The Star Machine | 
 enlarge | Author: Jeanine Basinger
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $35.00
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Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 73743
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 608
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.6
ISBN: 1400041309
Dewey Decimal Number: 384.80979494
EAN: 9781400041305
ASIN: 1400041309
Publication Date: October 23, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
From one of our leading film authorities, a rich, penetrating, amusing plum pudding of a book about the golden age of movies, full of Hollywood lore, anecdotes, and analysis.
Jeanine Basinger gives us an immensely entertaining look into the “star machine,” examining how, at the height of the studio system, from the 1930s to the 1950s, the studios worked to manufacture star actors and actresses. With revelatory insights and delightful asides, she shows us how the machine worked when it worked, how it failed when it didn’t, and how irrelevant it could sometimes be. She gives us the “human factor,” case studies focusing on big stars groomed into the system: the “awesomely beautiful” (and disillusioned) Tyrone Power; the seductive, disobedient Lana Turner; and a dazzling cast of others—Loretta Young, Errol Flynn, Irene Dunne, Deanna Durbin. She anatomizes their careers, showing how their fame happened, and what happened to them as a result. (Both Lana Turner and Errol Flynn, for instance, were involved in notorious court cases.) In her trenchantly observed conclusion, she explains what has become of the star machine and why the studios’ practice of “making” stars is no longer relevant.
Deeply engrossing, full of energy, wit, and wisdom, The Star Machine is destined to become an invaluable part of the film canon.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 building a better basinger May 10, 2008
jeanine basinger is the best!
she is a scholar with a conversational tone. it makes her books inviting and invaluable.
i enjoyed 'a woman's lot' and 'silent stars' so much, that reading this book was a no-brainer. and, being heavy in to classic musicals, my favorite aspect of 'the star machine' is her use of eleanor powell's career as a model for the tone of the book about the making of stars in the studio system.
i wrote her a fan letter but she didn't respond--boo hoo! but i'm still going to read her books.
and i know this review has a lame title. i can't think right now!
 Repetitive--and hung up on people's heights! May 7, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
As a previous reviewer said, Basinger makes her point in the introductory section (the movies weren't the product, the performers were!) and repeats it again and again--often within a single paragraph--much to our annoyance. She also has some peculiar hang-ups on performer's heights. Apparently, tall women are unattractive. Eleanor Powell is desribed as gangly ("a full five foot six!"). Barbara Lawrence didn't become a star BECAUSE she was tall (specifically, "string-beanish.") Granted, people have gotten taller over the last 50 years, but I doubt that women taller than 5' 4" were considered freakish Amazons during the studio era. Even stranger, she describes Clark Gable as "short," though the shortest I've ever seen him described is 5' 11", hardly a short man, even today. She also disses performers, apparently for her own enjoyment: Vera-Ellen is inexplicably said to be a mediocre dancer and Doris Day is described a buck-toothed! A very strange book by an author who clearly has some axes to grind regarding physical attractiveness!
Consider the stars April 20, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
The sheer amount of detailed information in this study of the star system during the Golden Age of Hollywood filmmaking (roughly 1930-1960) means that this book from Jeanine Basinger is an indispensable read for anyone seriously interested in the era. There are probably few people alive who know as much about the period or who have seen as many studio films from that era who also have as scholarly a background as Basinger's, and as such the book is a real treasure trove. There's not much new here in terms of ehr thesis--that most of the stars of the time were heavily "engineered" by the studios to fill certain niches that were apparent to everyone at the time but are now less clear to those who did not live then--but the pleasure of this book is Basinger's uncovering of what those niches were and how the studios remade certain stars to fill them. Why was everyone in the early Forties so crazy about Veronica Lake's peekaboo curl and why did so many women try to emulate it? Why was someone who seems today so plain-looking and unextraordinary as June Allyson such a giant star in the glamorous period of the late 40s and early 50s? Why is such a glamorous and gifted star as Loretta Young, who was so popular in her day, so largely forgotten today? Basinger provides very satisfying answers for all these questions which actually had puzzled me over the years: for example, with Allyson she demonstrates how MGM carefully played down her beauty to make her look as quotidian as possible (even providing her with a wardrobe carefully designed to look ready-made) so she would appeal to women sick of the glamour gals like Elizabeth Taylor and Rhonda Fleming who wanted someone more like themselves (and to men who longed for "The Perfect Wife," Allyson's studio appellation in the early 1950s).
Although she is a professor of film studies at Wesleyan College, Basinger does not adopt a particularly scholarly tone for the book: indeed, it's very clear from her style that she has spent quite a lot of time poring over the gossip magazines and studio publicity material from the time, and that their tone has seeped into hers. While sometimes it's refreshing to see a scholar who is so upfront about her enthusiasms, at other times her extreme fondness for certain stars (particularly, as others here have noted, Tyrone Power) borders a bit on the gushy and actually interferes with your enjoyment of the text, and also leads you to question her judgment. (Why does she feel so compelled to defend Lana Turner's mothering of Cheryl Crane? What on Earth possesses her to defend Turner's laughably bad performance as Milady in THE THREE MUSKETEERS?) Yet at other times you're very grateful for her biases because they help you understand why certain actors were as beloved as they were: I've never seen anyone, for example, make it clear to someone who wasn't alive in the 1940s why Deanna Durbin was one of the biggest stars of the day, or why she turned her back so definitively on Hollywood. I get the suspicion this is a book I will keep going back to for information about the period, if only to see some of the very unusual films Basinger keeps recommending.
 THE STAR MACHINE NEEDS SOME FUEL March 31, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
I was extremely disappointed in this lengthy book which makes its point very quickly and then makes it again and again. Ms. Basinger doesn't offer any insight worth reading or writing about. The studios manufactured their stars, admitted that they did, we all know that they did and we all bought into it. End of story. The rest is just a boring, poorly written attempt at creating something out of nothing. I could not get through it.
Very detailed, but hard to follow... March 23, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I bought this book thinking I'd get a detailed look at how the star machine worked. That information is there, but with footnotes sometimes spanning half a page and hundreds and hundreds of asides, it's tough to follow the narrative of this book unless you're a film historian. It's hard to imagine having enough time in a life to see all the movies the author commentates, most of them out of print and impossible to see. If you're a hardcore cinefile, I'm sure you'll be into this. It's rare for me not to finish a book, and I still go back to it from time to time. But I skip large sections of text that refer to movies I could never see even if I wanted to. There are fascinating elements here, and interesting photos of stars before and after the starmaking process. But this book should have been edited down. Much of the commentary is raw opinion, not fact-based, making it tough to stay interested unless one agrees with the author's point of view at every turn.
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