Review of Shooting Cowboys and Indians by Schafer

7/27/2019 Review of Shooting Cowboys and Indians by Schafer

1/5

The President and Fellows of Harvard College

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2/5

Book Reviews / 551The Electric Vehicle is a stunning triumph of creative and sophisticated scholarship. Nonetheless, the book's high data density, intricate

explanations not reducible to sound bites, and wooden phraseologythreaten to confine its audience to EV enthusiasts and historians ofbusiness and technology. Nonetheless, I recommend that this tome beread?or at least perused?by anyone interested in studying technological change, for Mom's framework gives good guidance. Indeed, Dr.Mom's prescription?that technological change be studied holistically?is a potent antidote to the poisonous extremes of technological, economic, and sociocultural determinism.

Michael Brian Schiffer is Fred A. Riecker Distinguished Professor ofAnthropology at the University of Arizona, and research associate atthe Lemelson Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. A theorist, cofounder of behavioral archaeology, andstudent of electrical history, his technology-related books (in additionto Taking Charge,) include The Portable Radio inAmerican Life (1991),Technological Perspectives on Behavioral Change (1992), The MaterialLife of Human Beings: Artifacts, Behavior, and Communication (1999),and Draw the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in the Age of Enlightenment (2003). He also edited Anthropological Perspectives on Technology (2001). Schiffer is currentlyresearching changes in electrical technology from 1800 to 1880.

Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Western Films, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood. By Andrew Brodie Smith. Boulder:

University Press of Colorado, 2003. 240 pp. Illustrations, notes, index.Cloth, $34.95. ISBN: 0-870-81746-9.

Reviewed by Eric SchaeferSince the mid-1970s Hollywood has considered the western as dead asa black-hatted villain on a sun-bleached street at high noon. While afew throwbacks?Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992) and the recentHBO series, Deadwood, come to mind?have commanded critical attention and audience interest, westerns have been supplanted by science fiction and fantasy as genres that can be counted on to bolster thebottom line. For years, though, westerns were amainstay of the American motion-picture industry. In Shooting Cowboys and Indians: SilentWestern Films, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood, Andrew Brodie Smith demonstrates that the genre played a critical role in

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3/5

Book Reviews / 552establishing movies as a popular medium and ensuring that Hollywoodbecame the center of motion-picture production in the United States.

Although the existing literature on westerns is extensive, Smith'sbook is predicated on what he identifies as two major gaps: "the failureto examine closely silent-era films and the failure to understand thegenre's evolving conventions as a function of larger changes within theindustry" (p. 3). Smith shows how the conventions of the western wereboth a response to contemporaneous social changes and "the crystallization of a particular set of business conditions, including shifts in audience demographics and tastes, censorship and reform activities, anddevelopments in film exhibition and distribution" (p. 4).The first two chapters of this compact volume, which are perhapsthe most interesting, examine the productions of Chicago-based companies, such as the collaborative ventures of film manufacturer WilliamSelig and photographer Harry H. Buckwalter. Buckwalter, who had tieswith Colorado developers, saw motion pictures as an ideal tool for pro

moting the state. The films he made with Selig at the turn of the centurywere "scenics" and short documentaries that captured the local color ofColorado and were designed to draw tourists and potential transplants.Buckwalter and Selig next incorporated elements of narrative films,notably crime movies like The Great Train Robbery (1903), with theColorado scenery. Films such as The Hold-Up of the Leadville Stage(1904) proved popular with audiences, but Buckwalter quickly realizedthat the demands of the crime film were incompatible with the requirements of civic boosterism. As Smith notes, "Although Buckwalter andSelig had assembled the basic elements of the western, itwas anothertwo-and-a-half years until audiences, filmmakers, and exhibitors recognized the genre and before Selig Company and the industry as awhole were organized enough to exploit its commercial potential" (p.24). A new Selig employee, Gilbert M. "Bronco Billy" Anderson, was thefirst tomake "western stories" that were promoted as such.

By the fall of 1909 the western had become the dominant genre inthe American film industry. Its success was due in part to the nickelodeon boom, but itwas derived as well from the western's relative easeof production and the producers' ability to promote it as a uniquely

American genre, one that could not be properly made by foreign companies. Authenticity became a central concern in the production of thewestern, whether itwas hiring riders and ropers from Wild West showsor Native American performers, such as James Young Deer and LillianRed Wing. The search for authentic western locations led Selig's Francis Boggs to establish the first permanent studio in Los Angeles in 1909,and the growing popularity of the genre soon had other studios follow

ing Selig's lead. "By 1911 six major studios were operating at least one



4/5

Book Reviews / 553unit year-round in the area: Selig, New York Motion Picture, Kalem,Nestor, American, and Path? West Coast. All of them specialized incowboy and Indian subjects" (p. 48). Others, like Essanay, whichAnderson had created with distributor George K. Spoor, moved intowestern production, and soon the genre's popularity not only laid thefoundation for a nationalist cinema but also allowed American producers to reclaim control of the domestic market, which had been dominated by European companies. In addition, it proved to be the genrethat independent producers could use most effectively in their battleagainst the Motion Picture Patents Company, the cartel developed byEdison to control film production in the United States.Much of Shooting Cowboys and Indians focuses on the young motion-picture industry's efforts to reach a wider audience that was bothmore upscale and included more female patrons. This campaign led toa decline in the "blood and thunder" of westerns and a greater emphasis on historical spectacle, exemplified in the films that producerThomas H. Ince made for Bison. But the major change came about withthe development of the western hero, and Smith demonstrates how"Bronco Billy," the character portrayed by Gilbert Anderson, was modified to appeal tomiddle-class sensibilities. This trend was further elaborated byWilliam S. Hart, who played psychologically nuanced westernheroes that were scripted "to promote Christianity, moral reform, andother Victorian values" (p. 170). But following World War I, the oldfashioned values extolled by the western were seen as pass?. Urbanfirst-run theaters shunned westerns and booked films that featured

matinee idols like John Barrymore and Rudolph Valentino, who hadgreater appeal to women. As the cowboy hero was transfigured into acharacter known for his athleticism and riding ability, "moral and psychological battles became less prevalent in the genre" (p. 188), and itbecame associated with low budgets, second-tier theaters, and a juvenile male audience.

Smith's impressive research draws on early studio records, tradepaper accounts, oral histories, and a range of secondary sources. Shooting Cowboys and Indians suffers from some redundancy, and readerswho are unfamiliar with the history of the early film industry may be ata bit of a disadvantage because of Smith's tendency to treat the westernin isolation from the rest of the industry. But he is largely successful inshowing how this quintessentially American genre contributed to thecreation ofthat quintessentially American place?Hollywood. Shooting

Cowboys and Indians shares the qualities of the westerns Smith writesabout: leanness, directness, and energy.Eric Schaefer is associate professor in the Department of Visual andMedia Arts at Emerson College in Boston. He is the author o/"Bold!



5/5

Book Reviews / 554Daring! Shocking! True!": A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959(1999) and of many articles on "low" film genres. He is currently

working on Massacre of Pleasure: A History of Sexploitation Films,1960-1979.

Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World.Edited by Glenn Adamson. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. xi + 219 pp.Photographs, illustrations, bibliography, notes, appendices, index.Cloth, $45.00. ISBN: 0-262-01207-3.

Reviewed by Carolyn Thomas de la Pe?aBrooks Stevens, whose Milwaukee-based design career spanned six decades, embodied his philosophy that an industrial designer should be"abusiness man, an engineer, and a stylist, and in that direct order" (p.203). His statement seems incongruent with a body of work that contains such standards of postwar American life as the Harley-Davidsonmotorcycle, the Jeep station wagon, and the Miller Brewing logo. Yetfor Stevens, as revealed by Glenn Adamson, the success of a design wasnot found exclusively in the product. A free-market conservative,Stevens's real interest was in how his designs moved products throughthe marketplace, creating profit for his clients and, as he saw it, contributing to a vigorous national economy. In this edited volume, a companion to the recent Milwaukee Art Museum retrospective, Stevensemerges as a unique hybrid within the field of industrial design, amanwho contributed countless iconic products but who was proud to statethat his most important design contribution was "dollars in the bankfor the client" (p. 23).Such pragmatism, in tandem with what Adamson terms an EastCoast, New York bias in industrial design history, may account forStevens's absence from the field's canon. While numerous volumeshave documented the work and influence of Stevens's contemporaries,including Norman Bel Geddes, Raymond Loewy, and Walter Dorwin

Teague, this edited volume is the first to elevate him to their ranks.Stevens entered a design marketplace in the 1930s and 1940s where"good design" was defined as that which expressed pure form (most fa

mously realized in the "streamline" style of the 1930s). Adamson's volume, which combines scholarly essays on Stevens's influence with decade-by-decade overviews of his designs and excerpts from Stevens'spublic addresses, allows us to understand how the designer earnedsuch neglect, along with the moniker "the enfant terrible of industrial


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Review of Shooting Cowboys and Indians by Schafer