Bankable Stars in Films

The purpose of this research is to examine the issue of star bankability as applied to two films in current release, Denise Calls Up and The Truth About Cats and Dogs. The plan of the research will be to set forth the advantages and disadvantages of casting bankable stars in general terms, and then to discuss the pattern of presentation in Denise Calls Up and The Truth About Cats and Dogs, to explore the degree to which casting bankable talent in these films might have affected their impact on the viewer.

Leaving aside the merits or demerits of a given script, commercial opportunity can be isolated as the principal reason that producers might wish to cast bankable stars in their films. The best evidence of that is the degree to which well-capitalized film projects are willing to pay millions of dollars to actors with high public appeal to appear in their films. When the commercial success of a film is attributed to its star, then the tendency appears to be to impute the success of future films to that star. Thus a star may be attached to a film by means of millions of dollars. The words of a headline for a story reporting a $12.5-million salary for the star of the film Stiptease sum up the marketing-oriented approach to film production: "Moore Money: Is Demi Moore Worth the Big Bucks? You Betcha" (Thompson 10). The positive aspect of this market-oriented option for film production is therefore the profit projection, anticipation, or expectation that the investment in star pow

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almost seducing him. It is her natural, more fundamental decency and loyalty to her new friend Abby that, we later learn, reasserts itself. Compare the action in The Truth About Cats and Dogs to what happens in Denise Calls Up, which can be seen as a story of telephone relationships. In fact, the trick of the plot is that until the last moments of the film, no two character are ever in the same room. Every character is portrayed at his or her telephone or at any rate in some solitary activity, usually at work on a laptop computer; they all appear to work for the same company as telecommuters. Very soon after the party-to-which-nobody-came has been cleaned up, the whole idea of the film emerges, which is that these people consider one another friends (some very good friends), that they have met in person in the past from time to time, and that more or less without realizing it they have made their mechanism of primary communication the telephone. Into this scheme of action jumps Denise, who has acquired the name and phone number of one of them, a chap who was a sperm bank donor to the facility from which Denise has lately made a withdrawal and, wandering the streets of greater New York with her cellular phone, is some days away fr

Category: Film - B