I saw - and even more, with the audio, I recognized her immediately. Stone possesses a distinctively husky voice — think ScarJo meets Lauren Bacall — and when you hear it, you remember all the other times….most likely her mini-star turns in Superbad and Zombieland. If you’re a Stone aficionado, or maybe just like crappy movies, you’ve also seen her in The Rocker (poor Rainn Wilson, I really do hope he gets a film career), Ghost of Girlfriends Past, and using her voice alone in the stink-bomb that was Marmaduke. And, ahem, House Bunny? She was also featured on the cover of Vanity Fair’s Young Hollywood issue — and if memory serves, she was the one girl I didn’t immediately recognize. But VF’s issue is equal parts hot-now and hot-future-tense, and they seem to have chosen wisely.
Because what you really need to know is that Poland is right: this girl’s got something. She’s not just beautiful: Jennifer Aniston she is most definitely not. She’s hilarious, but not in the “unruly woman” way that generally excludes many female comedians from mainstream success (whether Rosie O’Donnell, Margaret Cho, Roseanne Barr, even Kathy Griffin). Her body is that of a star; her face is that of a star. And she’s got charisma - loads of it. She’s a flirt in interview, but not in a cloying way. She young, she’s hungry — four movies in the can over the last 18 months, 1 in production, 2 slated - and if Easy A hits, and all signs seem to point to the fact that it will, she’ll be the next big thing.
Here’s the trailer for Easy A — (my favorite line is the very last one)
Most are likening her to Lindsay Lohan, pre-breakdown. Easy A will ”do for her what ‘Mean Girls’ did for Lindsay Lohan,” according to Moviefone, while “the world needs a new ‘Mean Girl’ to shake up the Fall movie season: get ready for Emma Stone.” Moviefone (and others) have also labelled her the new ‘It’ Girl — a banal (if fitting) title that deserves some history.
The very first ‘It’ Girl was Clara Bow, and boy, she was something.
She was a star of silent cinema — along with Joan Crawford, one of stars “made” through a “star search” fan magazine contest in the mid-1920s. She came to Hollywood, slogged through a few pictures, and became a sensation via her role in It (1927). Sounds like a monster movie, but It referred to a undefinable certain something — an ‘It’ quality, according to screenwriter/popular author Elinor Glynn — that separates some girls from the others. Charisma, sure. But what she’s really talking about is sex appeal. (Dorothy Parker famously quipped, concerning Bow, “It? Hell, she had those.). Click here for my absolute favorite scene from It — if you watch to the middle, you’ll see what exuberance and pure joy she takes in being onscreen. I always show It when I teach — in part because Marsha Orgeron has a fantastic essay on the way Bow’s star image embodied the consumer culture of the 1920s — but also because students are always struck by how modern Bow seems. In contrast to, say, Garbo, Bow looks like you could dress her in some contemporary clothes and she’s still be a star today.
Garbo had an ethereal quality, and the only person I can think of with a similar presence onscreen — and dexterity with little more than the face, the eyes, the voice — is Tilda Swinton. And neither Garbo nor Swinton are ‘It’ girls, although they are so much else. But Bow was the beginning of a long lineage of female stars, all of whom have wed charisma, a sense of vivacity, sex appeal, and a certain modernness, as if these girls forecast the future of female stardom and what young starlets will aspire to in years to come. The best examples: Rita Hayworth, Sophia Loren, (maybe Racquel Welch), and, most recently, Julia Roberts. (Lindsay Lohan was there too, but has been put on reserve). They’re not traditionally beautiful, but that’s part of what’s captivating: the representation of something unique, seemingly unmanufactured, the flaw that proves the rest immaculate.
My name is Rita Hayworth: red heads have more fun!
You’ll also note that all of these women — Stone included — were red heads, either for the role that made them famous (for Roberts, see all-important auburn curls of Pretty Woman). Indeed, Bow’s red hair was such a phenomenon that sales of henna skyrocketed.
Redheads are unique; they’re sexy. They’re ugly ducklings as teenagers and blossom into something voluptuous. Their marginalization helps them find humor in the everyday, in being different. They’re feisty, they don’t have a lot of girlfriends, they like to play. Mind you, I’m not saying that red heads really ARE these things — but that’s what red hair, especially dark, auburnish red hair, signifies. (Kathy Griffin’s hair seems to signify something else entirely, as does Lucille Ball’s — something unruly. It’s as if the the slight touch of brunette in the auburn hair makes these charismatic women tread the line between normal and exotic and end up flat-out sensual). You’ll also note that many of these women (post-Bow) were not natural redheads — Hayworth’s studio had her “Latin” hairline electrolysized and her black hair changed to red, while Emma Stone, a natural blonde, admits that she wasn’t getting any work as a blonde…went brunette, had to go red for Superbad, and has been cast as a redhead ever since.
Part of this is a matter of fit - Stone’s dead-pan, husky-voiced persona seems to fit with that of a redhead. It’s also a peg on which the rest of Hayworth, or Stone, or Roberts’ star image can be draped — and something that defined/will define each of them for the duration of their respective careers. When they deviate from red, it’s weird: see Hayworth’s much maligned performance in The Lady Shanghai, in which her chopped blonde hair feels like punishment from her angry then-husband and director of the film, Orson Welles. Or Julia Roberts’ dismal career after she ditched the hair in the mid-’90s — so dismal that when she attempted a comeback with My Best Friend’s Wedding, she declared “my hair is red and curly just the way you guys like it — please come see this movie!”
The way we like our Julia Roberts
These red heads are equal parts girl-and-guys’ girls: girls don’t hate them (see: Megan Fox); they might even like them. (The girl girls hate? The Amanda Bynes and Sarah Jessica Parkers of the world). And bonus: guys DO like them. Julia Roberts may not be a sex symbol now, but she was hot stuff in 1990. Same goes for the rest of the bunch. Which means that while Stone will draw in women — Easy A is tracking extremely well with teenage girls, according to The Wrap, probably in part because of the presence of Gossip Girl fav Penn Badgeley. But it will also draw men, and not just kicking-and-screaming boyfriends. That’s what makes an It Girl: multi-quadrant appeal.
As proof, take a look at the clips below, one from Chelsea Lately, the other from Jimmy Fallon, both filmed in the last week as part of Stone’s promotional tour for Easy A. Note her repartee with Fallon — she’s just one of the guys! She has a filthy mouth/mind, but she’s hot! But also note the way that while she’s clearly cut of the same cloth as Chelsea Handler, she lacks Handler’s willingless to completely desexualize herself through vulgarity. Put somewhat differently: Handler is the foil that emphasizes the fact that Stone is equal parts sex and humor; Handler SAYS sex, while Stone suggests it.
[The bit on the Hot Pockets just KILLS me. I too love Hot Pockets, but no telling.]
Stone is not only red-headed, feisty, charismatic, and genuinely funny, but also has solid industry connections. In an interview with Movie City News (which is pretty hilarious, especially the beginning, when she and Easy A director Will Gluck go back-and-forth), Gluck hints at the fact that Sony “loves her.” Indeed it does: Superbad and Zombieland were both distributed by Sony-owned subsidiaries; both Easy A and the forthcoming Friends with Benefit (featuring a star-studded cast) are from Screen Gems, Sony’s “genre” arm, e.g. the subsidiary that trades on relatively low-budget, clear-cut genre pictures: teen pics, romances, horror flics, thrillers. To give you a better idea: Dear John was a Screen Gems picture; so was Obsessed. Sometimes the formula fails miserably, as in, um, Legion. But when it works, it works incredibly well — Obsessed, Dear John, Resident Evil (and its sequels) have cut significant profit margins. Some of these films work on the basis of high concept or pre-sold idea, but they also require a charismatic, if not altogether traditional star, with appeal to a specific audience: Beyonce, Channing Tatum, Milla Jovovich, and now, Emma Stone. I’m not suggesting that Emma Stone is a contract player for Sony; she is, however, a known commodity, and one that they’ve added value to over the last four years, hoping for this very pay-off: a $20 million projected opening weekend on a film that cost $8 million to make. Just because the star and studio system are things of the past does not mean that the cultivation of stars is purely the provenance of agents and publicists.
The success of Easy A will prove whether or not Stone is ready to move past genre fare. She’s currently filming the film adaptation of the runaway bestseller The Help, which I very randomly happen to be reading. it’s a very Oprah-esque book, however compelling, and it’s produced by Chris Columbus’ company, so my hopes are LOW. But if she can somehow make the banal come to life, the way that, say, Rachel McAdams did in The Notebook, I’ll reconsider. If Easy A if her Mean Girls, or even her Mystic Pizza, then The Help could very well be her Steel Magnolias meets Pretty Woman. She’s hosting SNL in late October, which, to my mind, is always the test of an actor’s true skill and charisma. After the hoopla dies down and Jimmy Fallon stops saying things like “I’m so excited for you, because you’re going to be like the biggest movie star, like, ever…I’ve got my money on you!”, she’ll have a choice: does she become a spunky rom-com star, or do something truly risky, even unruly? She’s all of 21 years old. This girl has something. Call it “It,” call it multi-quadrant draw — but she’s the closest I’ve seen to true movie star material in a long time.
As final proof: Emma Stone, master of The Shake Weight.
How to Make a Valentine's Day Movie in 10 Steps or Less
1.) Say you’re Warner Bros. You’re trying to revamp your New Line ‘brand.’ You witness international success of your Valentine’s Day movie from last year, He’s Just Not That Into You, which grossed $93.9 million domestic and $84 million international. You realize that the film simply involved a vaguely pre-sold premise (a popular advice book) coupled with a large handful of male and female stars, all in supporting roles and thus (relatively) cheap. Also realize that the quasi-British quasi-prequel to He’s Just Not That Into You from Universal, entitled Love Actually, grossed $246 million internationally on a $40 million budget.
2.) Ah! So maybe New Line should have He’s Just Not That Into You and Love Actually mate! Only this time around, let’s ADD EVEN MORE STARS! Like an exponential amount of stars!
3.) How many stars? Would ten be too many? No? Okay, let’s try NINETEEN BIG NAME STARS.
4.) Get the woman who wrote The Prince and Me (and The Prince and Me 2: The Royal Wedding) and many episodes of Lifetime’s Army Wives to write the script, because that is exactly the filmic tradition that this movie should continue. Also get Pretty Woman director Garry Marshall, who, after a string of big flops (Georgia Rule, Raising Helen) is available for cheap. But you can still put “Director of Pretty Woman” next to his name on all of the promotional materials. SCORE.
5.) Make sure that that script involves each and every one of the nineteen stars (plus some otherwise cute little kids or hot also-rans) either falling in love with each other, proposing to one another, or falling in love with themselves for who they are (they might also start “dancing like no one is watching.”) Each plot line should be heteronormative and affirm our generalized understanding of love as the universal language.
6.) Ensure that each of your 19 stars hits a crucial demo. Get the teen audience with Taylor Swift, Taylor Lautner, and Emma Roberts (featured very, very prominently in the preview); get the 20/30 somethings with Jessica Biel, Jessica Alba, Ashton Kutcher, Topher Grace, Anne Hathaway, Jennifer Garner, and Bradley Cooper. Get the amorphous middle-aged set with Julia Roberts and McSteamy AND McDreamy. Make sure you spread your appeal beyond the just-white audience (a point on which He’s Just Not Into You failed) through the inclusion of Jamie Foxx, Hector Elizondo, and Queen Latifah. Oh, and put Shirley MacLaine in there too! You need to make this movie simultaneously seem like a girls-sympathy movie (e.g. the type of movie that girls go see when they’re without a “valentine”) AND a date movie (for teens as much as for married couples). In other words, make sure it’s not too female-centric — or something that a guy would feel embarrassed walking out of.
7.) Create aesthetically pleasing interactive functions on the website that invite you to share your experience with love, as evidenced below. Co-mingle user-generated ‘love’ content with star-generated ‘love’ content, available via each star’s authenticated Twitter account.
(Oh look, mypersonalized make-out spot in Walla Walla! Just enter your zip code!)
Note the incorporation of the film’s stars’ Tweet “concerning love”
8.) Solicit incredible tie-up/product placement/endorsement deals with so many companies so as to thoroughly subsidize our own budget — not to mention ingratiate yourself with fans through association with the likes of “Warriors in Pink,” which manages to promote the film, Ford, the stars involved with the promotion, and, well, breast cancer awareness. (Ads for this are also all over the gossip weeklies).
Also make sure that all endorsement and tie-up deals are with companies that specifically target an audience of white middle-class women ages 20-50.
9.) CROSS-PLUG. Make sure one of your stars just happens to be the hottest universally-palatable music artist of the moment, Taylor Swift. Then make sure she records a song — to do with love — and pre-sell it on iTunes to build hype for the film and soundtrack. Then have that star sing that song on the Grammy’s (two weeks before the film’s release) and celebrate the fact that the single was the fastest-selling female single iTunes history.
10.) And if you haven’t made a perfect Valentine’s Day movie yet, why don’t you NAME YOUR MOVIE VALENTINE’S DAY.
(And you can watch the trailer here).
Now that you, too, can create your own Valentine’s Day Movie, I will addthat as transparent and potentially brilliant as this strategy might seem, it’s certainly been done before, most notably by Universal in the early 1970s with ‘star-fests’ The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, Airport, and Airport 1975, all of which were overflowing with old and new stars. However, those movies required the actors to interact with each other — making it necessary for them to be on set simultaneously. Genre revision and what Charles Ramirez-Berg has termed “the Tarantino effect” have made the splintered galaxy-style narrative format at home in both Love Actually and Valentine’s Day (not to mention Babel and Crash) not just popular, but conventional. And it’s cost effective: each star can come in for two or three days and shoot what will end up to be three or four vignettes for total screen time between 10-15 minutes.
Crucially, star value was under threat during the 1970s, just as it is today. As I’ve argued elsewhere on the blog (and has been reported by several other outlets) the studios are not only tightening their belts in general, but especially in the realm of star salaries, especially following the very public failures of star-studded film from last Spring and Summer. (Duplicity, State of Play, Year One, The Taking of Pelham 123) Even someone like Denzel is taking a pay cut in exchange for points off the film’s net, a common practice that can give a star a huge paycheck….but only if the movie is a hit. Which isn’t to say that stars aren’t still important — obviously, celebrity gossip is as successful as ever, and star faces ensure much larger international grosses — but that the studios have figured out, once again, that they don’t assure a hit movie. So they’re cutting salaries — and arranging things like Valentine’s Day, which uses stars, but only in very small doses.
I’ve been unable to find any budget info on the film (if you have it, let me know) but my guess would be that the top level stars were each paid anywhere from $200,000 - $500,000, and the second tier stars a little less. Remember: 15 minutes of screen time, people. 19 stars x approx. 250,000 = 4.75 million. That’s less than one big star. While it remains to be seen how the film will compete with Nicholas Sparks weepie Dear John (released the week before), my guess is that no matter how fractured or cliched the story, it will succeed. But what’s next year’s Valentine’s Day movie going to do, now that the only good name is taken?
The Golden Globes: Feast During Celebrity Famine
It’s a dry time of year for gossip. There’s no place in North America for stars to frolic in bikinis or minidresses; the more flesh covered, the less interesting the paparazzi photos. Brangelina have been obliging us with several pictures of their brood in NYC, but the kids look like they’re clothed for an apocalyptic blizzard. People‘s biggest news = THE WEDDING OF THE BORINGEST JONAS BROTHER. In a fake castle. In New York. To a non-celebrity. There is absolutely nothing to interest me in that story, save the fact that the bride walked down the aisle to the music from Lady and the Tramp, which is just vomitous.
In other gossip news? Renee Zelwegger GOES ON A WALK. With Bradley Cooper’s parents. Taylor Swift is at home Tweeting about her Christmas Tree, not the fact that she and the other Taylor apparently broke up their non-relationship. And Jude Law and Sienna Miller, now back together for weeks, go on vacation with his kids. They’re so no-longer-scandalous that they don’t even try to hide. All the Oscar movies have been released, even if only in limited run, and the stars are finished with their exhaustive promotional tours. The water is calm, but it’s about to be stirred and shaken by MY MOST FAVORITE NIGHT IN ALL OF TELEVISION. Namely, The Golden Globes.
As as award show, The Golden Globes are superior to The Oscars in every way, and here’s why:
1.) There’s no host.
2.) There are no musical numbers.
3.) Everyone sits at tables, sometimes grouped like BFFs, sometimes awkwardly. (You can decide for yourself which category Scorsese + Spielberg + Coppola would fall into).
4.) It requires television stars to mingle with movie stars. Tiny Fey has to chat with Scarlett Johansson, etc. etc.
5.) The “Miss Golden Globe” introduction is the single most awesomely awkward and lecherous moment in live television.
6.) EVERYONE IS DRUNK AS SKUNKS. This is key. They’re ostensibly served dinner, but no one wants to be caught stuffing lettuce into her mouth on camera, so basically they just drink. And then end up presenting, or accepting awards, or whispering to each other when someone else wins an award, has Brangelina has been particularly wont to do. The awards themselves matter little; as Anne Thompson and Nikki Finke point out, if anything, they provide a red herring for ‘laymen’ who think they’re predictive of Oscar nominees/winners. The “Best Drama” and “Best Musical/Comedy” divide makes it so that they can invite more people and give out more statues, but it also divides the categories and renders them somewhat meaningless. (Which isn’t to say that I don’t like Musicals/Comedies — indeed, I agree with the thought that they’re too often given short shrift at the ‘serious minded’ Oscars, but dividing the categories just renders those awards into consolatory prizes, like the “Best Animated Feature” award at the Oscars, created almost exclusively to honor Pixar movies). The nominations are also somewhat shamelessly influenced by studio wine-and-dining, and unlike the Oscars, they’re not the tabulated desires of those actually working in the field.
BUT THE STARS ARE THERE, AND THEY’RE DRUNK. And oftentimes visibly, purposely so. Which, from a star studies perspective, is fascinating. They stars are ostensibly offering up their ‘authentic’ selves — in an awards ceremony to honor their performative work. We’re to take their actions, emotions, facial expressions, groupings, etc. as indicative of their unmediated selves, when, in reality, this is just as much of a performance of ‘being a star’ as any other highly orchestrated appearance. Unlike The Oscars, however, the pomp and circumstance is mostly removed at the Globes, rendering the ‘ceremony’ more believably ‘natural.’ And the knowledge of the alcohol does it as well. We see the wine, the whiskey, the near-hiccups. If they’re drunk, it’s the real them. Right?
So here’s what you have to look forward to this year:
*First, here’s a link to the full list of nominations, in case you weren’t up at 5 a.m. on the day they were released like “some people.”
*Scorsese’s getting the “Cecil B. DeMille Award,” which means that his old cronies will be there to present it to him, much as they did when he finally won the Oscar for The Departed. Hopefully Coppola will say something like “I wish I still made good movies like you, Marty” or Cameron Diaz will say “Remember that one time when I played a whore in your movie? Write me another role! Now I’m stuck in movies like My Sister’s Keeper, pretending I’m bald!”
Awkward or not awkward?
*Inglourious Basterds is up for Best Picture, which means the Weinsteins will be there. And as Nine continues to bomb, so do their hopes of salvaging their company. By the time of the awards, we’ll probably know if they’re secured financing to back up their failed financing to back up their previous failed financing. AWKWARD.
*Meryl Streep is up against herself in the Best Actress in a Comedy category. If she wins, which she will (for Julia and Julia) I’m sure there will be a brilliant self-deprecating quip, and probably some snide remark about Alec Baldwin and/or Steve Martin.
*When, and if, Carey Mulligan wins for An Education, I hope to god they show her boyfriend (Shia LaBeouf) looking ashamed that he can only act with giant robots.
*Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who you’d never get to see at the Oscars, will be there, nominated for being, along with Zooey Deschanel’s wardrobe, the most redeeming part of (500) Days of Summer. And he’ll be there in some variation of a suit. The picture below will testify as to why this is important.
*The ENTIRE CAST OF MAD MEN. I love it when you get to see who makes the big table who and who doesn’t, and be surprised when they’re not all dressed from the ’60s, especially Joan and Peggy, er, Christina Hendricks and Elizabeth Moss. And maybe Pete will have a gross beard again?
*They probably nominated Julia Roberts (for Duplicity) just so they could get her there, which means….
*…You can play a drinking game where you have to chug everytime they show Julia Roberts presumably making a dirty joke to George Clooney (nominated for Up in the Air) and/or Brad Pitt (there to support Inglourious Basterds) and/or Matt Damon (nominated TWICE — once for The Informant! and once for Invictus). Bonus points if one of the above at some point makes fun of Damon getting a.) fat or b.) doing a South African accent. (They give Matt Damon a bad time! JUST LIKE THEY DO IN Ocean’s 11!)
Oh, we’re such good friends!
*Of course, it’s exactly that Hollywood good-ol’-boys club atmosphere that’s at once so seemingly authentic and incredibly performative. It’s not like this is the award banquet at the company Christmas party — there are cameras at every table, zoomed in, hoping they’ll do something off-the-cuff, guffaw at the wrong moment, sneer when someone gestures to an overpraised actor. But that spontaneity, guffaws and sneers and all, is supremely self-aware. I love to think that it isn’t — that we’re getting the “authentic” Clooney, with his authentic Italian arm candy, not at all acquired to make him seem more lovable, living the sequel to Up in the Air, emotionally redeemed and happy, hanging out with his best pals. .
See, he can hold hands in public now, which means he, like his character in Up in the Air, is obviously past his commitment issues. (Photo via Just Jared)
*Bigelow and Cameron, head-to-head. If you haven’t been following the lead up to awards season, you might not know that James Cameron and Katherine Bigelow, directors of Avatar and The Hurt Locker, respectively, are the favorites for Best Director. AND THEY USED TO BE MARRIED. They’re now cordial — even though Cameron ruined the marriage by, oh, you know, having sex with Linda Hamilton while filming Terminator. I personally am absolutely rooting for Bigelow, and not only because The Hurt Locker is in my top three of the year, but James Cameron’s gorilla-sized ego might eat up everything in sight. Whichever one wins, I can’t wait to see what he/she says to the other, especially on-stage. It’ll be mightily calculated and ridiculously good.
*MAYBE JANE LYNCH WILL WEAR A ZOOT SUIT. One can only dream.
There’s also word that Jennifer Aniston will be presenting, which means there will be lots of speculation over whether or not Angelina Jolie will go to the bathroom when she’s onstage. Drew Barrymore is nominated for Grey Gardens, and she always gets wasted. Quentin Tarantino will probably be sweaty and manic. And, just for my good friend KW, True Blood is hilariously nominated for Best Drama, which means that The Swede himself, Alexander Skaarsgard, will be in attendance.
It’s a star studies feast amidst the celebrity gossip famine of mid-winter. Sunday, January 17th. There are few better ways to start the semester.
Sandra Bullock and Her Female Forever Fans
“I just love that Sandra Bullock.”
“Oh, I know! She’s so natural and perky and down to earth!”
“She was great in that one movie — oh, you know the one I’m talking about, that one with the guy, and they’re from the South, and oh, it’s just adorable. She’s just adorable.”
“Oh I know, I watch that one every year. She’s just great. I just love her.”
This is not an actual transcription of a conversation, but an approximation of one I’ve heard numerous times — at church potlucks, on airplanes, in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. Because WOMEN LOVE SANDRA BULLOCK. More specifically, middle-aged women, many of them members of the ever powerful minivan majority, love Sandra Bullock. They love her for her inoffensive humor; they love her natural, unexotic beauty. They love the fact that she ends up with normal looking, wholly likable white bread men in the movies (Bill Pullman, Harry Connick Jr., Hugh Grant, Benjamin Bratt, Ryan Reynolds) but they most especially love the consistency of her roles.
Normal looking nice guy makes normal looking nice girl happy!
Of course, these women are victims of selective amnesia: Bullock has attempted to complicate her star image with risky roles, including parts in Crash, Murder by Numbers, and the second of the two Capote films, Infamous. (She played the Harper Lee character.) But such roles have done little to alter her overarching image as likable, slightly madcap, and always the recipient of pure and genuine love.
For Bullock is no sex object. She’s a girls’ star — a Julia Roberts, a Meg Ryan. Men do not generally find her attractive, but girls want to be her best friend. The director of The Proposal explained “After I met Sandy for the first time, I remember thinking, This woman has been my friend for 100 years.” She has a beautiful body, skin, and hair, but such attributes are generally revealed through the course of a narrative — she starts out an ugly, somewhat masculine, awkward duckling, only to be transformed through the quiet yet strong love of a good, honest man. Indeed, she is often nearly asexual at the beginning of a film — see her business-minded superboss in The Proposal or her scorned, weepy break-up victim in Hope Floats.
You can tell she loves her career too much by the suit and the unmussed hair.
Bullock’s picture personalities is infused with promises and possibilities: you, too, fair viewer, can be transformed by the power of love. Not all of her films are makeover fantasies — indeed, only Miss Congeniality features an explicit makeover — but the most popular of films repeatedly position a non-glamorous protagonist as a site for transformation, both emotional and physical. Bullock’s presence in the lead encourages identification; she’s an awkward Jennifer Aniston, Julia Roberts with her makeup off and hair flat. She’s the supporting actor/best friend made central, and women love her for it.
Her extra-textual persona supports this image. In Glamour, she is described as follows:
Sandy loves her job but is not defined by it. And she knows how to have a life outside of Hollywood: She splits her time between L.A. and Austin, Texas, where she owns a popular bistro, Bess. She has a barn. She’s done a ton of good work for charities, like giving money to a New Orleans high school impacted by Hurricane Katrina. Hello, she even does her own home renovations, like tearing down walls with her bare hands! (OK, I might be exaggerating a bit.) But if I had to pinpoint what sets her apart, it’d be this: She’s humble. She’s real. It’s easy to lose yourself in this business, but Sandy hasn’t gotten swept up in any of it.
See! She likes people! She’d be friends with you! “She’s humble. She’s real.” She’s not a diva. She probably makes her own food and drives her own car and goes to the grocery store. Or so we are led to believe.
The other day, my friends and I were attempting to make a list of stars that our parents just love: stars who make them feel comfortable. Stars whose movies they’ll rent without any foreknowledge of plot; stars who will entice them to go to the movie theater for one of their 2-4 yearly trips. Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts made the cut. But Sandra Bullock was the most unanimous nominee: there’s something so wholly inoffensive and uniquely attractive about her, something that Julia Roberts has lost and Jennifer Aniston never really had. She makes 50 year-olds go see her fall in love with Ryan Reynolds. Her films make big bucks overseas. Her style and charisma translate. She appears virtually ageless, but not in an envy-inducing manner (Demi More) or as a grotesque (Nicole Kidman, Sharon Stone). She’s not stuck up (Renee Zelwegger/Aniston/Courtney Cox), she’s not intimidating (Jolie), she’s not perfect (Halle Berry) and she’s not too madcap (Roseanne).
Indeed, the only thing potentially controversial about Bullock is her choice of husband: motorcycle producer and heavily-tateooed Jesse James.
Bullock and Her Teddy Bear
Discursively, James has been constructed as the culmination of Bullock’s domestic fairytale. After being chased by many a prince (Tate Donovan, Troy Aikman, Ryan Gosling, Matthew McConaughey, Keanu Reeves) she settled with the least moviestarsish, least expected of the bunch — a man who simply made her happy. (And, coincidentally, recreated a narrative conclusion manifested in her most successful films).
In recent weeks, Bullock has been in the gossip weeklies — not to promote her upcoming The Blind Side or to apologize for the train wreck that was All About Steve, but because of her attempts to adopt James’ daughter from a previous marriage. In US Weekly, the article’s title declares her “Battle for Her Stepdaughter.” Bullock and James are attempting to receive full custody of James five-year-old daughter, whose mother, Janine Lindemulder, is a former drug addict, porn star, and general ne’er-do-well. The article is smattered with pictures of a dressed-down, casual Bullock carrying and holding hands with the young girl. Bullock’s image is placed in sharp contrast with the girl’s porn star birth mother: she is everything this blonde bimbo is not. Bullock is quoted declaring “My greatest joy is…being a good wife, a good stepmom.” She loves this child - and that’s what she’ll fight for. (Again, sounds mysteriously similar to the storyline of one of her films — only The Blind Side involves a black male high school student, not a cherubic blond girl).
Bullock says she doesn’t want to do rom-coms anymore — in fact, with something like The Proposal, she’s attempting to forge a path for the ‘female Judd Apatow film.’ Whether or not this is true is beside the point. For while The Blind Side is certainly not a rom-com, as evidenced by the trailer, it most certainly is a family melodrama. As such, the film caters to virtually the same demographic as the rom-com: females, both single and married, between the ages of 20 and 60. (Did you hear The Fray in the background? Yep, they’re talking to you, Grey’s Anatomy fans. Selfsame demo).
With that said, Bullock does not pull in the lower echelons of that demo. She’s got what I’ve termed her Forever Fans — the 30-60-year-olds who will always see her films, like our mothers — but she has failed to attract a younger demographic. Part of this is merely a matter of age — Sandra Bullock portrays 30-somethings and mothers, not teens and post-grads — but I’d also posit that it has something to do with her star image and its particular resonance. Her particular brand of spunk, quirk, Southernness, and romance seems very 1990s to me. Just as The Blind Side appears to be a remake of every film that’s ever told the story of white people saving black people, so too does Bullock’s star image seem to function as a reactivation and deradicalization of a certain type of female star: she’s Bette Davis without the teeth, Joan Crawford without the snarl. Davis and Crawford often ended their films happily coupled, but just as often they ended them alone — sometimes in tears, but nonetheless triumphant. Bullock’s characters never end unhappy; they rarely weather a storm without a silver lining already firmly in view. Bullock is soft, quick to weep, and quicker to give in, where Davis, Crawford, and even Stanwyk (especially in Stella Dallas) are steely, with a fierceness belied by their porcelain faces. These women were also points of identification, but the women in the theaters at the time were hard-bitten by the times — hungry, over-worked, exhausted, and oftentimes, due to the demands of The Depression and World War II, without even the dream of the help of a man or romance. The endings provided by the ’30s and ’40s melodramas emphasized a female independence that wasn’t simply a madcap act, neutralized by film’s end: it was a way of survival, a way of life.
Joan Crawford might eat Sandra Bullock alive…
Indeed, the ‘softness’ and heteronormatively-coupled endings of Bullock’s films have everything to do with 1990s in general: I could describe most of Julia Roberts’ films using the same language I’ve employed to describe Bullock. These films’ tone and conclusion likewise speaks to what women — and 30-40 year-old women in particular - imagine for themselves: how far they can reach, and what that place, and its potential splendors, might resemble.
Judging from Bullock’s recent films, happiness and fulfillment can come in the shape of a younger man, a retreat from strict professionalism, or venturing out of suburbia to participate in first-hand philanthropy. To me, all of these choices seem to present female self-reliance and independence as a hollow promise; that those women who sacrificed marriage and family for professional development will realize, sooner or later, that they too need a man, a cause, something greater than themselves. We can view this as selfless and a form of sacrifice…or as a troubling message that cultivating oneself, and one’s own desires, will never truly provide fulfillment.
I don’t dislike Sandra Bullock. I like her (early) films. But I do think that those who fail to understand her and her tremendous draw — as most clearly evidenced in Richard Rushfield’s perceptive yet reductive answer to “Why is Sandra Bullock Still a Star?” over at Gawker — they also demonstrate their lack of understanding of a key, if sometimes quiet, demographic. Middle aged women may not ‘open’ a film at number one, but they certainly can keep a film going strong when everyone else is off Megan Fox getting chased by giant robots. Media observers often express surprise when a film like The Proposal goes on to grosses $300 million international (on a budget of $40 million, no less). Those very same observers — oftentimes male — simply forget the tremendous power, however ‘unglamorous’ it may be, of neglected demographics.
This post explicitly concerns Sandra Bullock, but I’m also writing it as hundreds of thousands of girls and women head to the theaters to screen New Moon, which is now headed for a ridiculously huge international opening gross. Industry critics keep patting Summit Entertainment on the back for their luck in optioning the teen text, yet to attribute it to luck is to miss the point: someone at Summit realized that the text wouldn’t just exploit the teen girl demographic, but the adult female one as well. For The Proposal opened big ($33 million), but New Moon will open with $80 million domestic, if not more. Why? Women. Some of them already Forever Fans.
To answer Rushfield’s question, Sandra Bullock is still a star — and will remain a star — so long as her forever fans keep consuming. Her movies cost relatively little to make; even a bomb like All About Steve will not compromise her consistent palatablity. And with small costs and a built-in audience, she’s a much more reliable bet than Angelina Jolie or the over-priced Julia Roberts. The challenge for execs is how to cultivate new stars, equally inoffensive and socio-temporally resonant, to take her place in the years to come. Who will be our Sandra Bullock? Is it Jennifer Aniston? Gennifer Goodwin? Isla Fischer? Kate Hudson? Regardless, it’ll most likely be someone who men disdain, hot cultural critics ignore, and studios relegate to counter-programming.
Sandra Bullock matters, and is still a star, because women and their pocketbooks do, in fact, matter — and no number of billion dollar grossing smashfests will alter that fact.
