Crossover Stardom: Popular Male Music Stars in American Cinema 9781628925807, 9781501396298, 9781628925784

Citation preview

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Crossover Stardom

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Crossover Stardom Popular Male Music Stars in American Cinema Julie Lobalzo Wright

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Julie Lobalzo Wright, 2018 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Louse Dugdale Cover image: Photo of Paramount Theater, 1956, advertising the Elvis Presley film ‘Love Me Tender’. (Photo © Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-6289-2580-7 PB: 978-1-5013-5398-7 ePDF: 978-1-6289-2578-4 eBook: 978-1-6289-2579-1 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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In loving memory of Katherine and Jean—two great book lovers

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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1 The Crooner Film Star: Bing Crosby 2 The Rock ‘N’ Roll Film Star: Elvis Presley 3 The Country Film Star: Kris Kristofferson 4 The Rap Film Star: Will Smith 5 The Pop Film Star: Justin Timberlake Conclusion Bibliography Filmography Index

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Illustrations 1.1 Bing Crosby and Basil Rathbone in Rhythm on the River (1940)

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1.2 Bing Crosby in East Side of Heaven (1939)

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1.3 A couple listening to Bing Crosby in East Side of Heaven (1939)

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1.4 Bing Crosby in East Side of Heaven (1939)

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1.5 Bing Crosby and Marjorie Reynolds in Holiday Inn (1942)

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1.6 Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, and Marjorie Reynolds in Holiday Inn (1942)

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1.7 Fred Astaire and Marjorie Reynolds in Holiday Inn (1942)

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2.1 Elvis Presley performing “Jailhouse Rock” in Jailhouse Rock (1957)

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2.2 Elvis Presley singing “Wooden Heart” in G.I. Blues (1960)

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2.3 Elvis Presley performing “Mean Woman Blues” in Loving You (1957) 69 2.4 Elvis Presley performing “Stop Where You Are” in Paradise Hawaiian Style (1966)

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2.5 Elvis Presley performing “House of Sand” in Paradise Hawaiian Style (1966)

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2.6 Elvis Presley and Ann Margret in Viva Las Vegas (1964)

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3.1 Kris Kristofferson in Cisco Pike (1971)

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3.2 Kris Kristofferson and Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1975)

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3.3 Kris Kristofferson in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1975)

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3.4 DVD menu from A Star Is Born (1976)

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3.5 Kris Kristofferson in Convoy (1978)

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3.6 Kris Kristofferson and Barbara Streisand in A Star Is Born (1976)

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4.1 The opening credits to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990–1996)

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4.2 Will Smith in Men in Black (1997)

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Illustrations

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4.3 Will Smith in Men in Black (1997)

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4.4 Will Smith in I am Legend (2007)

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4.5 Will Smith in Wild Wild West (1999)

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4.6 Graham Norton, Jaden Smith, Will Smith, and Alfonso Riberto on The Graham Norton Show (2013)

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5.1 Justin Timberlake in The Love Guru (2008)

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5.2 Oscar Issac, Justin Timberlake, and Adam Driver in Inside Llewyn Davis (2012)

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5.3 DVD menu from Justin Timberlake FutureSex/LoveShow:  Live from Madison Square Garden (2007)

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5.4 Justin Timberlake and dancer in Southland Tales (2006)

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5.5 Justin Timberlake and dancers in Southland Tales (2006)

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Acknowledgments As with most books, the writing of this one has been a long process, and I must first thank those who read earlier drafts, especially Ginette Vincendeau, Peter Evans, and Andrew Spicer who all provided invaluable comments at various stages. I  am also grateful for the observations of the anonymous reviewers throughout the writing of this book. I would also like to thank the Film Departments at King’s College London and at Queen Mary University of London. I have studied and taught at both departments and found them to be encouraging scholarly environments where I met and worked with many individuals who inspire me to this day. Thanks also to my patient editor, Katie Gallof, and Susan Krogulski at Bloomsbury and various librarians who assisted my research. Stardom has been a subject that I have taught to many students and I wish to thank them for their curiosity and enthusiasm for the topic at KCL, QMUL, University of Surrey, and University of Warwick. It is a field of Film Studies that continues to fascinate me and (I hope) my students, too. I am indebted to my friends and family for their encouragement, especially Lucy Bolton—colleague, coeditor and, most importantly, friend. This book is dedicated to my great aunt Katherine and my mother, Jean. While my aunt adored Bing Crosby and owned many of his records, my mother met Elvis Presley when she was a young girl, holding his hand as he ate his lunch. I thought of both of them throughout the writing of this book. I could never put into words how thankful I am for Tristan who has been with me through the countless research hours, the restricting of personal time and devotion to watching films, reading about films, and writing about films. This book would never have been completed without his endless encouragement, limitless support, and boundless love.

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Introduction

The cover image of this book was taken outside the Paramount Theatre in New York City in October of 1956, weeks before Elvis Presley’s first film, Love Me Tender (Robert D. Webb), was released. The enormous crowds watched as the forty-foot tall figure of Elvis, with guitar in hand, was revealed. This image exemplifies the excitement that greeted Presley’s first cinematic appearance, but it also displays the discord between his music star image and the character he portrayed on-screen. Not only does the marquee only feature Presley’s name, even though he had, at best, a costarring role in the film, but the largerthan-life image is most decidedly promoting Presley, the rock ‘n’ roll star, as opposed to Presley, the film star. It was his first film role and, thus, it is understandable his established stardom as a music star would be publicized, however, the genre, setting, and time period of the film (a Western family drama set in the mid-1800s) are absent from the gigantic image of Presley. The image is appropriate for the subject of this book because it visually illustrates the difficult transition many music stars have made to the cinema.1 While some have been overly successful in establishing and then maintaining music and film stardom, others have been viewed as spectacular failures unable to equal their stardom in another media. Still others fall somewhere in between with most of the case studies in this book representing stars who achieved moderate success in the cinema, even if for only a short time, but were never able to fully replicate their original stardom in music. The impetus for this book partly lies in the fact that this type of stardom is often perceived as marginal when in reality2 crossover stardom has an illustrious history within American cinema. Though “crossover” has become a popular term to describe many modern stars who appear in various mediums,

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Crossover Stardom

crossover stardom has a long history, going back to the beginning of the cinema. Many early film stars across national cinemas began their career in the theater. With the emergence of sound cinema and the popularity of the musical, music stars crossing over to film became even more essential to the film industry. Despite this history, few studies have considered the implications of crossover stardom, especially the specificity of music stardom in relation to film stardom.3 This study seeks to expand the consideration of both the phenomenon in general, and specific stars in particular. Many film stars have been examined in relation to genre, but this study explores the connections between music star images (greatly informed by music genres) and film genres. Genre and stardom are fundamentally connected, especially in the Hollywood studio era when many studios employed “star-genre formulations” (Schatz qtd. in Neale (2000): 239) that were “often much more specific than traditional genre terms are able to suggest” (Neale, 2000:  239). Countless music stars in the classical Hollywood era starred in musical films allowing them to display their talent. In fact, the musical is a genre particularly influenced by the imprint of star images. As Bruce Babington and Peter Evans note, musicals often rely on the “idiosyncratic interpretations” of star images through “the multi-faceted forces of their personae . . . dominant in character construction” (1985:  15). In Easter Parade (Charles Walters, 1948) for example, the casting of Fred Astaire as opposed to the originally planned Gene Kelly, altered the character construction of Don Hewes; quite simply, “things would have been altered by the different force of Kelly’s persona” (Babington and Evans, 1985: 15). Although the same can be said about stars in other genres, the centrality of star performances in musicals, displayed through musical performance and characterization within the plot, creates a stronger link between stars and genre. Chapter  1 and Chapter 2 focus on stars who appeared in musical films during the height of the studio system (Crosby) and its decline (Presley). The musical acted as a successful platform for many music stars transferring to the cinema, even those not appearing in this book, such as Maurice Chevalier or Frank Sinatra. Presley, however, signals a shift that took place with musical films through the emergence of rock ‘n’ roll, a type of music that for many “was disruptive of the genre’s [musical] commitment to romance and community” through its

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“anarchic rebelliousness and raw sexuality” (Neale, 2007: 335). The film musical fragmented and declined in popularity. As a result, many music stars in the post-classical era appeared in films that were not, strictly speaking, musicals, and therefore did not particularly call for musical performances. Thus, a central consideration in this book is an examination of the ways in which music stars can appear in starring roles in nonmusical films.4 The final three chapters on Kristofferson, Smith, and Timberlake consider music stars that have rarely appeared in musical films, signaling the genre’s decline in popularity in the past four decades, but, also, how crossover stardom has altered from the classical Hollywood era to today. Crossover stardom is still desired by stars and within the highly diversified and vertically integrated Hollywood industry. Success, however, eludes many crossover stars and this book considers success, failure, and legacy in relation to specific case studies, in addition to, the general view that crossover stardom is unachievable (defined by the remarkable “failure” of Madonna’s film career5 or the one-time “failures” such as Mariah Carey in Glitter (Vondie Curtis Hall, 2001)). There is also the popular perception that music stars cannot act. Nevertheless, the trend for music stars to move to the cinema has endured. Ben Thompson sums up the rationale: There is no mystery about the mutual attraction between film-makers and pop stars. Big pop names will—in theory at least—supply both charisma and crowds, and films offer them the chance to appear multi-faceted at the same time as prolonging their working lives beyond the whim of teen allegiance. So why are the fruits of this apparently felicitous union so often the object of ridicule and contumely. (1995: 33)

In any case, this study is not concerned with these performers’ acting ability per se—always a subjective judgment, but with the process of their transition to the cinema. I am interested in how they adapt their star image, constructed from the nature of their music and the specificity of their stage performances, to film narratives. The question of success—and failure—is vital though, and my main purpose is to examine how and/or why some have found success and others have not, and whether their music genre and (stage) performance style helped or hindered their transition.

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At the core of this book is the contention that music stardom differs from film stardom, while the interchange between the two mediums produces stars who are required to fulfill the conventions of music and film stardom. Here, Richard Dyer’s work (1998, 2004) is essential to examine how music stars engage with film. Furthermore, following Dyer’s semiotic theory of stardom, many scholars including Christine Geraghty (2000) have questioned whether stars should be defined by a single medium anymore; instead, she argues, a model based on how their images are distilled in the media would be more logical. Although the stars examined overlap with Geraghty’s categories (starsas-performers, professionals, and celebrity), the fact that their image was deeply established in music before they entered the cinema necessitates an examination of the specificity of each medium (music and film). At issue for music stars attempting to move to film is the complex mediation between their already established stardom in music and the building of a cinematic image. By focusing on male case studies, the book is also centrally concerned with the changing nature of masculinity through the projection of specific male images within American culture from the late 1920s to today. As each chapter will illustrate, masculinity has altered throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, but common themes reemerge in each chapter, including the feminization and/or emasculation of the male image. While it can no longer be argued that male images are immune from some of the issues that are “repeatedly linked to the feminine,” as Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark’s introduction to Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinity in Hollywood Cinema observes; “spectacle, masochism, passivity, masquerade, and most of all, the body as it signifies gendered, racial, class, and generational divides” (1993: 3) all impact on the performance of the male gender on-screen. There is, however, a tendency for male stars to negotiate any feminization that may occur, especially if they are subjected to the gaze as defined by Laura Mulvey (1975). As each chapter will illustrate, the body becomes a place where masculinity is exposed and navigated through the various limitations that may arise, such as exposure to the gaze through the cinematic apparatus. Although many have argued against this simple equation (male body + gaze = feminization), including Paul Smith who contends, “the media and film deploy specific representational strategies to eroticize the male body” (2004: 46), the male body is

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an unstable site, often tested, and, ultimately, emblematic of passive or active masculinity (sometimes a mix of both). Masculinity is complex and there are no simple conclusions that can be inferred, however, feminization and emasculation are areas that reoccur in almost every chapter in this book. This can be attributed to the fact that the stars examined originate their stardom in music, which often utilizes the body in live performances. Cultural anxieties about masculinity and sexuality have been established through male music star’s bodies, evident in the discussions of Crosby and Presley (and, to a lesser extent, Timberlake). Furthermore, the foundations of these social concerns shift throughout time with each chapter exploring masculine bodies defined by sociocultural factors (particular milieu, historical periods, cultural types). As noted, genre is vital to this study, not just film, but music genres that assist in formulating the type of masculinity each star projects. Various scholars have considered stardom within popular music, including David R. Shumway who notes that rock stars eventually supplanted “movie stars at the top of the pyramid of entertainment royalty” (2015: 302). While I would question if this is wholly true (the decline of film stardom has been proposed for decades now), his further point that “rock stars from Elvis to Eminem have consistently figured politically in the cultural imagination” (302) locates the representational significance of popular music stars. Film stars have, also, “encompassed many aspects of modern life”, but popular music stars have often been the catalyst for social and cultural alterations, from Crosby and Presley to Madonna, Prince, and Lady Gaga. Some of this can be attributed to their star agency, especially as compared to film stars; the ability to write their own music and construct their own image to be utilized on album covers and in music videos affords music stars with more control over their image than film stars who appear in films (generally) written and directed by others. However, not all stars write their own music and authenticity can become an overriding feature of the music star (or the lack thereof). This all impacts on the cinema’s ability to accommodate the popular music star, first within a different medium and then within film genres that can be contradictory to their established stardom. Music stardom differs from film stardom and genre becomes an important marker, demarcating the music star image with particular attributes. The stars chosen to be included in this study—Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley,

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Kris Kristofferson, Will Smith, and Justin Timberlake—all emerge from different historical periods and, crucially, various music genres. This allows the study to survey the history of crossover stardom in American cinema, but, also, several defining music genres, including crooning, rock ‘n’ roll, country, rap and hip-hop, and pop music. There are countless other stars who could have been explored, including Al Jolson, Frank Sinatra, Art Garfunkel, IceT, just to name a few and there is still a book to be written on the history of female crossover stars in American cinema. However, the stars included organizes the book in a trajectory that focuses on particular decades within each chapter: the 1930s and 1940s in Chapter 1; the 1950s and 1960s in Chapter 2; the 1970s in Chapter 3; the 1980s and 1990s in Chapter 4; and the 2000s in Chapter 5. While each case study is unique, this book functions as an investigation into film and popular music stardom, popular culture and masculinity in an important, almost, one-hundred-year period. Finally, this book seeks to dispel two notions; first that crossover stardom is a contemporary phenomenon (as illustrated by Smith and Timberlake), by exploring its history from the beginning of sound cinema; second, that it is an anecdotal phenomenon. Although the film career of the stars examined are sometimes brief or nowhere near the height of their music stardom, their mark on film history, but also on cultural history at large (through their projection of masculinity), is nevertheless extremely significant, and this is due to their immense presence in popular music. This study as a result aims to explore this phenomenon—at particular moments in history, and in its varying degrees of success or failure—as part of the ongoing examination of popular culture.

Notes 1 Although this book focuses on American cinema, this phenomena is not exclusive to American and/or Hollywood cinema. 2 I note in my chapter on David Bowie’s film stardom, “David Bowie: The Extraordinary Rock Star as Film Star” (2015), the perceived lack of commercial and critical success of popular music stars in cinema when in reality, many stars have been able to equal their music stardom in film and there are even more

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examples of “perfect fit” (Dyer, 1998: 129) cinematic roles for music stars, such as Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976). 3 Various studies have explored the “crossover” phenomena, including Sukhmani Khorana’s edited collection titled Crossover Cinema: Cross-Cultural Film from Production to Reception (2013) that includes chapters examining many conceptual types of crossing in cinema; Gay Fandom and Crossover Stardom: James Dean, Mel Gibson, and Keanu Reeves (2001) by Michael DeAngelis that considers fandom, queer theory, and stardom; and Richard Dyer’s chapter on Paul Robeson in Heavenly Bodies (2004). DeAngelis and Dyer illustrate the political dimension of crossover stardom through stars that traverse sexual, gender, and racial lines. Cynthia Baron’s recent book on Denzel Washington (2015) examines one particular star’s ability to be a “crossover” star, rooted in a particular subculture, but also popular with a wide audience (19–20). Of note is also Kay Dickinson’s Off Key: When Film and Music Won’t Work Together (2008) that argues how the two industries are often unable to “work together” due to the relationship between labor and capital. 4 There were many male music stars featured in nonsinging roles in the classical Hollywood period, such as Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and even Bing Crosby. There was, however, the opportunity for these music stars to appear in musical films, whereas in the contemporary period, musical films are less popular with fewer musicals produced. 5 Although Madonna is commonly used as an example of failed crossover stardom, she starred or costarred in over fourteen films, directed two films, and has made countless cameos in film and on television in her forty-year career.

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The Crooner Film Star: Bing Crosby

Introduction It is almost impossible to sum up the contribution Bing Crosby made to American popular culture in his seventy-four years on Earth. It has been said that in the 1940s “his voice was being heard somewhere in the world every minute of the day” (Macfarlane, 2007: 142). Crosby was a star of recorded music, radio, film, and even appeared on television later in his career. He was not the first singing star in Hollywood, nor the first radio star, but the first significant star who was able to parlay his established success on the radio into a film career. As Michael Feinstein surmised, “he created a legacy that is unequaled in its scope and achievement” (2007: xviii). Crosby’s career began as part of a duo with childhood friend, Al Rinker, before joining the Paul Whiteman orchestra where they added a third member to the group, Harry Barris, and became known as The Rhythm Boys. Slowly, Crosby was singled out from the other members, leading to solo opportunities on radio and recordings. This was a significant period in not only Crosby’s career, building the star image that would come to dominate popular culture for over twenty years, but also represented a period of unprecedented change in American culture, including popular culture. In fact, Crosby sustained his stardom through significant social change in America (World War II and the immediate postwar period), but also major alterations that took place in the media, including mediums that Crosby would come to dominate—film and radio. This chapter will consider Crosby as a crossover star, from radio to music recordings to film, discussing his place within American popular culture for more than forty years, but also the various alterations that took place to help facilitate Crosby’s immense stardom.

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Early stardom: crooning and radio Crosby became a star at a crucial period in the development of cinema when sound became commonplace, which transformed the industry, not just through the technology needed to alter cinema from silent to sound, but, also, certain genres and stars emerged in this period due to the standardization of sound. Musicals became one of, if not the, most popular film genres after sound, leading, also, to the proliferation of singing stars in Hollywood. Stars were sought from the stage before sound, especially vaudevillian stars who were utilized in comedy shorts and features. The adaption of sound, industry wide, meant that the talent pool was expanded to include performers who could sing and dance, in addition to possessing comedic talent. Concurrently, radio was emerging as a significant entertainment format for Americans with many using radio as their primary entertainment source. With the rise of radio, the recording business altered through technological advancements and changing audience tastes. Technology, more than anything else, may have singlehandedly led to the rise of Bing Crosby. As Gary Giddins observed, “more than any other performer, Crosby would ride the tide of technology” (2001: 113) throughout his career. The microphone, popularity of radio, and the transition from sheet music to recorded music on phonographs all assisted in creating a singer who could transcend the physical limitations of connecting with audiences through voice-only mediums, such as the record and the radio. In fact, the 1947 quasi-biographical film The Road to Hollywood (Bud Pollard, Mack Sennett, Del Lord, and Leslie Pearce), which culled together various shorts Crosby made in the early 1930s, implied through narration that Crosby was the first “to successfully invade the wireless.” The adjective of invade was especially revealing because Crosby was celebrated and enamored for his ability to intimately connect to audiences through this singing voice, while also condemned and criticized by certain sectors of American society for his crooning style of singing. Allison McCracken discusses in her book Real Men Don’t Sing: Crooning in American Culture (2015) the hostility toward crooning in the late 1920s into the 1930s that was bound up in American ideals about sexuality, masculinity, and the domestic space. Crooning was considered “feminine” because of its

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emotionalism, subject matter, and female appeal. Early crooners entered the domestic space through recorded albums and live radio performances, establishing intimacy with, mainly, female audiences. This intimacy as historian Michael Chanan has noted was enhanced by the “ ‘close-up’ radio broadcast, where small groups of performers would use a small, acoustically dead studio and work close to the microphone . . . producing an effect of artificial intimacy as if the singer and song are transported into the presence of the listener” (1995: 60), both inhabiting the same space. The romantic crooner “threat” was the foundation of many of Crosby’s early shorts in Hollywood, including I Surrender Dear (Mack Sennett, 1931). The short begins with Crosby singing to an audience at the Cafè Royale, including transfixed women who cannot take their eyes off the singer. The short then fades to a shot of a train with Crosby’s singing of “I Surrender Dear” acting as a sound bridge before cutting to a close-up of a radio. The short then cuts to a medium long shot of two women and one man in a train carriage listening to Crosby’s song with the youngest woman smiling, the older woman working on her needlepoint, and the man lying down looking pensive. In a medium shot, the mother says to her daughter, “Would you please shut off that noise”? The daughter responds, “Noise? Mother, that’s Bing Crosby” to which she states, “I don’t understand how you can be so interested in a radio star you’ve never seen.” Here, the film is directly linking Crosby to radio, in addition to, firmly locating his appeal, to younger women, in the sound of his voice. The voice is displaced from the body and is a reoccurring theme in many of Crosby’s early shorts and feature length films, while also situating the perceived danger in crooning in the disembodied voice. The crooner was a new phenomenon, emerging during the Jazz Age and exposed the “transformative effects of microphone technology, which put soft-voiced singers on equal footing with classically trained singers and Broadway belters” (McCracken, 2015:  3). The amplified crooning voice was denigrated for its feminine connotations through the emotion the singers expressed and the deemphasized male body. As opposed to earlier singers, such as Al Jolson whose singing was physically demanding partly due to his need to aurally reach audience members without technological enhancements, crooners were able to sing with still bodies emoting sentimental songs.

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If masculinity is often judged through a man’s body, the shift from bodily performances to purely vocal performances onstage and in the home meant that masculinity became less about physical pursuits and was instead associated with feminine ideals:  emotion and feeling. McCracken’s study explores how mass media, especially the relatively new radio medium, encouraged women to become active consumers, especially through romantically inclined cultural products, such as crooning stars like Rudy Vallée, whom McCracken dubs as “America’s first pop idol” (2015:  11). The Jazz Age laid the groundwork for crooners and the physical arousal many women felt for these singers. Crosby was not immune to the moral panic that arose from the success of crooners. However, as opposed to Vallée and various other crooners, such as Morton Downey and Russ Columbo, Crosby was able to prolong his stardom through the height of the public attacks by calming fears of effeminacy through the creation of a more masculine image. For many critics, crooning was associated with femininity and passivity and Crosby was able to introduce more masculine characteristics—“aggressiveness, physical activity, emotional detachment” (McCracken, 2015: 268)—into his star persona while also instilling his image with American middle-class values. The evolution of Crosby’s image was necessitated by the negative reaction to the popularity of crooning in some sectors of American society as the criticism was especially damaging to a star building their stardom in a medium that served various commercial interests. Radio stars appeared on network shows with commercial sponsors. Although in reference to television on-screen talent, Susan Murray’s observations are as relevant to radio stars: On-screen talent had to represent the sometimes competing commercial aims of both the sponsor (who wanted the star to be associated with its specific product) and the network (who used the star’s persona to represent the character of the network as well to attract a mass audience). (2005: xi)

Radio stars were required to balance the interests of the sponsor and network, and if these stars became film stars, as Crosby did, they also incorporated the film studio’s interests (Hilmes, 1999: 3). While the film star system, especially developed in classical Hollywood, is well recognized with countless books and articles devoted to the subject,

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The Crooner Film Star: Bing Crosby

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the radio star-system is less familiar, although radio operated a very similar structure.1 Advertising agencies developed an “audio star-system” in conjunction with networks by building continuity between the star persona and the product brand, ensuring there was a consistent image promoted across various media (Murray 2005: 22–25). Michele Hilmes argues the role of sponsors and ad agencies have been grossly overlooked in historical and industrial studies of radio and that networks actually had “little impact into the creative process” partly due to radio shows “network-hopping” mid-run for better rates or more favorable time slots (1999: 80–81). Furthermore, advertising agencies opened offices in Hollywood to manage their radio programs after they had moved from New  York in the late 1930s to exploit Hollywood star talent (Meyers, 2014: 201).2 The interconnectedness between radio and advertising was most obviously displayed through the “integrated commercial message” (Hilmes, 1999: 86) that was seamlessly weaved into program narratives, titles, and show moments. Crosby began appearing on the radio with The Rhythm Boys in 1928 before solo appearances in 1929 and 1930. His first fifteen-minute radio show began in 1931 debuting September 2 on CBS radio and running Monday through Saturday (Giddins, 2001:  256). This show eventually found a sponsor in Certified Cremo, “a cigar-making subsidiary of American Tobacco” and this led to Crosby being refereed to, for a short time, as the “Cremo Singer” (Giddins, 2001: 268). Crosby would go on to front programs sponsored by Woodbury soap, Kraft (food), Philco (electronics), Chesterfield cigarettes, Minute Maid, and General Electric. The diversity of these products was matched with advertising campaigns that utilized Crosby’s star image, including Remington electric shavers, Royal Crown cola, Mastercraft pipes, and Whitman’s Chocolates (among many others). Cynthia B.  Meyers charts the development of advertising agencies and radio in its “golden age” signaling out the J. Walter Thompson (JWT) agency as introducing advertising strategies that relied on testimonials from stars, helping to align their products with “desirable attributes, such as wealth, social status, or celebrity, in order to create positive feelings in the consumer about the product” (2014: 209). JWT helped to alter the way advertisements were integrated into the programs by introducing commercials that were “straight”

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with “no tricks . . . no kidding” (Meyers, 2014:  221). This was achieved by beginning with an organically sounding lead-in from the host (Crosby) to the announcer of the program (in the case of Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall, Ken Carpenter), who then spoke in a casual manner for over a minute about what differentiates the sponsored product from others employing user-centered language. This type of sales pitch followed the typical mode of address on radio that emphasized the ordinariness and familiarity of the hosts and performers. Intimacy was the foundation of which programs were built through the performers directly addressing the audience and the way they presented their ordinariness. Richard Dyer notes the modes of performance developed by radio could be characterized as portraying: domestic intimacy, recognizable characters by type and individual, and performances that emphasize authenticity and ordinariness (1998:  139). It is unsurprising, then, that the preferred radio performance style coupled with the advertiser’s desire for appropriate spokespeople and the attacks on crooning  meant Crosby’s still developing star image was unsustainable, especially if he wished to succeed in radio.

1930s: image alterations In the early 1930s, Crosby was considered a playboy similar to his main rival Rudy Vallée, and Crosby’s excessive drinking was common knowledge. In 1929, he was involved in a car crash, spending sixty days in jail for reckless driving (although Crosby made a deal with his jailers and was able to work in the recording studio in the morning before returning to his cell at night) and missed his first opportunity for a lead solo in the short film The King of Jazz (John Murray Anderson, 1930), instead settling for an appearance with The Rhythm Boys (Giddins, 2001: 209–210). He was also embattled in a messy separation from his wife, Twentieth Century Fox actress Dixie Lee, who accused him of “mental cruelty.” Moreover, Crosby was strongly associated with the cultural context of the Jazz Age: the rebellion, hedonism, and immorality of the time personified through, among other things, jazz music. Crosby, as part of The Rhythm Boys, represented as Giddins put it, “something borderline

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radical: a trace of danger, a current from a generation that threatened to bust out of old and settled traditions” (2001:  139). Jazz and crooning were both new forms of music and singing that signaled a break from what came before, especially more middlebrow forms of popular music. Unsurprisingly, as discussed earlier, crooning was publically condemned, none more famously than by Cardinal William Henry O’Connell, the dean of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in America, who implied that crooning was a “bad art,” “immoral,” “lowbrow,” and “feminine” (McCracken, 2015: 227). Some of these same criticisms were leveled against jazz music. These attacks necessitated various alterations to Crosby’s image, cleaning up his “bad boy” image while also adjusting his singing style and the type of music he sang. First, he reconciled with Dixie, leading to a more family-oriented lifestyle promoted in the media. Crosby often spoke of his children on his weekly radio shows and his family became a permanent addition to his frequent holiday specials. The second change Crosby made was to his singing voice, becoming a baritone, no longer straining his voice to a higher pitch. Crosby also distanced himself from the negative connotation of “naturalness” (for many, naturalness was equivalent to laziness) associated with crooning. Though Crosby came to be admired for his natural singing voice, he demonstrated that there was an effort behind it by suggesting in the press that his singing took work and skill. The final alteration to Crosby’s image was through his music, helping him to become known as an everyman. He began performing different genres of music, moving away from purely romantic ballads and including jazz and traditional folk songs in his musical repertoire. In 1932, Crosby had a huge hit with “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” which became a Depression era anthem, especially for unemployed men. The songs Crosby released at this time were intended for male audiences more than for women as he began to align himself with white men who listened to his music. Through these musical changes, Crosby and Jack Kapp, a producer at Decca Records, created an image that allowed him to be, as Will Friedwald has commented, “all things for all people” (1991: 38). Crosby became a man of the people, but it is worth noting how unsettled this period was in American culture. The modernity of the Jazz Age with its common image of loose morals, prohibition, organized crime, urban settings, and

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the beginning of credit for Americans, later causing debt, gave way to the Great Depression. This was not an overnight transition and it has been suggested that although there was economic misery in the 1930s, the entertainment industries still produced exuberant spectacles at the same time as more reflective arts that illuminated the struggle many Americans were experiencing at the time. Torch songs about lost love, like those sung by Crosby, could also stand in for unhappiness, providing audiences with “an emotional catharsis, a temporary resolution, a satisfying moment of uplift” (Dickstein, 2009: xviii). Morris Dickstein has charted the cultural history of the Great Depression and argues that there was a “split personality of Depression culture: on the one hand, the effort to grapple with unprecedented economic disaster, to explain and interpret it; on the other hand, the need to get away, to create art and entertainment to distract people from their trouble” (2009: 4). This was apparent after the stock market crashed in 1929, when the image of the Jazz Age was replaced by gritty images of American fields without crops and people traveling further West to find work. Popular images of the time include Dorothea Lange’s photographs, such as the famous picture, “Migrant Mother” (1936), John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath published in 19383 and Crosby’s recording of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” which includes references to consumerism (“Once in khaki suits, ah, gee, we looked swell”) and larger-than-life urban buildings (“Once I built a tower up to the sun”). Within American culture, there was a transition from the modernity of the 1920s (the city, urban living, and consumerism) toward a more traditional way of life associated with the values of the heartland, which Crosby came to represent. McCracken even suggests that Kapp helped Crosby record songs that “associated him with home, family, and his roots in the rugged West rather than the sophisticated East” (2015: 266).4 More so than other stars of the era, Crosby came to illustrate the “split personality” that Dickstein discusses, most evidently in his star image, which promoted his extraordinary singing ability even as it was downplayed through his common man persona. This balance between extraordinary and ordinary qualities is a consistent element of the film star image, first argued by Dyer (1998), but it can be said that Crosby personified this dynamic more than other stars because the era of his peak stardom, from the Great Depression and through World War II, necessitated a star image that personified normality, familiarity,

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and trustworthiness. Furthermore, the high-spirited Jazz Age evolved into an era of harsh reality and it is unsurprising that Crosby, a reformed man, would become one of America’s greatest stars in this period. In the early 1930s, Crosby was first known as a singer before he began to make shorts for Mack Sennett in Hollywood, while concurrently embarking on his radio career, in addition to high profile appearances at various theaters in New York. This meant his image was shaped and utilized by these industries in differing ways. Radio and film needed to create and promote a personality to unite with Crosby’s voice. Press knowledge of Crosby’s escapades were exploited in the Sennett shorts by presenting Crosby as a playboy and romantic, always trying to win the girl. The press for one of Crosby’s earliest Paramount features, Too Much Harmony (A. Edward Sutherland, 1933), illustrates the alteration that occurred in Crosby’s image by including a press release “Bing Crosby Confesses: America’s King of Crooners Now Reveals his inmost Secrets in this Amazing Story of a ‘bad’ boy who Made Good” (Pressbook, BFI). Crosby’s 1936 feature for Paramount Anything Goes (Lewis Milestone) included in its pressbook various publicity stories about how Crosby cleaned up his act for Dixie. The 1938 film Sing You Sinners (Wesley Ruggles) features Crosby portraying Joe Beebe, the eldest of three brothers, tasked with financially supporting the family, including his mother. A chronic gambler, drinker, and all-around lazy individual, Joe finally does right by the family by paying off his gambling debts and joining his brothers in a singing group. While the film consistently shows Crosby in a negative light, the redemption of Joe by the end of the film reflects a similar trajectory in Crosby’s career up to this point. This repentant former carouser reached its zenith when Crosby played one of his most famous roles as Father O’Malley in Going My Way (Leo McCarey, 1944), a role which won him his only Academy Award for Best Actor, signaling how considerably the bad boy image had been transformed in a decade.

American dream and middle-class values The commitment to a more family-oriented image was not the only alteration to Crosby’s star image; his masculinity and temperament also changed in

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this period of budding stardom. As mentioned earlier, Dyer contends there is a similarity between the mode of performances for radio stars and the “Hollywood studio style” with one similarity “personalising the type the performer plays.” Crosby became synonymous with a social type that was, as Dyer wrote, “a central American type,” the “good Joe” (1998: 48). O.E. Klapp first wrote about social types arguing the “good Joe” is “friendly and easy going: he fits in and likes people; he never sets himself above others but goes along with the majority; he is a good sport—but, also a he-man who won’t let anyone push him around where basic rights are concerned” (qtd. in Dyer, 1998: 48). This is an apt description of Crosby’s own image. However, the “good Joe” type and Crosby’s persona display complexities that moves beyond this simple description. Crosby’s image altered just as the country moved from the decadence of the Jazz Age to the somber reality of the Depression. In addition, Crosby personified middle-class values, teaching the world, as Gary Giddins has noted, “what it meant to live the American common man’s dream” (Giddins, 2001: 11). The films Crosby made at Paramount (discussed below) capitalized on the singer’s humbleness and self-effacing nature, personifying the star’s ordinariness. Crosby was vocal about his modest acting talents often implying that he “wasn’t really an actor at all—just a lucky crooner who played himself ” (Giddins, 2001: 3). These types of statements and the popular perception that Crosby was lazy, both through his relaxed singing style and easygoing demeanor, belied his strong work ethic and the countless hours he spent in the recording studio, on film sets, and in radio studios. In many ways, his multimedia stardom personified the American work ethic, a foundational aspect of the American psyche. The promise of the American dream and the unbridled faith Americans have in achieving this dream through hard work is reflected through the rise of ordinary individuals to fame and stardom. Karen Sternheimer argues that “celebrity culture seems to provide continual reaffirmation that upward mobility is possible in America and reinforces the belief that inequality is the result of personal failure rather than systematic social conditions” (2011: 3). Sternheimer charts “eight major shifts” in celebrity magazines’ construction of the American dream from the beginning of the twentieth century through to the contemporary era. While the first two decades were focused on

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self-sufficiency, the 1930s was fixated on personal failure suggesting that failure was down to the individual’s failings and could not be attributed to the shaky economy (Sternheimer, 2011:  19–20). By America’s entry in World War II, “collective sacrifice” was paramount with many stars donating to the war effort, including Crosby. These transitions that Sternheimer maps coincided with Crosby’s altered image and his ability to admit to personal failures that stalled his career in the late 1920s and personified the need in the 1930s to represent core American values. There is no question that the American dream, a phrase that became common in the 1930s, was challenged due to the Great Depression. Many of Crosby’s film roles presented him as a “drifter,” a key metaphor for this period when, as Dickstein argues, due to the Depression a loosening of the “social bonds of family life and ties to the workplace” occurred (2009: 67). Films such as Pennies from Heaven (Norman Z McLeod, 1936) and Rhythm on the Range (Norman Taurog, 1936) begin with the Crosby character as aimless, drifting from town to town, but what becomes apparent throughout the course of the films is the importance of self-sufficiency and the desire to find companionship and be autonomous. In We’re Not Dressing (Norman Taurog, 1934), Crosby plays a sailor whose survival skills come in handy when he is stranded on a tropical island with socialites and royalty devoid of the instinct to survive. The characters Crosby portrayed illustrated the American dream principle that one must pull yourself up by your bootstraps, but what was achieved was not wealth and fame, but simple dreams of economic stability, something many viewers in the Great Depression could relate to. The definition of the American dream and indeed the middle class has shifted over time, but as Lawrence R. Samuel notes, the middle class reflects America’s “national mythology of the ‘Everyman,’ an idea that is central to [America’s] national identity” (2014: 5). Samuel goes on to say that while other countries look down upon those that fall between the “ruling elite and working class, seeing them as ‘bourgeois’,” in America, being a part of the middle class has been a source of pride and could even be seen as a “form of patriotism” (2014:  5). The common man, “good Joe” type, steeped in American vales was disseminated on Crosby’s radio programs through his laissez-faire attitude and informality. Reminiscing on his career, in 1972, Crosby indicated

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that his popularity was because “people from all walks of life can relate to me. They think, ‘He seems a natural sort of guy with no side, no pretensions’ ” (Scarth Fleet, 1972). The lack of pretension was displayed through his offscreen image, partly remade by the Paramount studios’ press office which presented Crosby as “generous, naïve, humorous, happy, modest, unpretentious, pleasingly eccentric, devoted to family, bemused by good fortune” (Giddins, 2001: 436). All of these traits speak to Crosby’s ability to be successful, famous, and wealthy, but still be admired as a common man. This is somewhat surprising when in reality the fame the star possessed allowed him to live a privileged life, an economic reality few Americans could comprehend. In addition to his radio programs and off-screen publicity, many of Crosby’s film roles emphasized his Americaness by contrasting his middle-class values with characters who represented the ruling or elite class. The characters Crosby often portrayed in films had a great affinity for the country and the values associated with small town America. These values are displayed through his characters in their middle-class aspirations, nonchalant attitude toward women, love of the country, and their comfort in family. Crosby stood for the common man whose ideals and needs were considered worthwhile while the rich seemed ridiculous—no longer people to admire because of their frivolous lifestyle devoid of the moral values of family, love, and work ethic. This antagonistic relationship between classes began in Crosby’s shorts that often pitted the singer against suitors who were “rich and prissy . . . or European and prissy” (Giddins, 2001: 254).5 It is important to differentiate, however, between the working class and the middle class in these films. Crosby represented the emerging middle class in America that by the 1950s would become the ideal from both a consumerist and moral perspective, nationally and internationally. A prototypical Crosby film from the era that displays his everyman and middle-class qualities is Rhythm on the River (Victor Schertzinger, 1940). In Rhythm on the River, Crosby plays Bob Summers, a ghostwriter for Oliver Courtney (Basil Rathbone), an important composer who suffers from writer’s block. Summers is first introduced in Oliver’s office, away from Oliver’s guests who are demanding to hear his new song. Summers delivers the song to Courtney who remarks the sheet music is wet to which Summers responds, “That’s sweat.” The song “What Would

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Shakespeare Say”? is a simple and pleasurable tune about a man imagining what Shakespeare would write about his love. Crosby sings the song effortlessly and smiles at Oscar Levant’s (Billy Starbuck, Summers’s musical partner) exuberant piano playing. Within this first scene, the film juxtaposes popular culture through Crosby’s common man ease with the cultural elite represented by Rathbone and the stuffiness of the party crowd, traditional American values and sophisticated European taste. In addition, Crosby and Rathbone are contrasted through the “high cultural capital (‘class’)” (Spicer, 2006:  141)  associated with Rathbone and the “good Joe,” common American values through Crosby. When Oliver takes the sheet music and delivers it to his party guests, they transform the song into an orchestrated performance with a female soprano taking the lead. “What Would Shakespeare Say”? performed by Crosby is a mid-tempo, folk song that would appeal to the general public while the rendition performed by Courtney’s guests appeals to the more sophisticated tastes of the elite crowd. Summers comments from the adjoining office room as he listens to their rendition, “They didn’t get any life into it. No bounce.” When Summers first sings his composition, he sits on the desk, slouched over and relaxed as Rathbone watches from his chair, tall, lean, and uptight in a tuxedo (Figure  1.1). The contrast between the two men signifies the difference between popular and high culture with emphasis placed on the simple pleasure of the common man as opposed to the difficult demands of the elite. The casting of the European Rathbone and the American Crosby also signifies the division between American democracy and European values featured in many musical films, especially fairy-tale musicals (Altman, 1987:  361). While Summers enjoys spending time at his uncle’s home in the country and has no desire for a contractual obligation to Courtney, Courtney is obsessed with maintaining his charade as a musical genius. The film suggests that to maintain the lifestyle associated with Oliver’s success, one must lie, steal, and cheat which Oliver engages in all, while Summers’s aspiration is to own a catboat, a simple dream that can be attained through solid work. By the end of the film, Summers is able to reach his dream by moving to his uncle’s country home with his fiancée Cherry Lane (Mary Martin) while Courtney is forced to expose his façade and Summers’s musical talent.

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Figure 1.1 Bing Crosby and Basil Rathbone in Rhythm on the River (1940)

This film also demonstrates how Crosby’s image is concerned with family, women, and country. Even though Crosby appears in numerous films without a wife, he often has a family whom he visits or gains a surrogate family throughout the course of the film, as in Birth of the Blues (Victor Schertzinger, 1941) and Pennies from Heaven. Furthermore, the true intention of Crosby’s films is rarely the active pursuit of women. In Rhythm on the Range when Crosby (portraying rodeo rider Jeff Larabee) first meets Francis Framer (portraying New York socialite Doris Halliday) he tells her, “I think what you’re looking for is a ladies’ man.” She responds, “And that lets you out.” Crosby smiles and says, “It sure does.” Comedy takes precedence over romance and this is also true of Crosby’s attempt to distance himself from the early attacks on crooning. In many of his films, he rarely sings directly to his love interest. In fact in Rhythm on the Range, Crosby sings more often toward his bull, Cuddles, than Doris. Alison McCracken contends the films Crosby made for Paramount worked to “underline his comedic talents and masculine ‘cool’ rather than his status as a romantic crooner” (1999: 386).

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Crosby musicals Although Crosby’s cool temperament and masculinity is emphasized in his films, romance is still a defining aspect of his persona, most notably displayed through his singing. Music is, predictably for a star first known as a singer, central to his films. However, the way music functions in the Paramount films sets Crosby’s films apart from other musicals from the same era. When Crosby first began appearing in films, the musical was a relatively new genre, evolving with each successful film. Richard Barrios’s enthralling A Song in the Dark:  The Birth of the Musical Film (2010) chronicles the establishment of the musical from just before The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927) through to 1934 when the Production Code not only transformed Hollywood, but the musical in particular, giving way to more family-oriented musicals and musical stars. What is interesting about this period is how the musical genre developed through star performers, production styles, and incorporation of various entertainment forms, such as vaudeville, stage musicals, and comedy. For example, the runaway success of The Jazz Singer and its star Al Jolson led to many carbon copy musical films being produced (knockoff films Barrios terms as “dueling mammies” musicals (2010: 139)). The musical became the most popular genre in the early sound era only for the Hollywood studios to oversaturate the market, with many expensive flops, leading to audience exhaustion for the genre. Notably, Paramount was one of the few studios to produce unique, positively received and well-remembered musicals in this period with their operettas starring Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier, such as The Love Parade (Ernst Lubitsch, 1929), One Hour with You (George Cuckor and Ernst Lubitsch, 1932), and Love Me Tonight (Rouben Mamoulian, 1932). When the popularity of musicals waned in 1930/1931, Paramount began to produce musicals that offered audiences something new by packing their films with radio stars whose voices the audiences would recognize, but whose faces they would not be familiar with (Barrios, 2010: 353). The Big Broadcast (Frank Tuttle, 1932) was Paramount’s first significant release to capitalize on radio talent and starred Crosby in his first full-length feature. This was a precarious period for the crossover between radio and film. Film studios had originally been reluctant to feature radio stars in their films in fear

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that it would drive the declining film audiences in the early 1930s to radio, ultimately upsetting film exhibitors (Meyers, 2014: 203). Studios utilized radio to promote their films, but their resistance to radio was genuine, illustrated in the studio-wide ban in 1932–1933 of their contracted film stars appearing live on radio (Meyers, 2014: 204). Hollywood was economically vulnerable in these years (Paramount went into receivership in 1933) and stars, with their dependable audience draw, were desirable. Many studios began to sign radio stars to film contracts recognizing the advantage of having established stars, even if from a different medium.6 Studios, including Warner Brothers and Paramount, also found cost-effective ways to test their new talent by casting “them in shorts, and if they were good, they would be offered long-term contracts” (Balio: 1993, 164). Crosby was one radio star Paramount signed as was Mae West. It is clear from Crosby’s early roles in Paramount films that his radio stardom was being exploited, especially through the songs that were chosen for him to sing on-screen. For example, in The Big Broadcast, one of the songs featured in the film and sung by Crosby is “Where the Blue of the Night,” the theme of his radio show (Balio: 1993, 231). The type of musicals Crosby came to make at Paramount may not have concentrated on romantic crooning, but there was no doubt that the voice was central to his appeal. Early films, especially the Sennett shorts, often began with Crosby singing or simply his voice bellowing out from a radio before revealing the face behind the voice (as illustrated in the earlier I Surrender Dear example). This was a strategy that even transferred to films he made outside of the Paramount studio (he was contractually able to make one picture per year at another studio), including the 1939 Universal production East Side of Heaven (David Butler). The film begins in a postal union office with the camera focused on the “Greetings Unit” sign before it tilts down to reveal the back of Crosby on the telephone. He begins his singing telegram and the film cuts to an older couple listening to his singing before a cut back to Crosby, in a medium shot, who spins around in his chair, merging the famous voice with his well-known face (Figures 1.2–1.4). The Hollywood studio system was fixed on standardization and differentiation. They sought to standardize their product through an industrial system that organized labor and the production of products in a similar manner to

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Figure 1.2 Bing Crosby in East Side of Heaven (1939)

manufacturing plants. Simultaneously, studios promoted difference through their particular filmic style, but also through genres and stars. In the 1930s, Paramount was a studio known for their personnel, from stars to directors, and a style of filmmaking that could be described as possessing “a casual continental sophistication in the writing and playing” (Barrios, 201: 172). Crosby joined the studio when it was financially unstable and it can be argued that Crosby was the sole reason the studio endured through that period, becoming the biggest star Paramount produced in the studio era. This is hyperbole, but not wholly inaccurate owing to the success Crosby achieved on screen and his cross media stardom which, ultimately, benefited Paramount through their most significant star.7 Paramount was unable to compete with the expensive, lavish, and big scale musical productions being produced at rival studios, such as Warner Brothers with their Busby Berkeley extravaganzas. What Paramount could produce were musicals that focused on the music and personality of their stars. Clearly, singing was fundamental to Crosby’s films and this set his films apart from

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Figure 1.3 A couple listening to Bing Crosby in East Side of Heaven (1939)

Figure 1.4 Bing Crosby in East Side of Heaven (1939)

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other musicals made in the studio era. Rick Altman asserts that many male musical stars relied on their “charm and rhythmical movement,” including Maurice Chevalier and Fred Astaire, to make up for what their singing voice lacked (1987: 136). These stars were known for their speaking style of singing and Altman goes on to say that “pure singers rarely last long in Hollywood,” although he notes that Crosby and Frank Sinatra are exceptions. Their singing, however, was “effortless” through a “seemingly untrained delivery” leading to what Altman argues is a perception of the song “as speech with pitch” (1987: 138). While I would agree that the ease of Crosby’s delivery and his untrained talent were foundation aspects of his star image, exploited in the promotion of many of his films, Crosby differed from Chevalier and Astaire because he relied on his singing as the source of wonder in his films more than charm or personality or movement. While his ordinariness, effortlessness, and natural singing ability underscored his star persona, Crosby’s films were fixated, through the mise-en-scéne and narrative, on the songs he sang. It is notable how often Crosby sings almost motionless and the stillness of his performance is matched in the mise-en-scéne that focuses on the performance in medium and/or close-up shots. Romance dictates these performative moments with Crosby almost always singing to a love interest, whether that is a woman or his prized bull, but the focus is on his voice. In the 1935 film Mississippi (A. Edward Sutherland) the first musical performance is the Rogers and Hart song “Soon,” with Tom Grayson (Crosby) sitting at a piano singing the song to his fiancé, Elvira (Gail Patrick), who is leaning on the piano. The medium shot of the two of them cuts to a close-up of Crosby singing to the left (toward Elvira), but the camera lingers on the musical performance before a close-up of Elvira appreciating the song and then a cut back to the original medium shot placement of the camera. The performance continues with this pattern before ending on a kiss between the Tom and Elvira. This example illustrates how Crosby’s singing performances are weaved into the narrative as moments of romance, but also how the films almost pause for the performance to take place. These films are star vehicles, built around Crosby’s image and as such the films become a space for him to “do her/his thing” (Dyer, 1998: 62) which is to sing like Bing Crosby. Still, it is

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remarkable that for a genre most associated with song and dance, how rarely Crosby was involved with the later. Bernard F. Dick attributes this condition solely to Paramount creating films that were “neither a musical or straight film, but one with musical numbers that were rarely integrated with the plot and were, for the most part, diversions” (2007: 87). Dick goes on to assert that Paramount produced films that were “loose enough to accommodate specialty numbers” and Crosby appeared only in a “handful of films that qualify as musicals in the traditional sense” (2007: 88). This is not unique to Crosby as there were other musical stars at the time that were famous for their singing (Dick Powell is one such example at Warner Brothers). However, musical performances, those that involve the body in energetic displays of movement, were frequently injected into other star vehicles, such as Powell’s partnering with the dancer Ruby Keeler or the Berkeley choreographed numbers in some of his 1930 musicals. Many of Crosby’s films are reflexive of his lack of movement, or more precisely, his attachment to the song and his partner to dance. In Double or Nothing (Theodore Reed, 1937), he sings “All You Want to Do Is Dance” with Mary Carlisle, crooning “the music is playing / the song that invites romance / and I / I want a chance / but you / all you want to do is dance.” Eventually Crosby attempts to join in with Carlisle, but his dancing is a tease, jokingly joining in, tossing off comments and continuing his song. Crosby is even upstaged at the end of the song by a policeman who first cuts in to dance with Carlisle before displaying his individually superior dancing skills. The musical frequently celebrates the popular song through reflexive song lyrics (Feuer, 1993:  49–50) with many of Crosby’s songs performed on-screen acknowledging his inability to dance. The singer’s position as the song man reached its peak in the 1940s, especially in Holiday Inn (Mark Sandrich, 1942) and Blue Skies (Stuart Heisler, 1946), films costarring Fred Astaire, and in the Road to. . . series of films costarring Bob Hope. The first number in Holiday Inn clearly sets out the two male stars’ ability to woo women through Crosby’s voice and Astaire’s dancing body in the number, “I’ll Capture Her Heart.”8 While Crosby croons, “I’ll capture her heart, singing,” Astaire retorts, “Just wait until she gets a load of my dancing” and the two jostle for the attention of Virginia Dale, who confirms that the

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perfect suitor would be able to sing like Crosby and dance like Astaire.9 By the 1940s, Crosby’s energy deficit was buoyed, in films, by spectacular set pieces, dancing partners (as in the case of Astaire) or even by slotting in dance numbers within his own singing performances. Holiday Inn begins the “Be Careful with My Heart” number by having Crosby sit at the piano and sing the song to Marjorie Reynolds, standing next to him (Figure 1.5). Reynolds slowly moves away from the piano, swaying to the music before Astaire enters the room and joins Reynolds on the dance floor (Figure 1.6). Unaware to Crosby, the two begin to dance and the camera first stays on a medium long shot with Crosby in the forefront and Reynolds and Astaire in the background, visually illustrating the love triangle emerging between the three. The camera then pans away from Crosby and follows the movement of the dancers, circling around the floor, catching Crosby in the bottom of the frame before abandoning him to focus on the dance (Figure 1.7). The performance begins with Crosby’s singing, overlaps the singing with Astaire’s dance, and finally ends on the pairing

Figure 1.5 Bing Crosby and Marjorie Reynolds in Holiday Inn (1942)

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Figure 1.6 Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, and Marjorie Reynolds in Holiday Inn (1942)

Figure 1.7 Fred Astaire and Marjorie Reynolds in Holiday Inn (1942)

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of Reynolds and Astaire, instilling Crosby’s number with the energy he often lacks. Energy is an essential part of the musical and, as argued by Dyer (2002) the utopic escape and wish fulfilment inherent in the genre. Energy is displayed through the “capacity to act vigorously,” “human power,” and “activity potential” (Dyer, 2002: 24). These traits are associated with Crosby through his connection to other people and their capacity for activity, but this is more apparent in his 1940s’ films when the musical evolved to become more spectacular through color, large-scale numbers, and boisterous performances.

1940s: World War II and postwar period The 1940s and specifically the first few years after World War II were the pinnacle of Crosby’s stardom. By this point, he was viewed as, quoting from the press book for his 1946 feature Blue Skies, a “one-man national institution.” Similar to the prior decade, the 1940s brought about major shifts in American national identity, personal circumstance, and economic stability. Crosby’s image did not alter greatly in this decade, but various elements of his persona became more pronounced, especially his American identity and middle-class image, and his crossmedia stardom greatly assisted his “national institution” position. Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black detail Hollywood’s complex relationship with the war and the American government, needing to please their overseas markets which could account for as much as 40 percent of their revenues while not disturbing politicians who wanted America to enter the war nor those that supported interventionist policies (2000: 20–21). Koppes and Black also discuss America’s uneasy relationship to propaganda because of the perspective that “access to information is crucial to democratic citizenship” (2000: 48). Eventually, America entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese and Hollywood and the American government worked together, not without tension, to produce morale-boosting films that would “mobilize public opinion for war” (Koppes and Black, 2000:  vii). The entire American entertainment industry rallied to assist the war effort by continuing to produce entertainment, entertain troops, and help to sell war bonds,

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among other activities. Crosby as a popular musician/entertainer, radio star, and film star was omnipresent in popular culture and Mary Anne Schofield argues, “because he was the leading celebrity in three entertainment media— radio, phonograph recordings, and motion pictures—from 1943–1950, it was his version of the war that shaped America and Americans during the war and in the immediate postwar years” (2007: 867) (author’s italics). If this statement seems like an exaggeration, one only needs to look at the entertainment the singer produced in the three years and eight months of the war to verify Schofield’s assessment. Crosby worked continuously, even excessively during the war, appearing in eight full-length films, twelve short films (including guest appearances), and more than seventy programs for the Armed Forces Radio Service, appeared in at least 190 other radio programs, recorded 160 songs for commercial release—and out of these, an incredible fifty-four were top-thirty hits, including nine number one hits. (Macfarlane, 2007: 145–146)

The Kraft Music Hall, Crosby’s weekly radio show during the war, became an important space to promote the war effort, celebrate servicemen, and implore Americans to take part in any way they can. Immediately after the opening song on the July 6, 1944 episode featuring Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Crosby, in his charming and relaxed manner, announces that the show is “bound around the world to wherever our soldiers are stationed” before shifting into a call for men to volunteer as paratroopers. Crosby signs off the show by telling the audience to take another look at their budget because the “fifth war loan has yet to be met. We have to meet it.” He goes on to say, “Our loved ones are meeting far and cold steel . . . Get on it. Don’t let someone else pay for your membership in the human race.” This is a somber way to end the broadcast, but Crosby comes across as warm and genuine, using the term “we” to suggest the collective impact of the war and in the last speech, the patriotic spirit needed to endure the war. As Malcolm Macfarlane stated, Crosby “was virtually the ‘Voice of America’ as he articulated the feelings of Americans everywhere in his wartime broadcasts” (qtd. in Schofield, 2007: 869). Sternheimer maintains that celebrity discourse during the war focused on patriotism, using celebrities as symbols of opportunity and abundance

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demonstrating that the American dream is a foundation of the American identity and worth fighting for (2011:  100). Furthermore, stars led the charge in the war effort, further cementing Hollywood as a quintessentially American industry (2011:  100). Many studios, including Paramount, produced what Jennifer R. Jenkins has deemed “war musicals,” films that accentuated the “dual tasks of providing escapism and instilling a sense of duty as a priority for all, not just those in uniform” (2001: 316)—a similar approach was taken on the radio as evidenced in the example above. The escapism of the genre may appear contrary to war time, but as Jane Feuer notes, the Hollywood musical’s “explicit function was to glorify American entertainment” (1993:  90). The industry, genre, stars, and patriotic themes all conspired to produce thoroughly American products. The two Crosby films that most closely fit into the “war musical” genre is Holiday Inn and Star Spangled Rhythm (George Marshall, 1942). During the filming of Holiday Inn the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, leading to the expansion of the Independence Day (July 4) section in the film, including newsreel footage of soldiers, war ships, factories, and President Roosevelt. Star Spangled Rhythm is an all-star Paramount production that narratively builds to a variety show for enlisted Navy men. These films could be described as “a homefront extension of the USO tours” (Jenkins, 2001:  325)  that many entertainers, including Crosby, performed for servicemen during the war with each star performing acts that are closely associated with their star image. This is most clearly displayed in Crosby’s final number, “Old Glory” when he is flanked on stage by a replica of Mount Rushmore, a flowing American flag, and a crowd of “average” Americans. The number diverges into a conversation between Crosby and a naysayer in the crowd who isn’t convinced by his “flag waving.” Various individuals assert their pride in America, its diversity, and the American dream before Crosby states, “American cornucopia, buddy, this is the way to utopia. This is your future, yours and mine. There aren’t any Germans, Italians or Japs gonna push us off our hard won, homemade Rand McNally maps.” This speech could be perceived as cliché, but Crosby’s sincerity, trustworthiness, and all-around “good Joe” persona help to authenticate the American goodwill within what could be (and, indeed, has been) deemed propaganda entertainment.

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Holiday Inn is also meaningful to Crosby’s career as the first time he performed the song, “White Christmas” on-screen (He would sing the song for the first time on his radio program on Christmas Day in the same year (Macfarlane, 2007: 141)). Mark Glancy remarks that Holiday Inn was the film that “established the commercial viability of the Christmas film” in Hollywood (2000:  64). People were displaced during the war, whether through soldiers stationed abroad or American citizens moving to urban areas to help the war effort. Christmas as a time of coming together for friends and family became idealized due to the improbability for many families to spend the holiday together. “White Christmas” situates this ideal in a dream (“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas”) with a melancholic tone that underscores the song because the dream is not a reality. More than a decade later, the song, by this time a holiday staple, is revived in White Christmas (Michael Curtiz, 1954) in two performances, but the first coming only a few minutes into the film, visually displays the longing and overall gloominess the song could produce in its listeners. While soldiers only miles from the frontline watch Captain Bob Wallace (Crosby) sing the song in front of a serene snow covered backdrop of an American small town, the camera cuts between Crosby’s subtle performance and the soldiers in attendance dropping their heads in sorrowful contemplation. More than in Holiday Inn, this performance perfectly captures the discord between the real world and the fantasy projected in “White Christmas” that took place during World War II.10 Crosby later stated in an interview: Well, it was always kind of a wrench for me to sing that song . . . I love it of course, but at the camps and in the field hospitals, places where spirits weren’t too high anyway, they’d ask for the song—they’d demand it—and half the audience would be in tears. (qtd. in MacFarlane, 2007: 144)

In addition to the filmed performance of “White Christmas” in Holiday Inn and the live recordings on radio, the song was also ubiquitous during the war having been reissued by Decca records every year, a practice (reissues of previously recorded songs) that only became commonplace in the late 1930s when there was a significant upturn in record sales (Giddins, 2001: 520). The 1940s was also noteworthy for Crosby by teaming him with Bob Hope in seven features spanning from 1940’s The Road to Singapore (Victor

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Schertzinger) to The Road to Hong Kong (Norman Panama) in 1962, with five of the Road to. . . films released in the decade.11 The film series, and possibly even more, the professional relationship between Hope and Crosby helped to cement Crosby’s American masculinity in this period. Contrasting the established Crosby persona in the 1940s with the evolving Crosby image of the 1930s, it becomes clear that male partnerships, and especially his with Hope, aided in balancing his romantic tendencies with more masculine pursuits. Servicemen would not be in tears, as the above quote indicates, for the 1930s playboy who made women weak in the knees just through the sound of his voice. Crosby’s image needed to become more multifaceted to appeal to male audiences and he was able to do this in the 1930s through the image alterations discussed earlier. However, his camaraderie with other male stars on-screen, from Louis Armstrong in Pennies from Heaven to Astaire in Holiday Inn and Blue Skies to Danny Kaye in White Christmas, and Hope in not only the Road to. . . films, but various shorts and radio appearances expanded his masculine image to be regarded as a man other men would wish to befriend. The war context is vital, as Steven Cohan argues, because of the cultural significance of the “buddy relation” when men formed intensely close relationships in primarily all-male environments (2003: 155). These films, Mike Chopra-Gant believes, provided “a space within the culture in which the pleasures of male friendships could be examined” (2006: 139). The Hope and Crosby partnership was successful in this period because of the Americaness of their comedy, but also the perspective of the rest of the world promoted in the Road to. . . series. Walter Raubicheck even opines that Hope and Crosby were “aggressively American male personalities,” down-and-out and willing to betray the other for a dame, but also fair and generous (2007: 80). The pairing of the two stars brought out the best in each other, noted by Giddins who writes, “Bing was never more comically broad and inventive than with Bob. Bob was never more human and credible than with Bing” (2001: 566). Hope also injected energy into Crosby’s films through his exaggerated faces, physical comedy, and overly enthusiastic delivery of jokes. The Road to. . . films present an alternative to everyday life, freedom from responsibility and from many of the expectations that defined Crosby’s middleclass image: marriage, family, and a profession (Raubicheck, 2007: 81). In this

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sense, the films could be read as diversions from the war (impending when The Road to Singapore and The Road to Zanzibar (Victor Schertzinger, 1941) were released, recently ended when The Road to Utopia (Hal Walker, 1946) and The Road to Rio (Norman McLeod, 1947) were released). The reflexive nature of the films, breaking the fourth wall and the formulaic premises, were part of the enjoyment of the series as was the spontaneous (appearing) nature of Hope and Crosby’s performances. The two would often poke fun at their on-screen buddy with Hope telling the audience in The Road to Bali (Hal Walker, 1952), “He’s [Crosby] going to sing now, folks. This is time to get popcorn” while in The Road to Morocco (David Butler, 1942) after watching a first kiss straighten Hope’s curled shoes, Crosby asks Dorothy Lamour to kiss Hope on the nose and “see if you can straighten that out.” The films take place in exotic locations and many of the jokes emerged from these American buddies attempting to adjust to foreign customs with generally disastrous results. Although it would be a stretch to say servicemen experienced anything similar to what Hope and Crosby did on-screen, being an American in a foreign land and being exposed to strikingly different customs must have struck a chord for many viewers of these films in the 1940s. Foreign environments were able to, in many ways, accentuate Crosby’s Americaness even more through the contrast with other cultures. In the postwar period, he appeared in The Emperor Waltz (Billy Wilder, 1948) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Tay Garnett, 1949), films that placed the star in non-American settings and historical time periods. In The Emperor Waltz, Crosby portrays Virgil Smith, a travelling salesman attempting to sell a gramophone to the Emperor of Austria in hope that it will lead to greater sales of the musical device in the country. The films begins with a regal ball at the palace which Crosby interrupts to talk to Countess Johanna Augusta Franziska (Joan Fontaine) before they dance off to a private room to discuss their personal problems. The film immediately cuts to a group of four individuals watching this take place and begin to comment on the “love affair that has rocked all of Vienna for the past four months.” When one onlooker asks, “who is he”?, a respectable man in a tuxedo adds, “the most vulgar, impossible, obnoxious human” to which the older bejeweled woman interrupts, “in one word, an American.” The film is obviously poking fun at the European/

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American divide and aristocracy and nobility, but these comments help to frame Crosby as the average American in this period, not pompous or ostentatious and unafraid to go against the grain. Crosby embodied the American egalitarian “can-do” attitude, even if it ruffled some feathers abroad. This overly nationalistic identity was important in the postwar period when America, and much of the Western world, were returning to peace after enduring war. While Crosby was the biggest box office draw in Hollywood in the first few years after the war, his stardom presented only one type of image that emerged from this period. Chopra-Gant notes that the postwar period was radically ambivalent and the “most accurate image of the intellectual and cultural climate of the early postwar years is one of a culture characterized not by consensus, but by a volatile mixture of contradictory feelings” (2006: 5). Some Americans wished to “return to a more traditional patriarchal image” (Bruzzi, 2005:  1)  with Crosby a star firmly associated with traditional American masculinity. According to Chopra-Gant, the films produced in this period fit into three broad themes: “national identity, the family and masculinity” (2006:  11)  with Crosby’s films especially useful to reinvigorate and reinstate “the cornerstones of American national identity through the nation’s popular cultural productions” (2006: 25). The star’s Catholicism became more pronounced in this period, especially after appearing as Father O’Malley in Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s (Leo McCarey, 1945).12 This allowed, as Elaine Anderson Phillips argues, Crosby to “signify a masculine self-control combined with moral gravitas” (2007:  36), although as even Anderson Philips contends, not all Crosby’s films presented the star as morally upright. Scheming and manipulation was always central to his film roles, especially the Road to. . . films where he would often compete in one-upmanship with Hope. Still, the dominant public image of Crosby in this period was one of a “calm, confidant man and a decent moral figure” (Anderson Phillips, 2007: 38). This was a transitional period for Catholics, entering the cultural mainstream similar to the Jewish community earlier in the century. Eric Michael Mazur argues that, similar to Jewish songwriters and movie makers, “American Catholics involved in American public culture also reworked what it meant to be an American” (2007: 180). No one did this more than Crosby and later John F. Kennedy as

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the first Catholic President, presenting a Catholicism of confidence, patriotism, practicality, and honesty.

1950s: declining stardom Crosby began the 1950s as one of Hollywood’s biggest and most established stars, but ended the decade as a past his prime old relic from a bygone era. The cultural shifts that happened in the 1950s made it almost impossible for a national institution, and one who had been for over two decades, to persist as a major star, especially one aged in their fifties for most of the 1950s. The decade also brought about significant changes in his personal life when his first wife, Dixie Lee, died in 1952 and he married actress Kathryn Grant in 1957. They would go on to have three children. This marriage began a very happy period for the star where he was semi-retired, but still made various appearances on television, radio,13 and in films, some with his much younger kids by Kathryn. Crosby’s personal wealth was also consolidated in the 1950s and 1960s through his company’s (Bing Crosby Enterprise) innovations into magnetic tape to record radio shows and videotape to record television programs, negating the need for live performances. Bing began the 1950s as the third most “moneymaking” star in Hollywood according to a popular poll of theater exhibitors, but this number decreased to fifth in 1951 and 1953, fourth in 1952, and eighth in 1954 (Lev, 2003: 306). By 1955, he was no longer listed in the top ten. This would, at first glance, point to the diminished appeal of the crooner, especially after the watershed year of 1956 when Elvis Presley became a phenomena and rock ‘n’ roll seemed to replace everything that came before. This, however, does not account for the success of Frank Sinatra in the very same period as Crosby’s reduced stardom. Sinatra was younger than Crosby, but his core stardom was able to appeal to a more ambivalent and rebellious time in American culture than the more pleasant, easygoing, and friendly charm of Crosby. Karen McNally (2008) has noted that Sinatra’s masculine vulnerability acts as the cornerstone of his star persona. While bravado works to disguise his weakness, Sinatra demonstrates the vulnerable state of masculinity in 1950s

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America through his meek physicality, ethnic background, and unease with postwar America. If there was a return to traditional gender values in the postwar 1940s through the screen image of Crosby, Sinatra represented the younger generation’s attempt to find their place within a changing cultural landscape. Though Sinatra was already in his forties in the 1950s, he came to personify a young, outsider image. He was less focused on generational differences than other rebellious male images of the 1950s such as Presley, James Dean, and Marlon Brando, but he still disrupted accepted notions of masculinity. This disruption was evident in many of his 1950s films, such as From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953), Young at Heart (Gordon Douglas, 1954), and Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958), but also through the concept albums he produced in the same period, including In the Wee Small Hours (1955) and Sinatra Sings Only for the Lonely (1958). Vulnerability was generally missing from Crosby’s image and in a decade where masculinity was being examined and the type of traditional masculinity Crosby stood for, challenged, it is unsurprising his stardom would decline (both as singer and actor). The one notable exception was his starring role in The Country Girl (George Seaton, 1954) where Crosby played against type as an alcoholic, out of work performer and was perceived as an actor, possibly for the first time in his career. Linda A. Robinson (2007) charts how Paramount and the actor promoted Crosby’s change of character type in The Country Girl, not playing “Bing Crosby” in the film (his established persona), but a character that is insecure, vulnerable, and cruel. In fact, Robinson suggests that the goodwill audiences had toward Crosby helped sell the film because the nature of Crosby’s persona, the sense of comradeship it had long cultivated with the screen audience, automatically allies the audience with Elgin, despite his obvious weakness and duplicity, so that the audience is resistant to “believing” the worst of him (even as that worst is exhibited on screen). (2007: 58) (author’s italics)

The film played on the illusion of Crosby as a washed up entertainer by implying many similarities between Crosby and the character of Frank Elgin. This was most evident in the first scene of the film when Elgin is brought in to read

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for a part and the only person who believes in his talent is director Bernie Dodd (William Holden). As Dodd argues to his producers, “I know a lot of guys who can act better than Elgin and I  know a lot of guys who can sing better, but I can’t think of anybody who can do both as well.” The same could be said about Crosby. Although his performance was celebrated with good reviews and an Academy Award nomination, it didn’t lead to more serious roles. Crosby’s reduced workload and advancing age may have impacted on this more than any other reasons.

Conclusion By the late 1950s and into the 1960s and 1970s, Crosby was perceived as a “grandfather,” with many viewing the singer as “a grandfatherly man wearing a floppy hat with a golf club on his shoulder” (Dempsey, 2007: 68). This final picture of the star is most likely how many remember him today, if they remember him at all. The debate rages on as to whether Crosby is a well-remembered star or if he is only, presently, associated with Christmas through the popularity of his rendition of “White Christmas.” Why certain stars endure and others fade is the subject of a book I coedited and the various chapters illustrated the complex nature of lasting stardom (Bolton and Lobalzo Wright, 2016). Some stars endure through early tragic death while others do so by taking a more proactive role in their career. Still more stars find that they are excessively associated with a particular cultural context and when the culture shifts, their stardom is no longer relevant. What is fascinating with Crosby is that his image altered to fit various times, that he also was very committed to the behind-the-scenes matters of his career, and left an extraordinary legacy as a performer in three different mediums. He was, at one point in his career, hip and cool through his association with jazz, producing songs that had a beat and hinted at rebellion and sensuality. While it is true that this early image became watered down in the 1930s, Crosby was still part of the swing era that dominated popular music from mid-1930s through to the late 1940s—a musical form built on excitement, freedom, and diversity (Erenberg, 1998: xvii).14

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The 1950s rock ‘n’ roll and youth culture moved the goal posts, so to speak, and this had an impact on Crosby’s ability not only to maintain his stardom while alive, but to stay relevant posthumously. It must also be acknowledged that some of Crosby’s performances not only appear outdated in modern times due to their corny and sentimental tone, but also his performances in blackface that are, understandably, difficult to watch.15 Crosby was not a notorious figure and Roger Gilbert has argued that “American cultural icons tend to come in two flavors . . . beloved and notorious” (2010: 167) (author’s italics). Predictably, Crosby is one of Gilbert’s main case studies in the “beloved” category and Gilbert writes that Crosby’s “easygoing persona whose familiarity and relative unchangingness” made him an “island of stability in tumultuous times” (2010: 168). It was his stability in times of instability that solidified his widespread popularity. It must also be noted that nostalgia informed his image from an early point in his career. As mentioned, Crosby employed minstrel performance modes and appeared in films that celebrated the “Old South.” His radio performances also would often include sections that would recreate musical performances from many of his prior films. For example, in a 1945 Kraft Music Hall show with Duke Ellington as guest, Bing took part in a medley of songs from his 1935 film, Mississippi. By 1945, Crosby was an established star with a wealth of material to draw on, thus it is understandable that he would perform some of his greatest hits on his weekly radio program. However, this was also toward the end of the war when some Americans desired a return to earlier gender relations and codes and Crosby fit this ideal well. By the 1950s, and a significantly prosperous period for many Americans, nostalgia for that bygone era was displaced by an excitement for the present and future. Crosby missed the important youth culture that took place in the 1950s; the one that we still look back on fondly; the one that is personified by the next star I  will examine, Elvis Presley. But, Crosby’s lack of posthumous staying power does not discount his importance in not just Hollywood, but American popular culture. Crosby matters, as Gilbert asserts (2010: 183), and his legacy—in films, radio, and recorded music—is more vital than most will ever comprehend.

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Notes 1 Both Murray (2005) and MacDonald (1979) discuss the similarities between the two star systems. 2 See Meyers (2014) for a fuller discussion of the “symbiosis between radio and Hollywood” that peaked in the late 1930s and 1940s. 3 Crosby is even mentioned twice in The Grapes of Wrath in chapter 15. 4 Born in northwest America in Tacoma, Washington, Crosby’s family later moved to Spokane. Crosby graduated from Gonzaga High School and attended three years at Gonzaga University before leaving college to pursue music. 5 It is predictable that these films would seek to contrast Crosby with a suitor who was “prissy” at the very same time that he was attempting to discard the effeminate connotations of crooning. 6 Crosby was originally signed to Paramount Pictures (known at the time as Paramount Publix) because of his success on radio, but also his popular appearances at the Paramount Theatre in New York. 7 James Douglas Eames asserts in The Paramount Story, Paramount “had been sustained during the dark days by Bing Crosby, musicals, Cecile De Mille spectacles, and the outrageous sex comedies of Mae West” (1985: 114). Crosby’s contribution was monumental to the studio in this period. 8 The 1946 film Blue Skies also confirms Crosby’s association with song and Astaire’s with dance in the performance of “A Couple of Song and Dance Men” to which Crosby sings, “I’m the song” and Astaire adds, “I’m the dance.” 9 Dale responds to their advances by singing to Crosby, “If you could dance instead of sing, I’d learn to love you somehow”; and to Astaire, “If you could sing instead of dance, I’d take you home with me now.” 10 Blue Skies, released just after the war, also includes a short montage of Crosby entertaining soldiers ending with a verse from “White Christmas” and the camera panning to capture the quiet and serious looking soldiers in attendance. 11 An eighth Road to . . . film, Road to the Fountain of Youth, was planned in 1977, but was abandoned when Crosby died in October of that year. 12 Crosby would also play a priest, Father Conroy, in Say One for Me (Frank Tashlin, 1959). 13 Crosby would record fifteen-minute radio broadcasts with the Buddy Cole Trio that were heard on a daily basis as late as 1961 on the CBS network (Bookbinder, 1977).

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The Crooner Film Star: Bing Crosby 14 See Lewis A. Erenberg’s (1998) Swingin’ the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture for a survey of this period. 15 Michael Dunne (2004) is one of many to discuss Crosby’s ties to racist performance styles, including blackface, in some of his films.

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2

The Rock ‘N’ Roll Film Star: Elvis Presley

Introduction While it can be argued that Bing Crosby has been forgotten in the contemporary era, Elvis Presley is still ever present in our culture. Contrary to the infamous announcement that would signal the end of his concerts in the 1970s, Elvis has never really left the building. Presley was a cultural touchstone when he was alive and still is more than forty years after his death. Out of all the case studies featured within this book, Presley is, arguably, the most well-known star image. In addition, he is the most written about and commented upon star examined. It would be understandable to suggest that there is nothing new to say about Presley and I would be the first to admit that the singer has been discussed in relation to almost every context imaginable, including his poor Southern background, his relation to black American music traditions, and his time in Hollywood. Although many great writers have explored all of these aspects of Presley’s stardom, what is most evident is that while Presley was, and still is, a complex star image, various narratives have come to dominate our understanding of Presley. And this is most apparent in the evaluation of his film stardom. The films Presley made in Hollywood have been criticized and widely dismissed as cheaply made star vehicles unworthy of Presley’s innate talent. The condemnation of the Presley films, generally reserved for the films made in the 1960s and after the star returned from the Army, is so omnipresent that most biographies, cultural commentaries, and even academic work on Presley tend to focus on the same trajectory: Presley’s rock ‘n’ roll rise was sanitized through his induction into the Army; the carbon copy films made after

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his release from the Army were predetermined by his controlling manager, Colonel Tom Parker; Presley wanted to reclaim his music stardom and did so through his 1968 television special, completing his film contract; performing, throughout the 1970s, in Las Vegas and touring the United States in garish jumpsuits before succumbing to a humiliating death in his home bathroom, an overweight, prescription drug-addicted shadow of his younger self. While this summary of Presley’s life is mixed with truth and judgment, it is still the most common way the star is written about and remembered. Although Presley was a commercially successful film star in the early 1960s, his film stardom is rarely analyzed on its own, often overlooked in favor of more complex studies that explore his cultural value, both in life and in death. Douglas Brode opens his book Elvis Cinema and Popular Culture (2006) by admitting that “practically every aspect of his life and career has been scrupulously studied” (1) with one element of Presley’s stardom that has remained “virtually untouched by scholars: The movies” (2). Brode’s book is a significant addition to this underdeveloped area, convincingly arguing that “far from the agreed-upon notion that a Presley film consists of nothing more than a single story, told over and over again with little modification other than variable settings, costumes and leading ladies, the films serve as an effective barometer of our ever-changing social, cultural and political landscape” (2006: 9). Still, Presley’s films are habitually caught in a no man’s land between film production in the 1950s and the 1960s, a significant era in Hollywood when the studio system collapsed and independent filmmaking became more commonplace. In the edited collection New Constellations:  Movie Stars of the 1960s (2012), Pamela Robertson Wojcik writes about stars omitted from the collection with Presley listed, noting that stars on this particular list, including Doris Day, Rock Hudson, and Dean Martin, were “each repeatedly among the top ten box office stars during the 1960s” (13). Wojicik goes on to say that many of these stars were “definitive for a different decade and are included in other volumes” of the series (2012: 13). Presley, however, is not featured in the 1950s collection with only a few mentions of the star throughout the book.1 This perfectly illustrates Presley’s lost film stardom and how his industrial position as a commercially successful star (at least in the early 1960s) is usurped in favor of prioritizing the meaning of his star image. As will be explored in this chapter,

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Presley’s films are disdained due to their formulaic premises, economical production, but mainly, viewed as inferior products in comparison to Presley’s music, television, and film outputs of the 1950s. What is most important within this study is not to revaluate his films, but to unpack why this has become the dominant Presley narrative and to consider how his transition from music to film may have had an impact on his inability to become a critically successful film star. This chapter will consider Presley’s stardom, both in music and film, and how various popular mythologies have come to shape how his film stardom is evaluated, while also examining what alters in the post-Army films, coming to some conclusions as to why they are so often mocked.

Mythology and the Elvis films Before delving into Presley’s films, it is important to consider the role myths have played in Presley’s career, both in life and death, and how these myths have informed the legacy of his film stardom. Gilbert B. Rodman (1996) has written a chapter about “Elvis Myths” in his book that considers Elvis’s posthumous career, Elvis after Elvis: The Posthumous Career of a Living Legend. Rodman summarizes the major myths associated with Elvis, myths that articulate his star image in relation to class, race, and the American dream. Rodman is not the first to plot these myths, often referencing, especially, Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train (2005) which also explores the various “tensions” that have come to define Presley, emphatically stating: “Elvis inherited these tensions, but more than that, gave them his own shape” (155). Still, Rodman convincingly argues that historical contexts alter the way many of the “Elvis myths” are read, but there is no denying their persistence. Myths are notoriously difficult to define and can produce narratives, revolving “around a particular point (or points) of articulation” (Rodman, 1996: 30–31). Marcus has suggested that myths are prevalent in popular music with an elasticity to their meaning: “it’s a big story, a grand story, a story with room in it—room for whoever might want to join the story, room for whatever beginning or ending one might want to try to put on it” (1999: 20). Marcus picks up on the shared nature of myths,

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but also their inability to be pinned down due to their liberal structure and functional space. Myths exist almost between the “real” and the “imagined,” ideologically rooted in allegories, stories, and narratives. Myths often feature gods or supernatural beings, and this is no less the case for music or film stars, our closest gods and goddesses. As Edgar Morin stated in Les Stars, “Stars are beings that partake at once of the human and the divine, they are analogous in some respects to the heroes of mythologies or the gods of Olympus, generating a cult, or even a sort of religion” (1972: 8). Elvis’s divine status has been examined by many, including by Gregory L. Reece in Elvis Religion: The Cult of the King (2006), but the mythology that shrouds his star image displaces reality, in that what becomes known and accepted are the imagined, but extremely powerful, myths. Facts, as Rodman argues, matter only when they are bound up in larger myths (1996: 38). Hence, the financial successes of the Presley films or even the pleasure some audiences may derive from the films are subsumed into the mythology of artist restricted by the system. It is important to summarize Presley’s music and film career, briefly considering cultural and industrial alterations that helped facilitate a star like Presley and then required that same star to modify their image.

Stardom, culture, and industry There can be no doubt that Presley represented the rebellious image of the 1950s, both within America and worldwide, and his cultural impact cannot be overstated. Presley’s music career signaled the beginning of rock ‘n’ roll for a worldwide audience and confirmed the power of the teenage market. While the cultural value and meaning of Presley, his music, politics, sexuality, fans, and commercialism have continued to be debated, his film career has been regarded as insignificant or at its worst, “fluff.” What is most striking about Presley’s film stardom is the length to which he and his controlling manager, Colonel Tom Parker, went to create a nonthreatening Presley in an attempt to turn him into a global film star. Through film, Presley became part of the establishment that had at first vilified him as a degenerate for his sexually suggestive music and performances. He became an institution, an enterprise

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concerned with the business of selling Presley as a matinee idol and not a rock ‘n’ roll rebel. In fact, he virtually abandoned his music career to become a film star, only releasing soundtrack albums from 1963 to 1966 with only seven studio albums released in the 1960s as compared to sixteen soundtrack albums. Presley’s career divides into two eras2: pre-army (1955–1959) and post-army (1960–1970) enlistment, contextualizing him in relation to the changing music industry, the rise of the teenager as consumer, and the break-up of Hollywood studios—charting the change in his stardom from rebellion to conformity and (arguably) ending as a cultural joke. More than any other media, radio was the place where rock ‘n’ roll became a phenomenon.3 As Robert Peterson (1990) notes, many applications were granted after the war that led to double the number of radio stations than there were in the early 1940s. These stations were mainly independent, locally owned, and required inexpensive forms of entertainment with the phonograph becoming the most cost-efficient way to program stations. The postwar era saw a boom in race4 and hillbilly records, two areas of music that had been virtually disregarded by the recording industry. The ability of Presley and his generation to hear and play new genres of music created the cross-generic form of rock ‘n’ roll born out of African American culture. It also meant that record companies such as Sun Records would take a chance on recording music that was not easily defined and identified as “race records.” Television also became an important medium for music stars beginning in the 1950s. Simon Frith (2002) has noted that major music stars of the 1950s came to prominence through their television performances on variety shows, causing the music industry to realize “at once that television was a potentially fundamental component of the star-making machinery” (279). Presley’s early live performances (especially notable performances on The Milton Berle Show, The Steve Allen Show, and The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956) created a stir displaying Presley’s overt sexuality that consistently presented his sexualized body as an object of desire. Thomas C.  Carlson has described his early television performances as “so sexy, not white sexy, not coy sexy, but so humping swaggering black r&b club sexy” that they led to a national uproar (1999:76). Much has been written about Presley’s early television performances and the inability of the networks to control what many deemed his obscene behavior, often

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filming him from the waist upwards or as in the famous incident when Presley was forced to wear a tuxedo and sing to a hound dog on The Steve Allen Show (July 1, 1956). In addition to television, several transformations in Hollywood in the 1950s created a need for rock ‘n’ roll films and the ultimate rock ‘n’ roll star, Presley. First, the emerging teen consumer meant that for the first time in America’s history, teenagers were considered an important demographic group economically, acting as “an immediate boom to the nation’s emerging consumer-based economy” (Doherty, 2002: 41). The dwindling cinema attendance, skyrocketing costs of film production, and the loss of secure profits through ownership of theater chains meant that studios began to produce inexpensive films appealing to teenagers and almost always including rock ‘n’ roll. The history of rock ‘n’ roll films begins with Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955), the first film to prominently use rock ‘n’ roll music, with Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” featured over the opening credits. The film has also been labeled as a juvenile delinquency film owing to rock ‘n’ roll’s links to juvenile delinquency and treatment as a threat to American values. The newness of rock ‘n’ roll, adolescence, and cultural obsession with sex, “the most important thing in life in fifties America,” as Dyer noted (2004: 22), all contributed to Presley’s position as both hero and villain. Presley biographer Peter Guralnick described the “threat” of adolescents as follows: A widespread breakdown of morality and cultural values, race mixing, riots, and irreligion all were being blamed on Elvis Presley and rock ‘n’ roll by a national press that was seemingly just awakening to the threat, the popularity of the new music among the young, and, of course, the circulation gains that could always be anticipated from a great hue and cry. (2000: 286)

While independent film companies began producing juvenile delinquency and rock ‘n’ roll pictures hoping to cash in on the latest “craze,” teen exploitation pictures were considered too risky for the major studios. The studios were worried about featuring music, artists, or styles that could become outdated by the film’s release; as a result they produced films that, while featuring rock ‘n’ roll, still prioritized adults and the traditional family.5

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Presley began his film career in 1956 with Love Me Tender (Robert D. Webb) an American Civil War drama featuring him in a supporting role that confirmed his immense appeal and star power through the centrality of his music. While the film features only four of his musical performances, the primary performance is “Love Me Tender” which came to replace the original title of the film, The Reno Brothers. By the time the film was released, Presley was the most popular performer in America with an avid fan base. Though his music stardom was exploited in Love Me Tender, there was an uneasiness about how to use his stardom, especially evident in many of the posters for the film used to publicize the film that displayed Presley’s contemporary music image promoting a drama set in the nineteenth century (evident in this book’s cover image). While Love Me Tender was his first film, the star vehicle Loving You (Hal Kanter, 1957) truly established Presley’s film stardom, followed closely by Jailhouse Rock (Richard Thorpe, 1957) and King Creole (Michael Curtiz, 1958). In his pre-Army films, there is an obvious negotiation between Presley’s teenage audience and the more family-oriented audience his manager Colonel Tom Parker and the film studios wished to attract. In all three films, Presley portrays a young man who has been labeled a juvenile delinquent and sexual rebel by society, but who through the course of the film demonstrates his ability and desire to reaffirm American societal gender norms. Presley’s preArmy films are organized around rags-to-riches narratives containing music and teenage angst appealing to adolescent audiences while endorsing the American patriarchal society to appease adult audiences. In all three films, Presley finds success by becoming a rock ‘n’ roll star (or, as is the case in King Creole, ends with his character performing on stage at the “King Creole”) with his style of music deemed by the films as youthful and energetic, as opposed to despicable and reprehensible. By the time Presley made his last narrative film in 1969—Change of Habit (William A. Graham)—he had become a rich movie star, but as a result had lost most of his music credibility. His last twenty-seven films made in Hollywood, including Blue Hawaii (Norman Taurog, 1961) and Viva Las Vegas (George Sidney, 1963), were the antithesis of his first four films:  more mainstream, tame, and safe. As Peter Guralnick noted, by 1957 the criticism against Presley

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and rock ‘n’ roll became too intense, serving as “a lightning rod for a more and more sharply divided society” (2000: 384) or, in Ian Inglis’s (1996) words, his career went from early nonconformity to eventual conformity. If this process took place mostly through the films themselves, there were some additional alterations to his star persona that helped create the new celluloid Presley. First, he enlisted in the Army in 1958, a calculated move to tone down his nonconformist persona. Most of Presley’s time in the Army was presented in public view through photographs, newsreel footage, and newspaper stories. While in the Army, he continued to release music, with estimated earnings of two million dollars in 1958, his first year of service (Inglis, 1996: 62). Upon release from the Army, Presley appeared on The Frank Sinatra Show as a grown-up entertainer (in a tuxedo!) who could woo audiences with his singing talent as opposed to his sexuality. Guralnick described him as “a modified Elvis, who suggests motion without precipitating it, who elicits genuine screams by indirection rather than assault” (2005: 63). In addition, the music he began to record was more traditional in tone, less associated with rhythm and blues, including “It’s Now or Never” (the singer’s second best-selling single of all-time) a reworking of the Italian aria “O Sole Mio.” The films Presley made in the 1960s, beginning with G.I. Blues (Norman Taurog, 1960), are glossier than his pre-Army films, with romance and music at the heart of the narratives. In fact, the songs are so incorporated into the films that, as Patsy Guy Hammontree has noted, the musical numbers in these films were “written to suit a part of the film and were hopelessly dull if heard outside that context” (qtd. in Inglis, 1996: 63). While his earlier films featured Presley as a rebellious and sometimes uncontrollable force, the post-Army films display a mature persona, portraying characters who are able to maintain a traditional position within society, finding love, and ultimately marrying. These films have been described as featuring “sunny skies, busty nymphs, cheap second-unit shots, hasty marriages, and ten songs” (Barth, 1991: 97). The formula was highly successful, helping to make Presley one of the biggest stars in Hollywood in the 1960s, with box office profitability overshadowing critical reception or artist capabilities. Films and Filming noted in 1966 that all of Presley’s films had made a profit and that he had become a “part of the Hollywood tradition,” “a family entertainer” (Bean, 1966: 51). When Presley

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made his music “comeback” through his 1968 television special (originally titled Elvis, but is now commonly referred to as the Comeback Special ), he was one of the most profitable stars in Hollywood. The irrevocable damage his post-Army films caused to his image forced the former “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll” to attempt to reassert his place in popular music. In the 1970s, Presley would appear in only two films—Elvis: That’s the Way It Is (Denis Sanders, 1970) and Elvis on Tour (Robert Abel and Pierre Adidge, 1972)—both documentaries featuring live concert performances. Music became the center of his activities again:  he released thirteen studio albums from 1970 until his death in 1977.

Rebellion and exploitation Although Presley’s entry into the Army was the most obvious signal that his image was being tamed, his film stardom is where the new sanitized Presley was most in evidence. The film image of Presley, especially from 1960 onward, was used and has been reused as the confirmation of his commercialization, corporatization, and conformity. It is commonly insinuated that Presley lost his authenticity when he became commodified by his manager and through his contracts with RCA Records and Paramount Pictures. As straightforward as this argument may at first appear, the commodification of Presley and the draining of his authenticity, respectability, and artistry underpins the reception of his film stardom. The dichotomy between young Elvis and older Elvis, between his pre-Army and post-Army films, and the opposition of the youthful rock ‘n’ roll singer and the Hollywood sell-out and, even later, the Vegas jumpsuited Elvis defines the way Presley is written about and remembered. Within these oppositions is the centrality of his films in helping to shape these perceptions. The pre-Army films (Love Me Tender, Loving You, Jailhouse Rock, and King Creole) are generally recognized as films that confirm the rebelliousness of Presley image that originated in his music and live performances. Although Love Me Tender is not set in contemporary times and features Presley portraying a character who plays music, but performance is not central to their characterization, the obvious connection to his music stardom is apparent

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through the title (from one of Presley’s new songs) and the promotion of the film, which included images of Presley singing with a guitar in his hand. The three other films Presley made in the 1950s presented the star in “various stages of adolescent angst” (Neibaur, 1989: 186), exemplifying Presley’s youthful rebellion. Loving You, especially, illustrated the cultural panic that surrounded Presley’s music star image at the time by setting the rise of the fictional Deke Rivers within public debates about the decency of his performance style. As pointed out earlier, the film ultimately reinforces that there is nothing to worry about with the newest teenage star. Although both Jailhouse Rock and King Creole present a defiant Presley image, with the star portraying an individual sent to jail for manslaughter (Jailhouse Rock) and a teenage hoodlum who becomes wrapped up with local mobsters (King Creole), both films seek to display the purity of the Presley image. In both films, Presley’s characters are led astray—by the corporate machinery of the music business (Jailhouse Rock) and the necessity to provide for his family, a family weakened by an emasculated father (King Creole). These uncomplicated assessments aside, Vince (Jailhouse Rock) and Danny (King Creole) exemplify the most complex film characters Presley portrayed in his career. As Freya Jarman-Ivens notes, it is the “Presley of the later years,” and generally the Hollywood Presley, that has been “commonly described in terms of a neutered masculinity,” “castrated” by Tom Parker (2007: 163). Parker is a central figure in the mythology that surrounds the star, as the manager who “imprisoned” Presley (Dickinson, 2008: 10) within terrible films throughout the 1960s, stunting his growth as a music artist and rock ‘n’ roll star. There are conflicting accounts about the Colonel and Presley, which help to add to the mythology—was Presley just a pawn in his manager’s scheme to make as much money as possible? Or was Presley complicit with the sanitized image promoted in the 1960s because he, too, profited from those sunny musicals in the 1960s? There is no debate that Parker helped to expand the commercialization of popular music through his “entrepreneurial vision” that made over $22 million for himself and for Presley (Nash, 2003: 119). Placing all “blame” on Parker releases Presley from the responsibility of his own products and his own career. The lack of resistance, at least outwardly, positions Presley as a

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star in the mold of some Hollywood studio stars, signed to long-term studio contracts. The star’s relationship to the manufacture of their image has varied, as Dyer notes in Heavenly Bodies, from stars who integrated their off-screen image with their on-screen image to those who were antagonistic and resentful of their lack of control over their star image (2004: 5–7). Presley was never openly antagonistic toward his musical films until after he stopped appearing in them, sometimes making dismissive comments in public, such as when he curled his lip in The Comeback Special and joked, “I made 29 pictures like that.” However, his “displeasure” with the quality of his films was revealed through others, mainly in memoirs and biographies published after his death. Some have argued, Landon Palmer in particular, that Presley’s multifilm contract with Paramount illustrates that the studio wanted a star whose image could be circulated in various media and their labor would serve the “efficient production of movies” and also “products that reinforced and advertised those movies in the commodity form of the soundtrack record” (2015: 182). Thus, Presley was part of a “corporate strategy” to not only promote and sell films, but to also promote and sell music. Presley was tied to Paramount, RCA, and Colonel Tom Parker, metamorphosing from, as Dickinson puts it, a “hellraising rock ‘n’ roller” to a “sell out”—from worker to commodity (2008: 9). Dickinson goes on to write, “Presley can be rescued from this doomed state by yet another archetypical social myth: the innocent exploited by the system” (2008: 9). The question of Presley’s role in his exploitation is important because of what Presley became later in his career, after he ceased to make fiction films in Hollywood—the gaudy Vegas act in rhinestone jumpsuits, living in a twentythree room mansion in Memphis, Tennessee. The excessiveness of his late career and the knowledge that much of the excess was paid for through his Hollywood salary complicate the perception that Presley was naïve and an “innocent exploited by the system.” Furthermore, the context of Hollywood in this period is often missing from the general appraisals of his film oeuvre, establishing a direct link between his exploitation and Paramount, RCA, and Colonel Tom Parker. David Baker tackles this issue head on in his chapter, “Elvis Goes to Hollywood: Authenticity, Resistance, Commodification and the

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Mainstream,” exploring Presley’s mythology as “both rock’s original iconoclast and its founding cautionary tale” (2013: 89) (author’s italics). Notably, Baker discusses the industrial context for the Elvis films, arguing “the movies were routinely profitable in a period when it was very difficult for Hollywood to make profitable movies” (90). Again, while the films are often considered to be a collection, formula films that can be interchanged in relation to characterization, location, story, and genre, as Baker notes, there are important industrial shifts that occurred in the almost fourteen years that Presley appeared in fiction films in Hollywood. The profitability of not only the Presley films, but all Hollywood productions, lessened as the 1960s wore on and audience levels dropped from a peak of forty million in 1960 to only seventeen million by the early 1970s (King, 2007: 24). In addition, while the “formula” of Presley films habitually focused on Presley in “exotic” locations while romancing numerous girls and fighting with men, there were notable diversions from this, including Presley’s nonmusical films Flaming Star (Don Siegel, 1960) and Charro! (Charles Marquis Warren, 1969) and the transition from Presley films produced by Hal Wallis in the early to mid-1960s to those produced by Sam Katzman, “the legendary king of exploitation cinema” (Baker, 2013: 94), toward the end of the decade. Although Presley was signed to a contract with Wallis until 1967, these films were made by a wide range of studios, film companies, and independent producers (Baker, 2013:  93), partially due to the Colonel’s negotiating to make one picture per year away from Wallis. As the 1960s wore on and Presley’s stardom waned, budgets were scaled back with less Presley screen time and the perception of the films as “exploitative” escalated (Baker, 2013: 94). This, however, was not unique to Presley’s films, but the context of Hollywood industry, which had by the early 1960s “bottomed out” (Harris, 2008: 9) after the peak success of the studio system in the 1940s. Nonetheless, Presley’s films are rarely evaluated on their merits between the early, higher quality musical films in the 1960s to smaller budgeted films made toward the end of the decade. The divide between his films tends to stick closely to the pre- and post-Army films and in doing so, value is placed not only on the more “rebellious” Presley image, but on his more dramatic films. The films made before he went into the Army were not “musicals” as much as they were “rock

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‘n’ roll” films that incorporated the juvenile delinquent genre with the emerging rock ‘n’ roll culture of the 1950s. David E. James discusses many of the early pop musical films, including Blackboard Jungle, Rock Around the Clock (Fred F. Sears, 1956), and The Girl Can’t Help It (Frank Tashlin, 1956), and the difficulty these films had with incorporating rock ‘n’ roll into the diegesis due to its disrupted nature and association with juvenile delinquency (2016: 29–30). Rock ‘n’ roll does not fit with many of the classic conventions of the Hollywood musical, especially as outlined by Jane Feuer (1993). Rock ‘n’ roll’s modernity, nonnostalgic tone, lack of conformity, rebellious spirit, and emphasis on sex are in opposition to the musical’s “folk aesthetic,” nostalgic tone, and conventional heterosexual coupling.

Romance, romantic comedies, and musicals Chapter 1 argued that Bing Crosby’s films were not truly musicals as much as they were films that incorporated his vocal performances. In a similar manner, Presley’s pre-Army films sought to include performances from the star, but these performances mainly functioned as moments for the star to “to do her/ his thing,” as Dyer proposed in relation to star vehicles (1998: 62). The performances rarely advance the plot or exhibit information in relation to characterization, examples including “Mean Woman Blues” in Loving You or “(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care” in Jailhouse Rock. These performances blur the divide between Presley and the character he portrays as every aspect of the performance can be read as a Presley performance. While this is not exclusive to Presley films, there is a noticeable alteration that takes place between the preand post-Army films where Presley’s musical numbers are frequently in service of the romantic plot, either to displace or aid a budding relationship (such as “Angel” from Follow That Dream (Gordon Douglas, 1962) or “I’m Falling in Love Tonight” from It Happened at the World’s Fair (Norman Taurog, 1963)). Thus, the musical numbers are aligned with the heterosexual coupling, reinforcing the film’s generic categorization as musicals. Whereas the 1950s films included romance, the focus was directed elsewhere—at generational divide (King Creole), sibling rivalry (Love Me Tender) and the exploitation of the

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young singer in the music business (Loving You and Jailhouse Rock). These themes were prevalent in the juvenile delinquent films of the 1950s and, also, early rock ‘n’ roll films, not only in Hollywood, but also in Britain, as noted by Stephen Glynn (2013). Whereas I would argue that the central position afforded to romance in the post-Army films, in addition to their large number of music performances qualify them as musicals, Rick Altman has famously written, “When is a musical not a musical? When it has Elvis Presley in it” (1987: 92). Undoubtedly, it is impossible to categorize an entire oeuvre of films, especially thirty-one films made with various personnel; however, there is a clear divide between the films produced before Presley entered the Army and when he returned. But, I maintain it’s not as simple as the “rebellious” image and “commercial” image as is most often attributed to these films. By classifying the majority of the films as musicals, their value is tainted by many who perceive musicals as a lesser genre, associated with more feminine qualities. Furthermore, Altman’s internal debate about the Presley films that ends with “I guess you’d have to call Fun in Acapulco a musical, but it’s sure no Singin’ in the Rain. Now there’s a real musical’ illustrates the widespread perception of Presley’s films as not worthwhile, even as musicals. The pre-Army films, however, are able to evade the musical tag and this assists in their more positive assessment. Romance is pivotal to the 1960s films and this is partly why they are degraded. The romantic comedy genre is generally viewed as formulaic—boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl—and purely produced for female audiences. Tamar Jeffers McDonald condenses these arguments in her introduction to Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre and goes on to write in the following chapter that “romantic comedy is, arguably, the lowest of the low,” viewed as “guilty pleasures” that “provide easy, uncomplicated pleasures” (2007: 7). I have, up until this point, referred to Presley’s post-Army films as musicals, but here is where the rigidity of genre classification can be limiting and this is partly what Altman was claiming in his dismissal of the Presley musicals. Genre is habitually deployed for commercial purposes, utilized in the promotion and publicity of a film. The pre-Army films were sold as musicals; in addition to their dramatic structure, Presley song performances and their fight scenes. This is evident in the promotion of Loving You which emphasized

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how Presley “uses his voice—and fists—fighting to the top. . .loving along the way” (Loving You Pressbook) and Jailhouse Rock that included four different stills with their own taglines: “Elvis Singing,” “Elvis Dancing,” “Elvis Brawling,” and “Elvis Romancing” (Jailhouse Rock Pressbook). While romance is an important selling point in these films, their dramatic value was also promoted, especially King Creole that stated in the press release, “King Creole is quite the most important picture of Elvis Presley’s career. A tense emotional story. It provides the singing star with a dramatic role that puts him in the Marlon Brando-James Dean class, and there are many people who predict that he will emerge as the acting discovery of 1958” (King Creole Pressbook). King Creole is distinctive within the Presley film oeuvre; originally intended as a James Dean vehicle and rewritten for Presley to portray a singer as opposed to a boxer, the film, in James L. Neibaur’s words, remains “in the eyes of many, his [Presley] greatest role and finest performance” (2014: 37). Presley even shaved his trademark sideburns before making the film because, as he stated in a press release, “For the first time in my screen career, I’m playing somebody other than Elvis Presley” (King Creole Pressbook). Directed by Michael Curtiz, director of many classic Hollywood films including Casablanca (1942), Mildred Pierce (1945), and the Bing Crosby vehicle White Christmas (1954), King Creole is viewed as his “greatest role” because of its emphasis on drama as opposed to singing or romance. Although both were present in King Creole, the debased nature of the French Quarter setting in New Orleans and Danny’s (Presley) involvement with gangster Maxie Fields (Walter Matthau) that leads to the death of Ronnie (Carolyn Jones) marks the film out from what comes later in the 1960s (although it is worth noting that even Jailhouse Rock features the dark subject matter of Vince Everett (Presley) sentenced to two years in prison for manslaughter). Outside of the nonmusical films, romance became one of the main elements of Presley’s films in the 1960s and this was most evident in their promotion. The first film Presley made after his discharge from the Army was G.I. Blues, which announced that the film featured “the New Elvis Presley” in a “romantic comedy” (G.I. Blues Pressbook). A press release even promoted the star’s comedic performance:  “He’s the same wonderfully-voiced singer, but has the added dimension of maturity plus a demonstrated flair for playing

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romantic comedy that stamps him another graduate from simply a singer of style to a singer-actor of considerable appeal” (G.I. Blues Pressbook). The blueprint for the 1960s films originated with G.I. Blues and the fact the studio sold Presley as a romantic comedy star illustrates the genre hybridity of these films as romantic-comedy-musicals. Throughout the 1960s, posters for Presley’s films accentuated his sex appeal, featuring his filmic love interests and/or an interchangeable set of beauties and frivolous fun in the musical comedies. The poster from Tickle Me (Norman Taurog, 1965) perfectly displays this through the headline “It’s Fun!. . .It’s Girls!. . .It’s Song!. . .It’s Color!.” Returning to Jeffers McDonald’s comment about romantic comedies as “guilty pleasures,” Presley’s post-Army films were overly conservative films devoid of any of the defiance the pre-Army films incorporated into their narratives. In one of the G.I. Blues posters, it states, “The Idol of the Teenagers is NOW the Idol of the Family,” and this tagline states in words what his postArmy musicals exhibited through their exotic locations, romantic plots, and juvenile situations. As a family entertainer, Presley was no longer the rebel rouser he was in the 1950s, but this should not be used to indicate worthlessness, although most often it is this transition—from rebel to entertainer—that is utilized to exhibit how Presley was sanitized through his Hollywood stardom. It is clear from the common dismissals of the post-Army “bland and colorful travelogues” (Quain, 1992: xix) that part of what drives these evaluations is the feminine vestige imprinted on this period of Presley’s career. The central tenant of romantic comedies—the potential of a happy ending for the couple—is fulfilled in most of these films, including many that end with the Presley character marrying his love interest (examples including Blue Hawaii, Viva Las Vegas, Tickle Me). The focus of these films is on the romantic partnership with more masculine pursuits and settings (such as the race track in Speedway (Norman Taurog, 1968) or the Orange Bowl boat race in Clambake (Arthur H.  Nadel, 1967)) serving as the backdrop to romance and music. Furthermore, the mythology that envelops these films—Presley’s aversion to the 1960’s musicals—and even more so, the belief that Colonel Tom Parker “bullied” Presley into appearing in mediocre films, presents the star as weak and, ultimately, feminine. The post-Army films “domesticated” Presley, first argued by biographer Peter Guralnick (2005: 74), and picked up by Dickinson

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who notes that this negative insinuation feminizes Presley, exemplifying how the star was sold to “an audience of young women and future workers within the home” (2008: 11).

Castration and authenticity The feminization of Presley has developed into the view that the singer was “castrated” by Parker. Jarman-Ivens discusses Presley’s “neutered masculinity,” referencing both Taylor (1985) and Wise (1990) who also have used the term “castration,” arguing that the music shift from an “earlier rockabilly style” to music that foregrounded his “powerful baritone” presented the star as “less masculine,” ultimately leading to a “loss of musical value” (2007: 166–167). While rooted in the type of music he began to sing, ballads and romantic pop songs, these songs were also closely tied to the post-Army films, performed in the films and appearing on the accompanying soundtracks. The star’s agency in relation to these alterations has always been called into question, but his authenticity is just as imperative to understanding Presley’s masculinity. As Baker notes, the opposition between rock ‘n’ roll Elvis (pre-Army) and Hollywood Elvis (postArmy) rests on the notion that Presley was “tamed,” “contained,” representing a “flaccid,” “predictability” in comparison to rock ‘n’ roll Elvis which was “sexy,” “androgynous,” and “revolutionary” (2013: 91). There is no doubt that Presley was perceived as a serious threat when he first rose to stardom and his sexuality was instrumental in painting the star as a social deviant. In his early television appearances, before his performances were modified through camera framing, his body was presented as an object of sexual desire through body movements intended to evoke responses by the, mainly, female audience. The uncontrollable screaming that would greet each twitch of his leg or jump onto his toes were unmistakable responses to Presley’s sexualized body. Although analyzing girls responses to “Beatlemania,” Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs (1992) expose the sexual undercurrent, frequently denied by cultural critics, displayed in the female hysteria that greeted teenage stars like Presley, who came before The Beatles. The uncontrollable responses—the shrieking and screaming that interrupted Presley’s performances—were “active” claims

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to “sexual feelings” (90), a “ratified teen sexuality” that “amplified teen sexual frustration almost beyond endurance” (98). Therefore, these performances can be, as David R. Shumway has argued, read as having feminized Presley’s body because he overtly displayed his body as a sexual object (1997: 131). This particular reading complicates the simple assumption that the post-Army films (and his enlistment into the Army) feminized the star. Here is where agency and more importantly, authenticity, betrays the “castration” myth by Parker. Clearly, the early performances by Presley were deemed inappropriate because he became forced to be filmed in ways that cut his body, either by only letting the star appear from the waist up (as occurred on The Ed Sullivan Show) or by truncating his sexual energy by having him perform in gimmicky ways (such as the aforementioned appearance, singing to a dog on The Steve Allen Show). These early adjustments to his performance style were necessary due to the moral panic about his star image and these adjustments took place after Parker was signed as Presley’s manager. Douglas Kellner writes, “The Dionysian Elvis was first sacrificed to TV, with the television industry carrying out the first symbolic castration of Elvis the Pelvis” (2008: 61). However, Presley’s own complacency in relation to these performances are often overlooked. It can be argued that he was young and naïve, following the orders of the adults who oversaw his career. There is another argument that Presley was performing as the rebellious rock ‘n’ roll star when in reality he was vastly different from his public persona. Stars possess on- and off-screen images with audiences never truly knowing who the “real” person is behind the star image. Presley’s rags-to-riches personal narrative is infamous and figures heavily in his American dream trajectory from poor boy to superstar (and, possibly, the indignity of his “pathetic decline” (Quain, 1992: xxii)). Dickinson suggests that Presley illustrates “the patent rift between ‘who we are’ (here symbolized by Presley’s musical activities) and what we are forced to do by greater social and economic forces in order to make a living” (2008: 9). She goes on to write, the “tame soundtracks that became the bulk of his musical output during this period are classified as the crass, heartless machinery that crushed raw talent” (2008: 9). This contention assumes that Presley’s raw talent was displayed in the earlier music performances and films, which can be questioned when his early songs and performances were genre bending,

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incorporating rhythm and blues with country music and rock ‘n’ roll and the emphasis the singer placed on gospel music later in his career when he was “freed” from his Hollywood contracts and able to concentrate on making music. Dickinson writes in the introduction to her book Off Key: When Film and Music Won’t Work Together, “whether or not Presley was ever truly an ‘outlaw’ is a moot point” (2008: 8). In a footnote, she discusses Presley’s “gentlemanliness” and quotes from Zmijewsky and Zmijewsky: “Contrary to his rebellious image, he was fairly conservative in his views. He looked upon himself as an entertainer” (qtd. in Dickinson, 2008: 200).6 Diverging from Dickinson, I would argue that it does matter whether or not Presley was an “outlaw” because the assessments of his “castration” depends on an authentic core that is neutralized. Again, this is not to suggest that Presley wasn’t restrained, but that the reception of the 1960s musicals hinge on the perception that feminization was forced upon the star. It is widely known that Presley’s ultimate desire was to be a film star. It is also well known that he was a courteous Southern gentleman who always referred to people as “sir” and “ma’am.” These facts complicate the idea that his innate talent was compromised as do many other factors that contributed to a changing culture, such as how rock ‘n’ roll developed after Presley entered the Army in 1958 and Buddy Holly, “The Big Bopper,” and Ritchie Valens all died in a plane crash in February 1959, in addition to the industrial and aesthetic alterations that occurred in Hollywood, especially the influence of European filmmaking on American filmmakers in the 1960s. There are no simplistic conclusions that can be reached in relation to Presley, but many of the popular myths that cloak his star image have come to define the star in ways that hinder our understanding of his music, and even more so, filmic oeuvre. For the rest of the chapter, I will focus on the films that are generally neglected in studies of the star and discuss how (as opposed to why) Presley’s performance style alters in the 1960s musicals.

Elvis’s Hollywood films While personal taste varies, the popularity of Presley’s performance of “Jailhouse Rock” in the film of the same name is undeniable. Images from

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the performance adorn numerous books, including James’s recent Rock ‘N’ Film and as noted by Steve Templeton, “of all the films Elvis made during his career, none have been more popular or more applauded than Jailhouse Rock ” (2002: 15). “Jailhouse Rock” is also significant because of how it differs from the performances in Presley’s post-Army films. Although the song is the epitome of early rock ‘n’ roll and features in a film that can be described as a “juvenile delinquent” picture, the staging is emblematic of the MGM style that thrived in the 1950s and, as Hillier and Pye write, is firmly grounded in the Hollywood tradition of the musical genre (2011: 111). The performance begins with a long shot of the “jail” set-up with bars across the top and bottom of a stage. Presley and the dancers are all behind the bars before opening the jail doors and dancing across the stage and down the circular staircase. The jazzy music with its loud horns and bopping beat are underlined by the dancers rhythmic singing of “one-two-two,” until Presley is left alone on the top tier of the stage. The choreography of this dance and the music that underscores it is representative of the organization that defined MGM musicals. Feuer (1993) argues that Hollywood musicals often concealed the work of choreographing dances through folk dances that involve “non-choreography,” ultimately, implying that “dancing is utterly natural and . . . easy” (9). “Jailhouse Rock” is performed for a television audience and obviously choreographed, however, there is a noticeable difference between the prison “extras” and Presley, fully displayed once the guitar strum and heavy beat of the song kicks in. Quite simply, Presley, the rock ‘n’ roll star, disrupts the musical performance with his energetic hip swinging and uncontrollable movements. In this performance, Presley’s dance can be viewed as “spontaneous” impressing upon the scene a discernable authenticity. This is a “constructed” authenticity, but as Richard Dyer has argued, the “process of authentication” can guarantee “the authenticity of the . . . particular values a star embodies” (1991: 133). According to Dyer, markers that indicate “authenticity” include “lack of control, lack of premeditation and privacy,” signifying a truth “behind or beneath the surface” (137). While the blocking of Presley’s body is clearly mapped out to coincide with the extras, most obviously when he returns from the center stage to the background and is swung around the pole by one of the

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extras, his body movements and gestures appear more spontaneous. The hip movements, in particular, appear uncontrollable as Presley delicately balances on his toes while his lower body shifts and shakes. None of these movements is on the beat of the song or even express the rhythm of the song (Figure 2.1). These movements display the “lack of control” and “premeditation” Dyer associates with authenticity. During the second verse, there is a medium shot of Presley singing and this further illustrates his expressive performance, snapping his fingers and moving his shoulders in a haphazard way. “Jailhouse Rock” includes more sophisticated choreography later in the performance, including lifting a table, but Presley is almost always singled out. Although this is unsurprising for the star of the film, what sets him apart from the others is his unrestrained movements—the twisting of his waist, the shaking of his shoulders, his almost manic snapping of his fingers. These performance ticks were evident in his early television performances, taped live, thus, markers of Presley’s “authentic” performance style.7

Figure 2.1 Elvis Presley performing “Jailhouse Rock” in Jailhouse Rock (1957)

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Figure 2.2 Elvis Presley singing “Wooden Heart” in G.I. Blues (1960)

As mentioned, G.I. Blues sought to present a “new” Presley, the all-around entertainer who would dominate his public persona in the 1960s. Included in the film is a performance that visually displays the “castration” that countless scholars and fans attributed to this period of Presley’s career. After sitting down with Lili (Juliet Prowse) to watch a puppet show, Tulsa McLean (Presley) volunteers, after a record player ceases to work, to sing “Wooden Heart” to accompany a children’s puppet show. The visual of Presley framed, from the chest up, in the puppet show and crooning to a blonde puppet confirms the impression that Presley became a neutered performer in the 1960s (Figure 2.2). The spontaneity of earlier performances, such as “Jailhouse Rock,” is missing from “Wooden Heart,” not just because Presley’s lower body is out of frame, but the choreography is deliberate and subtle, creating a unity between Presley and partner as opposed to the disruption of earlier performances. Many of the post-Army musicals include performances where Presley is sitting or singing directly to one individual. These musical numbers are more intimate and devoid of the energy of performances like “Jailhouse Rock” or “Mean Woman Blues” from Loving You. Furthermore, Presley is frequently physically contained whether singing “Beyond the Bend” at the beginning of It Happened at the World’s Fair from inside an agricultural aircraft or “King of

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the Whole Wild World” on the back of truck as it weaves through the Catskills in Kid Galahad (Phil Karlson, 1962). Both of these examples are performances that open the films while credits roll on the screen, setting the tone for the rest of the film. By limiting Presley’s physical movements from the first moment he appears on-screen, it establishes the opposite of “Jailhouse Rock,” limiting the output of energy from the star’s body. Later films, such as Frankie and Johnny (Frederick de Cordova, 1966), feature only the star’s voice during the credit sequence disembodying the voice from the body that had caused significant cultural anxieties just ten years earlier. The pre-Army films are less obviously rigid in linking the star with the narrative: Love Me Tender features only a score of the title song; Jailhouse Rock includes a drawn image of a singer with its back to the camera (connoting Presley); Loving You includes Presley’s voice singing a few lines from “Loving You”; King Creole establishes the New Orleans setting with street sellers singing about their goods with no visual or aural reference to Presley. The obvious alteration that occurs in the post-Army films is the establishment of a genre firmly associated with Presley. While the pre-Army films utilized Presley’s name and image as vehicles for the star, the Presley musical formula was defined post-Army and, thus, their employment of the star’s body is more consistent. What alters in the post-Army musicals is the outburst of energy that portends spontaneity and, ultimately, authenticity. It is problematic to discuss authenticity in relation to Presley, partly due to the doubts about his incorporation of established forms of music and performance, but also because he was not an artist who wrote his own music. As Richard Middleton wrote, “musically his contribution lies almost wholly in his singing,” but the type of music he sang produced “syncopation and cross-rhythm,” leading to a physical response “demanding movement [and] jerking the body into activity” (1992: 5). It is this “jerky movement” that was so omnipresent in his early television performances that almost disappears in his musical films of the 1960s. It is unsurprising that the positively received television special from 1968, features a set of performances where Presley, surrounded by audience members, sings some of his most famous songs. While the “black leather sit-down”8 session is most often discussed as an example of Presley asserting his authenticity, the “black leather stand-up” sessions flaunt the excitement and dynamism of

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his early television performances, especially when he drops to his knees during “Hound Dog.” Visually, the black leather costume presents Presley as a “rebel” figure, in opposition to the characters he was portraying on-screen at the time, but as important is his dark black hair styled in Presley’s trademark quiff that begins to fall the minute he starts singing “Heartbreak Hotel” and is completely dislodged by the end of “Hound Dog.” Presley’s hair is a telling marker of his limited bodily performance postenlistment in the Army. Many have noted the significance of hats to Frank Sinatra’s stardom with the star even mentioning in interviews that the way he wore a hat—tilted up, tilted down, or pushed back—reflected his mood.9 The wild abandon of Presley’s performances were, partially, echoed through the disorder of his hair. Notably, Presley’s most provocative performances, due to their subject manner, in the pre-Army films—“Jailhouse Rock,” “Mean Woman Blues,” and “Trouble” from King Creole—feature the star with hair emerging from his slicked back pompadour and falling onto his forehead. The “Mean Woman Blues” performance even begins with Presley’s hair perfectly in position before the boisterousness of his movements dislodges the uniformity of his hair (Figure 2.3). While the backcombed hairstyle varied in later films, such as Clambake, which featured the star with a looser version of his earlier hairstyle, the untamed nature of Presley’s body was reflected in his tousled hair in the pre-Army films. In the musical genre, dance can function as an expression of emotion, and energy is central to this. Chapter 1 discussed energy in relation to Bing Crosby’s musical performances, arguing that Crosby’s “capacity for activity” (Dyer, 2002: 24) was borrowed from those around him as opposed to energy originating from the star’s own body. Presley can be considered in a similar manner, especially in the post-Army films. The energy he displayed in performances from the 1950s disappears in the later films and the way the films substitute energy adds to the belief that Presley was “castrated” by the 1960s musicals. Paradise Hawaiian Style (Michael D. Moore, 1966) is a good example with multiple Presley performances that involve energetic extras, including a group of children to sing and dance to “Queen Wahine’s Papaya” and a rambunctious collection of dogs in a helicopter cockpit during the performance of “A Dog’s Life.” Not only are these performances devoid of the wild abandon

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Figure 2.3 Elvis Presley performing “Mean Woman Blues” in Loving You (1957)

of Presley’s early television appearances, energy is exhibited through others with the star almost laconic in his movements. “Stop Where You Are” not only surrounds Presley with a group of hula dancers whose grass skirts, grass pompoms, and hip movements act as visual and aural signifiers of movement (the sound of the skirts and pom-poms overlaps with the recorded song), but also features short freeze frames when Presley sings, “stop” (Figure 2.4). The dancers move around Presley, shepherding him around the small stage, boxing the star in, which allows his body to be restricted by the choreography of the dancers, while also through various medium shots in the sequence. As opposed to the freedom with which Presley moved in “Jailhouse Rock,” “Stop Where You Are” illustrates how the post-Army films often limited his movements and contained his energy. “Stop Where You Are” but more so “House of Sand” (Figure 2.5) from the same film also exhibits how sexual energy is channeled through Presley’s female costars or female extras in the 1960s musical performances. The common

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Figure  2.4 Elvis Presley performing “Stop Where You Are” in Paradise Hawaiian Style (1966)

Figure  2.5 Elvis Presley performing “House of Sand” in Paradise Hawaiian Style (1966)

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perception of these films is that Presley is surrounded by bathing beauties and this is often the case, but it is significant that, as Susan Doll writes, “instead of Elvis swinging his hips provocatively, a group of female dancers did it for him” (1994: 103). This can partly be attributed to the rise of beach party films in the early 1960s that the Presley musicals share traits with, but it also reveals how the films turned the gaze from Presley to women. Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) defines the male gaze that dominated classical Hollywood through the masculine perspective constructed within the text of the female figure as an object “to-be-looked-at.” Presley’s pre-Army films didn’t necessarily present the star’s body as an object “to-be-looked-at,” but the performances were generally accessed through Presley’s energetic body (argued earlier in relation to “Jailhouse Rock”). This is evident through the audience responses contained in the films that mirrored the type of hysteria that greeted Presley’s television performances. When Deke Rivers (Presley) sings “Party” early in Loving You, the film cuts between Rivers onstage at a community fair and various teenage girls in the audience that squeal, giggle, and shout for Rivers. Later in the film, while performing “Lonesome Cowboy,” his manager Glenda (Lizabeth Scott) comments from offstage, “Look at the women. What’s he doing to them”? Although the audience is motionless, transfixed by Rivers’s singing, this comment links his performance with female desire. The various modifications that occur in the post-Army films help to distance his body from being an object of desire, displayed in the filmic text through performance spaces and extras. In Girls! Girls! Girls! (Norman Taurog, 1962), Presley (Ross Carpenter) sings “Return to Sender” in a nightclub where his love interest, Stella (Robin Gantner), works. The setting is intimate with a small audience of adults sitting at tables that face the stage. Most of the performance is shot in a medium shot, cutting Presley off at the waist with a few cut-away long shots of his entire body. There is only one close-up of the audience, which focuses on Sam (Robert Strauss), the older male owner of the club. Presley’s movements are not manic, nor do they elicit desirous responses from the audience. Instead, when Ross finishes the song, the audience enthusiastically applauds and asks for “more,” but this is a far cry from the uninhibited reactions to Presley in the 1950s.

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Numerous films surround Presley with women in scantily clad clothing, including the examples discussed above from Paradise Hawaiian Style. Narratively, large groups of women are weaved into the plots through location, such as the female weight loss ranch in Tickle Me that Presley’s character, Lonnie, works at or through circumstance, such as the “Kittyhawks” in Kissin’ Cousins (Gene Nelson, 1964), a group of man-crazy young women who have been isolated from the modern world in their homes on the Great Smoky Mountains. These women function as little more than “eye candy,” but they also express energy originating in the musical performances delivered by Presley, communicated through his singing, but not articulated in his body. The women tend to be uninhibited, inspired by his performances and liberated to convey their excitement through dance. This is evident in Tickle Me when Lonnie begins singing “Dirty, Dirty Feeling” while tending to the horses at the ranch. The guests and employees all enthusiastically join Lonnie at the stables and Presley is framed throughout the performance with dancing women unreservedly wiggling their hips and bodies. There is no doubt that the spectacle in these types of performances arises from the dancing women and not Presley. Viva Las Vegas represents the pinnacle of “woman as spectacle” in Presley’s 1960s musicals. Costarring Ann Margret, repeatedly referred to as “the female Elvis,” it is unsurprising that this particular film would include a woman as the object of the gaze. Margret’s stardom is evident from the top billing she received, the first woman to receive this billing in a Presley film (Brode, 2006: 154). While the actress’s billing is equal to that of Presley, her “look” in the film can be described as personifying an “in-your-face sexuality” (Brode, 2006: 152) demonstrated through her body. The audience first sees Margret from the waist down in Viva Las Vegas before the camera tilts up to reveal the rest of her body. A  shot/reverse shot takes place of Lucky Jackson (Presley) and Count Elmo Mancini (Cesare Danova) speaking to Rusty (Margret) who has just brought her car into the garage, only the reverse shot of Jackson and Mancini includes Rusty’s bum and legs. After being told that they would be happy to “check her motor,” Margret turns and walks into the camera before a cut to a close-up of her bum as she sashays to her convertible outside. This scene establishes a structured view of Margret’s sexualized body that will reappear throughout the film. This sexuality is then merged with energetic dancing

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later in the film when Lucky visits Rusty’s dance rehearsal at the University of Nevada. The scene begins with a close-up of hands pounding to the beat of the music, before the camera tilts up to reveal Rusty leading a dance troupe. Rusty is the only woman, always at the center of the dance, visually set apart with her red sweater and black tights. Her dancing is enthusiastic, bursting with energy, evident not just through her wild movements, but the grunting she vocalizes as she performs. When she sees Lucky, she tells him that if he doesn’t want to dance, he should at least sing for the other dancers present. Presley then performs “C’mon Everybody,” a song that features instructions to the audience (“snap your fingers,” “slap your hands,” “stomp your feet,” etc.), which are carried out by the dance troupe. While Presley moves in his unique style during this performance, the film focuses on Margret’s body by cutting to her leading the dance number, but more significantly, returning to a low angle shot of Presley in the background and Margret’s truncated body in the foreground (Figure 2.6). The energy of the performance is firmly associated with Margret who even shouts in ecstasy toward the end of the performance. This foregrounding of Margret’s body occurs again during Presley’s performance of “What’d I Say” when Margret’s body obscures Presley’s as she wildly dances in front of the stage. Notably, one of Presley’s most energetic performances in any of the post-Army films is “Viva Las Vegas” when the star appears more spontaneous with his movements as he is afforded a large space to move around, not restricted by extras or the set design. However, this performance also utilizes

Figure 2.6 Elvis Presley and Ann Margret in Viva Las Vegas (1964)

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the male gaze as Presley moves around four showgirls dancing on pedestals while he sings (this, also, coming after Margret’s striptease-based performance of “Appreciation”).

Conclusion One last point worth making about the post-Army films is their self-reflexivity. Even though the films have been maligned for decades, they all contain an awareness of audience expectation that transpires in genre filmmaking. Partly, these films acknowledge Presley’s stardom outside of the film text, such as in Blue Hawaii when Chad (Presley) meets Abigail (Nancy Walters) to discuss acting as a tour guide for Abigail and four teenage girls, commenting that he “gets along very well with teenagers” and “used to be one” himself before Abigail responds, “and not too long ago.” These comments are met with a slight giggle from Presley and a knowing look from Walters. Released only three years after King Creole, a film that featured Presley as a high school dropout, the comment in Blue Hawaii can be read as a remark on Presley’s rapid evolution from teenager to adult in his film roles. Furthermore, many of the postArmy films include playful performances such as “Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce” in Girl Happy (Boris Sagal, 1965)  that lists various activities the chamber of commerce provide for visitors to the area and Presley is joined by his band (played by Gary Crosby, Joby Baker, and Jimmy Hawkins) who provide backing vocals through, first, the blinds of their hotel room and then the leaves of a palm tree by the pool; or “He’s Your Uncle, Not Your Dad” in Speedway, a performance in the waiting room of the IRS between Presley and various men in grey suits marching and kicking their legs in perfect unison. Frankly, these films do not take themselves very seriously and while some would use this fact to point to their triviality, representative of the low cultural capital these films possess, I  would counter that there is pleasure to derive from the post-Army films and most often, it is the musical performances that are of greatest value. There is no argument that the quality of Presley’s films declined through the 1960s, but even one of his later films like Live a Little, Love a Little (Norman Taurog, 1968), which contains a convoluted storyline,

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eccentric love interest, and a Great Dane that speaks to Greg (Presley) in a dream, includes the performance of “Edge of Reality,” a “flower power” era pop song about a man driven crazy by his love interest and represents the closest Presley ever got to embracing some of the late-1960s youth culture (Brode, 2006: 242). And for a star that mainly kept himself out of the public eye except for the films he made in Hollywood, these film performances are some of the only recorded performances of Presley in the 1960s. However, for many, the films act as verified documents of Presley’s conformity through the Hollywood industrial system. Dyer argued that star images are “extensive” (2004: 3), but these extensions are not always treated equally in a star’s history. Films can hold a privileged position for film stars, but music is more influential for crossover stars, like Presley, and his unique position as a star that elicited moral panic through his music and stage performances, created the need to temper that type of performance, which happened both on television and in his films even before he entered the Army. Stars are emblematic figures and some stars’ symbolic meaning can come to outweigh their cultural products. Marilyn Monroe is a good example of a star whose meaning is extensive, and as the recent journal issue of Film, Fashion and Consumption dedicated to the star illustrates (Bolton, 2015) the star’s face, body, and cultural value have almost become privileged over her films. As Bolton writes, Monroe inspires through her “enigmatic qualities, the contrast between the glamorous, joyful beacon of supreme sensuality, and the reportedly tormented, lonely addict so often written about in biographies and captured in melancholy photographs” (125). There is a similar pattern to Presley’s life, contrasting the “young Elvis” with the “fat Elvis” of his later years (the popularity of “young Elvis” confirmed when the Post Office ran a poll in 1993 asking the American public which postage stamp should be released with “young Elvis” besting “Vegas Elvis” by a large margin). Although, this later period—the Vegas jumpsuited, heavy-set Presley—was mainly confined to the 1970s, Presley needed to stage a “comeback” in the late 1960s and the television special acted as a way to accentuate his musicality, to mark the star out as a music star as opposed to a film star. While Monroe battled to be taken seriously, evident through her “desire and commitment to becoming a more accomplished actress” and was unfairly treated “by the industry and culture

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in which she operated” (Bolton, 2015: 128), Presley may have been “unfairly treated” by the industry, but his resistance to his film career was mainly hidden from the public. This taints his films, especially those made in the 1960s, and the dominant mythology of the artist constrained by the system is allowed to become truth, corrupting the films, which have become symbolic of Presley’s failure as an artist. The films, and in some ways Presley’s own stardom, are unable to rescue themselves from these debilitating narratives. While the importance of Bing Crosby as a star was argued in the last chapter and it was suggested that he might be a forgotten star, Presley is almost the opposite. Elvis is still everywhere, but while the image endures, and the pre-Army 1950s rock ‘n’ roller overwhelms all images that come after, the films are, generally, criticized, panned, or, worse, ignored all together. It is my contention that there is value in these films, not as great works of art, but as fun romantic-comedymusicals that offer great pleasures for audiences willing to consume the bright and breezy Presley of the 1960s.

Notes 1 The 1950’s edition of the series is edited by Palmer (2010). 2 There is, possibly, a third era to Presley’s career—the Vegas era—from 1970 until his death in 1977. 3 Peterson (1990) argues the main factors that helped facilitate the advent of rock ‘n’ roll were: the creation of BMI, a rival licensing agency to the established ASCAP; the development of the LP and radio’s need for the 45; the FCC’s postwar acceptance of applications for radio stations; and the technological advances of television and the transistor radio. 4 Albums made by and for African Americans were referred to as “race records” into the 1950s. Billboard Magazine even included the “Most-Played Juke Box Race Records” chart from 1945 to 1949 (Zak, 2010: 113). 5 It is no wonder that one of the few rock ‘n’ roll films made by the studios in the 1950s was The Girl Can’t Help It, starring Jayne Mansfield, a film that includes rock performances by Eddie Cochran, Little Richard, and Fats Domino while still featuring, as John Mundy puts it, a “resolutely anti-youth and anti-rock ’n’ roll position” through the “tension between exploitation and incorporation” within the narrative (1999: 110).

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6 Presley’s well-known idolization of Dean Martin may have influenced his desire to become an all-around entertainer. 7 Many have discussed whether Presley’s performance style was genuine or inherited from his awareness of black rhythm and blues performers. For the purposes of this study, the roots of his performance style is not as important as whether this was a style that Presley utilized, becoming the cornerstone of his performances on television and in movies. There are numerous excellent examinations of Presley’s connection to rhythm and blues performance styles, but Shumway (1997) explores the foundation of Presley’s style and how it was displayed on television. 8 Also known as the “jam session” when Presley and surviving members of his original backing band and other friends “recreated” informal jam sessions the musicians used to have while recording in the studio. 9 See Tomshinsky (2013: 14).

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The Country Film Star: Kris Kristofferson

Introduction Kris Kristofferson has sustained a career in music and film for almost forty years, releasing his first album Kristofferson in 1970 and his twenty-second, The Cedar Creek Sessions, in 2016. He last starred in the Western film, Traded (Timothy Woodward Jr., 2016) and appeared in over sixty films since his first starring role in Cisco Pike (Bill N. Norton, 1972), while also starring in over twenty-five television movies and mini-series from 1979 onward. Only Bing Crosby matches the breadth of Kristofferson’s body of work in this study. Unlike Crosby, however, Kristofferson’s music and film stardom has generally been marginal, never reaching the heights of some of the other stars examined. Still, in the 1970s, at the peak of his stardom, Kristofferson was both a significant music and film star—one of the few stars examined in post-studio system Hollywood who was concurrently popular in both mediums, albeit for a short period of time. Although his music and cinematic stardom have both faded since the 1970s (he released thirteen studio albums in the 1970s in comparison to eleven studio albums from 1980 to date and no longer commands starring roles in films), Kristofferson continues to be a working actor and musician: a true crossover star. His country music star image fitted well into the cinema, especially the Western and melodrama genres, aiding his crossover success. Kristofferson’s stardom existed within the dual framework of “newness” in both country music and American cinema, as he began his career at a transitional period in both mediums. He became a significant country artist who merged country music with rock and folk while also becoming a film star that typified the New Hollywood of the 1970s. This chapter will examine Kristofferson’s cinematic stardom in the 1970s, focusing in turn on his modern cowboy image, on his role as an object of

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female desire, and on the waxing and waning of his cinematic stardom in relation to his music stardom.

Cowboy image In both his music and film careers, Kristofferson has come to embody the Western hero. This was especially true in the 1970s when his image was closely associated with the cowboy. The cowboy he has come to represent mythic idea about America and especially masculinity. As a quintessentially American icon, the cowboy defines individualism, ruggedness, and heroic masculinity throughout American culture. Richard A. Peterson has noted that the cowboy was “bereft of family responsibilities, worked as a hand on a ranch or hired out as a scout, Texas Ranger, U.S Marshall, or country sheriff, thus becoming an ambivalent-primitive-loner turned agent-of-civilization” (1997:  82). The cowboy image became popular in the mid-nineteenth century in dime novels, later appearing in full-length Western novels, Western films (including early one-reelers such as The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter, 1903)), country music (especially the “singing cowboy”), and, finally, television (The Lone Ranger; Gunsmoke1). Though difficult to define in exact terms, the cowboy is marked by both the way he looks (especially clothing) and his attitude to life (individual freedom, impulsive actions, and instinct). Kristofferson is linked with a cowboy image partly owing to the cowboy’s intrinsic association with the country music genre. Central to the culture of country music is the mythology of the American West and the heroic cowboy, especially after Gene Autry became a popular country artist in the 1930s. Historian Bill C.  Malone has noted that cowboy and Western mythology were introduced into country music by artists from Texas, a state settled by Southerners with the same “values, traditions, and institutions,” but identified as part of the American West (1985: 137). As William W. Savage suggests, the cowboy “needs no proper identification because his clothes give him away, and so does his demeanor; he is immediately recognizable, and in popular entertainment there is seldom doubt about what his responses will be in given situations” (1979: 4). Autry and Roy Rogers became Western-identified Hollywood

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stars in the 1930s and 1940s, appearing in countless films. Their images were wholesome, traditional, and conservative, personifying “natural” masculinity through the cowboy image as family entertainers and patriotic ideals of American masculinity. While the cowboy and country music are interconnected, representing a particular type of masculinity, the development of the genre displays other influences. It is important to first define country as a genre, examining it through three important strands: music, culture, and commercialization. The origins of the genre exemplify how fractured country music has been and how various influences, both musical and cultural, contributed to define it, thus helping to contextualize Kristofferson’s success.

Country music: genre development Vital to country music’s formation as a genre are instruments, style, and environment. Much of what we now define as country music emerged in isolation, in the rural landscapes of the American South and the Ozark and Appalachian Mountains. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, immigrants from various European countries including France, England, Germany, and Scandinavia merged their folk traditions and music with already established forms of music popular in those areas of America, including gospel and the blues. This led to the hybridization of country music, a mix of various styles from Europe that flourished in different parts of America, including the South and Texas. Owing to the genre’s development in rural areas, the common belief was established that country music was “hillbilly music,” defined solely by the audience:  poor, white, uneducated, working-class individuals.2 This term came to define all types of country in the early to mid-twentieth century before Nashville, Tennessee surfaced as the commercial center and began to sell country music outside of already established areas. In the late 1950s to early 1960s, the Nashville Sound3 was established, merging bluegrass (an earlier form with nonelectric instruments), honky-tonk (a Texas variant with a heavier beat), and folk music to create a genre of country

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that crossed over to the pop charts, but also defined itself as something distinct from rock ‘n’ roll. Crucially, Kristofferson began his career at the highpoint of the Nashville Sound’s success. According to Trent Hill, the Nashville Sound stylistically “de-emphasized the fiddle-steel guitar so prominent in honky-tonk in favor of string sections and background singers” (1999: 9). This distanced country music from rural, Southern settings and values, allowing the Nashville Sound to appeal to a middle-class audience by “excluding its ‘undesirable’, poor-white-elements” (Hill, 1999: 11). The music also presented a specific type of masculinity; as Diane Pecknold argues, country listeners of the Nashville Sound were asked to imagine “an updated version of the western gentleman, the still-rugged flipside of the pathological working-class man, the hillbilly domesticated for consumer society” (2004: 103). The scope of country music expanded, stylistically, visually, and commercially, producing crossover hits on rock and pop stations (such as “I Fall to Pieces” by Patsy Cline; Eddy Arnold “Make the World Go Away”); the expansion of Nashville as Music City, USA, created a place for musicians (even from outside the country genre) to record their music in Nashville’s recording studios (Malone and Stricklin, 2003: 131). The commercial success of the Nashville Sound in the late 1950s and1960s emphasized the traditional family, and country music became a “feminized” genre, disconnected from the social culture of the liberal 1960s. Country music was conservative and old-fashioned, music made for families and not for young individuals protesting against the contemporary social order. Despite this conservatism, a revised image of the male country star arose, altering the cowboy/Western mythology to include a splinter movement of country music “outlaws.” This revisionist split from the Nashville Sound was achieved through gender, politics, and sentimentality and its exponents included Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kristofferson.

Antiestablishment sentiment Kristofferson was born in Texas, aligning him with the cowboy figure and Western romanticism that also defined Texas-born Nelson and Jennings, who had a crossover hit with their duet, “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to

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Be Cowboys” in 1978. Kristofferson first gained media attention as a Rhodes scholar, American football player, boxer, and part of the ROTC (Reserve Officer’s Training Corps) battalion while at Pomona College, appearing in Time magazine in 1959 with the author noting he was “an uncommon sort.” After leaving Pomona, he completed an MPhil in Literature from Oxford University where he answered an ad in the Daily Mirror and was signed by Paul Lincoln who managed Tommy Steele, Britain’s first teen idol rock ‘n’ roll star. Kristofferson left England, returned to America, and joined the Army, becoming a helicopter pilot before finally settling on a job at military academy West Point as a literature professor. He quickly left that post, moving to Nashville where he worked many odd jobs. This rejection of a stable career/lifestyle, and one based in the military, indicated a personal opposition with country music’s earlier embodiment of American establishment ideals at the same time as there were predominant antiestablishment sentiments in other music genres, especially folk music. Kristofferson went to Nashville when Bob Dylan abandoned his established acoustic sound and embraced electric guitars, having recorded part of Blonde on Blonde (1966), most of John Wesley Harding (1967), and all of Nashville Skyline (1969) at Columbia’s Nashville studios where Kristofferson had a job sweeping floors. These folk albums were influenced by country music, and the proliferation of country/folk/rock music artists in the late 1960s, such as Dylan, the Byrds, and Neil Young, helped to expand country music’s audience and lead to the success of artists like Kristofferson who sought inspiration from various music genres. In the late 1960s, Kristofferson began to find some success as a songwriter, especially through Roger Miller’s version of “Me and Bobby McGee” which went to number twelve on the country charts and Johnny Cash’s recording of “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” that he (famously) offered to Cash by landing a helicopter on his lawn. In 1970, Kristofferson achieved fame in country music when he won the “Song of the Year” award for Cash’s recording of “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” at the Country Music Awards. His appearance at the ceremony has been mythologized in country music history as the moment when the counterculture and “hippies” invaded country music. While it is debatable if Kristofferson should be described as a “hippie,” he did represent something

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new within country music, most notably, a new, “relaxed” and liberal type of cowboy distinct from earlier versions (like Autry). Kristofferson appeared at the awards with long hair, a black suede jacket, suede trousers, and a light blue turtleneck. This was decidedly “dressed down” for an industry awards show where most men wore tuxedos, but he also displayed a bohemian sensibility through his hair and dress. Paul Hemphill wrote in the New York Times: You could sense Tex Ritter and Roy Acuff and all the rest hunkering down in their seats as [Kris] floated to the stage of the Grand Ole Opry House to accept the award: suede bell-bottoms, shoulder length hair, strange deep-set Jack Palance eyes; weaving back and forth with his back to the audience for nearly 10 seconds like a cowboy who had lost his way... Nashville’s Music Row is still seething. “I mean, hell, he didn’t even wear a tux.” (qtd. in Green, 2001: 75)

Notably, while Hemphill sums up the predominant astonishment toward Kristofferson’s appearance at the awards, he also describes the singer as a cowboy. Kristofferson’s first album (Kristofferson) was released the same year and though not an initial success, it was rereleased after the success of his second album, The Silver Tongued Devil and I and Janis Joplin’s legendary cover version of “Me and Bobby McGee.” Various artists of both genders have covered “Me and Bobby McGee” over the years and this displays the ambiguous nature of gender depiction within many of his songs. His music departs from the traditional version of masculinity found in dominant forms of country music (like honky-tonk); instead it is sentimental, emotive, and introspective—traits typically associated with women. His position as a songwriter who could crystallize the mood of men and women at the time authenticated the counterculture movement of equality and change within country music. Kristofferson represented a new breed of songwriters in country music, of a kind who was “self-consciously poetic” and “opened up new realms of expression for country singers and writers” (Malone, 1985: 306). His music departed from the slick, pop arrangements of the Nashville Sound by being defiant as much as it was maudlin, expressing strong masculinity that was not defined by the domestic life as the conservative Nashville Sound had articulated. Kristofferson (like

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Nelson and Jennings) opened up “new realms of expression,” but ultimately came to define a new type of cowboy in country music: the outlaw. Kristofferson, Nelson, and Jennings’s particular take on country music has thus been referred to by many critics as “outlaw music,” derived from country, but also rock, with some critics calling it “redneck rock.”4 The artists were referred to and considered themselves as outlaws because they identified with marginalized people, and it seems this term applies to their attitude as well as to their political beliefs. Kristofferson even recorded antiwar songs including “Talkin’ Vietnam Blues,” signifying how far the former army pilot’s beliefs were from the military he once belonged to. As Bill C. Malone suggested at the time, “cowboys of modern country music, as represented by both musicians and singers, no longer inhabit the Old West but instead embody current occupations and fantasies” (qtd. in Franke, 1997: 405). Concurrent to the outlaw cowboy movement in country music, the Western cinematic genre was being reimagined and revised in the late 1960s, beginning with Sergio Leone’s trilogy—A Fistful of Dollars (1967), For a Few Dollars More (1967), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1967)—starring Clint Eastwood as “the man with no name.” American cinema was especially fascinated with using the genre’s signifiers to reinvent American myths within the contemporary social climate. Films such as Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) and Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969) used Western tropes, adapting the individualist and rugged sprit of the cowboy to the modern era. These films introduced antiheroes who were amoral and withdrawn, disassociated from the morally unambiguous cowboys like John Wayne who always “sacrificed themselves for the greater good” (Bapis, 2008: 102). Still a representation of American masculinity, the cowboy underwent a change through the films mentioned above, as well as Western-defined films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969), The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969), and Kristofferson’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973). As opposed to earlier Hollywood cowboys whose images were wholesome, traditional, and conservative, personifying a patriotic ideal of American masculinity, the modern cowboy questioned authority and was concerned with personal fulfillment instead of protecting society.

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Kristofferson’s cowboy image was different, however, from the various male antiheroes that dominated American cinema in the 1970s. His modern cowboy image was sensitive, lacking underlying violence, and shaped by domestic relationships while his cowboy look merged traditional cowboy and counterculture signifiers. His long hair marked him out as a “hippie,” both within country music and in the cinema. In Blume in Love (Paul Mazurksy, 1973), he even portrayed a “hippie” musician who had no job, smoked marijuana all day, and befriends his lover’s ex-husband. Kristofferson also appeared in cowboy clothing throughout most of his films in the 1970s, wearing at various points: tattered leather jackets, denim jackets, denim button-down shirts, denim jeans, cowboy boots, button-down shirts with piping, and cowboy hats; in A Star Is Born (Frank Pierson, 1976), he wore the six button, bib front shirt commonly associated with cowboys. At the same time, his relationships and sensitivity in these films distinguished him as a modern cowboy.

Relationships Kristofferson’s cowboy image was deployed in various film genres and it is worth examining how vital relationships were to his cowboy aesthetic. A  list of the films he appeared in during the 1970s illustrates the following genre distribution:

The Last Movie (1972) Cisco Pike (1972) Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) Blume in Love (1973) Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Sam Peckinpah, 1974) Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1976) Vigilante Force (1976) A Star Is Born (1976) Semi-Tough (1977) Convoy (1978) Heaven’s Gate (1980)

Western/social drama5 Social drama Western Romantic comedy/social drama Western/road movie Melodrama/woman’s film Melodrama/thriller/woman’s film Western/action Musical/melodrama Romantic comedy/social drama Western/action Western/melodrama/epic

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In these films, relationships are important for different reasons. While Westerns often depict relationships that display male bonding through hero/ sidekick and father/son pairs, the Western also presents domestic, heterosexual relationships, but generally as a threat to the cowboy’s individualism. The melodrama is just as concerned with relationships, specifically familial relationships, exposing the fixed positions individuals have within dominant ideology. Melodramas have traditionally been associated with “feminine issues” or domestic situations that focus on women, but as Christine Gledhill suggests, some typically defined male genres like gangster and Western films are just as informed with “melodrama rhetoric” (1987: 12–13). Fundamentally, both the Western and melodrama depict relationships with the Western characterized as a genre that exposes the active male hero striving for individualism; and the melodrama complicating masculinity by associating men with passivity, feminine dispositions (emphasis on emotion), and the importance of father/son relationships to eventually prolong family lineage. Kristofferson embodied American masculinity with an emphasis on independence, but an independent spirit that sought out companionship. His sensitivity broke apart from the traditional cowboy relationships by committing to domestication and settlement. In the 1970s, his film roles created an arch from individualist cowboy in Cisco Pike and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid through to the domesticated cowboy in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Martin Scorsese, 1974), A Star Is Born, and Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980). He began his film career by playing the young up-start, surrogate son opposite older, established male figures (and established stars, Gene Hackman and James Colburn) in Cisco Pike and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Although his beard soon became a trademark, Kristofferson appears clean-shaven in both films. While his music was able to convey weariness through lyrical content, his cinematic face looked fresh and youthful, contrasting Kristofferson’s youth with his aged voice (deeply baritone and rough) and mature subject matter of his music. His clean-shaven face even helped him appear younger than his character’s ages (Kristofferson was thirty-six when Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid was made; Billy the Kid was twenty-one when Pat Garrett shot and killed him).

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Although not a traditional father/son relationship in Cisco Pike, Pike (Kristofferson) and Officer Leo Holland’s (Gene Hackman) relationship is one of distrust and betrayal between an older authoritarian figure and a young hustler. The film follows the common Western trajectory of the lone cowboy battling against injustice, before enlisting the help from a sidekick; although presented with the possibility of a settled life, he ultimately decides to travel on. Tellingly, the main character’s name references the Western—the Cisco Kid, a fictional Western character created by writer O.  Henry in the early 1900s, eventually became a serial on radio, television, and film. Pike is a former music star whose fame had waned; he has become a drug dealer but then attempts to reform. Once home from jail, he is visited by Holland who wants him to sell a large stash of marijuana in less than sixty hours. If he does not come up with the money, Holland will put him back into jail. The beginning of the film features numerous shots of Pike walking with his guitar case against the Los Angeles landscape (homes, storefronts, and the beach), almost like a cowboy out on the range (Figure 3.1). Over halfway into the film, he is reunited with his old music partner and obliged to try and help redeem him. Although Jesse (Harry Dean Stanton) is strung-out on drugs and in a more terrible state than Pike who has been awake for two days, the two go out on the town together, rekindling their relationship and shared past before Jesse dies from a heroin overdose.

Figure 3.1 Kris Kristofferson in Cisco Pike (1971)

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The male relationships (Pike and Holland and Pike and Jesse) within Cisco Pike push the emotional development of Pike toward fleeing his home with girlfriend Sue (Karen Black) for a life on the road. The film begins and ends with Pike travelling toward and then away from his home in a similar fashion to the Western classic Shane (George Stevens, 1953). Though not physically injured like Shane, Pike is psychologically damaged from Jesse’s death and Holland’s corruption, eventually abandoning his home for the open road and an undefined future. While Cisco Pike borrows from Western ideology in the ways discussed above, Pat Garrett and Bill the Kid is a Western that also contains an explicit representation of a symbolic father/son relationship between two cowboys. Kristofferson plays Billy the Kid, former best friend and riding companion of Pat Garrett (James Colburn), now a sheriff hired to arrest Billy. As in Cisco Pike there is a noticeable age gap between the two men, lending a generational divide to their complicated relationship of respect and resentment. The film presents Pat as the weary father who betrays his more charismatic son. When Billy and Pat first meet, they reminisce about their past and discuss how “times have changed,” though Billy notes he has not changed. Pat implores the impulsive Billy to leave the country before he is forced to take him in. Pat realizes the law has taken hold and lawlessness has little place within the modern world. Their relationship follows the quintessential father/son mentor relationship with the father (Garrett) attempting to convince the son (Billy) what is most important is to build a life and settle down or as Pat puts it, “I aim to live to be rich, old and gray.” Billy, on the other hand, can only think about how he will spend Pat’s money. Their troubled relationship reaches a crescendo when Pat hires two men to help him pursue and then kill Billy, the father punishing the son who has not followed his advice. The sequence when Pat finally shoots Billy features alternates between Billy sleeping with a Mexican woman (Rita Coolidge) and Pat approaching the house and then room where Billy is located. The intercutting between Billy making love and Pat’s pained expression as he approaches the house adds a feeling of betrayal, both a sexual betrayal and the ultimate betrayal of their friendship. Instead of settling when Pat told him to, Billy challenged Pat by continuing in his lawless ways. Pat, however, is finally able to

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dispose of Billy once Billy slows down, tiring of the life on the run. Their relationship demonstrates that Pat hoped to become a functioning part of society and felt becoming a representative of the law would achieve this. Conversely after death, Billy became a hero, demonstrated at the end of the film with everyone sitting in silence near Billy’s dead body and Pat galloping out of town with a small child throwing stones at him. These two early roles defined Kristofferson as the young cowboy, held back by his youthful reluctance to commit to a settled life. Despite his contemporary look in these films, his narrative role was relatively traditional within the Western genre, as the son questioning the direction and motives of the father figure. The mid-1970s brought a turning point as his screen image changed, beginning with his role in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and then The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (Lewis John Carlino, 1976) and A Star Is Born. While these later films featured male relationships, they were secondary, often helping to support the dominant relationship with a woman, as in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. Here his main relationship was no longer that of son to father (as in Cisco Pike and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid) but of father to son (the young son of the female lead). It was his role as rancher David in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, a paradigmatic text in Kristofferson’s canon of film roles, that truly came to define his image as a modern, sensitive cowboy who yearns for a settled life.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is a woman’s film,6 focused on Alice Hyatt (Ellen Burstyn), a recent widow who travels West with her son, Tommy, in hope of fulfilling her childhood dream to become a singer. She temporarily settles in Tucson, Arizona with her son, securing a job as a waitress at Mel’s Diner where she meets rancher David (Kristofferson). Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary (1975) refer to David as “an enlightened lover” for Alice, “a Marlboro man willing to sacrifice his lazy ranch life to join Alice in search for her career.” The description of David as the Marlboro man  —a quintessential modern American icon—is fitting. From the 1950s, the Marlboro man was

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used in advertisements for Marlboro cigarettes. He was portrayed in various professions throughout the 1950s, but from the 1960s onward, the image was always of a cowboy or professional rancher, adding a sense of authenticity to the iconic image of rugged, heteronormative, American masculinity (Brown, 2008: 188). David is smoking when Alice first meets him, dressed in blue jeans and a denim button-down shirt (similar to the clothing Kristofferson wore offscreen). Before the audience has any indication of his profession, his cowboy identity is clear (Figure 3.2). The scenes at David’s ranch illustrate Kristofferson’s modern cowboy image deployed through his apparent sensitivity, in addition to his clothing (denim and cowboy boots). One significant scene at the ranch begins with David nailing wire to a fence (exhibiting his ruggedness) as he tells Alice about the livestock on his ranch. Alice has a smitten look on her face and asks if she can touch his beard. As opposed to his earlier roles, Kristofferson now wears a beard that is peppered with gray hair, adding to his “world-weary” image; no longer a young man on the run, but a hardened man looking for companionship. The film cuts to a close-up of Alice’s hand as she touches his beard, commenting that it’s “soft” as David takes her hand and kisses it (Figure 3.3).

Figure  3.2 Kris Kristofferson and Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1975)

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Figure 3.3 Kris Kristofferson in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1975)

David kisses her gently and allows Alice to turn toward his body, a sign that he is patient and willing to wait for her. This is in stark contrast to the aggressive men from her past including Donald, her domineering husband who contributed little support to Alice in their strained marriage and Ben (Harvey Keitel), a young, philandering and abusive boyfriend she met on the road. While at the ranch, there is an extended scene in David’s kitchen (a domestic space normally associated with women) where Alice tells David about her childhood, first husband, and dreams to become a singer. Throughout the entire scene, Kristofferson sits back and listens, asking a few questions, but mainly takes pleasure in watching Alice relive her past. These two scenes demonstrate that David is masculine, but also sensitive to the needs of his lover, wanting to see her achieve her dreams. His presence within these scenes says more about his character than the few words that he speaks. As with many of Kristofferson’s roles, his visual and aural presence is almost more important than anything said or done by the characters he portrays. John Wayne’s image was also defined by his visual presence and how he came to embody “what most American men (and many American women) [felt] that a man ought to be” (Freedman, 2007:  18). Deborah Thomas has suggested that Wayne’s body is “often seen by other characters as bearing the marks of the statuesque/

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monumental: tall, hard, unyielding and representative of institutional codes” (qtd. in Luhr, 2004:  77). Kristofferson’s body is as American and masculine as Wayne’s, except without the hardness. Instead, while representing confidence, security, and sensitivity, he embodies a relaxed and gentle disposition. Throughout Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, David leans and crouches whether sitting at the diner counter or leaning against the fence at his ranch. His body encapsulates the relaxed approach to life that Kristofferson embodied. This ease even transfers to his voice. Though he has a deep, baritone speaking voice, Kristofferson is soft-spoken, often mumbling his lines—in true New Hollywood fashion. At the end of the film, David goes to Mel’s Diner and asks Alice and Tommy to move to his ranch. He then backtracks and tells Alice, “Or whatever you want.” It is obvious that he wants to be accommodating to her needs. As opposed to Alice’s first husband, David says he will go with her to Monterey and help her reach her dream to be a singer.7 The films ends with Alice and Tommy staying in Tucson with David. Though this ending suggests that Alice has chosen a domestic life with David over her dream to sing, he represents a clean break in her life from her past when she made no decisions, even if the end of the narrative is her choice of a conventional home life.

Indictment of the cowboy image Many of the films Kristofferson appeared in during the late 1970s continued to display his modification of the cowboy image through his characters’ desire to settle down. In The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1976), A Star Is Born (1976), Semi-Tough (Michael Ritchie, 1977), and Heaven’s Gate (1980), Kristofferson portrays men who are not fixed to one place, instead spending their life at sea (The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea), on the football field/road (Semi-Tough), on rock tours/road (A Star Is Born), and as the sheriff of a large region (Heaven’s Gate). In all four films, Kristofferson’s characters ask his leading woman to live with him, proposing marriage in two films (The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea and Semi-Tough), marrying in A Star Is Born and suggesting marriage in Heaven’s Gate. These relationships are

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notable because they represent his characters’ abandonment of the freedom to wander, instead placing a priority on companionship. He moves in to Anne’s (Sarah Miles) home in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, builds a home with his new wife, Esther (Barbra Streisand) in A Star Is Born, begins living with Barbara Jean (Jill Clayburgh) in Semi-Tough, and asks Ella (Isabelle Huppert) to leave with him to marry and set-up a home in Heaven’s Gate. Through these roles, Kristofferson romanticizes the modern cowboy as a tender, vulnerable, but still masculine individual. As opposed to traditional cowboys whose valor was confirmed through physical merit, Kristofferson’s cowboy displays valor through his ability to provide emotional support for the women in his life. In his late 1970s roles, he often sacrifices not only his freedom, but also his relationship for what is best for his lover: In Semi-Tough, he worries that Barbara Jean, twice divorced, is rushing into marriage with him as she had done before, ultimately sacrificing their relationship for the more advisable partnership with Billy Clyde (Burt Reynolds); in A Star Is Born, he sacrifices his life for the success of his wife, Esther Hoffman. In the end, his sacrifices are to protect the woman and her ability to find stable companionship, even if unable to do so with him. While it may appear that his characters follow the individualistic impulse so intrinsic to the cowboy, his characters do not choose against settlement and companionship as much as they compassionately assist their lover to make the best choice. In both Semi-Tough and Heaven’s Gate, he loses the woman to another man, but acknowledges that those partnerships are in the woman’s best interest. There is, however, an indictment of Kristofferson’s modern cowboy that comes through in his lack of intensity. His sensitivity and body beguile women, but his masculinity is devoid of intensity and muscular strength. While Clint Eastwood at the time represented conniving masculinity in action, often seeking vengeance (especially as “the man with no name”) through murder, Kristofferson rarely displays the image of the dueling or vengeful cowboy. In fact, he possesses a gun only in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Heaven’s Gate, both actual Westerns, demonstrating that his characters act to save people (generally women), more than seek their own individual pursuits. In Heaven’s Gate, he acts only when his lover, Ella, is in harm’s way while Pat

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Garrett and Billy the Kid illustrates how his lifestyle has led to disillusionment, especially when Billy finds a friend murdered and decides to turn back home. His body is rarely the site of action even though he often appears shirtless in many of his films. There is no violence below the surface; instead his actions are often tied to his relationships and the search for companionship. One film that appears most critical of Kristofferson’s modern cowboy is The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. Kristofferson plays Jim Cameron, a shipping captain who docks in Dover where widower Anne and her son Jonathan live. At first, Jonathan is intrigued by the rugged American sailor who befriends him. As Anne and Jim begin a passionate affair and Jonathan watches them make love, he grows resentful and hostile toward Jim. Jonathan and his pack of spitefully, sadistic teenage friends (e.g., they torture a cat for their amusement) think that Jim is not honoring the traditions of the sea, an environment the boys believe holds mystical, almost spiritual power over the universe. By becoming engaged to Anne, he is choosing mortal companionship over the greater calling of sailing the sea. The boys eventually kill Jim by poisoning his drink. The film can be read as a Western allegory with the cowboy choosing to settle at home, only to be prevented from returning to his wandering ways. Though the film presents Jim as the epitome of masculine desire for Anne, to the boys, his masculine image, which at first they worshipped becomes imperfect when he decides to settle down. He can no longer be their ideal of masculinity, like the traditional wandering cowboy. One of the most striking aspects of the film is that Jim is killed in the quietest and most trusting way possible: he shares a poisoned drink with the boys while watching the ships in the dock. Kristofferson’s lack of violence allows his character to become defeated by teenage boys, and he is never given the possibility to defend himself physically. Kristofferson’s characters in these films borrowed from the traditional cowboy (costume, ruggedness, American masculinity), but they were less aggressive and threatening than those of some contemporary Western stars (especially Clint Eastwood). This allowed his new model of masculinity, striving for companionship, to become an object of desire for women. However, it

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could be argued that the films simultaneously undermined him by presenting him as weak—the films thereby exhibiting some of popular culture’s ambivalences toward the women’s movement, albeit in a positive framework.

Feminization as an object of female desire As The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea shows, in the 1970s, Kristofferson’s screen image evolved into that of an object of desire for female audiences. This desire can be located in his physicality and his status as a romantic lead. Kristofferson’s body was promoted within the cinema and through promotional materials for both his film and music careers, exhibiting his ruggedness, nonthreatening sexuality, and naturalness that contributed to his attractiveness for women. In addition, his romantic appeal was nuanced, providing comforting masculine strength through his relationships with women, on- and off-screen and promoting his desire for female companionship. As the New York Times suggested in 1978, Kristofferson embodied a “new ideal of masculinity” that was “masculine, without being dominating” (Starr). Throughout most of his films, Kristofferson was the romantic lead opposite a leading woman (his first two films Cisco Pike and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and later, Vigilante Force (George Armitage, 1976) are exceptions, though he still has relationships with women in all three films). His modern cowboy image, as we have seen, consisted of companionship and settlement with a woman, but he also represented, through his body, an image of masculine strength and comfort. The posters for most of his films show Kristofferson as a man women seek comfort from, as they are often holding onto his body. Tellingly, the poster for his greatest romantic role, in A Star Is Born, features Kristofferson embracing Streisand by holding her head and grasping her hand that is placed on his chest (this image was also used on the cover of the successful soundtrack album and is the featured image on the DVD menu (Figure 3.4)). He is in control of her, but she still longs to embrace him. We see him bare-chested, but Streisand, also naked from the waist up, obscures his body causing the image to represent tenderness and togetherness as opposed to simple erotic spectacle.

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Figure 3.4 DVD menu from A Star Is Born (1976)

This image complicates Kristofferson’s male image, established as we have seen, as that of a cowboy, subjecting him to the “threat” of feminization. Male film stars whose bodies are presented as erotic spectacles are often thought to be feminized images of masculinity. Historically they have found various ways to stave off the feminized label, including the promotion of “male pursuits” off-screen, macho iconography, and the ability to control the gaze within narrative cinema.8 Kristofferson’s body as an erotic spectacle is confined to the cinema—both within films and through the promotion of films. Within interviews and articles (and his album covers), his body is clothed. Many promotional photographs and album covers between 1972 and 1980 generally feature his second wife, singer Rita Coolidge, and/or his children with the locations of photographs often associating him with outdoor, “manly” pursuits, wearing Western-style, rugged clothing (such as on the cover of the 1974 duet album, Breakaway, photographed with wife Rita and two horses). Also worth considering in relation to the threat of feminization is Richard Dyer’s (1992) suggestion that “images of men are often images of men doing something.” Dyer states thus: Even when not actually caught in an act, the male image still promises activity by the way the body is posed. Even in an apparently relaxed, supine pose,

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the model tightens and tautens his body so that the muscles are emphasized, hence drawing attention to the body’s potential for action. (270)

As opposed to the image of Kristofferson and Streisand from A Star Is Born, Kristofferson’s later films made a conscious effort to disassociate his image from threats of feminization by flaunting his body as tough and manly. Posters for Convoy (Sam Peckinpah, 1978) and Vigilante Force and to a lesser extent, the male buddy comedy Semi-Tough all feature him bare-chested in body poses that tighten and tautens his body. Although in none of the films does Kristofferson appear as muscular as he does on these images, each poster exaggerates his muscles and his body connotes strength, power, and toughness, all terms that are commonly used to describe male action stars. His strength in the films was rather located within patriarchal relationships with women, measured through his ability to uphold traditional masculine ideals while also exhibiting a new type of masculinity for women who had come of age during the women’s movement. These images make a spectacle of his body, emphasizing aggression through his ripped muscles, tight facial features, and fighting pose (emphasized even more on one of the Vigilante Force posters with a hand drawn fist extended out from the poster). Of the three posters, Convoy, a Western story within the contemporary “trucker” environment, most closely accords with Kristofferson’s dominant image. Though it is a macho image, it is a variation on, not a reconstruction of his masculine image, with Ali McGraw embracing him, demonstrating his status as object of female desire as well as his own desire for female comfort. The narratives of Convoy and Vigilante Force sustain the image of Kristofferson’s body as a muscular spectacle, a deliberate effort to work against his sentimental, masculine image. (Although in Semi-Tough, as signaled by the film title, the narrative works against the spectacle of his body seen on the poster by portraying Kristofferson as sensitive and weak, overly committed to a self-improvement “new age” cult.) In both films, he regularly appears barechested, and though his body is rarely commented on, the camera often frames it as an excessive, self-conscious spectacle. Action films rely on, according to Yvonne Tasker, a negotiation between action and display: “the production of action as display through the spectacular bodies of its muscular stars” (2002: 2).

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Figure 3.5 Kris Kristofferson in Convoy (1978)

Throughout both films, Kristofferson’s body is framed to exhibit action and display, the kind of negotiation Tasker describes through his relaxed body posture and toned chest. As in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Kristofferson’s body is often relaxed, not standing upright and leaning against objects. While in other roles, especially as a romantic lead, his relaxed body insinuates a lack of intensity, within action films, it illustrates his calm demeanor and ability to read situations before acting. The threat of action enables Kristofferson not to appear as a weak male star because there is intensity below the surface. Fundamentally, Convoy presents a more physical image of masculinity for Kristofferson, subverting his sensitive image, although in this film he is unable to erase the latter completely because the film does not place enough emphasis on his body. While he is presented shirtless, it is often from within the truck he drives, cutting his body off (Figure 3.5). In addition, he spends most of the film inside his truck with Melissa (McGraw), a photographer who when she first meets Martin “Rubber Duck” Penwald (Kristofferson) takes his photograph, suggesting his body is for her gaze. Furthermore, the action that Kristofferson displays does not originate from his body, but from the truck he drives as he is chased throughout Southwest America. The final battle between the “Rubber Duck” and Lyle Wallace (Ernest Borgnine) is not physical, but a battle between machinery—“Rubber Duck’s” truck and Wallace’s military tank.9 It is worth noting that Kristofferson is also featured, albeit fleetingly, in one of the defining New Hollywood films Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) as

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a masculine contrast to antihero, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), an intense male image. Bickle admires campaign worker Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) from afar before finally asking her on a date. While talking at a coffee shop, Betsy remarks, “You know what you remind me of? That song. . .by Kris Kristofferson.” Travis asks who that is and Betsy responds, “The songwriter”: “He’s a profit and pusher/Partly truth, partly fiction/A walking contradiction.” Although Travis is offended by the “pusher” line, Betsy reassures him that it’s the “walking contradiction” part that describes him. Later, a long shot shows Travis buying Kristofferson’s record The Silver Tongued Devil and I from a store as a present for Betsy. This exchange demonstrates how Kristofferson’s stardom was closely linked to his appeal to women. When Travis first approaches Betsy at the campaign headquarters of Charles Palantine, he is friendly and sweet, telling her that she needs a friend to talk to. As Betsy spends more time with him, his sensitive veneer begins to fade, replaced by early signs of hostility, especially toward Betsy’s coworker Tom (Albert Brooks). Robert Phillip Kolker suggests Travis “projects his own feelings on her in such sentimental terms that she can hardly help but react to them” (2000: 228). His “fake” sentimentality contrasts Kristofferson’s “authentic” self as the introspective, sensitive songwriter, admired by Betsy. Kristofferson is, thus, positioned as the ideal male image for modern women like Betsy, a man who can observe and identify the “profits” and “pushers,” but not personify them.

Sex symbol and female companionship Kristofferson’s feminine appeal was exploited through companionship, but also through his body, promoted as a sexual spectacle within many film roles. The commercial success of A Star Is Born in 1976 (the film was one of the top grossing films of the year, with a domestic box office of eighty million dollars) caused Kristofferson to become a popular sex symbol. His concerts began to feature screaming women as the New York Times noted when they reviewed one of his concerts with Coolidge: “Oh, he’s so cute! Eeyagh! I don’t belieeeeve it!” squealed somebody at the sight of Kris Kristofferson, much the way people used to carry on about Paul

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McCartney’s hair 15  years ago. This spectator had her point, because Mr. Kristofferson is indeed a handsome specimen. (Maslin, 1979)

While A Star Is Born established Kristofferson as a mainstream sex symbol, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with The Sea (released the same year) exposed Kristofferson’s body as an erotic spectacle within the film, accompanied by a revealing Playboy spread with costar Sarah Miles. The first love scene between Kristofferson and Miles (Anne) is explicit, displaying Kristofferson’s body as strong and unyielding, able to support an emotionally fragile woman while also soft and gentle, and he is concerned about his lover’s first time making love since her husband’s death. Anne’s sexual needs and loneliness were established in an earlier scene when she masturbated while crying and looking at her husband’s portrait. The scene begins with Kristofferson framed from below, adding to his power while Miles is shot straight on in a medium shot, emphasizing her vulnerability. These first few shots establish that Kristofferson is controlling the gaze through the editing between him looking at her naked body while she gazes at his face. Kristofferson’s body holds Miles up as she trembles in his arms, moving her hands across his chest and touching scars on his back (a battered masculine body). The focus of this scene is on Anne, both narratively and visually, as the camera captures her orgasmic expressions, naked body, and extreme close-ups of her pupil. Visually, the film presents him as a masculine spectacle of strength through his bare chest and broad shoulders; aurally, the film confirms his masculine strength when Jonathan (Anne’s son) tells his friends (after watching Anne and Jim make love) that Jim “looked fantastic. His muscles and scars all over his body. Then, he took her to bed”! Although this last comment suggests Jim dominates Anne, the scene presents their lovemaking as gentle, shot in soft lighting and accompanied by a lone piano score. The tenderness exhibited within this scene and throughout the narrative meshes with Kristofferson’s image as a sensitive masculine ideal. This image, however, was challenged in the Playboy spread where Miles and Kristofferson “re-create[d] the film’s erotic intensity” (“Kris and Sarah— Pictorial,” 1976). The pictures include stills from the film and photographs taken especially for the magazine. The film stills feature Kristofferson and Miles in romantic gestures—embracing and looking at each other, including

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an image of the two making love. By contrast, the photos shot exclusively for Playboy are aggressive, portraying a rough sexual encounter, with one caption stating the pictures show “the man’s body is scarred, his muscles ripple” (masculinity subjected to violence though strong enough to bear it). These photos contrasted so much with the film’s sensitivity and Kristofferson’s screen image that he later dismissed them by stating, “It was a mistake” (Windeler, 1977). While Sailor was not a box office success, Playboy had a wide circulation in the mid-1970s and the photos became legendary, mentioned a great deal in the press, contributing to Kristofferson’s sex symbol status extensively established with A Star Is Born. Kristofferson’s sensitive screen image, demonstrated also through his music that exposed personal issues such as his alcoholism and marriage to Coolidge, helped to define him as a female object of desire as much, if not more, than the display of his body. In 1978, the Associated Press reported that a group of women called Male Watchers Inc. conducted a survey and named Kristofferson one of the “World’s most watchable men,” commenting that he is “handsome and super sexy with beautiful eyes and body. Mix this with his intelligence and sensitivity—and wow!” (Associated Press, 1976). This description illustrates how Kristofferson’s body was appealing to women as was his face and eyes, but his intelligence and sensitivity were as essential. In A Star Is Born, the third remake of the film (after earlier versions made in 1937 (William A. Wellman) and 1954 (George Cukor)) originally based on David O Selznick’s What Price Hollywood (George Cukor, 1932), Kristofferson plays John Norman Howard, an alcoholic rock singer whose fame has begun to fade, and who befriends Esther Hoffman (Streisand) whom he helps to achieve stardom as a popular singer. The film is a melodrama, focusing on the couple’s attempt to hold on to both their marriage and careers. While A Star Is Born is a romance, it is not an erotic film, containing only one sex scene that contrasts well with The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. In both films, the love scenes are shot with soft lighting, mainly in the dark, with a piano score. A Star Is Born, however, only shows Kristofferson and Streisand topless (without frontal shots), kissing before the film pans from the bedroom through a cut to the bathroom where they take a bath together. This short scene begins with a medium shot of the two embracing (an emphasis on companionship rather

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Figure 3.6 Kris Kristofferson and Barbara Streisand in A Star Is Born (1976)

than eroticism) before Esther starts to decorate John Howard’s face with female make-up. The scene ends when Esther comments, “You’re so pretty” and they both laugh and kiss (Figure 3.6). This scene epitomizes Kristofferson’s heartthrob appeal for female audiences, a masculine ideal defined by his empathy toward women, but in contrast to The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, not so much by his eroticism. As noted, A Star Is Born is a remake, a rock music version of the original story, first made in 1937 as a melodrama and then remade as a musical in 1954, starring Judy Garland and James Mason. Each version is of its time, representing how Hollywood perceived itself during the era the film was made, but also exposing the changing nature of masculinity. While the 1937 and 1954 versions make it clear the husband cannot live with a more successful wife, the 1976 version complicates the couple’s relationship by revealing John Howard’s aversion to stardom and happiness toward his wife’s popularity. John Howard is portrayed as a self-destructive individual more than a husband jealous of his wife’s success. He is content to record music (even telling his manager that all he wants to do is record and produce his own music) and not join his wife on the road (despite her demanding it of him). In the end, John Howard sacrifices himself for Esther because he knows he cannot survive on the road, preferring to be the settled cowboy as opposed to the wandering cowboy.

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Kristofferson’s personal life and confessional music contributed to his sensitive image with his alcoholism exhibiting weakness and need for female care and compassion, which Coolidge provided. From the beginning, Kristofferson’s music featured numerous songs about his alcoholism, often referred to in song as “the devil” and “demons” that plague his life, including the biographical song, “To Beat the Devil.” In this respect, Kristofferson fits within the country music genre, as alcoholism is a common theme within country music, with male singers often using alcohol to “ ‘deaden’ the loss of a love” (Lewis, 1993:  250).  In 1977, H.  Paul Chalfant and Robert E.  Beckley studied thirty country music songs in which alcohol was a theme between 1974 and 1975, and found: Drinking is seen as related to manhood (as in the “good old boy” syndrome), facilitation in social life, and assuagement of problems. Even with this real view, however, the narratives of the country songs can still suggest the idea of repentance. The drinker is seen as finally either repenting, particularly returning to the “good” woman, or meeting a tragic end—Skid Row, prison or death. (1429)

Many country stars suffered from alcohol addiction including Cash who repented, became a devout Christian, and settled into family life with his wife, the singer June Carter. Kristofferson’s alcoholism was well documented, contributing to his music and film star images, but it is notable how accommodating he was to the press. He was complacent with the depiction of this aspect of his persona, often granting interviews to journalists who were less interested in his music or films than his personal life. Press articles and interviews with Kristofferson and Coolidge focused on his alcoholism and their attempt to establish a solid family life within the entertainment industry. Beginning in 1976, the same year A Star Is Born was released, Kristofferson and Coolidge were featured in popular publications like People magazine, following the country music narrative of the alcoholic singer who was saved by a “good woman.” In 1977, Time magazine featured an article about the couple that stated thus: Throughout their four-year marriage, Kris and Rita have led a not-so-private life that would have a soap opera scenarist sudsing [sic] with envy. Can Kris

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deal with his drinking? Can Rita deal with his drinking? (“Music: Grooving with Kris and Rita”)

People magazine ran a feature with Kristofferson after the premiere of A Star Is Born entitled “Barbra’s ‘A Star’ Didn’t Fix Kris Kristofferson’s Wagon—It Put Him On It.” The article, featuring photographs of Kristofferson, Coolidge, and their daughter, Casey, at home, suggested that viewing a rough cut of A Star Is Born (along with Coolidge) contributed to his decision to quit drinking: For two decades he found he had been drinking himself towards oblivion and perhaps divorce from his second wife, Rita Coolidge. Watching himself disintegrate on screen, was like seein’ myself through Rita’s eyes—when I  saw the corpse [he dies at film’s end], I  had a weird feeling of sadness, like a character in Twilight Zone who sees a coffin with his name on it. I  feel so goddamn lucky to have found out in time—I’d been drinking heavily for 20 years. I’d forgotten what it was like to think without alcohol. (Windeler, 1977)

Even on his first album in 1970, his “battle with the bottle” and his need to be saved was explicitly described during the spoken-word beginning to “To Beat the Devil’: A couple of years back, I came across a great and wasted friend of mine in the hallway of a recording studio; and while he was reciting some poetry to me that he’d written, I saw that he was about a step away from dyin’ and I couldn’t help but wonder why. And the lines of this song occurred to me. I’m happy to say he’s no longer wasted and he’s got him a good woman. And I’d like to dedicate this to John and June [Cash], who helped show me how to beat the devil.

Within the patriarchal environment of country music, women hold an important role as the providers of strength and stability behind failing and self-destructive men. There is a model of romantic partnerships with country music (George Jones and Tammy Wynette; Faith Hill; and Tim McGraw), as well as an archetype of self-destructive men who are rescued by maternal women (John and June Cash fit this model). Women’s role as saviors cause men to appear vulnerable and in need of female guidance while also more

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compassionate and tender. In the 1970s, women were gaining greater independence through the women’s movement. Country music in the 1970s, however, was still a patriarchal culture, leaving strong women often with the only option of taking the mother role, as opposed to true independence from, or equality with, men. Essential to Kristofferson’s image as a female object of desire was his public relationship with Coolidge and highly personal music that highlighted companionship and self-destruction through alcoholism. It is interesting to note that as Kristofferson’s film stardom rose, stimulating the public’s interest in his personal life, especially his marriage to Coolidge, his music stardom began to fade. By the beginning of the 1980s, his stardom in both film and music was well below its mid-1970s peak. As a crossover star, it is worth investigating why Kristofferson was unable to maintain stardom in both mediums and how his image as a modern cowboy may have contributed to this decline.

Waxing and waning careers: antiestablishment artist to conventional leading man Kristofferson’s image evolved from individualistic cowboy to domesticated cowboy in the 1970s while at the same time, his stardom evolved from antiestablishment country music star to Hollywood leading man by the end of the decade. A joint examination of Kristofferson’s music and film careers displays two issues that came to hinder his progress in the 1970s. First, his music and film careers did not intersect—only Cisco Pike featured Kristofferson compositions, songs written for his second album, The Silver Tongued Devil and I, not specifically for the film. Second, and more significantly, was the fact that his music stardom relied on an antiestablishment, “outlaw” image while his film stardom relied on a quite conventional image as a leading man (albeit that of a soft, “feminized” man). His stardom in both media went through three stages in the 1970s and through each stage, one medium dominated; 1970–1974, music; 1975–1977, film; 1978–1980, both careers in decline. Kristofferson began his career as a country music star on the fringe of the country music establishment. His infamous appearance at the CMA awards

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in 1970 signaled the incorporation of the counterculture into the conservative genre of music. As critic William Ruhlmann argued, Kristofferson merged the “country archetype of a hard-drinking, romantically independent loner and the rock & roll archetype of a drug-taking, romantically free hippie.” His music star image in the early 1970s was associated with an underground movement that challenged the country music establishment through image and music. Kristofferson’s first few film roles embodied this image as an underground artist with critical success. His first film appearance was in Dennis Hopper’s follow-up to Easy Rider, The Last Movie (1971). Hopper was himself an antiestablishment figure due to the success of Easy Rider, a counterculture road movie starring Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicolson. The Last Movie has come to represent the New Hollywood movement or as Nick Hefferman puts it: The story of The Last Movie (1971) has become one of the abiding legends of the “New Hollywood”—that brief flowering of politically and culturally radical film-making that blossomed with the decline of the traditional movie mass audience in the mid-1960s and withered with the arrival of the bigbudget blockbuster in the mid-1970s. (2006: 12)

Kristofferson appears in the film only for a short time, but notably, he sings his own composition, “Me and Bobby McGee.” Though it is a small role, it fits well with his music image, displaying his talent through the performance of his music and associating him with radical, subversive filmmaking (the complex and layered story concerns reality and fantasy on a film set in Peru) and antiestablishment sentiments. The synergy between Kristofferson’s music and film stardom was apparent in Cisco Pike, his first starring role where he portrayed a former teen rock star and drug dealer, attempting to reestablish his music career. The film is an underground view of Los Angeles in 1972 with Kristofferson travelling through the city as he attempts to sell a large stash of marijuana. He visits coffee shops, a music studio, the famous Troubadour lounge where Kristofferson (the musician) played many shows and where he befriends Merna played by Viva, one of Andy Warhol’s Factory stars. The film also features many of Kristofferson’s own compositions from his second album, The Silver Tongued Devil and I with the poster for Cisco Pike including the cover image from that album.

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His next film, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, featured original music by Bob Dylan who also appeared in a small role as Alias, a follower of Billy the Kid. Though not Kristofferson’s own music, Dylan’s compositions, stylistically similar to Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) that included Leonard Cohen’s music, establish a Western narrative within the modern antiestablishment attitude that both Dylan and Kristofferson featured in their music. The Silver Tongued Devil and I was a hit album for Kristofferson, reaching number four on the country album chart and twenty-one on the pop album chart in 1971. Though the album ranked high, it was not an astounding success, never reaching number one on any album charts and included no hit singles for Kristofferson. In fact, the greatest commercial success he experienced was as a songwriter, yielding successful covers for other artists, such as Johnny Cash (“Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”), Sammi Smith (“Help Me Make It Through the Night”), Ray Price (“For the Good Times”), and Janis Joplin (“Me and Bobby McGee”). His stardom in the early 1970s as a music artist was thus built on his success as a songwriter, popular enough to be sought after to appear in films, but still not widely known within American popular culture. His first few film roles attempted to establish his antiestablishment image in “fringe” films seeking to exploit his unique image as opposed to appealing to a wide, popular audience. Beginning in 1972, Kristofferson’s music career gained greater attention through his marriage to Coolidge with whom he began to record and tour. He had his only career number one single on the country charts with “Why Me,” a traditional country lament about redemption. That same year, he won the “Country Song of the Year” at the Grammy Awards for “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” a song that reached number one on the country singles chart the year earlier (recorded by Sammi Smith). In 1974, Kristofferson appeared in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, signaling a shift in his cinematic image, establishing him as a leading man and female object of desire. At the same time, his solo music career was less commercially successful although his first duet album with Coolidge in 1974 reached number one on the country album charts. Within both his music image and film image, he was associated with romantic relationships with women. Press interviews with Kristofferson focused on his relationship with Coolidge, establishing him as a “wild man,”

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settled by marriage and fatherhood (his only child with Coolidge, Casey, was born in 1974). While his earlier songs and film performances helped establish him as a loner, his personal and professional relationship with Coolidge caused his image to become that of a man as part of a couple. His performances in women’s films like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, and A Star Is Born, mirrored his new image as a husband and father. From 1974 and his album Spooky Lady’s Shadow, Kristofferson began to receive negative reviews from music critics, many of whom suggested that his film work had compromised his music. A  typical review appeared in national newspapers in 1976 for the album Surreal Thing : “Kristofferson, once the most promising of country and western-based singer-song-writers, has nearly abandoned his original field for acting, at which he is terrific. Unfortunately, his recordings suffer an inevitable drain” (Marsh, 1976). Also at stake was Kristofferson’s authenticity as a country music artist. His success in music and film caused a public demand for his music with Kristofferson releasing nine solo albums in the 1970s, in addition to three duet albums with Coolidge. While his original material had garnered almost universal praise at the beginning of the decade, by the mid-1970s his albums began to feature cover songs and older compositions that had not been thus far recorded. His authenticity as a music artist lay in his original compositions, songs about self-destruction, personal demons, and freedom, accompanied by Kristofferson’s gruff voice and simple guitar-driven melodies. His music began to lose the intimacy admired in his first two albums through more layered instrumentation and production and also by sharing song-writing duties with other musicians. In addition, his albums began to feature Coolidge more, making it difficult to separate his solo material from their duet albums. Within country music mythology, his “credibility” as an artist who represented the counterculture disappeared with his marriage and working partnership with Coolidge and his popularity in the cinema as a female object of desire. By 1977, Kristofferson had evolved from, as an Associated Press article stated, “a bearded, bedraggled, boozing young songwriter who wanted nothing more from his life than to keep ‘the chilly wind off my gee-tar’” to his new image as a glamour boy (“Kris Kristofferson Ponders New Image as Glamor

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Boy”). This quote suggests that Kristofferson was incapable to be perceived as a serious musician while appearing in popular films and, in turn, he was unable to be viewed as a serious actor while his “pin-up” status was celebrated. The lack of realism within A Star Is Born, a melodrama, and the films that followed (Semi-Tough and Vigilante Force) was at odds with the authenticity of the personal narratives of his music. The Associated Press quote above also displays how separate Kristofferson’s music had become from his film stardom. In fact, Kristofferson often gave indications that he agreed with music critics and fans that felt his Hollywood stardom was incompatible with his music work: Whether it had been the movies or just the reality of being on the road, it would have cut in on some of the creative experiences that are in “To Beat The Devil” or “Saturday Morning Coming Down.” I  wasn’t living in that place anymore. (Friskics-Warren, 2006: 81)

While his first starring role contained many of his own songs, by the mid1970s, his film roles barely hinted at his music stardom. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore contains musical moments, including a scene with David teaching Tommy (Alice’s son) to play guitar. The scene, however, is short with the film generally focused on Alice as the musical person who is afforded an entire, solo musical performance. While in A Star Is Born, Kristofferson plays a former rock star (a genre of music he was never identified with), the film featured none of his own compositions. The lack of crossover between his music and film careers meant that his stardom in both media was marginalized because they rarely intersected.

Eternal costar Kristofferson’s film stardom was also affected by his propensity to be dominated by his costar through his feminized image as a “laid back,” modern cowboy. This was most apparent in his two romantic starring roles in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and A Star Is Born, both women’s films, but also in Heaven’s Gate, his last significant starring role. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore was a modern update of the traditionally female-oriented melodrama genre that

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according to Ellen Burstyn (Alice) was a “different kind of film. A film from a woman’s point of view” (Hebron, 2000) during the women’s movement. Narratively, Kristofferson was marginalized through the thin characterization of David whose entire narrative function was to help Alice reach a level of fulfillment. While Kristofferson was singled out by many critics for his performance, the success of the film (grossing over eighteen million dollars) was attributed to Burstyn’s performance for which she won an Academy Award and Scorsese’s direction, his first Hollywood film after critical success with the independently made Mean Streets (1973). A Star Is Born was the most commercially successful film Kristofferson appeared in throughout the 1970s. While much of the criticism and bad press was leveled against his costar and coproducer, Streisand, the media’s response to the film affected his credibility as a serious actor and as a masculine ideal. Although A Star Is Born introduced him to a wider audience, in effect expanding his “heartthrob” appeal, the film was considered lightweight and sentimental throughout the news media and serious film criticism. The film’s reception added to Kristofferson’s persona as a self-consciously sentimental male star, but negatively damaged his film stardom by presenting him as weak, especially against the overpowering star presence of Streisand. The publicity of the film focused on Streisand’s desire to produce a feminist version of the “star is born” story and Kristofferson’s excessive drinking that damaged his marriage to Coolidge. Streisand felt that the 1976 version of A Star Is Born would be a contemporary story about relationships with a feminist point of view. She told Photoplay in 1976: This is a woman’s picture—I’m going to see to that—but I  don’t mean in the old-fashioned way where the woman is the weakling and all the other females out there in the audience are crying with sympathy for her. No way! The hero this time around is not any man, but a woman. She’s got muscles. She’s definitely not a loser or a singer-of-the-blues like you’ll find in other “A Star is Born” pictures. She doesn’t take a back seat to any foolish drunk: Uhuh. (Deveraux, 1976: 54)

The comments Streisand made in the press in addition to the narrative of A Star Is Born promoting Esther as the hero marked Kristofferson as a feminized

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male star who was secondary to his female costar. Indeed, Steven Bach, head of East Coast and European Production at United Artists, wrote in his memoir about Heaven’s Gate that the studio felt Kristofferson was “emerging as an important film actor,” even though he had been overshadowed by Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Streisand in A Star Is Born (Bach, 1999: 124). The reception of Kristofferson’s last significant starring role in Heaven’s Gate also caused him to be overshadowed, this time by the director of the film (Michael Cimino) as opposed to a female costar. Heaven’s Gate became legendary for its runaway costs (budgeted at seven million and costing over thirty-five million dollars when production was completed (Prince, 2000:  33)), perfectionist director and abrasive critical reception (including Vincent Camby’s famous review in the New  York Times that suggested the film is like “a forced four-hour walking tour of one’s own living room” (1980)). This critical disaster, however, had little to do with Kristofferson. In fact, very few reviews included any assessment of his performance. Before filming began, Kristofferson was excited to work with the Academy Award winning Cimino, stating “. . .because I said I’d do Heaven’s Gate before The Deer Hunter came out makes me look real smart. In fact, when I finally saw that film I thought I was the smartest sucker in the world for making the right decision” (Mann, 1979: 15). The film was the last chance Kristofferson was given in Hollywood to establish himself as a leading male star and his inability to break through caused him to become an “eternal costar” from the 1980s to today.

Conclusion Kristofferson’s music and film career emerged almost in tandem with just two years separating his first album (Kristofferson) and the release of his first starring film role (Cisco Pike). This led to a conflation between his music and film images at a time when both were developing. The trajectory of Kristofferson’s three phases of his career—new cowboy (1970–1974), romantic leading man (1974–1977), and macho image (1977–1980)—displays the success he achieved as a new romantic cowboy throughout the 1970s, but this image also

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generated problems for the masculine star. His success as a new cowboy and romantic leading man constrained his stardom through the overshadowing by his female stars, especially in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, and A Star Is Born. His film image illustrates the tensions inherent in that era, specifically Hollywood’s attempt to accommodate feminism. As Robin Wood noted, especially in relation to An Unmarried Woman (Paul Mazursky, 1978) and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, “feminism had to undergo various drastic changes” to allow for the social movement to reach cinema screens (2003: 180). Kristofferson’s stardom is reflective of the period as a feminized man, someone who could be both masculine, but also is nonoppressive and as Wood suggests about David in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is a male who Alice can “relate to on equal terms and with whom she develops a satisfying . . . relationship” (2003: 182). Wood goes on to propose that these two films present men who are strong and burly, but also emotionally stable and this allows for the audience to engage in a sigh of relief: “the women don’t have to be independent after all; there are strong, protective males to look after them” (182–183) (author’s italics). While Wood is describing the fictional relationship in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, these comments can just as easily be adapted to describe Kristofferson’s film stardom in general. For much of the 1970s, he was a “woman-made” male star, similar to Rudolph Valentino whom Gaylyn Studlar described as representing in the 1920s “the ultimate in woman-made masculinity” (2004: 291). Kristofferson was a celebrity as much as a music and film star, with a great deal of press material generated by his personal life, generally in female targeted publications like People magazine. The correlation between his personal life and film career, especially his ability to be dominated by women on-screen and in his personal life through the success of Coolidge and the decline of his music stardom, led initially to a successful film career, only to falter when his macho image took over. After filming A Star Is Born, Kristofferson appeared in Convoy, Vigilante Force, and the television miniseries costarring Muhammad Ali, Freedom Road (Ján Kadár, 1979). These films focused on male relationships and in the case of Convoy and Vigilante Force were action films, a genre that became very popular with male protagonists based on the Western “definitions of masculinity: physical size, strength,

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charisma, pronounced facial features, aggressive behaviour, and the ability to generate action” (Gallagher, 2004: 115) and where spectacle took precedence over relationships. This was far removed from the film star image Kristofferson had built as a compassionate, romantic leading man in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, and A Star Is Born. As opposed to Robert Redford10 or Warren Beatty11 who expanded their leading man status to political films that were not in opposition to their liberal, feminized masculinity, Kristofferson attempted to appear in both masculine spectacles like Convoy and feminine melodramas like A Star Is Born, genres that do not accord. His first film in the 1980s, Heaven’s Gate, melds both his macho and romantic images, but the film ultimately illustrates that his film image cannot sustain both tendencies. The film acted as a “kiss of death” for Kristofferson (aggravated by the scathing critical response to the film) who thus lost his greatest appeal as a “woman-made” male star: his ability to protect the independent woman. After starring as the male romantic lead opposite Jane Fonda in 1981’s Rollover (Alan J.  Pakula), Kristofferson began appearing in more Western and action films, costarring with Willie Nelson in Songwriter (Alan Rudolph, 1984), Cash in The Last Days of Frank and Jesse James (William A. Graham, 1986), and both Nelson and Cash in Stagecoach (Ted Post, 1986), reverting to the more traditionally masculine country and Western image. In parallel, in 1985, Nelson, Cash, Jennings, and Kristofferson formed the country music “super-group,” the Highwaymen, whose image personified a return to traditional country music machismo and the ‘outlaw’ persona. While Kristofferson’s film stardom has lessened since the 1970s, his ability to transform himself into a character actor can be attributed to the harmony of his image between music and film. Though he has only released eight studio albums since 1981’s To the Bone, his stardom has evolved, becoming an elder-statesmen and legend within country music. Ethan Hawke wrote about Kristofferson in Rolling Stone magazine in 2009: Kris Kristofferson is cut from a thicker, more intricate cloth than most celebrities today: Imagine if Brad Pitt had also written a Number One single for someone like Amy Winehouse, was considered among the finest songwriters

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of his generation, had been a Rhodes scholar, a U.S. Army Airborne Ranger, a boxer, a professional helicopter pilot—and was as politically outspoken as Sean Penn. That’s what a motherfuckin’ badass Kris Kristofferson was in 1979.

Although this overly macho description of Kristofferson does hint at his sex symbol status by equating him to Brad Pitt, the quote ultimately reflects quite accurately the image that Kristofferson began in his music career in the early 1970s and returned to in the 1980s and maintains to this day as a loner, antiestablishment, outlaw and ultimately sensitive, cowboy.

Notes 1 The Lone Ranger aired on ABC from 1949 to 1957 while Gunsmoke aired on CBS from 1955 to 1975, and is one of American television’s longest running series. 2 See “The Early Period of Commercial Hillbilly Music” chapter in Malone (1985) for a contextualization of the early perception of country music as hillbilly music. 3 The Nashville Sound is a sub-genre of country music defined by its production and dominant themes that became popular in the late 1950s and 1960s. 4 See, in particular, Reid (2004). 5 I am defining films with a dramatic arc that engages with some of the prevailing social issues or cultural concerns of the era as social dramas. 6 Woman’s films are defined, by Neale (2007a), as “films marked generally by domestic settings, by romance and/or by pathos and sentiment” (326). 7 It can be argued, however, that Alice’s true dream is not to be a singer, but to return to the loving and warm home from her remembered childhood. 8 See Studlar (1993), Hansen (1991), and Hansen’s (1991a) studies of Rudolph Valentino as a good example of how controlling the look within narrative cinema actively challenged the threat of feminization brought about through the erotic spectacle of the male star body. 9 Vigilante Force is the one film that truly works against Kristofferson’s image as an object of female desire by presenting him as a villainous male—aggressive and violent. 10 See Lobalzo Wright (2016) for an examination of Redford’s all-American blonde image during the height of his stardom in the 1970s. 11 See Cagle (2010) for an examination of Redford and Beatty as political stars in the 1970s.

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The Rap Film Star: Will Smith

Introduction Smith is one of the most successful crossover stars in this study, and one of the biggest Hollywood stars in the contemporary era. His ability to market films through the synergy of his film and music stardom has been exploited with great success by Hollywood studios and record companies. Smith began his career as part of the rap group, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, before appearing on the hit network television show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (NBC) from 1990 to 1996. During his time on The Fresh Prince, Smith began to appear as a supporting actor in films, culminating in his breakout role in the blockbuster, Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996). His costarring role in Men in Black (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1997) established him as a global Hollywood and music star with the film grossing over five hundred and eighty million dollars and his soundtrack single for the film, “Men in Black,” became a hit. However, his career trajectory displays the changing nature of Hollywood from the late 1980s to today, especially the difficulties for crossover stars in maintaining stardom in multiple media. While Smith was—at one point—one of the most “bankable” stars in Hollywood (In 2009, he was named “Hollywood’s Most Valuable Actor” by Forbes Star Currency survey of industry professionals, scoring a perfect ten (Burman)), his film stardom has faded in the past few years owing to some significant box office failures. Furthermore, he has not released a music album since 2005. Smith is an important star to examine in the context of contemporary Hollywood stardom, but he is also bound by the key ideological foundation of his star image, namely his race—indeed his specificity is in his unique

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combination, for a rap artist, of blackness and a “nice guy” image. Unlike rap artists such as Ice Cube1 and others who began film careers at the same time, Smith always portrayed a nice, clean, as well as “goofy” image, displaying comic timing; later he moved on to serious acting roles in the 2000s with Academy Award nominated performances in Ali (Michael Mann, 2001) and The Pursuit of Happyness (Gabriele Muccino, 2006). The reverse of this is that he has been “accused” by critics of being a nonthreatening black male star able to transcend or even “whitewash” racial divisions, especially within America. His image, however, is more complex than this simplistic assessment, its interest precisely being located in his negotiation of race and the passage into mainstream stardom. This chapter will examine Smith’s rap and television stardom before contemplating his position as one of the most “bankable” stars in Hollywood in the 1990s and 2000s and the racial implications of such widespread popularity. Central to his success has been the Fresh Prince image, first established in music and then in television; however, this same image may limit his ability to maintain his successful position within the film industry as he ages.

Rap music genre It is important to first define the music genre he emerged from, rap, and consider the political dimension to rap and hip-hop stardom that cannot be ignored. As black males, rap stars were initially either excluded from the music industry and Hollywood or pushed to the periphery, achieving small-scale success compared to their white counterparts. Part of the success of rap music in the past thirty years is as a cultural expression of the black American experience. As opposed to earlier black music genres such as the blues and jazz, however, rap was gradually able to become a hugely popular and mainstream genre crossing racial and gender boundaries. In addition, the success of rap and hip-hop led to a shift in the music industry with major record companies devoted exclusively to this style of music; this is a complete turnaround from earlier eras when dominantly black music was relegated to the margins of the record industry or appropriated by white male artists.2

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As with many popular music genres, rap emerged from various sociocultural contexts as an expression of a group of individuals subordinate to the dominant culture. Quite simply, rap is an expression of black male identity. Rap is generally divided into three eras: old school from approximately 1979 to 1986; message rap and pop rap from approximately 1987 to 1993; and commercial rap from approximately 1994 to today.3 The old school era arose during the politically contentious and socially deprived condition of black New York neighborhoods in the 1970s, especially the Bronx. The South Bronx became a symbol of the postindustrial, decaying urban landscape in many American cities including Detroit and Cleveland, due to the “white flight” of white residents to more suburban neighborhoods and modest upward mobility available for the racial minorities still residing there. Hip-hop culture4 emerged in 1970s New York as an expressive youth culture for mainly black males, with three major components: rap music, breakdancing, and graffiti art.5 Although all three developments were unique, rap artists, breakdancers, and graffiti artists would often converge at block parties and club nights to create an intersection of styles. The common image of the South Bronx in ruin through abandoned buildings and rubble from demolished or burned down buildings was countered by the vibrancy, energy, and vitality of the new cultural forms of music, dance, and art associated with hiphop culture (Rose, 1994: 33). Personal expression was vital to hip-hop; what was expressed was specific to New York—generally the Bronx—but was also a dominantly male expression of enjoyment. The record industry did not immediately embrace rap because of concerns about its image as “ghetto music” (Charnas, 2011: 87). This linked the emergent music genre with the urban black experience even though many early rap songs were not explicitly centered on urban life. As Alan Light notes, Run-DMC changed rap music in 1984 by releasing the first full-length rap album, but also through the style of their music “with their stripped-to-thebone sound, crunching beats, and . . . accessible but street-smart narratives . . . in addition to more conventional rap boasting” (2012:  139). They were the first rap artists that displayed an ability to make money out of something that was up until then viewed as a passing fad, especially undesirable to the record industry that witnessed the implosion of disco just a few years earlier.

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Run-DMC represented the commercialization of rap and its progression from New York to the rest of America through their crossover success, starring in Krush Groove (Michael Schultz, 1985) and releasing Raising Hell (1986), an album that went triple-platinum and included the hit single, “Walk This Way.” Rap split in the late 1980s with one strand producing politically conscious music, such as Public Enemy’s oeuvre, and the other strand following in RunDMC’s (and, after the 1986 release of Licence to Ill, the Beastie Boys’) success by making radio-friendly rap music that incorporated elements of pop music. Smith was associated with this second strand, releasing his first rap single, “Girls Ain’t Nothing But Trouble,” in 1986, as part of DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince (with Jeff Townes) while still in high school, and living in the Philadelphia suburb of Winefield, Pennsylvania. DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince in addition to Tone Loc, the Fat Boys, and JJ Fad epitomized what came to be known as “pop rap” in the late 1980s, music that “explored common territory between races and classes, usually devoid of [a] social message” (Dyson, 2004: 64). In 1988, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince released the first rap doublealbum, He’s the DJ and I’m the Rapper, eventually reaching three times platinum status and featured the hit song, “Parents Just Don’t Understand” that reached number twelve on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. From the beginning of his rap career, Smith was labeled as “nice,” rapping about suburban issues like chasing girls and embarrassing parents that were far removed from the socially deprived, New  York experience early rap and hip-hop represented as well as from contemporary LA gangster rap (epitomized by NWA). In a Spin magazine cover story from October 1988, the author suggests that Smith (referred to throughout the article as “Prince”) is “hip-hop’s first pure pop star” (Levy, 1988: 45), signaling how his success was predicated on class (identified as middle class) and his ability to reach a younger audience. As a young, suburban rap group, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince also transcended racial lines by not rapping about race or ghetto experiences instead focusing on universal and youthful themes of love, family, and pop cultural references. Smith was central in their early videos as the charming, always smiling rapper who often commented about his good looks (“She said you’re kind of cute / “I said, ‘Yes, I know’ ” from “Girls Ain’t Nothing But Trouble.”) While their music was

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criticized for “sanitizing rap’s expression of urban realities” (Dyson, 2004: 71), DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince brought a comedic element to rap music while also expanding its popularity as the antithesis of gangster rap—safe and wholesome as well as nonthreatening, nonviolent, and nonsexist.

Television sitcom: The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air In 1990, Smith was approached to appear in a network sitcom produced by record producer Quincy Jones and based on the true-life story of Benny Medina (head of Warner Brothers Records black division at the time) (Collier, 1990:  59).6 The prevailing sentiment within the media was that Smith was hired for The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air because “he’s fresh and funky enough that kids will love him, but not so dangerous that parents will be threatened by him” (Cox News Service, 1990). Crucially, the show was an extension of his rap star image, as evidenced by the use of his rapper name in the title (“Fresh Prince”) and having him play the character of “Will Smith.” The theme song was written and performed by Smith, containing the show’s set-up as the lyrical content:  Smith as a streetwise kid in West Philadelphia, gets into trouble and his mother sends him to live with his aunt and uncle in Bel-Air. The opening sequence references many of DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s earlier videos by featuring him in scenes that act out the lyrics and use a similar graffiti, spray-painted background (Figure 4.1). The show often makes other references to his identity as a rapper by playing some of his music in the background, having characters mention titles of his songs (In season 1, Uncle Phil tells Will, “Sometimes, Parents Just Don’t Understand”) and featuring DJ Jazzy Jeff as a character named Jazz on the show for all six seasons. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is a sitcom that derived much of its humor from Smith as a “fish out of water”—a street-smart kid from the East Coast who lives within a stuffy, wealthy environment in one of the richest areas in America. The show positions him as a typical black teenager through his use of language, clothes, and pop culture references. This image is counter to that of the Banks family who, despite being black, act like their white upper-class counterparts, including cousins Carlton, Hillary, and Ashley. Above all, the

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Figure 4.1 The opening credits to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990–1996)

show allowed Smith to feature rap and street culture on network television, but channeled through his image as a pleasing wiseacre. In addition, the Fresh Prince image contained a childlike quality that added to Smith’s nonthreatening persona. His rap music was generally about adolescent concerns while his character on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was a teenager, spending the first three seasons in high school before attending college in the last three. Smith’s childlike image fit the show’s desire to portray a family unit with the patriarch, Uncle Phil, as the disciplinarian and voice of reason. From the very first episode, Phil is positioned as the authority who, coming from a similar background as Will, worked hard to achieve financial success (fulfilling the American dream). The relationship between the older, wiser Uncle Phil and the younger, impetuous Will becomes a structural characteristic in many of Smith’s film roles as he would often portray the naïve, inexperienced member of a partnership with an older, more established (and often, white) man: Independence Day, Men in Black, Enemy of the State (Tony Scott, 1998), and Wild Wild West (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1999).

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Crossover to Hollywood Beginning in 1992, while starring on TV, Smith appeared in a handful of films: Where the Day Takes You (Marc Rocco, 1992), Made in America (Richard Benjamin, 1993), and Six Degrees of Separation (Fred Schepisi, 1993), culminating in his breakout roles in Bad Boys (Michael Bay, 1995) and Independence Day in 1996. In these early, extremely varied, roles, Smith portrays supporting characters that incorporated some elements of his star image from music and television. Both Where the Day Takes You and Six Degrees of Separation were departures from his established pre-film stardom:  he portrayed a crippled homeless man in Where the Day Takes You and a homosexual con artist who convinces numerous white families that he is Sidney Poitier’s estranged son in Six Degrees of Separation. Made in America, Bad Boys, and Independence Day featured Smith in comic roles, while Bad Boys and Independence Day presented him as an action star and part of a buddy team. Bad Boys and Independence Day utilized some essential aspects of Smith’s music and television stardom, particularly his youthfulness, comic timing, and nonthreatening masculinity. Both films depict him as an action star exploiting his tall, muscular body by including many shirtless scenes; however, while his body is not sexualized, his body exudes heroic masculinity. His masculine identity is also softened through his sensitivity and ability to communicate with women. This becomes part of Bad Boys’ plot as Julie, the witness in police custody, will communicate only with Mike (Smith) because her friend told her that he was to be trusted. Both films show him as youthful, naïve, and innocent, pairing him with an older, more experienced partner (Martin Lawrence in Bad Boys and Harry Connick, Jr., followed by Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day). These early roles further extend the trajectory of Smith’s music and TV stardom by presenting him as an action hero, but the films also prolong his association with a childlike image, especially through comic moments. The comedy mode in both films hinges on his image as an adolescent figure, prone to cutting remarks toward his partners (in Bad Boys, Mike comments that Marcus (Lawrence) drives slow enough to “drive Miss Daisy”7). These comments often

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imply that Smith is hipper than his partner and more in touch with contemporary culture, especially hip-hop culture. Often, this idea is further illustrated through his race (as he is generally paired with white partners), but even in Bad Boys when partnered with another African American man, Smith portrays the young bachelor while Lawrence is married with children. Though Smith’s characters often boast about their love life, both films isolate him from sexual encounters. In Bad Boys, Smith does not have a love interest, while in Independence Day he is separated from his girlfriend for most of the film. His characters display swagger, often commenting on his own charisma and charm. These boastful comments are not solely related to his sexuality, but also encompass his strength and toughness. When asked in Independence Day if he had anything to share in a military briefing, Hiller (Smith) responds, “I’m just anxious to get up there and whop E.T.’s ass.” Smith’s comedy derives from language and the necessity to promote himself as a strong and capable, but ultimately, juvenile masculine hero. This is most evident in Independence Day when Captain Hiller brings down an alien ship, parachutes out of his own ship, lands on the ground, and proceeds to walk up to the alien ship while shouting, “Who’s the man, now?” before opening the door and punching the alien in the face. As is typical of comedy, the films exploit Smith’s masculinity while also mocking it. Will Smith’s fame, in addition to his position as a black star able to crossover to white audiences, reached a peak with Men in Black in 1997. The film and Smith’s stardom coincided to create his most commercially successful period in his career, but also a perfect moment of synergy for the corporations involved with the film and music soundtrack. The character of Agent J was a “perfect fit” (Dyer, 1998: 129) for Smith’s image as a comic, action star, while it also continued his association with the buddy film genre. With a few exceptions (I am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007), Seven Pounds (Gabriele Muccino, 2006), Made in America, and Six Degrees of Separation8), Smith’s films, during the pinnacle of his film stardom from the 1990s to the late 2000s, can all be considered buddy movies through biracial pairings. Often, the function of these “biracial buddy films,” that began in the 1980s—such as 48 Hours (Walter Hill, 1982) and Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, 1987)—is to address

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societal anxieties about America’s racial issues through narratives of crossracial partnerships. As Ed Guerrero suggests, these films negotiate, contain, and fantastically resolve “the tangled and socially charged issue of race relations on screen” (1993: 240). While they explicitly place black men in “official” positions such as military personnel, police officers, and government officials, the films are covertly working to ensure the continuation of the dominant (white) hierarchical society. Jared Sexton has noted the lineage of black police officers in Hollywood (including Smith in Bad Boys) arguing, “blacks in officialdom . . . complicate current thinking about an institutionalized black complicity with the structures of white supremacy” (2009: 39) (author’s italics). In the science-fiction comedy Men in Black, Smith plays James Darnell Edwards III, a New York police officer recruited by Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) for the top-secret government agency, Men in Black, that monitors alien activity on Earth. The importance of partnering Smith with an older, white man is twofold:  one, Smith’s characters are marked by race through the contrast to the white characters; and two, Smith’s characters are unable to complete tasks without the assistance of the white character. Agent K originally recruits Edwards to the MIB (Men in Black) because of his athletic ability (he is able to run down an alien) and his “problem with authority” (noted by General Zed (Rip Torn), head of MIB at Edwards’s interview). Though K admires Edwards’s qualities, his impulsive nature is eventually tamed by the older, more meticulous white partner, ultimately leading to the successful completion of their mission (this also occurs in Independence Day, Wild Wild West, and Enemy of the State). Smith is placed in an authoritative position of power as a government agent in Men in Black (and an army pilot in Independence Day, a marshal and secret service agent to the President in Wild Wild West, and lawyer in Enemy of the State), but his character is contained and kept in “protective custody” as Ed Guerrero describes it (1993: 239) by Jones. Edwards is forced to give up his identity by becoming Agent J, subsumed into an environment that is seemingly dominated by white characters and culture, but ultimately defined by “cool” contemporary black culture through the figure of Smith. This alters the buddy film formula, which often uses whiteness “ ‘as the norm’ and blackness as its absolute polar ‘other’ ” (Guerrero, 1993: 243). In Men in Black,

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Figure 4.2 Will Smith in Men in Black (1997)

blackness isn’t necessarily the “other” as much as it is more modern and hipper than whiteness. Agent K and Agent J are contrasted throughout the film, defined by their race and age; while K is older, stone-faced, and lacking in humor, J is young, athletic, and funny. When they first meet, K is wearing his MIB uniform while J’s costume connotes hip-hop culture: baggy trousers, bright jackets, and Timberland shoes (Figure  4.2). Once Edwards joins the agency, the two men wear the same costume throughout the film: a black suit with a black tie and black Ray-Ban sunglasses. Though they wear the same suit (as do all the employees of MIB), the hipness of the costume is associated with Smith who after he first dons the uniform tells Jones, “You know the difference between you and me? I make this look good” (Figure 4.3). Smith’s blackness is signaled in his first appearance in Men in Black as he chases a human who is later identified as an alien by jumping onto a New York sightseeing bus and commenting, “It must be raining black people in New York.” Smith’s athleticism is associated with his race as the other pursuing officers who are white lag behind him before eventually stopping the chase. Though J is told by Zed that he must “conform to the identity we give you” and need to “not stand out in anyway,” Smith often uses a black urban argot (“Damn!”; “Check this out”; “I ain’t playin’ ”) accentuating “his racial identity” (Hicks, 2007: 122) and his difference from others.

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Figure 4.3 Will Smith in Men in Black (1997)

As in Bad Boys and Independence Day, Smith’s youth is emphasized in Men in Black, especially compared to Jones as a veteran agent. When Edwards agrees to become a MIB agent, he tells K that he will join the agency as long as K doesn’t belittle him with terms like “son or kid or sport.” This becomes a running joke in the film with both K and Zed using similar terms to refer to J. When the two agents visit Beatrice whose husband was killed by Edgar the bug (Vincent D’Onofrio), J asks when he will receive a “Neuralyzer” (the device the MIB use to erase the memory of humans who come in contact with aliens) and K responds, “When you grow up!” After Zed commands that K give J a firearm, he is given a tiny “noisy cricket” gun that can be held with a finger and thumb and is much smaller than K’s—the implication is that J is not mature enough for a proper gun. The emphasis on Smith’s youth links directly to his image as both a music and television star, especially referencing his easygoing nature personified by his smile or as Seth Nesenholtz puts it, his “trademark ear-to-ear grin [that] appears at every photo-op, imbuing his image with a boyish giddiness that reappears in his on-screen roles” (2003). As noted in both Bad Boys and Independence Day, Smith’s boyishness is displayed through his impulsiveness, overexcitement, and adolescent tendency toward boastfulness and hurling insults at his enemy. Though presented as an action star, Smith engages more in verbal battles with his opponents, epitomized at

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the end of Men in Black when J distracts the bug with his verbal insults while K loads his gun and finally shoots the bug.

Nonthreatening image Smith’s persona as an adolescent figure assists in constructing a nonthreatening masculinity. Donald Bogle (2006) has written on Hollywood’s systematic stereotyping of black characters from the silent to the contemporary era, arguing that the five dominant black stereotypes established in early cinema (the Uncle Tom, the Coon, the Mammy, the tragic Mulatto, and the black buck) continue to “thrive in the new millennium” (xvi). Smith’s roles sometimes fit within some of these parameters, especially falling into the Uncle Tom stereotype, defined as the black man who is “. . .stoic, generous, selfless and oh-sovery kind” (Bogle, 2006: 6). He has even portrayed characters who personify another black stereotype, the “magical negro”:  “a lower class, uneducated black person who posses supernatural or magical powers” that are used to “save and transform disheveled, uncultured, lost, or broken whites” (Hughey, 2009:  544).9 As an action and comic black male star, Smith’s roles can also combine the Uncle Tom and the Coon (noted for “antics that are pleasing and diverting” (Bogle, 2006: 8)) stereotypes. While the physical comedy displayed in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to which many critics described Smith as an “overgrown child” (Magill, 2009: 128) is lessened in his film roles, he still engages in comic moments, generally verbal sparring that signal and arguably destabilize anxieties about race. Nevertheless, as a male character who rarely exudes overt masculine strength, or explicit sexuality, in terms of the range of black representations, Smith presents a nonthreatening image. A comparison here can be made between Smith and Denzel Washington, the two most successful black male stars in contemporary Hollywood. Washington found success in Hollywood through a similarly “nonthreatening” image, portraying characters that Donald Bogle describes as “thoughtful, committed, honest men, almost the paragons of decency and virtue without a possibly threatening or aggressive sexuality” (2006:  424). Bogle compares Washington to Sidney Poitier in terms of their righteous indignation, but

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notes that Poitier had to prove integration while Washington’s heroes appear on the surface as “living testaments to a free and open society” (2006: 424). However, Washington’s image is more of a challenge to dominant society than Smith’s. He often portrays “nice guys” and characters in “officialdom,” but he has also appeared in controversial roles, as in Malcolm X (Spike Lee, 1992) and Training Day (Antoine Fuqua, 2001) and starred in black-identified films by black directors such as Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues (1990), Malcolm X, He Got Game (1998), and Inside Man (2006); Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day, The Equalizer (2014), and The Magnificent Seven (2016); Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) and Out of Time (2003); The Hughes Brothers’ The Book of Eli (2010). Notably, Washington won his second Academy Award (first as a male lead) for Training Day, a role that deliberately went against his “good Samaritan” type and embodied the “gangster stereotype” from hip-hop. As Cynthia Baron (2015) notes, Washington’s star image and the roles that he has tackled have “prompted divergent responses to his identities as a black matinee idol” (5) and, indeed, her fascinating study of Washington explores the diverse readings, some that appear directly at odds with others. What is clear is that at points in Washington’s career, his stardom has directly intersected “with debates concerning black cinema” (9) and the same cannot be said about Will Smith. While Washington has featured in many black focused narratives, Smith’s characters, and thus star image, are often isolated from the black community. The necessity to partner him with a white character often places him in situations where is he away from home and family; for instance he is forced to leave his home in Enemy of the State; must separate from his family in Independence Day and I am Legend; and is without a home in The Pursuit of Happyness. He is also forced to assimilate into dominant white society. Men in Black makes him give up his personal life and possessions to enter the government organization. Smith’s image thus personifies the assimilated black male who poses no threat to dominant (white) society because he is separated from black society, but also, importantly, because of his lack of sexuality. Smith’s early Fresh Prince image in both music and television, as discussed, was that of an amiable maturing teenager. He was tall with big ears and his clothing (patterns, stripes, and pastels) and postures often accentuated

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his comic image as a goofy character. From Bad Boys onward, his masculine body was offered as a spectacle, thanks to tight shirts that accentuated his chest and shoulder muscles. The tight shirts he wears, however, are often covered by large coats and jackets or button-down shirts that lessens the impact of his muscular body. In later films including I, Robot (Alex Proyas, 2004) Smith is featured shirtless, but his exposed chest is not presented for a female gaze, instead his “buffed up” chest connotes strength and action. In I, Robot and I am Legend, he is filmed working out and lifting weights, ensuring that his muscular spectacle is still within the male context of strength and power (this adhering to Dyer’s notion that “images of men are often images of men doing something” (1992: 270)) (Figure 4.4). Smith, however, is also presented with sensitivity, something his partners do not possess and this feminization lessens his position as a sexual being. One of the running jokes in Men in Black is agent J’s concern for the people (generally women) whose minds have been erased by Agent K. The heterosexual relationships he is involved in, in many of his films, are often relegated to off-screen space. Only Independence Day, Bad Boys II (Michael Bay, 2003), Men in Black II (Barry Sonnenfeld, 2002), Hitch (Andy Tennant, 2005), and Focus (Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, 2015) feature romantic situations though these are not always prominent in the narrative (Hitch as a romantic comedy is an exception), and Seven Pounds, Ali, and Focus are the only films that contains love scenes (Ali with Smith’s real-life wife, Jada Pinkett Smith). Significantly, Smith’s romantic partners are either

Figure 4.4 Will Smith in I am Legend (2007)

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black or Hispanic (Hitch) with Hancock (Peter Berg, 2008) and Focus the only films that features relationships with white woman, Charlize Theron and Margot Robbie, respectively. Although the narrative of Hancock conspires to keep the two apart, Focus, notably, contains brief sex scenes and an entire scene where Smith is shirtless. Focus is his twenty-first film role, coming after his hiatus from film in the late 2000s and at a point when his stardom has greatly declined (I will return to this later in the chapter). It is significant that the love scenes in Focus are short in duration with the first encounter between Nicky (Smith) and Jess (Robbie) ending before it ever began due to Jess’s attempt to deceive Nicky and steal his money and another love scene cuts directly from Nicky and Jess kissing to the two lying in bed in a postcoital moment. For a film predicated on the romance between the two characters, they spend a large amount of the film apart and exhibit few love scenes. The press attention paid to the romantic coupling of not only an interracial couple, but one with a significant age gap (twenty years), in addition to Smith’s muscular body in his mid-forties could be perceived as a way to elicit excitement in film audiences that are not automatically buying cinema tickets to Smith’s latest film release.10 Most of Smith’s film roles confine his body and sexuality and his isolation within the dominant society can be argued to symbolically contain his race. He often comments about race through comic moments that acknowledge racial stereotypes and in the process, alleviate audiences’ anxieties about race. In Men in Black alone, Smith makes jokes about being faster that his white counterparts, more stylish than his partner and more sexually aware, all jokes that acknowledge black male stereotypes (athletic, fashionable, sexual), but they also, somewhat paradoxically, confirm audience suspicions by having him embody these stereotypes through his words and actions (he is more athletic, more stylish, and more sexually aware than his white counterparts). Barry Sonnenfeld attributes many of the racially comic lines in Men in Black to Smith, suggesting that Smith understands that race cannot be ignored within his films (DVD Commentary). The tendency to portray nonthreatening male characters is not unique to black male stars. Many male leads are presented as “soft” and romantic in Hollywood (George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp) compared to male

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action stars such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. What distinguishes black male stars in this respect, however, is their contained sexuality and isolation from their community. The black male body is rarely associated with strength and sexuality. Again, Focus is an exception, however, the film’s mixed reviews and tepid box office may signal that audiences are not clamoring to see Smith as both strong and sexual.

Synergy, Men in Black, and Wild Wild West Men in Black illustrates that while Smith has made the transition to the cinema, becoming a major mainstream Hollywood male star associated with the masculine and bodily action genre, he is still contained through his juvenile comic, nonthreatening image. The film was a “perfect fit” for his star image as discussed, but also a corporate “perfect fit,” exploiting his music stardom to the benefit of the film product. Men in Black has been used by many scholars, including Geoff King (2003) and Paul McDonald (2013), as an example of a contemporary star vehicle that is, as King puts it, the “embodiment of corporate synergy” (62). Men in Black was released the same year as Smith’s first solo album, Big Willie Style, featuring the single, “Men in Black,” released the week before the film—all properties were tied to the Sony Corporation. This was the first time Smith had a song directly associated with a film. Though the song did not appear in the film (only during the closing credits), the single and video became promotional tools for Men in Black. The video included clips from the film, the black suit, and Ray-Ban sunglasses costume and a dance between Smith and an alien (a generic alien that references the numerous aliens that appear in Men in Black). The chorus of the song is simple with the title of the film repeated throughout (“Here comes the men in black”) and Smith repeating the initials “M.I.B” used throughout posters for the film and on the covers of the single and soundtrack album. The song peaked at number two on the US Top 40 chart, and number one on numerous music charts throughout the world and won a Grammy Award for Best Rap Solo Performance while the soundtrack album spent two weeks at number one on the US Billboard 200 album charts. The film eventually grossed two hundred fifty million dollars in

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the United States and over three hundred million dollars worldwide, becoming a huge hit for both Smith and Sony Corporation (which owned Columbia, the film’s distributor) (King, 2003: 63). Justin Wyatt (2004) argues that a “uniform style” is a central part of the marketing of “high concept” films and McDonald contends Men in Black is an informative example (2000:  81). The film uses blackness to embody a cool, hip image connected to Smith’s star image derived from hip-hop music. Blackness is embodied by Smith through his rap stardom, but also through the title (Men in Black), gray dominated sets that contrast and highlight the color black, the numerous scenes that take place at night and Smith and Jones’s costume. Men in Black exemplifies a successful corporate “synergy” in the era of “high concept” filmmaking, but it also represents the moment in which Smith was able to successfully achieve perfect “synergy” between his music and film stardom. His next film, Wild Wild West attempted to repeat this with the song “Wild Wild West” soundtrack album and release of Smith’s second solo album, Willennium. While the song was a hit, reaching number one on the Billboard singles chart, the film was considered a critical and commercial disaster (even though it earned over two hundred and seventeen million dollars, domestic and overseas combined) (King, 2003: 65) and Smith’s album sales only reached two million dollars as compared to nine million dollars for his first solo album. After Wild Wild West, Smith has not attempted to replicate this strategy, only releasing the single “Black Suits Comin’ (Nod Ya Head)” for Men in Black II (with no soundtrack released) while his song, “Switch” was featured in the film Hitch, but not featured on the soundtrack album he helped produce. Wild Wild West was released two years after Men in Black, over the 4th of July holiday weekend in America, a release date that has been used six times to open Smith starring vehicles since 1996 (Independence Day; Men in Black; Wild Wild West; Men in Black II; I, Robot; and Hancock in 2008) (Corliss). The film was marketed and promoted in a similar fashion to Men in Black with the Will Smith original song, “Wild Wild West” released on May 4, followed by the soundtrack album on July 15. The seven-minute long video contained a long narrative section with Smith, Salma Hayek, and Kenneth Branagh reprising their roles from the film interspersed with clips from the movie and Smith’s performance of the song. By the time the film was released, the single had

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appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, peaking at number one the week of July 24 and the album debuted at number four on the album charts. The single became the most successful part of the enterprise. Wild Wild West as a film received mainly negative reviews, opening at number one at the domestic box office with twenty-seven million dollars, but steadily losing over 40  percent of the audience over the following weeks, finishing with a domestic total of one hundred and thirteen million dollars and an overseas total of two hundred and twenty-two million dollars for a film that had cost one hundred and seventy-five million dollars. The reviews of the film focused on the pairing of Sonnenfeld and Smith, insinuating that the two were given too much control over the film’s direction. The setting of Wild Wild West was problematic in that Smith portrays a Marshall in 1869 America, just six years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves and just four years after the Thirteenth Amendment was passed, outlawing slavery in America. The film was based on the Western television show The Wild, Wild West that ran from 1965 to 1969 with a white actor in the lead (Robert Conrad). The concept of the show was to merge the Western and the spy genre, especially James Bond films that introduced audiences to clever gadgets (The Wild, Wild West was originally pitched to the network as “James Bond on horseback” (King, 2008)). The film altered many elements of the television series, none more notably than in having Smith portray Jim West. The narrative was forced to expose race as a central hindrance for West to overcome because of the improbability of black Marshalls in 1869 (when they would have been uncommon). Though West is central to the film, he is partnered throughout with Artemus Gordon (Kevin Kline) who often dresses in disguises (including as women) and invents the unusual gadgets utilized. Though Kline’s character is odd, his status as the white, older partner to Smith affords him a certain amount of authority over West who is young and impulsive. At one point in the film, Gordon notes that West will “shoot first, shoot later, shoot some more and when everyone’s dead ask a few questions.” Wild Wild West knowingly acknowledges the racial anxieties that would have been present in 1869, but the film often cuts through these anxieties by using Smith as a comic foil. It is also noticeable that race is only commented on

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in scenes where Smith is present. The most significant exchange occurs when West and Gordon attempt to crash Dr.  Arliss Loveless’s (Kenneth Branagh) party (Loveless is a disgruntled former Confederate, hoping to restore the Confederation to its prewar prominence). Throughout the party scene, West is treated like an unintelligent slave, subjected to slave jokes by Loveless and mistaken for a sexual deviant after his misguided touching of a white woman’s breasts (West thought the woman was Gordon in disguise). This leads the white partygoers to take West outside and attempt to hang him. Though West escapes unharmed, the scene displaces the magical element of the film (notably, the preposterous gadgets), grounding the exchange in a seriousness that cannot be undermined by comedy. The framing of Smith’s head next to a noose (in addition to his all black costume, given that black is generally worn by the “bad guy” in Westerns) overrides the aural comedy, making it difficult to view the scene as simply comic; instead, it becomes uncomfortable (Figure 4.5). While few reviews noted discomfort toward the post-slavery context, the film did receive criticism for the attempt to merge multiple genres and tropes (The New York Times noted the film was “hard to categorize,” (Maslin, 1999) while The LA Times suggested, the “film plays more like a pinball machine than something made for a screen of any size” (Turan, 1999)). I would argue that

Figure 4.5 Will Smith in Wild Wild West (1999)

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part of the criticism toward the mix of genres lies in the inability of Smith to portray a Western hero because of the need to acknowledge his race. Though he uses urban argot at times (generally, exclamations of “damn!”) and his dandy costume hints at modernity (especially, the tipped hat), the film is set in the past whereas Smith’s star image, originating in hip-hop music and television comedy, is eminently contemporary. Locating him in a narrative that is weighed down by the historical place of black Americans means that he is unable to display his modern hipness and urban cool. It is no wonder that the song was so successful because it was the one place Smith was able to merge the dandy, Western hero with his hip contemporary image. Although Wild Wild West was a critical and commercial failure, Smith recovered with Enemy of the State, a film that promoted a less adolescent screen image, but still placed him in a subordinate position to the older and wiser male partner played by Gene Hackman. At the same time, Smith’s rap career saw a significant drop in the 2000s, releasing Born to Reign in 2002 and Lost and Found in 2005, both albums only achieving gold status as opposed to nine times platinum status of Big Willie Style and twice platinum Willennium. Smith found success as a rap artist at a time when audiences were moving away from gangster rap and embraced clean, pop-oriented rap. At the beginning of the 2000s, rap again adopted violent and sexualized images (especially of women) as shown by the success of Eminem, Nelly, and 50 Cent. This harder image conflicted with Smith’s “clean and comedic” (Jones, 2002) rap music. Smith acknowledged the difficulty in maintaining two careers with Lost and Found, an album that included numerous references to his “lost” status as a rapper as he concentrated on his film career and the criticism that he is too nice (“Mr. Nice Guy”). The album cover even included an image of Smith under street signs, “West Philly” (Philadelphia) and “Hollywood,” illustrating his place between the two careers. Lost and Found included the minor hit “Switch,” but never replicated the success of his first two solo albums. While never playing against type,11 Smith has appeared in films that challenge black stereotypes and are box office successes. Smith has also been able to make the transition from comedies to dramas, something many critics have noted is difficult for black actors with “Hollywood largely limiting black stars

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and black focused narratives to comedies” (Guerrero, 1993a: 127) (evidenced with Ice Cube’s move toward family-friendly comedic roles). At the 2002 Academy Awards, dubbed “The Black Oscars” after Washington and Halle Berry both won lead acting awards, Sidney Poitier received an honorary award and Whoopi Goldberg hosted, Smith was nominated for his first Academy Award. This was the first year to feature two black actors nominated in the lead category (This was replicated in 2004 and again in 2006 when Smith was nominated for The Pursuit of Happyness, along with Forest Whitaker for The Last King of Scotland (Kevin Macdonald, 2006)). The nomination confirmed his place in Hollywood as a black dramatic actor. Furthermore, by the late 2000s, Smith’s cultural position was buoyed by his connection to President Barack Obama. The rise of an African American man to the highest position of power in America cannot be overstated, nor can his accomplishment be compared to a Hollywood star without diminishing his cultural impact, but Smith and Obama share similar trajectories that have been noted by many cultural critics. In a 1999 article in Vanity Fair, Smith stated that he could see himself becoming President of the United States of America (Zedman, 1999: 124). This comment was strengthened by the author focusing on his likeability and affability—traits that are shared by both Smith and Obama. Though his stardom remained unchanged over the years, it “deepened” through narratives that promote strength, sacrifice, and morality, especially in I, Robot, I am Legend, and Seven Pounds (again, character traits admired in leaders). When Obama’s campaign gained prominence in 2008, Smith was a vocal supporter, eventually interviewing President Obama at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in 2009 along with his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. Just one year earlier, as Edward D. Bacal noted, the poster for Seven Pounds featured a “Presidential” looking Smith (2009: 50–52). The film was released in December 2008, one month after Obama was elected and one month before his inauguration. The two men look similar with relatively light brown skin, prominent ears, full lips and wide smile. Smith stated in 2008 that he would like to play Obama in a film, “as soon as he [Obama] writes the end of the story” (Kaufman, 2008), this comment coming after Obama suggested that Smith would be perfect to portray him because they have the same ears (Associated Press, 2008). The two men share the task of negotiating their race

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within dominant ideology, and crucially representing a less controversial black masculine image.

Post-Mr. 4th of July 2008 was a significant year for Smith because after the release of Seven Pounds, he took a career break and focused almost exclusively on building the Smith family brand. Although his children had already appeared in some of his films (Willow portrayed his daughter in I am Legend, while Jaden costarred with Will in The Pursuit of Happyness), 2008–2012 saw Smith and his wife Jada engrossed in their children’s developing careers, including relocating the entire family to China for the production of the Will and Jada produced and Jaden costarring The Karate Kid (Harald Zwart, 2010). Fatherhood had come to define Smith’s image in the 2000s, and as Hannah Hamad points out, “fatherhood has become the dominant paradigm of masculinity across the spectrum of mainstream U.S. cinema” (2014: 1). Hamad goes on to suggest that postfeminist fatherhood has become normalized as a model of fatherhood that is (or becomes) emotionally articulate, domestically competent, skilled in managing the quotidian practicalities of parenthood and adept at negotiating a balance and/or discursive confluence of private sphere fatherhood and public sphere paternalism. (2)

It is notable that the other case studies in this book rarely portrayed fathers on-screen. While Timberlake’s age has limited his adult roles thus far and Kristofferson only began to portray fathers (or father figures) when he hit middle age, Presley never portrayed a father on-screen and Crosby was only a father in a few films (Blue Skies, most memorably, but also The Country Girl where he portrayed a father torn apart after the death of his child). This could be understood as fulfilling Hamad’s assertion that fatherhood has become the “dominant paradigm of masculinity.” Indeed, Stella Bruzzi’s Bringing Up Daddy: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Post-War Hollywood begins its examination of fatherhood during World War II, arguing that there has, historically, been an “oscillation (though not an overly rigid one) between traditionalism

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and liberalism in American attitudes to the father that could be charted from decade to decade” (2005: ix). Fatherhood is more prominent in contemporary popular culture; although Crosby’s role as real-life father became more pronounced after his second marriage in 1957 and Presley’s only child, Lisa Marie, was habitually discussed in the press, these off-screen projections of fatherhood were unmatched on-screen.12 Fatherhood has become a central tenant of Smith’s stardom, but, also the possible cause of the demise of his stardom. Smith is still a well-known actor and celebrity, but his “bankability” has diminished, with his most recent release, Collateral Beauty (David Frankel, 2016), representing the lowest opening of one of his films in wide release (D’Alessandro, 2016). After spending almost four years off-screen, Smith returned in 2012, appearing in Men in Black 3 (Barry Sonnenfeld), reviving one of his most significant franchises and portraying his “perfect fit” character, Agent J. The film was a financial success and critically well received. His next film, After Earth (M. Night Shyamalan, 2013) was a commercial and critical disaster, exposing Smith’s unstable position in contemporary Hollywood. The film, costarring son Jaden, was also produced by Overbrook Entertainment, a production company that includes Smith, wife Jada, and her brother, Caleeb Pinkett. Even in preproduction, the film seemed a risky choice—first, Shyamalan is a director who has lost most of the cultural and critical capital that he secured at the height of his auteur status—with 1999’s The Sixth Sense and 2000’s Unbreakable. Posters for the film rarely even featured Shyamalan’s name. Second, the film places Smith in a costarring role with Jaden the true star of the film. This was not immediately apparent from the trailers of the film, but as the film came closer to its release date and details of the plot were exposed, it became apparent the narrative of the film focused on Jaden’s character, Kitai, exploring planet Earth while Smith’s character, Cypher, the father of Kitai, was physically confined to a spaceship. Many perceived the film as Smith’s attempt to hand over the movie star mantle to his son with the trailer even featuring a voiceover with Smith stating, “Son, this is not training.” In many ways, the film illustrated Smith’s desire to build a family entertainment brand and, possibly, his belief that as he ages, roles will diminish. It is not uncommon for stars to move into producing as a way to consolidate their capital and develop projects,

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but After Earth exposed the way the Smith family is industrializing their family dynamic.13

After Earth reception and promotion Although the film has earned more than it cost to make, it was declared a disaster by the end of the opening weekend. Critically, it was reviled, earning just an average rating on Rotten Tomatoes of 3.8 out of 10 (a minuscule 11 percent approval rating). The reception of the film reserved almost all the negativity toward Smith, as opposed to the script, director, or even the costar, Jaden, who may have proven with this film that he does not have the charisma nor acting range to become a film star. These aspects were referenced within the reviews, but the focus was on Smith and, specifically, what this film and its lack of box office success suggests about his stardom with the Los Angeles Times even asking in a headline, “What Does This Mean for Will Smith?” (Zeitchik, 2013). The question is located in Smith’s commercial position, recently studied by Eithne Quinn, noting that “Smith is a star brand associated with high-production, high-yield films with international reach” especially through Overbrook, founded in 1997 (2013:  198). Indeed, Paul McDonald has suggested that Smith is post-studio star, representative of “dependent independence which characterizes the post-studio system” (2013: 155). This “dependent independence” is forged through the relationships between star, production company (Overbrook), and studio (often, Sony/Columbia), however, there is no exclusivity between these three parties and arrangements, often differing by degree, are on a case-by-case basis (McDonald, 2013: 169). Smith is an independent with his own production company that allows him to develop projects for him to star in, such as Collateral Beauty or simply produce, such as Annie (Will Gluck, 2014). However, these films are unable to be made without the financial backing of studios and Smith has mainly utilized his solid connection with Sony (which includes Columbia Pictures) and Warner Brothers to get many of these projects off the ground. Therefore, the lack of domestic box office success was especially damaging for a star whose stardom is built on their capital, and also one who is not currently making many films.

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The international success of many of Smith’s films can be attributed to his “active role in global publicity drives for his films” (McDonald, 2013: 173). As Paul McDonald notes, “Smith’s involvement in publicizing his films [is] part of a conscious strategy to self-promote his stardom around the world” (173). I would argue part of the failure of After Earth can be attributed to the promotional appearances he made throughout Spring 2013, most with his son, Jaden. Pam Cook contends that contemporary stars engage in a “performance of celebrity” and their reputation “rests on a portfolio of performance expertise rather than on their accomplishments in film and skills of self-presentation, acquired through training, are equally if not more important than those of character acting” (2012: 73). The modern celebrity, according to Cook, operates between film and “extra-cinematic appearances to achieve maximum publicity becoming a personal brand” (2012: 73–74). Television appearances are key to the “performance of celebrity,” and for film stars, a negotiation occurs between the more intimate and familiar medium of television and the reified status they hold as movie stars. Thus, television appearances often allow film stars to appear natural, spontaneous, intimate, and familiar through emphasizing their ordinariness while still acknowledging their extraordinary place as film stars. And this is all performed. Sometimes the performance can go wrong, such as Tom Cruise’s overthe-top appearance on Oprah when he declared his love for new girlfriend, Katie Holmes. Donna Peberdy considers Cruise’s Oprah appearance to be a “performance of instability” that was perceived as inconsistent with the established Cruise persona, ultimately exposing the artifice that is the “Tom Cruise” image and forever associating his persona with inconsistencies and excess (2011: 118–119). Smith has, so far, not had a “Tom Cruise moment”; however, his promotional appearances for After Earth were intriguing and garnered as much, if not more, attention than the film. On the May 24, 2013 episode of the British television talk show The Graham Norton Show (BBC One), Smith gave one of his most famous performances, garnering over forty-six million views on YouTube at the time of writing. The appearance deserves further examination as it is representative of Smith’s contemporary “performance of celebrity,” which, crucially, includes his music stardom. The section begins when Norton hands microphones to both Smith and

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Figure  4.6 Graham Norton, Jaden Smith, Will Smith, and Alfonso Riberto on The Graham Norton Show (2013)

Jaden and they begin their performance with Smith beatboxing and Jaden rapping. After a performance that lasts forty seconds, Smith directs his attention to Norton rapping that the last time he appeared on the show he performed his “Fresh Prince” rap, which received over eight million hits on YouTube. He then states that this time he has brought his DJ, Jazzy Jeff. The camera refocuses on Smith, Jaden, and DJ Jazzy Jeff who run through a shortened version of “Switch” before they rap the theme from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to which the audience joins in. After completing the song, “It’s Not Usual” by Tom Jones plays and Alfonso Riberto (Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) joins them onstage as he recreates the “Carlton” dance with Jaden and Smith. The medley climaxes with all three (and Norton) remaking a dance that was performed on the show to the Sugarhill Gang’s “Apache” 14 (Figure 4.6). As fun as this performance is, and it’s evident the audience enjoys it, it is, for lack of a better word, problematic. The entire performance is based on Smith’s earlier work as a rapper—Jazzy Jeff was the DJ in his first rap group; the first song is “Switch” from his 2005 album Lost & Found (the last album he has released); and the performance is also centered on the television show he starred on from 1990 to 1996, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. What is fascinating about Smith performing this dance on Graham Norton is that the show it comes from is over twenty years old. It has been in almost constant rotation since the show stopped airing new episodes, but since the show ended in 1996,

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Smith has become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. In other words, there are a multitude of reference points for Smith that have little to do with The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. At the same time, there is no doubt that the character of the Fresh Prince was heavily based on the star himself and it can be difficult to find the separation between the two. This amalgamation between the character of the Fresh Prince and Smith himself is most apparent in his “performance of celebrity” through his off-screen image that is dominated by the Fresh Prince persona, while his onscreen image has proven to be more diverse. As noted, in the 2000s, Smith began to appear in more mature films, dramas that did not include his trademark goofy attitude and youthful impulses, such as Ali, I am Legend, The Pursuit of Happyness, and Seven Pounds. The maturity of Smith’s on-screen image continues through his most recent film releases, Collateral Beauty and Concussion (Peter Landesman, 2015). The Fresh Prince persona is associated with television considered a more immediate and familiar medium. This intimacy allows, as John Ellis has noted, television stars to become “a known and familiar person rather than a paradoxical figure, both ordinary and extraordinary” (1992:  106), one of the requirements of film stardom, as argued by Dyer (1998). Television stars are often subsumed within the characters they play, an illusion reinforced by their intertextual appearances in other media that emphasize a compare/contrast approach to the performer and their character. Television emphasizes the continuity of the performers’ image through the routine and repetitiveness of a television series. This can lead to a “slippage” between TV star and character, often times through the reduced space and distance between the circulated image and performance. The two become entangled so that the performer’s image is equated with that of the fictional role. Although it began in music, the easy transition from music to television binds the images together to create one Fresh Prince character, still utilized on the same medium to where the character was defined. It is, however, jarring to see a star in his late forties, appearing with his teenage son, embodying an image that is based on his own teenage self. Smith seems to be unable to move beyond this loveable image and I would suggest he may be at a tipping point, similar to Cruise in the mid2000s because, like Cruise, it is difficult to distinguish the real from the unreal

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through a “performance of celebrity” that now displays more artifice and construction than genuine moments.15 Furthermore, race and ageing come together through the Smith persona, the Fresh Prince persona, as a childlike image of safe black masculinity. Smith uses urban language, performs innocent songs about enjoyment and celebration, but ultimately, presents black culture as something to parody—as Bogle stated about the Coon stereotype, he is “harmless and congenial” (2006: 8)— and through laughter, Smith is able to displace racial anxieties. As Magill notes, Smith “presents a fantasy of black identity that ambivalently challenges the color line through a liberally racial vision of black masculinity that calms white cultural fears” (2009: 127). This fantasy image of black identity is presented in his films, through his “performance of celebrity” and in his music. Smith does not challenge racial stereotypes, nor does he truly engage with racial hierarchies in Hollywood. However, as Quinn has argued, Smith is among the most celebrated “self-made entertainment . . . moguls” in the history of Hollywood with a racially diverse and international audience, providing, through his production company, opportunities for minority cultural producers (2013: 204). Race, however, is invisible in any meaningful way and this is one of the reasons Smith has been able to transcend race, and become, as cultural critic Nelson George famously commented, “Tom Hanks with a tan” (qtd. in McDonald, 2013: 155).

Conclusion It has been rumored for years that Smith would return to music; however, he still has yet to release any new original material since Lost and Found. Music, at this point, is confined to his television appearances where he epitomizes the loveable affability of the Fresh Prince persona. He has consistently portrayed this role—in the press, on-screen, on television, in music—but with the failure of After Earth, Concussion, and Collateral Beauty and the frenzied promotional appearances, the question must be asked, have we begun to witness the end of Will Smith? The man-child image is difficult to sustain over a long period of time, evidenced by Adam Sandler’s fading stardom (among others). Is Smith now becoming, not only past his prime, but simply a nostalgic

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act, ready to perform his Fresh Prince act when his serious film roles require promotion? Ageing is an issue that is not purely confined to Smith, nor to crossover music stars. And the various case studies contained within this book illustrate that star images go through a process of adaptation between music and film. While some seek to reconstruct their image in order to displace cultural anxieties borne out of their music stardom (Crosby), others appear “forced” to make alterations for the cinema (Presley). Smith and the following chapter’s case study, Justin Timberlake, have built multimedia brands with the potential to utilize these brands in various media. Similar to Timberlake whose stardom began when he was in his teens, Smith appears unable to unify his music and television stardom with his later position as a “bankable” Hollywood property, while also negotiating the racial politics of the industry. The popularity Smith once held cannot be dismissed and is representative of his enormous success as a black music, television, and film star. This success, however, mainly exists in the past, most tellingly demonstrated through Smith’s most recent box office success, Suicide Squad (David Ayer, 2016), which earned over $745 million worldwide, but was only a costarring role for Smith and most of promotion and publicity around the film focused on the DC comic universe, Jared Leto (portraying the Joker) and Margot Robbie (portraying Harley Quinn). The synergy achieved by Smith with Men in Black has never been replicated by the star and his popular appearances on television talk shows may demonstrate that the medium of television is the only place where the Fresh Prince persona is able to endure, generally through the audience’s nostalgic enjoyment. Smith’s rap stardom exemplifies the difficulty of ageing a teenage brand and his inability to entirely leave that persona behind.

Notes 1 See Lobalzo Wright (2016a) for a fuller discussion of Ice Cube’s cinematic stardom and his contemporary position within Hollywood as a leading actor and producer.

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2 Presley is often evoked as a harbinger of the white appropriation of black music genres and styles. Albert Goldman, however, locates this “whitewashing” in Memphis as opposed to purely through the star image of Presley. He writes, “the blues, which has always been so indelibly black, was about to be bleached pure white. The place of this radical transformation? Memphis, Tennessee, home of Elvis Presley” (1991: 121). 3 While many terms are used to describe these eras of rap music and some debate as to when each era occurred, it is generally accepted that rap music began with an “old school” period from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s and then a division arose between pop rap and socially conscious rap music (including gangster rap) in the late 1980s to 1990s. 4 The definition of the terms “rap” and “hip-hop” are debatable, but I will from this point onward refer to hip-hop as the culture that emerged in New York that included rap, breakdancing, and graffiti art. 5 Although Hispanic and white participation has been documented by Jeff Chang (2007) and Rachel Z. Rivera (2003), women were generally marginalized. 6 Medina was moved as a teenager from the poor neighborhood of Watts to live with his family in a wealthy Los Angeles neighborhood (Collier, 1990: 59). 7 A reference to the Morgan Freeman-Jessica Tandy, Academy Award winning film, Driving Miss Daisy (Bruce Beresford, 1989) that charted the friendship of a white woman and her African American chauffeur. 8 Although the buddy formula is complicated by “mirroring” that occurs in Seven Pounds and Six Degrees of Separation with Smith playing characters that portray other people. 9 The “magical negro” stereotype most closely applies to The Legend of Bagger Vance (Robert Redford, 2000) with Smith portraying the ghostly figure of golf caddy Bagger Vance who helps Rannulph Junuh (Matt Damon) win an exhibition match against two of the PGA’s best golfers in 1930s Savannah, Georgia. 10 There were numerous stories about a relationship between the two leads during the filming of Focus, in addition to photographs of Smith’s muscular body as he toned up for the role. 11 Although Smith begins Hancock as a drunken, menace to society, he is recreated as an “appropriate” superhero by the end of the film, thus beginning the film playing against type, but ending as a typical Smith hero. 12 Crosby’s image as a perfect father has been tarnished since his death due to accusations of mental and physical abuse by children from his first marriage to actress Dixie Lee and the subsequent suicides of two of his sons.

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13 See Hamad (2015) for a fuller examination of the Smith family’s familial and racial politics. 14 In the season six episode, “Viva Lost Wages,” Will and Carlton gamble all their money away and enter a dance contest to win enough money to get home to Bel-Air. 15 Both stars (although Cruise more than Smith) have been plagued by rumors linking them with the controversial “religion,” Scientology. The secrecy of Scientology, including the shunning of individuals not a part of the church and the popular perception that Scientology is a cult that mentally abuses its followers through “auditing” may be responsible for the over-the-top, and sometimes unstable, public appearances.

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The Pop Film Star: Justin Timberlake

Introduction There is no question that Justin Timberlake’s greatest stardom is located in music. In fact, although the star has been appearing in feature films since Edison (David J.  Burke) in 2005, film stardom has remained a peripheral aspect of his multimedia stardom. Variety featured the star on the cover of their November 1, 2016 issue and included an interview where writer Andrew Barker noted Timberlake’s insecurities and modesty, musing that “full-scale leading-man movie stardom, after all, is perhaps the brass ring that has eluded him.” The piece goes on to remark on the various high profile, auteur filmmakers Timberlake has worked with: from the Coen Brothers (Inside Llewyn Davis (2012)) to David Fincher (The Social Network (2010)), most recently, Jonathan Demme directed his concert film, Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids (2016) and he is featured in the next Woody Allen film, Wonder Wheel (2017). In many ways, Demme’s concert film reestablished Timberlake’s position as a modern-day entertainer through the documentary that almost exclusively features performances from Timberlake’s most recent concert tour. As pointed out by The Guardian, “Timberlake is . . . in his element when on a stage being a showman.” The first line of the review is even more telling: “In recent years, Justin Timberlake’s been forcefully trying to sell the world that he can act” (Smith, 2016). Timberlake is not alone in attempting to carve out a film career to match his music stardom, however, his middling success as a music star who is building a significant filmography, and, yet, has still not reached a pinnacle of success in the film industry positions the star as a unique crossover star. He has, up until now, yet to attain the type of film stardom Crosby, Presley,

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or Smith achieved, nor can he even approach the breadth of film appearances Kristofferson has made. Timberlake is also distinctive from the earlier case studies in three meaningful ways: (1) He was first part of a group and later established himself as a solo music artist; (2)  He is a pop star; (3)  His film stardom is still developing. All of these factors impact on the understanding of his crossover stardom. Furthermore, Timberlake, more than even Smith, represents the new type of multimedia stardom that permeates contemporary Hollywood. This chapter will explore Timberlake’s evolving stardom and the transitions in his star image from boy band member to solo music artist to Hollywood actor all within the contemporary media landscape.

Stardom in contemporary Hollywood Chapter 4 investigated the crossover success of Will Smith in contemporary Hollywood, observing the importance of stars tied to Hollywood studios with the ability to sell products through the various corporate divisions within the studio’s parent company. Smith achieved this perfect synergy with Men in Black and the Sony-attached soundtrack album. Twenty years on from Men in Black, Hollywood has transformed itself again; the bonds between corporations and movie studios are stronger than even in the 1990s. Most media outlets are now consolidated into a few conglomerates that are vertically integrated and highly diversified. The benefits of large corporate ownership are twofold:  (1)  It increases stability and minimizes risk; (2)  It creates multiple “secondary” sources of income through ancillary markets. Studios are now focused on having as many “pipelines” to consumers, delivering content created and owned by the parent company. The record profits these studios achieve are not from films, generally released at a loss because of the massive marketing campaigns involved in launching global blockbuster films, but the ancillary markets where the film can be exploited and expanded in an everwidening range of entertainment products, including clothing, video games, soundtrack albums, and other tie-ins. Since the establishment of film stars in the early silent period of cinema, stars have been utilized as security against economic failures. The connection

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between stardom and the economies of film industries, especially Hollywood, has always been strong, with stars operating as “workers, commodities and capital” (Shingler, 2012: 93). What has altered since the 1990s and the pinnacle of Smith’s success as a crossover star is the predominance of media convergence, reshaping all media industries. The interconnectedness between various industries is more transparent in the contemporary age, especially through stars that move between various media (however, this book has sought to illustrate that this is not a new phenomena). The newness of this phenomenon is demonstrated through the plurality with which audiences access their media, whether through various forms of social media, streaming film and television sites, or even the cinema and television. Owing to the multitude of avenues for audiences to access media, stars must now exploit these various media in order to maintain a level of stardom concurrent with the diversity of consumer platforms. Pure film stars are on the wane with most stars now associated with a global media industry more than merely one media industry. This would suggest that crossover stardom would be more prevalent in the contemporary era and in many ways it is, but film stardom still acts as an impediment for many multimedia stars. For example, there are few stars that are currently as culturally significant as Beyoncé; however, even her film success has been tempered by critical and box office failures (such as Obsessed (Steve Shill, 2009)) and films where she was outshone by costars (such as Dreamgirls (Bill Condon, 2006), which won Jennifer Hudson an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress). Film stardom still appears as unique as compared to stardom in other media and while there is more convergence, the desire to appear in critical and commercially successful films endures. Timberlake has persisted throughout this changing media landscape, appearing on television, in films and, periodically, releasing new music. His star image, also, altered in significant ways, establishing himself as a solo artist separate from his boy band origins, while also establishing his crossmedia stardom. Timberlake began as a child performer on the entertainment competition show Star Search, before becoming a regular cast member of The All-New Mickey Mouse Club. After the cancellation of the show in 1994, Timberlake joined the boy band, *NSYNC, who released three studio albums (*NSYNC, No Strings Attached, and Celebrity) and sold over fifty million

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albums worldwide. In 2002, the band went on hiatus, eventually breaking up, with Timberlake releasing his first solo album, Justified. Although he appeared in two television movies while part of *NSYNC, Timberlake’s acting career truly begin in 2006 when he appeared in Alpha Dog (Nick Cassavetes, 2006), Black Snake Moan (Craig Brewer, 2006), and Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, 2006).1 In the same year, he released his most successful album (critically and commercially), FutureSex/LoveSounds, extensively toured in support of the album, and then went on a musical hiatus to focus on his acting. In 2013, he returned to music, releasing The 20/20 Experience, which was followed by his fourth studio album, The 20/20 Experience-2 of 2 and extensive worldwide tours. Most recently, Timberlake has voiced the character Troll Branch in the animated film Trolls (Mike Mitchell and Walt Dohrn, 2016) and released the number one single, “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” featured on the film’s soundtrack. It is clear from this career trajectory the evolution of Timberlake’s stardom from group member to solo artist and from child to adult star. It is also apparent the commitment Timberlake has shown to evolve his stardom to include film, even putting his music career on hiatus to concentrate on his cinematic outputs. As opposed to Smith who has abandoned his music career, Timberlake appears unable to do so due to his enormous success as a music star. Here is where the contemporary media convergence landscape appears to not extend from one pillar to another—from music to film stardom—with the divisions still clearly set out. One line of inquiry into this phenomenon could be the validity of film stardom. As I have already mentioned, “pure” film stars, stars that only appear in films and operate outside more modern forms of media, such as social media (stars like Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts), are less successful in contemporary Hollywood than those that have embraced the diverse media landscape, appearing in various forms of media, such as Dwayne Johnson. The importance of film stars has been questioned throughout the contemporary Hollywood period, especially from the 1970s onward when the blockbuster film has come to dominate, luring audiences to the cinema through special effects and high concepts as opposed to solely through the bankability of the film star. In a 2009 end of year review, Hannah McGill wrote in Sight and Sound, “Cinema has relied on star power almost since its inception, but that time is finally coming to an end” (2010: 34). Seven years

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on from McGill’s statement, it is clear that stars still endure and are used to secure funding for projects and sell films once they are completed. It, however, is also apparent the untenability of film stardom, with various stars rising and fading, but more significantly, franchise properties usurping the star’s central position. The rise of comic book-based franchises illustrates the selling capabilities of characters and comic book-based universes, in addition to the stars that portray these individuals. For example, the various Iron Man films are promoted and consumed as Marvel products, Iron Man narratives, and Robert Downey Jr. vehicles, but not exclusively as star vehicles. Thus, film stardom is not as dominant as it once was; however, the desire to still succeed in the film industry persists, evident through Timberlake’s continued presence in cinema. The rest of the chapter will explore Timberlake’s film stardom, considering his star persona and why this particular music star has been unable to match his music success in film.

From boy to metrosexual It is often overlooked that Timberlake has successfully transitioned from child star to adult star, a notoriously difficult alteration to negotiate while in the public’s eye. There is a historical difference between men and women that age in public view, especially from childhood to adulthood. While female stars such as Drew Barrymore or Jodie Foster personified sexualized images in their late teen years, partly as a way to present a more “adult” image, male stars are not exposed to the same standards. Yet, Timberlake’s boy band genesis can be compared to female stars, in film and music, who proclaim their adulthood through their body. Pop music, as a genre, is associated with the feminine, through the predominance of female pop consumers and the gendered nature of the music, especially in comparison to the rock music genre. Norma Coates has noted the gendered divide between rock and pop with rock associated with “authenticity” and pop with “artifice,” setting up the binary of rock as “masculine” and pop as “feminine” (1997: 52). Feminization of male star images has figured prominently in this study, especially male stars like Crosby, Presley, and Kristofferson who were desirable male images for female audiences.

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Timberlake’s first flush with stardom as part of *NSYNC locates his masculinity as part of boy bands, noted for, as Noel McLaughlin and Martin McLoone argue, the “constructed nature of a masculinity shaped by the forces that have constructed the feminine, with the male body and masculine identity more overtly objectified for voyeuristic consumption” (2014:  70). Ian Biddle and Freya Jarman-Ivens note in their introduction to the edited collection Oh Boy! Masculinities in Popular Music that one of the most important “connotations of the boy is that of the boy band” (2007: 5). They go on to locate the significance of boy band “archetypes,” brought together to “awaken desire in a young audience, not to bring sexual desire fully to the surface” (6) (author’s italics). Thus, boy band members are caught between childhood and adulthood, “man enough to be desiring, and yet boy enough to be unthreatening” (6). Timberlake represented the “cute” archetype member of *NSYNC, the unofficially most popular member, and the main singer along with JC Chasez. Notably, Timberlake’s falsetto voice was often contrasted with Chasez’s more baritone voice, generally through having the two sing alternating verses as they do in “I Want You Back” (their first single) and “Tearin’ Up My Heart” (from *NSYNC’s first album). Historically, the falsetto has been “coded in effeminacy” (Hawkins, 2007:  199)  and for the male voice, linked with an “unmasculine, unnatural” voice due to the straining, high-pitched articulation (Frith, 2004: 204).2 Couple this with the feminine audience for *NSYNC and the romantic tone of many of their songs, such as “This I Promise You” or “(God Must Have Spent) A Little More Time On You” and it is evident that Timberlake’s image was fixed as artificial, boyish, and feminine by the time he began his film career and released his first solo record. Furthermore, although only on the show for two seasons, Timberlake’s involvement with the Disney channel, as part of the Mickey Mouse Club, connects the star with the “feminine” through Disney’s investment “in girl performers and girl-targeted series and music [that] help legitimate girls’ engagements with popular culture” (Blue, 2016: 171). The star’s image was modified throughout his time in *NSYNC, taking on writing duties, first on “I’ll Be Good For You” from No Strings Attached (2000) and cowriting or coproducing seven of the thirteen tracks from Celebrity (2001), and by altering his style, most markedly by shaving his hair short. The writing and producing credits helped authenticate his pop stardom, presenting

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the star as a significant artistic presence in the contemporary music scene. As mentioned in the Chapter 2, hair can be an important site of meaning for male stars and Timberlake’s pre-solo curly hair was often dismissed for its color and shape, evidenced by Glamour’s description of his “bleach blonde curlysue locks” (Fearn, 2016). Before the release of Celebrity, Timberlake shaved his hair, emerging with a cropped hair cut, formerly associated with a hard working-class masculinity, but his “wide-eyed youthful innocence” displaces this hardness while also illustrating the value of male grooming to his image (Biddle-Perry and Cheang, 2008: 90–91). This one alteration visually presented the star as older and more “manly,” but it also linked his image with metrosexuality. Some have dismissed this term as purely created within the media and by marketers to attract consumers, however, as David Coad notes, various high profile male stars have encouraged heterosexual men to “engage in practices stereotypically associated with femininity and homosexuality, such as care for appearance and the latest fashion trends” (2008: 73). Timberlake, over time, has became a fixture of fashion spreads and grooming how-to’s featured in men’s magazines. When named by GQ as one of their “Men of the Year” in 2013, they also anointed him “hair of the year” and ran a “How to Get Justin Timberlake’s GQ Hair, From the Guy Who Styled It” piece that delineated “the inspiration,” “the cut” and “the style” of the longer and darker hair the star now wears (Dold). While this trajectory could suggest that Timberlake has fully grown from his boy band beginnings to adulthood, boyishness still infiltrates his star image, even when in his mid-thirties and married with a young son. I would argue that while Timberlake has been able to expand his appeal beyond the largely female audience that first admired him as part of *NSYNC and has also deepened his star image to include more contemporary notions of masculinity, the feminized and youthful boy band image still persists and this is most evident in his film roles.

Cinematic roles Timberlake’s first major role in Alpha Dog is not prototypical of his star image, nor the majority of the characters he has portrayed on-screen. The film was

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based on a real-life crime—the kidnapping and eventual murder of Nicholas Markowitz who was fifteen years old—and features a tattooed, aggressive Timberlake that, periodically, utters sexist and homophobic slurs. Beginning with his following film, Black Snake Moan, many of Timberlake’s film characters are partially defined by their masculine weaknesses, including Ronnie Morgan in Black Snake Moan who is eventually discharged from the National Guard due to severe anxiety and Private Pilot Abilene in Southland Tales, an Iraq war veteran, addicted to drugs in order to numb his physical and emotional distress. In addition to these weak male characters, Timberlake has also appeared in comedic roles, portraying young men characterized by feminine qualities, including The Love Guru (Marco Schnabel, 2008), Bad Teacher (Jake Kasdan, 2011), and Friends with Benefits (Will Gluck, 2011). These roles extend Timberlake’s “feminized” image from his boy band past, while also referencing his nonthreatening sexual desirability. The films frequently emasculate the star by presenting him as effeminate, passive, and vulnerable. Kathleen Rowe argues that romantic comedies often “challenge existing structures of gender and social authority” through the “male hero’s loss of control when the unruly woman enters his life” (1995:  148). All three comedic films feature women that enter Timberlake’s life and disrupt it (although his character in The Love Guru acts as the trigger for the separation of a married couple). Bad Teacher, but more so, Friends with Benefits can be considered as part of a “countertendency” in more recent romantic comedies to devote as much attention to the male lead, confirming, as Jeffers McDonald puts it, “that men need romance too” (2007: 108). These films also expose the “fragility of male identity” (Alberti 2013: 33), a mainstay of romantic comedies by presenting the perfect love interest (at least on the surface), but exposing his personal frailty. In Bad Teacher, Scott (Timberlake) is a kind and caring substitute teacher with an abnormal relationship to sex, ultimately disappointing Elizabeth (Cameron Diaz), who chooses Russell (Jason Segel) over Scott. The casting of the film also displays the difference between the male love interests: Timberlake’s conventional good looks, and Jason Segel’s sloppy everyman qualities. Scott’s sexual deviancy belies his sunny disposition and all-American looks, comparable to the artificiality of pop music stardom and the nonthreatening nature of male teen stars.

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Friend With Benefits expands Timberlake’s feminization by presenting his love interest, Mila Kunis, as the tougher, more active partner in the relationship. The film is built on the premise that Dylan (Timberlake) and Jaime (Kunis) are friends who have sex with “no strings attached,” ultimately realizing that they are perfect companions and should enter into a relationship together. While Jaime’s love of romantic comedies, often derided as “chick flicks,” positions her as typically “feminine,” and Dylan’s quick dismissal of the same genre of films sets up his typically masculine response, the rest of the film undermines Dylan’s masculine identity. There are numerous comments in the film about his perceived homosexuality: His ex-girlfriend’s comments about his sexual preferences, which Dylan vehemently argues do not “make me gay”; His enjoyment of Harry Potter, also protested by Dylan; Jaime’s explanation to Parker, a man she meets in the park while walking with Dylan, that Dylan is her “gay best friend”; and Tommy’s (GQ’s sports writer (Woody Harrelson)) assumption when he first meets Dylan that he must be gay. At one point while having sex and Jaime is on top, Dylan mentions that he feels “a little emasculated” and the two switch places to his delight. These moments are all played for comedic effect. Still, there is no question that Timberlake is presented as weaker, and even though what puts him off dating Jaime is that she is an emotionally damaged individual, it is Dylan’s inability to “fix her” that hinders their relationship. Jaime is in the more typically masculine profession, as a headhunter, luring individuals to interview with bigger companies, while Dylan is an art director. Although he goes on to work for corporate companies, art and design is more associated with talent and emotion (feminine) and not gumption and initiative (masculine). This all marks Dylan out as weak, as does the reveal of his fear of heights and past history as a stutterer. Dylan could be considered as part of a more contemporary repositioning of “male heterosexuality,” displaying how “fragile” and “unstable” masculinity is, as Alberti argues in relation to Gerard Butler in The Ugly Truth (Robert Luketic, 2009) (2013: 12). What is significant in this study is how Timberlake’s own persona informs this characterization through his youthful image, which locates his masculinity between boyhood and adulthood. His off-screen life further links the star with vulnerability through his public break-up with Britney Spears in 2002 and his hit song “Cry Me a River” about a girl who cheated on her boyfriend and the

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accompanying video that included a Spears lookalike. This placed Timberlake as the victim as did his response to the “wardrobe malfunction” that occurred at Super Bowl XXXVIII when he performed with Janet Jackson and ripped a part of her costume—a planned gesture—but one that elicited outrage and severely harmed Jackson’s career. Timberlake clearly exhibits a modern form of masculinity, one defined by postfeminism, revealing the “requirement for men in postfeminist media texts to remain ‘masculine’ while also acquiring the emergent traits of being caring, soft, aestheticized and domesticated” (Thompson, 2013:  151). This hard/soft division is most evident in his film roles through his body, which is at once presented as masculine and youthful. Hawkins notes that the contemporary “body spectacular” in pop music is restricted to a “rigid criteria” of “facial beauty and muscularity” (2007:  202). Timberlake’s body fits this assessment as an “ideal male body” that is “muscular and hairless” (Hawkins, 2007: 203). This type of body—toned and groomed—is associated with metrosexuality, but also can be linked to Timberlake’s past as an adolescent male idol in *NSYNC. While his body has generally remained clothed in his post-boy band pop music career, it is often displayed in his film roles. In The Love Guru, Timberlake portrays Jacques “Le Coq” Grandé, an ice hockey player who steals the wife of the star player for a rival hockey team. The character’s name clearly signals one of the running jokes in the film—Jacques impressive manhood—also, emphasized with a close-up of his nether regions in his swimsuit. This creates an image of Timberlake as hyper-sexualized with this sexualization illustrated through his triumphant romanticism (his ability to be “more manly” than his rival) and the desirability of his body. However, there is a feminization that underpins Jacques throughout the film, connected to his French Canadian roots. In the same scene that includes the close-up of Jacques’s swimsuit, and a comment from Guru Maurice Pitka (Mike Myers) that it looks like Jacques is “smuggling a schnauzer,” Jacques sings along to Celine Dion’s “Because I  Loved You” as he rubs the calves of his lover (Figure 5.1). The film, therefore, sets up the dichotomy of “European” manhood as effeminate and prissy and North American (here, Canadian) manhood as challenged, but tough and resilient. This characterization, also, corresponds to Timberlake’s intermediate masculinity with his body presented as mature, while his actions are unsophisticated and, fairly, naïve.

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Figure 5.1 Justin Timberlake in The Love Guru (2008)

All of the music stars examined within this study represented contemporary masculinity at the time of their stardom and Timberlake is no different. He is allied with the emerging Internet and social media culture through his utilization of social media. He has Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook accounts that include posts by the star, relating to his personal life, in addition to more professional posts concerning his work, most likely from his personal employees and owns a stake in MySpace. As mentioned, he portrayed an art director of websites in Friends With Benefits, but his 2010 role in David Fincher’s The Social Network, understandably, associates the star with the rise of Internet businesses and the new generation of web CEOs. The film was a box office and critical success (It appeared top on numerous “Top Ten” lists of the best films of 2010 and was nominated for eight Academy Awards) with Timberlake even garnering favorable reviews and discussed as a possible Academy Award nominee. Timberlake’s portrayal of Sean Parker, the creator of Napster3 who became a small owner of Facebook, as a brash, but confident young man, trading on his charisma, was contrasted by Jesse Eisenberg’s socially awkward Mark Zuckerberg, who lacked charm, and as evidenced in the film, any people skills. The film’s university context aided in presenting Timberlake (as Parker) functioning as the popular kid, with lots of acquaintances, and Zuckerberg, the geeky student with few friends who avoids social activities, and instead, spends all his time at his computer. Timberlake’s enormous popularity as a music star and his contemporary all-American, metrosexual image

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demarcated his performance, allowing him to personify the embodiment of personality that Zuckerberg admired and desired. Timberlake was also used as an opposition to the main protagonist in Inside Llewyn Davis. As part of the folk duo, Jim and Jean (Carey Mulligan), Timberlake’s character is clean-cut and honorable, two things folk singer Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is not, but Jim is also presented as inauthentic, contrasting Llewyn’s musical sincerity. The film focuses on Llewyn as an antihero, “experiencing professional and emotional crises,” while at the same time, shedding light on New York’s Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, before, as Jeffrey Adams puts it, “the commercialisation of folk music, when the Village was a mecca for sincere young musicians” (2015: 14). Llewyn appears stuck in a cycle, never progressing beyond his poor lifestyle of low-paying gigs, nonexistent record sales, and homelessness. Llewyn, however, is bound to this lifestyle, perceiving it as part of the code of being an authentic folk singer. Jim visually contrasts Llewyn:  Jim’s cropped hair, trimmed beard, button-down shirt, and V-neck sweater are the direct opposite of Llewyn’s tousled, longer hair, scruffy beard, and t-shirt under his shirt (Figure 5.2). More vitally, his singing style and music contrast with Llewyn’s especially through his voice, displayed when he sings “Five Hundred Miles” with Jean and Troy. Hawkins

Figure  5.2 Oscar Issac, Justin Timberlake, and Adam Driver in Inside Llewyn Davis (2012)

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has argued that Timberlake’s voice, moving within the “falsetto borders,” illustrates his “mannered way of controlling the tone of his voice and attitude” (2007: 199). Mannered is another way of suggesting his voice is inauthentic, or at the very least, requires work to control and release. The performance in the film is not a typical Timberlake performance, but Llewyn’s objection to “Five Hundred Miles” is located in their sentimental folk performance, typified by Timberlake’s careful and restrained vocal. Later in the film, Jim invites Llewyn to record, as part of the “John Glenn Singers,” “Please Mr. Kennedy,” a novelty song written by Jim. This scene represents the beginning of the commercialization of folk music, the “selling out” that occurred with artists looking to “cash in” on the trend (it is later revealed in the film that the song will be a big hit, but Llewyn already signed away his right to royalties). The inauthenticity of this song is illustrated through its lighthearted subject manner, silly lyrics, and Timberlake’s (and Adam Driver as Al Cody) bombastic performance. This is distinct from Llewyn’s heartfelt, personal expressions of love and loss, most evident toward the end of the film when he sings “Fare Thee Well,” alone on a darkened stage at the Gaslight club. Timberlake’s pop stardom acts as a perfect counterbalance to the sincerity of Llewyn’s musicianship and the bleakness of his life. Inside Llewyn Davis is only the second film Timberlake has appeared in that contains a full musical performance from the star. The other film, Southland Tales, is not only a bewildering film in its own right, but is also unique in Timberlake’s filmography as a film that attempts to subvert his star image. This is achieved in one particular scene, which deserves a fuller analysis as one of the few musical performances of Timberlake in a feature film.

Southland Tales Richard Kelly’s follow-up to Donnie Darko (2001), Southland Tales was intended as, in the director’s words, “a musical in a post-modern sense” (Dunkley, 2004). The film’s reception is notorious, including its disastrous premiere screening at Cannes (the audience booed and walked out of the screening) and a completely reedited and much shorter version released into the theaters, with a box office totaling just over $300,000. One scene that

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remained throughout the drastic editing process was Timberlake’s lip-synced performance of The Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done,” a scene Kelly referred to as the “heart and soul” of the film (Peranson, 2006). The refrain of “I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier” is the highlight of the song with many artists, including Coldplay and U2 incorporating this particular snippet into their own songs in live performances. Southland Tales also uses the “soldier” chorus, establishing a direct relationship between the song’s lyrical content and Private Pilot Abilene. At first glance, the “All These Things That I’ve Done” performance appears to reference Timberlake’s music stardom as the scene resembles a music video, with Timberlake directly addressing the audience through the personal song/ performance, adhering to Andrew Goodwin’s assertion that music video uses “double identity” with the singer simultaneously acting as “both the character in the song and the storyteller” (Goodwin, 1993: 75). This performance adds the third element of Timberlake’s own music star persona and in doing so, complicates reading this scene as representative of his music stardom as the song and performance are in stark opposition to his music star image. The solider scene takes place half way through the film and represents Timberlake’s most time on-screen. Set in an arcade that is used as a nightclub for soldiers, Pilot Abilene sells “fluid karma,” a drug he has been smuggling out of Utopia, along with other soldiers for years. It is suggested that the government has tested this drug on the soldiers and Abilene is obviously now addicted. Before the music performance, he injects “fluid karma” and the scene that follows is his drug induced hallucination. The scene begins with Pilot Abilene looking directly at the camera, an acknowledgment of the film audience, suggesting this performance is for our viewing, but also a reference to music videos that often engage in direct address and musical films that promote the celebration of entertainment culture through direct address (Feuer, 1993: 36–37). Timberlake moves through the arcade with a can of Budweiser beer in his hand (a nod to his all-Americaness), but also displays some antagonism toward his soldier status—both through the lyrics of the song and by grabbing his dog tags and giving the middle finger to the camera. Throughout the scene, he interacts with dancers, dressed as nurses with Marilyn Monroe’s trademark blond hair and make-up. He continues to lip-sync the lyrics of the

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song until the very end when he becomes more contemplative and looks away from the camera. Timberlake’s bodily performance is fluid throughout the scene as he is constantly moving until the very end when his mental state appears to mirror the words of the song. However, dance is almost nonexistent except for the dancing women and this separates the scene from Timberlake’s own music stardom. From his involvement with *NSYNC through to his solo career, Timberlake has been associated with dance and movement. In fact, publicity and promotional materials for the star often emphasize his bodily movements (even his wedding photo album for People magazine (November 5, 2012) featured on their cover a photo of Timberlake jumping in the air).4 The music genre Timberlake is closely aligned with—pop and R&B—often emphasizes beats and rhythm, evidenced in his video for “LoveStoned/I Think She Knows” that places his body within the frequency of the song (replicated in the DVD menu for his concert film, Justin Timberlake FutureSex/LoveShow: Live from Madison Garden (Figure 5.3)). Dance has also traditionally formed a significant part of boy band performances as the complex choreographed routines emphasize visual spectacle while at the same time, focusing the audience’s

Figure  5.3 DVD menu from Justin Timberlake FutureSex/LoveShow:  Live from Madison Square Garden (2007)

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(generally, young girls) attention on their bodies—bodies that are not necessarily marked as sexual, as much as in motion. Timberlake’s solo career includes dance routines and performances that are overly sexual (almost predatory), generally in the company of women with these performances both using the women as visual props to display Timberlake’s heterosexuality, but also to illustrate his desirability through contact initiated by the female dancers. One of his most famous live performances—the infamous “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl—ended with a sexually revealing moment as he sang the final line from “Rock Your Body’: “Gonna have you naked by the end of this song.” The soldier scene from Southland Tales uses women in very a similar way. In fact, the women appear as possessing what Laura Mulvey described as “to-be-looked-at-ness”: they are there for erotic spectacle and present a tableau of female bodies for the audience’s visual pleasure, not too dissimilar to Busby Berkeley choreographed routines from 1930s/1940s musicals that created spectacular geometric shapes out of the female body form. Timberlake does interact with various dancers twice: one after she emerges from the photobooth; the other from behind the bar (Figure 5.4). These moments mirror Timberlake’s dance performances with women initiating physical contact to which Timberlake obliges; however, his focus is not on sexual fulfillment and both times he walks away from the female dancer, leaving her disappointed and unfulfilled.

Figure 5.4 Justin Timberlake and dancer in Southland Tales (2006)

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Figure 5.5 Justin Timberlake and dancers in Southland Tales (2006)

It can be surmised that the audience is left feeling the same because Timberlake never dances within the scene. Using a pop music star, whose performance style is associated with dance, in a self-contained musical scene, within a film that features only one other (debatable) musical moment,5 arises in the audience the expectation of a dance performance. In fact, the most authentic and genuine moment in the scene comes when the chorus girls line up behind Pilot Abilene and he mirrors their shoulder movement (albeit, a lethargic movement) (Figure  5.5). Audience expectations are not just subverted within this scene, but destroyed, partly due to the lack of dance, but also the incongruous relationship between Timberlake and The Killers’ song. “All These Things That I’ve Done” is featured on The Killers’ first album, Hot Fuss, released in 2004 as the third and fourth single from the album in the United Kingdom and United States, respectively. Although never a chart hit, it is still a highlight of their lives shows (mainly due to the “I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier” refrain), often the last song played before the encore or featured in the encore. The Killers’ music can be described as a pop/rock blend with indie aspirations and is dissimilar to Timberlake’s pop/R&B music style, which is more urban and borrows heavily from black music (indeed his songs often feature rap or hip-hop guest vocalists, such as Timbaland, T.I., and Snoop Dogg). In addition, his star image, including his clothing and costumes, appropriate black culture, specifically hip-hop style and swagger. Thus, the lip-synced performance in Southland Tales disassociates Timberlake from

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the black influences that inform his music and star image. In addition, the subject matter of the song is not his usual subject matter—love and sex. Generally, a popular subject in pop music, love was the dominant theme of *NSYNC’s music, but in his solo career, and especially on the FutureSex/LoveSounds album, sex became as important (Indeed, the title of the album points to the equal weight given to sex and love). The first single off the album, “SexyBack,” announced that Timberlake was “bringing sexy back” with this boastful claim reflecting the mood of the album. Although love is often the core concern, sexual innuendo is prominent. The Killers’ song, on the other hand, is reflective, concerned with personal redemption, not focused on external relationships as much as the internal struggle to be a good individual. The songs’ lyrics are vague with no real context given as to whom the singer is or whom they may be singing to. The soldier chorus is most puzzling as it could mean the singer is an actual soldier or just allude to the war he is having within his own consciousness. Either way, thematically the song fits the character of Pilot Abilene: a soldier wanting to be forgiven for his war crimes, desperate to forget his past and unable to let go. Tellingly, the song’s lyrics expand the audience’s knowledge of the character (thinly sketched throughout the fi lm) and it is notable that the director includes only the soldier chorus and last stanza, thereby condensing the song’s meaning. Although the most well-known part of the song namely the “I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier” line is actually nonsensical,6 the rest of the lyrics paint a much fuller picture as to the song’s meaning. Thus, for many viewers, their familiarity of the song assists in adding context to this scene, but also rounding out the character of Pilot Abilene. This, however, is not a Justin Timberlake song or performance. The entire performance is more conventionally masculine than Timberlake’s star image, an image that Hawkins (2007) has noted occupies queer performance spaces and a sexual identity that appeals to both heterosexual female audiences and gay male viewers. Timberlake’s falsetto voice is missing, replaced by a much deeper and more traditionally masculine rock voice of Brandon Flowers. Furthermore, fashion, a significant part of Timberlake’s stardom through the fashion line he co-owns, William Rast, and his own metrosexual, hip-hop,

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and relaxed take on suits, waistcoats, and vests, is completely absent from this scene, instead replaced by sloppy and bloodied clothing. The garish art direction is also inconsistent with Timberlake’s style of sleek images and muted colors exhibited in his videos and album covers, but also through his clothing. While it must be acknowledged that Timberlake is portraying a film character on-screen, there is a notable discord, a “problematic fit” (Dyer, 1998: 129) between his star image and character. This scene was written for the film and Timberlake was specifically hired to portray Pilot Abilene whose most time on-screen is the soldier scene. The mix of the performance, song, and Timberlake is bewildering within a film already puzzling, to say the least. Although many have leveled the “worst film ever” tag on Southland Tales, for others, the film has merit because of the Timberlake/The Killers scene and this positive assessment can be attributed, I would argue, to the scene’s selfcontained context and episodic structure. If one searches for Southland Tales on YouTube, the fourth video listed is the soldier scene, with over 260,000 views, only second in views to the trailer at over 2.5 million views.7

Conclusion This scene is reflective of Timberlake’s film stardom, casting the star in roles that do not hinge on his pop stardom, but utilize elements of his star image that underpin his characterization. As argued, his intermediate position between boyhood and adulthood factors into many of his film roles, as does his metrosexual masculinity and the artifice of pop music stardom. There appears to be a complex negotiation between Timberlake’s pop music stardom with its connotations of inauthenticity and feminization and his age, notably his boyish looks and attitude. Timberlake’s stardom has expanded to include television and the Internet through comedic performances on the sketch show, Saturday Night Live (NBC, 1975-), and musical and comedic performances on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (NBC, 2009-2014) and The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon (NBC, 2014-). These performances often satirize fundamental aspects of his own star image, such as the overt sexuality displayed in R&B music (Such as “Dick in a Box” by The Lonely Island, featuring Timberlake,

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which premiered on SNL in December 2006) or the “Camp Winnipesaukee” sketches with Fallon that parodies the youthfulness of Timberlake and Fallon by having them perform as boys at summer camp.8 These performances are essential to late night television in America, becoming viral hits on sites like YouTube and shared through various social media platforms. A much larger audience than those that watch the television shows can see these clips or shorts and Timberlake’s involvement in these comedy bits prolongs and diversifies his stardom. It is notable how often these sketches rely on homophobic jokes, which can be recognized as a way to distance the star from his feminized image and disavow any queer identity. Timberlake’s relationship with Fallon, especially, can be defined as a “bromance” with the two demonstrating a heightened level of intimacy without the expression of sexual desire (DeAngelis, 2014, 1). Their buddy relationship updates Timberlake’s boy band past by linking him with another male performer, whose performances are delivered to a wider audience and one not purely female or homosexual. It is unmistakable that Timberlake is eager to brand himself across several media. Paul McDonald has written that the film star is “a person-as-brand, a symbolic vehicle used to create a set of impressions deployed in selling a particular film experience” (2013: 41). Branding is used for symbolic and economic reasons to illustrate difference between products with this idea very important to film stardom as it is based on repetition and difference. In the contemporary media landscape, branding is vital to celebrity commodity, as a means to attract investments on products or endorse products, but, also, through the development of the celebrity’s public profile, often to the financial benefit of the star (Turner, 2004:  34–35). Timberlake has made significant alterations to his pop music stardom, not only from *NSYNC to his solo career, but more recently with the release of The 20/20 Experience when the star appeared with a new look that was modeled on Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack style of tuxedos, luxury, and cabaret performances. This grown-up style sought to present the star as a “song and dance man” and he has always acknowledged that his heroes are Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Fred Astaire, all male performers who could sing, dance, and act (Cooke, 2011). In a similar manner to Presley, Timberlake’s body has been restricted in his films, limiting

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the ability for audiences to recognize his performances as star performances. His success in film has been inconsistent and, as mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, his film stardom is still developing. Although the star has been appearing in films for more than ten years now, his film roles have, mainly, focused on his boyish qualities and hardly any films have utilized his innate talent as a singer or dancer. This may limit Timberlake’s longevity in film and his most recent film, the animated movie Trolls, does little to suggest that he will be able to break out of his perpetual adolescence and portray more adult characters on-screen. As opposed to Kristofferson or Smith, Timberlake’s pop stardom does not easily transfer over to the screen, nor does he personify the solidified “good Joe” image that helped Crosby remain a multimedia star for decades. All of this may speak more to the instability of film stardom in the contemporary era, or indeed, the difficulty adapting a type of stardom that emerges from a genre defined by its artifice. However, Timberlake’s enormous success as a music star (his 20/20 Experience tour was the highest-grossing solo tour of 2014 with $231.7 million earned from the tour that was attended by 1.9 million fans (Allen, 2015)) has been unequaled in film and as opposed to other contemporary crossover stars, Timberlake has appeared in more than fifteen feature films. The 89th Academy Awards began with a musical performance from Timberlake for his Oscar nominated song “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” from the Trolls soundtrack. The chart topping single was an energetic and crowdpleasing way to open the ceremony, but it was significant that Timberlake was at the Academy Awards as a singer performing his successful song and not as a nominated actor. Although made for a family audience, Trolls can be read as a film that directly connects the star with music through his character’s refusal to sing, at first, before the climatic performance of “True Colors” when Branch (Timberlake) restores color to the trolls’ dreary situation. But, all of this takes place within an animated film, distancing the human star and performer from the animated character. While the song and film were commercially successful, and Timberlake’s performance at the Oscars was well received, his crossover stardom remains unstable with few indications that he will be able to merge his music and film stardom or, indeed, if his film stardom will ever mature.9

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Notes 1 The film premiered at Cannes on May 21, 2006, was significantly reedited, and released, wide, in November 2007 in the United States. 2 This is similar to Crosby who was not a falsetto, but was required to lower his voice and not strain to higher notes in an effort to appear more masculine. 3 Napster was founded as an independent peer-to-peer music file sharing Internet service. It ran into multiple legal issues, mainly due to copyright infringement, and was launched as an online store. By this point, Parker was no longer associated with the service. 4 Gossip columnist, Lainey Gossip, wrote after the 2017 Oscars that Timberlake “pops and locks his way down a red carpet” as though he’s in “motion all the time” (Lui, 2017). 5 There is a dance, featuring the “Memory Gospel Dancers” that takes place toward the end of the film, intercut with scenes depicting the final fate of many of the main characters. This performance, however, is not self-contained, as the “soldier” scene is, and scenes featuring other characters interrupt the dance performance. 6 Comedian Bill Bailey suggested the lyric is cool, but just meaningless drivel and parodied the song by singing, “I’ve got ham, but I’m not a hamster.” 7 These figures are correct as of December 28, 2016. 8 The “Winnipesaukee” sketches even have Timberlake wear a curly haired blonde wig reminiscent of his hair when he was in *NSYNC. 9 As of the writing of this book, Trolls 2 (2020) is the only listed upcoming film project for Timberlake.

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The stars featured within this study are no different to film stars in general. Some stars last; others don’t. Still, others can become victims of changing cultural tastes or limited by industrial trends, including the rise and fall of particular film genres or the preverbal glass ceiling restricting the advancements of women or people of color in Hollywood. While this study has sought to demonstrate that crossover stardom is not new, it can be proposed that crossover stardom is not as popular as it once was. This appears at odds with the conglomerate nature of Hollywood and the constantly evolving media landscape. Will Smith’s next film, Bright (David Ayer), a fantasy cop film slated to be released on Netflix by the end of 2017, signals how the platforms for film exhibition have greatly altered in the contemporary period. As of the writing of this book, Justin Timberlake is teasing new music material, most recently posting a photo on his Instagram page of himself and music producers (and longtime collaborators) Timbaland and Pharrell (Shilliday, 2017). These new media platforms are not just related to contemporary stars, but past stars, like Crosby, are utilizing (through the owners of his estate) new opportunities to prolong their stardom in the contemporary period, such as the Bing Crosby Internet radio station available at bingcrobsy.com. With all of these new pathways for fans to access stars and their various projects, it is surprising that crossover stardom appears to be declining, but one of the reasons for this could be located in the riskiness of altering a successful formula, especially when stardom can be sudden and fleeting. Denisoff and Romanowski’s book on rock in film is titled Risky Business (1991), and this seems an appropriate sentiment to describe the overlapping between

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popular music and film. While the payoff can be enormous—for film studios, record companies and the artists involved—the fallout can be as substantial. Kris Kristofferson illustrates how difficult it is to maintain, concurrently, stardom in two different mediums and the resentment that can stain a music star’s foray into film. Part of this is located in the scale of their stardom—the larger the star, the more significant the failure. Tom Waits, a cult music star, has appeared in over twenty films, but has never lost his credibility as a distinctive singer-songwriter. His roles in films are generally small and sometimes uncredited, but his ability to portray character roles is grounded in the unassuming ordinariness bred from his music stardom. The stars featured within this book have all found greater commercial success than Waits has and, thus, the spotlight burns much brighter in their direction. There may be a new path to successful crossover stardom that is, significantly, guided by two contemporary female music stars, Lady Gaga and Rihanna. As opposed to throwing their star weight behind costly productions that depend on their name recognition, both women have started smaller with supporting roles in film and television. This is a similar strategy to Timberlake; however, while Timberlake has mainly appeared in film, both Lady Gaga and Rihanna have had significant roles on television, a medium now defined by its prestigious productions. Rihanna portrayed Marion Crane in the final two episodes of Bates Motel (A&E, 2013–2017), while Lady Gaga was a cast regular on the fifth season of American Horror Story:  Hotel (FX, 2015–2016), earning a Golden Globe for her performance, and, also appeared in season six, American Horror Story: Roanoke (FX, 2016). These were not the first acting roles for the singers, but television became an important proving ground for their acting ability. Television has featured throughout this study as an important space to extend stardom when film roles were less common (such as Crosby in the 1960s and 1970s) or the place where the visual image of the music star was solidified (such as Presley in the 1950s) or as an avenue to incorporate comedic acting to an already established persona (as Smith did on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air). Both Rihanna and Lady Gaga are moving on to larger roles in more significant film productions. Rihanna has appeared in Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) and is one of the eight women in the all-female spin-off of the Ocean’s Trilogy, Ocean’s

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Eight (Gary Ross, 2018). While Rihanna’s roles are still supporting, releasing her from the weight of expectations that dominates top-billing film stardom, Lady Gaga will next be seen in Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut, the fourth remake of A Star Is Born. Although costarring Cooper, the anticipation for the film will be on the female superstar’s shoulders (as all Star is Born remakes have been in the past). The risk may be worth the reward, but by building a television portfolio, Gaga has proven her ability to act and, also, has a safety net to fall back on if the film is unsuccessful. These contemporary examples correspond to the stars I examined in this book, especially Gaga, not just because her film will be updating the Star is Born story from the last incarnation with Kris Kristofferson, but the film will rely on musical performances by the singer. It cannot be understated how greatly the declining popularity of the musical has had an impact on crossover stardom. These stars are not only noted for their musical performances, but popular due to their particular performance styles and there are few music-based star images that are able to strip away the performance aspect of their stardom and still appeal to audiences. The critical and commercial success of La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2016) aside (although important to note, a musical film starring nonmusical actors), musicals are nowhere near the peak production and consumption level of the classical Hollywood era. The case studies examined illustrate how important it is to be able to sing and dance on-screen to mirror their stage and recorded music stardom. Only Kristofferson whose stardom was steeped in various human qualities that could be presented through characterization and physical presence was able to transcend the necessity for musical performances. Even Smith altered his Fresh Prince music image through television before he appeared in films, thus finding ways to physically personify the teenage “goofball” image he rapped about while part of DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. It is unsurprising the one star that most resembles the old school song and dance man, Timberlake, has found the transition to cinema most difficult as his musical performances still take precedence over his acting roles (exhibited by his opening performance at the 2017 Academy Awards). The transition from music to film may be less common and crossover stardom could be moving into new avenues, such as the transition of YouTube

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stars to more traditional mediums, but there is no doubt that the transition between mediums can be difficult and, sometimes, not worthwhile. Stardom is not monolithically determined. It varies between countries and cultures, genders and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and between mediums. This is what makes the crossover so difficult—music stars are defined by different criteria than, in comparison, film stars and it can be an arduous challenge to find ways to adapt stardom to specific mediums or particular cultural contexts (as illustrated in Presley’s rebellious rock ‘n’ roll image that transformed into a family-friendly entertainer). Even if crossover stardom is waning (which, I  would admit, is debatable), there is still a fascinating history of crossover stardom, especially between music and film that this book has aimed to shed light on and inspire others to explore some of these alternative histories of popular music and American cinema. Overall, the stars featured in this book have made some very significant and interesting films that deserve to be more than just afterthoughts when compared to their music oeuvre.

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Filmography 48 Hours (1982). Directed by Walter Hill. United States: Paramount. After Earth (2013). Directed by M. Night Shyamalan. United States: Columbia Pictures. Ali (2001). Directed by Michael Mann. United States: Columbia Pictures. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974). Directed by Martin Scorsese. United States: Warner Brothers. Alpha Dog (2006). Directed by Nick Cassavetes. United States: Universal. American Horror Story: Hotel (2015–2016). Created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk. United States: FX. American Horror Story: Roanoke (2016). Created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk. United States: FX. Annie (2014). Directed by Will Gluck. United States: Columbia Pictures. An Unmarried Woman (1978). Directed by Paul Mazursky. United States: 20th Century Fox. Anything Goes (1936). Directed by Lewis Milestone. United States: Paramount. Bad Boys (1995). Directed by Michael Bay. United States: Columbia Pictures. Bad Boys II (2003). Directed by Michael Bay. United States: Columbia Pictures. Bad Teacher (2011). Directed by Jake Kasdan. United States: Columbia Pictures. Bates Motel (2013–2017). Created by Carlton Cuse, Kerry Ehrin and Anthony Cipriano. United States: A&E. The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945). Directed by Leo McCarey. United States: RKO Radio Pictures. The Big Broadcast (1932). Directed by Frank Tuttle. United States: Paramount. Birth of the Blues (1941). Directed by Victor Schertzinger. United States: Paramount. Blackboard Jungle (1955). Directed by Richard Brooks. United States: MGM. Black Snake Moan (2006). Directed by Craig Brewer. United States: Paramount Vantage. Blue Hawaii (1961). Directed by Norman Taurog. United States: Paramount. Blue Skies (1946). Directed by Stuart Heisler. United States: Paramount. Blume in Love (1973). Directed by Paul Mazurksy. United States: Warner Brothers. The Book of Eli (2010). Directed by The Hughes Brothers. United States: Warner Brothers. Bright (2017). Directed by David Ayer. United States: Netflix.

192

192

Filmography

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974). Directed by Sam Peckinpah. United States: United Artists. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Directed by George Roy Hill. United States: 20th Century Fox. Casablanca (1942). Directed by Michael Curtiz. United States: Warner Brothers. Change of Habit (1969). Directed by William A. Graham. United States: Universal. Charro! (1969). Directed by Charles Marquis Warren. United States: National General Pictures. Cisco Pike (1972). Directed by Bill N. Norton. United States: Columbia Pictures. Clambake (1967). Directed by Arthur H. Nadel. United States: United Artists. Collateral Beauty (2016). Directed by David Frankel. United States: Warner Brothers. Concussion (2015). Directed by Peter Landesman. United States: Columbia Pictures. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1949). Directed by Tay Garnett. United States: Paramount. Convoy (1978). Directed by Sam Peckinpah. United States and United Kingdom: United Artists. The Country Girl (1954). Directed by George Seaton. United States: Paramount. The Deer Hunter (1979). Directed by Michael Cimino. United States: United Artists. Devil in a Blue Dress (1995). Directed by Carl Franklin. United States: TriStar Pictures. Donnie Darko (2001). Directed by Richard Kelly. United States: Newmarket Films. Double or Nothing (1937). Directed by Theodore Reed. United States: Paramount. Dreamgirls (2006). Directed by Bill Condon. United States: DreamWorks Pictures. Driving Miss Daisy (1989). Directed by Bruce Beresford. United States: Warner Brothers. East Side of Heaven (1939). Directed by David Butler. United States: Universal. Easter Parade (1948). Directed by Charles Walters. United States: MGM. Easy Rider (1969). Directed by Dennis Hopper. United States: Columbia Pictures. Edison (2005). Directed by David J. Burke. United States: MGM. Elvis (a.k.a The Comeback Special ) (1968). Directed by Steve Binder. United States: NBC. Elvis: That’s the Way It Is (1970). Directed by Denis Sanders. United States: MGM. Elvis on Tour (1972). Directed by Robert Abel and Pierre Adidge. United States: MGM. The Emperor Waltz (1948). Directed by Billy Wilder. United States: Paramount. Enemy of the State (1998). Directed by Tony Scott. United States: Buena Vista Pictures.

193

Filmography

193

The Equalizer (2014). Directed by Antoine Fuqua. United States: Columbia Pictures. A Fistful of Dollars (1967). Directed by Sergio Leone. Italy: Unidis. Flaming Star (1960). Directed by Don Siegel. United States: 20th Century Fox. Focus (2015). Directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. United States: Warner Brothers. Follow That Dream (1962). Directed by Gordon Douglas. United States: United Artists. For a Few Dollars More (1967). Directed by Sergio Leone. Italy: PEA. Frankie and Johnny (1966). Directed by Frederick de Cordova. United States: United Artists. Freedom Road (1979). Directed by Ján Kadár. United States: NBC. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990–1996). Created by Andy Borowitz and Susan Borowitz. United States: NBC. Friends with Benefits (2011). Directed by Will Gluck. United States: Screen Gems. From Here to Eternity (1953). Directed by Fred Zinnemann. United States: Columbia Pictures. G.I. Blues (1960). Directed by Norman Taurog. United States: Paramount. The Girl Can’t Help It (1956). Directed by Frank Tashlin. United States: 20th Century Fox. Girl Happy (1965). Directed by Boris Sagal. United States: MGM. Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962). Directed by Norman Taurog. United States: Paramount. Glitter (2001). Directed by Vondie Curtis Hall. United States: 20th Century Fox. Going My Way (1944). Directed by Leo McCarey. United States: Paramount. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1967). Directed by Sergio Leone. Italy: PEA. The Great Train Robbery (1903). Directed by Edwin S. Porter. United States: Edison Manufacturing Company. Hancock (2008). Directed by Peter Berg. United States: Columbia Pictures. Heaven’s Gate (1980). Directed by Michael Cimino. United States: United Artists. He Got Game (1998). Directed by Spike Lee. United States: Buena Vista Pictures. Hitch (2005). Directed by Andy Tennant. United States: Columbia Pictures. Holiday Inn (1942). Directed by Mark Sandrich. United States: Paramount. I am Legend (2007). Directed by Francis Lawrence. United States: Warner Brothers. Independence Day (1996). Directed by Roland Emmerich. United States: 20th Century Fox. Inside Llewyn Davis (2012). Directed by Coen Brothers. United States: CBS Films. Inside Man (2006). Directed by Spike Lee. United States: Universal. I, Robot (2004). Directed by Alex Proyas. United States: 20th Century Fox.

194

194

Filmography

I Surrender Dear (1931). Directed by Mack Sennett. United States: Fox Film. It Happened at the World’s Fair (1963). Directed by Norman Taurog. United States: MGM. Jailhouse Rock (1957). Directed by Richard Thorpe. United States: MGM. The Jazz Singer (1927). Directed by Alan Crosland. United States: Warner Brothers. Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids (2016). Directed by Jonathan Demme. United States: Netflix. The Karate Kid (2010). Directed by Harald Zwart. United States and China: Sony and Columbia Pictures. Kid Galahad (1962). Directed by Phil Karlson. United States: United Artists. King Creole (1958). Directed by Michael Curtiz. United States: Paramount. The King of Jazz (1930). Directed by John Murray Anderson. United States: Universal. Kissin’ Cousins (1964). Directed by Gene Nelson. United States: MGM. Krush Groove (1985). Directed by Michael Schultz. United States: Warner Brothers. La La Land (2016). Directed by Damien Chazelle. United States: Summit Entertainment. The Last Days of Frank and Jesse James (1986). Directed by William A. Graham. United States: NBC. The Last King of Scotland (2006). Directed by Kevin Macdonald. United Kingdom and United States: Fox Searchlight Pictures. The Last Movie (1971). Directed by Dennis Hopper. United States: Universal. The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000). Directed by Robert Redford. United States: DreamWorks Pictures. Lethal Weapon (1987). Directed by Richard Donner. United States: Warner Brothers. Live a Little, Love a Little (1968). Directed by Norman Taurog. United States: MGM. The Love Guru (2008). Directed by Marco Schnabel. United States: Paramount. Love Me Tender (1956). Directed by Robert D. Webb. United States: 20th Century Fox. Love Me Tonight (1932). Directed by Rouben Mamoulian. United States: Paramount. The Love Parade (1929). Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. United States: Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation. Loving You (1957). Directed by Hal Kanter. United States: Paramount. Made in America (1993). Directed by Richard Benjamin. United States: Warner Brothers. The Magnificent Seven (2016). Directed by Antoine Fuqua. United States: MGM and Columbia Pictures. Malcolm X (1992). Directed by Spike Lee. United States: Warner Brothers.

195

Filmography

195

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). Directed by Nicolas Roeg. United Kingdom: British Lion Films. McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971). Directed by Robert Altman. United States: Warner Brothers. Mean Streets (1973). Directed by Martin Scorsese. United States: Warner Brothers. Men in Black (1997). Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. United States: Columbia Pictures. Men in Black II (2002). Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. United States: Columbia Pictures. Men in Black 3 (2012). Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. United States: Columbia Pictures. Midnight Cowboy (1969). Directed by John Schlesinger. United States: United Artists. Mildred Pierce (1945). Directed by Michael Curtiz. United States: Warner Brothers. Mississippi (1935). Directed by A. Edward Sutherland. United States: Paramount. Mo’ Better Blues (1990). Directed by Spike Lee. United States: Universal. Obsessed (2009). Directed by Steve Shill. United States: Screen Gems. Ocean’s Eight (2018). Directed by Gary Ross. United States: Warner Brothers. One Hour with You (1932). Directed by George Cuckor and Ernst Lubitsch. United States: Paramount. Out of Time (2003). Directed by Carl Franklin. United States: MGM. Paradise Hawaiian Style (1966). Directed by Michael D. Moore. United States: Paramount. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). Directed by Sam Peckinpah. United States: MGM. Pennies from Heaven (1936). Directed by Norman Z McLeod. United States: Columbia. The Pursuit of Happyness (2006). Directed by Gabriele Muccino. United States: Columbia Pictures. Rhythm on the Range (1936). Directed by Norman Taurog. United States: Paramount. Rhythm on the River (1940). Directed by Victor Schertzinger. United States: Paramount. The Road to Bali (1952). Directed by Hal Walker. United States: Paramount. The Road to Hollywood (1947). Directed by Bud Pollard, Mack Sennett, Del Lord, and Leslie Pearce. United States: Astor Pictures. The Road to Hong Kong (1962). Directed by Norman Panama. United Kingdom: United Artists. The Road to Morocco (1942). Directed by David Butler. United States: Paramount. The Road to Rio (1947). Directed by Norman McLeod. United States: Paramount.

196

196

Filmography

The Road to Singapore (1940). Directed by Victor Schertzinger. United States: Paramount. The Road to Utopia (1946). Directed by Hal Walker. United States: Paramount. The Road to Zanzibar (1941). Directed by Victor Schertzinger. United States: Paramount. Rock Around the Clock (1956). Directed by Fred F. Sears. United States: Columbia. Rollover (1981). Directed by Alan J. Pakula. United States: Warner Brothers. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1976). Directed by Lewis John Carlino. United Kingdom: AVCO Embassy Pictures. Say One for Me (1959). Directed by Frank Tashlin. United States: 20th Century Fox. Semi-Tough (1977). Directed Michael Ritchie. United States: United Artists. Seven Pounds (2006). Directed by Gabriele Muccino. United States: Columbia Pictures. Shane (1953). Directed by George Stevens. United States: Paramount. Sing You Sinners (1938). Directed by Wesley Ruggles. United States: Paramount. Six Degrees of Separation (1993). Directed by Fred Schepisi. United States: MGM. The Sixth Sense (1999). Directed by M. Night Shyamalan. United States: Buena Vista Pictures. The Social Network (2010). Directed by David Fincher. United States: Columbia Pictures. Some Came Running (1958). Directed by Vincente Minnelli. United States: MGM. Songwriter (1984). Directed by Alan Rudolph. United States: TriStar Pictures. Southland Tales (2006). Directed by Richard Kelly. United States: Destination Films. Speedway (1968). Directed by Norman Taurog. United States: MGM. Stagecoach (1986). Directed by Ted Post. United States: CBS. A Star Is Born (1937). Directed by William A. Wellman. United States: United Artists. A Star Is Born (1954). Directed by George Cukor. United States: Warner Brothers. A Star Is Born (1976). Directed by Frank Pierson. United States: Warner Brothers. Star Spangled Rhythm (1942). Directed by George Marshall. United States: Paramount Pictures. Suicide Squad (2016). Directed by David Ayer. United States: Warner Brothers. Taxi Driver (1976). Directed by Martin Scorsese. United States: Columbia. Tickle Me (1965). Directed by Norman Taurog. United States: Allied Artists Pictures. Too Much Harmony (1933). Directed by A. Edward Sutherland. United States: Paramount. Traded (2016). Directed by Timothy Woodward Jr. United States: Cinedigm. Training Day (2001). Directed by Antoine Fuqua. United States: Warner Brothers.

197

Filmography

197

Trolls (2016). Directed by Mike Mitchell and Walt Dohrn. United States: 20th Century Fox. The Ugly Truth (2009). Directed by Robert Luketic. United States: Columbia. Unbreakable (2000). Directed by M. Night Shyamalan. United States: Buena Vista Pictures. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017). Directed by Luc Besson. France: Lionsgate. Vigilante Force (1976). Directed by George Armitage. United States: United Artists. Viva Las Vegas (1963). Directed by George Sidney. United States: MGM. We’re Not Dressing (1934). Directed by Norman Taurog. United States: Paramount. What Price Hollywood (1932). Directed by George Cukor. United States: RKO-Pathé Distributing Corporation. Where the Day Takes You (1992). Directed by Marc Rocco. United States: New Line Cinema. White Christmas (1954). Directed by Michael Curtiz. United States: Paramount. The Wild Bunch (1969). Directed by Sam Peckinpah. United States: Warner Brothers-Seven Arts. Wild Wild West (1999). Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. United States: Warner Brothers. Wonder Wheel (2017). Directed by Woody Allen. United States: Amazon Studios. Young at Heart (1954). Directed by Gordon Douglas. United States: Warner Brothers.

198

199

Index 48 Hours (1982) 124 Academy Awards/Oscars ceremony 137, 169, 173 nomination 40, 118, 159 red carpet 170 win 17, 111, 129, 151 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1949) 36 ABC (American Broadcasting Association) 115 A Fistful of Dollars (1967) 85 After Earth (2013) 139–40, 141, 144 Ali (2001) 118, 130, 143 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) 86, 90–3, 99, 108, 109, 110, 113–14 All-New Mickey Mouse Club, The (TV) 151 Alpha Dog (2006) 152, 155 Altman, Rick 21, 27, 58 American cinema 1, 6, 79, 85–6, 174 American dream 17–19, 33, 47, 62, 122 androgyny/androgynous 61 Annie (2014) 140 An Unmarried Woman (1978) 113 Anything Goes (1936) 17 Armstrong, Louis 35 Arnold, Eddy 82 American Horror Story 172 Astaire, Fred 2, 27, 28–9, 35, 168 A Star is Born (1937) 102 A Star is Born (1954) 102 A Star is Born (1976) 86, 90, 100, 102, 104– 5, 110, 113–14 authenticity 5, 14, 53, 55, 61–8, 91, 109–10, 153, 161, 167 Autry, Gene 80, 84 Bad Boys (1995) 123, 125, 127 Bad Boys II (2002) 130 Bad Teacher (2011) 156 Baron, Cynthia 7, 129

Beatles, The 61 Bells of St. Mary’s, The (1945) 37 Beyoncé 151 Big Broadcast, The (1932) 23–4 Birth of the Blues (1941) 22 Blackboard Jungle (1955) 50, 57 Blackface 41, 43 Black Snake Moon (2006) 152, 156 Blonde on Blonde 83 Blue Hawaii (1961) 51, 74 Blue Skies (1946) 28, 31, 35, 42, 138 Blume in Love (1973) 86 body 4–5, 11–12, 28, 49, 61–2, 64, 65–73, 75, 92–9, 100–2, 115, 123, 130–2, 146, 153–4, 158, 163–4, 168 Bogle, Donald 128, 144 Bolton, Lucy 75–6 and Lobalzo Wright 40 Book of Eli (2010) 129 Bowie, David 6–7 Brando, Marlon 39 Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) 86 Bright (2017) 171 Brooks, Albert 100 Burstyn, Ellen 90–1, 111–12 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) 85 Cannes Film Festival 161, 170 Carey, Mariah 3 Casablanca (1942) 59 Cash, Johnny 83, 104–5, 108, 114 celebrity 4, 13, 18, 32, 113, 139, 141, 143–4, 168 Change of Habit (1969) 51 Charro! (1969) 56 Chevalier, Maurice 23, 27 Cisco Pike (1972) 79, 86, 87–8, 90, 96, 106, 107, 112 Clambake (1967) 60, 68

200

200

Index

class middle 12, 17–20, 31, 35, 82, 120 working 19, 20, 81, 82, 155 Cline, Patsy 82 clothing/costume 46, 68, 80, 86, 91, 95, 97, 126, 129, 132, 133, 135, 136, 150, 158, 160, 165, 167 Cohan, Steven 35 and Ina Rae Hark 4 Collateral Beauty (2016) 139–40, 143–4 CBS (Columbia Broadcasting Services) 13, 42, 115 Concussion (2015) 143–4 Convoy (1978) 86, 98, 113–14 Cook, Pam 141 Coolidge, Rita 89, 97, 100–1, 104–6, 108–9, 113 Cooper, Bradley 173 Country Girl, The (1954) 39, 138 country music 6, 63, 79, 80–6, 104–9, 114, 115 crooning/crooners 6, 10–12, 14–15, 22, 24, 42 Crosby, Bing 2, 4, 7, 9–43, 45, 68, 76, 79, 138–9, 145, 146, 150, 169, 170, 171, 172 catholicism 37–8 declining stardom in 1950s 38–40 Dixie Lee (first wife) 14–15, 38, 146 family 15, 16, 20, 22, 34–5, 42 Kathryn (second wife) 38 legacy 40–1 musical films 23–31 postwar stardom 37–8 radio stardom 9–18, 19, 20, 23–4, 32–3 Road to. . . film series 34–7 World War II 31–6 Crosby, Bing songs “Be Careful with My Heart” 29–31 “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” 15–16 “White Christmas” 34, 40, 42 crossover stardom (see Stardom, Crossover) Cruise, Tom 141, 143, 147, 152 Cowboy image 79–87, 88, 90, 91, 93–6, 97, 103, 106, 110, 112–13 outlaw cowboy/persona 63, 82, 85, 106, 114, 115

Day, Doris 46 DeAngelis, Michael 7 Dean, James 39, 59 De Niro, Robert 100 Denisoff and Romanowski 171 Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) 129 Dickinson, Kay 7, 54, 55, 60–1, 62–3 Dickstein, Morris 16, 19 DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince 117, 120, 142, 173 Donnie Darko (2001) 161 Double or Nothing (1937) 28 Downey, Morton 12 Dreamgirls (2006) 151 Driving Miss Daisy (1989) 146 Dyer, Richard 4, 7, 14, 16, 18, 27, 31, 50, 55, 57, 64–5, 68, 75, 97–8, 124, 130, 143, 167 Dylan, Bob 83, 108 East Side of Heaven (1939) 24–6 Eastwood, Clint 85, 94 Easy Rider (1969) 85, 107 Edison (2005) 149 Elvis (68 Comeback Special ) 53, 55, 67–8, 75 Elvis on Tour (1972) 53 Elvis: That’s the Way It Is (1970) 53 emasculation/emasculated 4–5, 54, 157 Emperor Waltz, The (1948) 36 Enemy of the State (1988) 122, 125, 129, 136 Equalizer (2014) 129 feminization/feminine 4–5, 10, 12, 58, 60–1, 62, 63, 82, 87, 96–100, 106, 110, 111–12, 113–15, 130, 153–8, 167 Flaming Star (1960) 56 Focus (2015) 130–2, 146 folk music 15, 21, 79, 81, 83, 160–1 Follow that Dream (1962) 57 For a Few Dollars More (1967) 85 Frankie and Johnny (1966) 67 Freedom Road (1979) 113 Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The (TV) 117, 121–2, 128, 142–3, 172

201

Index Friends with Benefits (2011) 156, 157, 159 Frith, Simon 49, 154 From Here to Eternity (1953) 39 Feuer, Jane 28, 33, 57, 64, 162 Garland, Judy 103 genre film (see Melodrama, Musical, Romantic Comedy, Rock ‘n’ Roll films, and Western) music (see Crooning, Country, Folk, Jazz, Pop, Rap and Hip-Hop, Rhythm and Blues, Rock ‘n’ Roll) Geraghty, Christine 4 Garfunkel, Art 6 G.I. Blues (1960) 51, 59–60, 66 Giddins, Gary 10, 13, 14–15, 18, 20, 34, 35 Girl Can’t Help It, The (1956) 57, 76 Girl Happy (1965) 74 Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962) 71 Going My Way (1944) 17, 37 ‘Good Joe’ type 18, 19, 21, 33, 169 Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The (1967) 85 Grammy Awards 108, 132 Graham Norton Show, The (TV) 141–3 Great Depression 16, 18, 19 Great Train Robbery, The (1903) 80 Guerrero, Ed 125, 137 Gunsmoke 80, 115 Guralnick, Peter 50, 51–2, 60 hair 68, 84, 86, 91, 154–5, 160, 170 Hancock (2008) 131, 133, 146 Hamad, Hannah 138, 147 Heaven’s Gate (1980) 86, 93, 110, 112, 114 He Got Game (1998) 129 hip-hop (see Rap and hip-hop) Hitch (2005) 130 Holiday Inn (1941) 28–9, 33–5 Hollywood cinema 4, 6 Classical Hollywood/studio era 2, 3, 7, 12, 25, 27, 71, 173 Contemporary Hollywood 117, 128, 139, 150–3 New Hollywood 79, 93, 99–100, 107 Hope, Bob 28, 34–36 Hudson, Rock 46

201

I am Legend (2007) 124, 129, 130, 137–8, 143 Ice Cube 118, 145 Ice-T 6 Independence Day (1996) 117, 122–3, 125, 127, 129, 130, 133 Inside Llewyn Davis (2012) 149, 160–1 Inside Man (2006) 129 I, Robot (2004) 130, 133, 137 I Surrender Dear (1931) 11, 23 It Happened at the World’s Fair (1963) 57, 66 Jailhouse Rock (1957) 51, 53–4, 57–9, 63–5, 67 Jazz Age 11, 12, 14–15, 16–18 Jazz music 14–15, 17, 40 Jazz Singer, The 23 Jeffers McDonald, Tamar 58, 60, 156 Jennings, Waylon 82, 85, 114 Jolson, Al 6, 11, 23 Joplin, Janis 84, 108 Justin Timberlake FutureSex/LoveShow: Live from Madison Garden (2007) 163 Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids (2016) 149 Karate Kid, The (2010) 138 Kaye, Danny 35 Kelly, Gene 2, 168 Kid Galahad (1962) 67 Killers, The 162–3, 165–7 King Creole (1958) 51, 54, 57, 59, 67, 68, 74 King, Geoff 132–3 King of Jazz, The (1970) 14 Kissin’ Cousins (1964) 72 Kraft Music Hall, The (radio) 14, 32, 41 Kristofferson, Kris 2, 6, 79–115, 150, 169, 172, 173 alcoholism 104–6, 111 anti-establishment artist 106–9 co-star 110–12 cowboy image 80–96 leading man 108–10 relationships in films 86–93 sex symbol 100–6, 114–15

202

202

Index

Kristofferson, Kris albums Cedar Creek Session, The 79 Kristofferson 79, 84, 112 Silver Tongued Devil and I, The 84, 100, 106–7 Spooky Lady’s Shadow 109 Surreal Thing 109 To the Bone 114 Kristofferson, Kris songs “For the Good Times” 108 “Help Me Make It Through the Night” 108 “Me and Bobby McGee” 83, 84, 107, 108 “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” 83, 108 “Talkin’ Vietnam Blues” 85 “To Beat the Devil” 110 “Why Me” 108 Krush Groove (1985) 120 Lady Gaga 5, 172–3 La La Land (2016) 173 Last Days of Frank and Jesse James, The (1986) 114 Last King of Scotland, The (2006) 137 Last Movie, The (1972) 86, 107 Lethal Weapon (1987) 124 Legend of Bagger Vance, The (2000) 146 Live a Little, Love a Little (1968) 74–5 Lobalzo Wright, Julie 115, 145 Lone Ranger, The (TV) 80, 115 Love Guru, The (2008) 156, 158–9 Love Me Tender (1956) 1, 51, 53, 67 Love Me Tonight (1932) 23, 51, 57 Love Parade, The (1929) 23 Loving You (1957) 51, 53–4, 57–8, 59, 66, 67 Made in America (1993) 123, 124 Madonna 3, 4, 7 Magnificent Seven, The (2016) 129 Malcolm X (1992) 129 Marcus, Greil 47 Margret, Ann 72–4 Marlboro Man 90–1 Martin, Dean 7, 46, 77

masculinity 4–5, 6, 10, 12, 17, 23, 35, 37, 38–9, 54, 61, 80–2, 84–5, 87, 90–100, 102–3, 113–14, 123, 124, 128, 138, 144, 154–5, 157–9, 166, 167 McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) 108 McCracken, Allison 10, 11, 12, 16, 22 McDonald, Paul 132, 133, 140–1, 168 McGraw, Ali 96, 98 Mean Streets (1973) 111 melodrama genre 79, 86–7, 102, 103, 110–11, 114 Men in Black (1997) 117, 122, 125–8, 129, 133, 145, 150 Men in Black II (2002) 130, 133 Men in Black 3 (2013) 139 Mickey Mouse Club, The (TV) 151, 154 Midnight Cowboy (1969) 85 Mildred Pierce (1945) 59 Miles, Sarah 94, 101 Mississippi (1935) 27, 41 MGM 64 Mo’ Better Blues (1990) 129 Monroe, Marilyn 75–76, 162 Morin, Edgar 48 Mulvey, Laura 4, 71, 164 musical genre 2–3, 7, 10, 21, 23–31, 33, 42, 54–61, 63–74, 102–3, 161, 162, 164, 167, 173 music video 5, 120, 121, 132, 133, 158, 162, 163, 167 mythology 19, 47–8, 54–6, 60–1, 76, 80, 82, 109 Nashville Sound 81–82, 115 NBC (National Broadcasting Company) 117, 167 Neale, Steve 2–3, 115 Nelson, Willie 82, 85, 114 *NSYNC 151, 154–5, 163, 166, 168, 170 *NSYNC albums Celebrity 154–5 No Strings Attached 154 *NSYNC 154 *NSYNC songs “(God Must Have Spent) A Little More Time On You” 154

203

Index “I’ll Be Good For You” 154 “I Want You Back” 154 “Tearin’ Up My Heart” 154 “This I Promise You” 154 Obama, President Barack 137 Object of Sexual Desire 49, 61, 71, 79–80, 95–8, 102, 106, 108, 109 Obsessed (2009) 151 Ocean’s Eight (2018) 172–3 One Hour With You (1932) 23 ordinariness 14, 18, 27, 141, 172 Out of Time (2003) 129 Paradise Hawaiian Style (1966) 67–70, 72 Paramount Pictures 17, 20, 22, 24, 2, 25, 28, 33, 42, 53, 55 Parker, Colonel Tom 46, 48, 51, 54, 55, 56, 60, 61, 62 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) 85–90, 96, 108 Pennies from Heaven (1936) 19, 22, 35 Playboy 101–2 popular culture 6, 9, 21, 32, 41, 96, 108, 121, 139, 154 pop music 6, 120, 150, 153–4, 156, 158, 163, 165–6, 168 Presley, Elvis 1, 2, 4, 38, 41, 45–77, 139, 145, 146, 150, 168, 172, 174 1960’s musicals 45–9, 52, 54–6, 57–60, 63, 66–76 army enlistment 45, 49, 58, 63 authenticity 53, 55, 61–8 body 49, 61–72, 73 castration (through image) 61–3, 66 energy (through performance) 62, 66–74 mythology 47–8, 54, 56, 60, 76 pre-army stardom 48–51, 53–4, 58–9, 61, 63–5, 66–7, 68, 76 post-army stardom 51–3, 54–7, 58, 59–61, 66–76 young Elvis/old Elvis dichotomy 45–6, 53, 75 Vegas era 46, 53, 55, 76 Presley, Elvis songs “A Dog’s Life” 68 “Angel” 57

203

“(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care” 57 “Beyond the Bend” 66 “‘C’mon Everybody” 73 “Dirty, Dirty Feeling” 72 “Edge of Reality” 75 “Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce” 74 “Heartbreak Hotel” 68 “He’s Your Uncle, Not Your Dad” 74 “Hound Dog” 68 “House of Sand” 69–70 “I’m Falling in Love Tonight” 57 “Jailhouse Rock” 63–5, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71 “King of the Whole Wild World” 66–7 “Lonesome Cowboy” 71 “Loving You” 67 “Mean Woman Blues” 57, 66, 68 “Party” 71 “Queen Wahine’s Papaya” 68 “Return to Sender” 71 “Stop Where You Are” 69–70 “Trouble” 68 “Wooden Heart” 66 “Viva Las Vegas” 73 “What’d I Say” 73 Prince 5 Pursuit of Happyness, The 118, 129, 137–8, 143 race 47, 49, 50, 76, 117–18, 120, 124–32, 134–8, 144, 174 radio 9–11, 12–13, 17, 23, 32, 49 rap and hip-hop 6, 117–22, 124, 126, 129, 132–3, 136, 142, 145–6, 165–6, 173 Rathbone, Basil 20–2 Redford, Robert 114–15, 146 Reynolds, Marjorie 28–31 rhythm and blues/R&B 49, 52, 63, 77, 163, 165–7 Rhythm Boys, The 9, 13, 14 Rhythm on the Range (1936) 19, 22 Rhythm on the River (1940) 20–2 Rihanna 172 Road to Bali, The (1952) 36 Road to Hollywood, The (1947) 10 Road to Hong Kong, The (1962) 35

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204

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Road to Morocco, The (1942) 36 Road to Rio, The (1947) 36 Road to Singapore, The (1940) 34–5, 36 Road to Utopia, The (1946) 36 Road to Zanzibar, The (1941) 36 Rock Around the Clock (1956) 57 rock ‘n’ roll films 50, 57 rock ‘n’ roll music 1, 2, 6, 38, 41, 45, 48–9, 50, 52–3, 55, 57, 61, 62–3, 64, 76, 82–3, 174 romantic comedy genre 58–61, 86, 130, 156–7 Rollover (1981) 114 Say One for Me (1959) 42 Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, The (1976) 86, 90, 94–5, 101–3, 109, 114 Semi-Tough (1977) 86, 93, 98, 110 Sennett, Mack 17 Seven Pounds (2006) 124, 130, 137, 143, 146 sexuality 3, 10, 48, 49, 61, 72–4, 131, 153–9, 164, 167–8 Shumway, David R. 5, 62, 77 Sinatra, Frank 2, 6, 7, 38–9, 52, 68, 168 Sing You Sinners (1938) 17 Six Degrees of Separation (1993) 123, 124, 146 Sixth Sense, The (1999) 139 Shane (1953) 89 Smith, Will 3, 6, 117–47, 150–1, 152, 169, 172–3 children-Jaden and Willow 138–42 contemporary stardom 138–45 fatherhood 138–9 Fresh Prince persona 118, 122, 129, 143–5, 173 initial film stardom 123–8 nonthreatening image 128–32 rap stardom 118–21 television stardom 121–3 synergy 132–8, 150 Smith, Will albums Big Willie Style 132, 136 Born to Reign 136 Lost and Found 136, 142, 144

Wild Wild West 133 Willennium 136 Smith, Will songs “Black Suits Comin’ (Nod Ya Head)” 133 “Men in Black” 117, 132 “Mr. Nice Guy” 136 “Switch 133, 142 “Wild Wild West” 133 Social Network, The (2010) 149, 159 social type (see ‘Good Joe’) Some Came Running (1958) 39 Songwriter (1984) 114 Sony corporation 132–3, 140, 150 Southland Tales (2006) 152, 156, 161–7 Speedway (1968) 60, 74 Stagecoach (1986) 114 stardom crossover 1–3, 6–7, 79, 117, 124, 151, 171–4 Star Spangled Rhythm (1942) 33 Sternheimer, Karen 18–19, 32 Streisand, Barbra 94, 96, 98, 102–3, 111–12 Suicide Squad (2016) 145 Taxi Driver (1976) 99–100 television 7, 9, 12, 38, 46, 47, 49–50, 61, 62, 65, 67–8, 69, 71, 75–7, 80, 88, 115, 117–18, 121–3, 127, 129, 134, 141– 5, 151, 167–8, 172–3 Tickle Me (1965) 60, 72 Timberlake, Justin 3, 6, 138, 145, 149–70, 173 Timberlake, Justin cinematic roles 155–61 from child star to adult star 153–5 multimedia branding 168–9 sketch show performances 167–8 Southland Tales 161–7 Timberlake, Justin albums FutureSex/LoveSounds 152, 166 Justified 152 The 20/20 Experience 152, 168 The 20/20 Experience- 2 of 2 152 Timberlake, Justin songs “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” 152, 169 “Cry Me a River” 157–8 “LoveStoned/I Think She Knows” 163

205

Index

205

Valentino, Rudolph 113, 115 Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) 172 Vallée, Rudy 11, 14 Vigilante Force (1976) 86, 96, 98, 110, 113, 115 Viva Las Vegas (1963) 51, 60, 72–4 voice 9–11, 15, 17, 23, 24, 27, 28, 32, 35, 59, 67, 87, 93, 109, 154, 160–1, 166, 170

Washington, Denzel 7, 128–9 Wayne, John 85, 92, 93 We’re Not Dressing (1934) 19 Western genre 1, 79, 80, 82, 85–90, 94–8, 108, 113–14, 134–6 What Price Hollywood (1932) 102 Where the Day Takes You (1992) 123 White Christmas (1954) 34, 35, 59 Whiteman, Paul 9 Wild Bunch, The (1969) 85 Wild Wild West (1999) 122, 125, 133–6 Women’s Movement 96, 98, 106, 111 Wonder Wheel (2017) 149 Wood, Robin 113 World War II 9, 16, 19, 31, 34, 138

Waits, Tom 172 Warner Brothers 24–5, 140

Young at Heart (1954) 39 Young, Neil 83

“SexyBack” 166 Too Much Harmony (1933) 17 Training Day (2001) 129 Trolls (2016) 152, 169 Unbreakable (2000) 139

206