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Katherine Fusco, "Hollywood's Others: Love and Limitation in the Star System" (Columbia UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Pete Kunze
Welcome to New Books and Film, a podcast series on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Pete Kunze. My guest today is Katherine Fusco, associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the author of Hollywood's Love and Limitation in the Star System. The book was published by Columbia University Press in 2025. Good afternoon, Katherine. How are you doing today?
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Katherine Fusco
I'm well. Thanks for having me.
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Pete Kunze
The pleasure is mine. I'm excited to talk about this book. As we begin. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and your training?
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Katherine Fusco
Sure. So I should say I always want to shout out my hometown of Rochester, New York, which has a great independent theater called the Little which is where I grew up watching movies. But I also have more formal film training from my graduate program at Vanderbilt, where I studied silent film and US Literature. And since then I've been at the University of Nevada, where I've been very happy to develop our film studies curriculum and chair our lovely English department.
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Pete Kunze
Excellent. So you mentioned your earlier interest in silent film and US Literature. How does that kind of lead into this project or what brought you to this project in particular?
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Katherine Fusco
Yeah, so I really came. So this. This book covers the 1920s and the 1930s. So for the uninitiated, that's both silent and sound film. And so I had previously written a book about very early silent film. So when I say early, I mean like 1895 to, you know, 1915 was the end point of that book. And so I was sort of still thinking in silent film mode. And I was at the Silent Film Festival in Portugnone, Italy, which is just this, like, wonderful festival where you go see silent movies all day, and there's live accompaniment, just like there would have been, you know, if you were watching a movie in the nineteen teens or twenties. And I just so happened to go to the children's program they were running one day. And so they. They do silent films for children. And so all these Italian school children come. Totally random, that I was there for the children's program. I thought, well, this will just be delightful. And they showed a series of our gang films. And so our gang is now better known today as the Little Rascals. And so I was watching these films, and I noticed that by far the most adorable of these children, a child named Farina is the character's name, was sometimes being referred to by the titles as a little boy, and then sometimes in other films being referred to as a little girl. And sitting there with the Italian school children and the live accompaniment, I was like, wait, is that the same performer? What's happening? And why is it happening? And so it was really just kind of like that itch to sort of figure out, like, who is this performer? What's happening? Why is the gender of this child changing from film to film? That. That became just this, like, weird little inquiry. And it turned out that Alan Hoskins is a little boy. That's the name of the performer. And Farina was popular with everyone. And so I thought, okay, what's happening? This is, you know, the kind of, like the height of Jim Crow America, right? What does it mean that this black child star is so incredibly popular? Which, you know, like, he's very charismatic. He's wonderful, he's delightful. But I sort of thought, like, well, I know from studying US literature, and I had written about D.W. griffith's notorious film, the Birth of a Nation, which is from 1915. I said, this is a very racist time in the United States. It's a very violent time for black Americans. And so that was kind of the seed of this project, which is thinking about how stars who are one or another way, kind of outside of a white, normative, heterosexual kind of mainstream. How are they being marketed to this mainstream? And that was kind of the research question that got me going.
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Pete Kunze
Excellent. So that brings you also to the field of star studies. And I'm curious, what drew you? Right. It seems like you're already kind of gesturing towards the importance of affect and appeal in your response already. What drew you to star studies and what are you hoping? This collection. Not collection of. Well, in some ways collection of essays. But this monograph is contributing to that field.
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Katherine Fusco
Yeah. So, I mean, it's. There's sort of two, maybe two ways I'm thinking about that important question. So there's lots of folks who've done work in star studies that I really admire looking at stars who are kind of aspirational. So people we might want to be like or stars who. And I think we still talk about stars this way. So, like, the stars, they're just like us kind of thing. Right. Stars were relatable. Right. So there's the kind of model of the aspirational star, the model of the kind of relatable star. And then I think, too, there are folks who've written about the kind of stars iconoclastic. And so I really admire that work. And I need to say you so nicely corrected me before we hopped on here, Richard Dyer, who I apparently killed. In my acknowledgment, there's a different Richard Dyer who died when I was working on this book. In my acknowledgments, I suggest that the film scholar Richard Dyer died. He didn't. I'm so sorry. Richard Dyer, if you ever hear this. But he's done a lot of this work sort of talking about how stars give us a gloss on what it means to be a person in public. And so all of that feels like mostly right and interesting to me, except when it isn't right. Except when we know that, like, after World War I, there's a lot of, like, anxiety about disability. And we've got Lon Chaney here playing characters who've been maimed or lost limbs in various ways. And so, like, what is that? That's not exactly, like, aspirational in the marketing. Right. That's not necessarily, like, what the American mainstream is promoting as, like, the relatable, certainly when it comes to cross racial identification, like, are we really saying that, like, white adults are being encouraged to identify with a black child? What would that mean? So, but to kind of pick up. I think I suggested there were two ways in thinking about that, so did all this really important work in star studies about the relatable star, the iconoclastic star, things like that. But because I also have training in silent film studies, there's work in silent film studies on what Richard de Cordova called the picture personality. And so that was, like, back a long time ago, silent film studios didn't necessarily publicize the names of their actors and actresses. People kind of got to know them as certain types over time. So there's like the idea of the Biograph Girl. It was an actress you might be following from picture to picture, but they were heavily associated with the roles they played and less so with what we might think of as, like, the biographical information about the star or the actress. And so one thing that I noticed with some of the actors or character types that I'm writing about is that they were behaving a lot like kind of picture personality. So studio publicity didn't tell you about this little boy, Alan Hoskins, very much because there was a lot invested in kind of promoting the character Farina. So it was productive for Hal Roach for there to be confusion, actually about Furina's gender because of the way that particular stardom was being promoted. So, yeah, so maybe I'll stop there because I feel like I got on a little bit of a tear.
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Pete Kunze
Well, if I can ask you a brief follow up, your cover image on your book is quite striking. I guess it's a production still or publicity photo of Lon Chaney in Phantom of the Opera, but his face is obscured. Can you tell us a little bit more about what drew you in about this image and made it cover imageable for you?
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Katherine Fusco
Yeah, so it was a publicity photo. Yeah. And so I think Lon Chaney is a really interesting case because he's also a star, where he himself was resistant to having biographical information circulate about him. He thought that was not what was interesting about him. He was very invested in these characters and the extensive makeup work that he was doing. He, interestingly, was very resistant to sound because he didn't like the idea of having a kind of stable voice under his characters. And so the, like, part of what's interesting about Lon Chaney is everybody's showing up to see, like, what's he gonna look like this time? Right. Like, what's he gonna look like? And so what's interesting in the star discourse about him is there's this bizarre effort on the part of these magazine writers and the fan magazines to be like, oh, he's real Normal under there. Right. And that's something that, as I read about Chaney and read these pieces, it just seemed like he was not very invested in portraying that narrative. But there was something about, like, okay, all these young men, all these little boys are obsessed with this star. How are we gonna sell this in a way that's kind of like, wholesome when what they're clearly so invested in is the strangeness of his appearance from film to film. Right. And so there's kind of both things happening in these star stories that I'm looking at is there's some kind of appeal to, clearly, that audiences are finding. But there's something kind of dangerous about these appeals that we also see the fan magazines trying to figure out, like, how do we manage? How do we keep this tame? Yeah, yeah.
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Pete Kunze
As a. As a child of. A child of the 50s, I had a universal monsters period in my childhood because my dad made me watch them. And I remember Lon Chaney as kind of coming up in the man of a Thousand Faces. And, you know, the way that the reveal of what's behind the mask, I mean, it's such a fascinating figure to kind of think about in a star studies context. You mentioned the fan magazines and how they were kind of a central source for you here, in particular those that have been made available on the Media History Digital Library and Lantern. Can you tell us about the joys and the challenges of using fan magazines as a primary source for this kind of study?
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Katherine Fusco
Yeah, and I. I owe so much to that website and to Eric Hoyt and, like, the work he's done there, because this was very much a book that, you know, was written during some of the pandemic lockdown. So those resources, those digitized magazines were so valuable to me. I mean, I think, you know, part. Part of what. I mean, it's. They're. They're delightful. They're so weird sometimes. You know, just what gets said, things that are clearly not true. It's. It's interesting because I think for a little while, folks thought that really this was just all studio copy. And certainly, like, there was a symbiotic relationship between studios and fan magazines, but there was also the pressure of the fans reading these magazines. So the. The magazines couldn't totally capitulate to just, you know, promoting studio copy. They also needed to be telling fans something. And so, I mean, one thing that is interesting is, like, seeing in some of the magazines, questions that fans would write in, like, you know, is Lon Chaney really maimed? Or, you know, what's you know, what's happening with so and so actress. But I also found really interesting. So I read fan magazines for this project. And so you could see stars being constructed certain ways. There's a chapter I cut from the book that was about Katharine Hepburn kind of in the early years of Katharine Hepburn's career. And you could see the fan magazines trying to figure out, like, what kind of a star is she? And so across the years, you could sort of figure out, like, what are the other actresses they're comparing her to, to try to figure out, like, how do we help fans learn what kind of star this is? So, like, very much like in the mode of teaching fans based on things they already know or other movies they've maybe already seen. One of my favorite things, though, these same websites that Pete's mentioned, Lantern, you can also see magazines that we might call trade magazines that were for exhibitors. And so one of my favorite things in magazines, like, I think Exhibitors Trade Review is the name of one. I believe they would have articles for local studios saying, like, this is a good idea about how to market this film. So in the case of the Our Gang films, they would suggest, like, dress up days. So, you know, dress up like your favorite character from Our Gang. Also they had reports from the local studios. Sorry, from the local theaters where theater owners could write in and say, you know, how did it, you know, play in Peoria? Right. And so you would have theater owners kind of complaining about certain films or certain stars or saying, you know, this worked, this didn't work. Or, like, they get very sick of Shirley Temple as she gets older. So they're sort of like, tell her. They say really mean things about Shirley Temple. Like, tell her to go to college and come back when she's attractive again. You know, things like that. So that was kind of wild. I think maybe what's most frustrating or difficult about working in the fan magazines is they're not a source of truth. Like, you can't count on for anything to be true. So there's. I think there's a description of Lon Chaney in, like, a really weird costume in one of the articles that I read. And I kept trying to find the film that it would have made sense for him to be wearing the costume that was described. And I was like, I never figured out what movie it was. Might not have been. It might have just been sort of something made up for the sake of this article. So sometimes that could be frustrating trying to, you know, I couldn't rely on them as Truthful. Instead, I really treated them as items of analysis. Right. Their own kind of cultural objects to consider and sort of see the cases that were getting made about how we should feel about different stars.
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Pete Kunze
Yeah. I mean, as they say on the Internet, the discourse is discoursing. Right. So you're also bringing affect theory to the table, which is something I was really excited about because I'm personally trying to think through this myself and about feelings and emotions and in media history and how that helps us with this kind of triangulation between stars and studios and fans. And in particular, you refer to fan magazines as, quote, a school for fandom in a nervous age. What does this mean for you? Can you help us unpack that phrase? I think it's a really useful one.
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Katherine Fusco
Yeah. I mean, I think like if you. So if you think about this period between World War I and basically the height of the Great Depression, right, so the 1920s and 1930s, that's a period of lots of cultural change in the United States. Right. It's a period in which you have folks returning from war. Right. In various states, you have black GIs returning from the war and making claims on citizenship in various ways. You have women voting, you have regulations on child labor. Coming into being, thinking about what kind of a person a child is. Is it economic laborer, economic worker? It's just, you know, immigration. So it's just like a very kind of tumultuous time. There's lots of groups, you know, in the public sphere making claims on rights. Like that's one way that I'm kind of conceiving of this time. This is a time where, you know, in. In the public world of the United States, lots of groups are sort of saying like, we exist, we deserve certain kinds of rights. We deserve to have our voices heard in various ways. And then there is the kind of like concomitant pushback that always accompanies things like that. And then this is also a time that the film industry is deciding how it's going to self regulate. So lots of folks will have heard about the Hays Code. And so this is a book that is really a pre Hays Code book, but it is very much a book about Hollywood kind of under the coming pressure of the Hays Code. Right. And the magazines and kind of advertising code are part of that as well. Right. They would have been scrutinized in this way. So it's like this very kind of tumultuous time, both in the United States and then also for the film industry. And so what I'm arguing in the book is that you can see fandom as a place where these kinds of things are being worked out. Right. That there's, like, different groups kind of like scrapping for visibility and control. And there needs to be some acknowledgement of that. There has to be a nod to that. But then, like, only taken so far. Right? Only taken so far because this is a commercial industry. Right. And so that's what I see being negotiated. There has to be, like, some room for, you know, like agency for difficult women, but only so much. Right. There needs to be, like, some nod to what's going on with civil rights in the United States, but only to a certain extent. And so kind of like fan identification and fan attachments can be one place that that's worked through. And, you know, very much I'm conscious of the fact that I'm writing about magazines that are appealing to a kind of American mainstream. So they're sort of telling the American mainstream, which they're positing as kind of white, heteronormative, able bodied, et cetera, et cetera, how to feel about these issues.
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Pete Kunze
And then if we can take this a step further, I was really struck by this idea of stardom serving as a technology for policing fandom. I think this is a really useful concept, especially when we think about, you know, when I talk to my students about, like, stars on social media, I'm like, notice how they retweet certain things and they don't retweet other things. And. And in that way they teach you how to engage with them or, you know, conversely, the way that they'll engage with negative comments, but they often won't engage with the positive comments. Right. And how does that make fans feel as a result, in this historical moment, though, that you're working in right before social media as we know it today.
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Katherine Fusco
How.
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Pete Kunze
How is stardom operating in kind of navigating the relationship between studios and audiences?
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Katherine Fusco
Yeah, so let me think about that question. So, like, one. One case. So she's. She's actually a case that got cut. So Jean Harlow makes a late appearance in the book mostly in the context of her husband, Paul Burns suicide. So the chapter that I ended up cutting was about her kind of fighting with her studio about how much she was getting paid and her contracts. And Jean Harlow was a star whose reputation, I think, was tricky to manage because of the roles she played and the ways that she looked. Right. So she, you know, played these kind of gold digger types. She kind of appeared as this, you know, the kind of like blonde, you know, gold, Gold digger, man eater. And then the fan magazines had done all this work to kind of distance her from that image by sort of saying like, oh, like she lives with her mother. Like her mother sleeps in her bed. Really kind of weird, almost like excessively wholesome stuff. They're saying like, oh, she's so different from the kind of woman you love to hate. But then when she was fighting with her studio, the magazines did this kind of like bizarre work to present what she was doing as not a labor dispute, but instead saying like, oh, the folks at the studio are her friends. This is a misunderstanding among friends. And what they don't understand is this. And like Jean Harlow really just needed to have a conversation about, you know, these things. And like, oh, you, her fans don't need to worry about this. You're her friends too, right? So the magazine does all this kind of like weird work to be like, you know, hey, 1930s readers, this is not a labor dispute. This is not like somebody basically like walking off set and refusing to work like this. You are friends. You're friends of the industry, you're friends of this star. She's having a hard time with this other friend of hers, right? So it's very much sort of like here's, here's how to understand things. You know, workplaces are like families, workplaces are like friends. You know, these massive workplaces that are Hollywood studios. You know, we shouldn't think about things like striking or you know, like fighting contracts in this way we can just sort of like work things out interpersonally and, you know, don't you like to think about Jean Harlow as your friend? Well, she has other friends too and sometimes they get into a tiff.
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Pete Kunze
So I, I think then there's, there's an area I, I forgot to kind of encourage you to parse out for us so that you can kind of understand this better, which is where do you see the fan magazine in mediating industry and, and star. Right. I mean, to what extent are fan magazines, you know, complicit with the studios? To what extent are they independent? What did you find in your research?
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Katherine Fusco
Yeah, so I mean they're, they're very, they are closely aligned but not identical to like the studios. So there's good research by a scholar named Mary Desjardins where she talks about kind of like the. The pressure that the magazines and kind of ads came under. Kind of similar to the Hays Code kind of pressure. And basically studios sort of said, like, you cannot keep publishing salacious stuff about our stars. And if you do, we are going to cut off access. Right. So it's not always a matter of saying, you know, here's the story, print it. Although I think sometimes that kind of PR work did happen. But there was also a sense that, like, if your reporters, if your writers don't play nice with us, we don't have to make our stars accessible to you. Right. So I think you see that kind of work as well as kind of like. And actually I saw this, I went to the Herrick Library and got to see manuscripts that Shirley Temple's mom, Gertrude had edited. So basically, like, they were manuscripts that a reporter would have written about, having gone and visited with the Temples. Right. And you could see what Gertrude had taken out had kind of like red X'd from the manuscript and then it was signed off on. Right. Sort of like approved by gt, you know, on this date. Right. So I think that's a similar kind of thing where it's like, yes, I'm gonna allow you access to Shirley, but I'm getting kind of editorial approval here.
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Pete Kunze
Yeah. It's a fascinating kind of question of authorship and control and power there and how it gets kind of structured in this period. Your focus throughout the volume, as we kind of gestured towards earlier, is on the non normative. Right. The stars, who are often kind of left out of more traditional star studies. And I'm hoping you could talk a little bit more about race and disability in this period and how it's shaping. You're studying, you're thinking about stardom.
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Katherine Fusco
Yeah. And I should say there's such good work that's come out recently on black stars in this period. So, like Miriam Petty's book Stealing the Show, I think is just so good. And it's about some of the same figures and kind of the same period. And so she's really looking at the way black stars kind of made agency and made space for themselves in, you know, white authored productions. And Anna Everett was somebody else who I wanted to kind of bring up because her work on kind of black film criticism was really important. And so I'm working on some of those same figures. But part of what I was trying to figure out is like, okay, there is rich, like, discourse happening in black newspapers about the black stars of the period. And we've got really kind of iconic performances. So One of the films that I'm talking about in the book is Imitation of Life, the earlier one with Louise Beavers. So you get these really important performances by black stars. And so part of what I was trying to figure out is like, okay, so like, how are white people being taught to think about this, right? So I think there's really important work being done, sort of saying, like, how is the black community talking about these performances? You know, how is the black community reacting to, you know, sort of like stereotyped performances and like maid type roles? And like, how are these actors, actors and actresses trying to find agency within the kind of limitations of Hollywood during this period? But I was sort of interested in like, normie White America and what Normie White America is kind of doing, because that also seems like an important part of this story. And so. And you really do see, like, people, like in the example of Imitation of Life, people saying, like, oh my God, God, like, Louise Beavers is so much better than Claudette Colbert. Like, why isn't she being advertised more? And so, like, there's a funny letter in one of the magazines from a theater owner from Canada, basically, like writing it and saying, like, hey, you dopes in the U.S. like, is this part of your, like, stupid race stuff that you don't understand that Louise Beavers is the real star? So there's this kind of like, like, acknowledgement of black talent in these kind of like white authored and white directed pieces. And so, like, that was super interesting to me, is trying to figure out, like, well, how much room was there, you know, and then like, also, what is it doing for white people? So like, the theorist bell hooks talks about eating the other, right? So this idea of like a certain kind of empathy that like a white person might have towards a black person, but it ends up sort of like serving or like reaffirming the white person's identity in a certain way. And so, like, there's real weird stuff about Louise Beavers, like, for example, about how she's not wearing as much makeup as these kind of like tarted up white women. And how this white critic prefers that Louise Beavers has a shiny nose. But it's like, is this really in service of Louise Beavers?
- [31:07]
Pete Kunze
Like, right.
- [31:08]
Katherine Fusco
Is this actually like in service of white men and women in a different kind of way? So I think that that's a story that I was really kind of interested in figuring out. Like, what. What does this tell us about the way white audiences are being encouraged to like, empathize with black performers, but only to an extent. Right. And in the context of disability, that plays out in different and interesting ways with Lon Chaney. And also the final chapter in the book is about kind of depression and star suicide. And there seems to be, in both of those cases, this kind of like saying to fans, like, sympathize, but not too much. Right. Like, so, like, there's this. These kind of like, amazing stories when Lon Chaney dies that basically, like, he's dead because he, like, sympathized too much with these characters he was playing. And there's like, lots of lore about how for a character he played in the movie the Penalty, he actually really damaged his body because he was, like, trying too hard to get into character as disabled. Right. And so there's a kind of like, you know, don't feel too much. And that. That was also the case with Jean Harlow's husband, Paul Byrne, who had this reputation as being the kind of like, father confessor of Hollywood, that he kind of collected all of these kind of like, depressives and exotic types. And because he was like, surrounding himself with too much sorrow. And there's also some kind of like, weird Orientalist and kind of like anti Semitic stuff that's also in the mix here. But he basically succumbs. Unlike his kind of blonde, cheery, all American wife, Paul Burns kind of like succumbs to too much sadness. It was kind of like too seductive for him. And that's like, you know, he should have been happy with his blonde wife, but instead he can't and he's committed suicide. And so there really is this kind of like, yeah, sure, like, feel for someone different than you, but don't feel too much. Right. Like, let's. Let's be reasonable here. Seems to be what's being argued.
- [33:13]
Pete Kunze
Yeah. That speaks to the kind of vicarious nature of spectatorship itself. Right. That we kind of go to these situations for a certain kind of affective payoff and how the studios and the fan magazines are modulating that. You organize your study into kind of these three subsections or three sections. The Babies, the Nobodies, and the Unhappy. Can you tell us more about how you came to that structure?
- [33:41]
Katherine Fusco
Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, like it's weird to try to figure out how to structure a book. Like, there's a kind of like, artifice to it. Right. You sort of like, I wrote this first, but maybe it doesn't belong first. And I think the way I ended up conceiving about of it is in my mind There is a kind of arc to the book from, like, those with whom it feels like, in some ways the easiest to love or the easiest to like to those who are the least likable. And so, you know, the babies. Babies only can make so many claims on us. Right? And so I have our gang and Shirley Temple in the chapter about the babies. And so in some ways, part of what's at stake with Farina is, like, it's going to become a challenge for him to get older. And that's going to become a problem for Shirley Temple, too. But when they're babies, they're relatively safe. So it's like, kind of easy to love a baby. There's lots of conflict around loving babies, Right. They're not making lots of claims on things like citizenship rights. They don't have, like, complaints that are hard to deal with. The nobodies is kind of like a mid space. And so these I think I talk about in the book is, like, stars about, like, who much was new? I don't know. I had a clever thing in the book that I care about now. But, like, we know some things about these stars, but not others. Basically, some parts of their stories were suppressed. And so here I have Lon Chaney and his performance of disability. And much about Chaney is kind of suppressed in the star narrative. And there's also black performers who are in supporting roles where obviously there's kind of rich biographical lives of these performers that are not part of the story that's told in the fan magazines. Instead, they're treated much more like stars from an earlier period. Period. Right. Like, we don't. Louise Beaver's star stories don't tell us much about her biographical life. Instead, they do a lot of kind of conflating her with her character. And then in the unhappy. That's where I get to start. Suicides and depressives. And in some ways, these are folks who I'm saying are kind of like, the most difficult to love because they don't. They don't make fans feel good. They're the kind of, like, most challenging to attach to because of their unhappiness. And so that actually kind of going back to your question of affect was interesting to me when I was writing this is like, the Problem of the Depressive. And so what I found when I was researching that chapter was like, a real desire in the fan magazines and among fans to interpret star suicides as murders. And I was like, why would we rather have someone be murdered than have had them commit suicide? And I Think partly it's because, like the murder victim, we can still imagine they were happy with their lives. So we can imagine Thaumatod. And I do not make a call on the Thaumatod case. I'm not like, yes, she was murdered. Yes, it was a mob hit. Yes, it was a suicide. I'm not really interested in deciding that question, but I think it's really interesting that we would rather she be a victim of a mob hit than the possibility that she commits suicide. Like, why is the one violent death preferable? And I think it's because the idea of the suicide makes us have all kinds of questions about if this person who is wealthy and beautiful is unhappy, what does that mean for me? I'm fantasizing that were I only more beautiful, as the Stan magazine is teaching me to be, or were I only successful and got my big break? Oh, like, maybe it doesn't actually change the world. Or, like, oh, maybe it doesn't actually, like, change how happy I am. And that's very dangerous. So that's sort of like my arc of, like, you know, folks who it's easier to attach to because it's like, emotionally, you know, there are less claims being made on us folks we aren't really given the opportunity to attach to. With my folks, the nobodies, who are really not nobodies, they're like, amazing stars, and then the unhappy, who are really challenging. I'm arguing for fans.
- [37:51]
Pete Kunze
Yeah. I mean, I think this is such a useful way of thinking. Right. I mean, in reading Unhappy, I was thinking, you know, we just came. I think recently was like the 11th anniversary of the passing of Robin Williams and the way that his death kind of recast his star image. But I think kind of has people rethinking and kind of retroactively. Right. Like, you know, he was hiding his depression from us the whole time or, you know, or, you know, the depth of comedy itself. Right. I think, yeah. I mean, this really kind of prompts us to open up a lot of new avenues and how we. We think about stardom and our effective relationships, but also maybe how we understand the films themselves as a result. So I'm curious, in that spirit, you know, who are you hoping will read this book, and what are you hoping might come out of it? It's a big question for any author. But I. You know, I feel like anytime someone writes a book, there are things they did and things they didn't get to do and things they hope others will do. So how are you hoping this might inspire Future research?
- [38:55]
Katherine Fusco
Yeah, I mean, I. Yeah, obviously I hope everyone will read the book, but, yeah, I mean, I think these are just my cases. And I, you know, I really struggled to sort of say, like, okay, well, who are the cases I'm including or excluding here? Right. And, like, my story is that this began for me, like, watching silent movies with a bunch of kids. But I do, you know, I think. What do I want to say? It's a good question, actually. Like, the fact that you were sourcing. What research might it inspire? I think there's room for thinking about how are different stars marketed differentially? I think that's really important. I think we've started to look at different places that stars were discussed. But I'm really encouraged by work like Anna Everett that I mentioned. It's just sort of helping us think about looking in different places to see how stars were discussed. I think that work is maybe overwhelmingly easier to do if you're working in contemporary celebrity studies. Like, there's so many places you could be looking to see how contemporary star is discussed, especially since kind of fan magazines have fallen apart. Right. And I guess the other thing, too, is that there are strong feelings we might have about different stars that are messy is something else that I'm really interested in, fascinations with stars that are not necessarily positive or that aren't all about identifying. And so I hope there's maybe room for more of that kind of research. So, like, you know, I think the kind of, like, being attached to a star that you have real ambivalence about trying to figure that out, or what is the kind of, like, ambivalence that's expressed in certain kinds of fan star relationships that involve following somebody. But, like, you know, like, I think about all the, like, Sydney Sweeney of it all at the moment where, like, we're all watching Sydney Sweeney, like, what are we feeling like and how are we being told to feel? I think like, as of today, she's dating Scooter Braun, which does, like, a really weird thing relative to Taylor Swift and, like, the whole. Like, that whole triangulation. So, yeah, I don't know. This is a messy answer, but I think it's an interesting question.
- [41:22]
Pete Kunze
And so I guess we can pivot from there into, like, what are you working on now? Are you continuing along this line, or are you pursuing new avenues? Or, dare I ask, are you taking a break?
- [41:33]
Katherine Fusco
No. Yeah. No. So I'm working on two books now, and they both actually are kind of related to this. So I'm working on one book that came out of the star suicide chapter, which is Thelma Todd shows up. As I said, I'm not closing the case on her, but I'm really interested in the slapstick comedies she was in. And so I'm working on a book about the slapstick women at Hal Roach Studios. So she was paired with Zezu Pitts. And I am interested in kind of how her stardom was part of that and how women were marketed as funny in the 30s doing slapstick comedy. But the other one, who's maybe a little more complicated in relationship to what I'm saying about, like, oh, who are we attached to? And what are our messy feelings about them, is that I'm working on a biography of Anita Luz, who's best known for writing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which is best known as the Marilyn Monroe film. But Anita Luz had a long writing career. She wrote silent films. She wrote stage plays. She wrote Hollywood memoirs. She wrote a million things. She also lived, like, a hundred years. But there's no biography of her in print. And there's such a pressure on biographies of women to be these kind of, like, hidden figures, secret heroines of history. And certainly Anita deserves her biography and did a million things, but she's a very messy person, not unpro. Problematically a heroine. And I am writing it, feeling all of these, like, mixed feelings about Anita, who I love, but also I'm, like, disappointed in sometimes. And, you know, she, like, votes for Nixon instead of Kennedy, and I have to figure out what to do with that in this biography and, you know, stuff like that. So. So I'm dealing with kind of, like, my own weird. Like, I'm fascinated by her. I love her, but I'm mad at her and all of that. So that's. That's my own kind of, like, psychological baggage in writing this. But I think there is also this weird kind of fan pressure that I feel from people who want an Anita Lou's biography in print. You know, she is a kind of important woman in film history and US literary history. And so there's a lot of pressure to kind of make her a good star of history. And she's partially good, you know.
- [43:54]
Pete Kunze
Yeah. Those questions of bad objects, I think, are fascinating. But, you know, feminism gives us the tools, too, right? Negotiated pleasures, pleasurable negotiations. But it'll be interesting to see what comes out of both those projects. Thank you so much for your time today, Katherine. It's been a pleasure speaking with you.
- [44:12]
Katherine Fusco
Thank you. It's been really fun.
- [44:13]
Pete Kunze
The book is Hollywood's love and Limitation in the Star system, available now from Columbia University Press and other online booksellers. This is Pete Kunze and this has been new books and film on the New Books Network. Thank you for listening and we hope you'll join us again next time.
- [44:40]
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