1914 - 1929 The Modernist World Jump to:
1914 - 1929 The Modernist World Jump to:
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4 The Rise of Hollywood
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The rise of Hollywood signaled the arrival of America's urban-industrial age, a period when traditional values and established notions of family and community, of the social and political order, and of individual freedom and initiative were radically transformed. Hollywood movies were among the first and were certainly the most widespread and accessible manifestations of an emergent "mass culture" which brought with it new forms of cultural expression. Businessmen began to realize the financial potential for movies. While movies were first shown as part of other forms of entertainment, they soon became the featured attraction themselves. By 1905 the first nickelodeon had opened in Pittsburgh, where customers each paid a nickel to see a full program of a half dozen short films. The opening of theaters completed the elements necessary for an industry: product, technology, producer, purchaser, and distributor.
As the United States became an increasingly child-centered culture, concern grew about the moral effects of popular culture on the young.
This was not simply a matter of its content: many educationalists shared philosopher Charles Horton Coolef's disquiet about its "expressive" function in stimulating emotions. The "rapid and multitudinous flow of personal images, sentiments, and impulses", he feared, produced "an overexcitation which weakens or breaks down character".
One man who learned his trade from Griffith was Mack Sennett. Sennett worked for Griffith for a few years as a director and writer, but his interests were more in comedy than in melodrama. In 1912 he broke away and began to work for an independent company, Keystone. Here he learned to merge the methods of stage slapstick comedy with the techniques of film; the results were the Keystone Cops, Ben Turpin, and Charlie Chaplin. Sennett's films used only the barest plot outline as a frame for comic gags that were improvised and shot quickly. From the Sennett method, Charlie Chaplin developed his own technique and character. He began making shorts under the direction of Sennett, but in 1915 he left and joined with Essenay which agreed to let him write and direct his own films at an unprecedented salary. Here he fleshed out his tramp character; one of his first films for Essenay was The Tramp ( 1915). He continued making films that combined his own comic sense and acrobatic movements with social commentary and along with Mary Pickford became one of the first "stars." Later he made features, such as The Gold Rush ( 1925) and Modern Times ( 1936). Sennett and Chaplin began a period of great film comedy. Buster Keaton combined a deadpan look with remarkable physical ability and timing. He too began making shorts, but soon was directing and starring in features, such as The General ( 1926). Harold Lloyd ( The Freshman, 1925) and Harry Langdon ( The Strong Man, 1926) also created comic characters that demonstrated their individuality and imagination.
From these ingredients came the studio system and the star system. The demands of the moviegoing audiences created a need for a great number of films, and small companies were unable to meet the demands. Adolph Zukor at Paramount and Marcus Loew, Louis B. Mayer, and Irvin Thalberg at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer quickly learned the means of applying American business methods to this new industry. They bought out their competition and eventually controlled film production, distribution, and exhibition. Even the actors and directors got into the act as Chaplin, Griffith, Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks joined together to create United Artists, intended at first to distribute the various productions of its founders. Later it too became a studio force, along with Columbia, Fox, Warners, and others.
With the studios came the stars. The public hungered for new heroes and new sex objects, and the studios were quick to give the public what it wanted. Along with the stars who had been established in the early 1900s came the new generation of the 1920s: Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, Clara Bow. The stars soon became the nucleus of American myth, and the public followed the stars' affairs, marriages, and extravagant lives with keen interest. This was the stuff Hollywood was made of. Fortunately there were behind these stars creative directors, such as Cecil B. DeMille, Eric Von Stroheim, and Henry King, who were able to mold the talents of the stars into movies.
The projection of overt sexuality was far more difficult far male stars than female. Rudolph Valentino's screen performances were often ridiculed by American men who either accused him of being a gigolo ar questioned his masculinity because he consciously made himself appealing to women. His gaudy, stage-managed funeral after his death from peritonitis in 1926 epitomized the public excesses of the decade.
Despite the complaints of moralists, it was an unthreatening rebellion, with its tensions resolved in the cult of youth. Stars encouraged their fans to make the private world of leisure a refuge from somber public concerns. They offered no challenge to economic inequalities, routine work, or the continuing separation of sexual roles in public life.
As work came to occupy less of peoples' energies, leisure became an egalitarian arena where imitating the spontaneity of adolescence brought personal fulfillment. The business world was no longer a maral testing ground, but a supply house for new desires. Scandal became an epidemic in Hollywood at this time, as an inevitable part of the process of publicity for the studios and their stars, but it had unfortunate effects on the careers of its victims, notably Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle.
The twenties saw some of Hollywood' s most exotic epics, including The Thief of Baghdad (1924) and Ben Hur (1926). Taking a theme that was elose to home, in James Cruze's The Covered Wagon (1923) and John Ford's The Iron Horse (1924) it also produced the first epic enactments of the Westem myth. Here the pioneer endeavors of an earlier generation of Americans were seen as laying the heroic foundations of the 20th - the American century. The worldwide popularity of these films indicated the extent to which the Westem was coming to be seen as a myth of origin not just for Americans but for the emerging Westem culture of consumption as a whole.
The period between the coming of sound and World War II was dominated by the studios. They controlled the production--including story, the role of the directors, and the selection of actors--distribution, and exhibition (they owned their own theaters). In the 1930s America went to the movies; by the end of the decade some eighty million people saw a movie every week. The studios provided them with the means to live out their fantasies, find heroes, and escape from the Depression.
One factor directly affecting the films of the 1930s was censorship. Hollywood movies in the late 1920s and early 1930s had become rather open in their use of sex, and the scandals in the private lives of the stars shocked the public even as it hungered for vicarious living. Fear of government intervention and of the Depression forced the studios to censor themselves. They established the Hays Office under the directorship of Will Hays, former postmaster-general, and this office published a strict moral code for on-screen activities and language. The results stifled creativity, but the new moral tastes of the public were satisfied.
The stars captured the public's imagination as in no other time in American popular culture: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh, Edward G. Robinson, and Marlene Dietrich. The comics maintained the traditions of the silent comedians: Charlie Chaplin continued to make movies and was joined by the Marx brothers, Mae West, and W. C. Fields.
At the same time, the directors had to find a path through the maze created by the studios, the Hays Office, and the stars. They had to bring all these divergent elements together and make movies. Men such as John Ford and Howard Hawks created their own visions of America and discovered methods of capturing the American myth on film. Many of the directors of the period were immigrants: Josef von Sternberg, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, and Frank Capra. Each discovered for himself the essence of this country and its people. Perhaps that essence was most fittingly expressed in a film that came at the end of the prewar period, Citizen Kane ( 1941), the first film Orson Welles directed.
The war changed the industry. Many residents of Hollywood took time off to participate in the war effort. Some like John Ford and Frank Capra made films for the government. Others like Fritz Lang continued to make commercial films, but they were propaganda-oriented and helped build morale. The stars went to the battle areas to entertain the troops. Even studio space was commandeered to produce war documentaries, and war films became a dominant fictional genre.
4 Next Page: European Cinema: Focusing Individual Characters
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