What would you say to a movie star?

What would you say to a movie star? Here is an entertainer that you think you know or at least know something about them.  You might want to touch their lives because in some way they have touched yours.

 

Last week I was listening to a person talk about his own past drinking problems and how he would like to share what he learned with Lindsey Lohan.  This sounds like the beginning of a sad story that could end with restraining order -that is if it was being written as a movie screenplay.

The dilemma of being a well known actor is similar to being a politician. There's a need to be in touch with the people who support you but it easy to overwhelmed  with too much attention.  Almost every successful politician has at least one story of an event where they had to shake a thousand or more hands, like at a huge meet and greet. Each person wants to make their presence known with a good firm handshake. By the end of the day the politician's hand is swollen and bruised and needs a long soak in ice water.  

For a long time entertainment was up close and personal. The poet, the singer, the dancer and musician performed for small groups of people. It was for the elites in palaces and castle halls, around the fire during the long winters or for the occasional village festival. Religion sometimes orchestrated large events but they had their own priesthood, which is a different kind of performer.

 Out of the Greek festivals for Dionysus we get the beginning of modern theater. One historian mused that citizens that had a little too much to drink, in honor of the God of Wine, began to perform the original "gong show".  Eventually the plays became organized and secular -and over time developed into real comedies and dramas. The plays were so beloved that they were state sponsored though taxes.

 

So over 2,000 years later these plays still survive and stay relevant.  I know of one independent filmmaker who wants to make an updated version of The Trojan Women by Euripides.  Here's a playwright who has over a dozen titles deemed as classics and at the same time almost as many of Euripides plays are lost or only known in fragments.  

After the fall of the ancient world up to the industrial revolution -being an actor was on par with prostitution and petty crime.  Even with Shakespeare, an actor's life was a tough one. It was the railroad that improved actor's prospects, where great acting families like the Booths and Barrymores could have national audiences and an affluent life by traveling on tour from city to city by rail. The railroads brought a constant stream of entertainment and things like vaudeville. It was not uncommon for a popular act to travel over 25,000 miles a year when Jules Vern's Around The World In Eighty Days was still a pretty fanciful book of fiction.

 

As actors had access to larger accumulated audiences, they achieved wealth, prestige and stardom.  Then came the movies. Motion pictures are a qualitatively different experience, best summed up with the "close-up shot". It is a whole level of intimacy you can not have with a stage performance.  Movies also allow for the immediate shared experience of a mass market.  It's like the difference between wholesale and retail, where even as early the 1920's a movie premiere could be seen by millions across the nation.  Almost everybody could afford to go to the movies and each new movie gave everybody something to talk about. 

The intimacy of the movies was not immediately apparent to the producers. By the time Rudolph Valentino died it was. Over 100,000 people came to the funeral home to pay their respects and his crypt in Beverly Hills is to this regularly visited. It's impossible to say how many women were deeply in love with Valentino even though they only saw him on the silver screen and maybe once as a body in casket.

One time I sat in on an acting class. They show the audition reel that Warner Brothers made for Humphrey Bogart. The two other actors he was reading with were probably former stage actors. Their movements big and broad, their voices loud and over enunciated. Everything about Bogart was understated and close to natural.  As the other two actors displayed every thought and action so they could be seen from the back row of a theater, Bogart would just have a subtle change of expression. It was enough to suggestion something but you had to fill in part of it and be an active partner in this role.

  

A good actor leaves some space where each member of the audience can interject themselves and feel they can be part of that role. I bet it's close to impossible to watch Casablanca and not identify with Rick, not think about a past love lost. Most people want to be that kind of heroic figure and most people would like to believe Humphrey Bogart was that kind of person. One thought I like to entertain is the role of Rick was first offer to Ronald Reagan and he turned it down -what if Reagan played Rick and Bogart went into politics? It could have been a better world.

Of course Humphrey Bogart wasn't Rick in Casablanca. Supposedly he was good and decent man.  His son Sam Bogart always poke lovingly of his father but then again Sam's experience with his Dad was probably more like any other father-son relationship. 

With the crew working on their webcast idea I wonder about the future of movies. The home movie experience is competing with the theater and with a 60 plus inch TV  the financial future of Hollywood could be in jeopardy. These days a $10,000 investment in video equipment could get you results that could have cost you ten times as much to produce twenty years ago.  It looks like a much more open frontier but the market also looks flooded with so much quality material that can't find an audience.

Maybe that's the last role of actors, to be celebrities and fodder for tabloids until their name is needed to create a buzz and draw attention to an upcoming movie.  Or as another acting coach once said -that many actors go through the story of Jesus.  Where an actor rises, then falls and if they are lucky they are resurrected.  

That kind of redemption story with the added benefit of playing out other people's fantasies while being paid a huge sum of money for it ... well practically doesn't everybody thinks their life would make a good movie? So when we're all finally in the movies and the world is a continuous vaudeville act -or reality TV show -or the audition reel for our rationed 15 minutes of fame; will we all become special or equally mundane?