Creation of Screen Stars

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 141, 11 March 1938, Page 18

Creation of Screen Stars

Many Players are Products of Months

of Education and Planning

UINE of the most remarkable developments of the film industry in America has .been the creation of stars. Some actors and actresses- are famous before they step in front of a movie camera; some are young men and women who are given an opportunity because their personality or talent appeals to somebody of importance in the industry, and some are unknown men and women who have been practically manufactured into stars. They have had an appearance and presence different from those of reigning stars, and have possessed the requisites that the industry knows are the foundation of a screen career. Months of teaching them their work, studying how to use them to the best advantage, and even a process of piiysical improvement follow, and, finally, there is placed before the public a new star.

THREE years ago one of the leading x Hollywood film companies hired a young French girl named Ariane Borg to go to school for 200 dollars a week. Later the company changed her name to Veda Anne Borg. Miss Borg had no movie experience hnd knew hardly a word of English, but she was what is technically known as a New Face, and she was believed to have the authentic colour and sparkle of a coming star, so she was signed up for 10,000 dollars a year to study English and acting. Three days a week she went to the School for Stars directed by Oliver Hinsdell.

Part of her eduation took place in the projection room, where day after day she looked at pictures belonging to different movie companies. After nearly a year she received a part in “Camille.” A good-sized fortune will have been invested in Miss Borg before the public passps final judgment on her. If the verdict is favourable, the investment will pay for itself a hundred times over. Any company in Hollywood would pay a million dollars for a new star. Thousands of Discoveries. If she is a success, Miss Borg will not be the only school-made celebrity in Hollywood. Robert Taylor, for example, is wholly' of academic manufacture. Miss Borg will be unique in one respect. She discovered herself.. She was in Hollywood on a pleasure trip -when she took a notion that she wanted to be a star.

It is years since a potential great one has walked on to a Hollywood lot like that and given herself up. Usually the star is discovered dozens of scores of times before the discovery takes place. Olfecurity and oblivion are terrifically aggressive and they make short work of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every one thusand finds.

Hollywood is always desperate for new faces arid the cost of scouting for new facies increases each year. The greatest part of the cost is that of checking up bad suggestions. Most of the inhabitants of the United States are volunteer Hollywood spies. They make tens of thousands of discoveries annually. Hollywood has to maintain a battalion of paid scouts to pass on the finds of the grand army of unpaid scouts. Theatres and night clubs are haunted by wistful talent-hunters from the movie companies. Even the New England barns are honeycombed with Hollywood recruiting sergeants during the summer.

Yet it is a big year when more than two or three important new faces come to light. The process was simpler 15 years ago. Then Mack Sennett found the stars in bathing beauty contests and the big companies kidnapped them from Mack Sennett. The talking picture changed all that. Formerly the movie scout had to be a connoisseur of face and figure; to-day it is more important for him to be a connoisseur of voice and personality. It is ' not enough for a scout to find a star; he must convince, the executives that he has found one, and this part of his task is complicated by changing styles in Hollywood. Robert Taylor’s glamour, for example, almost cheated him out of his career. Directors -wanted another Cagney or Gable. They rejected Taylor time after time on the ground that he was too handsome to be of interest to women.

The slow rate of discovery or manufacture of new stars -would have caused a crisis in Hollywood except for the increased tenacity of life of the old stars. The cameramen, by tricks with lights and lenses, are turning back the clock for the benefit of mature artists/ The movie public itself is ageing and is a little more tolerant of ageing troupers. The only passions proper to adults, according to the cinema of a few years ago, were mother love, avarice and revenge; to-day a wellpreserved actress of 30 years can still have a screen romance. Camera magic and changing taste of audiences are giving the current stars a few years of grace, but this process may be near an end. The luck of different companies in discovering new stars varies widely from year to year. Four years ago Paramount had Mae West, Bing Crosby, Claudette Colbert and Baby Leßoy all blazing their way to sudden glory. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer came along in 1935 with a big catch of headliners including Robert Taylor, Luise Rainer, Eleanor Powell and James Stewart. Luise Rainer is the only one of the four who received no part of her education at the studio school. Because the company was having salary trouble with Myrna Loy, it took a chance on Miss Rainer and assigned her to play in “Escapade” with William Powell. She had been before the camera only a few hours when Bowel was offering to bet that she would receive immediate recognition as a star. Miss Rainer’s only defect was a sketchy knowledge of English, but that was no great drawback in her first three parts. She was Viennese in- “ Escapade,” French in “The Great Ziegfeld,” and Chinese in “The Good Earth.” Physical Reconstruction.

Taylor learned everything he knows about acting. and unlearned some things that he should not have known, at the studio school. Both lie and James Stewart were reconstructed physically—rebuilt from stringy adolescents to the athlete-hero type. Eleanor Powell knew dancing as well as anybody alive -when she arrived in Hollywood, but she developed a voiceand an acting technique at the star school. The headmaster of the star school is Oliver Hinsdell. Movie scouts send him promising young people from all over America and Europe. He usually starts with a course in imitating classic statues. The candidate studies photographs of the Winged Victory of Samothrace and other celebrated works in order to learn the arts of standing and walking. The first essential, according to Mr. Hinsdell, is, to carry yourself with the upper breastbone and lower thorax well forward. The pupil is not to worry about the position of his chin, shoulders or other items. If the collarbone and windpipe are held as in the Winged Victory or in Cellini’s Perseus, the rest of the physique cannot go wrong. The pupil who masters the correct stance and locomotion is considered worthy of further training and polishing. Students with promise are not usually disqualified for ordinary physical defects. If the teeth do not measure up to cinema standards, they are resculptured by a Hollywood artist-den-tist. Some physiques are astonishingly reshaped in the gymnasium.