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No Room for Manoeuvre: Star Images and the Regulation of Actors’ Labour in Silent-Era Hollywood
| For the relatively small number of performers who won a place in the cinematic firmament in the 1920s, conditions of employment were, on the face of it, far from onerous. Even so, the silent era was punctuated by bitter and often very public power struggles that arose out of the efforts of star performers to challenge producers and studio managers for control over the terms of their commodification. Film theorist Barry King has argued that stardom allows individual actors and actresses to carve out what he terms a “manoeuvrable space” in their relationships with their employers. In practice, however, the majority of stars during the studio era had only limited room for manoeuvre. With unlimited access to the national media, industry leaders could construct screen luminaries in such a way as to strip them of their identity as workers and to obscure the realities of the conditions under which they laboured. By the late teens, a discourse of screen acting had emerged in the United States that detached stars from the world of work and defined stardom almost exclusively in terms of the rewards that accrued to it. Performers who complained about the terms of their employment or who sought a role in the construction of their screen images found themselves characterized as temperamental egotists whose professional idiosyncrasies posed a threat to the smooth operation of the Hollywood “dream factory”. This paper will focus on the experience of Jetta Goudal, a screen star of the early 1920s, whose efforts to assert her right to have a say in how her star image was constructed brought her into conflict with the studios and led eventually to her blacklisting.
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