I'm wondering if this trope should be renamed. It seems to me that a trope named Hollywood Old would be more like Hollywood Pudgy or Hollywood Homely. Where a character is called one thing when by all sane standards he or she isn't. So a reletively young character is called "old". A twenty-six-year-old model being called "over the hill." A thirty-four-year-old actress being told she's too old to play a thirty-four-year-old character. Example: Cybill, whose main character was constantly being rejecting from acting roles because of her age, including roles for characters the same age as her (and once a role for a character based on her), despite her still mostly being in her prime.
While this trope as described now would be more accurately called Reverse Dawson Casting, as has been mentioned before (thought obviously it would need a better name than that).
Happy New Year!
One critic believes that the disparity is caused by mommy issues: the producer who resents his or her mother isn't likely to cast an actress who looks like Mother in a sympathetic role.
if you can say 'which' critic said this put it back in, if not, zap the pop psychology.
Edited by joeyjojo hashtagsarestupid
Trope launched after a few days at YKTTW. Launched it manually, havn't gotten the hang of the technicak launch feature yet.
The YKTTW thread had three replies from people other then myself:
2010-04-30 08:45:45 by halfmillennium "Type 1 is presumably reverse Dawson Casting." - provided me with the link.
2010-05-02 07:39:05 by randomsurfer "Click the pencil at the top of the OP." - taught me how to edit the main entry.
added: 2010-05-02 09:48:45 by Mimimurlough "could this me Playing Gertrude?" - provided the link to that trope, and thus indirectly also to Playing Hamlet.
My thanks to all three tropers.
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First, three responses and nine hours isn't really very long or very much input, particularly when none of them included even one example. The suggested duration of a YKTTW is Three Rules Of Three: Three days, three examples, a name that three people agreed on with no serious objections from others.
That said, I think theres's a difference between Hollywood Old ( better name would be Hollywood Old Lady) (an older or old lady in Hollywood works rarely looks as old as a non-actree of the same age) and playing Gertrude (the actress playig a male character's mother is likely to be the same age as, or younger than, the actor playing her son.
I think this should go back to YKTTW for more input. There's no extra points for launching fast, but sketchy pages.
Edited by Madrugada ...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
Yeah, I should have waited one more day. (I did leave it on YKYYW for two days.) Thanks for the link to TROT, I'll keep it in mind for future tropes. :-)
I strongly disagree with making the trope itself gendered. The focus should be on how age is treated, not on Double Standard regarding how men and women are viewed. While a vast majority of the examples are surely going to be female, the trope should be open for male examples as well. If nothing else, the gender difference is better shown if the reason that all examples are female is a lack of male examples rather then that a male example wouldn't fit the trope. Besides, "Old Lady" sounds a bit Unfortunate Implications to me.
Edited by Xzenu
In itself, Hollywood Old isn't a gendered trope. However, Hollywood Old seems to be far more common with female characters then with male ones. One critic believes that the disparity is caused by mommy issues: the producer who resents his or her mother isn't likely to cast an actress who looks like Mother in a sympathetic role.
Hmm. I'm a bit ambivalent about the line between Older Than They Look and Hollowood Old.
Thoughts?
For starters, how much overlap should be considered falling within both tropes?
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Isn't this just an in-universe/meta distinction? Older Than They Look for when the improbable appearance of youth is real to other characters, and Hollywood Old for when it's merely a result of the casting? If that is how the two tropes break down, there shouldn't normally be any overlap.
Older Than They Look is attempting to de-squickify what looks loli, pedophilia or cradle-robbing by making the child-like one of the pair "older than they look" — she looks like a 13-year old, but is "really 17".
This is a disconnect between normal appearance and "typical Hollywood appearance". How many non-actress 63-year-olds look like this
◊? How many non-Hollywood 73-year-olds look like this
◊?
Hmm, is Older Then They Look restricted to characters that look VERY young? I thiught it was for all characters that are very older then they look . including, but not limited to, those who look underage although they are not.
Hmm. I will give this some further thought, read Older Then They Look again, and then either remove the reference entirely or rephrase it. Hollywood Old should be restricted to characters who, while not looking their age, still look adult.
Maso Tey, Mmm, good distinction. The overlap would be when the character's age isn't clearly specified so it can be hard to distinguish between the three tropes.
The trope needs a new picture, since according to a comment below the Agora entry, the film is an example of Age Lift, not this trope:
- Agora: Even in the first scenes, the character Hypatia ought to already be much older than her actress. By the end of the movie, the character was 60 or 65, while the actress still looked like 25 to 35.
- Given various sources of her birthdate, Hypatia might be as young as 45. Rachel Weisz was 39. Also, the film took aesthetic license in liberal dosage, so Hypatia might even be canonically in her 30s in the movie.
Edited by 69.172.221.4