It’s a well-loved theme with many variations.
Like a martini, or a bowl of chili, A Star Is Born is a staple that welcomes reinvention. All iterations of the film — including the latest, directed by Bradley Cooper and starring Cooper and Lady Gaga — sing the same tune, but each version has new variations on the theme, flourishes and inversions that reinterpret the old story.
Spoilers for the basic plot of A Star Is Born, in all its iterations, follow.
Simultaneously a romance, a tragedy, and a rags-to-riches story with a magnetic young woman at its center, A Star is Born follows an essential arc that has, thus far, stayed the same: An aging male celebrity, hamstrung by his addictions, meets a talented, younger woman with whom he is instantly smitten.
He connects her to the platform and contacts she needed, and she becomes a sensation almost overnight; meanwhile, his career is bottoming out. The two fall in love and marry, and her success then becomes a problem for him.
In every version of the film, he meets the same end. There are also a few repeated lines in each version, and always a scene in which the rising star’s first major awards win (at the Oscars in two versions and the Grammys in later ones) is ruined by her dissipated husband.
But looking beyond specific plot beats, it’s always, at heart, a story about what it takes to be a celebrity in America, as well as what addiction does to close relationships. The faces, details, settings, and character motivation may all vary, but A Star Is Born keeps getting remade for a reason: It’s a story of romance and mortality, with a swooning arc that borders on epic. It feels so familiar, so archetypal, that it seems almost as if someone must also have carved it into cave walls in prehistoric France, or drawn it in cuneiform on some Sumerian scroll.
But of course, it’s not an ancient story — it’s one that depends on the unique machinations of the American celebrity-making machine. No wonder it’s proven so attractive to the filmmakers and actors who keep retelling the story, retooling it for another generation.
There are actually five Hollywood versions of the story — the first one is just a little different, and doesn’t have the same title. And while they each shift focus and change certain details, the allure remains the same, particularly to Academy Awards voters, who nominated the first four films in multiple categories and seem likely to do the same with the newest version.
So if you want to understand what’s most interesting about the 2018 A Star Is Born — and why the story keeps being reinvented — it’s worth looking at each of its predecessors, which intersect in dramatic and even tragic ways with the lives of the people who made them.
Director: George Cukor
Writer: Gene Fowler and Rowland Brown, adapted from a story by Adela Rogers St. Johns
Starring: Constance Bennett and Lowell Sherman
Oscars: One nomination for Best Story
The legend: Some film buffs call 1932’s What Price Hollywood? the true first version of A Star Is Born, because the basic arc strongly resembles the later films. The stories are similar enough that when What Price Hollywood? director George Cukor was asked to direct the first A Star Is Born five years later, he refused. The similarities were so pronounced that RKO even considered suing, though they ultimately decided not to.
The theme: What Price Hollywood? is the story of a young waitress and aspiring actress named Mary (Constance Bennett) who encounters a drunk, famous movie director Max (Lowell Sherman) one night at work. He brings her to a movie premiere and promises her a screen test, but doesn’t remember any of it the next morning.
She does finally get her chance and, after some failed attempts, becomes an Academy Award-winning success. At the same time, Max’s career tanks, and he avoids a relationship with Mary to keep from dragging her down with him. In the end, Max — after ruining Mary’s acceptance speech and embarrassing her in front of the Academy — finally takes a hard look at himself. He decides his dissipated self is a disgrace to his former glory days. And he shoots himself in the chest.
The variations: The film’s plot isn’t exactly the same as the classic plot of A Star Is Born, in which the ingenue and the aging star always end up together. Mary and Max never end up together: She marries another man, who grows jealous of her time and her career, and becomes pregnant by him — a fact she discovers just after their divorce is finalized. And after Max’s death by suicide, Mary follows her ex-husband to London, where they reconcile.
But the marked similarities between What Price Hollywood? and the subsequent A Star Is Born show something key: a story like this has always been in Hollywood’s DNA. How stars get made has captured imaginations since the beginning — and how they fade has always felt like a tragedy. Put the two together in the same film, and the sparks fly.
What Price Hollywood? is available on DVD and is currently playing intermittently on Turner Classic Movies .
Director: William A. Wellman
Writer: William A. Wellman, Robert Carson, Dorothy Parker, and Alan Campbell
Starring: Janet Gaynor and Fredric March
Oscars: Seven nominations; one win for Best Writing (Original Story)
The legend: The first A Star Is Born was directed by William A. Wellman, whose 1927 film Wings won the first Academy Award for Best Picture. One of his co-writers was critic and satirist Dorothy Parker, for whom A Star Is Born represented one of her two Academy Award nominations before her left-wing politics landed her on the Hollywood Blacklist.
The movie stars Janet Gaynor as Esther Blodgett, a fresh-faced young woman who moves to Hollywood with stars in her eyes, and Fredric March as Norman Maine, a stumbling drunk whose career as a screen star is already on the wane when he meets Esther at a party where she’s working as a caterer.
He promises to get her a screen test and, eventually, she’s signed to a studio contract and renamed Vickie Lester by studio executives, who find her real name off-putting. Esther and Norman fall in love and elope; he struggles with her rising fame and spoils her Academy Awards speech; eventually, he kills himself by walking into the sea.
This was a comeback moment for Gaynor, who was no rising star: She had been a popular actress and huge box-office draw in the 1920s and early 1930s, beginning in silent films and transitioning successfully to sound. She was the first actress to win an Academy Award, and she won for three films in the same year, 1929: 7th Heaven, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, and Street Angel. (She’s the only actress to ever win for more than one role.)
But by the middle of the 1930s, amid shifts and mergers among movie studios, her career started to flag — especially with younger stars like Loretta Young and Shirley Temple gaining prominence.
Then she landed the role of Esther Blodgett (incidentally, the same year she starred in a film with What Price Hollywood? star Constance Bennett). The film was a huge success and revitalized her career, earning her a second Academy Award nomination, though she lost to Luise Rainer.
A Star Is Born was Gaynor’s only Technicolor film, and the first Technicolor film for March, who originated the role of the alcoholic falling star and earned his third Oscar nomination for the film. (He’d won one previously, in 1931, and would go on to win an additional Oscar and two Tonys in the 1940s and 1950s.)
And while both March and Gaynor were among cinema’s most recognizable faces, Gaynor’s recent misfortunes meant that it was easy to root for her as she portrayed a young woman on the rise.
The theme: As the first real iteration of A Star Is Born, this one’s plot exemplifies a lot of the things that would mark future versions of the story.
To modern eyes, A Star Is Born ’s gender politics can feel a little creepy, particularly Esther’s declaration at the end of the film — repeated in each successive film, but in different configurations — that she will be known by her late husband’s name, “Mrs. Norman Maine.”
Since her (older) husband has both helped her reach success and acted in ways that intentionally or unintentionally will sabotage that success, her dependence on him can feel frustrating at times. And though the gender politics change a little with each iteration, the gap in age and questions about men’s and women’s routes to fame remain.
Yet there’s an authenticity to the relationship between the two characters, and the jealousy between them, that feels as if it could have been drawn from life. In fact, it was rumored that the marriage of screen legend Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Fay was the film’s real-life inspiration.
Another aspect of A Star Is Born that would be repeated in future versions is the centrality of the female character, and, perhaps most importantly, the way that the role was seen as a way for an actress to breathe new life into her career. The Norman character is an important one in A Star Is Born, but there’s a reason that the Esther character has always been played by an icon, and that reason, most likely, is that Janet Gaynor played her first.
The variations: Gaynor and March’s version is the only non-musical version of A Star Is Born. Instead, it’s framed as a screenplay; the first and last frames of the film are images of a script page. And so the whole thing takes on a kind of mythical quality, a story of Hollywood fame, written and produced by the Hollywood famous.
Norman and Esther struggle to maintain control of their own star images, eloping in order to avoid the prying eyes of celebrity journalists. The film is particularly clear-eyed about how the fan magazines of early Hollywood and the tightly controlled images the studios created for its contracted stars affect the real people off screen — something that feels a little startling, given that those same studios responsible for this movie. That adds a layer of meta-commentary to the entire endeavor that is mostly absent from other versions.
The 1932 version of A Star Is Born is currently streaming on Filmstruck .
Director: George Cukor
Writer: Moss Hart
Starring: Judy Garland and James Mason
Oscars: Six nominations; zero wins
The legend: In 1954, George Cukor — who had directed What Price Hollywood? almost a quarter century before but turned down the Gaynor/March A Star Is Born — was finally ready to take another crack at this story. The studio brought in Moss Hart, the wildly successful playwright and theatre director, to adapt the 1937 screenplay into a movie-musical, with songs by Harold Arden and Ira Gershwin. They cast James Mason, the British actor who had made his transition to Hollywood five years earlier, as Norman Maine.
And, most importantly, they cast Judy Garland as Esther.
Garland was, by most accounts, not entirely stable while shooting the film. It had been 15 years since her most famous role, as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. In the intervening years, her life had grown more tumultuous; she’d experienced breakdowns and addiction and several suicide attempts. In 1950, she negotiated a release from her contract at MGM. She hadn’t made a film since.
A Star Is Born was promoted as her comeback film. Production was reportedly difficult, having to contend with Garland’s addictions, weight fluctuations, and illnesses. Executives at Warner Bros. also decided, after a significant portion of the film had been completed, to reshoot so that it could be the first of the studio’s films in widescreen CinemaScope. Some sequences, including the lengthy “Born in a Trunk” musical sequence, were shot after Cukor had already departed the production for another project.
