America on Film. Sean Griffin
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Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York, The Byron Collection.
The first movies were short travelogs, documentaries, and “trick” films shown at traveling tent shows and vaudeville theaters. As the novelty of seeing photographs brought to life faded, filmmakers moved to telling fictional stories, first in one‐reel shorts (which lasted about 5–10 minutes) and then in two‐reel and four‐reel short features. Films grew so popular that a wave of nickelodeons, small store‐front theaters devoted solely to showing films, opened their doors across the United States. During this period, American filmmakers began refining the methods of storytelling, methods that eventually became Hollywood’s invisible style. Since films were silent during this period, filmmakers had to learn how to emphasize key narrative points without the use of sound. Often this involved exaggerated gestures by the actors, but filmmakers also learned how to communicate through the choice of camera placement, lighting, focus, and editing. Simultaneously, audiences learned and accepted what these choices meant. By the 1910s, fictional films that told melodramatic or sensationalistic stories over the course of one of more hours were becoming the norm.
In the United States, Hollywood was incorporated as a town in 1911 and, for a number of reasons, quickly became the center for the nation’s film production. Southern California provided almost year‐round sunny weather (needed to illuminate early cinematography). The diversity of terrain in and around Los Angeles (beaches, mountains, forests, and deserts) allowed many different locations for filming. In the 1910s, Los Angeles was still a relatively small town and film companies could buy land cheaply to build their mammoth studios. Growing unionization in all US industries had not made a significant impact in Los Angeles yet, and the availability of cheap labor also drew filmmakers to Hollywood. These pioneering filmmakers were also seeking an escape from Thomas Edison’s east‐coast patent lawyers, who wanted them to pay royalties.
When American filmmaking was still a small cottage industry, individuals from various minority groups had more opportunity to move into the business. While a consortium of WASP (White Anglo‐Saxon Protestant) males and their lawyers were trying to control the American film industry, women and some racial/ethnic minorities were able to carve out a niche. Many pioneering Hollywood film businesses were started by recent European Jewish immigrants such as Samuel Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor, and Carl Laemmle. However, as film in America became a bigger and bigger business, more controlled by companies rather than individuals, the opportunities for minorities behind the camera dwindled. Laemmle, Zukor, and others of Jewish descent were able to maintain their power, but people of color were rarely permitted any creative control behind the scenes in Hollywood. Increasingly, the producing and directing of motion pictures was regarded as man’s work, and women were pushed aside. American women did not even have the right to vote prior to 1920, and non‐white people were rarely permitted into white social spheres or business concerns during these decades.
During the 1910s, cinema was commonly regarded in the United States as entertainment for immigrants and the working class. Some middle‐to‐upper‐class white Americans felt that cinema was potentially a disturbing social institution that promoted “dangerous” ideas to the lower classes, and thus many local and state censorship boards began to monitor the content of films. (In 1915, the Supreme Court ruled that cinema was not an art form protected as free speech, but simply a business and therefore open to regulation.) The film industry thus felt pressure to become more “respectable,” a euphemism for affirming the social ideals of the era’s white patriarchy. The industry also wanted to capture the more lucrative middle‐class audience. One of the ways it did this was by replacing nickelodeons with opulent theaters known as movie palaces. It was not unusual for movie palaces to have marble foyers, crystal chandeliers, and curtained boxes. Able to seat thousands of patrons at once, the palaces helped elevate the cultural status of film to something closer to that of live theater.
The Comet Theatre in New York City was a typical nickelodeon; note the price of admission and the various short films advertised.
Courtesy of the Quigley Photographic Archive, Georgetown University Library.
During the 1910s and 1920s, studios also developed the concept of the movie star (an actor or actress the public recognizes and likes), realizing that a star’s fans would pay to see any of the star’s films. Stars are thus used to sell films, giving them a kind of brand‐name appeal. Often stars were (and still are) associated with a specific type of role or a stereotypical persona. Charlie Chaplin’s beloved “Little Tramp” character was a poor but optimistic everyman figure, while Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford usually played helpless ingénues, dependent upon swashbuckling heroes like Douglas Fairbanks to save them. In this way, the Hollywood star system (in conjunction with the form of Hollywood narrative itself) endorsed middle‐class American values of strong physically active men and passive women, heterosexual romance, and the centrality of whiteness. At its most basic level, the star system is a caste system, creating a class of individuals who supposedly shine brighter than the rest of us, and, as the word “star” suggests, glitter in the night sky above us. Indeed, the terms “movie god,” “movie goddess,” and “Hollywood royalty” have been part of the Hollywood publicity machine for many years. The star system thus elevates some human beings above others, and constructs specific ideals of beauty, appropriate gender behavior, skin color, class, sexuality, and so forth.
This interior shot of the Majestic Theatre shows the size and opulence of a typical movie palace.
Courtesy of the Quigley Photographic Archive, Georgetown University Library.
The Classical Hollywood Cinema
By the 1920s (sometimes known as the Golden Age of Silent Cinema), Hollywood had streamlined its production, distribution, and exhibition practices, and was regularly exhibiting its opulent entertainments in lush movie palaces attended by middle‐ and upper‐class patrons. In 1927, sound was added to the silent movie, and by the 1930s, Hollywood had entered what many historians now call its classical phase. During this period of classical Hollywood cinema (roughly the 1930s to the 1950s), Hollywood developed a standardized product that employed classical Hollywood narrative form and the invisible style. Film production occurred mostly under the oligopolistic control of eight Hollywood companies. The so‐called Big 5 or the major studios (Warner Brothers, Metro‐Goldwyn‐Mayer [MGM], 20th Century‐Fox, RKO, and Paramount) were each vertically integrated, while the Little 3 or minor studios (Columbia, Universal, and United Artists) did not own their own theaters and had fewer assets with which to produce the lush expensive movies for which the Big 5 were famous. At the bottom of the economic ladder in Hollywood were the Poverty Row studios (such as Monogram, Mascot, and Producers Releasing Corporation), studios that made cheap genre films and serials that were often used by exhibitors to fill out the second half of a double feature.
Most of these Hollywood companies were centralized around their own production facilities, referred to as movie studios. A Hollywood movie studio housed any number of large sound stages, on which sets could be built and torn down as needed, so that multiple films could be shot simultaneously. Most studios included a number of permanent (or standing) sets, such as a Western town, an urban street, a European village, a jungle, etc., that could be used repeatedly in different films. The studios also had large lists of actors, directors, camera operators, editors, screenwriters, musicians, costumers, set designers, and makeup artists under contract. Studios also employed janitors, bookkeepers, electricians, carpenters, and security guards. The major Hollywood studios