Recycled Stars

Female Film Stardom in the Age of Television and Video

Mary R Desjardins author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Duke University Press

Published:6th Mar '15

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

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Recycled Stars cover

The popularity of television in postwar suburban America had a devastating effect on the traditional Hollywood studio system. Yet many aging Hollywood stars used television to revive their fading careers. In Recycled Stars, Mary R. Desjardins examines the recirculation, ownership, and control of female film stars and their images in television, print, and new media. Female stardom, she argues, is central to understanding both the anxieties and the pleasures that these figures evoke in their audiences’ psyches through patterns of fame, decline, and return. From Gloria Swanson, Loretta Young, Ida Lupino, and Lucille Ball, who found new careers in early television, to Maureen O’Hara’s high-profile 1957 lawsuit against the scandal magazine Confidential, to the reappropriation of iconic star images by experimental filmmakers, video artists, and fans, this book explores the contours of female stars’ resilience as they struggled to create new contexts for their waning images across emerging media.

"This meticulously researched book expertly draws from dazzling range material to produce a new understanding of how star images are produced and reproduced over time and to different ends."  -- Kristen Hatch * Journal of American History *
"Recycled Stars makes an original and sophisticated contribution to film and television studies and will be widely welcomed by readers and teachers. It is also illustrated with a delectable selection of stills that communicate the glamour and the sheer creepiness of the star images under discussion in equal measure." -- Ruth Barton * Journal of American Studies *
"Desjardins covers [Gloria Swanson and Lucille Ball] and much more in this fascinating tome, which is richly illustrated with frame grabs from kinescopes, as she considers the shifting landscape of mid-20th-century female celebrity. Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers." -- G. A. Foster * Choice *
"Well-written and using a rich variety of examples and methods, Recycled Stars is a useful and very readable addition to star studies, feminist media studies and film history."  -- Ellen Wright * Celebrity Studies *
"In addition to being multidisciplinary, this book demonstrates the importance of considering different elements of film studies together. Areas that were previously separate in film studies, such as stardom, fandom, and industrial factors, present a completely different understanding of the field when brought together—an understanding that could greatly benefit future research and study." -- Catherine Bednarz * International Journal of Communication *

Recycled Stars offers valuable insights into the relationships between stars and their publics, extending traditional scholarship by evaluating their impacts and consequences beyond a specific historical moment.”

-- Patrick Kent Russell * Journal of American Culture *

ISBN: 9780822358022

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 435g

320 pages