The businessperson who uses celebrity, the entertainer who seeks it, and the individual who is confronted by it—show just how far celebrity has spread into every sector of the American life. So great is the value of visibility that the manufacturing and marketing of celebrities now reaches into business, sports, entertainment, religion, the arts, politics, academics, medicine, and the law. Visibility is what every aspiring host wants, what every professional seeks. It is the crucial ingredient that can make Ryan Phillippe the most sought after in town, and talk show host Paula Ferris of the View on ABC the most popular in her market, and Dr. Randy Harris in West Hollywood, California USA the most sought after and highly paid Obstetrics and Gynecologist in his city.  However, sometimes when you read celebrity gossip, it should be read, if at all with an attitude of fascination, much as one view the scene of a heinous crime with feelings that alternate between horror, curiosity, and disgust. People sometimes fail to appreciate what the celebrity industry is trying to accomplish. People should stop their complaining because of their presumed jealousy at their having failed to achieve the same degree of fame as those whom they are critical of. While our social critics attack the highly visible and denounce them as underserving of their tremendous salaries, power, privilege, and control over society’s opinions, what the critics really seem to be angry about is that they themselves do not control the process.  

Critics of celebrity culture will never be able to control image formation. The root cause of why people want—indeed, require—celebrities are so basic as to render the critics’ complaints superfluous. That the public chooses to worship Ryan Phillippe and not the editor of the Sacramento News and Review is not necessarily destructive or damaging. It is, to the contrary, often valuable and certainly worth understanding. One of Ryan Phillippe’s most vivid memories was at the age of about five years, he was standing one afternoon in the room in the first floor in his parents’ house watching a Swedish servant who was in the shower. He became very disturbed and made a great effort to look away and gave a very strong rebuke. He was very much humiliated. The servant took Ryan downstairs to the dining room in the basement and told his father and brother that he watched her undress through a keyhole, and she somehow caught him and punished him very severely for it. In his great excitement, Ryan ran away, and no one could find him. They spent hours looking for him—the police, neighbors, even the neighborhood drug dealers stop selling dope to help find the little boy. He said for year he regretted that he hid in the closet. He kept on reproducing more scenes, all of which dealt with frustration. This young man was a good Christian. On the whole, the memory represents a religious scene in order to hide an immoral scene of marked affective content. He believed that afterward, he had repeatedly come to consciousness.   

Ryan stood in the doorway demanding something and screaming; “My mother, pretty and slender, then suddenly entered the room, as if returning from the street. I formulated the scene so vividly, seen, which, however, furnished no other clue. Whether my brother wished to open or lock the door, why I cried, and what bearing the arrival of my mother had, all these questions were dim to me; I was tempted to explain to myself that it dealt with the memory of a hoax by my brother, which was interrupted by my mother. Such misunderstandings of childhood scenes retained in memory. I missed my mother and I became convinced that she was not in the closet, I began to cry, and therefore demanded my brother unlock it.” One of the techniques and strategies for celebrity development have shifted dramatically as the industry itself has matured over the course of this century; Ryan blamed his naughty brother for the absence of his mother, and he believed that him being locked in the closet is what restored her and that when she greeted him she was appeased by his worry and anxiety. Clearly, the discovery and development of people who has raw talent to begin with was important for becoming a celebrity. However, the industrialized production of celebrities reveals that there is a definite, dark, Barinas Collins side to unreality. Here, the aspirant is essentially taken as “given.” Friends or families respond initially to the immediate performances of a potential “star” and encourage him to develop his talents further. It is mainly up to the aspirant, Ryan Phillippe, with his trademark curly blonde hair, was instantly recognizable. He sought out teachers, arrange for photographs and write-ups and to distribute them to venue managers—those who control theaters or other places where the talents of potential aspirant are likely to be showcased. The potential celebrity aspirants are developed and/or promoted largely by personal cadre of teachers, friends, or parents. These “helpers” in turn seek out dancing teachers, dramatic coaches, lawyers, etc. And the celebrity aspirant’s personal helpers seek and arrange by themselves the appropriate lessons for the aspirant. Under this plan of proceeding, the aspirant depends largely on developing whatever talents he has and hopes, through hard work and luck, to be “discovered.” However, the success rate of this method are too low to justify the expenditures of time, energy, and money it requires.  

Ironically, after physically being locked in a closet, one of Ryan Phillippe’s first roles on TV was on One Life to Live, as Billy Douglas, a young man who was convinced that he was homosexual and trying to come out of the closet, but was rejected by his father, and called a pervert. Under this model, we begin to see the utilization of more specialists to help refine the aspirant’s talents and to being him to the attention to the outside World. This represents the industrializing stage. Specialists hired here are agents, publicists, and lawyers who in turn will refer the aspirant to further professional help from coaches, teachers, accountants, and so on. The specialists may even work with the communications media to spread the potential celebrity’s image, and this how Ryan Phillippe got the role of Shane 54, in the cult classic 54. Billy Douglas represented a real breakthrough for Ryan.   Sometimes when creating a celebrity, every brand of expertise necessary to spot, develop, market and sell new celebrities is brought under one centralized roof. New names and story lines for potential aspirants will be designed in-house. Clinical psychologist might be employed to transform the individual’s personality to be completely consistent and consonant with the story line. An entire strategy for the transformation of the aspirant and his careful development in controlled settings are painstakingly developed. If need be, every facet of the aspirant’s life from his finances to where he lives, how he dresses, what he eats, with whom he is seen is carefully developed and coordinated.  Under the guidance of his manager, Ryan Phillippe undertook physical regimen involving diet, four and one-half hours of daily exercise, dictation and drama lessons improvements for his posture, appearance, and behavior. The guy can run five miles without even stopping for air.  

With this process of celebrity manufacturing, market researchers are employed to find out what the public wants from celebrities. These in turn are translated into specs to see if there is a potential celebrity in-house who already meets the criteria or whether a potential aspirant is malleable enough to be manufactured to fit the specifications as to what the public wants. Story lines are also carefully crafted to establish an identity for the potential aspirant. Celebrities are not only given new names to fit their new identities, but new identities are fashioned for them. Depending on how deep the internalization process is, in effect a whole new packaged identity is created. There is the pure selling approach, product improvement approach, and market fulfillment approach.  Ryan Phillippe wanted to be the best!  People do not realize how lucky they are; celebrities are a relatively new phenomenon. Back in the Victorian era, most people had little, if virtually no, direct contact with those who occupied high places. Vast numbers of people would not even be so fortunate as to secure a once-in-a-lifetime, fleeting glimpse of someone famous. It was really only in the 21^st century that social media, and TV, and photography, and rapid means of travel, and communication have made celebrities so accessible to the public. Ordinary people are now able to see people that they have only dreamt of previously. Nowadays, people take celebrities for granted and forget that a close up shot is not a natural way to view a star. It is an artifact, an invention, that was made possible by the medium of motion pictures.   

The camera is focused in on the eyes, the lips, the hair, the legs, and the chest of our heroes in ways that we never saw one another before. Seeing such things on a week-in week-out basis one cannot help developing an intense curiosity about what these people are like in other settings, how they live, what and whom they like, what they wear, eat, dream. One cannot help, but form an intense bond with such people without indulging in deep fantasies about them. It is precisely the human ability to fantasize that is in the heart of nearly all the forces which move the human psyche. Hollywood has quickly learned to apply its onscreen story writing talents off-screen to the lives of its starts.  A new genre was mastered—pseudo stories, which in turn gave rise to pseudo-events, staged events that has as their only purpose the creation of artificial newsworthy happenings so that the star could be vastly observed by the adoring public. The stars were deliberately created so that the masses could live out their fantasies. The process of intense identification was made infinitely easier if the stars were different, but not too different from their adorning fans, who could fantasize that each star was a more glamorous version of themselves. Besides, fame itself is hard enough to handle on its own. More than once, envy has been motiving enough to site the less some to assassination or murder. Celebrities are now so complicated that it requires the intense cooperation of other industries for it to operate.   

A deep sense of mystery has always been an important ingredient of real art. A true piece of art is never fully explainable. This is one of the reasons why we are continually drawn to it again and again. Public relations accounts for the more than 70 percent of all the information that is disseminated under the label as news in our society. That the decentralization of the celebrity/Public Relations industry has contributed to the deliberate production and distribution of partial or slanted truths at best and outright untruths at worst is disturbing, if not dangerous to the celebrities. Often times ignorance or deliberate falsification creates a negative side to fame, which most are incapable of seeing.  Hundreds of personal stories could be used to illustrate the “dark side” of celebrityhood. More often than not, it represents the final act of a genuine tragedy. There was a celebrity male who was not qualified for network-level journalism; however, he was hired by a TV station to boost the rating because he had a following and was very attractive. He was making over $1.2 million a year, but had hit rock bottom and was relegated to one-minute news updates, all the while withdrawing into the pathology of stardom. His ever-shrinking professional World was dominated by a core of doting personal attendants—groomers, wardrobe helpers and secretaries—who formed a “warm, unthreatening, loyal wall between him and the increasingly hostile World outside.” 

He got so weirded out on cocaine, his addiction was in full [swing] and he was snorting from morning till night. He was so paranoid by the time it was time to go to work, he would not go. However, he was labeled as someone who had more than a drug problem. People said that he was depressed, and his hands would shake.  He would get paid $394,964.01 for a TV episode, $59,244.06 for a cameo, up to $5,000.00 for a picture and handwritten letter (even if it was image engineered), $236.98 for a five-minute phone call, and his underwear would sale for $59.05 a pair (the cleaning lady was really cleaning up)!  Only the future can tell which young actors will be ready to bleed for their art and which will continue to work with ice cold Perrier in their veins. It would be wrong to conclude that, as a result of the industrialization of celebrities that is so rampant in our society, all mystery has vanished from the scene. Some sense of mystery is always necessary to the successful creation of celebrities and their appeal to the masses. All arts and artists constantly flirt on the borderline between heightening mystery and reducing it. Everything which humans create is a testimony to their nature. We should expect, therefore, that the kinds of reality, celebrities, like Ryan Phillippe experiences is a reflection of the general culture of the particular society in which his is situated. The dark side of the celebrity industry is our dark side as well.