Contemporary US Cinema
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Contemporary US Cinema

Michael Allen

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eBook - ePub

Contemporary US Cinema

Michael Allen

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About This Book

Contemporary U.S. Cinema is a forceful exploration of the tumultuous changes that have dominated the shifting landscape of American film-making over the past three decades. From the explosive release of Easy Rider to the excesses of Heaven's Gate and the comic book figures of Spider-Man, its aim is to examine the economic, social and cultural contexts of mainstream and independent American films.

The book divides into nine provocative chapters with material on:

  • the most significant individual film-makers, such as Scorsese, Coppola and Lucas, as well as independent film-makers like Jarmusch and Anders
  • the careers of leading actors of the last thirty years, such as Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford and Julia Roberts, whilst exploring the powerful position of the film star in the modern American film-making process
  • the economics of Contemporary U.S. Cinema with particular reference to the tortuous journey from production, distribution and exhibition of Waterworld and Titanic
  • the artistic influence of foreign film-makers, such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, and explores Hollywood's increasing dominance and reliance on the global market
  • genres, sequels and the recent developments in computer-based technologies, using examples from The Godfather I - III, The Matrix, the Star Wars saga and remakes from Shaft to Ocean's Eleven

The book is illustrated with stills throughout and includes a bibliography and annotated further reading list.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2014
ISBN
9781317874188
CHAPTER ONE
The Background
In this first chapter I want to lay out the context which framed and created American film-making from 1970 through to 2001. The last 30 years of American film-making have seen a number of seismic changes in the industry and in the kind of films it produces. At the industrial level, new business models emerged which have given the major American film studios new owners and a different sense of their place within an economic marketplace. This new position, in turn, has resulted in changes in the management hierarchy and structure of the film companies, changing the way they make films.
Another phenomenon of the past 30 years has been the rise of independent American film-making to the point where it now offers a serious alternative to mainstream film-making. Again, the purpose of this chapter is to chart where that strand of independent film-making originated and developed, to show that its modern manifestation is not a bolt from the blue, but rather a continuation and expansion of earlier initiatives.
Recent decades have seen the rise of the ‘multi-hyphenate’: the film-maker who adopts multiple roles on a film production: as actor, director, and/or producer. American cinema had seen such figures before, but they occurred as exception rather than the norm. The contemporary period of American filmmaking has seen their exponential rise.
Most famously, even infamously, the costs of making films in Hollywood, in terms of both film production budgets and star (actor and director) salaries, have risen to alarming levels. While not a new phenomenon – spectacular films with exorbitant budgets have been an aspect of American film industry since at least the days of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916) – big-budget films have become far more common in the last decade or two, to the point where they might almost be said to dominate public perceptions of the American film industry. The consequences of this phenomenon for the economics of modern American film-making, whereby big-budget films have to make increasingly huge sums at the box office to justify their investment, are being played out as this book is written, and will form a central focus throughout its pages.
The American film industry has periodically been required to redefine itself, technologically. Although the studio period lasted several decades, technical innovation was an integral part of production strategy. Changes in format, shape of screen, and quality of sound were introduced as and when the film industry needed to reinvigorate its market position. Though such changes might have been extremely expensive, they were seen as necessary investments to maintain the specificity and attraction of cinema as an entertainment form.
The last three decades have witnessed the latest phase of that technical innovation, with the emergence and development of a number of new media: computer-based, digital, non celluloid-based. These new media have entered into a set of increasingly complex interactions with more ‘traditional’ filmmaking, as both new sources of funding and as new distribution channels for films, to the point where they are substantially transforming the very nature of the industry. These developments and interactions are themselves changing rapidly as time goes by. It is the somewhat daunting aim of the final chapter of this book to try to chart the progress of these changes and to offer some thoughts on what might happen in the next few years.
Mostly, in this chapter, we will be looking at the post-Second World War period, although where relevant, our investigation will go back further, sometimes to the very beginning of cinema at the end of the century before last. The hope in doing this is not to risk redundancy or irrelevance but, rather, to show that the various elements that go to make up contemporary American film-making in all its aspects have a long history and complex genealogy. Nothing ever appears ready-formed; everything that appears does so because of innumerable prior events and decisions. And so it is with the American film industry as we now know it. This first chapter is designed to sketch out that history, to outline the framework in which the industry has developed to this current point in its story.

THE HOLLYWOOD STUDIO SYSTEM

The American mainstream film-making process between the 1920s and the 1950s has been given many labels – classical; studio system; production line; mature oligopoly. The ‘studio system’, as it has come to be known, can be defined as many things: a physical place, an industrial method, a developer of audio-visual technologies, an aesthetic sensibility, and a structured employment situation.
The major film companies were sited in a particular geographical location – Hollywood, in California – in extensive studio complexes which consisted of sound stages, editing rooms, backlots containing huge scenery from past productions, offices, and so forth, within which the films they made were chosen, created, and sent out for release:
[The MGM] plant – fifty-three acres, valued at a trifling $2,000,000 – is in Culver City, California 
 It contains twenty-two sound stages, a park that can be photographed as anything from a football field to the gardens of Versailles, $2,000,000 worth of antique furniture, a greenhouse consecrated to the raising of ferns, [and] twenty-two projection rooms 
 MGM’s weekly payroll is roughly $250,000 
 Actors’ salaries are only a small part of MGM’s outlay. The biggest and most expensive writing staff in Hollywood costs $40,000 a week. Directors cost $25,000. Executives cost slightly less. Budget for equipment is $100,000 a week. Average cost of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer pictures runs slightly under $500,000. This is at least $150,000 more per picture than other companies spend. Thus, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer provides $20,000,000 worth of entertainment a year at cost of production, to see which something like a billion people of all races will pay something more than $100,000,000 at the box office.
(Fortune magazine, vol.6, December 1932, pp.51–2; quoted in Balio, 1985; pp.311–2)
The overheads required to keep such an operation going were therefore sizeable, and could only be afforded because films were made cheaply and efficiently enough, and frequently enough, to ensure a steady and more than adequate income for each of the studios. We will see soon what happened when this financial equation ceased to balance.
[F]acilities created thirty to forty years ago no longer meet the current requirements and cannot be readily adapted to modern production methods. The giant shooting sets and supply departments were designed for the simultaneous production of a dozen or more medium- and large-budget features. Those days are long gone and nowadays a studio considers itself lucky having two or three films in simultaneous production 
 The maintenance of a studio with a dozen or more shooting sets costs annually around $3 million. The figure refers to a slack period, when administrative duties are reduced to hardly more than cleaning, opening and locking up.
(Toeplitz, 1975; pp.31–2)
But while the production facilities were located on the West Coast of America, the headquarters and financial operations of the major film companies were, and still are, located 3,000 miles away, on the East Coast of the country, primarily in New York City. This is partly historical, because that is where the earliest film-making concerns grew up in the last years of the nineteenth century – for example, Edison in Orange County, New Jersey and Biograph on the East Side of New York City. It is also to do with closeness (both physical and psychological) to the financial heart of America, concentrated on Wall Street in New York. From the 1910s onwards, the film-making concerns operating out of Hollywood were fundamentally dependent upon the financial support of Wall Street. It made no sense at all, in such circumstances, to locate all aspects of a studio’s operations, especially its financial management, several thousand miles away from the country’s financial centre. This 3,000-mile separation between the organisational and financial base of America’s film industry and its sites of production worked both ways, causing, on occasion, disagreement and tension, but also allowing each the space to do what it did best:
The movies were a ‘vertical’ industry in that the ultimate authority belonged to the owners and top corporate officers in New York. But the New York office couldn’t make movies, nor could it dictate audience interest and public taste. And whatever the efforts to regulate production and marketing, moviemaking remained a competitive and creative enterprise. In the overall scheme of things, the West Coast management team was the key to studio operations, integrating the company’s economic and creative resources, translating fiscal policy into filmmaking practice. This demanded close contact with New York and a feel for the company’s market skew, but also an acute awareness of the studio’s resources and heavy interaction with the top filmmakers on the lot, particularly the directors, writers and stars.
(Schatz, 1989; pp.11–12)
The studio was also a company that employed permanent personnel – stars, directors, producers and cameramen, as well as administrators, accountants and managers. During the main decades of the studio system, for example, Warner Bros. maintained a large number of creative and technical personnel on long-term contracts. Figures such as Hal B. Wallis rose up through the ranks over many years to achieve executive status. In 1953, when the studio finally terminated his contract under pressures to economise in the post-war period, Michael Curtiz had been with the studio for 26 years.
This permanent staff gave the studio a great sense of continuity. It knew that it could count on a particular director or star to be available if it chose to assign him or her to a new film project. It knew that if it wanted a certain look given to a film, its key cameraman could also be assigned to the production. And it knew that that cameraman had probably worked with the director and stars before on one or more of its previous films. This usually lent the whole production process a calm efficiency, with everyone knowing their place and role in the greater whole. Things had to run smoothly; the system could not work otherwise.
The five Hollywood ‘majors’ of the studio period – Warner Bros., Paramount, MGM, Twentieth Century-Fox and RKO – each made 40–60 films a year. This constituted around 50 per cent of the American film industry’s annual output and 75 per cent of its class–A features, the remainder being contributed by the large and ever-changing army of independent film production companies. That is a considerable number, and indicates an impressive consistency and efficiency at the heart of the machine. The studio system could only achieve this level and continuity of production by maintaining efficient industrial methods, making best use of resources, spreading the risk and the financial load across a whole range of projects. As well as the Big Five, there were the Little Three – Columbia and Universal each had their own distribution system as well as a production arm, supplying smaller films to cinemas for frequent change of programme and double bills, while United Artists was solely a distributor for independent productions.
These films were released in the 23,000 cinemas open in the United States during this period. The majors owned or controlled only 3,000 of them, but they were the top 3,000, the largest and the best: the Paramount-Publix chain of 1,200 cinemas or the Fox-Loew chain, which owned 800 cinemas. They were the first-run and premiere site cinemas, the flagships – the 6,250-seat Roxy, 5,450-seat Capitol or 4,000-seat Paramount, all on New York’s Broadway – where major new films opened to great fanfare and, usually, a large box office. In a period when glossy, good-looking, starry feature films were what the cinema audience craved, this ownership of the prime cinema chains constituted a virtual stranglehold on the exhibition arm of the business. It allowed the big films to open well and securely, and forced the owners of the remaining, smaller, cinemas to accept whatever terms the majors dictated. Those terms were usually prohibitive, and included block booking, whereby weaker or less attractive films were grouped with the leading ones so the exhibitor had to take them all if it wanted the big ones. This situation of coercion would eventually run into problems of legality to do with monopolistic practices, and we will see shortly what effect its cessation came to have on the industry into the period covered by this book.
American film-making of the studio period also constituted a particular aesthetic. Defined by, amongst others, Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (1985) as the Classical Hollywood Cinema, it is deemed to have a certain wholeness, and even purity, of form; a formal system with a set of aesthetic rules which had been developed and honed through practice until they reached their fullest expression. The Warner Bros. production The Big Sleep (1946) is a good example. The first shot of the film establishes the location – the mansion of the Sternwood family – for the scene to come. Shot reverse shot sequences – in which a first shot shows one character looking off screen, and the following shot shows a second character looking off screen back, seeming to return the first character’s gaze – clearly establish spatial relationships for the spectators as they watch the scene unfold. Directional and spatial cues are continually employed to reinforce this sense of a coherent space. For example, at one point in the opening scene, Humphrey Bogart’s character, Philip Marlowe, gestures off-screen towards a drinks trolley. A cut to a new angle frames him as he rises from his seat. This ‘match cut’, with the edit timed mid-movement, deceives the eye into seeing the two shots as a single continuous action. The second shot then shows Bogart moving to the trolley towards which he had gestured in the first. These carefully timed edits between shots, together with the continual confirmation and reconfirmation, through gesture and look, of characters’ spatial relationships to one another and the objects around them, create an ‘invisible’ filmstyle in which the audience watches, and is directed to look at, the action on screen rather than the formal processes.
Classical Hollywood films, taking their cue from traditional theatre play structure, also told a certain kind of narrative, which had a particular shape, number of ‘acts’ and a certain arch of action. Characters and significant events were carefully introduced. Clues and significant elements were ‘planted’ and then made to carry significance within the logic of the narrative. Even a famously convoluted narrative such as The Big Sleep observes these basic rules. The opening scene just described, for example, sets up the narrative premise: that one of the Sternwood daughters is being blackmailed and Philip Marlowe’s private eye is being hired to find out who is doing it. At regular intervals throughout the narrative, Marlowe summarises the situation so far for one or more characters involved. All strands and loose ends are tied up by the end of the film: Marlowe solves the case, finds, captures or kills the villains, and falls in love with the heroine (the other Sternwood daughter) to form the couple by the film’s end.
This classical form was intimately tied to production efficiency, to a process designed to get the film made in as quick, efficient and economical a way as possible. A hierarchy of production personnel was central to the efficiency of the system. The classic period witnessed a shift from what is termed the ‘central producer system’ to the producer unit system. Irving Thalberg at MGM, typified the former by ‘believ[ing] that the producer was the pivotal figure, responsible not just for the creation of a single movie but ultimately for the entire style of film-making that conferred a distinctive character upon each studio’ (Puttnam with Watson, 2000; p. 141). David Selznick represented the latter, in which a producer was more directly involved with only one film at a time. The change occurred because it was felt that the former system, because it was essentially one man’s vision and taste, led to too much similarity and uniformity. Having a range of producers each supervising a few films allowed greater range of style, genre and subject matter while maintaining overarching studio identity.
In terms of industrial economics, mainstream American film-making during the classic studio period is referred to as a ‘mature oligopoly’ – ‘a group of companies co-operating to control a certain market’ (Schatz, 1989; p.9). This understanding had been in place since 1930, by which time the countless interactions and re-formations of the companies forming the American film industry had become dominated by the five large studios. Although each of these studios was in competition with each of the others, there was also a fair degree of co-operation – lending of personnel, the exhibition of films from a rival studio in the others’ cinemas. This symbiotic relationship between rival studios was designed to keep the industry in the hands of a few powerful intere...

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