Public Reel

A Star Is Born · Beat 331 · permalink

Theatre

1:50:29–1:50:50 Registered 1937

Machine annotation by Qwen/Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct, cut beats-0.2, prompt beats-0.2. Machine checks passed (partial). 2 names checked for a spoken or on-screen source; 2 of 4 visible events checked against a frame. Not human-reviewed. Observations and transcript may still be wrong.

Frame at 1:50:391:50:39

Play from 1:50:29 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: on-screen text appears or ends. Sequence 208 · shots 749–749. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
theatre (theatre, interior) evidence: frame:1
People
  • Esther (named at frame:1): woman, visible in close-up, tears on cheeks visible
  • Norman Maine (named at frame:1): unseen, referred to as Norman Maine mentioned
Seen happening
  • Esther stands at a microphone and is identified as Mrs. Norman Maine. [frame:1]
  • Tears start down Esther’s cheeks as she looks out past the crowd. [frame:1]
  • The music swells up. [frame:1]
  • The scene fades out. [frame:1]
Seen
microphone [frame:1]
On screen
ESTHER AT MICROPHONE Esther everybody. This is Norman Maine. ovation is tremendous. CAMERA MOVES TO BIG CLOSEUP OF ESTHER. Tears are She looks out tarting down her cheeks. ast all this this this to some distant point of her wn. The music swells up. FADE OUT.
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: emotional, climactic; themes: public persona vs private emotion, farewell, celebrity; style notes: close-up framing, dramatic lighting implied by tear visibility, swelling music cues emotional peak

Esther is at a microphone addressing a crowd, identified as Mrs. Norman Maine, while tears fall as the camera closes in on her face; the music swells and the scene fades out. No dialogue is transcribed for this beat, only stage directions from the script.

The record

No renewal found An automated finding, not a verdict. A renewal would have appeared in the Copyright Office's renewal registrations 27 to 29 years after the term began. Those volumes are loaded and our parse of them found no matching renewal. If that is right, a work published 1931–1963 that was not renewed entered the public domain at the end of its 28th year; the volumes are OCR of old print, and the method page reports how often the parse has been found to miss one. Evidence dossier. The finding concerns the US copyright record for the film; it is not clearance for any use, and this page's annotation is machine output.

Share

Paste the permalink anywhere that shows link previews and it carries the frame, the time and the finding. The card image can be saved and used with a credit.

Frame from A Star Is Born (1937) at 1:50:39 (passage 1:50:29–1:50:50); US record: No renewal found

Permalink
always the current cut
Permalink to this version
warns if the beats are recut later
Card image
https://publicreel.org/cards/moment/AStarIsBorn/b331.png
Figure for a newsletter or page
Cite