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Louise Lovely, Bluebird Photoplays, and the Star System
- The Moving Image
- University of Minnesota Press
- Volume 4, Number 2, Fall 2004
- pp. 64-85
- 10.1353/mov.2004.0025
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
The Moving Image 4.2 (2004) 64-85
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Louise Lovely, Bluebird Photoplays, and the Star System
Jeannette Delamoir
[End Page 64]
Focusing on Australian silent actress Louise Lovely, this paper outlines some complex and ambiguous attitudes toward the star system in early Hollywood. This exploration takes as its starting point the poster in Figure 1 and examines the importance of Lovely's name, which was linked to her contract with Universal and her prominent roles in "expensive" Bluebird Photoplay productions. Universal surrounded Lovely with star hype at exactly the same time that its studio heads were publicly critical of the star system and were devising strategies to control stars.
Who was Louise Lovely? Although in one Australian film history she was labeled "Australia's foremost international screen star,"1 she is little remembered today. Born in 1895, she appeared in early Australian cinema productions as Louise Carbasse, then was [End Page 65] featured in fifty-plus Hollywood films between 1915 and 1922,2 of which only a handful still exist.3 The low survival numbers aren't unusual for films from this era, and the two studios for which she did much of her Hollywood work were Universal and Fox, whose silent productions have particularly high rates of loss.
Click for larger view | Figure 1 Color genre portrait, Louise Lovely/Bluebird Photoplays, n.d. From the collections of ScreenSound Australia, the National Film and Sound Archive. |
The disappearance of Lovely's films is unfortunate, if for no other reason than today preventing an assessment of her screen presence. However, research into how her star persona was built can still be conducted.4 The nature of this investigation involves [End Page 66] extensive archival searching in a wide variety of materials ranging from legal documents, advertisements, and costumes to promotional ephemera. Richard Dyer, one of the first and most influential theorists of star studies, has pointed out that, although "[a] film star's films are likely to have a privileged place in his or her image," it is in fact the ephemera that constructs stardom:
The star phenomenon consists of everything that is publicly available about stars. A star's image is not just his or her films, but the promotion of those films and of the star through pin-ups, public appearances, studio hand-outs and so on, as well as interviews, biographies and coverage in the press of the star's doings and "private" life.5
Ironically, this poster, as well as other "ephemeral" materials, have outlasted Lovely herself as well as her films.
Methodology
Because star images are comprised of many different texts, they encompass colliding discourses. The methodology for the overall project, then, had to preserve contradictions, resistances, and instabilities and to avoid attempts to reconcile them.
It also had to be able to meet the need to carefully reconstruct industry strategies—which demanded a detailed historical perspective—as well as understand how audiences may have experienced Lovely's star persona—which oriented the methodology toward reception studies. For reasons of length, this paper omits the reception-studies exploration of the connotations of "Lovely,"6 concentrating on a historical reconstruction of industry star strategies associated with star names.
To meet the differing needs of these connected investigations, the methodology for the overall project was modeled on the "total history" described by Barbara Klinger's article, "Film History Terminable and Interminable." She warns of possible inadequacies in studies that focus on one type of text only, such as reviews or the films themselves, and argues for looking at the "complex interactive environments or levels of society involved in the production of a particular event."7 Klinger's approach, reflecting the influence of reception studies, is similar to that of Janet Staiger, in Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema, and Sarah Street, who points out that, in looking at film, "material often regarded as extraneous can contribute to our [End Page 67] understanding of film in its cultural and historical context."8 While there is nothing new in this approach, it was particularly useful to study...
