celebrity gossip, academic style

1.) What is your name, occupation, website?

Kelli Marshall, Visiting Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies, University of Toledo, http://kellimarshall.net/unmuzzledthoughts

2.) What is your first memory of being drawn to a star or celebrity?

Probably Aileen Quinn in Annie (John Huston, 1982). After watching the film many, many times, I wanted to know the actor’s real name, what color her hair was underneath that wig (if that was even a wig), if it were really her voice singing “Tomorrow,” etc. In fact, I was so enamored by Quinn and the musical that I named my childhood dog Sandy.

3.) Who are your favorite participants, broadly speaking, in the history of stardom, and why?

Gene Kelly. The short answer: he represents a complicated form of heterosexual masculinity that is largely absent in cinema today. The long answer: “Elation, Star Signification, and Singin’ in the Rain; or Why Gene Kelly Gets Me All Hot and Bothered”

6.) You can only date on person in all of celebritude, past and present. Who? Where would you first date be? What would he/she get you for your birthday?

Honestly, I don’t think of celebrities this way. I enjoy analyzing them from afar, watching them onscreen, and reading about them (I’ve devoured loads of star memoirs, for instance). But I’ve little interest in befriending them (or meeting many of them) either in reality or fantasy.

7.) Who do you regard as the lowest depth of celebritude?

Reality TV “stars”

8.) Name a celebrity that is
a.) Overrated: Nicole Kidman
b.) Underrated: Catherine Keener
c.) Appropriately rated: Colin Firth // Denzel Washington

10.) What is the greatest/most bombastic moment of celebrity ever?

I don’t know if it’s the greatest, but it’s certainly memorable: Humphrey Bogart and the panda incident. An inebriated Bogart allegedly shoved a woman because he thought she was going to take a stuffed panda he purchased for his son, Stephen. Time reported: “When Columnist Earl Wilson asked him if he was drunk five years ago after an ultra-shapely young woman accused him of knocking her down at El Morocco (Bogart said that she tried to steal his stuffed panda), he replied, genially: ‘Isn’t everybody drunk at 4 a.m.?’” The case was eventually dismissed.

12.) How do celebrities and stardom relate to your own work/extra-work activites?

Occasionally in Introduction to Film and Cinema History courses, I dedicate a lecture to stardom and the star system, and sometimes my students and I discuss celebrities on Twitter and the like. I’ve also recently written an essay on Humphrey Bogart’s star image in light of Lauren Bacall’s latest autobiography By Myself and Then Some.

13.) Why is celebrity culture — and our attention, analysis, and discussion of it — important?
Because, as I point out in my Gene Kelly post, celebrities function as ideological texts on which viewers project their desires; they reinforce dominate cultural ideas about sex, gender, race, religion, politics, etc.; and they compensate for qualities lacking in our lives and (as Richard Dyer writes) “act out aspects of life that are important to us.” In short, for good or bad, “our” celebrities teach us something about ourselves.