Hollywood Golden Age

6 Key excerpts on "Hollywood Golden Age"

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  Cinemas of the World

  Film and Society from 1895 to the Present

  • James Chapman(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Reaktion Books

    (Publisher)

  A Star is Born (1937).

  This chapter examines the history of the Hollywood ‘dream factory’ during its heyday of the 1930s and 1940s. This period, often described as Hollywood’s ‘golden age’, is defined, at its outset, by the arrival of talking pictures and the onset of the Great Depression, and, at its end, by the arrival of television and the landmark decision of the us Supreme Court that the major film corporations should relinquish their ownership of movie theatres. On the face of it there is much to recommend the idea of a golden age. Not only was this the time when cinema as a social practice reached its zenith, it was also the time when a particular mode of production – the ‘studio system’ – was institutionalized in Hollywood. Yet on closer analysis the notion of a golden age is somewhat misleading, as the term might be suggestive of a degree of stability that was not necessarily the case. This was in fact a period of acute crisis and instability for the film industry. It is rather ironic that Hollywood’s golden age coincided with a decade of economic and social turmoil in the United States in the wake of the Great Depression and that the cinema’s period of greatest popularity in the 1940s came on the back of a war effort that saw the film industry serving the national interest as a vehicle of propaganda. It is even more ironic that Hollywood’s role in promoting social unity and patriotism during the Depression and the Second World War was later to result in many of its personnel being branded ‘unAmerican’ during the anti-communist witch hunts of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

  HOLLYWOOD AS A SOCIAL INSTITUTION

  In one respect the golden age metaphor is perfectly appropriate: the 1930s and 1940s marked the height of the popularity of cinema as a social institution in America. In 1930 cinema attendances reached a high of approximately 80 million per week (from a total population of some 130 million). While there was to be a sharp decline in the early 1930s as the effects of the Depression were felt – weekly attendances dropped to 70 million in 1931 and 55 million in 1932 – this downturn proved temporary. Attendances began to recover in the mid-1930s and by the end of the decade had once again reached their pre-Depression levels.2 This upward trend continued during the Second World War, with a peak of around 90 million per week being reached by the mid-1940s. Robert Sklar suggests that it was in 1946, the first full year of peace, that ‘American movies attained the highest level of popular appeal in their half century of existence’ in that they reached ‘nearly three fifths of their “potential audience” – that is, the movie industry’s estimate of all the people in the country capable of making their way to a box office, leaving out the very young and very old, the ill, those confined to institutions, and others without access to movie theatres.’3

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  The Hidden Art of Hollywood

  In Defense of the Studio Era Film

  • John Fawell(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  The celebration of Hollywood’s craft was coincident with the diminution of that craft, certainly not the first time in the history of art that the consciousness of greatness came with the loss of greatness. SHORT ANSWER The short answer to the question “When was Hollywood?” is from the late teens, when the essentials of the Hollywood narrative tradition had been set in place, to the early or mid-1960s, when we see the last vestiges of the Hollywood studio tradition dying out and even Hollywood’s greatest masters floundering. Still, if we define Hollywood as being from the late teens to the early 1960s, we must be on guard against the tendency to see a logical or continuous arc of development within that span. Hollywood suffers ups and downs within its lifetimes. Certain eras are mixed bags. Many, for example, define the silent era as the purest tradition in American filmmaking, a time where filmmakers were forced to show rather than tell, where visual art and suggestiveness reigned supreme. On the other hand, that era is steeped in a good deal of melodramatic tripe as well. Others find Hollywood’s high point in the precode films of the early 1930s. If these films were often stagy and static due to cumbersome sound equipment, they had a spiritual ´ elan and freedom that was lost with the installation of the code. The films of the late 1930s have the greatest polish. To many, these seem like the definitive years. But these films can also seem stiff and propagandistic next to precode fare, most vulnerable to the criticism that Hollywood forced middle- American middle-class attitudes down the throat of its audience.

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  F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context

  • Bryant Mangum(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  In a telling 1937 article, “The Task of Trying to Please You,” producer Samuel Goldwyn concluded with this observation: “I grant that there are things wrong with the motion- picture industry. After all, it is still only 25 years old. When you consider that the stage has 3,000 years of experience and background on its side, The Golden Age of Hollywood 407 then we have done pretty well in only a quarter of a century” (Watts 8). At times brutal and unforgiving in its processes, the Golden Age did not always guarantee gold standard, yet it would prove overall a phenomenal era of American filmmaking, its collective achievements unmatched. The Golden Age outlived Fitzgerald: Further studio triumphs were to be real- ized in the decade beyond. In a letter to his daughter, Scottie, the year before he died, Fitzgerald wrote, “Sorry you got the impression that I’m quitting the movies – they are always there.” 17 In the final frame, F. Scott Fitzgerald undoubtedly did not produce anything like his best work for Hollywood. The Last Tycoon, however, suggests some of his finest writing would have been about Hollywood and its Golden Age: Hollywood, that is, via the novelist’s page. Notes 1 S. Watts, foreword in S. Watts (ed.), Stars and Films of 1937 (London: Daily Express Publications, 1937), 5. Subsequent references to this work are included in the text. 2 R. Prigozy, “Fitzgerald’s Flapper and Flapper Films of the Jazz Age” in K. Curnutt (ed.), A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 129–61; 129–30. 3 F. S. Fitzgerald quoted in M. J. Bruccoli and J. R. Bryer (eds.), F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time: A Miscellany (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1971), 249. 4 D. Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926–1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 521, 111. 5 K. Macgowan, Behind the Screen: The History and Techniques of the Motion Picture (New York: Delacorte Press, 1965), 289.

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  Screen Culture

  A Global History

  • Richard Butsch(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  3  The Hollywood Studio Era, 1910s–1940s

  In 1926, William Seabury, General Counsel to the Motion Picture Board of Trade and the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry, quoted Thomas Edison saying, “whoever controls the motion picture industry controls the most powerful medium of influence over the people.”1 In this era film was the screen medium in America, a highly organized, vertically integrated oligopoly, with annual ticket sales in the billions. The basic characteristics of the industry, including its relocation in Hollywood, began to emerge by the mid 1910s. The mature economic and cultural formation, the Hollywood studio system, would remain dominant and essentially unchanged for three decades, until the US government dismantled the vertical integration and television arrived after World War II.2

  A handful of Hollywood studios had centralized control of film production, distribution and exhibition. They shaped what films were made, how much each was promoted and distributed, and in what circumstances each was viewed. They even colonized other entertainments, such as the Broadway theater and recorded music industries, to feed its maul. Most important, the concentration of Hollywood decision-making and routinization of production resulted in a uniformity in style of Hollywood films from the 1920s to the 1960s. Noting this, French auteur François Truffaut said, “We love the American cinema because the films all resemble each other.”3 Such consistency and repetition did much to naturalize underlying viewpoints, values and beliefs encoded in these films, making them a greater influence on American screen culture and on American culture generally than they otherwise may have been.

  At the same time, Hollywood succeeded in containing the controversy and criticism that had constituted a national discourse before this consolidation. Movie-going became a normal part of American everyday life. Audiences were uncontroversial and only sporadically surfaced in public discourse. This was demonstrated by the mild reception to the thirteen-volume Payne Fund Studies published in 1933, probably still the largest single research effort to document the effects of film on child audiences.4

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  Historical Film

  A Critical Introduction

  • Jonathan Stubbs(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  3 Hollywood historical cinema up to World War II

  T he following three chapters provide a history of the historical film in Hollywood up to the present day. Chapter 3 examines the emergence of historical filmmaking in the 1890s up to the end of World War II, including the ‘classical era’ of Hollywood filmmaking in the 1920s and 1930s. Chapter 4 addresses the ways in which Hollywood production and exhibition shifted in the late 1940s and early 1950s and examines the rise and fall of the large-scale historical epic, concluding in the late 1960s. Chapter 6 looks at developments in historical filmmaking from the New Hollywood era in the late 1960s and 1970s up to the re-emergence of the historical epic in the late 1990s and 2000s. Following the definition of the historical film established in Chapter 1 , this historical survey casts a wide net and attempts to broaden the corpus of films which can be identified as ‘historical.’ As Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell have argued, working on such a ‘wide canvas’ has advantages: ‘new patterns of information may leap to the eye, and fresh causal and functional connections may become more visible.’1 At the same time, giving an account of every significant historical film produced during this hundred years-plus period would be exhausting and possibly unproductive. Instead, this section focuses on the key films, production cycles, and industrial trends which characterize the development of historical cinema in the American film industry, and which in the broadest sense can be considered representative of the genre in its entirety.

  Silent histories

  The roots of the historical film in America can be traced back to the late nineteenth century, many years before the term ‘Hollywood’ was publicly associated with filmed entertainment. Material produced during the emergence of cinema tended to be orientated around sensation and spectacle rather than the presentation of sustained narratives. Nevertheless, the existence and indeed the popularity of films depicting the past usefully contextualize the historical engagements made subsequently as the American film industry matured. In 1895 the Edison Manufacturing Company produced a number of very short films based on historical iconography for its Kinetoscope device, including

  Joan of Arc , Rescue of Capt. John Smith by Pocahontas

  , and The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots (all 1895).2 Only the latter survives; lasting less than a minute, it is essentially a ‘trick shot’ dramatization of the beheading using a hidden cut to allow the actor playing Mary to be substituted for a dummy. Despite the relatively detailed Elizabethan costumes worn by 12 visible performers, it seems most likely that the film’s main attraction was its gruesome content rather than its evocation of the past. In 1901 the Edison Company returned to the execution theme in a film depicting the electrocution of Leon Czolgosz, who was convicted of assassinating President McKinley the same year. Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison (1901) consists of two sections: in the first, a camera pans slowly around the exterior of the prison where Czolgosz was held; in the second, the prisoner is led from his cell to an electric chair where he is wired up and proclaimed dead. The first section was filmed at the real location on the morning of the actual execution, while the second was a reconstruction based on ‘the description of an eye-witness.’3 In terms of its coherent evocation of historical time and place, Execution of Czolgosz is notably more sophisticated than The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots

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  European Cinemas, European Societies

  • Pierre Sorlin(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 A GOLDEN AGE

  The decade which followed the Second World War was a Golden Age for the film exhibitors. Let us forget for a moment that in Britain film attendance began to decrease as early as 1948. In Europe 1955 saw the peak of cinema admissions: more than 3,000 million tickets were bought, which means that, statistically, every European, including the new-born, went to the movies sixteen times. I must admit that my figures are to a large extent artificial since they combine those of different countries. Contrasts between nations regarding entertainment as a whole, and more specifically film consumption, are important and extremely instructive. But seen from outside—say from Hollywood which at the time was losing a large proportion of its domestic clients1 —Europe was a wonderful market, ready to swallow an enormous quantity of cinematic productions. As film history is generally organized according to the divisions between languages and national boundaries, little has been said up to now about this extraordinary juncture which Europe went through in the 1950s, and it is hard for us to realize that this passing fancy (it did not last more than fifteen years) was common to the whole continent. Also it is said that the movies made at the time were not exceptionally good. However, we are not concerned here with judging their quality but with understanding the relationship between the Europeans and their cinemas, and as soon as we take a look at the statistics we guess that something unusual happened during these years. This is what I would like to throw some light on in this chapter.

  VISITING THE PICTURE-HOUSES

  In the 1930s the ‘circuits’—the big or small companies which owned the film-theatres—had built in the American fashion luxurious picture-palaces, the famous ‘domes of pleasure’ in which the patrons were supposed to have dreamt, for a few hours, of a brilliant, exciting life which in fact was not theirs. At the end of the 1940s the cinemas which had not been redecorated for a long time looked a bit dilapidated, they were badly heated in winter, their seats were often defective and their carpets worn out, but the circuits did not bother to restore them since there were long lines of clients waiting outside the doors. The Europeans were so anxious to go to the pictures that new picture-houses appeared even in the smallest towns; in the 1950s an extra 1,000 cinemas opened in France, another 1,000 in Germany and 3,000 in Italy. Researchers have excavated the archives of the local cinemas throughout the continent so that we now have a reasonably good vision of film exhibition in the post-war era.2

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