{"id":2654477,"date":"2026-09-04T07:48:02","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T11:48:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignwhy-hollywood-has-no-successors-for-dolly-curry-or-cullen\/"},"modified":"2026-09-04T08:02:07","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T12:02:07","slug":"utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignwhy-hollywood-has-no-successors-for-dolly-curry-or-cullen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignwhy-hollywood-has-no-successors-for-dolly-curry-or-cullen\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Hollywood Has No Successors For Dolly, Curry, Or Cullen"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">20<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Futm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignwhy-hollywood-has-no-successors-for-dolly-curry-or-cullen%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2654477&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>Last week marked the loss of three influential cultural icons: Dolly Parton, Tim Curry, and Peter Cullen. Parton\u2019s death was especially impactful, as she symbolized American entertainment and culture. Curry was a versatile character actor capable of roles across genres, while Cullen\u2019s voice brought life to Optimus Prime in the Transformers franchise, contributing significantly to its success.<\/p>\n<p>Their deaths highlight a broader issue: Hollywood\u2019s failure to groom successors for its stars due to the decline of conventional star-making systems. Historically, Hollywood replaced aging icons with new talents through a structured process akin to apprenticeships and studio assembly lines, which produced new stars and maintained artistic standards.<\/p>\n<p>over time,Hollywood shifted away from this system,notably abandoning popular genres like action films and romcoms,which traditionally helped cultivate new stars. This shift has been influenced by cultural changes, including a rejection of masculine-focused films and a focus on social justice narratives that frequently enough vilify or diminish men. The result is a decline in star-making movies and a shrinking pool of new icons, compounded by social media exposing stars\u2019 personal flaws, further eroding their mythic status.<\/p>\n<p>Today\u2019s films ofen fail to attract audiences or produce new stars,and many current movies are criticized for lacking artistic substance. Social and cultural shifts have contributed to this decline, making the future uncertain for the kinds of entertainment icons that shaped Hollywood\u2019s golden age.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Last week was a harsh one for culture lovers. In less than 48 hours, we lost a trio of titans. <\/p>\n<p>Dolly Parton\u2019s death was obviously the hardest blow. She wasn\u2019t just a gifted country music singer. She wasn\u2019t even a star. She was an icon, an embodiment of America, as much as John Wayne. <\/p>\n<p>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 <em>Transformers<\/em>. His return to voice Optimus was a major reason why Michael Bay\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/comic-writer-alan-moore-said-hes-donating-his-dc-movie-royalties-to-black-lives-matter\/\" title=\"Alan Moore, comic writer, donates DC movie royalties to Black Lives Matter.\">big-screen adaptations<\/a> of <em>Transformers<\/em> succeeded. <\/p>\n<p>Their deaths would be hard on any occasion. But they hit harder now because it\u2019s obvious they have no successors. Worse, there is no longer a structure in place to create successors. <\/p>\n<p>Talking about successors sounds cold, reducing a person to a mere product. However, for much of Hollywood\u2019s existence, grooming successors for its stars was just part of show business. As Denis Gifford put it in his 1973 book, <em>The Pictorial History of Horror Movies<\/em>: It was an iron law of Hollywood that every star needed a successor. <\/p>\n<p>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\u2019t panic but replaced him with Conrad Veidt (best remembered today as Major Strasser in <em>Casablanca<\/em>) to star in <em>The Man Who Laughs<\/em>, 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\u2019s <em>Frankenstein. <\/em>The rest, as they say, is history. From the \u201930s through the \u201950s, Karloff was the king of horror. <\/p>\n<p>This same process was practiced across studios, genres, and decades. When Rudy Valentino, the silent movie era\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n<p>Marilyn Monroe was <em>the <\/em>Golden Era sex symbol <em>par excellence. <\/em>But, in the mid-\u201950s, 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. <\/p>\n<p>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\u2019 works. Once they had acquired the necessary skills, the apprentices might be assigned specific figures in a new work. The studio of da Vinci\u2019s 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\u2019s interests and proclivities would eventually give him his own style or, at least, his own flourish. <\/p>\n<p>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 <em>The Terminator<\/em>, <em>Ghostbusters<\/em>, and <em>Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom<\/em>, to what we have now? <\/p>\n<p>Several things.\u00a0One 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 \u2014 movies that were cheap to make and unapologetically masculine \u2014 were dumped by Hollywood. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis happened,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/thecontinentalcongress.substack.com\/p\/new-year-observations-and-predictions\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">MF says<\/a>, \u201cnot because these movies stopped being profitable, but because they no longer work within the broken framework of modern Hollywood\u2019s cultural and economic calculations.\u201d And a large part of that broken framework is an unabashed hatred of men. In its lust for \u201cequality\u201d (communistic egalitarianism), the lords of Hollywood decided men had to be cut down for women to be \u201cequal.\u201d This is why #MeToo quickly became \u201cBelieve All (leftist) Women,\u201d which really means \u201cSuspect All Men.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>And it wasn\u2019t just action movies. Old-style romcoms like <em>Pretty Woman<\/em>, <em>The Holiday<\/em>, <em>My Big Fat Greek Wedding<\/em>, and <em>Return to Me<\/em> are all verboten now because they violate the <a href=\"https:\/\/bechdeltest.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bechdel Test<\/a> (which was supposed to just be <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2023\/jul\/02\/alison-bechdel-test-dykes-to-watch-out-for-cartoonist-interview\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">a joke<\/a>). The practical result is that what George MF Washington calls \u201cprogrammers\u201d \u2014 inexpensive films practically guaranteed to make money because they have a built-in audience \u2014 died away, and the space to find new stars shrank. <em><a href=\"https:\/\/thecontinentalcongress.substack.com\/p\/when-hollywood-did-it-right-die-hard\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Die Hard<\/a><\/em>, 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. <\/p>\n<p>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. <em>One Battle After Another<\/em>, the Best Picture winner at the 2026 Oscars, was just a violence-glorifying screed about white supremacy and illegal aliens. <em>The End of Oak Street<\/em> was Anne Hathaway girlbossing against dinosaurs while her loser husband gets eaten. The <em>Star Wars<\/em> sequels and the fifth <em>Indiana Jones<\/em> entry turned our childhood heroes into sad, broken, old men. <\/p>\n<p>Of course, even if Hollywood had not cut its own throat by killing the star-making process, it\u2019s possible Hollywood would still be struggling because now, with social media, we can see our stars without any tinsel. And, oftentimes, it isn\u2019t pretty. Who can forget Sean Penn admitting he had a voodoo doll of Ann Coulter with \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.huffpost.com\/entry\/sean-penn-admits-to-havin_n_18049\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">cigarette burns in some funny places<\/a>?\u201d Or Marina Sirtis saying <a href=\"https:\/\/boundingintocomics.com\/uncategorized\/star-trek-and-young-justice-actress-marina-sirtis-says-texans-get-what-they-deserve\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Texans freezing to death was them getting what they voted for<\/a>? Or Mark Ruffalo saying <a href=\"https:\/\/www.yahoo.com\/entertainment\/videos\/mark-ruffalo-202910273.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">he can\u2019t be friends with Jewish actors unless they cheer on antisemitic terrorists<\/a>? Or Andrew Garfield <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodintoto.com\/andrew-garfield-j-k-rowling-voldemort\/?utm_source=www.hollywoodintoto.com&#038;utm_medium=recirculation&#038;utm_campaign=pubexchange_module\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">treating J.K. Rowling like Voldemort<\/a> because she thinks women should not be surrounded by men in dresses? <\/p>\n<p>Thank God movies and records made Dolly, Curry, and Cullen immortal \u2014 because the odds are not in our favor that we will see the likes of their entertainment for a while. <\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>      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&#8217;s degree in American history from Liberty University in 2016. Subscribe to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/channel\/UCAf9yqD5ewDue7gE8NDUmqg?view_as=subscriber\">his channel<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/nes_nathan\">follow him on Twitter<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hollywood&#8217;s star-making era has ended<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1686,"featured_media":2654478,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/dolly-q.png","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33651],"tags":[39469,37184,4361,4185,74885],"class_list":["post-2654477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-western-journal","tag-dolly-parton","tag-entertainment-industry","tag-hollywood","tag-legacy","tag-successors"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/dolly-q.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2654477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1686"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2654477"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2654477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2654481,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2654477\/revisions\/2654481"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2654478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2654477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2654477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2654477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}