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A History of American Movies A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of CinemaPaul MonacoTHE SCARECROW ...
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A History of American Movies A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema

Paul Monaco

THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC. Lanham • New York • Plymouth, UK 2010

Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.scarecrowpress.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2010 by Paul Monaco All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Monaco, Paul. A history of American movies : a film-by-film look at the art, craft, and business of cinema / Paul Monaco. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8108-7433-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-7434-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-7439-8 (ebook) 1. Motion pictures—California—Los Angeles—History—20th century. 2. Motion picture industry—United States—Los Angeles—History—20th century. 3. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)—History—20th century. I. Title. PN1993.5.U65M55 2010 791.430973—dc22 2009051427

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

To my mother, Birdena O’Melia Monaco, who was born in 1916, and who, like the Hollywood movies, has grown since then and continues to flourish.

Contents

Preface

1 2 3 4 5 6

vii

Part I: Classic Hollywood, 1927–1948 Establishing Hollywood Early Synchronous Sound Classic Hollywood Takes Form Banner Years Red, White, Blue, and Noir Postwar Triumphs and Reversals

3 23 43 59 83 97

7 8 9 10 11

Part II: Hollywood in Transition, 1949–1974 Postwar Unravelings Declining Audiences and Initial Responses Hollywood on the Ropes Indications of Revival Conglomerate Control, Movie Brats, and Creativity

115 141 161 179 195

12 13 14 15 16

Part III: New Hollywood, 1975–2009 Origins of Hollywood Divided Mixed Styles, Mixed Messages Hollywood in the 1980s New Hollywood Enters the Digital Age Hollywood Enters the Twenty-First Century

217 233 245 273 313

v

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Contents

Conclusion Selected Bibliography Index About the Author

335 339 341 349

Preface

This book is for the reader who wants to understand one of the most im-

portant cultural institutions of the twentieth century: the American cinema. It is a history, but it is also a story. And telling any story requires selectively choosing what to put in and what to leave out. A History of American Movies chronicles an institution that had taken on its fundamental characteristics by the year 1927, when the introduction of synchronous sound in film put an abrupt end to the silent movies. This story is about a professional community with its own ways of doing things, as well as a story about the relationships between the many talented people belonging to that community. Cinema is simultaneously an art, a craft, and a business. Art is best defined as a human-produced object, text, or performance with limited practical utility but with added dimensions of meaning and value open to interpretation. A sunset may be beautiful and engage the viewer’s emotions, but it is not art. Like a sculpture, a coat rack may be a standing form made of wood and metal—but it is not a sculpture, and is not considered art. How art is regarded critically, and valued, is subject to complex development through cultural and social institutions, education, and the opinions of various experts. Motion pictures are made by various people who specialize in each of the crafts that go into moviemaking, but always work collaboratively. Among the major motion picture crafts are producing, screenwriting, directing, production management, cinematography, lighting, acting, production design, sound recording, sound mixing, and editing. Hollywood professionals typically specialize in a single craft, although there is sometimes crossover of an individual from one craft to another. Just how the collaboration of these various elements functions in the making of any particular movie is elusive. It is widely recognized that making feature-length movies is collaborative. Just how this vii

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collaboration works, however, usually is ignored or glossed over in thinking and writing about what movies are and where they come from. Finally, movies are a business, produced, distributed, and exhibited with the intention of covering the costs of the materials and personnel needed to make any individual movie, and with an eye to profitability. That profitability is the margin that permits moviemaking and movie watching to continue. A History of American Movies is a story told in recognition of the complexity of movies as an art, craft, and business. It is written, first of all, for people who love movies and who would like to make them, especially for those younger men and women who see themselves as the filmmakers of the future. At the same time, it is a book written for readers of any age who want to know what the American cinema is and truly has been, and how those strands of art, craft, and business were woven together complexly throughout Hollywood’s history. The value of any Hollywood history depends on which movies are written about, with an explanation of how they were selected as being significant. Mentioning the titles of a great many movies in encyclopedic fashion has value, but it is not the best way to tell the story of Hollywood. Instead, this book focuses its attention on a select set of movies. The movies selected are not choices of the author, however, nor of any other film critic or film scholar. Instead, this history is based on the premise that the essence of Hollywood is best revealed through those movies whose titles are found on three lists that have been created primarily by professionals actually working in the movie industry. The cinema of the United States has two “official” organizations. The first is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, founded in 1927 by the leading motion picture production and distribution companies to promote film as an art and a science. Very early in its history, the Academy instituted awards of merit to recognize accomplishment in a wide range of artistic and technical fields; the recipients of these awards receive statuettes known as “Oscars.” Forty years later, in 1967, the other official body, the American Film Institute (AFI), was founded with the specific goal of training filmmakers and preserving America’s film heritage. With initial funding from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and the Ford Foundation, AFI’s broad mission is to enrich and nurture the art of film in America. In addition to providing advanced graduate education in film production, AFI has created various forms of recognition to honor specific filmmakers and films. Combined, the Academy and AFI provide us three lists of films recognized as exceptional.

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BEST PICTURE ACADEMY AWARDS The first of these lists consists of the movies selected for the Best Picture award by the Academy. The Academy is the Hollywood establishment; its membership consists of people working in the motion picture industry above the line (studio executives, producers, screenwriters, actors) and craftspeople (production designers, actors, cinematographers, editors, sound recordists, sound mixers, art directors, etc.), as well as other creative, performing, and business personnel. Since its earliest years in the late 1920s, when the Academy’s membership comprised just over four hundred, it has eventually grown into an organization with roughly six thousand voting members. The Academy’s Best Picture Oscar winners for each year, beginning in 1927/28, have been selected by a cross-section of professionals actually engaged in finding, developing, and funding movie ideas, bringing them to the screen, and disseminating them to the public. The Best Picture Academy Awards for each year are contemporary awards of distinction based exclusively on the evaluation and judgment of movie industry peers. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has selected a Best Picture for each year by vote since 1927/28. The awardee normally is selected from a list of five, or more, nominated films. The winners through 2008 are: 1927/28: Wings 1928/29: The Broadway Melody 1929/30: Cimarron 1931/32: Grand Hotel 1932/33: Cavalcade 1934: It Happened One Night 1935: Mutiny on the Bounty 1936: The Great Ziegfeld 1937: The Life of Emile Zola 1938: You Can’t Take It with You 1939: Gone with the Wind 1940: Rebecca 1941: How Green Was My Valley 1942: Mrs. Miniver 1943: Casablanca 1944: Going My Way 1945: The Lost Weekend 1946: The Best Years of Our Lives 1947: Gentleman’s Agreement

1948: Hamlet 1949: All the King’s Men 1950: All About Eve 1951: An American in Paris 1952: The Greatest Show on Earth 1953: From Here to Eternity 1954: On the Waterfront 1955: Marty 1956: Around the World in Eighty Days 1957: The Bridge on the River Kwai 1958: Gigi 1959: Ben-Hur 1960: The Apartment 1961: West Side Story 1962: Lawrence of Arabia 1963: Tom Jones 1964: My Fair Lady 1965: The Sound of Music 1966: A Man for All Seasons

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1967: 1968: 1969: 1970: 1971: 1972: 1973: 1974: 1975: 1976: 1977: 1978: 1979: 1980: 1981: 1982: 1983: 1984: 1985: 1986: 1987: 1988:

In the Heat of the Night Oliver! Midnight Cowboy Patton The French Connection The Godfather The Sting The Godfather, Part II One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest Rocky Annie Hall The Deer Hunter Kramer vs. Kramer Ordinary People Chariots of Fire Gandhi Terms of Endearment Amadeus Out of Africa Platoon The Last Emperor Rain Man

1989: 1990: 1991: 1992: 1993: 1994: 1995: 1996: 1997: 1998: 1999: 2000: 2001: 2002: 2003. 2004: 2005: 2006: 2007: 2008:

Driving Miss Daisy Dances with Wolves The Silence of the Lambs Unforgiven Schindler’s List Forrest Gump Braveheart The English Patient Titanic Shakespeare in Love American Beauty Gladiator A Beautiful Mind Chicago The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King Million Dollar Baby Crash The Departed No Country for Old Men Slumdog Millionaire

100 GREATEST AMERICAN FILMS (1996) The second list of movie titles is the “100 Greatest American Films,” assembled by the American Film Institute for all movies made between 1896 and 1996 from the votes of working professionals in the cinema of the United States. The 100 selected films were: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Citizen Kane (1941) Casablanca (1943) The Godfather (1972) Gone with the Wind (1939) Lawrence of Arabia (1962) The Wizard of Oz (1939) The Graduate (1967) On the Waterfront (1954) Schindler’s List (1993)

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Singin’ in the Rain (1952) It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) Sunset Boulevard (1950) The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) Some Like It Hot (1959) Star Wars (1977) All About Eve (1950) The African Queen (1951)

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18. Psycho (1960) 19. Chinatown (1974) 20. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) 21. The Grapes of Wrath (1940) 22. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) 23. The Maltese Falcon (1941) 24. Raging Bull (1980) 25. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) 26. Dr. Strangelove (1964) 27. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) 28. Apocalypse Now (1979) 29. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) 30. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) 31. Annie Hall (1977) 32. The Godfather, Part II (1974) 33. High Noon (1952) 34. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) 35. It Happened One Night (1934) 36. Midnight Cowboy (1969) 37. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) 38. Double Indemnity (1944) 39. Doctor Zhivago (1965) 40. North by Northwest (1959) 41. West Side Story (1961) 42. Rear Window (1954) 43. King Kong (1933) 44. The Birth of a Nation (1915) 45. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) 46. A Clockwork Orange (1971) 47. Taxi Driver (1976) 48. Jaws (1975) 49. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) 50. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) 51. The Philadelphia Story (1940) 52. From Here to Eternity (1953)

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53. Amadeus (1984) 54. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) 55. The Sound of Music (1965) 56. M*A*S*H (1970) 57. The Third Man (1949) 58. Fantasia (1940) 59. Rebel without a Cause (1955) 60. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) 61. Vertigo (1958) 62. Tootsie (1982) 63. Stagecoach (1939) 64. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) 65. The Silence of the Lambs (1991) 66. Network (1976) 67. The Manchurian Candidate (1962) 68. An American in Paris (1951) 69. Shane (1953) 70. The French Connection (1971) 71. Forrest Gump (1994) 72. Ben-Hur (1959) 73. Wuthering Heights (1939) 74. The Gold Rush (1925) 75. Dances with Wolves (1990) 76. City Lights (1931) 77. American Graffiti (1973) 78. Rocky (1976) 79. The Deer Hunter (1978) 80. The Wild Bunch (1969) 81. Modern Times (1936) 82. Giant (1956) 83. Platoon (1986) 84. Fargo (1996) 85. Duck Soup (1933) 86. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) 87. Frankenstein (1931) 88. Easy Rider (1969) 89. Patton (1970) 90. The Jazz Singer (1927) 91. My Fair Lady (1964)

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92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

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A Place in the Sun (1951) The Apartment (1960) GoodFellas (1990) Pulp Fiction (1994) The Searchers (1956)

97. Bringing Up Baby (1938) 98. Unforgiven (1992) 99. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) 100. Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)

AFI invited more than 1,500 leaders from across the U.S. film community— primarily screenwriters, directors, actors, cinematographers, producers, editors, and studio executives—to choose the hundred greatest movies from a list of four hundred nominated films. Thirty-four of the movies on this American Film Institute list duplicate the titles of the Oscar-winning Best Picture selections. To create this list, AFI distributed ballots to a jury of 1,500 motion picture industry leaders, consisting of film artists, including directors, screenwriters, actors, editors, cinematographers, production designers, sound technicians, and others, as well as to a limited number of select film critics and film historians. AFI’s guidelines permitted write-in votes, thereby allowing jurors to nominate films not already on the list. AFI asked its 1,500 jurors to use the following criteria in making their selections: • Feature-length fiction films only (narrative format typically over sixty minutes in length) • American films only (English language film with significant creative and/or financial production elements from the United States) • Critical commendation (formal commendation in print, including awards from organizations in the film community and major film festivals) • Major award winner (recognition from competitive events, including awards from organizations in the film community and major film festivals) • Popularity over time (including figures for box office adjusted for inflation, television broadcasts and syndication, and home video sales and rentals) • Historical significance (a film’s mark on the history of the moving image through technical innovation, visionary narrative devices, or other groundbreaking achievements) • Cultural impact (a film’s mark on American society in matters of style and substance) • Legacy (also enjoyed apart from the movie and evoking the memory of its film source, thus ensuring and enlivening both the music and the movie’s historical legacy)

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100 YEARS . . . 100 MOVIES: THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION In 2006, the American Film Institute conducted a follow-up survey to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its original list of 100 Greatest American Films. This voting, again, was based on the ballots of 1,500 motion picture industry professionals. One major reason for this “updating” of the list was for the voters to consider feature films released since 1996. In all, forty-three films released between 1996 and 2006 were nominated for consideration, but only four of them—The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2000), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Titanic (1997), and The Sixth Sense (1999)—made the list. A second reason was to allow for an expansion of the list of the original one hundred titles produced by AFI and published in 1997. Twenty-three new film titles appear for the first time on this second AFI list, which was published in 2007. In A History of American Movies, the two AFI lists are treated as being of equal value and importance. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Citizen Kane (1941) The Godfather (1972) Casablanca (1942) Raging Bull (1980) Singin’ in the Rain (1952) Gone with the Wind (1939) Lawrence of Arabia (1962) Schindler’s List (1993) Vertigo (1958) The Wizard of Oz (1939) City Lights (1931) The Searchers (1956) Star Wars (1977) Psycho (1960) 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Sunset Boulevard (1950) The Graduate (1967) The General (1927) On the Waterfront (1954) It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) Chinatown (1974) Some Like It Hot (1959) The Grapes of Wrath (1940) E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

25. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) 26. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) 27. High Noon (1952) 28. All About Eve (1950) 29. Double Indemnity (1944) 30. Apocalypse Now (1979) 31. The Maltese Falcon (1941) 32. The Godfather, Part II (1974) 33. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) 34. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) 35. Annie Hall (1977) 36. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) 37. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) 38. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) 39. Dr. Strangelove (1964) 40. The Sound of Music (1965) 41. King Kong (1933) 42. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

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43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

Preface

Midnight Cowboy (1969) The Philadelphia Story (1940) Shane (1953) It Happened One Night (1934) A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) Rear Window (1954) Intolerance (1916) Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) West Side Story (1961) Taxi Driver (1976) The Deer Hunter (1978) M*A*S*H (1970) North by Northwest (1959) Jaws (1975) Rocky (1976) The Gold Rush (1925) Nashville (1976) Duck Soup (1933) Sullivan’s Travels (1941) American Graffiti (1973) Cabaret (1972) Network (1976) The African Queen (1951) Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) Unforgiven (1992) Tootsie (1982) A Clockwork Orange (1971) Saving Private Ryan (1998)

72. The Shawshank Redemption (1994) 73. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) 74. The Silence of the Lambs (1991) 75. In the Heat of the Night (1967) 76. Forrest Gump (1994) 77. All the President’s Men (1976) 78. Modern Times (1936) 79. The Wild Bunch (1969) 80. The Apartment (1960) 81. Spartacus (1960) 82. Sunrise (1927) 83. Titanic (1997) 84. Easy Rider (1969) 85. A Night at the Opera (1935) 86. Platoon (1989) 87. Twelve Angry Men (1957) 88. Bringing Up Baby (1938) 89. The Sixth Sense (1999) 90. Swing Time (1936) 91. Sophie’s Choice (1982) 92. GoodFellas (1990) 93. The French Connection (1971) 94. Pulp Fiction (1994) 95. The Last Picture Show (1971) 96. Do the Right Thing (1989) 97. Blade Runner (1982) 98. Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) 99. Toy Story (1995) 100. Ben-Hur (1959)

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE THREE LISTS The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s list of Best Pictures reflects immediacy, and the opinions and biases of a particular point in time. The American Film Institute’s lists reflect hindsight, taking into account how movies have held up over time and how influential they have been. There are many other lists of favorite films or greatest films, as voted on by the public or

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selected by critics or assembled by organizations interested in promoting film. None of these other lists, however, is based primarily on the votes of working professionals in the motion picture industry, with representation of the creative talent in all of the crafts that contribute to filmmaking. These working professionals understand and appreciate the art, the craft, and the business of the movies better than anyone else, and this history of the Hollywood feature film recognizes that fact. This essential history of Hollywood is based on close attention to the 180 movies found on one or more of these three lists. Other movies may be alluded to or mentioned, but this is a story told through the fewer than two hundred films that the Academy and AFI have designated as having particular significance. Being about movies, this book is also largely about the people who make movies: the creative impulses they feel, how they work, with whom they collaborate, and how they adapt to the complicated circumstances surrounding the making of Hollywood movies. The other group of people who figure in this history are the viewers who make up the audience for movies. Who it is that makes up the audience—and when and how the audience changes—has great influence on which movies are actually made and released. At the same time, A History of American Movies is also about structures and practices within the workings of the American cinema. For nearly five decades, from the 1920s through the 1960s, movies were strongly identified with the studios that produced them. During Hollywood’s Classic Era, nearly any movie could be thought of as being from a particular studio—a typical Warner Bros. production, for example, or a lavish film produced in characteristic MGM style. Since the 1960s, movies have been increasingly identified with the names of their individual directors. Either sort of identification may be helpful, but it is never sufficient to account consistently for the imaginative spark and dominant influence that resulted in a specific motion picture. The question of who the dominating force is on any particular movie must always be treated as an open one. A producer, a director, a screenwriter, an actor, a director of photography, an editor, or even a production code administrator, a production designer, or someone else working on the movie or deciding on its distribution and exhibition may be the most important single figure for that particular movie. There are theories that seek to ascribe responsibility for the effectiveness of movies in general: for example, the auteur theory, which asserts that the movie’s director is always the most dominant figure in the making of a movie, or the Schreiber theory, which holds that the most important figure is the writer of the screenplay on which any movie is based. What is missed by these theories of attribution is that the cinema is a collaborative art, and that the story of any particular movie is in how the

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specifics of the collaboration have played out for that particular film and how we can assess who played what role most successfully in that movie’s effectiveness. Even when the Hollywood studio system was at its height, the movies produced at a particular studio could not necessarily be reliably attributed to the studio rather than to the particular creative personnel or actors involved in their making. Often, the market for movies is interpreted by critics as demonstrating only how popular taste undermines artistic intention and integrity. If we acknowledge, however, that any market functions as a system of communication from which we gain insight into audience expectation and its relationship to creativity, the role of popular taste in cinema is seen far differently. Moreover, Hollywood’s blend of art and commerce is hardly unique. For centuries in the western world, art, everywhere and in every era, has had to exist within a system of valuation and exchange that justifies its continuation. Getting the record straight is the biggest challenge in telling this story. Nonetheless, what happened and how it happened always remains an easier part of history than explaining why something happened. Drawing inferences about what particular movies might mean in terms of bigger issues in society and culture often is great fun, but doing so is highly problematic. For that reason, indulging in such speculation has been dampened here. In the long run, there is much more value and genuine pleasure in understanding the authentic history of Hollywood movies as it actually happened. There are no photographs in this book. Still photographs are common in books about movies, but they do little to convey what motion pictures are about. The operative word here, of course, is motion. Movies are about motion, not frozen still images. Nearly every movie mentioned in these pages may be purchased or rented on DVD. A goal of this book is to encourage its readers to expand their knowledge of Hollywood film and its history by seeing some of the movies they have heard about but have not yet seen. Keep in mind, however, that at the end of the day, much of the experience of movies still is about the aesthetic of power created by the large screen, and the dynamic of reception that is part of the excitement of watching a movie in a theater with strangers. Newer technologies are fabulous for spreading film literacy, but the experience of moviegoing as it has existed through most of Hollywood’s history still has to be imagined. Quotes from contemporary criticism published in newspapers, magazines, and trade journals—written at the time a movie was first released—are cited throughout A History of American Movies to provide a sense of how a particular movie was perceived and appreciated at the time of its original release to the public. The content and tone of comments from contemporary critics provide

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an insight into how a movie was being thought about at the time of its first release. The emphasis is on reviews published in major newspapers such as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, the national weekly news magazines Time and Newsweek, and the major motion picture industry trade journals, including Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, and Boxoffice. Writing by academics, historians, or critics attempting to frame an understanding of a movie for later generations is quoted less frequently. Unless otherwise indicated, all the quotations and notes cited in documenting the production and reception histories of the movies written about in this book are found in the extensive file holdings under each movie’s specific title at the Douglas Fairbanks Center for the Study of Motion Pictures/Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, located at La Cienega and Olympic boulevards in Beverly Hills, California. Finally, I thank three people who have kindly reviewed this book and contributed their corrections to it: my teaching colleague, Bill Neff; my friend, cinematographer Andrew Laszlo, ASC; and my dear wife, Victoria O’Donnell, who is a widely published scholar in communication and the media.

Part I CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD, 1927–1948

•

1•

Establishing Hollywood

One year splits the history of Hollywood in two. There are movies made

through 1927, and those made since. That divide is marked by the absence of acceptable synchronous sound production in motion pictures until nearly the end of 1927, and the pervasive domination of it from 1928 onward. From their first projection in 1895, movies existed for more than thirty years as silent cinema. That is, the movies were produced without synchronous sound—not that audiences watched them in silence: Live musical accompaniment, ranging from a single piano player to a full orchestra, was the norm for movie exhibition throughout the “silent” era of cinema. During the decade and a half before 1927, Hollywood was established in its basic business structures, and the word Hollywood itself became synonymous with the American cinema. D. W. (David Wark) Griffith, a former actor who had left the stage to make movies in northern New Jersey—for a company owned by inventor Thomas Edison—arrived in Los Angeles early in 1914. Within a year, he had completed and released the first movie perceived to mark a genuine turning point in the American cinema, The Birth of a Nation. Full of technical innovations and creating a truly epic feeling, this three-hour-long feature may be considered the beginning of Hollywood movies as we know them. Unfortunately, its content remains controversial and disturbing.

THE FOUNDING OF HOLLYWOOD Hollywood, incorporated as a village in the Los Angeles basin in 1903, became a place for making movies when Col. William Selig relocated his production 3

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company, Polyscope, there from Chicago in 1909. Early motion picture production in the United States had been concentrated in New York City and its environs. Even the early “westerns” were filmed in northern New Jersey. There was some activity around Chicago and other places, as well, but in Southern California, Selig found a locale that afforded cheap land; a mild year-round climate especially favorable to exterior filming; a variety of settings, from sandy ocean beaches to nearby mountains; and a region filled with a variety of vegetation and flora. Soon, many other barely established and would-be filmmakers were following his trail to the Los Angeles area. It is also said speculatively that Southern California appealed to early moviemakers because it was so distant from Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company on the East Coast. The inventor Edison held one of the earliest patents for a motion picture apparatus that he called the “kinetoscope.” In 1908, on the basis of this and other patents that he held, Edison had joined with the makers of motion picture equipment and film stock manufacturers to establish a trust in order to exert a monopoly over motion pictures in the United States. Ever the creative inventor and wily entrepreneur, Edison believed that he could dominate motion pictures in the United States by controlling the technology, film stock, and equipment for making and showing movies. Edison was incorrect. By the time a federal court ruled in 1915 that his Motion Picture Patents Company was in violation of federal antitrust acts, the earliest Hollywood companies had already begun taking a different path toward their global domination of cinema that would be challenged only rarely throughout the entire twentieth century. While fleeing the legal grasp of Edison’s trust was a possible motive for filmmakers relocating to Los Angeles, a more general factor was that Southern California was a long way from the centers of the East Coast establishment’s perceived political, economic, social, and cultural domination of American society. From numerous early movie companies, there emerged several major ones. In 1913, movie producer, screenwriter, and director Cecil B. DeMille joined vaudeville musician Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s brother-in-law, Samuel Goldfish (who later changed his name to Samuel Goldwyn), to found a company that would become Paramount Pictures. Paramount was the earliest of the major Hollywood companies that survived into the twenty-first century, producing and distributing movies, and, at times, exhibiting them as well. In its origins, its business practices, and the system it constructed for making and distributing movies, Paramount was typical of the six other major Hollywood studios with similar origins and long histories of sustained success: Warner Bros., Fox, Universal, Columbia, United Artists, and MetroGoldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Each of these studios was different, and each one

Establishing Hollywood

5

contributed to the formation of a system that made the feature-length motion picture released for theatrical distribution the continuing core of the American cinema throughout the twentieth century. These major Hollywood studios all had their business offices in New York City, even though their factories and their personnel for actually making movies were in Los Angeles. Unlike the scientific genius and inventor Edison, the founders of Hollywood predominantly came from backgrounds as showmen and salesmen. From its inception, Hollywood was geared by these men to the idea of finding out what audiences wanted and giving it to them. Doing so proved to be a continuing challenge that required the constant refining of perceptions of what audiences wanted to see, continually rethinking what would keep patrons coming back to movie theaters. Instead of competing directly with Edison’s idea of monopolizing cinema by controlling the patents, technologies, film stocks, and the actual equipment for making and showing movies, the major Hollywood studios crafted a system based on movies whose production, distribution, and exhibition could be relatively standardized and would reliably attract audiences. The Hollywood solution to the challenge of building a sustainable cinema was to control costs, to turn out movies with a consistently high level of technical polish, and to tell screen stories that reliably appealed to mass audiences. The motion picture business is extremely risky. It is difficult to overestimate the determination and will of those ambitious, creative, and sometimes obsessive personalities in the major Hollywood companies who took on those risks. The story of the American cinema, however, is also as much about caution and control as it is about risk-taking and ambitions. The risk takers make for the more colorful portraits and anecdotes. The people who sought to make Hollywood function by restraining the impulses toward creative excess, and by seeking to control moviemaking as a sustainable business, were just as important. Hollywood needed both, and the success of the American feature film into the twenty-first century relies on that combination. The original cobbling together of the company that came to be called Paramount represented one side of the fundamental equation of Hollywood. It reflected the business model within which the craft of the art form was to be nurtured. The debut of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in 1915 marks the origin of Hollywood from the other side. That movie’s appearance was a turning point in American cinema history. It confronted viewers with an array of the basics: an epic structure using all the known techniques of filming, melodramatic screen performances, and an engaging story that mixed the personal tales of family and romantic love with the broad sweeps of history, the tragedy of war, and its aftermath. Better than any film of its time, The Birth of a Nation

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brought to the screen two of the major elements that define Hollywood entertainment throughout its subsequent history: sentiment and spectacle.

THE BIRTH OF A NATION Based on a novel entitled The Clansman by the Reverend Thomas Dixon Jr., The Birth of a Nation is three hours of pathbreaking cinematic ingenuity and creativity that rarely strays from its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan and the related themes that inspired Dixon’s book. Dixon’s published novel bore the subtitle: “An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan,” and he asserted that one reason he supported its adaptation to the screen was “to help prevent the mixing of White and Negro blood by intermarriage.” The movie depicts opposition to race-mixing and portrays the recently freed slaves of the South in negative and racist caricatures. As the movie’s director, D. W. Griffith utilized a full range of long, medium, and close shots to tell his story visually, as based on the written scenario (often called a “photoplay” in the early silent era) by Frank Wood. The movie’s cinematographer, W. G. “Billy” Bitzer, with whom Griffith had been working regularly on shorter films since 1908, supplied much of the “look” to The Birth of a Nation. In fact, with regard to the focal length of the shots (long, medium, or close), as well as the visual composition of shots within the frame, it is nearly impossible for us to distinguish which creative choices were director Griffith’s and which came from the movie’s director of photography, Bitzer. Bitzer, like so many craftspeople in the American cinema, especially in its early decades, loved to tinker with equipment and was the inventor of various tools to assist in camera operations and gadgets used to create special shots. Many such shots are found in The Birth of a Nation. In hindsight, we can recognize how new and influential The Birth of a Nation’s buildup of visual storytelling devices through close-ups, fades, iris shots, backlighting, and dolly shots really is. The elements of what is so often called the “language” of cinema consisted of the fundamental variables of any moviemaking. A shot may be long, medium, or close, depending on the focal length of the camera lens from the subject and how the subject is framed. The camera’s angle to the subject may be high (from above) or low (from below). The camera may be stationary or in motion (such as being mounted on a dolly to move in and out on a subject, or moving laterally with action in the movie as in a “tracking shot”). Such choices are basic to the cinema’s approach to visual storytelling. The entire range of shots, camera angles, stationary setups, and moving camera action were all to be found in The Birth of a Nation.

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Equally as important, the process of editing in motion pictures permits the effective manipulation of time and space, and the manipulation embodies much of the specific artistic power of the medium. The editor on The Birth of a Nation was James Smith, and the film is frequently cited as an early example of the analytical approach to editing. These shots, moreover, come together in the movie to form a clear example of what is called analytical editing, which consists of alternating perspectives according to the “shot/ countershot” technique. Analytical editing allows the editor of a movie to stage a scene within a particular space by cutting from one camera angle to another in order to indicate the visual points of view of different characters in the same scene. Stage directors stage scenes by “blocking” them; movie directors use blocking and camera setups to stage scenes; and movie editors stage scenes by arranging shots. Nationwide, contemporary critics in 1915 hailed The Birth of a Nation as superior to any movie made before it. Right after its first screenings, the movie critic for Motion Picture World, W. Stephen Bush, wrote that “nothing more impressive has ever been seen on the screen.” Writing in the movie industry trade magazine Variety, Mark Vance cited the movie as “launching a great epoch in picture making . . . great for the pictures and great for the name and fame of David Wark Griffith.” Subsequent generations of film historians and critics have concurred that there is little argument about the significance of The Birth of a Nation as a breakthrough in filmmaking. In terms of both spectacle and sentiment, the work of Griffith, Bitzer, and Smith had combined to craft a work that unleashed the promises of the medium. The success of The Birth of a Nation as a seminal artistic event, and as the beginning of the mainstream American feature film, is marred by controversy, however. Debate over the movie’s contents began even before it was released publicly. As its praises were being sung for its newness of scope and style and its pathbreaking artistic triumph, critics weighed in on the offensiveness of the movie’s subject matter. The review in the large-circulation New York Globe read: “To present the members of a race as women chasers and foul fiends is a cruel distortion of history. To make a few dollars men are willing to pander to depraved tastes and to foment race antipathy.” Just as harshly, critic Francis Hackett wrote in the New Republic: My objection to this drama is based partly on the tendency of the pictures but mainly on the animus of the printed lines [in the movie’s inter titles]. . . . Reinforced by quotations from Woodrow Wilson and representative assurances of impartiality and good will, [they serve] to arouse in the audience a strong sense of the evil possibilities of the Negro and the extreme propriety and sanctity of the Ku Klux Klan.

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Beginning right after the announcement in 1914 that the book would be developed as a movie, Griffith’s production of The Birth of a Nation became the target of protests, sponsored primarily by the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League. These protests intensified after the movie was released. However active the protestors were, though, and no matter how passionately held their objections to the movie were, many of the ideas and biases in Griffith’s film were nonetheless widely held by the general population of the United States in 1915. The quotes from Wilson’s writings were highly selective, cited for emotional effect, and played up in the movie’s printed titles, but the words still came from a serious historical book written by the respected former Princeton professor and university president, who was now the president of the United States. Many of the racist biases of the movie’s depictions apparently meshed with racist stereotypes held by much of the American populace at the time. Such views appeared to be more common among whites in the former states of the Confederacy, where, for example, Ward Green wrote in the Atlanta Journal in his review of the movie: There has been nothing to equal it—nothing. Not as a motion picture, nor as a play, nor a book . . . Race prejudice? Injustice? Suppression? You would not think of those things had you seen The Birth of a Nation. For no one but a man with a spirit too picayunish and warped for words would pick such flaws in a spectacle so great and wholehearted as this.

These attitudes, moreover, spread widely beyond the South. In 1915, there was widespread sympathy in many quarters for the suffering of the Southern states after the Civil War. Jim Crow laws and segregationist statutes in Southern and border states were largely taken for granted and had been upheld as constitutional under a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1896. In the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan would grow rapidly in membership—most notably in northern states such as Ohio and Indiana. The Birth of a Nation did well at movie theater box offices, but while its profits likely mean that most viewers did not find it offensive, those profits do not necessarily mean that everyone who saw the movie adhered to racist stereotypes of Negroes. For his part, Griffith claimed publicly that he was surprised at the negative criticism of his movie, and in the following year he made a movie entitled Intolerance that many regarded as his attempt to atone for feelings outraged by The Birth of a Nation.

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INTOLERANCE Biographically, it is often held that D. W. Griffith felt that he had to outdo himself with his next production in order to answer the charges of bigotry leveled at him for The Birth of a Nation. The veracity of this claim, however, is difficult to establish. Since the evidence indicates that Griffith had never regarded The Birth of a Nation as anything but a faithful depiction of the Civil War and its aftermath, the idea that he considered Intolerance to be his atonement is problematic. Furthermore, we know that Griffith took as his inspiration for Intolerance a story of industrial and social exploitation that he had begun writing in 1914—before he started making The Birth of a Nation. The premier of the $2 million production of Intolerance was on September 5, 1916, at the Liberty Theater, one of the famed early movie palaces in New York City. The film’s structure intercuts four different stories of intolerance from four different eras, linked together by the image of a mother (Lilian Gish) rocking a cradle. Judea, Babylon, Paris, and an American city in the west (contemporary to the film’s release) are featured. It was originally released in prints with color tinting that played up the scenery and stage design elements reminiscent of the nineteenth-century theater tradition out of which Griffith had come. In addition to Gish, the film starred Mae Marsh as the “Little Dear One.” Billy Bitzer was again the cinematographer; James Andrew Smith edited and Griffith’s own company produced the movie. Intolerance, which was released with the subtitle “Love’s Struggles throughout the Ages,” failed commercially, and this failure alone more than devoured entirely the substantial profits Griffith had made with The Birth of a Nation. Some observers attribute the failure of Intolerance at the box office to what they thought was its pacifist message on the eve of U.S. entry into World War I. Yet, the more probable explanation for the unpopularity of Intolerance with audiences had more to do with the film’s style. Griffith was seeking to develop a new blueprint for film narrative with Intolerance by rejecting unity and order (and arguably creating the first “modernist” film). In fact, the segment entitled “The Mother and the Law,” which was the contemporary story, and the section called “The Fall of Babylon” were both considered suitable for separate exhibition as stand-alone movies. Intolerance failed financially most likely because of its confusing story structure. It tried to tell four different stories from four different places and four different historical periods, going back and forth between them, which many viewers found confusing.

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After its 1916 premiere, Griffith repeatedly cut and recut the movie, seeking each time to better address the challenge of interweaving the four different stories in order “to trace a universal theme through various periods of the [human] race’s history.” That ambition was, perhaps, best summed up by critic Pauline Kael—writing several decades later—who called Intolerance “perhaps the greatest movie ever made and the greatest folly in movie history.” She continued, “In spite of its weaknesses, and its lack of success at the box office, Intolerance still managed to explore ideas about associative editing that would influence moviemaking from Soviet montage classics of the 1920s to American experimental film of the 1960s.” In 1989, a reconstructed print of Intolerance was shown in conjunction with the New York Film Festival; as renowned film historian Russell Merritt noted: Part morality play and part three-ring circus, the movie was part of a new eclectic aesthetic that had all but buried the ideal of organic synthesis. Along with Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha and Charles Ives’s Third Symphony it remains one of the period’s great hybrids.

SOLIDIFYING THE HOLLYWOOD SYSTEM Both The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance were made in Southern California, but their maker, D. W. Griffith, had been an independent. His personal vision infused his movie entirely, and his ambitious work was not produced under the aegis of a major Hollywood studio. As a system, studio Hollywood emerged between 1915 and 1920 in a manner that sought to harness the ambitions and excesses of such personal filmmaking. As the Hollywood studio system took on its fundamental characteristics and grew during the early 1920s, the commitment of its production choices turned toward subjects less controversial than the material of The Birth of a Nation and less challenging to narrative convention than Intolerance. A perception of what subjects to avoid, or at least how to deal with controversial subjects for the tastes of mass audiences, developed early in Hollywood history. By 1920, the Hollywood studios understood well that their audience was broad and diverse. Therefore, it was commercially farsighted to avoid movies that would appear to be so slanted in their view of historical, political, or social issues as to risk offending significant portions of the potential audience. This led to a relatively clear pattern for the studios to follow in taming possibly controversial subjects and themes to broad tastes: the principle of portraying characters and situations with some degree of ambiguity that invited audience members to reach different inferences and interpretations.

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The strong biases of the screen adaptation of Dixon’s novel for The Birth of a Nation and trying to tell the complex four-part story of Intolerance were instances of a director having free rein over his material because he was also the movie’s producer. It was a situation that could not be permitted to prevail as the Hollywood system was being put together. Hollywood as a system could succeed only to the extent that the interests of studios and their staff producers prevailed over the willfulness and selfindulgence of directors. In spite of his enormous talents, his understanding of cinema as emotional communication, and his leadership in establishing the modern feature film in the United States as based on sentiment and spectacle, after The Birth of a Nation, Griffith could never sustain a truly successful Hollywood career. Both were landmark movies, but they were not typical ones for Hollywood. Nonetheless, early Hollywood still provided enough latitude for the work of another early genius of the screen who was also both a producer and director, as well as being a star performer in his own movies. Produced, written, and directed by Charlie Chaplin, The Gold Rush, a silent film from 1925, has proven to be arguably the most enduring of his life’s work. Self-financed, it was released and distributed by United Artists, the Hollywood company that Chaplin had cofounded with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D. W. Griffith in 1919. From its inception, United Artists specialized in distributing movies, rather being responsible for their entire funding and production. Hence, it became an outlet for movies that were produced by independents, and while United Artists was considered one of the major Hollywood studios, its business practices and functions remained quite different from the other major studios. The Gold Rush is based on Chaplin’s signature character of the “Little Tramp.” Its story is about the Tramp’s two central relationships—a friendship with the prospector Big Jim (Mack Swain) and an attempted romance with a dance hall girl, Georgia (Georgia Hale)—set in Alaska during the 1890s. Through the years, critics have come to especially appreciate Chaplin’s weaving together of comic bits and melodrama in The Gold Rush for two major reasons. First, the story of the movie builds on what is called a social metaphor based on the premise of becoming rich and then finding love. The Little Tramp pursues the affections of the dance hall girl through much of the movie, resulting in only rejection and disappointment. He then meets her again on a freighter traveling back from Alaska after he has shared Big Jim’s great gold strike and become a millionaire, and their love blossoms. The second element that distinguishes The Gold Rush is the visual inventiveness of so many of the scenes. These include the scene in which the

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starving Big Jim imagines the Tramp has been transformed into a chicken, as well as the Thanksgiving dinner in their cabin for which the Tramp boils his shoe and eats it, picking out the nails as if they were chicken bones, twirling the laces as if they were spaghetti, and slicing the shoe leather as if it were slices from a roast. Chaplin subtitled his movie “A Dramatic Comedy,” and it is well documented that his idea for The Gold Rush originated from looking at actual photographs of lines of men tramping through the snowy Chilkoot Pass en route to the Alaskan goldfields, which he happened to view at a friend’s home. Chaplin’s passion for the project was inspired by his sense of the hardships and deprivations endured by people hoping to strike it rich that he had discovered in these photographs from that period. This idea was carried out so well on the screen because the movie is structured as a series of clever visual vignettes about hardship and deprivation, each of which makes viewers laugh. By 1925, Charlie Chaplin himself had struck it rich by Hollywood standards. He was a producer-writer-director in the mold of Griffith, a virtuoso screen performer, and an artistic genius of immense proportions. He had his own studio space and a staff that was essentially his, including the services of art director Charles D. “Danny” Hall, who built elaborate sets for The Gold Rush, created artificial ice and snowfields, and manufactured fierce blizzards for the movie. Only the opening of The Gold Rush, with lines of men trudging through the pass, and a brief scene of the Tramp sliding down the side of the hill in the snow, were actually filmed on location. In general, Chaplin did not like filming on location, where he thought there were too many distractions. The aesthetic of production on the studio lot appealed to him, as it did to most Hollywood filmmakers well into the late 1940s. One of the most successful visual bits in The Gold Rush is the scene of the prospector’s cabin being blown across the snowy fields in a blizzard until it stops, teetering on the edge of a precipice. The entire design and execution of this scene was the work of Hall, who built a full-size log cabin, outfitted it with hinged walls, placed a crew strategically off-camera, and then led them himself in rocking and swaying the cabin to give the impression of the fierce storm raging outside. This sequence depended heavily on the camera positions and angles selected by The Gold Rush’s director of photography, Rolland “Rollie” Totheroth, who worked steadily with Chaplin. Totheroth was as creative as he was reliable. The shots of the Tramp leaping from the cabin to safety, for example, had to be achieved by double-exposing the negative film in the camera, the same technique used in the sequence in which Big Jim imagines that the Tramp has turned into a chicken. Such double exposures were an established Hollywood device, and Totheroth was a master of the process. By

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1925, when they made The Gold Rush, Totheroth already had been working with Chaplin for more than a decade, and their collaboration would continue through 1947. Chaplin himself was the equivalent of an entire studio. He produced The Gold Rush by raising some money and borrowing the rest, coming up with the $923,000 needed for the movie’s production costs. He wrote the photoplay on which the movie was based, directed it, and starred in it. He stands for the kind of figure admired in a long-standing tradition of evaluating the movies: Chaplin was an artistic genius whose personality and creative energy permeated a film with the undeniable personal presence. He was also a shrewd businessman. The Gold Rush ultimately had gross earnings from its initial theatrical release in excess of $6 million. It was widely acclaimed by critics at the time, as well as by subsequent generations of commentators. The Gold Rush was a grand combination of individual artistry, collaboration with inventive craftsmen, and a dazzling example of creating entertainment for financial profit. Chaplin himself once said that The Gold Rush was the one film that he wanted to be remembered for. While the body of his life’s work was vast and influential, it is likely that his 1925 feature will long remain his most memorable movie.

THE GENERAL Among the earliest Hollywood accomplishments were silent era comedies. Alongside the pioneering successes of Charlie Chaplin was the work of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. Lloyd usually portrayed an ambitious middle-class man bent on success, who inevitably wound up as a bumbling striver who failed. Keaton, in many ways more like Chaplin, portrayed a character who was bewildered by the world around him but who still proved capable of dealing with it ingeniously. Keaton’s most recognized comedy was a 1926 film. Directed by Clyde Bruckman and “Buster” (Joseph Frank) Keaton, and presumed to be based on a real-life incident, The General was adapted as a silent film scenario from a novel entitled The Great Locomotive Chase by William Pittenger. Keaton, along with Bruckman, Al Boasburg, and Charles Smith, wrote the photoplay for the movie. Early in the Civil War, Keaton’s character is declared unfit for uniform because of a recruitment office foul-up. Working as a locomotive engineer, he becomes admired by soldiers in the Confederate Army, but still he is spurned by his would-be girlfriend Annabelle Lee (played by Marian Mack).

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However, when Union spies steal his beloved locomotive—which is called The General—Buster rises to the occasion and single-handedly pursues them to demonstrate his worth. The film was distinguished by exceptional production design evoking the Civil War period and has frequently been cited as one of the most accomplished comedies ever made for the screen, but it failed at the box office initially. Later, it became revered by critics as a model of pure, visual storytelling, deadpan comedy, and a mastery of spectacle, with cinematography by Dev Jennings. Keaton’s performance infuses into his character a certain humanity that transcends the contemporary dismissal of the film as predictable, typical farce. Like The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, the Civil War provides the background for the landmark film that The General has become. And, in this case, although it is a comedy, The General is still regarded and discussed as a film that is about war. According to notes for the Toronto Film Society’s screening of the film in 1989, Keaton is the silent-era comedian who appealed most to late twentieth-century tastes because he is so cool, as opposed to Chaplin’s sentimentality, and because he displays a “mulish imperturbability [sic] under the wildest of circumstances.” The General is Keaton’s most accomplished film. Buster Keaton wrote, directed, edited, and starred in ten feature-length films and nineteen short comedies. According to his widow, Eleanor, he always considered The General to be “his baby.” Its reputation among film scholars has continually grown in stature. No stuntmen were utilized in those days, and no rear projection was available to facilitate the faking of action against backgrounds that had been filmed previously. Hence, Keaton is widely considered a painstaking filmmaker. The General often is praised as having a look that is reminiscent of Matthew Brady’s pathbreaking still photography from the Civil War. The General was produced by Joseph M. Schenk for United Artists release (the same company that distributed Chaplin’s films). Schenk demanded a tight $400,000 budget for the production and found a small railroad in the heart of Oregon lumbering country to use in the production. Still, The General became one of early Hollywood’s “runaway productions,” and its final cost was over a million dollars. THE GENIUS OF THE BUSINESS Chaplin was born in England, and the son of music hall entertainers. By the early 1920s, he was known worldwide as a distinctive screen character and a

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comedic genius. Keaton grew up with his parents in vaudeville and medicine shows, and at age twenty-one, left their show in 1917 to start his own Hollywood career, playing first alongside Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. In contrast to these two producer-performer-writer-director talents— Chaplin and Keaton—a young man from New York City who entered the movie business right after his graduation from high school, Irving Thalberg, stood at the opposite end of the Hollywood equation. No one ever saw Thalberg on screen, and his extensive work on dozens of movies was rarely even listed in the credits. His signature contribution to the American cinema was the supervisory system for production that he built over a decade and a half, first at Universal, then more famously at MGM between 1924 and his early death at the age of thirty-seven in 1936. The goal of Thalberg’s system was for the studio to treat each motion picture as a new unit, in order to control the costs of productions, to rein in the excesses of spendthrift filmmakers, and to use careful calculations to make practical and wise decisions to complete a movie from the nascent stages of its early development to its final release to the public. It became the backbone for how Hollywood produced all its features. Thalberg’s system was based on the studio’s tight control over two of the three stages of professional moviemaking. The first of these was the preproduction stage, meaning the selection of the idea or the property—such as a short story, novel, or play on which the movie was to be based—as well as the actual scripting, casting, budgeting, assigning of a crew, and scheduling. Up front, the studio needed control of how the project was developed and scripted, how it was budgeted, and on what schedule it would be made for what specific cost. As for the actual production stage, so long as it kept to schedule and within budget, Thalberg’s system normally did not interfere directly with the filming process and directorial decisions on the set. According to Thalberg, the studio needed next to weigh back in on the project with strict control only in the postproduction stage. This meant overseeing the editing and, after 1927, the music scoring and the sound mix, as well as closely controlling the final form in which the movie would be released to the public. A central component of the successful Hollywood studio system was to harness the ambitions of the creative people making films to the demands of entertainment that satisfied audience taste. Even before sound was introduced in 1927, one of Thalberg’s major accomplishments was to demonstrate how brilliantly he could use the responses of preview audiences to help the studio evaluate a near-final version of a movie and decide what final and definitive changes were needed before its release to the broad public. In many cases, the changes decided upon would be editing cuts, which nearly always were intended to tighten the movie and make its visual storytelling more efficient. The creative personnel who make movies normally do not like to see cuts

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made in their films. In nearly all phases of production, there is a tendency to want to hold on to the material for its own sake. Cuts were usually the order of the day after screenings of a movie to test audiences. In some cases, however, the responses of the test audiences led studio producers to add material to a film, sometimes even at additional cost to the production budget. The idea of using preview audience responses, or the responses of audiences to a movie during an initial limited engagement, before finalizing the movie for general release was widespread in Hollywood from very early on. Every major studio followed the practice, and independent moviemakers did as well. Chaplin, for example, although a genius of the early cinema coming at it from the opposite direction of studio boss Thalberg, relied just as much on test audiences before a final decision on the version of the movie to release to the broad public. With The Gold Rush, for example, Chaplin used responses to an initial premiere booking at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood as justification for extensive cuts to shorten the movie for its general release nationwide.

THE STUDIOS GAIN CONTROL Frequently, historians and commentators have remarked on Hollywood movies as being produced on an assembly-line model like the manufacturing of automobiles. Early on, Hollywood studios did establish a division of labor between the crafts and treated production schedules like an assembly line. But making movies is not mass production. Automobiles in a company’s series or line must be all the same; by contrast, each new movie is a new unit that must be at least a little bit different from the last. Enhancing any movie as a product, and shaping popular taste in movies, is much more complicated than it sounds at first. From its inception, the central problem faced by the movie industry was how to find and nurture potential audiences who would keep coming back to see movies. No matter how used to them we have become, movies, after all, are not a necessity of life. Hollywood explored and followed two avenues to build and hold audiences. The first strategy of the major studios was for a company to simultaneously control the production, the distribution, and the exhibition of movies. The second strategy was to standardize movies enough to help keep bringing back audiences predictably to theaters to see them. The first goal was achieved by vertical integration, meaning that the same company that produced and distributed movies also owned many of the firstrun theaters in which they were shown. The five most successful studios in

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the Hollywood business during its Classic Era were all vertically integrated companies: Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros., MGM, and RKO. They made movies; then they rented the movies they made—as well as others that they acquired—to movie theaters nationwide, including their own chains of movie theaters where they showcased the movies they produced. The business approach of vertical integration meshed hand-in-glove with the tightly controlled approach to unit production pioneered by Irving Thalberg. Making, distributing, and showing movies to the public in their own theaters, as a complete package, was at the heart of Hollywood’s success throughout its Classic Era. Still, the challenge to each of these vertically integrated studios was how to attract viewers back to the movie theaters week after week. At the heart of doing that was seeing to it that the Hollywood system of movie production was based on a division of labor to assure the professional quality of production through specialization and expertise: directors directed, writers wrote photoplays, cinematographers did camera and lighting, editors edited, and so forth. Crafts personnel were in great demand, worked on long-term contracts, and were well paid. The major Hollywood studios built large factories in Southern California where they physically made movies, yet these factories did not really massproduce their product. Instead, they efficiently produced each new movie as a distinct product that could be imitated but not reproduced. Unlike massproduced refrigerators, each new film had to be different! The challenge of what is called genre filmmaking—“genre” being one way of bringing a measure of standardization to cinema—is to reliably create small differences within the particulars of each movie, even while it remains generally within the standard genre model. Genre is a way of approaching moviemaking by type, but genres themselves change over time, and the audiences for movies demand that shifts occur in genres. Alongside seeing MGM’s 1925 movie The Big Parade as the prototype of the “war movie,” or classifying The Gold Rush as a melodramatic comedy, substantial numbers of moviegoers were thought to reliably pay to see less distinctive westerns, romances, suspense movies, or slapstick comedies. Nonetheless, for the entire history of Hollywood, the influence of movie genre on audience taste and moviegoing may be overemphasized. Genre is much more clearly defined by later generations of historians and critics than by a movie’s makers or the audience for it at the time it first appeared. Feature filmmaking succeeds to the extent that nearly every movie so carefully treads the fine line between originality and familiarity. Besides making movies by genre or type, early on, the Hollywood studios also recognized the business value of screen talent. The studio moguls and their production chiefs knew that a great deal of a movie’s success depended

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on the perceived effectiveness and popularity of a player’s screen performance. This recognition took the business of making movies into uncharted waters. Screen chemistry was not exactly stage performance, and theatrical stage talent was not necessarily transferable to screen. Talent might move back and forth from stage to screen, especially in the earliest years of moviemaking, but by the early 1920s the Hollywood studios had a talent system in place based upon “contract players.” Each studio hired and developed talent, nurturing the looks and acting abilities of young actors and actresses, developing some toward stardom, others toward supporting or character roles. The contract player system in Hollywood was based on seven-year contracts that assured a great deal of continuity in the cast of players available and provided the studios with a reliable pool of talent. Stardom was a concept that built followings for certain actors and actresses, and stardom translated into a stabilizing element in terms of prospective audiences. Many people went to a movie primarily to see a known star. Stardom was like genre, however. The concept of stardom depended on the nuances of slight and subtle changes from role to role and from screen performance to screen performance. Audience taste in stars was perceived to be highly subject to change as well.

THE EMERGING HOLLYWOOD ESTABLISHMENT In spite of reservations about just how far the term applies, the idea of genre still is valuable in talking about a great many movies. The first film to be recognized for its achievement by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as Best Picture was a war movie, Wings. It was more distinguishable by its adherence to type than by any characteristics of its individual distinctiveness. Honored for 1927/28, immediately after the Academy was founded, this Paramount production used both black-and-white and color footage and was released in select first-run theaters in several large cities in “Magnascope,” a widescreen process that required the print to pass through an enlarging lens and be shown simultaneously utilizing two projectors. As impressive as this screening process was, it nonetheless could be seen in only a handful of movie theaters around the country. Wings also utilized a soundtrack that contained music, and an impressive array of recorded sound effects to accompany the air battle sequences, but no voice dialogue. The U.S. secretary of war and the War Department permitted extensive filming of Wings at Army facilities in Texas. Trenches and a simulated noman’s-land were even constructed for the movie by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. During production, a major motion picture trade paper, Film

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Daily, reported that the zealous cooperation of military officials in this production was calculated to produce good publicity from the movie in the hope of earning congressional support for establishing an Air Corps distinct from the Army. In hindsight, it was recognized that Wings helped the Department of War politically with its success in that campaign. The movie itself was set entirely during World War I and featured the exploits of wartime aviators. Much of the photoplay was based on the actual experiences of two aviators during the war: the movie’s director, William Wellman, and the author of the story on which the screenplay was based, John Monk Saunders. The screenplay was by Hope Loring and Louis D. Lighton, and the spectacular visual effects were created and coordinated by Roy Pomeroy. In the review of Wings in Moving Picture World, Epes W. Sergeant asserted: “With a better story Wings could have been one of the great pictures of all time.” The critic’s review in Film Daily echoed that sentiment: “This is a big aviation spectacle that is outstanding. The story is weak, but the punch is there. A sure-fire money maker.” The excitement of the aerial footage of World War I–era dogfights onscreen brought audiences to a level of excitement that still was unusual in the movies. As of 1927, when Wings premiered, movies were still being shown as part of an evening’s program that included live vaudeville acts, stand-up comics, and live music. The ambitious aerial spectacle of Wings was notable for distinguishing the movie from the rest of the evening’s fare. Besides the ambitious technical advances of Magnascope and the studio’s choice to present different sequences either in black-and-white or color, Wings presented viewers with a dazzling array of aerial cinematography by Lucien Hubbard that held together this wartime tale of patriotic duty, comradeship-in-arms, and romance. Clara Bow played an ambulance driver who volunteers for military service in order to follow her love interest, Buddy Rogers, to France, where she also happens to catch the eye of his Army buddy, played by Richard Arlen. These two friends become rivals for her affection. Gary Cooper made one of his earliest screen appearances in Wings in a supporting role, playing an enlistee who bunks with Rogers and Arlen, and Hedda Hopper, who later became one of Hollywood’s most successful gossip columnists, appeared in the supporting role of Mrs. Powell.

SUNRISE: THE APEX OF THE SILENT CINEMA Hollywood perceived the major competition to its global domination of feature film production during the silent era as coming from Germany. In

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response, one Hollywood studio boss, William Fox, hired one of the leading German movie directors, F. W. (Friedrich Wilhelm) Murnau, to come to Southern California to work for him. Having given Murnau a green light to choose any project he liked as his first feature at Fox, the studio also let him bring along from Germany a team that included the scenario writer, Carl Mayer, and veteran art director Rochus Gliese. This team’s first Hollywood film, Sunrise, was subtitled a “Song of Two Humans” and was based on a 1917 story written in German by Hermann Sudermann, entitled “The Trip to Tilsit.” The two lead roles in Sunrise were played by George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor, with primary filming taking place at Lake Arrowhead in the mountains east of Los Angeles. In this melodrama, a rural couple finds their world rocked by the man’s infatuation and dalliance with a jazz-age “it girl” (Margaret Livingston) on holiday, who urges him to drown his wife and come to live with her in the city. He is tempted by this idea, and his infatuation with the city girl is powerful, but in the end, he cannot carry out the deed. The danger to their relationship, however, allows the husband and wife to discover the true depth of their feelings for each other—and allows Murnau to orchestrate visuals conveying their passionate reengagement with life. They go to the city and end up renewing their wedding vows. Fox allowed the studio’s new recruit from Germany latitude to create a symphony of pace and movement as a roving camera glides through sets filled with people, trolley buses, neon lights, and so on. Sunrise is widely praised as a movie that deftly exploits the potential of the visual medium, and the timeliness of its capacity to do so is applauded because it appeared at a moment when the arrival of synchronous sound in motion picture production was altering motion pictures extensively and pushing them toward new conventions dominated by screenplay and dialogue. Released by Fox just days before Warner Bros.’s release of Hollywood’s first “talkie,” The Jazz Singer, Sunrise was shown with a synchronized original music score by Hugo Riesenfeld, who was experienced in writing music for silent films to be performed by orchestras at major New York City theaters. Riesenfeld summarized his approach to this task: In feature films it is important to synchronize music and action without becoming too punctuated. I synchronize only the most important moments or to emphasize humor. I don’t synchronize all the film so as not to disrupt the melodic line.

Critics early on recognized Sunrise for its unusually effective camerawork and lighting, as in the review by Laurence Reid in Motion Picture News that appeared just after the film premiered: “The German director’s first American

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picture furnishes proof positive that real thought can be translated for the silver screen . . . novel camera effects, the marvelous lighting, and the manner in which the players are handled. . . . Murnau is a real storyteller.” Fox gave Murnau a five-year contract shortly after the film’s premiere (less than four years later, he died in an auto accident at the age of forty-two). In an interview he granted shortly after the movie premiere, Murnau noted: They say I have a passion for camera angles, but I do not take trick scenes from unusual positions just to get startling effects. To me the camera represents the eye of a person, through whose mind is watching the vents on the screen.

Sunrise won the accolade “Best Picture, for Unique and Artistic Production” for 1927 at the first Academy Awards. This was a distinct and separate category from Best Picture. In 1957, the prestigious French journal Cahiers du Cinema declared Sunrise “the single greatest masterwork in the history of cinema.” In hindsight, Sunrise may be regarded as the apex of silent filmmaking in Hollywood, a grand farewell by a masterful director with an international reputation to the medium of silent film itself that was destined to abruptly disappear. However, critical praise did not turn into box office success in 1927 for what turned out to be the last—and the most expensive—silent film that Fox ever produced.

SUMMARY In 1895, the earliest films were shown, first in Europe and soon afterward in the United States. Movies as we know them, however, did not come into existence until the period between 1910 and 1915. Understanding motion pictures appreciates that there is more to movies than just making them. A complete system of cinema consists of production, distribution, and exhibition. Between 1915 and 1920, Hollywood was built on this understanding, and it was built quickly. The most successful of the Hollywood companies simultaneously produced and distributed movies and owned their own chains of theaters in which movies were shown. These studios were vertically integrated. Vertical integration would last until 1948. From early on, tension existed between the artistic aspirations of moviemakers and the financial realities of the motion picture industry. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton on the one hand, and Irving Thalberg on the other, personified this tension. Chaplin and Keaton were creative geniuses and accomplished screen performers and storytellers. Both excelled as writers,

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directors, and screen comedians. In addition, Chaplin and Keaton were both wise businessmen (although Chaplin was savvier and more successful) who recognized that audiences wanted movies that told engaging stories through sympathetic characters. Thalberg, meanwhile, created a system treating the production of each movie as a unit. As a businessman, Thalberg had an uncanny ability to recognize talent in all the production crafts, to encourage artistic excellence, and to recognize when a story worked on-screen and when it did not. By 1927, the movie industry in the United States was fully established. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was founded, and it soon began honoring achievement in moviemaking by awarding its first Oscars.

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Although it was the advent of the “talkies” in 1927 that marked the true

beginning of the Classic Hollywood, silent movies were already a decided success in terms of audience enthusiasm by the mid-1920s. Weekly attendance at the movies in the United States exceeded sixty-five million, and the silent movies being shown to these audiences covered a broad range of drama and comedy. By 1925, the silent motion picture appeared to be a fully accomplished form, capable of a wide array of expressive creativity and sophisticated communication. The silent cinema worked for all kinds of dramatic and comedic purposes, and the creative personnel and technicians who made movies everywhere honed their skills to a stellar level of mature artistic accomplishment. Nowhere were critics complaining about silent movies. Audiences were flocking to silent movies at growing numbers of theaters. There is no evidence that directors, photoplay writers, cinematographers, or editors were rebelling against silent movies. Nor did the actors and actresses whose careers had been made by mastering its techniques chafe at the bit to make movies more like performing a play on-stage by introducing speech. Although the “talkies” depended on the advancement of technologies for recording and amplifying sound, this major turning point in cinema history was not caused by technology. The “coming of sound”—meaning recorded music, effects, and voice dialogue played back in sync with the picture when a movie was projected in a theater—is attributed to Warner Bros., the studio that, along with Fox, was the most dedicated to advancing the technology of synchronous sound film production. Although it turned out that Fox had developed the more useful technology—its Movietone system for “sound on film”—Warner’s Vitaphone system of “sound on disc” was used on the first truly successful talkie released. 23

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Despite its synchronous sound technology that ultimately proved inferior, what advantaged Warner Bros. in its competition with Fox was that Warner had a stronger commitment to finding a movie it could produce as a successful vehicle for synchronous sound. That lucky project turned out to be based on a sentimental stage play, with themes of generational conflict.

THE JAZZ SINGER AND SYNCHRONOUS SOUND The first significant synchronous sound film with spoken lines, The Jazz Singer, is about a son’s estrangement from his father because the young man becomes Americanized, breaks from the Old World and religious traditions of his parents, leaves home, and pursues a career as an entertainer. At first, Warner Bros. hoped to use the same vaudeville veteran who had played the lead in the play on Broadway, George Jessel, in the movie. The studio, however, eventually cast Al Jolson instead. Casting Jolson was not so much a stroke of genius by Warner Bros. as it was a matter of good fortune. Jessel reportedly turned down the lead in this story about a Jewish cantor and his son because the director selected by Warner Bros., Alan Crosland, was not Jewish. Jolson—who, like Jessel, was Jewish—was not concerned about that, however. He took the lead that Jessel had turned down, and, to the extent that Jolson’s performance marks much of the movie’s success, it was fortunate that he did. His role in The Jazz Singer occurred at an ideal point in Jolson’s professional career just as he was emerging as a stage singer on Broadway and becoming widely recognized as one of the country’s earliest and most popular recording artists. Hollywood legend long held that Warner Bros. was in desperate financial shape in 1927 and that the company produced The Jazz Singer as a last-ditch move to save the studio. The reality was far less dramatic. Warner Bros. was not on the brink of collapse in 1927. One sector of the studio’s vertical integration was ailing, however, because Warner’s own chain of theaters was inferior to the theater chains owned by the competition. At the time, Paramount, Fox, and MGM owned the grandest movie palaces in the best prime locations in America’s largest cities. So, Warner Bros.’s strategy behind producing The Jazz Singer was to take a major singing talent—whose reputation as a live performer was stellar and who was becoming even better known nationwide because audiences could hear him on radio or buy his recordings—and harness his popularity to the advent of the synchronous sound movie. The studio’s decision was driven by the goal of improving Warner Bros.’s position in the exhibition sector.

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Company records document this thinking through interoffice letters among the four brothers who owned the studio. Since their studio did not own the biggest and best movie theaters in the largest cities where first-run live performers mixed with screen presentations, if synchronous sound succeeded, it would mean that moviegoers in Peoria, Dubuque, or Boise could be seeing and hearing the biggest-name performers on-screen just as audiences in New York City or Chicago might have the opportunity to see and hear them live. The Jazz Singer had its premiere on October 6, 1927. Audiences were treated to seeing and hearing Al Jolson perform several popular songs in sync, but what really captured their imagination was the naturalness of the movie’s story as underscored by the content and tone of the brief dialogue scenes—the lines for which Jolson improvised. In a recollection published in the Saturday Evening Post nearly twenty years later, Jolson acknowledged: The Jazz Singer appealed to me more than any other role because it was a story of my own experiences. I was reliving part of my own life—my early environment and upbringing, my refusal to follow in my father’s footsteps and become a Rabbi, my unbreakable preoccupation with singing and acting. As I started making the picture in 1927, I was thrilled by the fact that it was to be the first picture to have singing in it, but I didn’t dream that it would also introduce dialogue to the screen. The speaking was accidental. When I sat down to the piano as we began work on a singing scene, I adlibbed: “Wait till you hear this, mamma! If I’m a big hit, I’m gonna take you to Coney Island and I’ll buy you a black silk dress that’ll make a noise when you walk!” The Warners decided the words might be effective, so several takes were made—and the moving pictures had begun to talk.

In 1927, Jolson was at the peak of his success as a stage entertainer with his own distinct style, but the mechanical devices of electrical engineering threatened all the legitimate theaters and vaudeville houses. The possibility of dumping Jolson and thousands of other live performers onto the ash heap of history was quite real. Nonetheless, Jolson survived to be celebrated in a commemorative article published in 1940 in Variety as “the conspicuous personality who has coped successfully with the impacts of machinery on the traditional age in the theatre.” Up until synchronous sound, a night at the movies mixed a program of live entertainment with the screen feature. This live entertainment varied greatly, depending on where you were seeing the movie. In the first-run movie palaces in the largest cities, the live entertainment was first rate and consisted of headliners. In midsize cities, it was mediocre, while in the hinterlands, its

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quality was dubious or entirely absent. Whatever assessments are made about the coming of synchronous sound to the movies, it is clear that the consistency and quality of the moviegoing experience nationwide was vastly improved. The exhibition sector for movies was changed forever. Once established in film, synchronous sound spread like wildfire. Although some major figures in world cinema—from Charlie Chaplin to the famed Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein—lamented the coming of sound, audiences embraced sound movies wholeheartedly. Within a year of the release of The Jazz Singer, for all practical purposes it had become impossible to successfully produce and release a silent movie anywhere in the world. EARLY SOUND PRODUCTION AND THE EARLY OSCAR WINNERS On the one hand, synchronous sound changed the production of motion pictures toward a greater role for music in their artistic composition and emotional impact. On the other hand, Hollywood shifted toward producing films that were more overtly literary, based on screenplays as texts, in which an actor’s success came to depend on his or her dramatic performance in the delivery of lines. Synchronous sound production in the movies occurred just as the awarding of the Oscars began. As the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences settled into the early years of its awards for merit, its second and third selections for Best Picture, for 1928/29 and 1929/30, respectively, were The Broadway Melody and All Quiet on the Western Front. As it turned out, each of these movies characterized one of two major tendencies in Hollywood films during the early years of synchronous sound production. The 1928/29 winner was MGM’s first musical in the era of synchronous sound, and it started the studio’s tradition of lavish spectacles featuring singing and dancing that lasted well into the 1960s. The Broadway Melody was directed by Harry Beaumont, who was chosen by the studio because of his success with Our Dancing Daughters in 1928, one of the last of what were called “silent musical films.” Accompanied by live performed music whereever they were shown, these silent musicals had no synchronous soundtrack, but always featured a grand overall production design and the popular dances of the moment such as the Charleston. Although Hollywood’s leading studio called upon Beaumont to direct its first synchronous sound musical, his subsequent career as a director of “talkies” was undistinguished. As originally released, The Broadway Melody included some sequences in Technicolor, which were interspersed with the main body of the movie that

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was in black-and-white. In the period of early synchronous sound production, and confronted with other new technologies, Hollywood filmmakers utilized the device of mixing black-and-white and color footage in a number of feature movies. This experimentation, however, went nowhere; this device made little impact on mainstream movie production and has remained a curiosity. All Quiet on the Western Front was an entirely different kind of movie. Its challenge was to effectively make a screen adaptation of the recently published popular novel by German author Erich Maria Remarque. The novel already was considered by many to portray antiwar sentiment in a manner that made the book a classic. A production of Universal—a studio hardly known for taking on risky production projects for the sake of art—this movie was considered an especially high risk by many Hollywood experts. As a movie about a naïve young German who marches off to World War I emboldened by idealistic enthusiasm, only to slowly realize the bleak futility of military conflict, All Quiet on the Western Front was hardly perceived as an assured success with American audiences. Universal had a reputation as a tightfisted studio that specialized in churning out relatively low-budget genre movies. Nonetheless, on an impulse, the semiretired founder of the studio, Carl Laemmle, personally traveled to his native Germany to acquire the rights to this highly regarded literary work for screen adaptation. Written and published in Germany in 1927/28, the novel’s English translation had sold 300,000 copies in the United States in 1929 alone. Although Universal’s purchase of the rights might have reflected an elderly man’s grasp at prestige, his son, Junior Laemmle, who was now running the studio, budgeted All Quiet on the Western Front at the handsome level of $1.2 million. The younger Laemmle then hired veteran Lewis Milestone, who was widely respected by Hollywood peers and had already won one of the earliest Oscars given for Best Director, to direct the movie and engaged Arthur Edeson as the picture’s director of photography. One of the founders of the distinguished American Society of Cinematographers in 1919, Edeson was considered by his Hollywood peers to be a genius of cinematography in the early sound era because of his work on the first synchronous sound western, a Fox production entitled In Old Arizona. The challenges of exterior cinematography on location for sound production were greater than even the formidable ones facing directors of photography in a studio. On All Quiet on the Western Front, Milestone and Edeson combined their talents to bring to the screen a genuine breakthrough in the use of a movie’s soundtrack so that voice, music, and effects truly complemented the visuals rather than simply relying on voiceover or dialogue to explain the pictures. Edeson was innovative in his shooting style, but he was also a master in the details of solving some basic problems of early sound cinematography.

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The whirring noise of the camera gears interfered with the audio sound of the actors’ voices being recorded. Studio production at the time required placement of the camera in a glass box to cut out that noise, but this also meant that camera placement and movement were severely limited. Edeson decided instead to simply wrap the camera body in heavy blankets to deaden the camera noise. This act of insulating the camera body provided a solution for one of the earliest major problems of motion picture sound. Motion picture camera manufacturers were soon building casings of insulation material, called “blimps,” for their cameras. Insulated camera bodies meant the end of filming from inside a glass enclosure on sets and opened up various choices for camera use in nearly any location. All Quiet on the Western Front starred Lew Ayres, whose portrayal of the disillusioned young German soldier brought him immediate global acclaim. As Paul Bauner, a German high school student who enlists for the front in a spurt of idealistic patriotism, Ayres’s performance convincingly captured this young man’s growing disenchantment as this brutal war of attrition dragged on. All Quiet on the Western Front is widely considered by critics and historians to have held up well over the years, with some commentators still labeling it as the best motion picture ever made in English that is set during World War I. Both Remarque’s book and the Hollywood movie adaptation long have been regarded as vintage expressions of the theme of brutality and the uselessness of war. As celebrated expressions of such antiwar sentiment, both drew harsh, negative commentary from extremes on the political left and right. Both the novel and the movie, however, weathered this criticism and are widely regarded as classics.

THE MONSTER RISING Junior Laemmle and his Universal Studio—founded by his father Carl in 1915—might have been expected to be more comfortable with a movie that was simpler genre fare rather than with director James Whale’s approach to Frankenstein in 1931. The movie’s style went well beyond genre expectations in order to capture what one critic called the “gothic decay” of Mary Shelley’s nineteenth-century novel on which the movie was based. Boris Karloff would be identified with the role of the monster for the rest of his career, in recognition of his compassionate portrayal of the frightening creature seeking to find his own true identity. Cinematography for the film was in the able hands of Arthur Edeson. The movie is widely regarded as a high point in both Whale’s and Karloff’s careers.

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Among its artistic accomplishments, Frankenstein is distinguished by its chilling use of sound: Colin Clive’s distinctive voice as the young scientist Frankenstein; the sound of the shovel banging coldly on the grave; the barking of dogs echoing against the rocks. Each of these moments fully exploited just how sound on film could impact a movie viewer emotionally. At just seventy minutes, it was a decidedly short feature film in length, but still a remarkable one. As the Reel Journal advised its readers, most of whom owned movie theaters: “use large cut-outs of the Monster in your lobby, and spark curiosity with the slogan: ‘To have seen Frankenstein is to wear a badge of courage.’” Originally from Britain, director Whale chose Frankenstein from nearly thirty scripts proposed to him at Universal. At the time, special effects in the movies were still a function of the creative imagination and cleverness rather than technology. Universal’s makeup man, Jack Pierce, modeled Karloff’s bone structure into a figure based on the monster in a 1923 German silent film, The Golem: How He Came into the World. Every morning it took three hours just to apply Karloff’s makeup and to adjust his forty-eight-pound costume (Universal’s publicist embellished a bit, claiming that the costume weighed more than sixty pounds). Whale decided to depart from what was already common Hollywood practice in order to shoot Frankenstein in sequence, following the chronology of the screenplay from the beginning to the end. Shooting out of sequence was the well-established approach used by all the Hollywood studios to save costs on actors and extras, who were hired for just certain days when they were in scenes and then not again. In spite of violating this standard Hollywood practice, Whale still managed to keep the production costs within the $262,000 that Universal had allocated. Whale’s style of coverage was to cut from a medium shot to a close-up, and then to an extreme close-up. When his footage was turned over to the movie’s editors, Maurice Pivar and Clarence Kloster, the resulting pace of Frankenstein was termed “breathless” by several contemporary critics. There is little argument that the decision not to compose and record music for the film was an effective part of its artistry. The soundtrack was minimal, which heightened the presence of the sound effects and the tension created by them throughout the movie. According to Variety, there were a noticeable number of audience member walkouts from the preview showings, but the Universal publicity campaign for the movie in 1931 was based on building up, rather than toning down, viewer expectations of the chilling descent into horror. The studio filmed a prologue for national distribution with Edward Van Sloan, an actor known for portraying doctors, professors, or other intellectual types, stepping out from behind a curtain to prepare the audience by warning them about

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the strange and disturbing tale they were about to see. As part of its publicity campaign, Universal claimed to be meeting its public responsibility by stationing nurses at all showings at the New York City opening of the movie at the Mayfair in Times Square. The popular success of the 1931 movie version of Frankenstein made it legendary. Subsequently, its iconic status translated into providing a model in movie history that led to productions by moviemakers as varied as Abbott and Costello, Andy Warhol, and Mel Brooks. Alongside Chaplin’s Little Tramp and the ape King Kong, the monster from Frankenstein became one of the most recognizable characters of the black-and-white era of the movies. In Universal’s 1935 sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, Karloff and Clive repeated their roles under Whale’s direction. The Bride of Frankenstein is recognized by film critics and historians as an exception to the rule that movie sequels rarely equal or surpass the original. THE PRODUCTION CODE Unlike both the original novel by Shelley and the Broadway stage play based on it by Peggy Webling, the screenplay for Universal’s 1931 Frankenstein was substantially changed because the relatively new Motion Picture Production Code Office demanded that footage be shot so that in the movie Dr. Frankenstein does not die at the end. In spite of this demand and other changes to the original story demanded by the Production Code Office, Frankenstein was still scary. The Production Code was new, but its subsequent importance in all mainstream Hollywood moviemaking was to be striking. In order to avoid government censorship of movies, the Code had been agreed to in 1930 by the eight major Hollywood companies (Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros., MGM, RKO,