PW: The Baftas, have changed - this upgrading of the Baftas was just one act. They simply moved the ceremony from after the Oscars to before. At the time, I was living in Los Angeles, I was quite involved in Bafta LA, and there was a huge excitement about who you were going to get along to the ceremonies. The ceremonies themselves used to be concocted around who was going to come, basically.
Although we live in this age of celebrity, people often say that Hollywood doesn't produce any glamorous people any more - we know too much about them. But I wouldn't say it's anything to do with that, we still don't know an awful lot about the celebrities of today, because they've got good PR people. It's because the cult of youth which happened in general culture and basically stripped stars of the possibility of being glamorous. Glamour was about being streetwise, about being worldly, a man of the world, or a street-smart woman, and now it's all about projecting youth, and youth is the antithesis of glamour.
I think Joan Collins once said there's no such thing as a glamorous baby. She's absolutely right. If you look at Tom Cruise, when he was in Mission Impossible, he was roughly the same age as Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind, and yet one is a Peter Pan character, and one is a sort of man of the world that you would aspire to become. It's youth, that's what's killed stardom.
PF: It's the new movie moguls: the old ones used to play their hunches, they were in touch with a world from which they had come, which was working class, blue collar, immigrants, a wider range of people. Now, the new group have just discovered sociology and demographics, and they talk like business men in the making of their films. They aim their films at 18-24-year-olds, or another film pointed at people in their late twenties and early thirties. They're not thinking of what a film expresses, they're thinking in terms of how it could be pitched to a certain stratum of society.
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