Search Results

This chapter shows that classical norms were not fixed rules or structures, but set particular boundaries within which innovation could take place. In essence, classical film style rejected formal techniques that were purposely disruptive or jarring to the audience. While it is sometimes implied that classical norms emerged simultaneously with the studio system, it is important to note that the aesthetic principles of classical Hollywood cinema preceded the studio system. The development of film style in this sense (classical norms) did not emerge in the very same historical instant as the mode of production that gave it institutional shape (the studio system). Instead, the relation between the two would develop a gradual symbiosis, such that classical norms would become synonymous with the studio system as it emerged more fully after the First World War. The chapter also includes the study, ‘Mass-produced Photoplays: Economic and Signifying Practices in the First Years of Hollywood’ by Janet Staiger, which examines how production practices in the early 1910s influenced the way that films were developed and made.

The introduction presents an overview of Tanaka’s life and career vis-a-vis the history of twentieth-century Japan, emphasising how women participated in and were affected by legal, political and socio-economic changes. Through Tanaka’s professional development, it revisits the evolution of the Japanese studio system and stardom, and explains the importance of women as subjects within the films, consumers of the industry, and professionals behind the scenes. This historical overview highlights Japan’s negotiation of modernity and tradition, often played out through symbolic dichotomies of gender and sexuality. By underscoring women’s new routes of mobility, the authors challenge the simplified image of Japanese oppressed women. The second part of the introduction posits director Tanaka as an outstanding, yet understudied, figure in the world history of women filmmaking. Her case inspires compelling questions around labels such as female authorship, star-as-author, and director-as-star and their role in advancing the production and acknowledgement of women filmmaking.

This chapter describes the rise of the Hollywood studios and advent of sound technology. The Hollywood Studio System would properly take hold by 1930 once five companies — Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, RKO, Fox (later Twentieth-Century Fox), Warner Bros. and Paramount — had emerged victorious from increasing competition and a scrimmage of mergers and takeovers of production and distribution companies. By 1930 it is estimated that there were around 24,000 cinemas in the US with the five major studios controlling at least 50 per cent of the total industry output. By 1931, D. W. Griffith had made his last film and the film industry was primed to establish the classical Hollywood era with the new technology of sound. In fact, the era from the coming of the sound film to the end of the 1940s is often called Hollywood's ‘Golden Age’. The chapter also includes the study, ‘Translating the Talkies: Diffusion, Reception and Live Performance’ by Mark Jancovich and Lucy Faire. Their study of spectatorship and film consumption in a single British city, Nottingham, at the moment in which the talkies came to Nottingham's Elite cinema in June 1929, is significant in its interrelation of the local with a global phenomenon — the coming of sound.

This chapter focuses on what many film historians refer to as the “classical period” of the studio system. Not coincidentally, it was also the “golden age” of the composer biopic, both classical and popular. The American film industry was dominated by the vertically integrated “Big Five” studios, namely, MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., RKO, and Twentieth Century-Fox; by the “Little Three” studios, namely, United Artists, Universal, and Columbia; and by smaller, independent studios, such as Republic and Disney. Under these studios, a “consistent system of production and consumption, a set of formalized creative practices and constraints, and thus a body of work with a uniform style, a standard way of telling stories, from camera work and cutting to plot structure and thematics” was established.

Serious scholarly attention to Gunga Din(1939) has largely been neglected as allegations of condescending and one-dimensional depictions of its Indian characters have disrupted its reputation as one of the greatest epics of the studio era.However, George Stevens’ adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s poem extends its source text’s colonial ambivalence to American anxieties stemming from the death rattle of Manifest Destiny and the traumas of the Great Depression. Seizing upon the popularity of late Victorian Empire narratives, Hollywood integrated its own ideology into a final product that was a hybrid of imperial narrative and American western. This chapter argues that the film’s loose resemblance to its source material demonstrates a fissure in the American valorization of British culture. Gunga Din completely dismantles Kipling’s poem, recreating it as an example of a uniquely American form: the seamless studio system product that led to Hollywood’s international dominance in cultural production. While the politics of the adaptation resemble textual strategies of resistance common in postcolonial texts, the film’s retention of colonial literature’s representations of its native characters addresses an America beginning to assert a distinct national culture while positioning itself as a future imperial power in the tradition of the faltering British Empire.

This chapter is the mirror image of the previous one. It looks at narratives about has-been female stars in the context of the studio system’s demise during the 1950s and 1960s. These somewhat later backstudios depict the agency and sexuality of an older female star, who no longer has the safe haven of the studio to control or at least cushion her excessive behavior, as a “monstrous” perversion of femininity. In these films the mature female star personifies the incoherence of the Hollywood brand as a result of the studio system’s implosion, just as her excessive figure is treated as its cause, not its symptom. The chapter closes with a glance at the millennial backstudio, S1m0ne (2002), which takes as its premise the possibility of a computer-generated star and which registers the same anxieties about powerful female actors that these midcentury backstudios enact.

This chapter describes the decline of the Hollywood studio system in the in 1950s and 1960s, and with it the decline of Hedda Hopper's career. The studio system provided Hopper with regular and consistent products as subject matter for her column, with the “behind-the-scenes” access to films and film stars that gave her column cachet and made it more than just another studio press release, and with a large, national movie audience potentially interested in reading it. With the decline of the studio system Hopper's subject matter and potential readership narrowed. Her power and relevance worked in tandem with the major studios, and she saw her power and relevance shrink over time. By the 1960s Hopper was no longer seen as all-powerful within the film industry or celebrity journalism. The placement of her column in newspapers became less prominent over time, with some papers dropping her column altogether.

This chapter details Ann’s 1936 lawsuit against the Warner Bros., in which she attempted to secure an early release from her long-term contract. Ann set the stage for Bette Davis and James Cagney, who also took Warner Bros. to court in 1936, though their cases have been discussed often while Ann’s has been largely ignored. Also covered is the aftermath of the court’s decisions and Ann’s continued battles with her studio as well as the early cancelation of her contract.

The introduction explores reasons for the relative scholarly neglect of Lewis Milestone and his films: his diverse body of work, his troubles during the Blacklist period, the serious nature of most of his films, his difficulty getting along with studio bosses, his distaste for the “star system,” changing Hollywood tastes. It provides an overview of his career, from the silent to the sound era, and his huge early success with All Quiet on the Western Front, which came to haunt him in later years. Milestone was drawn repeatedly to the theme of war, especially its impact on ordinary soldiers. Also discussed is how Milestone’s life embodies the “rag-to-riches” American dream of millions of immigrants.

This chapter details Ann’s sudden departure from Los Angeles to New York, and ultimately to Europe, for an extended honeymoon. Included in the discussion are the reactions of Warner Bros. and Anna Lehr to Dvorak walking out on her contract, along with the immediate media backlash to Ann publicly disputing her salary and the studio system in general under the advisement of Leslie Fenton and her agent Charles Feldman. Also included are Dvorak’s justifications for her actions, many of which came retroactively.

Traditional histories of studio-era Hollywood contend that the film industry offered little more than acting and secretarial jobs to women; however, industry trade papers and syndicated press of the time reveal a different picture. Women worked as producers, executives, writers, script readers, production and costume designers, film and sound editors, set dressers, make-up artists, publicists, agents, researchers, actors, and directors. They worked for their unions and on industry committees. Although they didn’t always agree politically, Hollywood’s women shared a commitment to the Equal Rights Amendment and often helped each other’s careers. This chapter provides an overview of the diverse professions open to women in the Hollywood studio system and challenges the “great man” theories of authorship and female disempowerment that have driven conventional histories of old Hollywood.

This chapter illustrates some of the untapped riches of Preston Sturges’s unproduced screenplay for the musical Song of Joy, both in terms of its pivotal timing in his filmmaking career and its unappreciated achievements in screenwriting. When compared with Sturges’s other written-and-directed films, Song of Joy often shows less restraint and more exuberance in testing the boundaries of the Hollywood studio system, especially in terms of plotting, meta-cinema, and dialogue. Tracing these extremes clarifies why the script was so disliked and why so many studios rejected it. These analyses also illustrate the intensity of Sturges’s creative ambitions at this point in his career—that period between his roles as playwright and writer-director when he took an even more over-the-top approach to screenwriting.

The chapter examines Tanaka’s early career as an actress in the 1930s and her star persona in terms of acting style and roles played within the Japanese studio system. The notion of ‘idiogest’ is introduced to analyse the gestural characteristics of Tanaka’s acting style, which constitute a fundamental element of her star image. Against preconceptions of a homogenised star image, it explores Tanaka versatile acting skills and roles in films, ranging from traditional girls to modern career women and athlete. The chapter argues that the recurrent link between her characters and tragic motherhood and romance is connected to contemporary social shifts in femininity and Tanaka’s real life. Because her star persona had a significant impact on the content, promotion and appraisal of the films as the chapter demonstrates, Kitsnik suggests talking about ‘joint stardom’ or joint authorship between Tanaka and the directors of the films.

This chapter discusses the international scope and status of early cinema, and the particular significance of European production companies. While Europe dominated world film markets in the first decade of the twentieth century, the situation began to change as the business organisation of the American film industry was streamlined, and the Hollywood studio system developed. In the emerging history of Hollywood, the established powers of the Motion Picture Patents Company positioned themselves against a growing lobby of independent producers, distributors, and exhibitors in a fight for market control. It was from this struggle that the industrial and aesthetic dominance of the American studio system would emerge and come to assert itself in national and international terms. The chapter also includes the study, ‘The Perils of Pathé, or the Americanization of Early American Cinema’ by Richard Abel, which examines the means by which cinema became a contested site of Americanization.

This chapter discusses Ann and Leslie’s return to Hollywood, her hiring Myron Selznick as her new agent, and Warner Bros. choosing to maintain her long-term contract within the studio system. This chapter also begins to explore Ann and Leslie’s private lives and notes their early attempts at living a fairly isolated existence by moving to a ranch in the Van Nuys neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley and engaging in peculiar hobbies like bacteriology. Also covered is Ann’s loanout Paramount Pictures for The Way to Love, costarring Maurice Chevalier along with College Coach, the first film Ann had made with Warner Bros. in well over a year.

This chapter discusses the renewed promise of Ann’s career in 1935 with higher-budget, higher-profile Warner films like Sweet Music with Rudy Vallee and “G” Men with James Cagney, only to have this momentum halted by illness and dissatisfaction over a loan-out to another studio. Also detailed is the battle of wills between Ann and her studio after she refuses to visit an approved studio doctor, and Warner Bros. refuses to lift a suspension until she does so.

This shows how Hollywood was more effective than any other institution in America in challenging gender roles and portraying a positive image of working women both on and off screen. It reviews the importance of women within the studio system not only as actors and stars but also as screenwriters, film editors, costume and make-up design, research, and production (but significantly not as directors). It then analyses a set of highly successful films that were significant for promoting a positive image of working women. These are: A Woman Rebels (RKO, 1936); A Star is Born (Selznick International, 1937); Gone With the Wind (Selznick International-MGM, 1939); and Kitty Foyle (RKO, 1940). What these films have in common is an awareness of generations of women working in front of and behind the scenes that is rendered through their working-women heroines.