If you’re a completist like me and are determined to watch every iteration of A Star Is Born, don’t make the same mistake as I did. Start with What Price Hollywood? then move on to the other four movies with the title that just won’t quit. I didn’t even know that What Price Hollywood? existed and was the (disputed) original A Star Is Born until I watched the 1937 version. By then, it was impossible to see it any sooner than twenty-nine days after my A Star Is Born marathon because it was so difficult to find. My local library had it, but I was one in a long line of potential viewers waiting my turn.
Even if you have zero interest in A Star Is Born, hate musicals and wouldn’t know who Lady Gaga is if you were her local butcher, if you’re into Pre-Code Hollywood or even the classic Hollywood film era, which in spite of Tarantino’s use of the phrase was not 1970s Hollywood, you definitely need to see What Price Hollywood? George Cukor directed this little gem, and if that name sounds familiar, it should, especially since he directed the Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born and often worked with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. He is one of the forefathers of film.
For those of you unfamiliar with A Star Is Born and What Price Hollywood?, it is about a woman who makes it big in Hollywood after a chance encounter with a director, not a fellow actor or singer, but this version is notably different from the subsequent four. Unlike the 1937 version, I enjoyed that this movie showed her working a day job while trying to make it big. She isn’t just innately talented, beautiful or likeable. Even after making the connection, she almost blows her opportunity because there is a huge gap between her ambition and her ability so she has to work hard to make it. This movie is more about finding a calling and your people. She enjoys his antics, which ultimately ruin his career, and one of the reasons that he wanted to work with her is that she lives as if improv is her life. There is this unspoken camaraderie based on love of play that translates to entertainment when harnessed into a product. Also unlike all of the subsequent movies, she deliberately tries to cultivate the connection to improve her career instead of the golly, shucks routine that most of the others employ until he basically has to force her to embrace fame.
What Price Hollywood? separates the romance from the making it big storyline. Her personal and professional relationship with the director is rooted in friendship, and the romance is with an old money polo player. I theoretically enjoyed comparing and contrasting the two men to see how they would play such a pivotal role in her life, but everything dated about the film that does not translate favorably in the twenty-first century is related to the romantic storyline. Basically in order to attract him, she pretends to hate him so he literally commits a series of acts that would get you a list of charges and some bracelets that you couldn’t take off if you did it today. Think caveman with money and style—the masculinity is so attractive, so nonconsensual. If he behaved that way today, we would tell her to run. Unsurprisingly her relationship with her husband is rockier than with the director, who is her soul mate, which should not automatically be conflated or confused with the person that you should marry. For example, twins usually think of each other as soul mates.
After watching What Price Hollywood?, I read that the director considered having a relationship with her, but didn’t want to drag her down with him. Maybe my reading of the situation was unduly influenced by my knowledge of Cukor, but I thought that the subtext of why people, especially her husband, disapproved of his mostly inoffensive antics was because he was gay, which was a criminal offense on the books. He was usually a happy drunk unlike the belligerent drunks in A Star Is Born. An argument against this reading is that the film explicitly takes a dig at a woman strongly implied to be a lesbian. Wouldn’t a pre-Code film just have a strongly implied gay male character? Shrug, I think that it did, and it was the director. The only people who would really know are probably dead.
What Price Hollywood? sets up a number of conflicts between her personal and professional life, old money versus Hollywood types and gender normative masculinity versus an artistic man more comfortable with fully expressing himself. Depending on who is looking at the situation, he is either a human being living fully or cheap and vulgar. Her husband is the stuffed shirt, the moral police, which was really dissonant for me as a viewer, but completely credible. I’ve never understood, but witnessed on numerous occasions people marrying people and knowing who they are then being annoyed at who they are instead of realizing that when they got married, they signed a waiver if they were fully informed. Don’t marry a famous actor if you don’t want your wife to work or hang out with people from Hollywood. Astonishingly this concept is actually difficult to grasp for most people. This version is also the most realistic because the heroine has more to her life than work and men.
The heroine of What Price Hollywood? never compromises about her identity or her desires and refuses to gives up her friends or her career. She may be the most likeable of the bunch, which makes the depiction of her romance rooted in the conventional norms of that era, so incongruous. Her husband taunts her that she is “free, white and twenty one” (yeah, I KNOW). Unlike A Star Is Born, the director is a true friend because he is genuinely happy for her success though not her marriage, “He doesn’t understand people like us.” He never humiliates her, but he relishes in her success and taunts her husband by calling him Mr. Evans. Her husband does humiliate her. The entire dynamic seems more organic and overall healthy for the star than the toxic husband as everything to the heroine shown in every version of A Star Is Born even if it has roughly the same ending, but it isn’t Jesus suicide, just utter inconsolable grief about the personal loss of his career, reputation and inability to change. They are individuals first with separate paths, but always friends regardless of the health of their respective careers or their romantic lives.
Setting the horrific romantic storyline aside, What Price Hollywood? probably has the best relationship of all the movies, the most feminist message and rejects normative gender roles in favor of the determined pursuit of desires and self-fulfillment. I think that if there are future versions of A Star Is Born, a filmmaker should consider dividing the romance and professional sides again then putting them in conflict since Cooper made an indelible mark that will be hard to outshine in the future. There are tons of potential for variety if you split the roles into separate characters, explore gender and sexual orientation and open the door to exploring other facets of identity.