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Another distinctive trend was the all-star revue film, as produced by most of the major studios. Each would serve as a guidepost to its company's reigning aesthetic as it addressed the new world of sound films. With The Hollywood Revue, MGM triumphed through a wise use of stars and production knowhow. With Show of Shows, Warner Bros. failed through a misspent budget and indifferent material. While Fox's Happy Days was tepid, Paramount on Parade was witty and resourceful. Universal's King of Jazz, by far the most spectacular of the revues, found artistic success at the expense of diminished audience favor. Seldom, after 1930, would such work ever be tried again.

This chapter describes Hitchcock’s working relationships during his most productive years as a director. Under terms negotiated by his agent, Lew Wasserman, ownership of the films he directed for Paramount reverted to Hitchcock eight years after their initial release, eventually pushing his earnings well beyond those of his peers. As Hitchcock’s star ascended, the influence of Joe Breen and the Production Code declined. Joe Breen’s health failed, and he was replaced in 1954 by his assistant, Geoffrey Shurlock, who was more accommodating than his predecessor with directors he admired, like Hitchcock. The Code itself received a major makeover in 1956 with the rescinding of flat bans on illegal drugs, abortion, white slavery, and kidnapping. Restrictions on such long-forbidden words as damn and hell were also lifted, and some directors, like Otto Preminger, openly challenged the Code and released films, notably The Moon Is Blue, without a Code Seal. Subsequent chapters include detailed discussions on the impacts of censorship on each of the eleven films Hitchcock made during his glory years.

This chapter describes the decline of the Production Code and its replacement by the current rating system. Two Supreme Court rulings contributed to the end of the Production Code. In 1948, the court ruled that the major motion picture companies could no longer control the theaters in their distribution system, making it possible for independently produced and foreign films without a Code Seal to obtain first-run screenings. And in 1952 the court overturned the ban on Roberto Rossellini’s The Miracle and ruled that motion pictures were entitled to the guarantees of free speech and free press. The liberalization of public attitudes in the post-Code years, the influx of more explicit foreign films, and the impact of TV on box-office receipts all contributed to the decline of the Code, as did several groundbreaking movies. In 1953, Otto Preminger’s ‘racy’ comedy (by 1953 standards), The Moon Is Blue, became one of the first major US movies to be released without a Code Seal. In 1964, Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker successfully challenged the Code ban on nudity, and in 1966, Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? broke the taboo on vulgar language. In 1966, Jack Valenti became head of the MPAA and soon replaced the Production Code with the precursor of today’s rating system.

Furie is hired by the new regime at Paramount and takes Brad Dexter along with him. There, they form Furie Productions and are handed “The Sam Sheppard Murder Trial” as their first film project. Furie rewrites everything to focus on the lawyer defending the murderous doctor Sam Sheppard, basing the character on the real-life litigator F. Lee Bailey, whom they officially cast in the role and then drop. Furie selects unknown New York actor Barry Newman, who now plays a small-town defender named Petrocelli, and Furie enjoys one of the most tension-free shoots of his career. He follows this film, The Lawyer (1970), with Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), from a script by Charles Eastman, starring Robert Redford and Michael J. Pollard. The tensions between the two stars and a negative reception to the film plague any chance of its success.

As a reward for delivering Little Fauss and Big Halsy under budget and under schedule, producer Albert S. Ruddy is selected to adapt The Godfather. Ruddy chooses Furie as his director, but pressures from the studio and the Italian community corner Ruddy into hiring an Italian director, namely Francis Ford Coppola. Meanwhile, Furie is brought on by producer Jay Weston to helm Lady Sings the Blues, a biopic covering the life of Billie Holiday. Furie gets the idea to cast unlikely candidate Diana Ross for the title role, and thus Berry Gordy’s Motown comes to produce (and eventually fully finance) the project. Lady Sings the Blues (1972) turns out to be a critical and box-office success, and Furie now has carte blanche to select his follow-up project. He chooses Hit! (1973), an ostensible genre item (and oddity) starring Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor. Penned by screenwriter Alan Trustman, the film is dismissed and quickly disappears from theaters.

During this period, congressional hearings were held about communist influences in Hollywood, studios lost control of theater chains (the Paramount Decree), and they lost some of their audiences to television. TV shows (Hopalong Cassidy, Gunsmoke) expanded the demand for stunt performers, but only about ten stuntwomen worked regularly. William A. Wellman’s 1951 movie Westward the Women was a boon to actresses and stuntwomen. However, the tradition of “location girls” was a detriment and took work away from real stuntwomen. Stuntwomen almost always earned less than men doing same stunts.

After leaving RKO Hermes Pan joins Fred Astaire at Paramount to choreograph Second Chorus and Danny Dare at Republic Pictures to choreograph Hit Parade of 1941 before signing with Twentieth Century-Fox to choreograph That Night in Rio with Alice Faye, Don Ameche, and Carmen Miranda. While at Fox Hermes initiates weekly luncheon discussion groups on topics ranging from religion to philosophy, one of the core participants of which, Angela (“Angie”) Blue becomes Pan’s favorite assistant and “dance-in” for films starring Betty Grable. At Grable’s request, Hermes appears onscreen as her dancing partner in several films, including Moon Over Miami, Footlight Serenade, and Coney Island. In his early days at Fox, Pan also designs dances for Sonja Henie, Rita Hayworth, and George Murphy.

This chapter sheds new light on the strategies that Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Fox developed in the early 1930s to target the Italian-speaking market. It documents how the Italian government, local film traders, and the press responded to the majors’ Italian-language production during a critical turning point for the national film industry. The chapter draws on a range of historical records (diplomatic, censorship and administrative state documents, film prints, press reviews, and other publicity materials) from Italian and North-American archives. The findings show that the majors’ experiments with Italian dubbing and versioning were not always successful and elicited ambivalent responses in Italy; the findings also demonstrate the gradual emergence of dubbing as the most commercially viable solution for both the US majors and the Italian establishment. Incongruities in the archival records, and the scarcity of surviving film prints, pose interpretative problems and call for further empirical research in the field.

On June 26, 1917, Ince signed a distribution contract with Paramount that stipulated he was to produce one to four “special features,” at least 6,000 feet in length and at least four months apart, each year for two years beginning September 1, 1917. Moving Picture World announced in its July 7 issue that Ince would be building his own studio in Los Angeles, larger than the plant he had sold to Triangle. December brought word that he had decided to build again in Culver City, and after negotiations with Harry Culver, Ince purchased eleven acres on June 11, 1918. The cost of the buildings would be $200,000, with his six companies moving in as soon as the studio was complete at the end of the year. He would be able to double his present capacity, with eighteen buildings in the form of a quadrangle. Benefiting from all Ince had learned from constructing his previous studios, the new facility now included its own property buildings, electrical and technical departments, water, heating, sewage plant, and fire department.

The final chapter follows the decline of the studio system. Toward the late 1940s, political and economic factors such as the rise of television and changes in the tax code, pushed film production away from the studio system and towards a system based more and more on “spot production” or separate deals. Furthermore, the Paramount decision handed down by the Supreme Court ended vertical integration and eroded the power of the major film companies. Changes in labor practices followed, as demonstrated by the career of actors like Gino Corrado and producers like Hal Wallis. As the “stock-company” model ended, and the number of long-term contracts declined, new forces, particularly talent agents such as Lew Wasserman became the power brokers of the new Hollywood.

Commercial recordings of music made by African Americans, discs designed by record companies to sell to African Americans, finally emerged in the 1920s as a further extension of earlier ethnic music recording programs. The phonograph's mediation of the musical experience for both performers and listeners emerges clearly enough in ethnic records, but all the more so in those marketed to African Americans. Just as the recording industry had created its spinning encapsulations of ethnicity, so too it now turned to making engravings of the sounds of race. From 1920 to 1945, the race record era, many different companies made recordings of African American music, but four major record labels—Okeh, Paramount, Brunswick/Vocalion, and Columbia—took control of the field. Race records, however, present a dilemma: several Black musicians and singers claimed that despite the rich eclectic variety of Black popular music, they were allowed to record only blues.

Adeline “Ad” Schulberg was an admirer of von Sternberg's career. She was the wife of B.P. Schulberg, West Coast production head of Famous Players. She had lobbyied her husband to hire von Sternberg ever since The Salvation Hunters. Von Sternberg came under the influence of senior art director Hans Dreier, imported from UFA in 1923. Although von Sternberg liked to say he “dictated” the look of his films, dictation is not creation. He needed talented individuals to realize his conceptions, and none was more gifted than Dreier, who worked on all von Sternberg's Paramount productions.

Marlene Dietrich's arrival in New York had elements of farce. She chose not to remember that she was not simply an hour late but an entire day late, and her wardrobe was not the only problem. Paramount delayed the press reception 24 hours while lawyers negotiated. In return for keeping Dietrich's suits out of the papers, they promised Riza generous treatment when the divorce came to court. Jesse Lasky officially unveiled her the following day at a press lunch. Dietrich complained that the press conference was all men. The following day, studio publicists, anticipating a call for head shots of the new star, had her photographed by fashionable portraitist Irving Chidnoff.

The failure of The Scarlet Empress was as damaging to von Sternberg's career as had been the shelving of A Woman of the Sea. This, combined with his growing estrangement from Dietrich, further eroded his reputation at Paramount. Although he and Lubitsch remained superficially friendly and sometimes played chess at the Hollywood Club on Cherokee Avenue, Lubitsch, in his role as an executive, was a different man. There remained one last film on von Sternberg's contract and thus one chance to redeem himself.

Though Whoopee! was regarded as a success upon its release, musical films in general were suffering a steep decline in interest. Buzz went to Paramount. Gertrude was unconvinced that her son's Hollywood career could sustain him in the same way as Broadway. Buzz's marriage was also in trouble. With a bit of fortuitous timing, good news came by way of Sam Goldwyn. Based on the success of Whoopee!, Goldwyn signed Eddie Cantor for another picture called Palmy Days, and both wanted Buzz on board. Later, however, Esther requested and was granted divorce. At this point in his career, Buzz's musical numbers were experiments in camera placement and movement, ensemble blocking, and set manipulation. After about a year of parlaying his experience at various studios into projects key to his development, Buzz was again in the employ of Sam Goldwyn. With Eddie Cantor on board, their third collaboration was called The Kid from Spain.

In November 1930, in association with Max Dreyfus, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart announced the formation of a new music publishing house, its name a melding of theirs: Rodart Music Publishing Company. Its purpose was to exploit the existing catalogue and publish their future songs: they needed the money. The establishing of Rodart turned out to be their farewell to Broadway for four years. Just a few days later they received a call from Mel Shauer, Hart's old camping and songwriting companion, who had gone out to California the preceding year and was now a producer at Paramount. Shauer had met Maurice Chevalier in Paris, and they had become very friendly. When Chevalier came to work in Hollywood, Shauer put up the suggestion that Rodgers and Hart be hired to write songs for him. The studio was not enthusiastic. His persistence paid off, however; Jesse Lasky decided to give them a chance.

In January of 1929, Paramount released its first all-talking picture, and in March Fox announced its decision to produce films. MGM was one of the last to produce sound films, not even making part-talkies until 1929. And in 1928, the head of the production of MGM, Thalberg, initially saw sound as merely an adjunct to silent film. Thalberg, together with his brother-in-law, added a synchronized score as well as sound effects to the other silent film, and in the same year he ordered the reshooting of two reels of the completed silent movie ;Alias Jimmy Valentine. Thalberg realized how profoundly sound could transform movies. Once Thalberg did realize the appeal of sound in film, however, it was not song but dialogue that intrigued him, and so he started reading “Whoopee” by Edmund Goulding. As his enthusiasm for “Whoopee” grew, he decided to make it an all-talkie film to which he added original songs.

The 1930s was the decade when the most films were produced. In 1937 there were more than 500 feature films, and in 1938 there were 80 million movie admissions every week. Radio had begun broadcasting in the early 1920s but did not attract a large audience until it began playing popular songs. Radio competed with Hollywood by providing “free” entertainment, particularly in the early decades when movie attendance dropped off more than 30 percent. Paramount fought back with a series of “Big Broadcast” movies, the first of which, The Big Broadcast (1932), presented a series of radio performers. Because of the enormous success of The Big Broadcast, Paramount made an annual series of Big Broadcast musicals. The last series presented one of the wittiest songs ever written in Hollywood cinema: “Thanks for the Memory.”

MGM had created and presented songs imaginatively and lavishly. Arthur Freed, a lyricist and producer, had brought a songwriter's understanding to how song should be presented in film. Freed imparted to MGM his experience, earned in traveling all over the world, to acquire a taste and knowledge for music and art. Freed found a position as an assistant director at Paramount, where he also played mood music on the sets. He and Brown wrote “Singin' in the Rain” for the 1927 edition of the annual Hollywood Music Box Revue, and after two years, Irving Thalberg hired the two songwriters to write the score for MGM's Broadway Melody. In 1934, while he was still a staff lyricist at MGM, Freed hired a young piano player and vocal arranger named Roger Edens. Freed and Edens shared the conviction that song must be integral, expressive, and dramatic.