Images above:
1/ Cooper and Lady Gaga, filmed in 2017 at Coachella. It was a special 2-day performance for use in the film and admission was $10, proceeds going to Lady Gaga’s charity called Born This Way. Attendees were asked to dress in clothing appropriate for country-music fans.
2/ Cooper and Gaga look at their dog, a gift from her character to his. In real life, that’s Cooper’s own dog. In the film he’s called “Charlie” after Cooper’s father.
3. Cooper and Sam Elliot. Elliot plays Cooper’s older brother by another mom and long before Cooper’s character, Jackson Maine, was born. Given that Elliot is 74 and Cooper is 43, it’s a stretch to think of the two as brothers.
4. Cooper as a country/rock star and Lady Gaga as his wife and overnight hit performer experiencing a touching moment in a house she buys for them in the film.
Below: A poster for a film that predated and has a very similar plot to that of A STAR IS BORN. Note that WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD came out in 1932 and the original A STAR IS BORN came out in 1937.
Below: Posters for the 3 earlier versions. The first two were about actors. The version with Kristofferson and Streisand shifted the story slightly to the world of music, but still kept the Hollywood setting.
Ahhh, Hollywood. I’ve been there, worked there. It will eat your soul with a dash of hot sauce for a snack.
And, in the latest recycling of that very danger, we have superstar Bradley Cooper’s doubletake on A Star Is Born. Or quadruple take, rather.
If you were born yesterday, don’t read any further. You will discover the awful truth about Hollywood.
It happened one night in the later part of the 1936 in a bar and grill in Hollywood called Musso and Frank over some Manhattans. A red-faced writer with a pencil mustache and devilishly gleaming eyes said to his pal, “My girlfriend is only twenty-three and I’m pushing fifty and I’ve nurtured her talent from when she was nineteen and right off the bus from Milwaukee and what happens, how does she thank me? Soon as she starts making it, I’m ancient history and she’s scouting around for new boyfriends.”
The other half-drunken screenwriter, a tall guy with yellowish teeth and a sharp wit, laughed and said, “It’s the oldest story in the book. Adam creates Eve from a rib and she thanks him by making nice with a snake.”
The other writer says, “I need something by Monday to pitch to Selznick.”
“How about the story of you and your lady friend? A farm girl from North Dakota goes to the world capitol of dreams, the great Babylon of the West, to become a movie star. Catches the eye of an old hand who knows the ropes, a guy like you. He helps her get a lead role, then she leaves him.”
“Good ideas, but we need to smear some pigeon poop on this gaudy bauble,” said the writer with the pencil mustache. “We need something to make the older guy pathetic so the audience feels sorry for him and it makes the story all the more maudlin.”
His friend lifted his Manhattan. “I’ll drink to that.”
Pencil-mustache snapped his fingers and said, “Perfect. Let’s make him a lush. After he marries the young doll and helps her become a star — we’ll call her Vicki — he keeps hitting the bottle hard despite their great love for each other. The boozing tanks his career. After she wins an Oscar, he staggers on stage and demands an Oscar for himself for the worst acting of the year.”
The tall guy with yellow teeth grimaced. “This is getting awfully close to how life really is out here. Selznick will want a happy ending, something pretty rare in this town.”
“Selznick knows how to make a tear-jerker if anyone does. I have the perfect ending. The old actor is at a party and gets so drunk he falls face down in the punch bowl and drowns.”
There was a furrowed brow on the tall writer. “We need something poetic. The moon over the ocean, that kind of thing. How about they live in a huge place out in Malibu? Being thirsty but drunk, he walks into the ocean and is swept away.”
“It’s like he wants to be reborn in the womb of the saline sauce of the sea instead getting his sauce from a bottle. Who’s gonna play Vicki?”
“Barbara Stanwyck, how about?”
They both laughed uncontrollably. The tall guy was weeping, he was laughing so hard. He put his head on his friend’s shoulder. “Barbara Stanwyck! Oh, god, that is perfect. That’s her story.”
Soooo, that’s how it happened one night in Hollywood. The movie came out in 1937 with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, again in 1954 as a musical with Judy Garland and James Mason, and again in 1976 as a rock musical with Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand.
Years later, after making over forty million dollars in one year, Bradley Cooper felt he’d like to direct a movie about how Hollywood steals your soul, your authentic voice and self. Previous plans for the remake had fallen through and his friend Clint Eastwood, once slated to direct, was losing interest as his choice for the female lead, Beyonce, left the project and then things didn’t work out with his next choice, Esperanza Spalding.
Cooper felt he could make the story closer in spirit to the age of totally vapid pop stars who both act in films and make it big with the hit pop tunes that are downloaded a million times in one afternoon.
Cooper wasn’t sure he could handle it, but he walked beneath the Hollywood sign one night and gazed up into the stars above and asked, “What price Hollywood?”
Cooper had struggled with addiction to booze and pain pills when he was in his twenties. Apparently part of the reason he turned to booze had to do with career issues, a sense of things faltering, not going anywhere. So he drank and popped pills. He got in AA and has been sober for years and became a huge star thanks to a movie called The Hangover, 2009. Given his own substance-abuse history, he felt that he could play a boozing and pill-popping country rock star perfectly. In that way it would echo the Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand version from 1976, a camp classic.
To make his character seem real, he was going to need to ramp up his music chops so he learned to play the guitar via hundreds of hours of training, plus got a lot of voice coaching and also realized that if he growled the songs, it wouldn’t matter how well he could sing.
He decided that Lady Gaga, who is worth almost 300 million bucks to Cooper’s 100 million, would be perfect for the part of a naive aspiring singer who could belt out a tune and also do the hard work of learning some dance numbers. And the idea that she is a great songwriter would ring true. Her father would be Andrew Dice Clay, formerly a guy who played clownish thug, now a serious actor, a story arc that echoed that in the film: Gaga goes from drag performer to soulful singer.
“It all makes sense!” Cooper shouted to the stars.
At Musso and Frank one night in the fall of 2016, when Cooper was still involved in re-writing the script for the film, he met with one of the key producers, Todd Phillips. Phillips had helped write the reality-based film Borat.
Phillips said, “How’s it all going?”
Cooper said, “We need to give her a flaw. But what?”
Just then a guy walked by watching the 1973 Woody Allen film Sleepers on his phone, the scene were a road roller flattens a nose.
“Who knows?” asked Phillips.
“That’s it, her nose!” Cooper yelled excitedly.
“Everything in this film will be taken from real life in Hollywood,” Cooper added. “This is a very, very personal film for me.”
“Draw on your own experience and soul,” advised Phillips. “If you’re not true to yourself, your career won’t have legs, it’ll just wobble around and fall flat.”
“Hey, maybe I’ll put that nugget of wisdom in the film, or something like it. I want this all to be totally real. This movie is all about fathers and how important they are, so I’m gonna use my own dog in the film and give him my own father’s name, Charlie!”
“Nice touch,” said Phillips.
“And I want to get Dave Chappelle in this film because I love that guy and he told me he’s never been in a good-ass movie.
“And I’m gonna put in De Niro’s daughter, Drena, as Chappelle’s wife, because she’s a lot prettier than De Niro himself would be in that role.
“And I need Sam Elliott to provide a lot of the back story about my character’s terrible childhood, something right out of a Sam Shepard play.”
Phillips grinned. “I love it.”
“And I want to include the iconic line where he tells his new girlfriend he just wants to take another look at her. I think he should say, ‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’”
Phillips shook his head. “Maybe something more simple, like, ‘I just wanted to take another look at you.’”
Cooper nodded. “Right, pare it all down, like my buddy Sean Penn’s prose in the novel he’s working on.”
Phillips asked, “How will you end the saga? Are we going to bring anything new to the story to justify the fourth remake?”
Cooper scrunched up his face. “Could they go off to live in a cabin in Joshua Tree with the dog?”
Just then an aspiring Hollywood screenwriter walked up. He was watching a movie on his phone. It was The Big Lebowski and it was just starting.
The guy stopped for a moment beside Phillips’ and Cooper’s table. The voice of Sam Elliot said, “They call Los Angeles the ‘City of Angels.’ I didn’t find it to be that, exactly. But I’ll allow there are some nice folks there. ‘Course I can’t say I’ve seen London, and I ain’t never been to France. And I ain’t never seen no queen in her damned undies, so the feller says. But I’ll tell you what — after seeing Los Angeles, and this here story I’m about to unfold, well, I guess I’ve seen somethin’ every bit as stupifyin’ as you’d see in any of them other places. And in English too. So I can die with a smile on my face, without feelin’ like the good Lord gypped me.”
Cooper blinked and started to speak but Phillips shook his head.
Cooper pounded his fist on the table, upsetting a cup of creamed spinach. “I want to have Sam Elliot say something similar at the end of the film. It’ll tie the film together.”
“No, no, no,” said Phillips. “Using Sam Elliot as your brother is okay, even if he is old enough to be your father. But that’s it.”
“Dang,” said Cooper.
“I read the script and I have a little problem,” said Phillips.
“What’s that?”
“Well, Lady Gaga is married to the guy who made her a star and he’s a huge star too, a country rocker, played by you, a handsome guy. So near the end of the film when he staggers up on the stage at the Emmys with her and then says drunken stuff into the microphone to the crowd, how is that a liability to her career? If anything, it would give her a ton of publicity and add some authenticity to her emerging hairstyle-based musical career.”
“But that’s how the other movies went,” groaned Cooper.
“Well, it doesn’t matter if one aspect of the story makes no sense in today’s world, all movies have big plot holes in them and we expect our audiences to accept them, to suspend disbelief, as the saying goes. And if your growling accent as a country dude comes and goes and sometimes it sounds like you’re drunk when you’re not, that’s okay too. With you and Lady Gaga in this thing and a lot of schmaltz, it’s gonna be huge, I promise. And it’ll probably win a bunch of Oscars. I look forward to our night on the stage together accepting the Oscars.”
“Can I touch your nose for good luck?” asked Cooper.
“It’s not my nose that has made me lucky,” said Phillips.
“What made you lucky?”
“Years ago I floated out to sea and found the port town at San Pedro and hung out at Charles and Linda Bukowski’s house in their living room and I said to them that I was going to stay there for a few days and they said it was okay. And then a few days became a few years and I was still there. I’d forgotten why I was there or where I was going. One day Bukowski said he’d give me a lucky rabbit foot if I’d leave. I said it was a deal.”
Cooper nodded. “Great story. Do you still have the rabbit foot Bukowski gave you?”
“Yep, here it is.” Phillips took out the brownish and nearly hairless rabbit’s foot, a terrible shrunken and petrified thing to hold or look at. “I keep it with me at all times, like a talisman.”
“Can I see it?” Cooper asked.
Phillips reluctantly handed it to Cooper. Cooper popped it in his mouth and pretended to swallow it.
“I’ll give you what’s left of it back when it comes out the other end,” Cooper said.
Phillips laughed so hard, he tipped over and rested his head on Cooper’s shoulder. Cooper spit out the rabbit foot and used the tiny claws to touch Phillips on the nose. “We’re gonna win Oscars, man. I promise you. It’s gonna be better than with Borat. It’s gonna be a night to remember.”
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