I remember like yesterday my 1990 stint in Hollywood, meant to create the so called ‘Nug-Story’ about the Hollywood Walk of Fame for WXIA TV-Atlanta, for which I had worked for several years as part of Georgia-to-Georgia journalistic exchange right at the start of that ill-famed Perestroika (reconstruction) in the Soviet Union. I could not believe it was me, striding along Hollywood Boulevard where there are embedded thousands of five-pointed stars, made of marble and brass, and reflecting the achievement of actors, musicians, directors, producers, musical and theatrical groups and fictional characters.
It is an attractive destination for millions of tourists annually from around the world. Several years ago, the trend was emulated by our entertainment industry decision makers. That’s the way it had started here – the outrageous star mania. The main conclusion of my television story in America was that the star was usually dedicated to a persona grata based on his or her wide popular recognition. In principle, the same mechanism is working here in Georgia, but certain peculiarities of our national character, a proclivity for widespread self-adulation, an over-blown sense of jealousy and most deplorable absence of fairness in judgment have made those marble-and-brass stars in the asphalt one more additional apple of discord in this country. My moderate sense of reason and objectivity is telling me that the introduction of the Hollywood star-awarding phenomenon has not worked in Georgia as flawlessly as it has in the United States, and was absolutely irrelevant to have it introduced here by automatically carbon-copying somebody else’s culture. In the first place, our small country of only several million people, living here, tends to generate such a preposterous number of stars and starlets that our pitifully shrunk land will never be able to accommodate so many marble-and-brass stars with all those names on them. Excuse my bitterly darkened humor please! The truth is that there will not be enough room on the pavements, mostly because the stars are instilled in front of the theater buildings with which the stars’ names are associated; there is no special street or alley in Tbilisi, allotted for this purpose, like it is in Hollywood. These pathetic Hollywood-Tbilisi comparisons of mine sound a little funny, don’t they? Secondly, the decision about somebody’s stardom is often made at the discretion of a bunch of administrators who are not very far from regular human weaknesses. Thirdly, the aspirants for the star honor and status would bend over backwards to have their names embossed down on the pavement into a five point purplish marble-and-brass star. And finally, the cherished star-in-the- pavement has a detestable quality of triggering discord and quarrels among our famous entertainers. There is something flagrantly irrelevant in this sickening hullabaloo, procreating envy, hostility, covetousness and bitterness. On top of all that, stars are dedicated only to regular living stars, not to the dead megastars. Unfair, unfair, so egregiously unfair! Would it not be more righteous and reasonable to direct all the funds and efforts, consumed by the indigenous star mania towards rescuing from poverty the socially unprotected part of our population, especially the indigent families and hard-up orphanages? Who would not agree that every little help will count for those who badly need it. Isn’t it time for us to say a big vociferous ‘No’ to anything that sounds illogical and incongruent? And by the way, the bigger and the shinier the stars of stage and screen, the less they need those five-point marble-and-brass stars under our feet.