Movie Star Blog

Great post on Hollywood stars today.

Welles unwittingly set us on the path toward the utter destabilization of reality with “War of the Worlds,” and then compounded the syndrome with his subsequent film masterpiece “Citizen Kane,” a fictional biography of a thinly disguised William Randolph Hearst that invented the pseudo-journalistic docudrama. But it’s only in the past few years that Welles’s ideas have been taken completely over the top by his trashy heirs. Not only do we have TV movies bastardizing the history of celebrities living and dead, but there is also a steady parade of “real” celebrities playing themselves in their own fictionalized “reality” shows. (This summer alone, Bobby Brown, Motley Crue’s Tommy Lee, Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends and Paris Hilton’s mother are all getting their own series.) The Cruise-Holmes antics, not to mention the concurrent shenanigans of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, add yet another variant to this mix, shrewdly identified by Patrick Goldstein of The Los Angeles Times as “a new rogue genre in which celebrities act out their own reality show, free from the constraints of a network time slot or a staged setting, like a boardroom or a desert island.”