Don't ask about the first 79 stars

A movie that I was pleased to see show up on TCM during Summer Under the Stars was Star 80, which was on during a day saluting Carroll Baker. It's available on DVD from the Warner Archive, so I watched it to do a post on it here.

Mariel Hemingway plays Dorothy Stratten, a young Canadian woman who, if you don't know the story, was plucked from obscurity in Vancouver to become a Playboy centerfold and would-be actress before.... Well, you can click the Wikipedia biography if you don't already know about Stratten's life.

Stratten was 16 when she was working a part-time job at a Dairy Queen in the Vancouver area when she was discovered by Paul Snider (Eric Roberts), a man several years older who made a living doing all sorts of scheming business deals. Snider saw Stratten and felt that she could be a model, with himself as her manager. So he started taking erotic photographs of her and having a romantic relationship with her, which if you think about it is incredibly creepy given the age difference.

Eventually, Snider gets Stratten an in at the Playboy Mansion where she meets Hugh Hefner (Cliff Robertson) and the rest of the staff. She gets a job as a model, and as one of the bunnies at the Playboy Club to keep her financially solvent. Hefner and his advisers, meanwhile, see Snider for what he is, and strongly advise Dorothy that she should stay away from him.

But she stupidly gets married to him, as her success is rising. Paul, never being able to keep a stable job other htan his self-styled management of her career, is burning through Dorothy's money left and right. When Dorothy gets her first big acting job, in a movie directed by Aram Nicholas (a stand-in for Peter Bogdanovich, and played by Roger Rees), hte filming schedule requires her to go to New York, which she does without Snider. He becomes more insanely jealous, and hires a private investigator, leading to the eventual denouement....

Star 80 is a fascinating movie. It's told in an interesting style, with a mostly normal narrative and then some breaks in the action. Some of those jump forward to hint at the end of the story, while others are quasi-documentary, taking the actors who play the various characters and have them talk as though they're looking back at the events. That, and playing audio of clips from Stratten interviews (I think recreated, not Stratten's actual voice) as a sort of narration at certain points. It's a daring idea, and for the most part it works.

Star 80 is also not really the story of Dorothy Stratten, although she's the nominal subject. If anything, it's much more about Snider and his obsession with having Dorothy as his meal ticket and the lengths he is willing to go to to keep her, since all his other schemes have pretty much failed up ountil this point. To be honest, I found a lot of the scenes with Snider to be difficult to watch, mostly because he's such a smarmy schemer that he makes Jack Carson and Lee Tracy's characters look like pikers. He really needed to have somebody smack him upside the head. (Well, to be fair, he had some loan sharks dangle him outside a window, but that didn't change his character.) As for Carroll Baker, she plays Dorothy Stratten's mother, and does a creditable job in her small number of scenes.

I can recommend Star 80 for the grown-ups. Due to the subject nature, it's certainly not for kids, and since one of the main characters is a Playboy centerfold, there's a substantial amount of female nudity, although I didn't find the use of nudity particularly exploitative. As for the title, it refers to a vanity plate Snider was going to get for Dorothy's new car, a Mercedes that he bought with her money, and the idea that she was going to become a star in 1980.