A distinctive voice that can easily be recognized and imitated. Marlon Brando called all their attempts “a lot of frozen monkey vomit.” Adding up the monkey’s offerings, it’s clear that over the years, Hollywood collected a sensible list of informed observations: A star has exceptional looks. As soon as the business realized that moviegoers wanted to see stars, they grappled with trying to find a useful definition for the phenomenon of movie stardom, which is really not like any other kind. The truth is that nobody-either then or now-can define what a movie star is except by specific example, but the workaday world of moviemaking never gave up trying to figure it out. As a definition, it wasn’t much, but it was all anyone needed-and there’s no arguing with it.
(“She has something!” cries out Lowell Sherman when he spies waitress Constance Bennett in the earlier version of the story, What Price Hollywood?) Hollywood just told people that “he” or “she” or “it” (let’s not forget Rin Tin Tin and Trigger) had “that little something extra” and let it go at that. Since he’s talking about Judy Garland as he watches her sing “The Man That Got Away,” the point is made. “She’s got that little something extra,” muses James Mason in 1954’s A Star Is Born, quoting actress Ellen Terry for credibility. They just trusted that the audience wouldn’t need an explanation because it would believe what it was seeing-star presence-could verify its own existence.
Sometimes they made films that told the story of their own star-making business, and even then they couldn’t say what exactly a movie star was.
Thousands of people in the movie business made a Wizard-of-Oz living, working hidden levers to present an awe-inspiring display on theatre screens: Movie Stars! Hollywood made ’em and sold ’em daily, gamely producing a product for which its creators had no concrete explanation. It’s a crackpot business that sets out to manufacture a product it can’t even define, but that was old Hollywood.
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