I agree that society has changed, and I'm not sure which came first, the chicken or the egg. Have we become more open about everything because of the media or has the media responded to our changes? I do think that the stars are more actively pursued by the media (paparazzi) as they showed on Nick & Jessica in the last week or so. I think that in the past, we only saw what they wanted us to see, and now we see more than we want to see of these celebrities.

Dee

Once the stars didn't have the studios to crank their publicity machine and get their name known, they had to do it themselves. However, they found it was a double edged sword. They could "be themselves" but sometimes things they said got twisted.

This is an apropos discussion...I think Marlon Brando really changed a lot of things. He certainly didn't live his life in a way that the studios liked, nor did he cover any of it up, but you couldn't deny his talent or charisma. People started asking more from their stars than good looks and smoothness. People like DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman, Walter Matthau etc would NEVER have become famous under the studio system - they were too different. It would be interesting to put some of the stars from the "Golden Age" in a time machine and plop them back into the 1970's or now, and see what they would have been like without the studios' influence.