INTRODUCTION

Studies in star phenomena have paid considerable attention to the working of stardom in intra-and transcultural appropriations of stars’ images (Dyer 1986, Jenkins 1992, McDonald 2000, Hills 2002, Chin and Hitchcock-Morimoto 2013). A great part of this attention has been dedicated to Hollywood stardom – an unquestionable blueprint for star/celebrity systems and the image-making process in both mainstream and oppositional practices of cultural production. As a vast term of a significant importance for most cultural development, Hollywood, although measured by its achievements in cinema, extends far beyond the filmic context, and when talking about it today, we talk less about a filmic phenomenon than about a cultural concept representative of various levels of cultural manufacture from filming aesthetics, working styles and presentation codes to manners and modes of artistic expression (Neale 1998, Schatz 2004). The change in theorising Hollywood is perhaps due to the impact its forms and styles had exerted on the culture industry for almost half a century of its monopoly over American film. During its golden period from 1927 to 1963, Hollywood created star iconographies: images, lifestyles, behavioural patterns and archetypes that did, and still do, appeal to Western and non-Western systems of culture. Becoming a potent fantasy-making arena, Hollywood has operated within a complex network of cultural and economic markets that partake in the deployment and management as well as recycling and exploitation of fantasy. Many of them do it in ways that exceed the fantasy's filmic environment.

A system that perhaps best reflects on the non-cinematic uses of filmic utopias is fandom. Represented by a variety of audience phenomena, it plays a crucial role for the distribution and maintenance of film images. Fandom performs an interpretative function used for transcoding imagined worlds onto discourses of reality. Being ‘associated with the cultural tastes of subordinated formations of people, particularly those disempowered by any combination of gender, age, class, and race’ (Fisk 1992: 30 in Gray et al. 2007: 2), fandom is a space in which the imaginary turns into the real through the transposition of film fiction onto realities of everyday life. Although it interplays with various levels of cinematic creation, fandom predominantly engages with characters, embodiments and impersonations encoded through star images and vice versa.