Coda

This chapter concludes the volume with a concise coda that problematizes the genre and medium specificity of categories such as “rock” and “cinema,” and interrogates their relevance to understanding popular music stardom onscreen in the twenty-first century. By exploring several recent visual albums, this coda demonstrates how the history of rock stardom onscreen paved the way for the unification of the feature film and the music video on display in this unique form. Yet, at the same time, visual albums present musicians with renewed opportunity for overt political expression and aesthetic experimentation not seen since late 1960s rock movies. Visual albums are ultimately the latest intersection between the recording industry and moving image media—an intersection that, as this book demonstrates, has a rich and enduring history.

Who’s That Girl?

Chapter 5 examines Madonna’s film career from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. Inspired by the star images of Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, and Mae West, Madonna performed an interpretation of “Classical Hollywood” female glamour, attitude, and sexuality throughout the rise and peak of her music career. She sought to extend this image into distinct commercial film cycles of the 1980s and 1990s, including the downtown indie, the synergistic blockbuster, the sex thriller, and the prestige Oscar film. Madonna offers an illustrative case for the history of cinematic rock stardom at the end of the twentieth century. She pursued a screen career within arguably the final period in which stardom served as a central driving force in Hollywood’s economic logic, and this pursuit was manifested via her cinephilic interpretation of Hollywood’s legacy of platinum blonde sex symbols. At the same time, Madonna aspired to a cinematic star image during the apex of the music video’s economic and cultural power, seeking to translate her anti-censorship and pro-sex efforts established within the media realm into Hollywood filmmaking in the midst of the 1980s–1990s culture wars. Madonna’s film career epitomizes the issues driving this book, as it speaks to the discordance between older (studio-era Hollywood) and newer (the era of MTV and beyond) models of stardom.

Sound and Vision

Chapter 4 focuses on the first decade of David Bowie’s feature screen career in order to examine the changing industrial and aesthetic relationships of narrative feature filmmaking to popular music between the 1970s and 1980s. Using six of Bowie’s starring feature film roles between 1976 and 1986, this chapter explores broadening nonmusical roles for rock stars onscreen. Such casting was made possible in a context in which rock music had become normalized on film soundtracks, absent the rock star’s onscreen performance. This chapter draws connections across the economic and aesthetic relations of popular music and cinema from the popularization of the composite score in the 1970s (that is, film scoring with popular songs rather than orchestral music) to the synergistic organization of film and music industries in the 1980s, demonstrating how composite scoring set the stage for synergy organized around MTV. In this context, rock stars’ screen performances became less tied to the previous types of roles explored in this volume: composite scoring and synergy both expanded and standardized the nondiegetic prominence of rock music within film, and such practices meant that the industrial imperatives that constitute rock stars’ relationships to film no longer necessitated those stars’ onscreen performances of music. Analyzing how his dramatic and musical film performances intersected with his rock star image, this chapter explores Bowie’s variegated screen roles in terms of how rock stars’ industrial and textual functions no longer required cogent alignment.

“And Introducing Elvis Presley”

Chapter 1 offers a case study that illuminates how norms of studio-era film production came to be negotiated with the multimedia context of the 1950s and early 1960s. In exploring the production of “Elvis movies” from 1956 to 1961, this chapter examines how Hollywood transformed Presley the rock ’n’ roll star into a singular screen attraction. Producer Hal Wallis, a veteran of the studio era, sought a balance between the cyclical, generic structure of the former star system with the new opportunities for cross-platform promotion portended by the media landscape of the 1950s. Presley’s rebel-oriented 1950s films put on display what modern media fame meant in the second half of the 1950s and suggest a hierarchical relationship between television and film. Subsequently, Presley’s 1960s work enacted an assembly-line integration of feature film and LP record production, demonstrating how Wallis’s star-making formula during the studio era translated to a cross-platform context. In this way, Hollywood adapted to the “electronic age” of the 1950s while maintaining strict control over the output of a star’s labor, reconfiguring the power structures of the star system by aligning media industries into the synchronous production of a multimedia star image.

Introduction

The book’s introduction first discusses why looking back at cinematic rock stars is useful for understanding a present context in which stardom seems to matter little to the industrial work of Hollywood. It then provides a summary of the industrial and media context in which rock stardom became significant for commercial filmmaking, distinguishes the category of “rock stars” from prior popular music stars who transitioned to screen, and articulates a theory of media power with regard to rock stardom that explains how such stars produce commercially valuable performances of difference and protest (particularly through performances of race and gender). The introduction ends with a methodological overview that explains how the book’s select case studies indicate different arrangements of power in rock musicians’ relationships to changing media contexts over their extensive onscreen careers.

All Together Now

Chapter 2 uses as its starting point United Artists’ diversification during the early 1960s via European film distribution as well as television and record production. This company’s varied commercial investments informed the way it attempted to incorporate the Beatles into feature filmmaking. Yet a transmedia approach to filmmaking also defined the Beatles’ efforts to distinguish themselves from the formulaic models that characterized the film careers of Presley and British rock ’n’ roll icon Cliff Richard. By forming an autonomous media company in Apple Corps., the Beatles sought a countercultural design of industrial convergence through which they could take authorship over their own media images, explore alternative forms of cultural production in film and music, and provide an ostensible platform for unconventional creative voices. As is evident in their discourse about Apple and their creative work during and after 1967, the Beatles viewed the moving image (in short- and feature-length modes) as essential to their pursuits in music. An ensuing dispute between United Artists and the Beatles effectively put to rest the Hal Wallis model of rock stardom on screen, as (at least) the appearance of creative autonomy became intrinsic to the ideology of rock. The case of the Beatles illustrates a distinctive break in the assumed power structure between rock stars’ ideas about cinema and those of the companies that represent and produce their image.

Onstage/Onscreen

The link between alternative film production and rock culture continued in the subgenre of the music festival documentary, which came into being through the direct cinema documentary movement. The transition from the recording studio to the live stage was a defining one for rock culture at the end of the 1960s, and the aesthetics of presenting dynamic concert performances—communicated widely by audio and moving image representations of concerts—displayed ideals of rock authenticity. Exploring four feature documentary projects organized around the countercultural space of the rock festival, my third chapter demonstrates how emergent means of nonfiction film production shaped the onscreen spectacle of a rock musician performing live onstage. Through concert documentaries, a rock star no longer had to go to the studio lot to appear onscreen; instead, their stage labor could be preserved and extended through new camera and sound recording technologies. However, while the technologies (and filmmakers’ philosophies) that informed direct cinema seemed to offer a uniquely uncompromised means for representing rock culture onscreen, the production histories of concert documentaries also reveal how rock stars’ control over their own representation was not distributed equally, ranging from the option of refusing to be filmed to the power to determine whether a film project even saw the light of day. Produced in the absence of major film studios, arrangements of power between filmmakers, rock stars, and festival organizers existed on a case-by-case basis, and rock stars operated on a spectrum between observed subjects and controlling gatekeepers of moving image depictions of their performances.