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Redford, Keaton and the Twilight of the Gods (The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/robert-redford-diane-keaton-twilight-of-the-gods-1236405701/-snip-
The stars who came before them had been shaped by the studio system — groomed, styled and slotted into types. They signed long-term contracts, wore what the wardrobe department handed them and gave interviews ghostwritten by studio publicists. Even the greats — Bogart, Hepburn, Gable, Davis — were often playing variations of a persona the system had helped construct. Their power came from polish, execution and consistency. Stardom was a product, and it was carefully managed.
By the time Redford, Keaton, Beatty and the others were coming of age as actors, the old studio scaffolding was already coming apart, with the contract system unraveling and the great moguls who once ruled the town with an iron fist fading from the scene. There was no longer a press-office puppeteer telling actors how to dress or what to say, no studio image to protect. They were free to define themselves — onscreen and off — and to let those two identities blur. Their personas could be withholding, eccentric, neurotic, ambiguous, strange. They could play characters the previous generation never got near: complicated people with unresolved feelings and messy inner lives.
At the same time, a new kind 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 interested in preserving the system. They wanted to blow it up. Their films — Carnal Knowledge, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, Klute, Taxi Driver — didn’t just break the rules, they rewrote the language of cinema itself. And that reinvention gave this young, liberated generation of actors a canvas as unbound and unconventional as they were — a kind of free-spirited platform that hadn’t existed before and hasn’t really existed since.
-snipping to get to one of the paragraphs about an AI-generated "actress" named Tilly Norwood-
Stars like Keaton and Redford were messy, mercurial, alive — and that was the point. They and the other ’70s actors reminded audiences that being human was the story. Tilly, and the technologies that will follow her, promise something cleaner, faster, cheaper and more controllable — but infinitely less relatable. Maybe that’s progress. Or maybe it’s the final act in a long process of polishing the humanity out of movie stars altogether.
-snip-
The stars who came before them had been shaped by the studio system — groomed, styled and slotted into types. They signed long-term contracts, wore what the wardrobe department handed them and gave interviews ghostwritten by studio publicists. Even the greats — Bogart, Hepburn, Gable, Davis — were often playing variations of a persona the system had helped construct. Their power came from polish, execution and consistency. Stardom was a product, and it was carefully managed.
By the time Redford, Keaton, Beatty and the others were coming of age as actors, the old studio scaffolding was already coming apart, with the contract system unraveling and the great moguls who once ruled the town with an iron fist fading from the scene. There was no longer a press-office puppeteer telling actors how to dress or what to say, no studio image to protect. They were free to define themselves — onscreen and off — and to let those two identities blur. Their personas could be withholding, eccentric, neurotic, ambiguous, strange. They could play characters the previous generation never got near: complicated people with unresolved feelings and messy inner lives.
At the same time, a new kind 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 interested in preserving the system. They wanted to blow it up. Their films — Carnal Knowledge, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, Klute, Taxi Driver — didn’t just break the rules, they rewrote the language of cinema itself. And that reinvention gave this young, liberated generation of actors a canvas as unbound and unconventional as they were — a kind of free-spirited platform that hadn’t existed before and hasn’t really existed since.
-snipping to get to one of the paragraphs about an AI-generated "actress" named Tilly Norwood-
Stars like Keaton and Redford were messy, mercurial, alive — and that was the point. They and the other ’70s actors reminded audiences that being human was the story. Tilly, and the technologies that will follow her, promise something cleaner, faster, cheaper and more controllable — but infinitely less relatable. Maybe that’s progress. Or maybe it’s the final act in a long process of polishing the humanity out of movie stars altogether.
-snip-
Much more at the link, and only one paragraph of what I didn't excerpt is about AI. There's an analysis of the decline in filmmaking over decades.
And a good explanation about why losing icons like Redford and Keaton is especially painful.