The legend: Some film buffs call 1932’s What Price Hollywood? the true first version of A Star Is Born, because the basic arc strongly resembles the later films. Starring: Constance Bennett and Lowell Sherman Writer: Gene Fowler and Rowland Brown, adapted from a story by Adela Rogers St. What Price Hollywood? (1932): The one where they don’t get together So if you want to understand what’s most interesting about the 2018 A Star Is Born - and why the story keeps being reinvented - it’s worth looking at each of its predecessors, which intersect in dramatic and even tragic ways with the lives of the people who made them. And while they each shift focus and change certain details, the allure remains the same, particularly to Academy Awards voters, who nominated the first four films in multiple categories and seem likely to do the same with the newest version. There are actually five Hollywood versions of the story - the first one is just a little different in some key details, and doesn’t have the same title.
No wonder it’s proven so attractive to the filmmakers and actors who keep retelling the story, retooling it for another generation. It feels so familiar, so archetypal, that it seems almost as if someone must also have carved it into cave walls in prehistoric France, or drawn it in cuneiform on some Sumerian scroll.īut of course, it’s not an ancient story - it’s one that depends on the unique machinations of the American celebrity-making machine. The faces, details, settings, and character motivation may all vary, but A Star Is Born keeps getting remade for a reason: It’s a story of romance and mortality, with a swooning arc that borders on epic. United Artistsīut looking beyond specific plot beats, it’s always, at heart, a story about what it takes to be a celebrity in America, as well as what addiction does to close relationships. Janet Gaynor in the first A Star Is Born. There are also a few repeated lines in each version, and always a scene in which the rising star’s first major awards win (at the Oscars in two versions and the Grammys in later ones) is ruined by her dissipated husband. In every version of A Star is Born, he meets the same end. The two fall in love and marry, and her success then becomes a problem for him. He connects her to the platform and contacts she needed, and she becomes a sensation almost overnight meanwhile, his career is bottoming out. Simultaneously a romance, a tragedy, and a rags-to-riches story with a magnetic young woman at its center, A Star is Born follows an essential arc that has, thus far, stayed the same: An aging male celebrity, hamstrung by his addictions, meets a talented, younger woman with whom he is instantly smitten. Spoilers for the basic plot of A Star Is Born, in all its iterations, follow. All iterations of the film - including the latest, directed by Bradley Cooper and starring Cooper and Lady Gaga - sing the same tune, but each version has new variations on the theme, flourishes and inversions that reinterpret the old story. Like a martini, or a bowl of chili, A Star Is Born is a staple that welcomes reinvention.
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