A-list

An A-list celebrity is a professional at the very top of their career. It may be a bankable movie star who has a very strong track record of box office successes, or a pop star with a string of #1 hit singles and albums.

For other uses, see A-list (disambiguation).

The A-list is part of a larger guide called The Hot List that has become an industry-standard guide in Hollywood. Entertainment journalist James Ulmer, the guide's creator, has also developed a version including directors, the Hot List of Directors.[1] The Ulmer scale categorizes the lists into A+, A, B+, B, C, and D, E ... X, Y, Z listings.

In popular usage outside the film industry, an A-list celebrity is any person with an admired or desirable social status.[2] Even socialites with popular press coverage and elite associations have been termed as A-list celebrities. Similarly, less popular persons and current teen idols are referred to as B-list celebrities – and the ones with lesser fame as C-list ones.[3] In the year 2000, Entertainment Weekly interpreted a C-list celebrity as "that guy (or sometimes that girl), the easy-to-remember but hard-to-name character actor".[4]

The D-list (or sometimes Z-list) is for a person whose celebrity is so obscure that they are generally only known for appearances as celebrities on panel game shows and reality television. In the late 20th century, D-listers were largely ignored by the entertainment news industry; for example, Paul Lynde, by this point in his career best known for being on the daytime game show Hollywood Squares, went largely unnoticed by the supermarket tabloids, and his homosexuality (which would have drawn attention for bigger celebrities) went largely unreported.[5] Kathy Griffin, an American comedian who became widely known for her frequent appearances on such programs, used the term in a tongue-in-cheek manner for her 2005 TV special The D-List and her 2005 TV series Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List. It is also the lowest rating used by American journalist James Ulmer for his Ulmer Scale which ranks the bankability of 1,400 movie actors worldwide.[6] Other successive letters of the alphabet beyond D, as in the terms E-list and Z-list, are sometimes used for exaggeration or comic effect but effectively have the same meaning as D-list;[7] to the extent that there is a difference, letters further down the alphabet would indicate decreasing levels of fame (for example, regional celebrities such as local news anchors, community theatre actors, or common persons with no claim to fame whatsoever).

See also

References
  1. "About The Ulmer Scale". The Ulmer Scale.
  2. American Heritage Dictionary Archived October 13, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
  3. Encarta Archived 2010-03-16 at the Wayback Machine, Webster's New Millennium Dictionary. Archived October 31, 2009.
  4. Podolsky, Erin (November 10, 2000). "C-list celebrities – Three sites with information on 'that one guy' you see in movies from time to time". Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on April 25, 2009. Retrieved April 14, 2009.
  5. "TV Stars Who Ruled the 70s". Retrieved June 14, 2017.
  6. Ulmer Scale Hot List Archived December 14, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
  7. Blalock, Meghan. "The 50 Most Infamous D-List Celebrities of All Time". stylecaster.com. stylecaster.com. Retrieved September 2, 2016.
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