What Price Hollywood?

Wednesday, September 21 at 7:30 PM — The Auditorium at NEIU — 3701 W Bryn Mawr Ave
Tickets: $10 at the door

WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD?
Directed by George Cukor • 1932
Officially, there have been four versions of A Star Is Born over the last eighty-five years, with Janet Gaynor, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, and Lady Gaga playing the ingénue who rises as her partner falls. (Malpaso diehards will long lament that the Beyoncé version under Clint Eastwood’s direction never materialized.) But the roots of this seemingly unkillable template go back further — to this 1932 pre-Code chestnut produced by David O. Selznick (who would oversee the 1937 version) and directed by George Cukor (who would assume the reins of the 1954 edition). Yet What Price Hollywood? is very much its own thing — a visually dense, fluidly conceived tour of the dark side of movieland, a (relatively) realistic reflection on the precarity of fame and favor in a company town. Screen veteran Constance Bennett convincingly portrays Mary Evans, a Brown Derby waitress who aspires to stardom from her cramped studio apartment. Her big break comes when director Max Carey (Lowell Sherman) tipsily invites her to accompany him to his premiere and later accedes to her request for a walk-on part. The road is rough, but Mary soon sets a land speed record for acting transformations that would go unchallenged until Naomi Watts’s Mulholland Dr. audition scene. Mary’s career takes off, while Max loses his to alcoholism. Cukor recalled that Sherman was “a very fine actor, but there was something about him, a slightly odious quality, that kept him from being a real star. It worked very well in this story.” Tragically, Sherman, a real-life alcoholic, would be dead in two years. Restored by the Library of Congress and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation (KW)
88 min • RKO-Pathé  Pictures • 35mm from Library of Congress, permission Swank
Preceded by: “I’m Afraid to Come Home in the Dark” (Fleischer Studios, 1929) – 7 min – 16mm