Robert Redford, Diane Keaton and the Twilight of the Gods

There was a second, again in 2012, when Diane Keaton and Robert Redford practically shared the display screen. Each had been reported to be “eyeing” the leads in a holiday-themed ensemble comedy titled The Most Great Time, pitched as a Love Really-style pastiche involving a number of interwoven tales of household and romance, all set towards a backdrop of Christmas lights and yuletide meltdowns.

Alas, that film by no means received made — not less than not in that kind — and Keaton and Redford by no means once more got here so near working collectively. However in their very own methods, these two very completely different actors — she, the eccentric spirit of New Hollywood comedy; he, the golden-boy stoic of the American pastoral — had been sure by one thing much more highly effective than onscreen chemistry: generational gravity. They belonged to the identical unfastened orbit of Nineteen Seventies-era performers who upended the foundations of stardom and helped reshape what American motion pictures might be.

Keaton died Oct. 11 at age 79 after a surprisingly fast battle with pneumonia. Redford died in his sleep, at 89, rather less than a month earlier, on Sept. 16. Some from their cohort had gone earlier than — Paul Newman in 2008, Shelley Duvall in 2024, Gene Hackman in February — whereas others have merely drifted from view. Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway — all now of their 80s — have largely stepped away from the highlight.

In fact, that is nothing new. All stars, even the brightest, finally flicker out as new generations take their place. However there’s one thing completely different — one thing extra poignant — about watching this specific circle start to fade.

The celebrities who got here earlier than them had been formed by the studio system — groomed, styled and slotted into varieties. They signed long-term contracts, wore what the wardrobe division handed them and gave interviews ghostwritten by studio publicists. Even the greats — Bogart, Hepburn, Gable, Davis — had been typically taking part in variations of a persona the system had helped assemble. Their energy got here from polish, execution and consistency. Stardom was a product, and it was rigorously managed.

By the point Redford, Keaton, Beatty and the others had been coming of age as actors, the previous studio scaffolding was already coming aside, with the contract system unraveling and the good moguls who as soon as dominated the city with an iron fist fading from the scene. There was now not a press-office puppeteer telling actors how one can costume or what to say, no studio picture to guard. They had been free to outline themselves — onscreen and off — and to let these two identities blur. Their personas might be withholding, eccentric, neurotic, ambiguous, unusual. They may play characters the earlier era by no means received close to: difficult folks with unresolved emotions and messy inside lives.

On the identical time, a brand new form of director had taken over the asylum — such mavericks as Mike Nichols, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Alan J. Pakula and Martin Scorsese — filmmakers who weren’t inquisitive about preserving the system. They needed to blow it up. Their movies — Carnal Information, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, Klute, Taxi Driver — didn’t simply break the foundations, they rewrote the language of cinema itself. And that reinvention gave this younger, liberated era of actors a canvas as unbound and unconventional as they had been — a form of free-spirited platform that hadn’t existed earlier than and hasn’t actually existed since.

Few actors made higher use of that freedom than Redford and Keaton. In such movies as The Candidate, Three Days of the Condor and The Approach We Have been, Redford turned the clean-cut main man into one thing extra introspective and morally unsure — a determine torn between idealism and self-interest. Keaton took the identical open, idiosyncratic presence that made Annie Corridor so partaking and revealed its darker shades in The Godfather and Searching for Mr. Goodbar, proving she might be fearless, advanced, even unsettling. Each discovered fact in contradiction. They made uncertainty look thrilling.

However by the early Nineteen Eighties, because the counterculture spirit of the earlier decade gave option to one thing extra field office-driven and fewer tolerant of artistic chaos, a distinct mannequin of film star began taking on. Actors weren’t searching for to problem the system anymore; they had been the system, powering tentpoles, sequels and high-concept hits that might promote in each nook of the world. This was the period of the Occasion Film, when opening-weekend grosses grew to become the brand new measure of stardom. The actors who started showing on marquees — Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Willis, Gibson, Cruise — weren’t celebrated for subtlety or transformation or their onscreen bravery, however for his or her field workplace clout.

Positive, by the Nineties, there was a parallel indie motion the place a few of these stars might unfurl their dramatic vary, ’70s-style — Cruise in Magnolia, Stallone in Cop Land — however for all of the essential acclaim and Oscar consideration these roles would possibly appeal to, what outlined success in Nineteen Eighties and ’90s Hollywood had been the ticket gross sales for such tentpoles as High Gun, Die Exhausting, the Rambo motion pictures and The Terminator. Actors had change into commodities of scale, outlined largely by their capability to summon $100 million grosses.

When the brand new millennium arrived, that equation shifted but once more, even when the give attention to cash hadn’t. Hollywood’s middle of gravity moved from stars to franchises. The IP grew to become the true draw — superheroes, wizards, Jedi and different branded worlds. The costume, typically spandex, mattered greater than the actor inside it (even Redford received in on the act, taking part in a Marvel villain in Captain America: The Winter Soldier). Stardom now not was the engine of the film enterprise; it was simply one other interchangeable a part of the enterprise.

Then, within the 2010s and ’20s, stardom began shifting from the large display screen to a a lot smaller stage — the cellphone. Hollywood was nonetheless turning out superhero sagas, status dramas and comfy seasonal fare (like that Christmas film, The Most Great Time, finally rewritten and launched in 2015 because the forgettable Love the Coopers, with Keaton nonetheless starring and Redford’s position taken by, of all folks, John Goodman). However the true competitors for consideration was shifting elsewhere — to feeds and timelines, the place fame was measured not by field workplace totals however by followers.

Stars used to fade between movies. Right this moment, they’re required to remain perpetually current — posting skincare routines, political endorsements, private podcasts. The rigorously curated distance that when made icons really feel larger-than-life has been changed by the algorithmic closeness of TikTok confessionals. Even the indie-minded actors who would possibly’ve inherited the Keaton/Redford mantle — your Ethan Hawkes, Michelle Williamses, Adam Drivers — have needed to negotiate this consideration economic system. They’re nonetheless critical actors, however they exist in a tradition that prizes entry over aura. The artwork of elusiveness — that high quality of unknowable magnetism — has nearly vanished.

Now and again, you catch a glimmer of that older magic — the awkward honesty and unvarnished humanity that outlined the Nineteen Seventies era. Movies like The Holdovers, Licorice Pizza, even As soon as Upon a Time in Hollywood evoke that temper once more, although now it performs like nostalgia for the period when stars like Keaton and Redford dominated the display screen. What was as soon as insurrection now reads as retro — authenticity repackaged for an viewers craving for the very messiness that when made these earlier actors really feel so actual.

The irony, in fact, is that this new era has extra instruments than ever to regulate their picture, but much less precise management over how they’re perceived. Each pink carpet misstep, each viral sound chunk, is immediately flattened into content material. Stardom, as soon as about transcendence, has change into a type of relentless participation.

As for the subsequent era of stars — if there’s even to be one — it’s exhausting to think about it resembling the actors who got here earlier than, least of all of the unruly brood who took over the display screen throughout the Nineteen Seventies. The circumstances that when created icons have splintered. Theaters are shrinking, audiences scattered, and the equipment that when turned actors into family names has gone digital. Stardom used to rely upon shortage; the longer term will run on replication.

When a Dutch creator just lately launched Tilly Norwood, a completely AI-generated “actress,” it wasn’t her efficiency that felt uncanny — it was the thought behind it. A star with no previous, no flesh-and-blood physique, no human connection in any respect. Only a simulation of emotion, programmed to ship the phantasm of depth. Satirically, it’s the precise inverse of what outlined the Nineteen Seventies era: actors whose energy got here from being recognizably, typically painfully, actual.

Stars like Keaton and Redford had been messy, mercurial, alive — and that was the purpose. They and the opposite ’70s actors reminded audiences that being human was the story. Tilly, and the applied sciences that may observe her, promise one thing cleaner, quicker, cheaper and extra controllable — however infinitely much less relatable. Perhaps that’s progress. Or perhaps it’s the ultimate act in a protracted means of sprucing the humanity out of film stars altogether.

This story appeared within the Oct. 22 difficulty of The Hollywood Reporter journal. Click on right here to subscribe.