The Classical Hollywood Reader

Steve Neale, Steve Neale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135720070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

The Classical Hollywood Reader brings together essential readings to provide a history of Hollywood from the 1910s to the mid 1960s.

Following on from a Prologue that discusses the aesthetic characteristics of Classical Hollywood films, Part 1 covers the period between the 1910s and the mid-to-late 1920s. It deals with the advent of feature-length films in the US and the growing national and international dominance of the companies responsible for their production, distribution and exhibition. In doing so, it also deals with film making practices, aspects of style, the changing roles played by women in an increasingly business-oriented environment, and the different audiences in the US for which Hollywood sought to cater.

Part 2 covers the period between the coming of sound in the mid 1920s and the beginnings of the demise of the `studio system` in late 1940s. In doing so it deals with the impact of sound on films and film production in the US and Europe, the subsequent impact of the Depression and World War II on the industry and its audiences, the growth of unions, and the roles played by production managers and film stars at the height of the studio era.

Part 3 deals with aspects of style, censorship, technology, and film production. It includes articles on the Production Code, music and sound, cinematography, and the often neglected topic of animation.

Part 4 covers the period between 1946 and 1966. It deals with the demise of the studio system and the advent of independent production. In an era of demographic and social change, it looks at the growth of drive-in theatres, the impact of television, the advent of new technologies, the increasing importance of international markets, the Hollywood blacklist, the rise in art house imports and in overseas production, and the eventual demise of the Production Code.

Designed especially for courses on Hollywood Cinema, the Reader includes a number of newly researched and written chapters and a series of introductions to each of its parts. It concludes with an epilogue, a list of resources for further research, and an extensive bibliography.

Part I

Feature Films, Hollywood and the Advent of the Studio System, 1912–26

Introduction

In their discussions of classical Hollywood cinema, Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson and their critics focus exclusively on feature films (or, to be more precise, feature-length films): films of four or more reels that usually ran for at least an hour. (The length of ‘silent’ films was generally measured in reels rather than hours or minutes because projection speeds could vary; the standard length of a reel of film was 1,000 feet by the late 1900s.) Films as long as this were extremely rare prior to the 1910s. Those produced in the US or imported from abroad were usually either Biblical or boxing films (films that recorded prize fights, usually on a round-by-round basis). Their exceptional length and their equally exceptional (if very different) cultural status meant they tended to circulate outside the systems and sites of distribution and exhibition that prevailed in the late 1890s and early 1900s, and those that began to prevail with the establishment of the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) in 1908.¹

The MPPC was a cartel of patent holders, importers, and film and equipment manufacturers.² Its films were targeted at those who managed and frequented nickelodeons. Nickelodeons were exhibition venues. (The term ‘nickelodeon’ conjoined the Greek word for theatre with the US term for a five cent coin.) When introduced in or around 1905, they proved extremely successful. By 1907, it was estimated that there were over 2,500. By 1908, this number had more than doubled. It was estimated that by 1910 as many as 26 million people visited nickelodeons every week.³ By then, some nickelodeons could accommodate over a thousand spectators. But most were much smaller. Given the relatively low admission price, profits were dependent on the rapid turnover of relatively short (half-hour or hour-long) programmes of equally short (split-reel or reel-long) films. Longer two-reel or three-reel films were produced and imported in greater numbers between 1909 and 1912, but initially most were released a reel at a time on consecutive days. Most were shown a reel at a time as well, even when, as was the norm by 1912, reels were released simultaneously and most nickelodeons were equipped with more than one projector.⁴

For all these reasons, this ‘system had no place for films longer than three reels, the films that later came to be called “feature films”’. However, ‘the entertainment industry had a readymade alternative in the state-rights system, in which exclusive rights to an act were granted to a regional franchise holder, who would then book it into theatres in his or her territory, guaranteeing the theatre owner exclusive exhibition for a negotiable period, thus allowing for long runs and a run-up period for an advertising campaign’.⁵ Franchise holders could also subdivide and re-sell these rights to other distributors. Either way, in facilitating long runs and extensive advertising campaigns for individual films, and in facilitating higher ticket prices, scheduled screening times, and special modes of presentation (particularly in large venues such as opera houses and legitimate theatres), state-rights franchisees not only demonstrated the commercial viability of feature films, they also shared many of the practices associated with roadshowing. Roadshowing involved the hiring of venues directly, usually on a percentage-of-the-gross basis. Roadshowing on a small scale had been used to tour film presentations in rural areas since the 1890s and it continued to be used in this way for several decades.⁶ On a larger scale, on a scale akin to its use in touring major circuses and legitimate theatre productions, one or more companies, usually comprising a manager, a publicist, a group of musicians, a print of the film and a projectionist, would either tour venues throughout the country or, if there were multiple companies (as was much more common), venues in specific cities, states or regions.⁷

Large-scale roadshowing was used initially to distribute lengthy prestigious imports such as Quo Vadis? (1913) and Cabiria (1914) and lengthy and prestigious domestic productions such as The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916); the state-rights system was used slightly earlier to distribute feature-length imports such Dante’s Inferno (1909), The Fall of Troy (1910) and Queen Elizabeth (1912).⁸ Roadshowing on a major scale was inherently unsuited to routine productions, though in various guises it was used to distribute exceptionally long, expensive or prestigious films for decades to come. The state-rights system offered more advantages, at least in the short term. It was used by the Famous Players Motion Picture Company (which was founded by Adolph Zukor, Daniel Frohman and Edwin S. Porter in 1912) not only to distribute Queen Elizabeth, but to provide the basis for distributing a regular annual programme of feature-length films. However, although it ‘could be profitable for an importer or producer film by film’, the state-rights system ‘provided too uncertain a cash flow for the continuous production of long and expensive films’.⁹ As a result, while General Film, the distribution arm of the M PPC, ‘created an “exclusive service” of feature programs made up of expensive one- to three-reel films’, and while the state-rights system came increasingly to be used for marginal productions of one kind or another for decades to come, the Paramount Pictures Corporation, which had been formed by W.W. Hodkinson in 1914, regularised ‘the system that Famous Players had developed, combining the weekly program format of General Film with the feature marketing techniques of the state rights firms’.¹⁰ With films supplied by Famous Players and the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, among others, ‘Paramount began offering a yearly program of features, consisting of 104 films of four to six reels each, released at a rate of two per week’.¹¹

By the time Hodkinson had been deposed by Adolph Zukor in 1916, Paramount (which at that point became a brand name for the newly formed Famous Players-Lasky Corporation) had been joined by other producer-distributors of feature-length films, among them the World Picture Corporation and the Fox Film Company. However, in advertising its features individually, publicising its stars, innovating ‘a percentage distribution fee, whereby producer and distributor received a percentage of the gross exhibitor rentals’, offering the first annual programmes of feature-length films, and subsequently building and acquiring chains of cinemas and establishing a global distribution network, Paramount became ‘the model for other firms in the classical Hollywood period’.¹² By then a new cartel of companies had long since emerged to displace the MPPC and rival cartels of independent suppliers of one-reel or two-reel films, and this was formally marked by the establishment of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) in 1922.¹³ Most of the MPPDA’s members distributed short films, cartoons and newsreels as well as feature-length films. Some were produced in-house. Others were subcontracted from small-scale suppliers. But along with ownership or access to major cinemas chains, it was the production and national (and international) distribution of programmes of relatively high-cost feature-length films that marked and cemented their power.

For Gerben Bakker, an economic historian, these were key developments in the history of what he calls the ‘industrialisation of entertainment’. Seeking, among other things, to explain the emerging global dominance of Hollywood, Bakker focuses on the 1910s as a key decade. He argues that during the course of the nineteenth century ‘falling working hours, rising disposable income, increasing urbanisation, expanding transport networks and strong population growth resulted in a sharp increase in the demand for entertainment’. This demand was initially met ‘by a surge in the quantity and variety of live entertainment … Large cities would offer a cascade of entertainment at staggered prices and qualities, including opera, theatre, vaudeville, variety, music hall, circuses and burlesque’.¹⁴ At this point, motion pictures ‘industrialised entertainment by automating it, standardising its quality and transforming it into tradeable product’, thus merging ‘freshly integrated national entertainment markets into an international one’.¹⁵ Both before and immediately after the advent of feature-length films these markets were often dominated by European companies. The US was potentially the largest national market in the world. Yet despite vociferous campaigns against foreign films and an increasingly successful export drive by the MPPC and its member companies,¹⁶ it was European companies that initiated what Bakker calls ‘the quality race’, the race to establish or re-establish market dominance by escalating expenditure on the production and marketing of feature-length films and on research and development (R&D) in general.

As Bakker goes on to argue in the extract reprinted here (Chapter 2), European companies lost out, not because their films were inferior, nor because of the advent of World War One as such, but because at a time when they needed capital and access to international markets in order to sustain the quality of their feature films they found it increasingly difficult to obtain either, let alone both.¹⁷ Further hampered by high rates of tax on admissions and tickets, the result was the collapse of a number of European companies during and after the war, and the increasing dominance not just of US companies producing US feature films, but of US companies with a production base in Southern California. Though not all these companies prospered in the long term, those that did benefited not only from clement weather, anti-union policies and a diverse range of nearby locations, but also from their proximity to one another, as Bakker points out later on in his book. Actors, directors, technicians and other creative employees generally lived close by and could easily be hired by or loaned out to other companies, thus reducing ‘downtime’. This in turn meant that employees like these could be paid more, and high rates of pay meant that talented personnel could be attracted both from other fields of entertainment and from competitor industries in Europe and elsewhere abroad.¹⁸ In addition, ready access to a range of ‘inputs’ of this kind meant ‘fast and low-cost try-outs’ in arriving at the optimal combination of creative personnel on any one production and the capacity to make changes and adjustments with relative ease.¹⁹

As Richard Koszarski points out in ‘Making Movies’ (Chapter 3), ‘Southern California was clearly recognized as the major American production center by 1915’, though, as he also points out, ‘executive operations, newsreel production, and even much of the animation industry remained’ in New York, along with studio facilities owned or opened by Goldwyn, Metro, Cosmopolitan, Vitagraph and Famous Players-Lasky.²⁰ He goes on to discuss the costs, the systems of management and other aspects of film production in the late 1910s and early to mid-1920s. Taking issue with the emphasis on the ‘central producer system’ that marks Janet Staiger’s account of this period in The Classical Hollywood Cinema, and arguing that the stress in industry discourse on ‘the tight, pyramidal control exercised by the top executives’ functioned largely as a means of reassuring investors and theatre owners, Koszarski notes that the ‘most memorable work of many of the key filmmakers, Griffith, Weber, von Stroheim, Cruze, Lubitsch, DeMille, Neilan, and Ingram in particular, was created via a simpler director-unit system, where projects were developed from script level through editing by individual creative directors and their personal staffs’. Either way it is clear that production management systems varied. While central producer systems were adopted by smaller studios like Cosmopolitan under William Randolph Hearst as well as by MGM under Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, Paramount tended to use a mix of smaller director-unit and producer-unit systems.²¹ These and other systems are further discussed in later sections of this Reader. In meantime, Koszarski...