America on Film. Sean Griffin
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musicals that are successful tend to be either animated films for kids (like Frozen [2013] or Trolls [2016]) or live‐action Broadway adaptations that explore darker thematic material (such as Chicago [2002] or Les Misérables [2012]).
Thus, the popularity (or unpopularity) of certain genres can tell the film historian interesting things about the culture that produced them. Genre films reflect social concerns, but only rarely do they challenge the underlying ideological biases of Hollywood narrative form itself. (Most genre films, being Hollywood films, still feature straight white able‐bodied male protagonists, while women and people of color are relegated to peripheral roles.) Rather, popular Hollywood genres often attempt to shore up the dominant ideology by repeating over and over again certain types of stories that seem to resolve social tensions. For example, the horror film’s emphasis on the threat posed to “normality” by the monstrous reinforces social ideas about what is considered normal. Not surprisingly, in classical Hollywood horror films, “normality” is conventionally represented by middle‐to‐upper‐class, white, heterosexual, and able‐bodied couples and patriarchal institutions. Monsters and villains, on the other hand, are often coded as non‐white, non‐patriarchal, non‐capitalist, and/or differently abled.
The Business of Hollywood
By examining the structure of Hollywood filmmaking, and exploring when and why certain films were popular with American audiences, one can gain insight into the changing ideological currents of twentieth‐ and early twenty‐first‐century America. Yet one must also take into consideration the specific economic and industrial conditions that determine how Hollywood produces its films. Indeed, Hollywood must be understood not just as a set of formal and stylistic structures, but also as an industry that produces certain types of fictional films for profit. As such, Hollywood is an excellent example of capitalism at work. Hollywood companies make and sell films that they think people want to see (that is, films that in some way reflect the dominant ideology), and Hollywood’s business practices use every tool at their disposal to lessen competition, increase buyer demand, and reduce the cost of production. Though Hollywood films are sometimes discussed as “art” by critics and some filmmakers, a Hollywood film’s merit is chiefly judged by its box office revenues. Even when awards are given for artistic achievement, these too are drawn into a film’s economic evaluation – winning a Best Picture Oscar will usually boost a film’s profits. (There are exceptions: Best Picture Winners The Hurt Locker [2008] and Moonlight [2016] are among the least seen Oscar‐winners, ostensibly because of their subject matter.)
Since the earliest days of cinema, film as an industry has been divided into three main components: production, distribution, and exhibition. Production involves the actual making of a film: the financing, writing, shooting, editing, etc. Distribution refers to the shipping of copies (or prints and now digital files) of the finished film to various theaters (or more recently, to digital streaming systems). The theaters where the film is actually projected to audiences make up the third arm, or exhibition. Cable television sales, Blu‐ray purchases, access via Netflix, etc. also comprise film exhibition. Hollywood producers have always been highly dependent upon the distribution and exhibition arms of the business: no matter how many films you make, or how high‐quality they are, if no one ships them or shows them, then they cannot make any money. Hollywood companies have thus consistently worked to maintain close ties with distribution networks and theaters. One method of doing this is called vertical integration, in which one parent company oversees the business of all three branches. This was the strategy adopted by the major studios in the first half of the twentieth century, and it helped to ensure that American theaters were almost exclusively dominated by Hollywood film during that period.
Another strategy that helped Hollywood come to dominate the US film industry was the creation of an oligopoly, a state of business affairs in which a few companies control an entire industry. (An oligopoly is thus very similar to a monopoly, wherein one company controls an entire industry.) In an oligopoly, several large companies agree to work together, keeping potential competitors weak or driving them out of business altogether. In the case of film in America, the Hollywood oligopolies worked throughout the twentieth century, and continue to work, to keep foreign and independent American films marginalized. This has had a specific effect on minority filmmakers. Excluded from the Hollywood studios, independent films made by non‐white, non‐patriarchal, and/or non‐capitalist people often had trouble being distributed and exhibited. Furthermore, Hollywood’s control of production, distribution, and exhibition has not been limited to the United States alone. Motion pictures have been one of America’s leading exports for at least a century, and Hollywood maximizes its profits by distributing its films globally. Since Hollywood films usually make back their cost during domestic release, most of the money earned from foreign exhibition is pure profit. Consequently, Hollywood films can offer foreign theater owners their films at a discount – a price calculatedly lower than the cost of films made locally in their native country. This makes it very difficult for other countries to support their own film industries.
As such, the Hollywood system is an example not just of industrial capitalism but also of cultural imperialism, the promotion and imposition of ideals and ideologies throughout the world via cultural means. Imperialism means one country dominating another through force and economic control, but in cultural imperialism, one nation doesn’t conquer another with force, but rather overwhelms it with cultural products and the ideologies contained within them. People around the world are inundated with American ways of viewing life when they go to the movies, and often they have little or no access to films made by people of their own nationality. Furthermore, since Hollywood films dominate the world, Hollywood style tends to define film practice for all filmmakers around the world, since Hollywood style is what most people are accustomed to seeing and understanding. Many filmmakers in other countries, having grown up themselves watching Hollywood films, make pictures that duplicate the Hollywood style, again reinforcing its dominance.
As the following history hopes to show, various restructurings of Hollywood’s business practices have affected the ability of other types of films (and their different representations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability) to get made and to find audiences. Yet, although new technologies and legal decisions have occasionally challenged and disrupted the business strategies of the Hollywood oligopoly, its dominance has not changed very much in a century. Most of the major companies that founded the Hollywood industry are still around: Paramount, Warner Brothers, Universal, Columbia, and 20th Century‐Fox (which was recently acquired by Disney). If anything, these companies have grown stronger and more diversified, becoming global corporate entities. The main purpose of Hollywood’s business practices – to keep profits high and inhibit competition by maintaining centralized control over the industry – has been upheld. Hollywood film, with its formulas and genres that uphold white patriarchal capitalism, affects not just people in America, but people around the globe.
The History of Hollywood: The Movies Begin
The United States did not always dominate the international film industry, and a number of people around the globe could arguably take credit for inventing motion pictures at the end of the nineteenth century. In America, Thomas Edison’s company first demonstrated moving images in 1894 through a mechanical peep‐hole device, the kinetoscope. In France, the Lumière Brothers first projected their moving pictures upon a screen in 1895, giving birth to cinema as a shared social phenomenon for paying audiences. The Lumières’ method of exhibition soon became the standard worldwide, and French filmmakers often led the way in cinema’s early years. French film companies such as Pathé became the first to accomplish vertical integration, long before the Hollywood studios even existed.
Arcades filled with Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscopes, such