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Young Hollywood’s Last Party
Is the media murdering our most talented movie stars?
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It’s unquestionable that today’s celebrities are expected to live their personal lives in as public a way as possible and that if they try to hold anything back, the shameless media (which means pretty much all the media) will gladly sniff out the missing material. “The celebrity as a person is forced into a condition of almost total passivity,” Pomerance says. “Without making any attempt to engage the press—through a press agent, say, and for known publicity purposes—the star gets photographed, commented upon, analyzed—even diagnosed—with respect to all sorts of commonplace activities that in earlier days would have constituted part of the star’s ‘backstage.’ Now the backstage is gone as far as reporters are concerned. They see no limits, which means privacy can be maintained only at very great expense and with the loyalty (bought) of minions in the hundreds. Passivity equals impotence. The star can’t do anything, because every miniscule aspect of daily life is done to the star.”
If things are this bad when media hyenas dig out embarrassing facts, they’re a whole lot worse when journalists decide truthfulness is a pesky detail—that a story’s entertainment value is what counts and sticking to reality just interrupts the chase when it’s getting good. “Smaller and smaller nuances of star behavior are sufficient to [generate] more and more elaborate stories,” Pomerance points out, “so we see an expansion of the questionable story, the story purporting things the stars vehemently deny. Tabloid reporting isn’t basically factual. It only needs to be connected to some thread that can be tied to an ongoing reality—say, a star standing next to a figure they can be rumored to be attached to or not attached to. Anything and everything the star does is news. The star has become a form of currency.”
Another large pressure on unseasoned entertainers is society’s expectation that they’ll act as role models for fans who aren’t much younger—or may even be older—than they are. “Someone like Amy Winehouse rose to fame because her art was a way for her to transmute, to exorcise her demons,” Adams says. “The demons didn’t go away because she became famous. She couldn’t be a role model once she had everything a little girl could want because she was never role model material. Or take Miley Cyrus and ask her if she wanted to be a role model. No, she wanted to sing. And as she became more successful, she was increasingly surrounded by adults who expected her to work adult hours and behave like an adult. So she listens to adults, advisers and Vanity Fair and does a photo shoot with a classy artiste photographer and ends up on the cover of the mag with a naked back. Not her decision; not her trajectory. She was still a minor, straddling the worlds of childhood and adulthood, being expected to behave like an adult in some situations and a child in others. It’s an impossible situation.”
Pomerance has a similar take on the impossible situation syndrome. “Young stars who find great celebrity very quickly have no easy resources for learning how to accommodate this state of affairs,” he says. “Older celebrities do not give workshops for younger ones on what it means to have a public life. Often young stars learn about the features of public life by reading the same tabloid tales everyone else reads and then gossiping about them with their friends… The young celebrity feels more and more stifled and suffocated all the time, subjected to more and more attention for doing less and less. Finally the star breaks out, as a way of committing action, and we see an apparent violent or explosive behavior ‘coming out of the blue.’ A reason why stars turn to drugs is because their effect is internal—reporters can see the star’s face but not the star’s experience. The star turns to dramatic self-endangerment, perhaps seeing this as the only way of doing and being that can speed out of the reporter’s orbit.”
Behind their analyses of what drives some 21st-century celebrities off the rails, the experts I spoke with generally agree that Hollywood success stories have come with high price tags for a long time and that the biggest changes have taken place not in the stars’ personalities but in the high-tech media machines that stalk and harass them. “A pop star who has a mental health problem… can get more press than the war in Iraq,” observes Schamus, but the star’s actual problems may be pretty much the same as they would have been decades ago. “I cannot imagine,” Schamus adds with a sardonic laugh, “that you could possibly sustain a thesis that says: Back in 1967 and 1968, [stars] had none of this pressure of drugs and sex and rock ‘n’ roll and media—and now they do!’”
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by celebrity fashion on 4/09/09 at 6:15 am
really great information. thanks for sharing…
- Comment by Nevada Drug Rehab centers on 4/09/10 at 7:33 am
I don’t know what makes a young celebrity to fall down after they had a quick rise. Perhaps they can’t deal with being famous, all of a sudden they draw too much attention and they simply can’t handle it. They get criticized and judged by thousands of people, everything is happening in a very short time so it’s no wonder they get overwhelmed. Too bad they don’t realize that using drugs won’t make them feel any better or neither they’ll have their problems vanished by them. Drug usage draws more problems, throwing their lives apart in the end.
- Comment by Florida Drug Rehab on 6/23/11 at 10:58 pm
I would never want anyone to have to go through any type of addiction. I only want the best for those around me. I hope that anyone struggling through an addiction can find help through a great Florida drug rehab before anything terrible happens.
- Comment by Elizabeth88 on 7/28/11 at 5:20 pm
In young Hollywood we have all heard the influences of drugs and alcohol and it can go from bad to worse. There are some that want to change their ways and want to make a new life for themselves and I hope that others going through the same way would decide to get help as well. A long term drug rehab treatment can help turn your life around.
This story was published in the Summer 2008 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Hollywood Then and Now
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