Take a Class with Professor Ty

An announcement for Watch List subscribers: Starting the evening of Tuesday, February 24, I will be teaching a ten-week historical survey, MOVIE STARS, STARDOM & MODERN FAME, on the online film-school platform CineJourneys.

The class is an extension of my 2013 book “Gods Like Us” and adapts a curriculum I have previously taught at Boston University, Tufts University and Emerson College. Many people over the years have told me they wished they could sit in on this course; now they can, and so can you. Over the span of ten lectures held on Tuesday nights at 7 p.m. EST, I’ll be covering the entire history of film, from its beginnings to the present day, as well as discussing a great deal of the surrounding popular culture. The class promises to be a lot of fun, and paid Watch List subscribers will get a 25% discount on the tuition fee! (See below.) You can register for the course here.

Launched in 2023, CineJourneys is an online platform for movie lovers that presents shared interactive experiences and explorations of all things cinema. Instructors include academics and critics of note, and the experiences vary from one-off lectures to full postgraduate-level courses. MOVIE STARS, STARDOM & MODERN FAME will begin on February 24 and consist of a weekly live online lecture and ensuing discussion. Tuition for the full ten weeks is $300, with individual sessions priced separately. In addition, the sessions will be archived and available for a fee on the CineJourneys platform (but without the live component, obviously). As mentioned, paid Watch List subscribers (as well as registered CineJourneys members) get a 25% discount on the course. You'll find the coupon code for the discount below the paywall at the bottom of this post.

Here are a few selected student-evaluation comments from my years teaching this course at the above-mentioned colleges and universities: "Professor Burr was one of the most knowledgable professors I have ever had the pleasure to have for a class." "He's the perfect person to teach this class. I could talk movies/celebrities all day with him." "This class made me think about pop culture in a different way. It has made me question why we like celebrities and why we follow them. I'm definitely a lot more cautious handling social media and celebrities now." "Honestly one of the best professors I've had. Extremely well-organized and talented at conveying ideas."

Below is an outline of the course. I hope you consider signing up, as it offers an incredible journey through a century-plus of popular culture and celebrity personas. There will be a lot of film clips used in the course and a fair amount of recommended (but not required) readings, but there are no written assignments or other coursework. The learning, the discussions and the overall experience are what matter.

MOVIE STARS, STARDOM & MODERN FAME: A HISTORY

Ever since Florence Lawrence became the first film actor to be billed by name in 1910, the movie star has been the common coin of American and global entertainment culture. We go to movies to see the people in them, a complex, century-long love affair made up of equal parts affection, emulation, obsession, consumption, and envy. This class will consider movie stars, film stardom, and pop culture fame from the silent era to the 21st century, establishing key personality and social types, tracing the rise and fall of the cinematic celebrity, and discussing the move from movie screen to TV screen to computer screen as stardom – or the social construct we call by that name – comes within the grasp of the audience.

Questions we’ll address will include: How have stars, both great and small, affected who we want to be and how we want to be seen? What are the “stories” each star tells, about social status and mobility, pitfalls and potentialities? How do they answer complex notions of desire? Do we want to be them, own them, consume then, or destroy them? Is scandal necessary? How have new mediums, technologies, and cultural movements changed what we ask of stars and the power we have to celebrate ourselves? And – perhaps most fundamentally – what pressures does star culture bring to bear on individuals and society, and are such pressures beneficial, detrimental, or neutral?

Week 1: The invention of the movie star: Celebrity persona before the cinema and in early cinema. The first superstars.

Week 2: The Silent Era: Female archetypes from Mary Pickford to Clara Bow. Male movie stars and archetypes. Silent scandals and how they changed celebrity, the film industry, and 1920s culture.

Week 3: The Talkie Revolution and the Depression: The star playing field gets demolished and redefined. The Production Code and its impact on star and character presentation.

Week 4: The Studio Years, The 1930s: The movie factory and its new archetypes. House style of the individual studios. “Gone with the Wind” and the search for Scarlett.

Week 5: The Studio Years, The 1940s: Character actors. WWII and the post-war era. New archetypes, adjusting star personas, the rise of film noir. Brando changes everything.

Week 6: The Rise of the Counterculture, Part 1: The 1950s. Television and the small-screen star; international stars; the rock ‘n’ roll explosion and expansion of star personas into popular music.

Week 7: The Rise of the Counterculture, Part 2: The 1960s. The decline of the studio factory system and the arrival of a “realistic” new Hollywood star. The flowering of the African-American star. The Warhol Factory and stardom as commodity. Political star personas.

Week 8: The 1970s through the 1990s: The death of the new realism and the reassertion of glamour. The cult of the dead star and the growth of the celebrity industry. Alt-stardom and its conceits. Star permutations in the modern marketplace.

Week 9: The 1990s through early 2000s: The rise of the Internet and its effect on the culture of fame – a new democracy of celebrity.

Week 10: 2010 to today: New variations on old archetypes. Darwinian stars. The multimedia/multi-platform revolution and rise of the Influencers. Stardom in the Trump Era: A Battle for Reality. Do movie stars matter anymore?

That's the long and short of it. Please forward this post to any friends you think might be interested. The more the merrier!