About A Star Is Born (1937)
The story behind the film
A Star Is Born is Hollywood's most famous story about Hollywood, and this 1937 film is the original. Producer David O. Selznick, who two years later would make Gone with the Wind, made it in full three-strip Technicolor at a time when colour features were still rare and expensive. William A. Wellman (who had directed Wings, also on Starlite TV) directed, and the script was the work of Wellman, Robert Carson, and the writing team of Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell. The plot drew heavily on an earlier Hollywood drama, What Price Hollywood? (1932).
Esther Blodgett, a farm girl, dreams of becoming a movie star. Encouraged by her grandmother, she heads to Hollywood, where she struggles to get even extra work until she meets Norman Maine, a famous leading man whose career is sliding because of his drinking. Norman gets her a screen test; the studio renames her "Vicki Lester"; and as her star rises, they fall in love and marry. But his decline is as steep as her rise.
Cast & crew
- Directed by William A. Wellman; produced by David O. Selznick
- Janet Gaynor as Esther Blodgett / Vicki Lester
- Fredric March as Norman Maine
- Adolphe Menjou as Oliver Niles, Norman's longtime producer
- May Robson as Esther's grandmother
- Andy Devine as Danny McGuire
- Lionel Stander as Matt Libby, the press agent
Why it's worth watching
The film is both a glamorous Technicolor tour of 1930s Hollywood — premieres at Grauman's Chinese Theatre, studio back lots, the Academy Awards — and a sharp, often bitter look behind the publicity. Fredric March is superb as Norman, charming, funny and self-destructive, and Janet Gaynor, the first actress ever to win the Best Actress Oscar, brings warmth and steel to Esther. Lionel Stander's cynical press agent provides some of the best, most acid lines.
The story has been so popular that it has been remade three times: in 1954 with Judy Garland and James Mason, in 1976 with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, and in 2018 with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper. Unlike the remakes, this original is not a musical, and it's fascinating to see where the story began.
Fun facts
- A Star Is Born was the first colour film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
- It won the Oscar for Best Original Story, and cinematographer W. Howard Greene received an honorary award for its colour photography.
- In the scene where Vicki Lester wins an Academy Award, the statuette Gaynor holds is her own real Oscar, which she won in 1929.
- The film's closing line — "This is Mrs. Norman Maine" — was added by Budd Schulberg and Ring Lardner Jr., then young studio employees, and was reused in the 1954 remake.
Public-domain status
The copyright on the 1937 A Star Is Born was not renewed, so the film entered the US public domain. The later remakes are separate works under copyright and are not shown here. See "Rights & source" below.