Consider This from NPR - Are We Witnessing The Death Of Movie Stars?

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Bettie Davis, Clark Gable. During Hollywood's Golden Age, which existed roughly from the 1910s and 20's into the early 1960s, these actors weren't just stars... They were in the words of NPR's movie critic Bob Mondello "American royalty".But in an age of Disney and Marvel, the movie star appears to have been eclipsed by the franchises in which they appear.NPR critics Mondello and Aisha Harris breakdown the decline and seemingly disappearance of the classic movie star and what that means for Hollywood.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University is committed to moving the world forward, working to tackle some of society's biggest challenges. Nine campuses, one purpose. Creating tomorrow, today. More at iu.edu. He's looking at you, kid. You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow. Hey, Stella! Bogie, Bacall, Brando, you know movie stars when you hear them.

The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. I'm also just a girl standing in front front of a boy, asking him to love her. King Kong ain't got shit on me! Pitt, Julia, Denzel, and with others, it's an image. Marilyn Monroe standing over a subway grate, the breeze billowing her white dress. Oh, do you feel the breeze from the subway? Isn't it delicious? A young Tom Cruise, in brief, sliding across the living room floor to the sounds of Bob Seger.

Just take those old records off the shelf. I said, listen to me. Or Audrey Hepburn, stepping outside of a taxi in black satin and tortoise shell shades. I mean, when I think about movie stars, I think about someone who feels larger than life. There's usually some sort of mystique or mystery, I think, to a movie star. NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour host Aisha, has been thinking a lot about movie stars lately, and she's a little worried about their cultural health today. Consider this.

Since the golden age of Hollywood, movies have been defined by their stars. And in turn, they've defined our times. But is that changing? From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow. It's Friday, July 7th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR.

Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Betty Davis, Clark Gable. During Hollywood's golden age, which existed roughly from the 1910s and 20s into the early 60s, these actors weren't just stars. Americans didn't have royalty, so these folks were our royalty. That's NPR's film critic Bob Mondello. He says long before the advent of franchises and intellectual property, major studios like MGM, Paramount, and Warner Brothers depended on stars to sell their movies to hungry audiences.

Stars weren't just born, they were made. MGM used to brag that they had more stars than there are in heaven. They created those stars. They were actors, workaday actors, who came to Hollywood, and they were groomed in a variety of ways. Their hair color was changed, their names were changed. They did as much as they could to make someone glamorous. With the help of fan magazines and powerful gossip columnists with studio connections, they would cultivate their images and give them personalities. And those personalities stuck with

them from picture to picture. You went to a Cary Grant picture because he was making a certain kind of movie. He was playing a certain kind of character. Sorry, the name's Adam Canfield. Adam Canfield? Mm-hmm. Wonderful. Don't you realize you've had three names in the past two days? I don't even know who I'm talking to anymore. Well, man's the same, even if the name isn't. Those personalities burrowed into the minds of audiences,

whose principal form of entertainment was going to the movies. At the height of cinema's popularity, more than 80 million Americans went to the movies. At the height of cinema's popularity, more than 80 million Americans went to the theater more than once a week as these studios cranked out movie after movie. Well, it was a factory system. In the early days of film, film was what television has become. If you put out a Ruby Keillor movie and it was a hit, then you put out another one and another one and another one. And Ruby Keillor and Dick Powell made musicals together in the 1930s. They seem to come out every six months.

Come on, I've been waiting long. Why don't we get started? Come on, maybe this is wrong. Gee, what of it? We just love it. And the rationale for that was to keep the machinery going. Mondello says that machinery began to break down as stars wanted more control over their careers. And directors got more control over their movies.

But the legacy of that old star system cast a long and lasting shadow over the industry. I mean, I look at photos from those days and think there's no one like that now. But even if there's no one today like Marilyn Monroe or Clark Gable, there are still movie stars, right? Well, not according to some of the stars themselves. Like there are no movie stars anymore. Like Anthony Mackie isn't a movie star. The Falcon is a movie star. The evolution of the superhero has meant the death of the movie star. That was a clip of Marvel actor Anthony Mackie from a 2018 Comic-Con event that's recently gone viral. And he's not the only one blaming the dominance of superhero movies and other established intellectual properties on the decline of the movie star.

Director Quentin Tarantino echoed his words on a podcast late last year. You have all these actors who have become famous playing these characters. But they're not movie stars. Right. Captain America is the star. Right. Thor is the star. Many critics have also sounded the alarm over a lack of real movie stars in Hollywood.

Are there really none left? I asked Pop Culture Happy Hour host Aisha Harris. Well, I think it depends on how you define a movie star, right? I mean, there's also this idea of who is bankable, who is going to draw a crowd merely just for the fact that they are in the movie. And I think to some extent that is true, that we don't really have movie stars in the traditional sense anymore. Because even when we're talking about someone like Tom Cruise, like he is someone who I think when you think about Tom Cruise,

you're like, I want to go see this movie because he's in it. But most of the movies he's made in the last decade have been franchise films. And so you have to question, you know, is this Tom Cruise who's driving, you know, all of this box office to movies like the Top Gun sequel and, you know, Mission Impossible? Or is it the franchise doing a lot of heavy lifting? Because we do live in this era now where franchise is king. All of our biggest stars now are in franchises. And it's hard to tell where their charisma and where their pull begins and where the pull of the franchise itself and the familiarity of the franchise begins.

Right. I mean, we've got the buzzy movies of the summer are what? Indiana Jones 5. You a woman? My memory's a little fuzzy. Are you still a Nazi? Mission Impossible 72. I think it's, you know, is it 7 Part 1, I think, actually. None of our lives can matter more than this mission.

I don't accept that. Yeah, yeah. And then Barbie, which is a movie based around a toy. Hi, Barbie. Hi, Ken. Hi, Barbie. Hi, Barbie. Is IP just the movie star now?

I kind of think so. It's interesting because you have, like, one example is Zoe Saldana, right? Zoe Saldana is recently became the first performer to star in four movies that made at least $2 billion at the box office. Now, that's like a very arbitrary sort of record to break. But it kind of points to this idea that, you know, Zoe Saldana, yes, she's famous. She's a movie star. But I wouldn't necessarily call her a movie star. Like people aren't going to see Guardians of the Galaxy or Avatar just because she's in it. That's no shade to Zoe Zadana, but that's the truth.

And I think that the way that we are measuring movie star has had to shift because the landscape has shifted. And things are not the same as they used to be 10, 15, you know, 50 years ago. How much does this matter, though? Does this matter just because these are people that we think about and talk about and are common bonds for all of us? Or is there an effect on the movies being made if this orbit of movie stars that has centered movies for so long is changing? Well, I think it definitely matters in the sense of, you know, what is being released in theaters and what gets to be released in theaters. And so we're having this ongoing conversation about the death of moviegoing and the fact that the only way to get butts in seats seems to be to, you know, create this familiar IP and cast the biggest movie stars you can think of

in them. And I think that from a creative standpoint, it feels kind of dire because look, I'm always happy for another Mission Impossible movie. I think that this is like the rare franchise where the movies have actually gotten better over the years. But at the same time, it'd be nice to see Tom Cruise in something that, you know, wasn't IP because some of his greatest performances are in, you know, dramas or one-off, you know, movie, action movie set pieces. And I think that it really does sort of swallow up in many ways our favorite actors and performers

into these roles that are driven by, not necessarily character-driven or narrative-driven, but just by, you know, what is going to draw people into theaters. And that's familiarity, that is reboots, that is sequels. Now I'm interrogating myself, and I feel like I've seen a lot of movies I really like on my couch.

And the only time I've been in a movie theater in the past year was a couple weeks ago to see the new Flash movie, which I knew would be terrible, but I wanted to see Michael Keaton as Batman. And I was like, you know, I'm going to go. And then it was terrible. Yeah, I mean, we're all complicit.

We're all part of the problem. Our money is what is making Hollywood want to keep going back to the well and not being daring, not being creative, not being interesting, unfortunately, you know. Is there a limit to this, though? Because, I mean, if you look at some of the returns, Indiana Jones, hard to find a bigger franchise than that. Harrison Ford, hard to find a bigger movie star than that, even though he is not exaggerating roughly the age of President Joe Biden. But I mean, it is underperforming and falling off a huge cliff. And that's just one of several examples of

what you think would be a no-brainer, maybe not panning out. Or maybe we shouldn't make movies with 80-year-old action stars is the takeaway. I don't know. You could go a few different ways there. Well, I mean, I don't want to be ageist about it, but I do think that it doesn't help that the last Indiana Jones movie, it was widely panned for good reason. It was not very good. so well at the box office last year definitely sort of um kind of proves the opposite point but you also have to realize that that it had been like 30 plus years between the first and the second one and so i think there was that that extra draw and i think that the diminishing returns are often because there's just not enough time in between you know these these sequels in these franchises and um it's just, I really do think though, now that I think about it

and now that you've asked that question, I do feel as though Tom Cruise does feel like sort of the last person standing because all of his peers, even Will Smith, when he makes an action movie, it's not really doing it. It's not doing it the way that it did when he was Mr. Fourth of July

for that long stretch of the late 90s into the aughts. And I think part of it is also that Tom Cruise, unlike a lot of other movie stars, does not really play the social media game. If you look at his Instagram page, pretty much all of it is just promotion for whatever movie he's hawking that summer. Other performers like Will Smith feel the need to put themselves out there on social media. And so there's not as much mystique or mystery there. Whereas with Tom Cruise, it's like, we know a few things about him. We know about the Scientology. We know about all that stuff. But like, he doesn't really try to put himself and make himself seem like a normal person. He still has that air of mystique. And that I think helps

in bringing people into theaters because we don't know every little thing about him. And he doesn't do the prestige TV game either, right? If you want to see Tom Cruise, you have to get your butt to a movie theater. Yeah, that's very true too. He shows up every year to do his Mission Impossible thing, and that's what we're here for.

We know exactly what we're going to get with him. That was Aisha Harris. She's a host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.