I wanted to write about the system of star making, about ‘the star machine’ that evolved at the end of the silent era and created movie stars in the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s.” She accomplishes her aim, animating that machine with literally hundreds of anecdotes and pointed observations, but with all due respect, she does write about movie stars, and so engagingly that she might as well skip the apology.
As she states in her introduction, “Movie stars are fascinating, but I didn’t want to write about them. “MOVIE stardom,” writes Jeanine Basinger very close to the end of “The Star Machine,” a smart, deeply researched but also chatty and fast-flowing history of the phenomenon, “is still - and will always be - half-calculated and half-serendipitous.”Īlthough Basinger is a longtime professor and the chairwoman of film studies at Wesleyan University, that statement is anything but the usual thesis-maker’s tack.
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