The cinema’s ambience—from the smells and tastes of buttery popcorn to the comfort of the seat and room temperature—is just an iota of what the late film historian Richard Dyer MacCann termed “the total film experience.” It’s not just the film on the screen but the sensations all around at the screening, he once said at a lecture at the University of Iowa.
But the main attraction, Dr. MacCann believed, was the Silent Film-Era born-and-bred Star System.
“Who’s in it?” viewers ask. In the movies, a name by any other name is not the same. The New Yorker adds that success of a film depends on the stars, who routinely command $20 million a picture these days.
The end of a night at the pictures is quite predictable. The house lights come up, credits roll, and patrons stream out, not batting an eye over who played Cop #4. Or who that man was who asked who the masked man was. Yet the question lingers, like Trivial Pursuit: Who was that so-and-so who said, “He went atta way, Sheriff”? In a sense, these unsung players are the masked man, or woman.
Craig and Carla Barnett, of West Hollywood, Calif., are old hands in the acting business. Transplanted Missourians who’ve played the real-life role of husband and wife for 39 years, the couple, both in their late fifties, boast an impressive list of movie and TV credits. Craig played director George Stevens in a TV movie about James Dean and a deputy in “Liar Liar.” He was in “Boston Legal” as a man in a bar and as a jury foreman in “Raising the Bar.”
