Chapter 24 The SAGE Handbook of Media Studies (original) (raw)

Hollywood's Major Crisis and the American Film "Renaissance

2008

In its long history, Hollywood faced several crises most of which were sustained with slight damage. However, the most severe crisis started in the post-war years and culminated in the period of the late 60s and early 70s when the Big Hollywood Studios came to the brink of bankruptcy. The aim of this paper is to re-examine the post-war period in order to assess the major changes (social, political, economic, technological) that gravely affected the Hollywood system of production and transformed the American cinema. As a result of this, Hollywood underwent a brief period of radicalization and innovation, which came to be known as Hollywood Renaissance. Hollywood Renaissance films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), and Easy Rider (1969) marked a return to a truly American Cinema. Furthermore, the films' artistic sensibilities brought them closer to their European counterparts. In effect, the period of the late 60s and early 70s signaled a rebirth of the American Fi...

The Transformation of Films and Audiences from Early Years of Cinema to Hollywood

FA49A: Cinema and Audience, Sociological Debate - Fall, 2022

This paper explores the birth and evolution of cinema, focusing on its impact on movie theaters, films, and audiences. It highlights the motivations behind cinema's development and the early fascination with moving images. The emergence of nickelodeons made movies more accessible to a wider audience, including immigrants and the working class. Feature films brought changes in narrative structure and appealed to the middle and upper classes. The global movie industry before WWI gradually gave way to Hollywood's dominance. French Impressionism and movements like Dadaism and Surrealism challenged traditional narratives. Eventually, Hollywood adopted a standardized narrative structure. Overall, cinema's transformation was influenced by technology, industry, changing audiences, and artistic movements, shaping it into its recognizable form today.

An Alliance of Convenience: Independent Exhibitors and Purity Crusaders Battle Hollywood, 1920–1940

The Historian, 1997

here are moral issues behind block booking, blind booking, the uniform "T contract, arbitrations, and all other trade practices," motion picture reformer Catheryne Cooke Gilman explained to a colleague in 1927.' So-called "purity crusaders" lobbied in the 1920s and '30s against what they perceived to be the undermining of traditional moral values by the film industry. Other critics, such as independent movie exhibitors who resented the iron control motion picture producers wielded over the industry, spoke from economic concerns. Historians have amply described the antitrust and censorship assaults on Hollywood during this time, which were an outgrowth of other reform efforts of the Progressive Era that preceded World War 1. But while scholars have acknowledged the Progressive Era roots of motion picture reformers, the relationship between market-oriented activists and moral purity crusaders needs to be explored further. The present essay describes the development of the tenuous and fluctuating anti-Hollywood alliance between these two groups of reformers that emerged after 1920. It attempts to assess their success in tying industry practices such as "block booking" to the moral quality of film content, and further suggests how the liaison between economic and moral protesters offers significant insights into the cultural conflicts that accompanied the growth of a corporate and consumer-oriented economy and society. Capitalized at over $1 billion, motion pictures constituted one of the nation's leading industries by 1920. Eight corporate giants accounted for 90 percent of the 800 films produced each year in the United States. Funds from leading investment firms enabled Hollywood studios to integrate operations and dramatically increase their ownership of motion picture theaters across the country in the decade after World War I. Centralized booking, national advertising, and system-wide accounting provided enormous cost advantages to companies such as Paramount, Warner Bros., RKO, the Fox syndicate, and Loew's-MGM. By the 1930s, when 23,000 film

The Political Economy of Hollywood: Capitalist Power and Cultural Production

Routledge, 2022

In Hollywood, the goals of art and business are entangled. Directors, writers, actors, and idealistic producers aspire to make the best films possible. These aspirations often interact with the dominant firms that control Hollywood film distribution. This control of distribution is crucial as it enables the firms and other large businesses involved, such as banks that offer financing, to effectively stand between film production and the market. This book analyses the power structure of the Hollywood film business and its general modes of behaviour. More specifically, the work analyses how the largest Hollywood firms attempt to control social creativity such that they can mitigate the financial risks inherent in the art of filmmaking. Controlling the ways people make or watch films, the book argues, is a key element of Hollywood’s capitalist power. Capitalist power—the ability to control, modify, and, sometimes, limit social creation through the rights of ownership—is the foundation of capital accumulation. For the Hollywood film business, capitalist power is about the ability of business concerns to set the terms that will shape the future of cinema. For the major film distributors of Hollywood, these terms include the types of films that will be distributed, the number of films that will be distributed, and the cinematic alternatives that will be made available to the individual moviegoer. Combining theoretical analysis with detailed empirical research on the financial performance of the major Hollywood film companies, the book details how Hollywood’s capitalist goals have clashed with the aesthetic potentials of cinema and ultimately stymied creativity in the pursuit of limiting risk. This sharp critique of the Hollywood machine provides vital reading for students and scholars of political economy, political theory, film studies, and cinema.