10 Films to Watch if You Like A Star Is Born

One good film leads to another and Cinema Paradiso is the perfect place to follow up your favourite movies by searching for other titles along similar lines. We've already suggested what to watch after The Greatest Showman and Stan & Ollie. Now, we seek to tempt you with another choice selection, if you can't get enough of Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga in A Star Is Born.

Remakes are almost as old as cinema itself. From the moment Auguste and Louis Lumière demonstrated that there was money to be made from projecting moving images on to a screen in December 1895, rivals began copying their ideas. As American copyright law only prevented the direct duplication of film reels rather than protecting intellectual property, it was possible to produce shot-for-shot facsimiles of popular pictures.

We shouldn't be surprised, therefore, to learn that Bradley Cooper's A Star Is Born (2018) is the fourth feature of that name. Nor that the core storyline is a knock-off from another film altogether. As dozens of movies had satirised Hollywood during the silent era, RKO producer David O. Selznick decided to give a more truthful impression of life behind the scenes. In 1932, he commissioned former journalist Adela Rogers St Johns to devise a plot and she drew on the tragic marriage of silent siren Colleen Moore and her alcoholic producer husband John McCormick for What Price Hollywood? However, she must also have been aware of the 1926 suicide of director Tom Forman, while Selznick knew lots of stories of his own, having followed his father Lewis into the movie business. Consequently, he helped writers Jane Murfin, Ben Markson, Gene Fowler and Rowland Brown shape the narrative for director George Cukor.

He had just enjoyed a hit with The Royal Family of Broadway (1930), which ribbed the famous Barrymore dynasty, and Cukor encouraged Lowell Sherman to base the character of dipsomaniac director Maximilian Carey on John Barrymore, who just happened to be his brother-in-law. Sherman's slow-motion suicide was devised by special effects expert Slavko Vorkapich, who had joined with Robert Florey to co-direct the influential avant-garde short, The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra (1928).

Alcohol prevented onetime 'It Girl' Clara Bow from making a sensational comeback as waitress-turned-star, Mary Evans, and the part went to Constance Bennett, whose father (Richard) and sister (Joan) were also celebrated actors. But, while St Johns received an Oscar nomination for Best Story, the picture lost money. Undaunted, Selznick revisits the plotline five years later.

A Star Is Born (1937)

Having left RKO in 1933, Selznick set himself up as an independent producer and took a chance on an idea that director William Wellman had been developing with writer Robert Carson. Several other studios had passed on It Happened in Hollywood as it bore too close a similarity to What Price Hollywood? Indeed, a forensic comparison of the screenplays prompted RKO's lawyers to recommend a plagiarism suit. But, after wife Irene had praised the draft, Selznick asked father-in-law and MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer to used his influence to mollify the RKO front office and a distribution deal was struck with United Artists that allowed Selznick and Wellman to shoot in the new three-strip Technicolor process.

Changing the title to A Star Is Born, Selznick asked Dorothy Parker and writer husband Alan Campbell to polish the script. But, when he also hired Ring Lardner, Jr., Budd Schulberg and John Lee Mahin to rework certain scenes, Wellman threatened to sue. However, he was talked out of taking legal action by his agent, Myron Selznick, who was the producer's brother. In a more touching gesture, Wellman found a role for ex-wife Helene Chadwick, a faded star whom he had met at a party in 1919, while he was still serving as a pilot in the Lafayette Flying Corps.

This 'couldn't make it up' element extended to the scenario, which made reference to the crumbling showbiz marriages of Marshall Neilan and Blanche Sweet, Al Jolson and Ruby Keeler, John Gilbert and Ina Claire, and Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Fay, as well as the suicide of actor John Bowers, who had perished in a Malibu sailing accident the previous year. In what many considered to be an act of bad taste, the picture also mirrored the funeral of MGM producer Irving G. Thalberg, who had died during production and whose actress widow, Norma Shearer, had been mobbed by fans paying their respects. Even the film's most famous line was a steal, as Dorothy Davenport had appeared on the radio soon after the death of her morphine-addicted actor husband, Wallace Reid, and introduced herself with the words, 'This is Mrs Wallace Reid.'

Life also imitated art, albeit in reverse. Although Fredric March was cast as washed-up actor Norman Maine, his career was going from strength to strength. By contrast, despite playing Esther Blodgett, the North Dakota farm girl who finds film fame as Vicki Lester, Janet Gaynor's heyday had rather come and gone, Indeed, a decade had passed since she has won the inaugural Academy Award for Best Actress for her work in three features: FW Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans and Frank Borzage's 7th Heaven (both 1927) and Street Angel (1928).

Slipping cheeky impressions of Greta Garbo, Mae West and Katharine Hepburn into her excellent performance, Gaynor would be nominated again, as would March and Wellman. Ironically, he would win for Best Original Story rather than for his direction, which deftly captured the Tinseltown mood by filming in such iconic locations as the Hollywood Bowl and Grauman's Chinese Theatre. At the awards ceremony, Wellman marched across the room and handed his statuette to Selznick with the words, 'Here, you deserve this. You wrote more of it than I did.'

A Star Is Born (1954)

Having topped the end-of-year box-office charts. Selznick considered making a sequel about a child star, entitled Heartbreak Town. Budd Schulberg was reported to be working on a script with Marshall Neilan, a veteran director whose bottle battle had helped shape both Sherman and March's characters. According to the New York Times, this was one of 15 Hollywood-themed features in development following the success of A Star Is Born. But 17 years would pass before the material resurfaced.

Selznick had sold the rights on the collapse of Selznick International in the mid-1940s and they had been acquired by Edward Alperson, who formed a company called Transcona with Sid Luft, who had done much to relaunch the career of Judy Garland after her well-publicised departure from MGM with sell-out 1951 concert performances at the London Palladium and the Palace Theatre in New York. Having played Esther Blodgett opposite Walter Pidgeon in Cecil B. DeMille's 1942 Lux Radio Theatre production, Garland had been desperate to make A Star Is Born. But Louis B. Meyer felt it would be bad for her screen image if her character was married to a drunk.

The irony was, of course, that Garland was no stranger to addiction herself, having become hooked on the pills that MGM had started giving her as a teenager in order to suppress her appetite and help her cope with her hectic schedule. So, when Warners offered Luft a chance to produce the picture, Garland was delighted, especially as her director would be George Cukor, who had stopped her from wearing a blonde wig as Dorothy Gale during his brief tenure of The Wizard of Oz (1939). He might also have directed Garland in Meet Me in St Louis (1944), but the position passed to Vincente Minnelli, who would become Garland's second husband. The break-up of the marriage had contributed to the psychological strain that had caused Garland to be fired off George Sidney's Annie Get Your Gun and Stanley Donen's Royal Wedding (1951) and she hadn't meaningfully appeared in front of a camera since shooting the 'Get Happy' routine for Summer Stock (both 1950), the last of her collaborations with Gene Kelly.

However, Fred Astaire had headlined a more sombre showbiz study in Vincente Minnelli's The Band Wagon (1953) and the 1954 remake of A Star Is Born followed its lead by highlighting the pitfalls of celebrity and the harsh realities of the entertainment business.

Screenwriter Moss Hart tweaked the plot to make Norman Maine an actor rather than a director. But, despite Garland's entreaties, Cary Grant refused to play a has-been and Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, Frank Sinatra, Gregory Peck, Glenn Ford, Ray Milland, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Tyrone Power and Stewart Granger all followed suit before James Mason pipped Errol Flynn to the role. William Powell also declined the role of studio chief Oliver Niles.

Keen to keep the strain off Garland, Cukor rejected the chance to shoot in 3D and ditched the flawed WarnerScope format for CinemaScope. But, despite being enthusiastic about Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin's songs, Garland soon slipped back into her old ways. Longtime musical arranger Hugh Martin quit after a row during the recording of 'Lose That Long Face' and Luft persuaded MGM to loan trusted mentor Roger Edens to supervise the rest of the session. His work with Leonard Gershe on the 18-minute medley, 'Born in a Trunk', was particularly inspired and Garland's performance led Time magazine to call the film 'the greatest one-woman show in modern movie history'.

However, her unprofessionalism led the production to drag on for nine months and choreographers Jack Donahue and Richard Barstow directed the last numbers after Cukor had left for India to make Bhowani Junction (1956). Moreover, his absence meant that he was unable to prevent Jack Warner from cutting 27 minutes from Cukor's approved cut. Word of the excisions supposedly contributed to the drop off in box-office business and the film lost money after becoming the second most expensive picture in Hollywood history after King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1946), which had been produced by Selznick. Garland and Luft were almost ruined by the failure, although he still had enough loose change by buying the furniture from the film for the couple's own home.

Three decades were to pass before archivist Ronald Haver was able to embark upon a remarkable restoration that took the running time back to 176 minutes and allowed audiences to understand what Groucho Marx had meant when he described Garland's Oscar loss to Grace Kelly in George Seaton's The Country Girl as 'the biggest robbery since Brinks'.

A Star Is Born (1976)

Despite excelling as Norman Maine, particularly during the gripping Oscar telecast sequence, James Mason also missed out on an Academy Award, as he had the misfortune to be up against Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954). Yet, while Mason found himself a niche in Hollywood after giving another compelling performance in Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life (1956), Garland didn't make another film for six years. Moreover, by the time she died at the age of 47 in 1969, her place as America's favourite female singer had been taken by Barbra Streisand. They had duetted on 'Happy Days Are Here Again' and 'Get Happy' on Garland's TV show in October 1963 before Streisand had taken Broadway by storm and won the Oscar for Best Actress on debut in William Wyler's Fanny Brice biopic, Funny Girl (1968).

While the Wellman and Cukor versions established the narrative parameters, it was Frank Pierson's 1976 remake of A Star Is Born that proved the primary influence on Bradley Cooper's reboot. For a start, it switched the drama's milieu from the movie to the music business and swapped the Oscars for the Grammys. But it also introduced the element of the adoring crowds who flock to the stadium gigs that drive John Norman Howard to party as hard as he plays. Moreover, Pierson and co-scenarists John Gregory Dunne and novelist Joan Didion also changed the heroine's lot, so that Esther Hoffman was less a starry-eyed hopeful than a grassroots toiler who plays minor league venues with her backing group, The Oreos (Venetta Fields and Clydie King).

But the husband-and-wife team of Dunne and Didion had originally offered their script to director Peter Bogdanovich, as a vehicle for his actress partner, Cybil Shepherd. They passed on Rainbow Road, as did Liza Minnelli, who had won an Oscar for her performance as Sally Bowles in Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972) and didn't want to take on a role that had been played so memorably by her mother. Having been nominated for essaying Billie Holiday in Sidney J. Furie's Lady Sings the Blues (1972), Diana Ross also nixed the project, as did the married duo of Carly Simon and James Taylor.

Streisand was persuaded to accept the picture by her hairdresser boyfriend, Jon Peters, who had designed the short wig that she had worn in Peter Yates's For Pete's Sake (1974). Acting as executive producer, Streisand had tried to persuade Elvis Presley to play Howard, despite the fact he hadn't made a movie since William A. Graham's Change of Habit (1969). Manager Colonel Tom Parker was keen to see Elvis resume his screen career. But, while he demanded top billing and a huge fee for his services, Parker didn't like the idea of The King being depicted as a washed-up junkie, as he was making a fortune from the Las Vegas bookings that had kept coming in after Presley had reinvented himself with the '68 Comback Special (1968). Ironically, following his death in August 1977, it became clear that Presley had actually had more in common with John Norman Howard than his fans had realised.

With Marlon Brando unavailable, Streisand turned to her old classmate at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. But, while Neil Diamond was eager to branch into acting, his touring schedule prevented him from signing up. Consequently, Streisand was teamed with Oxford graduate Kris Kristofferson, who had enjoyed a string of hits since the mid-1960s and had proved himself an imposing screen presence in Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974).

Rumours circulated that Kristofferson had modelled his performance on Jim Morrison but he conceded there was more than a hint of autobiography about his interpretation of the self-destructive rocker, a gambit that was encouraged by the debuting Pierson, who had won an Oscar for the screenplay for Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon (1975). Streisand also allowed something of her own personality to shade her characterisation, as her costumes came entirely from her own wardrobe, while she took writing credits on two of her songs, 'Lost Inside of You' and 'Evergreen', which earned her and lyricist Paul Williams the Academy Award for Best Song. She also appears to have directed several scenes, as she was less than impressed with Pierson, who got his own back by writing the tell-all article 'My Battles With Barbra and Jon' in The Village Voice, whose review of the film was famously headlined 'A Bore is Starred'.

Other reviews insisted on pointing out that Streisand's Esther was too assured from the outset and lacked the vulnerability that had made Gaynor and Garland's performances so heartbreaking. In many ways, Lady Gaga fell into the same trap in the 2018 revival, as her brand was equally too strong for audiences to buy into her as someone suffering from self-doubt. Moreover, each film shares a musical crossover problem, as it's highly unlikely that the audiences baying for Kristofferson and Cooper's brand of propulsive country rock are going to swoon over the respective easy listening and experimental pop by Streisand and Gaga. As the public keep averring, however, critics know nothing and, despite the fact that Streisand and Kristofferson were snubbed by the Academy after landing Golden Globe nominations, their soundtrack album went on to become a bestseller. Moreover, the film did such brisk business that it was only bested in the end-of-year charts by John G. Avildsen's Rocky (1976), which went on to scoop the Oscar for Best Picture.

A Star Is Born (2018)

The secret of a good story is that it can be reinvented and rumours started circulating in 2002 that Will Smith was going to play the rising star to Jennifer Lopez's self-destructive diva for director Joel Schumacher. Nothing came of the project, however, and a decade passed before news broke that Clint Eastwood was going to update the scenario with Beyoncé Knowles and Bradley Cooper as his leads. Ultimately, Beyoncé had to withdraw after becoming pregnant, while Cooper felt he was too young at 36 to play a has-been. But Cooper still hankered after strutting the stage as a rocker and, when the opportunity arose to make his directorial debut with Lady Gaga as his co-star, he grasped it with both hands and the third remake of A Star Is Born got the green light.

It took four years to realise the project, during which time Cooper had to learn to play the guitar and the piano, while also shadowing Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder to get an insight into the authentic rock idol lifestyle. He also had to lower his register to create Jackson Maine's whisky-soused voice and, ironically, offered Sam Elliott the part of his minder brother after listening to tapes of his basso profondo tones. Cooper also had to write some songs and a screenplay, although he kept the core that Will Fetters had produced for Eastwood and worked with him and Eric Roth to interweave autobiographical details about himself, Gaga and Elliott, as well as references to the previous versions of the story.

He also needed to convince the suits at Warners that he was the right man to call the shots and produced a 10-minute showreel with cinematographer Janusz Kaminski to suggest his vision. Furthermore, he had to persuade them that Gaga was the best fit for the role of Ally. Cooper had been convinced the moment he saw her perform Edith Piaf's 'La Vie en Rose' at a charity concert. But it took phone footage of the pair duetting on the folk song 'Midnight Special' to sway the Warner bean counters.

Despite this vote of confidence, Cooper was only given a budget of $38 million and a 42-day shooting schedule. Consequently, he had to beg favours to film the gig footage. As Lukas Nelson and Promise of the Real were playing Jackson's backing band, the former's famous father, Willie Nelson, gave them the eight minutes before he went on at the Stagecoach Festival to shoot the opening scene. Nelson's co-star in Alan Rudolph's Songwriter (1984) had been Kris Kristofferson and he allowed Cooper to film in a four-minute gap before his entrance in front of 80,000 people at Glastonbury. In another nod to past versions, Gaga got to sing the closing number, 'I'll Never Love Again', at the same Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles where Judy Garland had performed 'The Man That Got Away'.

Such grace notes dot the action, as Cooper drew on both the picture's three predecessors and such musical classics as Bob Fosse's All That Jazz (1979), Steve Kloves's The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), Rob Marshall's Chicago (2002) and John Carney's Once (2006). He also took inspiration from Nick Nolte and Rosanna Arquette's depiction of an artist and his muse in Martin Scorsese's 'Life Lessons' segment in New York Stories (1989). But this is just one of the themes explored in a love story about fulfilling dreams that is also about self-destruction, co-dependence and substance abuse. It's also about the demise of old school rebellious rock and its replacement by plastic, corporately marketed pop and it takes a de-gazed, unisex version of Roy Orbison's 'Pretty Woman' to make Jackson realise what a relic he has become.

Curiously, however, Cooper's retelling is more about Jackson than Ally, as its focus is on the end of the patriarchal system that men have so long taken for granted. Moreover, its potency lies in the fact that while Jackson isn't jealous of Ally's success, he's crushed by the realisation that his day is done and it didn't really need her snippy British manager (Rafi Gavron) to tell him to leave the stage. Perhaps that's why the film only converted one of its eight Oscar nominations?