New Books in Popular Culture Katherine Fusco, "Hollywood's Others: Love and Limitation in the Star System" (Columbia UP, 2025)
Sep 6, 2025
Katherine Fusco, an Associate Professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, discusses her book on Hollywood’s unconventional stars. She delves into the complex relationships between early cinema, race, and gender, highlighting how atypical stars like Lon Chaney challenged audience perceptions. Fusco explores Shirley Temple's career against the backdrop of child labor laws and analyzes how marginalized identities were navigated within the star system. Her insights reveal the limits of empathy in film and the ways the industry managed audience attachments.
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Silent-Film Discovery Sparked The Project
- Katherine Fusco discovered the ambigously gendered Our Gang performer Farina while watching silent films with Italian schoolchildren at Pordenone festival.
- That chance viewing sparked her project about how atypical stars were marketed to white mainstream audiences in the 1920s–30s.
Stars Can Be 'Picture Personalities'
- Fusco argues star models (aspirational, relatable, iconoclastic) don't cover atypical stars like Lon Chaney or Farina.
- She frames some stars as 'picture personalities' whose character types, not biographical identities, drove appeal and managed ambiguity.
Lon Chaney Preferred Character Mystery
- Fusco explains Lon Chaney resisted biographical exposure and sound because he wanted characters to remain unstable across films.
- Fans came to see the surprise of his changing appearances, which studios and magazines then tried to sanitize.
