HOLLYWOOD IS A fallen empire. Over the years, the industry has lost power, prestige, and its distribution monopoly. But a more telling void in the current landscape is highlighted by the Grand Illusion's summer series of six classic films. Simply put, where are all the blondes?

Golden Era Hollywood Blondes used to be Galateas: adopted, crafted, and subsequently longed for by froggish Pygmalions, often to the detriment of movie mogul and movie star alike. Acting like lovesick Kanes slapping up opera houses (a movie fiction itself based on the disastrous controlling of a Blonde's career), Howard Hughes and David Selznick threw away fortunes to convince audiences that we should share their objects of desire. Such behavior was monstrously and unforgivably egotistic, misogynistic, and absurd--but it speaks to a passion that, for the most part, has been lost in today's obsession with the bottom line. The town then was at least more frank in acting out its own carnal desires--this was the period, after all, when the lengths of movies were determined not by test screenings but the endurance of Harry Cohn's ass. Blondes weren't stars because we responded to their naturalism and freshness, but because every step of the way, those in the studio machine were humming to make their latest manufactured product look her platinum best.

There are, I know, plenty of actresses today, such as Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, and Reese Witherspoon, whose locks are as golden as ever; but being a Hollywood Blonde used to mean more than just hair color. Ticking off the half-dozen ladies featured in the Grand Illusion series, one remembers fondly the knowing voluptuousness of Jean Harlow, the witty (at times Wildean) sexual epigrams of Mae West, and the sculptured perfection of Marlene Dietrich. Not to mention the clangorous variations on Small Town Girl Makes It Big offered by three fascinating... I guess you'd have to call them stars: Lana Turner's melodramatic voraciousness; the battered kewpie-doll availability of Marilyn Monroe; and the shy, wounded longing of Kim Novak, the only real actress of the trio. Novak never made such naked grabs for respectability as, say, tearfully exploiting a personal tragedy or courting an acclaimed playwright, but she turned in several excellent performances, and in Vertigo, at least, one that's immortal.

So, is it sexiness that's gone by the wayside? Not in the least; plenty of today's actresses, including those mentioned earlier, can be just as devastatingly erotic as the women of yesterday. What's missing is the sense of submitting to fate, of following the instructions of others. Being discovered working behind the counter at Schwab's (or for that matter, engaging in the tawdry negotiations of the closed-door casting session) was only the first part of the dream of making it. After signing the contract came the dance and elocution lessons, the complete makeover, the surgical alterations, the new name--all that and whatever else was demanded, paid for by the studio heads, of course, who also got to decree what, exactly, those changes should be. West was always her own woman (that's how she made hefty middle-age so desirable), but Dietrich was practically created by Josef von Sternberg; Turner and Monroe were micromanaged by their studios (not always to their best interests), Novak could never hide how uncomfortable she was "acting," and even before Hollywood got a hold on Harlow, her mother had molded her into what a star should be.

The possessive, even contemptuous attitude of the industry toward the women it remade in its own image can be fully heard in Howard Hawks' remarks about his discovery of Lauren Bacall (born Betty Joan Perske, she was actually spotted modeling on a Harper's cover and was brought to the director's attention by his wife, Nancy "Slim" Hawks) to interviewer Peter Bogdanovich:

Was Bacall happy to be transformed?

"I don't know quite what you mean by that. She was perfectly happy and made the whole picture in a kind of daze of happiness."

I mean, she obviously allowed you to manipulate her into what you wanted for the character.

"Oh, sure, she did anything we asked her to. She hadn't had any experience whatsoever."

Betty Joan Perske's voice was dropped to its lowest register, her 19-year-old diffidence was eased into a provocative insolence, and of course her hair was altered. Yet in Hawks' blasé assessment and his no-harm-done dismissal of how she might have felt about it, such re-creation is very much business as usual. Stars aren't born, they're made. (Those who demand tidy moral comeuppances to salacious anecdotes might relish the thought that Hawks lusted after Bacall, but she rebuffed his advances, instead swiping Humphrey Bogart away from his wife.)

Blondes today are rather more in control of their position in the business, and the business has responded primarily by not caring so much about its leading ladies. Now the surgeon's knife is no longer paid for with studio dollars; actresses are expected to arrive on the scene already nipped, tucked, and enhanced. As the studios reluctantly, and oh-so-glacially, agree to keep hiring older women in romantic parts, more and more are opting to have their wrinkles smoothed out for them, as Barley Blair pointed out in these pages a few weeks ago. (A confederation of porn actresses has recently banded together to pressure the industry away from employing women with breast implants. New York Post columnist Amy Sohn has wittily suggested that Hollywood actresses take a lesson in maturity from their workmates in this supposedly disreputable portion of the industry.)

So today even the last of the great Blondes--Melanie Griffith, who has consistently done her best work for the cynically devious Brian De Palma and the openhearted Jonathan Demme (like the best Blondes of old, Griffith works best under an affectionate gaze, even if it's controlling)--has been denied the attentions that would have been lavished upon her had she timorously allowed herself to be remade into a mogul's own image of perfection. You can see this in her dazzling lead turn in John Waters' upcoming Cecil B. Demented, where Griffith blossoms in the role of an actress who finally comes under the spell of a director so in love with her he could kill her.

Of course, while growing up Griffith saw firsthand how nasty the game could be. Griffith's mom, Tippi Hedren, so paralyzed Alfred Hitchcock with lust that throughout The Birds and Marnie he contrived numerous cruel stratagems to put her in her place. In the long run, she's come out better on the deal; Hitch has a posthumous reputation as a sexually repressed sadist, and Hedren has two fine roles to ensure her place in film history. Was it worth the humiliations and torments Hedren had to endure? Maybe, maybe not--but the self-tortured and humiliated actresses of today aren't even able to claim films of that caliber as they put themselves through the same old grind.