The Hollywood Sequel

History & Form, 1911-2010

Stuart Henderson

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781839020193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This illuminating study charts the changing role of the Hollywood film sequel over the past century. Considering a range of sequels in their industrial, historical and aesthetic contexts, from The Son of a Sheik (1926) to Toy Story 3 (2010), this book provides a comprehensive history of this critically-neglected yet commercially-dominant art form.

PART 1 | HISTORY

1 | Early sequels, 1911–28

Before movies told coherent stories with recognisable characters, they could not present the sequels to those stories. From this basic but fundamental assumption, it follows that the early history of the sequel in American cinema necessarily intertwines with the history of narrative’s role in the medium. Just when fictional narrative became the dominant impulse remains a matter of considerable debate, with Charles Musser arguing that ‘story films’ had become the central product of the American film industry by the summer of 1904; a periodisation which conflicts with Tom Gunning’s influential notion that a ‘cinema of attractions’, concerned less with telling stories than ‘presenting a series of views to an audience’, dominated until around 1906–7.¹ Either way, the primacy of narrative form was not the sole precondition for the emergence of the cinematic sequel. Rather, the sequel in its fullest sense could not come into being until there was an incentive for both producers and exhibitors to differentiate their product, and an environment in which each individual film emerged as an autonomous cultural and commercial commodity.

Effective product differentiation could only be achieved if producers had at least a modicum of control over the exhibition of their films and, if a film’s sequel status is established in part via what Gérard Genette would call paratextual markers (title, advertising and publicity), then early film manufacturers were at a considerable disadvantage.² Until around 1906, films in the United States were exhibited in a broad range of venues, none of which were dedicated to the screening of motion pictures.³ Often, film was part of a larger programme of entertainment, meaning both that audiences were unlikely to be paying solely to see moving pictures, and that producers had very little control over the context in which they were presented. With few permanent, dedicated venues, the notion of a repeat audience for moving pictures was yet to take hold, meaning that exhibitors could make no firm assumptions about what their audience had or hadn’t previously seen. The Nickelodeon boom between 1905 and 1908⁴ may have solved some of these issues, and encouraged the growth of the story film,⁵ but it also continued the vaudeville traditions of showmanship and variety, with the theatre manager free to create a programme of entertainment and provide contextual information as he wished. There was, in other words, only limited economic value in producing a sequel when there was still no guarantee that it would either be advertised or presented as such. Until it became standard practice for audiences to pay to see specific narrative films starring particular performers, or at least until it became clear to exhibitors and producers that this is what audiences were doing, there would be little impetus to directly capitalise on the popularity of any one film with a direct follow-up. This is not to suggest that manufacturers were disinclined to exploit successes where possible, as the race between Vitagraph and Edison to dupe films by Méliès,⁶ alongside Edwin S. Porter’s remakes of competitors’ hits,⁷ make clear. Nonetheless, there could be little in the way of systematic exploitation until the pattern of supply and demand – and the relationship between audiences, exhibitors, distributors and producers – was more formally regulated.

It is perhaps unnecessary to point out that the early history of the sequel involves exhibition and distribution practices as much as it does production trends, but it is only because of the creeping standardisation in all three areas at this time, leading up to and then on from the incorporation of the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908, that the sequel as we now understand it came to be a valuable commodity. There is evidently a complex interaction between these forces and the demands of the audiences they jointly sought, and I do not want to imply that any one set of interests carried the day in the cultivation of the form. Nor should we assume some kind of teleological march towards the emergence of the sequel. What follows will briefly survey the period prior to 1912, stressing that both the notion of protracted storytelling and recurring characters (or something resembling them) are evident from the outset: an indication that the constituent parts of the sequel as we now understand it were in existence some time before the rise of the standalone feature film facilitated their coalescence.

Before 1912: character and story

Whereas the default explanation for contemporary Hollywood’s reliance on the adaptation of popular existing material is that it guarantees audiences will turn up, Charles Musser identifies the pre-1908 reliance on popular stories, songs and comic strips as one of three means by which manufacturers sought to make their films comprehensible to audiences, suggesting that ‘most films worked within a highly specific, well-known cultural framework’.⁸ In Musser’s account, the reliance on pre-existing source material was, of course, just as commercially motivated as it is today (audiences weren’t likely to think favourably of movies they found incomprehensible), but it represents a means to a subtly different end. Still, it seems unlikely that audience comprehension was the sole driving force behind the trend for adapting existing material, as evidenced by the numerous movies drawing on comic strips, which represent some of the earliest examples of recurring characters (as opposed to character types) in cinema.

Among these were the Happy Hooligan films, twenty-five of which were released between 1900 and 1903, the first eight of which starred J. Stuart Blackton and were produced by Vitagraph;⁹ Biograph’s three Alphonse and Gaston pictures from 1903, both based on comic strips of the same name by Frederick Opper; the five-scene adaptation of Carl E. Schultze’s Foxy Grandpa strip (and subsequent musical revue) into five scenes starring Joseph Hart, produced by American Mutoscope and Biograph in 1902;¹⁰ and the five Buster Brown scenes shot for Edison in 1904 by Edwin S. Porter, taken from the strip by Richard Felton Outcault.

There were, however, some crucial distinctions between, for example, Blackton’s role as Happy Hooligan and the star–character pairings that came later. First, it is arguable that Happy Hooligan on film was less a straightforward adaptation of the titular comic strip, and more an amalgam of similar characters borrowing that name. Second, there was only a slim chance the audience would be aware of any casting consistency. Blackton probably never received a credit on screen or off, and the action was staged sufficiently far from the camera that positively identifying him as the figure in the Hooligan costume, and as the same figure seen in said costume in previous Hooligan entries, would have been extremely difficult. This latter issue was the result of a practice which was relatively standard until around the middle of 1909,¹¹ whereby such credits were rarely supplied by manufacturers or distributors, either on the film itself or in advertising, leaving the paying public in the dark about who they were watching in the fiction films of the period. It was not until the 1909–10 season that Edison, Vitagraph and other producers began regularly advertising their stars as such, with Biograph, home of the biggest names of the era, resisting until 1913.¹² If stars were credited, this was usually motivated by their association with either the legitimate theatre or, as was the case for Joseph Hart in the Foxy Grandpa films, with the specific production being reproduced for the camera. It was only after 1910, therefore, that audiences could routinely expect to be provided with both the names of the characters and the actors who played them.

This sporadic, uneven development of a star system was in some instances replicated when it came to notions of character consistency – even after the standardisation of on-screen credits. Perhaps the most famous example of this inconsistency is that of ‘Broncho Billy’, created by Gilbert M. Anderson, co-founder, with George K. Spoor, of the Essanay production company. Anderson wrote, directed and starred in numerous Essanay Westerns before appearing for the first time as the title character in Broncho Billy’s Redemption (1910), an outlaw who redeems himself in the act of saving a father and daughter from dying on the prairie. He went on to appear as Broncho Billy in more than 100 films, becoming synonymous with the character. Only a handful of these films survive, but from the synopses collated by Anderson’s biographer David Kiehn it is evident that little more than the character name was carried over from film to film.¹³ Sometimes Billy is not an outlaw but a sheriff (Broncho Billy’s Christmas Deed [1913]; Broncho Billy Misled [both 1915]), a ranger (Broncho Billy and the Lumber King [1915]), or a gold miner (Broncho Billy and the Claim Jumpers [1914]); sometimes he is settled (Broncho Billy’s Mistake [1913]; Broncho Billy’s Mexican Wife [1915]), while on other occasions he is a wandering drunk, or courting a girl played by Marguerite Clayton – who also on occasions played his wife.

Unlike the Essanay Westerns, Biograph’s Jones series, directed by D. W. Griffith and released between December 1908 and August 1909, did maintain a level of consistency. Tom Gunning has suggested that the series ‘signalled Biograph’s wooing of middle class family audiences with a form of comedy unlikely to offend their sensibilities with slapstick rowdiness’,¹⁴ and we might further speculate that one of the features distinguishing these films from more ‘disreputable’ forms of comedy is the lip-service they paid to psychological realism in the form of character consistency. As played by John R. Cumpson and Florence Lawrence (both unbilled, although the latter become known as ‘the Biograph Girl’ shortly thereafter), the Joneses were also original creations, making this possibly the first film series to revisit characters over a series of episodes without recourse to pre-existing source material. There was nothing in the way of sequential development evident within the films themselves, each being a pretext for Mr Jones to comically upset (sometimes, but not always, intentionally) the equilibrium strived for by his wife, but they were consistent in situation, with their marriage always in media res. Despite the narrative stasis, the Biograph Bulletin entry for the last in the series, Mrs Jones’ Lover; or, ‘I Want My Hat’ (1909), reveals an assumed familiarity between the audience and the characters: ‘We are all cognizant of the fact that our friend Jones is of a jealous disposition, for the little episode at the rehearsal of the Amateur Dramatic Club is still fresh in our minds.’¹⁵ The colloquial, almost conspiratorial tone of this entry, referring back to the plot of The Joneses’ Have Theatricals (1909), suggests that, while there is no explicit narrative continuation, the information regular viewers have retained about Mr Jones, accreted over the course of multiple films, will aid their comprehension and enhance their enjoyment of this latest entry. By striking this balance, in which characters do not develop but nonetheless become known quantities with associated traits, Griffith’s films are absolutely typical of the series format which was quickly becoming a staple of film production in North America. And the Joneses were not alone: Kalem launched the Girl Spy series (devised by and starring Gene Gauntier) in 1909, which in turn encouraged Yankee to launch a series centring on a ‘girl detective’, commencing with The Monogrammed Cigarette in 1910. In both cases, each standalone film featured recurring, consistent characters in unconnected stories.

Although the evidence of recurring characters in early cinema underlines its reliance on other artworks, the practice of storytelling in instalments owes as much to technological and logistical restrictions unique to the form as it does to cultural and industrial norms. Predictable as it may be to attribute film-making innovations to D. W. Griffith, he would seem to be responsible for one of the first films billed as a sequel: His Trust Fulfilled (1911). A direct continuation of His Trust, released...