Unfinished but not imperfect. Not by a long shot.

Go figure. For the life of me, I have not so far been able to understand why unfinished novels fascinate me. Could it be because they were works-in-progress that got interrupted by the author’s death, thus doomed to never get finished? Or, is it because, in Italo Calvino’s words, “A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.”? http://bit.ly/16NkyvQ

Here are the three unfinished works-in-progress that enthralled me, listed here in the order of their appearance in my life as a reader:  Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers; Kurt Vonnegut’s If God Were Alive Today; and, last though by no means the least, F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. Curiously, all three were by writers who were besieged by alcoholism and/or substance abuse and all three are about celebrity and, in varying degrees, celebrity-bashing.

A distinguishing characteristic of Capote’s book (he called it his “posthumous novel” on the Dick Cavell show in May 1971, thirteen years prior to his death), peopled by Unspoiled (and Spoiled) Monsters, is a cavalcade of NHRN characters flitting across its terrain. NHRN ( = Not His/Her Real Name) because in Answered Prayers, Capote put into practice his belief expressed in his Playboy December 1976 interview, viz., “All literature is gossip.” He bravely – almost stoically – endured the wrath of − and ostracization by − his high-society friends for letting the skeletons tumble out of their celebrity closets by the advanced publication of excerpts from his work-in-progress. I was bemused by his trashing of celebrity and enjoyed the writing that no doubt is simply dishy. I have a feeling that being outrageous in all he did and said had by the end of his life become his chief oeuvre. This is what Capote said about himself: “I don’t know anybody who gets as much publicity as I do for doing nothing.” And, this is how he dismissed Jack Kerouac’s On The Road: “It is not writing. It is only typing.” Dorothy Parker agreed with his pronouncement. James Michener who by his own admission knew Capote “tangentially” wrote that he knew “four of the people T.C. lacerates” in Answered Prayers – which he thought was “[a] proctologist’s view of American society” but nonetheless capable of becoming “the roman à clef of my decade” – in the Proustian vein – if only Capote managed to complete it.

In If God Were Alive Today, Vonnegut too is engaged in a similar pursuit – celebrity mauling − although the characters don’t seem to be inspired by real people. The chief protagonist is a standup comic clearly off his rocker. He has been to the loony bin twice. Vonnegut’s take on politics and American values is often devastatingly cynical, occasionally hilarious and at times over-the-top bonkers especially because of Gil Berman’s overlong rants. Chances are, Vonnegut might have trimmed and polished the spiel had Death stayed its hand a little longer. In her interview in the Rumpus magazine http://bit.ly/1dKW3TV Vonnegut’s youngest daughter, Nanette, mentions her son’s opinion that Gil Berman would never have made it to the stage. It’s view worth keeping in mind as the said son is a practicing standup comic, no less. Well, well, well, summing up the world’s status in Vonnegut’s own words: “If God were alive today, he would have to be an atheist, because the excrement has hit the air-conditioning big time, big time.” http://bit.ly/15uXD9x

I read The Last Tycoon recently in its Penguin Modern Classic avatar. Fitzgerald’s close friend, Edmund Wilson, was the editor. He also wrote a brief introduction. In this incarnation, it includes the first six chapters followed by the author’s notes on the cast of characters and alternative plot development pathways. Publisher’s Weekly’s review of Matthew J Bruccoli’s critical edition of the novel  http://bit.ly/17swohl hints at it too being a roman à clef about Hollywood in the nineteen-thirties. The power struggle between MGM producer Irving Thalberg (Monroe Stahr, the chief protagonist) and MGM chief honcho Louis B Mayer (Pat Brady) presumably based on Fitzgerald’s personal observations of life in Hollywood during his sojourn there as a scriptwriter for MGM, Twentieth-Century Fox, United Artists and other studios from 1937 to 1940, was to form the core of the novel. The first six chapters in the Wilson-edited version in which the story seems to be about halfway developed barely suggests this, though. It is only when you go through the supplementary material that you begin to get a vague idea of what a rousingly powerful story it could have been had the author been able to complete it. Even in its truncated form, it is quite an absorbing read. Fitzgerald’s notes give the reader an opportunity to observe at close quarters how a master storyteller shapes his material and steers his narrative. In a review of The Last Tycoon (New York Times, 9 November 1941) http://nyti.ms/18y5lWl J Donald Adams, apparently a regular contributor, expressed his view that Fitzgerald was particularly suited to write about Hollywood “inside out” because he was a “romantic realist”. By this phrase, he implied that Fitzgerald possessed in abundance “a lively sense of the fantastic” combined with “intuitive perceptions”, in addition to an insider’s knowledge of how the system worked owing to a fairly long stay there. He also cites this observation of Peter Monro Jack, Professor and Chair of Rhetoric, University of Michigan (1927-1930): "Had his extraordinary gifts met with an early astringent criticism and a decisive set of values, he might very well have been the Proust of his generation instead of the desperate sort of Punch that he is." That, indeed, is high praise.

Purple prose. Scarlet sirens.

When it comes to gossip, I am neophobic. Old is gold for this old timer. You may have noticed my predilection here http://bit.ly/HBk5Fl, here http://bit.ly/HeTW9E, here http://bit.ly/H8SxTE, and, here too http://bit.ly/HIDCEa. To indulge in my fondness for time-tested gossip, I recently breezed through two books of the canon. Truth to tell I had bought them both in the US in spring 2010 and devoured them hungrily post haste. Both the books deal with Hollywood’s dirty linen and scrumptious scandal of mid-20th century vintage. Of the two, Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon (Dell Publishing, 1981) is the so-called “legendary underground classic of Hollywood’s darkest and best kept secrets”. Anger’s angry and frenzied – though unauthenticated − narrative rips along merrily into the innards of the studio system, spilling rumours and innuendos galore and generally playing havoc with the filmdom’s carefully crafted propagandistic iconography. An entire chapter of Hollywood Babylon (Con Game) is devoted to the brief but sensational career of the tabloid that spawned the celeb-centric yellow-journalism culture. Confidential was its name. It trashed exalted reputations willy-nilly spreading terror in the hearts of the denizens of tinsel town for a span of no more than five years. It opened shop in New York in 1952 and folded for all practical purposes in 1957. The second book of the canon I ran through recently was Henry E Scott’s Shocking True Story (Pantheon Books, New York, 2010). A real page turner it is – fully living up to its subtitle: The Rise and Fall of Confidential, “America’s Most Scandalous Scandal Magazine”. Trying to live up to its don’t-give-a-damn motto: “Tells the Facts and Names the Names”, Confidential spawned an entire tabloid, paparazzi sub-culture whose banner is kept flying today by the likes of People, E! Online, Ok! and TMZ.

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool.

There I’ve gone and done it once again. Excavated from the inner recesses of one of my many bookcases a very readable and moving account of a Hollywood star’s last days enshrined in a Chatto & Windus (1986) hardcover first edition − that’s what I have done – no less. I must have picked Peter Turner’s Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool off the DN Road footpath probably near its Flora Fountain end in the mid-90s, merrily chucked it in one of my numerous bookcases and forgotten all about it. The book, I confess, may not be everybody’s cup of tea. With me, it qualifies one hundred per cent because it is (a) in the historical gossip genre which has been my perennial favourite – I simply relish it; and (b) about a minor Hollywood film noir star of the 40s and 50s invariably typecast as a floosy with a heart of gold. Gloria Grahame caught my eye and my fancy in the Humphrey Bogart starrer, In A Lonely Place (1950), and The Big Heat (1953). By a strange coincidence, Gloria’s private life happened to match her screen persona perfectly. To put it mildly, she lived her life along unorthodox lines with a string of failed marriages and stormy affairs. The book depicts her as being quite quirky, living in a trailer parked in a caravan park in California, not possessing too many clothes and accessories, forever anxious about keeping her awkward feet covered in socks and so forth. It is written by her lover in a cougar relationship, the Liverpudlian stage actor Peter Turner who was 29 years her junior. The narrative intertwines two distinct streams: one of nostalgia and the other describing pre-death rites of care and comfort. It is surprisingly racy, tragic, at times unintentionally funny, very visual and very, very believable. There is no flourish or fanfare used in the telling. I feel it would make a great movie. What’s more, it deserves a wider reading public as well. P.S.: By the way, the book title comes from a chance remark by the author’s bête noire when informed of the impending demise of a Hollywood star in the hometown of The Beatles.

Poor princess.

A few days back, I happened to watch purely by chance Mona Lisa Smile in which Julia Roberts plays Katherine Watson, a feminist and forward-thinking Art History instructor in Wellesley, a women’s college in the US in the early 1950s. Though smacking at times of the feel-good chick flick http://digbig.com/4yrbx aroma, a key sequence in the movie in which Katherine’s most committed student keen on joining Yale for a law degree suddenly does a 360-degree turnaround to opt for instant marriage instead made quite an impact on me. It reminded me of Grace Kelly. To me, Kelly’s abdication of a most promising career in insecurity-laden Hollywood just a year after winning an Oscar for The Country Girl (1955) and turning down the marriage proposal of co-star Bing Crosby to wed Prince Ranier III of Monaco has epitomised the compromise women the world over make in favour of marriage offering long-term security and a future as a virtual broodmare. Monaco, by the way, was a little known (till then) principality – and tax haven – in Europe which “in those pre-Jet Set days catered to the frantically idle über-rich and the Eurotrash who clung to them in an altogether more discreet way than it can today”. http://digbig.com/4yrby. Like Kelly, I have seen plenty of women sacrificing their career and future on the matrimonial altar. For instance: http://digbig.com/4yrca and http://digbig.com/4yrcb.

Flick. Movie. Film. Cinema.

The two rhyming pejoratives in Chicks on Flicks, the Sony Pix review show title, took me back to the days http://digbig.com/4xypw when I could, and would, distinguish between movie, film and cinema. According to my then received ideas on the French theory, here is how it goes. The "filmic" facet of the art concerns its relationship with the world. The "cinematic" aspect deals with the aesthetics and the internal structure of a film. "Cinema" may turn out to be high art, for all you know. "Movie" delineates its role as an economic commodity or a marketable product. You watch a movie just like you eat pop corn and drink soda now sold in the multiplexes at as conscionably high prices as those of the movie tickets. If you dare me to spout some more of my borrowed wisdom, I would bore you with the definition of "auteur" again according to the French theory. The French word means "author". When it is applied to cinema, it means a film maker whose individual style and total control over all elements of production give a film his or her personal and unique stamp. Hitchcock http://digbig.com/4ybhd was considered the quintessential auteur although he worked in the British and, later on, in the Hollywood Studio System. Ask Francois Truffaut, the originator of the auteur theory. John Ford and Howard Hawks too sailed in the same boat as the Master of Suspense. Woody Allen may also fit the bill. http://digbig.com/4ybhe. If you're still not bored to distraction, let me enlighten you on what a chick flick is. Simply put, it's a movie specifically designed to appeal to a primarily female audience, the exact opposite of a guy movie. Two recent chick flicks had either a made-in-India (Monsoon Wedding, 2001) or a British Indian Sikh expat (Bend It Like Beckham, 2002) bias. Was Chak De India a chick flick?

Rocket science anyone?

In the fifties, I used to be an ardent fan of black and white B-grade sci-fi movies from Hollywood scripted using pulp magazine writers’ logic. You know stuff like It Came From Outer Space, the 1953 flick also made in the 3-D format which I remember seeing in the Eros Theatre at Church Gate. I had also seen and enjoyed The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and The Blob (1958), the Steve(n) McQueen debut vehicle. Somehow or the other, though, I had missed watching The Invisible Boy (1957). Well, I made up for the lapse yesterday. I happened to switch on Turner Classic Movies early morning and there it was, lo and behold! The hero is Robby, the Robot – who debuted in Forbidden Planet (1956) – with 10-year-old Timmie as his sidekick. A gargantuan Super Computer with hypnotic flashing lights (“Look at the pretty lights, Timmie”) and an ambition of world domination is the villain. The Matrix with its two sequels deals with the same theme of world domination too, you’ll recall. However, I found the idea of the doddering, plodding AI colossus, made and fed by Timmie’s computer scientist dad, in The Invisible Boy getting anywhere close to taking over the world ridiculous. Even his persuasive spiel at the end of the movie did not impress me much. ("Come, scientist! Let us reason together. I can still answer any question your mind can devise. I am an instrument of knowledge. I will lead you to the farthest planets. I will lead you to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. I will show you the stars!") The idea of Timmie being endowed with super intelligence by the far-seeing evil genius with flashing lights seems ludicrous too – at least the way it is presented. The boy is then able to reassemble and put into serviceable mode Robby whom his dad and his colleagues have discarded as a derelict piece of scrap beyond redemption. Nobody takes Timmie’s handiwork too seriously until the kite made by Robby carries his young friend aloft. This puts Timmie’s technophobe and techno-illiterate mom ("Did you have a nice day at the computer, dear?") into a ballistic frenzy. To grant his wish of being able to play without parental interference, Robbie – and the Super Comp – make Timmie invisible. He is kidnapped and held hostage to force his dad into surrendering a classified safety code that stands in the way of the Super Comp’s ambition and so on and so forth. What starts off as a fun sci-fi movie suddenly starts taking itself too seriously and ends up a damp squib which incidentally is a firework that fails to go off because it happens to be wet. http://www2.english.uiuc.edu/cybercinema/filmogra.htm. My discomfort with the theme of the film springs from my inability to accept the Super Comp as a sentient being, I reckon. True, it had AI but was it not fed information by his – and Timmie’s – dad, the computer scientist? Where then did the ability to feel and perceive subjectively, the (self) “awareness” as it were, come from? How could the ambition to take over the world arise? Am I making a mountain from a molehill, rocket science from pulp sci-fi? Horace would've approved, though. Was it not he who wrote: “Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus” (= “The mountain will labour, a ridiculous mouse will be born”)? Much ado about nothing, the Bard of Avon aka William Shakespeare would've whole-heartedly agreed.

Photoshopping as Worship.

Life sure is getting funnier and funkier by the day. The old Irani bakery, Sassanian, opposite the Gol Masjid, close to Liberty and Metro, where I go to buy crispy and delectable mutton and chicken puffs twice a week or so, has started calling itself a Boulangerie of late. I find it as pretentious if not pernicious as the recent propensity of the Bollywoodians and journalists to add the ‘Mr’ tag before Amitabh Bachchan. Nobody does that to Tom Hanks, Robert de Niro, even Paul Newman in Hollywood, for Pete's sake. I’m dreading the day when the credits in an AB-starrer start using the ‘Mr’ tag before his name. Indians seem to have mastered the art of morphing admiration for a movie star, a sportsperson, a politician into worshipful obsession. A daily example are the ads released by government departments with VVIP and VIP photographs. The recent news story about the Vasundhara Raje Scindia qua Goddess Annapurna poster is an apt case in point. That this work of art is the brainchild of a BJP MLA and a local priest is an especially illuminating clue. Both have a vested interest in the Hindu pantheon. Equally illuminating is the fact that Vasundhara Raje who only last year was caught on camera smooching or being smooched by Biocon India Chief Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw has also to her credit a fan-inspired poster depicting her as Goddess Durga as well as a batisha, a chalisa (32 and 40 worshipful couplets respectively) and an aarti. (The most famous chalisa, of course, is the one dedicated to Lord Hanuman. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanuman. It is significant that one of the couplets in it claims that Hanuman’s worship is the one-stop route to Lord Rama’s worship.) Those who object to the Annapurna poster saying that it hurts their religious sentiments ought to remember that Hinduism isn’t strictly a religion but a tolerant way of life. The seemingly bizarre behaviour of the worshippers seamlessly fits into it. Don’t’ forget too that most gods ultimately reveal their feet of clay, as several recent examples show.

Worth zillions.

A few days after the much-hyped Indian Oscar contender ended an also-ran, my eye and attention were caught by an e-mail ad. Hollywood films are now produced more and more by independent producers, it said. They, in turn, depend for funds to 'develop' the project (the story, the talent package and the producer's ability to get the production financed) on legitimate individual investors (not money launderers). If one invests in the development of a movie, one can well recoup one's investment including interest as soon as production starts. What's more, one's 'stake' in the profits to come after the film is released remains untouched. Consider the multiple revenue streams now open to feature-length movies (theatre release, television, pay-per-view licensing, DVD/video release, merchandising and niche markets such as airlines, the armed forces, schools and colleges). Even alien also-rans may access all these money-making avenues once they're inside the magic circle. I also came across another instructive news byte. Looks like Hollywood is now using online auctions (Yahoo, eBay) to encash on movie memorabilia - instead of stashing it in a store room to gather dust and cobwebs - as well as to promote forthcoming projects. (Hollywood studios are sold on Web auctioneering by Doug Young) chicagotribune.com. (Free registration essential.) There are the studio-owned auction sites too, such as auction.newline.com where props from Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring came under the gavel and disneyauctions.com (or pages.ebay.disney.com).

Celebrity DIY instruction sheet. Step #1: Open mouth. Step #2: Shove foot in. Step #3: Go blab, blab, blab.

The foot-in-the-mouth disease spares no one. Its most famous victim was India’s (most probably) No.1 ‘icon’ when tied himself into knots on being asked if he would continue to work for a cola that’s at the toxic hub of the pesticide scandal. First he said Yes. Then he said ask the company because he didn’t understand ‘these things’. All he needed to say was, he was only the hired help, he did what he was told to do. (Remember the factoid that Alfred Hitchcock reportedly called actors cattle?) In the same newspaper another ‘icon’ made an ass of himself in a special ‘interview’ – obviously a part of the publicity blitz for his new release – by telling his equally clueless interviewer that Hollywood started making spectacularly mounted sci-fi flicks only twenty years back. (Huh? Duh!) Obviously, he wasn’t aware of, say, George Pal’s The War of The Worlds with its Oscar-winning special effects made as early as 1953. He also proudly said that he had persuaded his dad to make India’s first (?) sci-fi movie to clear the way for others to follow. If they didn’t do it, that genre would be lost forever to Bollywood. (Huh? Duh!) What about Kidar Sharma’s Armaan made as early as 1942, the Quit India year? I stopped reading the gibberish at that point vowing never to read another word uttered by him – a promise to myself I’m sure I shall break. Serves me right for my ‘scratch an icon to find an intellectual’ frame of mind, what? P.S.: All the critics were hailing the ‘ten-year-IQ-in-an-eighteen-year-old’ act put on by the latter ‘icon’ in the new sci-fi-set-to-music flick. Maybe, it’s not an act, after all. To read a bunch of ‘foot-in-the-mouth’ jokes concerning ordinary mortals, head for http://footinmymouth.com/ http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8034 http://www.jn10.co.uk/stories/index.php?cat=7.

Are we like that only?

Imagine! A cursory Bollywood history (of sorts) tells you Kishore Kumar was “a relatively unknown actor” before Padosan (1968) – and banking on our willing suspension of disbelief against all hope! This sloppily written and shoddily edited paperback makes no mention whatsoever of Rajesh Khanna and V Shantaram. If memory serves, Kishore Kumar was a renowned comedian of long standing much earlier. Remember Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi released exactly a decade before Mehmood’s cult classic? The omission of Rajesh Khanna too is curious, almsot callous – especially considering his singing voice was Kishore Kumar in most of his movies. (RK scored eleven hits in a row followed by eight flops.) Shantaram’s Duniya Na Maney is considered a landmark in societal filmmaking. Could it be a case of selective amnesia, I wonder? Considering the high editorial standards of the book’s renowned publishers (after all, they’ve India’s No.1 print columnist-novelist on their marquee), it’s also irritating to come across such erratic but obvious blunders as “Dean Martin and Bing Crosby’s Road series”. Well, to err is human, I guess, and we all are like that only.

Take the promos with a pinch of salt. Preferably large.

One of my stupidest blunders in either the first or the second year of my college career was to almost forcibly take my father and mother to the Regal Cinema in Colaba to see The Robe. It was a dull and listless movie, as I now recall, with a wooden Richard Burton performance that was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar nevertheless. Victor Mature as his slave, Demetrius, was far better and even got rewarded for it with a starring role in a sequel, Demetrius and the Gladiators. (That too was a bomb. End of digression.) The reason I did what I did was because The Robe was the first film photographed in CinemaScope – badly, I admit (the newly developed lens was still full of flaws like an MS beta) – and I thought I was taking them to watch a major technological innovation in movie-making. (The ads said: “The first motion picture in CinemaScope – the modern miracle you see without glasses!” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046247/taglines.) I used to be rather naïve and trusting about Hollywood in those days. I thought all that came from the West was best. One thing I distinctly remember, though, and am thankful for. Neither my father nor my mother enjoyed the ‘experience’ (as the promos put it) – my father, I suspect, loathed going to movies – and yet they accompanied me meekly and didn’t protest my impertinence even after returning home. What reminded me of this incidence is probably all the fuss that’s going on about Fanna. These days, my attitude is, cease and desist. It’s only a movie, for Pete’s sake. Even if Kunal Kohli whom we all love made it.

Two fascinating finds. Author’s Galleys anyone?

It happened, if memory serves, about a couple of years ago or, maybe, a little longer. Near where I live and close to the Central Plaza is a book distributor’s showroom in the basement of an old and dusty shopping mall. I used to be a fairly regular visitor there for years off and on to look at the new stuff. That fateful day, they’d a couple of uncorrected proof copies of forthcoming titles lying in the stack. I offered to buy them. They said, take them with the compliments of the house. Lucky me. The first one happened to be The Travels of a Fat Bulldog by George Courtauld, was the memoirs of a Queen’s Messenger. It’s an absolutely fascinating read, fast-paced, at times hilarious, at times lyrical, always gripping. Get a feel of the world of uncorrected proof or ‘Advance Reading’ copies aka ‘Author’s Galleys’: http://www.lopezbooks.com/pr/pr-01.html. And, a feel of the QM’s job of transporting “bags marked 'HM Diplomatic Service' … made from sturdy white canvas by prison inmates” here: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2242/is_n1574_v270/ai_19420280.

The second find was equally fascinating. But first, a little build-up for it in the good ol’ Hollywood-of-‘50s style. Once upon a time, somewhere in the golden age of Hollywood, a reporter of The New Yorker had the temerity to opine in print something outrageous. It was perilous, went his argument, for a man who had quit school after the eighth grade to be in charge of making films which disseminated so many ideas to people. Both Gregory Peck and Nunnally Johnson did not share this opinion about the cigar-chomping Darryl F Zanuck who did try half-heartedly to resume his war-interrupted education at the Los Angeles Manual Arts High School in September 1919. “Just as his contemporary and sometimes friend and colleague Walter Winchell was the first newspaperman to see that the reappropriation of journalese through slang was a form of empowerment (both for the man who wielded the pen and for his readership), Zanuck was the first producer in the sound era to realize that by making films culled from daily tabloid headlines, you could speak to the public in stylized versions of its own speech,” writes George F Custen, Professor of Communications, The College of Staten Island in his Twentieth Century’s Fox: Darryl F Zanuck and the Culture of Hollywood. http://hallbiography.com/arts_literature/571.shtml. P.S.: I wonder what the nameless reporter of The New Yorker would have to say were he to watch some of the handiwork of today’s Bollywood, though. Speechless in Manhattan?

Hitch your wagon to a star. Literally.

Star power! No, I don’t mean the one you check out in the daily newspaper’s astrological column. The star power I’m referring to is the contribution a star (in showbiz) makes to the success of the venture (s)he stars in, be it film, sports, even business. At the Harvard Business School, Professor Anita Elberse recently researched the concept and the dynamics of ‘star power. Her study included riddles like: Can studios depend on a star's track record to predict future success? Are two ‘A-list’ stars better than one? Can stars improve a studio's overall profitability and box office revenue on one movie? What stars attract the most ticket buyers? Her aim? To better understand if and how A-list stars contribute to Hollywood’s bottom line. Her modus operandi involved a design research not around actual box office receipts but rather around an online simulation game, called ‘The Hollywood Stock Exchange’ with over half a million players. Now all this sounds intriguing, almost esoteric, doesn’t it? She published her findings in a working paper, ‘The Power of Stars: Creative Talent and the Success of Entertainment Products’ . According to her, the notion of ‘star power’ “captures the extent to which an artist's involvement with an entertainment product contributes to the success of that product. … For example, in the case of films, powerful actors and actresses can help guarantee financing and push a movie through the development process; they can aid in generating interest from theaters across the globe seeking to show the film; and they can help to attract audiences to the film. Their power may find its origins in superior acting skills, a loyal fan base, a knack for picking the most promising projects, a strong relationship with other creative talent, a solid box-office record, or a combination of such factors.” Read her interview by Sarah Jane Gilbert, a content developer at HBS's Baker Library, (‘The Box Office Power of Stars’) here: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=5025&t=marketing. By the way. ‘The Hollywood Stock Exchange’ has voluntary players who use ‘Hollywood dollars’ (virtual money) to “increase the value of their portfolio by, among other things, strategically trading ’MovieStocks’. The prices of these MovieStocks reflect expectations of box office revenues.” http://www.hsx.com/.