Hollywood studios and their production model

Stars and celebrity culture

A Triumph of Bitchery: Warner Bros., Bette Davis and Jezebel, Thomas Schatz

“Perhaps the most complex and paradoxical figure in the Hollywood studio system was

the movie star, whose enormous power on the screen and at the box office did not

extend into the production area.”

“…the star system became simply another factor in the overall equation of commercial

filmmaking—an equation that was calculated buy the studios and that relegated the

star, whatever his or her marquee value and visibility, to subordinate status.”

“The more effectively a studio packaged and commodified its stars, the more restrictive

the studio’s and the public’s shared perception of that star’s screen persona tended to be.”

A Hollywood star is an actor whose persona evolves through a series of performances, an identity rooted in specific roles. Stars answer a specific need in the audience, conscious or unconscious.

Stars (and all celebrities) can be seen as a type of socio/cultural barometer, giving expression to, and providing symbolic solutions for, specific fears, desires, anxieties and dreams in popular consciousness.

"… a consumer's paradise that resembled an innocent doll's house … Swimming pools, gyms, fountains and cultivated lawns supplied a private 'vacation land.' Inside, the couple decorated each room in the motif of a foreign country, so that the movement from one part of the house to another provided exotic adventure. In this kingdom of eternal youth, Doug and Mary highlighted continual newness by dipping into their vast wardrobes of stylish clothes for each of the day's activities: work, sports, dining, dancing, and parties. It followed that whenever the two sat for photographs, their smiles radiated happiness. A typical reporter described the Pickfair life as 'the most successful and famous marriage that the world has ever known.'"

Pickfair

A tangible model to which one could conform life, and a standard against which one could measure it, both in seemingly trivial ways, like fashion and behavior, and in more serious ways, like movie-induced expectations about the course of one’s life or the value of one’s own deeds.

Gabler: “… movies gradually began occupying the American imagination, not only filling American’s heads with models to appropriate but imbuing them with a profound sense of how important appearances were in producing just the right effect.”

The close-up opened the way to audience identification with characters--and with the actors who played them. The close-up allowed the audience to appreciate both the actor's physical characteristics and her/his acting ability, and allowed a vivid memory of the actor.

Thomas Schatz on the Hollywood studio system:

“It was a positive creative force, a point of convergence for the social, industrial, technological, economic and aesthetic entities that produced the classic Hollywood films. The Studio era provided a consistent system of consumption and production, a standard way of telling stories, from camera work and editing to plot structure and thematics”.

The Genius of the System, Thomas Schatz

“…studio filmmaking was less a process of collaboration than of negotiation and struggle. But somehow it worked, and it worked well.”

“What’s remarkable about classical Hollywood, finally, is that such varied and contradictory forces were held in equilibrium for so long. The New Hollywood and commercial television indicate all too clearly what happens when that balance is lost, reminding us what a productive, efficient and creative system was lost back in the 1950’s.”

Hollywood Studios

• Produce, distribute, market and exhibit, vertical integration

• Stars, genres, story-telling formula (adherence to formula facilitated production)

• Self-censorship

• World market

Five Major Studios

• Warner Brothers

• MGM

• 20th Century Fox

• Paramount

• RKO

Controlled a large percentage of the 1st-run theaters

Vertical integration –Production, exhibition and distribution.

Three Minor Studios

• Universal

• Columbia

• United Artists

• Selznick

• Disney

• Goldwyn

Didn’t control exhibition

Independent producers

Hollywood Formula

An assembly line method was established, and a standard mode of narrative expression (or formula) was developed that contained some basic conventions.

The formula was broad enough to be applied in a variety of ways,

flexible enough to change with the times, yet fixed enough to serve

as a pattern for production and marketing.

Studio Production Executive

• Budget

• Coordinated operations

• Contracts

• Developed stories, scripts

• Supervised filming, editing, post-production

• Studio’s style

• Story formulas

• Contract stars Irving Thalberg

Commercial feature-length narrative films that, through repetition and variation, tell familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations to form a coherent, value-laden narrative system. A film genre is both static (familiar formula) and dynamic (reflector of cultural attitudes). Only a limited number of stories have been refined into formulas. The genre stories are varied and repeated as long as they satisfy audience demand and turn a profit.

Film Genre, Thomas Schatz

Qualities of Film Genre

• Codified narrative patterns, built upon audience expectations.

• The repetition of formulaic clusters, elements that are charged with an accretion of meaning.

• The accommodation of both novelty and familiarity.

• A social community, a cultural milieu with thematic conflicts that are animated and resolved by familiar characters.

The classical Hollywood cinema has a very distinct style, sometimes called the Institutional Mode of Representation: continuity editing, massive coverage, three-point lighting, "mood" music, dissolves, all designed to make the experience as pleasant as possible.

• A style determines how the film is organized with the elements of story, sets, scenes, shots, sound.

• A plot is the sequence of actions in chronological order.

• A story is the narrative, or cause-and-effect chain of events, sometimes unseen and able to change time and space.

• A character has certain traits and reacts to certain situations as an agent of action and decision.

• A protagonist is the central character, active, goal-oriented, positive motivations. The antagonist is in conflict with the central character's effort to solve a problem.

• A story must have resolution, an ending, closure for characters and situations.

The Classic Hollywood Narrative Style

The Classic Hollywood Narrative Style

•Editing is the physical rearrangement of frames of film and the adding of effects such as sound (invisible style)

•Continuity is the arrangement of shots to tell a consistent story.

•Genre is a standard formula for a particular kind of story.

•Auteur is the filmmaker.

•Mis-en-scene is the arrangement of space, to "place on stage" the characters, props, lighting.

•Chiaroscuro is the range of lighting from dark to bright.

•Montage is the arrangement of images for effect.

•Metaphor is a symbolic construction

Understanding Movies, by Louis Giannetti

Formalism

A style of filmmaking in which aesthetic forms take precedence over

subject matter as content. Emphasis is placed on the essential and

symbolic characteristics of objects and people, not necessarily on their

superficial appearance. Formalist films are often lyrical, self-consciously

heightening their style in order to call attention to it as a value for its on

sake.

Understanding Movies, by Louis Giannetti

Realism

A style of filmmaking that attempts to duplicate the look of objective reality

as it’s commonly perceived, with emphasis on authentic locations and

details, deep-focus shots, lengthy takes and a minimum of distorting

techniques. The acting in realist films is often minimally staged and

unscripted.

NC chase

Expressionism

A term used to characterize works of art and literature in which the

representation of reality is distorted for the sake of conveying an inner

vision. The expressionist transforms reality rather than seeking to imitate it.

Expressionist films ought to create mood and reveal emotion (“soul”) through the

use of setting, light, movement and composition within the shot, and camera

movement to achieve the shot or frame.

Cinematography: the art or science of motion-picture photography

Cinematography involves composition—the position of every visual element within the frame, and illumination—the character and quality of the lighting of each scene.

Made into Movies by Stuart McDougalSymbol: an action, object, person or name that that signifies more than its literal meaning. These meanings are determined by the context of the film or by reference to a common belief or value.

Made into Movies by Stuart McDougalAn allegory is a work in which the characters, events and often the setting function on several levels of meaning simultaneously. Allegories can be political/historical or focused on truths or generalizations about human existence.

Hitchcock’s America, Freedman and Milligan

“…Hitchcock’s varied deployments of American public spaces, cultural narratives, literary traditions, iconography and ideological crosscurrents are not adventitious, accidental, or marginal. Rather, we suggest that at the center of Hitchcock’s Hollywood films stands a sustained, specific and extraordinarily acute exploration of American culture.”

As an “outsider”, Hitchcock could more easily see and articulate the ideological structures of thought and behavior that govern the activities of Americans.

Hitchcock’s Films Revisited by Robin Wood

Shadow of a DoubtOn the surface, an affectionate/intimate look at middle class (bourgeois) family. It has as a central ideological project the reaffirmation of family and small town

values which the action has called into question.

Hitchcock’s Films Revisited by Robin Wood

What is in jeopardy is the family, but given the family’s central ideological significance, once that is imperiled, all American, middle class values ( capitalism, work ethic, marriage, success/wealth, progress/technology, male and female archetypes) are in jeopardy as well.

The subversion of ideology within the film is everywhere traceable to Hitchcock’s presence, to the skepticism and nihilism that lies just below the jocular façade of his public image.

Young Charlie’s goodness and innocence are revealed to be limitations but we are never invited to find them ridiculous. It is precisely because they are convincingly realized as genuine and positive that the film is so authentically disturbing.

Hitchcock’s Films Revisited by Robin Wood

The Hitchcockian dread of repressed forces is characteristically accompanied by a sense of the emptiness of the surface world that represses them, and this crucially affects the presentations in SOAD of the American small town family.

Hitchcock’s Films Revisited by Robin Wood

The superficial ideological project tries to insist upon the preservation of young Charlie’s innocence, in association with the restoration of small town values, hence her final reassurance, outside of church, when she asks her detective lover how to account for a world that produces people like her uncle, that it “just goes a little crazy sometimes and has to be watched”.

Yet the film has made clear that Uncle Charlie’s sickness cannot be disassociated from the values and assumptions of capitalist ideology and is in fact its extreme product

Life: The Movie by Neal Gabler

In the 20th century, entertainment dominates all other cultural entities. “More and more, the civic elements of American life would conform or convert, changing to resemble entertainment, in order to survive.”

“More and more, the civic elements of American life would conform or convert, changing to resemble entertainment, in order to survive.”