A Star Is Born (Warner Bros., MGM, Live Nation Entertainment, Peters Entertainment, Gerber Pictures, Joint Effort, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie Charles and I watched last night while taking a break from the Georgia Senate results was the 2018 version of A Star Is Born, either the fourth or the fifth time this venerable story has been filmed depending on whether you count the very first go-round for it, What Price Hollywood? That was filmed by RKO with David O. Selznick producing, George Cukor directing, and Constance Bennett, Lowell Sherman and Neil Hamilton as stars, and told the tale of a young woman in Hollywood who’s discovered by a brilliant but alcoholic director who makes her a star. She falls in love with him but his dipsomania gets so much worse she eventually leaves him for a rich playboy who’s not part of the movie business, but when the director hits bottom she takes him in as a house guest, he commits suicide in her home, there’s a scandal that nearly wrecks her career, but she endures and at her husband’s uriging makes a successful comeback. What Price Hollywood? was based on a story by Adela Rogers St. John (famous as a fiction writer for the Hearst publications and the daughter of legendary L.A. attorney Earl Rogers), but when Selznick returned to the same theme in 1937 at his own studio, Selznick International, he had William Wellman (who also directed) and Robert Carson tweak the story so the alcoholic director and the playboy husband became the same person: Norman Maine, once powerful and popular star whose drinking and public antics while drunk had cost him his popularity. This version featured Fredric March as Maine and Janet Gaynor as Vicki Lester (true name: Esther Blodgett), the woman whose career he helps launch and who quickly becomes a bigger star than he, and while other actors have been named as the real-life inspiration for Norman Maine, the one I’m convinced they were modeling the character after was John Barrymore.

The 1937 A Star Is Born is also noteworthy for the marvelously acerbic and witty script by Dorothy Parker and her husband Alan Campbell, full of such Parkerisms as the token reading “Good for Amusement Only” which Norman hands to people to describe himself, and the remark of the long-suffering press agent (Lionel Stander) who’d always hated Norman but had had to clean up his messes, who when he hears that Norman has committed suicide by drowning himself at the beach, says, “How do you wire congratulations to the Pacific Ocean?” This version of A Star Is Born was done as a radio show on the Lux Radio Theatre in 1942 with Judy Garland as Vicki Lester and Walter Pidgeon as Norman Maine, and Judy was so taken with the story she was determined to star in a remake – a chance she got in 1953 when she and her then-husband Sid Luft formed their own production company, signed a distribution and co-financing deal with Warner Bros. and acquired the remake rights to A Star Is Born. George Cukor returned as director, Moss Hart wrote the screenplay (and by his own admission made the story more romantic and less acerbic – much of the difference between the 1937 and 1954 A Star Is Borns comes from the different sensibilities between Parker and Hart as writers) and Garland’s co-star was James Mason after her and Luft’s original choice, Cary Grant, turned down the part. (Humphrey Bogart wanted it but obviously Garland and Luft wanted someone more openly romantic.) I’d long faulted the 1954 A Star Is Born because James Mason didn’t capture both the noble and self-destructive sides of the character as well as Fredric March had – but when A Star Is Born was restored in 1983 and Jack Warner’s destructive cuts in the film were undone, it turned out Mason had acted the character fully; we just didn’t know because his more noble, less self-destructive scenes had been left on Jack Warner’s cutting-room floor. (The cuts were done to shrink the movie from three hours to two hours 15 minutes so theatres could get in one more showing per day.)

The next A Star Is Born came out in 1976, transposed the story from the movie industry to the music business, and starred Barbra Strieisand in the female lead and Kris Kristofferson as the man, a rock star named John Norman Howard (Mad magazine ridiculed the film for giving him three first names), who as in the earlier films discovers Streisand by accident playing in a cheap nightclub, takes her on tour with him, builds her into a star but his drinking and drug use continue to undo him. Both Charles and I had seen this version before but remembered little of it; all I can recall is the rather silly song Streisand sings in her pre-stardom days, their initial lovemaking scene in a bathtub with candles all around them (one wonders whether Kristofferson is there to fuck Streisand or to worship her), a scene in which Kristofferson disrupts a rock festival by riding a motorcycle on stage; and his suicide, which he accomplishes by deliberately crashing his motorcycle (though the actual crash is not shown) rather than walking into the Pacific and drowning himself the way Fredric March and James Mason did. The 2018 A Star Is Born was the brainchild of actor Bradley Cooper, who starred as fading country-rock star “Jackson Maine” and also directed and co-wrote the film (Will Fethers and Eric Roth were his writing partners), who at the start of the film is seen gulping down a handful of prescription drugs and washing them down with alcohol – Charles joked that this time we got the substance abuse even before there was a word of dialogue – and cast Lady Gaga as Ally. The writers had the two of them meet in a drag bar, where Ally is the only biologically female performer – after the opening credit played over a version of the rarely heard verse to “Over the Rainbow” (“just to remind people this story was once associated with Judy Garland,” I joked), Lady Gaga appears at that drag bar and sings Edith Piaf’s iconic hit “La Vie en Rose.” (“Now,” I joked, “if they include a Billie Holiday song they’ll have represented all three of the most legendary doomed divas.” Alas, they didn’t – though Lady Gaga has shown off enough chops for singing standards she probably could do a good job covering Billie Holiday.)

Jackson Maine discovers her there, takes her to another bar – where she gets into a fight with one of the police officers who are the place’s regulars – and then to an all-night grocery where he buys a bag of frozen vegetables to improvise a cold compress for her arm. Ally works as a waitress and is about to start her shift when Maine’s driver shows up to pick her up and take her to his next gig, where he intends (to the extent he’s not too drunk and stoned to intend anything) to put her on stage and have her sing the song she sang him in the all-night grocery’s parking lot. She’s willing to give up her potentially big break for her proletarian job when her boss upbraids her for being late again – whereupon she walks out and, scared shitless, she goes on at Maine’s concert and the two sing the movie’s big duet, “Shallow.” It’s a nice enough song that gets reprised at the end of the movie when Ally makes her big appearance following Maine’s suicide (which in this case happens when he does one last drink-and-drugs binge in his old red truck – there was also a motorcycle in his garage and for a moment I thought they were going to have him get on it and take himself out the way Kristofferson did, but no such luck) and sings it solo, but as Charles pointed out it’s really not in the same league as “The Man That Got Away” or “Evergreen.” The problem is that Bradley Cooper really can’t sing – though he’s a good enough actor he can deliver the illusion that he can – and when I saw the Garth Brooks-Trisha Yearwood Christmas special and they performed “Shallow” I wrote in my blog afterwards that it was nice to hear this song done by two people who can sing.

The new A Star Is Born has some changes that reflect the different social mores of the period (indeed one could screen all five versions in sequence to get an index of the social changes between 1932 and 2018), including so many swear words it reminded me of former producer Steven Bach’s joke that the original script for The Raging Bull contained “more fucks in it than have occurred in Hollywood in history.” I’m not sure what I would make of this film if I were coming to it de novo without having seen any of its predecessors – which I suspect was true for most of the modern audience – but as it stands I liked it. I gave the new writers points for at least trying to give Bradley Cooper’s character enough of a backstory (raised by a single dad after his teenage mom died giving birth to him; dad was also an alcoholic and essentially taught him that that was the way to get over his problems) to explain how he became so self-destructive, and they also gave him tinnitus and showed him losing his hearing (an occupational hazard for longer-lived rock stars who’ve found all those years standing on stages powering out ultra-loud music have gotten to them), and there are neat little touches like having Lady Gaga appear with a cocktail glass to indicate that she too is in danger of going down the primrose path. (This suggests sequel possibilities; David Selznick actually briefly contemplated a sequel called Another Star Is Born in which Vicki Lester would have discovered, after Norman Maine’s death, that she was pregnant by him.) I also liked the subplot that has Ally discovered and signed by a supercilious British manager who remodels her act into the sort of dance-diva mold Lady Gaga’s original stardom was based on (though even as a dance diva I gave her credit for writing actual songs with identifiable beginnings, middles and ends instead of just barking out a few words over a dance groove and calling it a “song”), and there are at least hints that the writers regard this as a commercial compromise that strikes against her essence as an artist and the sincerity Cooper’s character tells her she should maintain in one of the scenes between them. Otherwise this A Star Is Born is a competent remake of a classic (two classics, actually) that tells the story well enough, offers some interesting variations but doesn’t really grab you the way the 1937 and 1954 versions did.