Why Hollywood Has No Successors For Dolly, Curry, Or Cullen

Last week was a harsh one for culture lovers. In less than 48 hours, we lost a trio of titans. 

Dolly Parton’s death was obviously the hardest blow. She wasn’t just a gifted country music singer. She wasn’t even a star. She was an icon, an embodiment of America, as much as John Wayne. 

For his part, Tim Curry was one of the last of the old-school character actors like Roddy McDowall and Joseph Calleia, a man who could play opposite Kermit the Frog or Sean Connery and fit perfectly, regardless of genre. Peter Cullen was probably the least known of the three, but multiple generations loved him as the life force of the heroic Optimus Prime in multiple incarnations of Transformers. His return to voice Optimus was a major reason why Michael Bay’s big-screen adaptations of Transformers succeeded. 

Their deaths would be hard on any occasion. But they hit harder now because it’s obvious they have no successors. Worse, there is no longer a structure in place to create successors. 

Talking about successors sounds cold, reducing a person to a mere product. However, for much of Hollywood’s existence, grooming successors for its stars was just part of show business. As Denis Gifford put it in his 1973 book, The Pictorial History of Horror Movies: It was an iron law of Hollywood that every star needed a successor. 

Some of the clearest examples of this law come from the early horror movies. Lon Chaney Sr. was the first true horror star, after he brought the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Phantom of the Opera to life. When Chaney left Universal for MGM, Universal didn’t panic but replaced him with Conrad Veidt (best remembered today as Major Strasser in Casablanca) to star in The Man Who Laughs, since Veidt, after Chaney, was the best-known actor of macabre roles. A more permanent solution was found when director James Whale discovered an unknown bit player named Boris Karloff and cast him in Universal’s Frankenstein. The rest, as they say, is history. From the ’30s through the ’50s, Karloff was the king of horror. 

This same process was practiced across studios, genres, and decades. When Rudy Valentino, the silent movie era’s greatest romantic leading man, went on strike, Paramount found a substitute in a 22-year-old Jacob Krantz, who, after training and a Hollywoodized pedigree (which included grafting European nobility onto his family tree), was introduced to the world as Ricardo Cortez. After Valentino died in 1926, Cortez was one of the leading men slipped into his place.

Marilyn Monroe was the Golden Era sex symbol par excellence. But, in the mid-’50s, 20th Century Fox set up not one, but two possible replacements for Monroe: Sheree North (whom Fox even got on the cover of Life magazine) and Jayne Mansfield. And on it went. Errol Flynn succeeded Douglas Fairbanks. Burt Lancaster succeeded Flynn. Lana Turner replaced Jean Harlow. Even Karloff was replaced by Vincent Price and Christopher Lee. 

In doing this, golden age Hollywood was just doing what professions have practically always done to perpetuate themselves. Since no one is immortal, guilds, crafts, and artisans took on apprentices. Renaissance artists, for example, trained by copying their masters’ works. Once they had acquired the necessary skills, the apprentices might be assigned specific figures in a new work. The studio of da Vinci’s master, Verrocchio, for example, was an assembly line, with different apprentices assigned different parts of a new painting. The idea was that copying a master would teach and hone technique; the individual’s interests and proclivities would eventually give him his own style or, at least, his own flourish. 

As harsh as it seems, the system worked. Throughout the golden age, Hollywood made new stars from all walks of life (Lana Turner was found in the Top Hat Malt Shop), and the process produced acceptable fare, good movies, and even masterpieces. So what happened? How did we go from a Hollywood that, in one year, 1984, was capable of releasing a cornucopia of great films, including The Terminator, Ghostbusters, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, to what we have now? 

Several things. One was the almost total abandonment of popular movie genres. George MF Washington, a Substacker who knows the movie business inside and out, wrote at the start of this year that action movies of the kind that made Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, and Chuck Norris stars — movies that were cheap to make and unapologetically masculine — were dumped by Hollywood.

“This happened,” MF says, “not because these movies stopped being profitable, but because they no longer work within the broken framework of modern Hollywood’s cultural and economic calculations.” And a large part of that broken framework is an unabashed hatred of men. In its lust for “equality” (communistic egalitarianism), the lords of Hollywood decided men had to be cut down for women to be “equal.” This is why #MeToo quickly became “Believe All (leftist) Women,” which really means “Suspect All Men.” 

And it wasn’t just action movies. Old-style romcoms like Pretty Woman, The Holiday, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and Return to Me are all verboten now because they violate the Bechdel Test (which was supposed to just be a joke). The practical result is that what George MF Washington calls “programmers” — inexpensive films practically guaranteed to make money because they have a built-in audience — died away, and the space to find new stars shrank. Die Hard, for example, was a programmer that put Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman into the limelight. You cannot make new stars if there are no new movies people want to see. 

And, for the most part, the movies coming out now are not movies people want to see because, in many cases, they are not movies. One Battle After Another, the Best Picture winner at the 2026 Oscars, was just a violence-glorifying screed about white supremacy and illegal aliens. The End of Oak Street was Anne Hathaway girlbossing against dinosaurs while her loser husband gets eaten. The Star Wars sequels and the fifth Indiana Jones entry turned our childhood heroes into sad, broken, old men. 

Of course, even if Hollywood had not cut its own throat by killing the star-making process, it’s possible Hollywood would still be struggling because now, with social media, we can see our stars without any tinsel. And, oftentimes, it isn’t pretty. Who can forget Sean Penn admitting he had a voodoo doll of Ann Coulter with “cigarette burns in some funny places?” Or Marina Sirtis saying Texans freezing to death was them getting what they voted for? Or Mark Ruffalo saying he can’t be friends with Jewish actors unless they cheer on antisemitic terrorists? Or Andrew Garfield treating J.K. Rowling like Voldemort because she thinks women should not be surrounded by men in dresses? 

Thank God movies and records made Dolly, Curry, and Cullen immortal — because the odds are not in our favor that we will see the likes of their entertainment for a while. 

Nathan Stone is a storyteller who looks at culture, politics, and religion from a different point of view on his YouTube channel Nate on the Stone, and who exercises moral imagination in his writing. A lover of books, music, and the outdoors (especially with dogs), he earned a master’s degree in American history from Liberty University in 2016. Subscribe to his channel and follow him on Twitter.