Monstrous Hollywood

This chapter is the mirror image of the previous one. It looks at narratives about has-been female stars in the context of the studio system’s demise during the 1950s and 1960s. These somewhat later backstudios depict the agency and sexuality of an older female star, who no longer has the safe haven of the studio to control or at least cushion her excessive behavior, as a “monstrous” perversion of femininity. In these films the mature female star personifies the incoherence of the Hollywood brand as a result of the studio system’s implosion, just as her excessive figure is treated as its cause, not its symptom. The chapter closes with a glance at the millennial backstudio, S1m0ne (2002), which takes as its premise the possibility of a computer-generated star and which registers the same anxieties about powerful female actors that these midcentury backstudios enact.