by Mark Cousins
A series of uneducated working-class Jewish businessmen led the way. Adolph Zukor, for example, was a Hungarian immigrant who initially worked in the fur trade and then made a fortune copying Duc de Guise-type films in the US produced by his company, Famous Players. Joining forces with Jesse J. Lasky, a musical theatre producer, he formed the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, which would later become Paramount Pictures, the most European of the Hollywood Studios. During the so-called “Golden Age of Hollywood”, from the end of the First World War until 1945, its star actors and directors would be Marlene Dietrich, Joseph Von Sternberg, Gary Cooper, Ernst Lubitsch, Fredric March, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, W.C. Fields and Mae West. In its later years, Billy Wilder, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas would make their films for Paramount and in the 1970s, after its purchase by Gulf and Western, the slimmed-down studio would make The Godfather films (USA, 1970, 1972) and Grease (USA, 1978). In the 1980s, box-office hits such as Top Gun (USA, 1982), Beverly Hills Cop (USA, 1984), “Crocodile” Dundee (Australia, 1986) and Fatal Attraction (USA, 1987) would carry the Paramount logo.
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Large factory buildings like these at the MGM studios indicated how much Hollywood had industrialized.
In 1923, four Polish-Canadian brothers who had made money in penny arcades and film distribution established the Warners studio, named after themselves. Their films were grittier, cheaper and less glossy than those of Paramount. Their subjects emanated from newspaper headlines and their contractees were Bette Davis, James Cagney, Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart and Olivia De Havilland, the last of whom would eventually sue them and help to bring down the studio system in the US. Warners was the first studio to invest properly in sound technology. Its long-term fortunes were typical of Hollywood in the decades to come: In 1989, they were bought by publishing empire Time Inc. Time Warner would reconfigure again in the era of the Internet, becoming AOL-Time Warner.
A third studio, Metro-Goldywn-Mayer, was established in 1924 and it became the biggest, eventually boasting that it had more stars than there are in the heavens. MGM’s driving force was a brash Russian émigré, Louis B. Mayer, who came from a family of scrap metal merchants. He made a fortune distributing The Birth of a Nation and became the highest paid individual in the US in his MGM years, earning $1.25 million plus bonuses. He steered the careers of Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, James Stewart, Clark Gable and Elizabeth Taylor. The studio’s signature roaring lion announced pictures such as Greed (1924), The Crowd (1928), The Wizard of Oz (1939), Gone with the Wind (1939), An American in Paris (1951) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952), all landmarks in the history of cinema.
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This staged production still from Flesh and the Devil (1926), starring Greta Garbo, reveals how crowded was the filming of even intimate moments in industralized production.
Zukor, Warners, Mayer and their colleagues at the other Hollywood studios, 20th Century-Fox, Universal, Columbia and United Artists, shackled their rosters of talent with golden handcuffs. Actress Joan Crawford’s contract was lucrative, but specified when she should go to bed. Former Olympic swimmer Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan contract fined him for every pound he weighed over 190lb. These absurd details illustrate how much the studios tried to control and standardize every part of their operation, attempting to assemble films according to a series of tried and tested blue-prints, like the Ford production line. Technicians would become experts at their piece of the process and then hand the emerging film down the line. The standard division of labour in silent era preproduction and postproduction would involve the following: a production boss would pick a subject intended for key contract stars and assign a producer to it. In the major studios, subdivisions called production units grew up around certain producers with proven track records who liked to work with key technicians, such as David O. Selznick at RKO from 1931 onward. The producers would then attach a series of contract writers to the subject, who would produce a “photoplay” or script, detailing the action and the sparse dialogue that would be reproduced as intertitles in the final film. Using this the art department would design and build the sets necessary to film the written scenes or, as happened in most cases, modify existing large sets already constructed on the “back lot”. Concurrently, a director would be assigned to the film. The best or most powerful directors, such as the ones who feature in this book, might have written the script themselves, as in Erich Von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives (1921), King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928) or Preston Sturges’ The Great McGinty (1940). The chosen actors would have their costumes designed and fitted by the costume department, costume and make-up tests would be carried out to ensure that they photographed clearly and pleasingly within the sets and then the actors would learn their lines and rehearse with the director. This would be the end of the preproduction.
Production is the shooting process. The cinematographer would be assigned to the project and decide with the director the shot construction and the lighting. In the image below (42), from Beau Sabreur (1928), Gary Cooper is fencing in close-up as the camera dollies backward. The cinematographer, C. Edgar Schoenbaum, is on the dolly, smoking a pipe. The cinematographer would usually have camera assistants who measured the distance between actors and camera (here, a wooden guide ensures Cooper stays in focus by keeping him a constant distance from the lens) and often a camera operator would film the shot as instructed by the cinematographer, although there is no operator in this posed still. A script/continuity girl noted down whether a “take” was good, which part of the script was being filmed and what aspects of the action should be repeated in further takes and scenes, so that the shots matched.
42
The cinematographer, Schoenbaum, films the action, while a grip (far left) pulls the camera dolly backward. A T-shaped stick keeps actor Gary Cooper at a constant distance from the lens. Beau Sabreur. USA, 1928.
An electrician or “gaffer” set the lights according to the cinematographer’s instructions. If the camera was to be moved, a “grip” (at left of image, wearing the white trilby) pushed or pulled the camera, on wheels or wheels on tracks. Special effects people might be on the set to perhaps blow smoke onto it or to arrange a miniature painting in front of the camera to simulate a location which would be too expensive to build or to travel to. Props people would be on hand to provide and arrange objects. Hair and make-up experts would be on standby to smooth a blemish or comb hair into place.
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The production of Ben-Hur closely followed the Hollywood divison of labour model. USA, 1925.
The shot footage would be given to an editor, often a woman, when the filming was completed or during the production and this marked the beginning of postproduction. The editor cut the pictures together to tell the story in the liveliest or most engaging way. In the silent era, only the most prestigous films would have scores specially commissioned from composers; when completed, most films were sent silent to cinemas, which employed pianists or organists to provide music appropriate to the depicted action. With the advent of sound cinema, the composer would look through the “rough cut” and write a score, which could be recorded by an orchestra and whose sound layers would be added by a technician within the musical team. In the meantime, the editor got approval for the cut from the studio boss, producer and director and decided on the visual devices, such as dissolves and wipes, that would be used as transitions from one shot to the next. A laboratory then cut the negative according to the editor’s directions and copied it hundreds of times to manufacture prints to travel round the world’s cinemas.
Films such as Way Down East (D.W Griffith. 1919), The Three Musketeers (Fred Niblo, 1920), The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Rex Ingram, 1921), Robin Hood (Allan Dwan, 1922), The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. De Mille, 1923), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Wallace Worsley, 1923), The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924), Ben Hur (Fred Niblo, 1925) (43), Don Juan (Alan Crosland, 1926), Flesh and the Devil (Clarence Brown, 1926) and Wings (William Wellman, 1927) were produced this way.
These were the big adventure stories and romances of their day, intended to entertain. They attempted to be spatially and psychologically clear and were made to engage audiences emotionally and be more romantic than real life. Yet they also wanted to be accessible, about real people, perhaps more glamorous and exciting than the public, but still made of flesh and blood. The word “classical” has often been used to describe these characteristics, but that is too loose a term. Classicism in art refers to balance between form and content, a state of order where intellectual and emotional values are in harmony, but Hollywood studio films of the 1920s and 1930s almost never achieved this balance, this harmony. Director John Ford is often described as Hollywood’s key classicist, but his My Darling Clementine (1946) or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) are more romantic than classical.
Most Hollywood films have an emotional amplitude greater than that of everyday life. Dark clouds hang over them as they do in romantic poetry and painting, and their stories are drawn against the background of fate. Theirs is a phenomenally successful brand of emotional excess, against which other branches of world cinema would be defined. For the rest of this book their combined characteristics will be referred to as “closed romantic realism”. I use “closed” because these films tend to create worlds which do not acknowledge that they are being watched and the actors behave as if the camera isn’t there. Novice actors would be told not to look at the camera. (This is not always the case, examples being Japanese and Indian films.) They also try not to be open to uncertainty or alternative meanings. I use “realism” because they are seldom about gods, other planets or symbolic figures.
It was not only the tone and structure of closed romantic realism that was distinctive, but also the length of individual shots. Although these varied according to the film type, the Hollywood industrial approach led to shorter shots than in Europe. The average shot length in an American film in the period 1918–23 was 6.5 seconds, in Europe it was 30 percent longer at 8.5 seconds. Industrial cinema, in Hollywood and elsewhere, also preferred its films to be photographed from many angles, which allowed their producers and editors to have more control of scene and story pacing.
The style of shots in closed romantic realism changed in the 1920s. Directors in America, in particular, put gauzes over their lenses to flatter the look of their actresses, to soften the mood and to make the imagery more romantic. One of the first to do this, anticipating the trend by several years, was D.W. Griffith’s cinematographer, Billy Bitzer, in Broken Blossoms (USA, 1918). The use of longer lenses in the same period accentuated romantic detachment. In the American films of Swedish star, Greta Garbo, the close-ups were shot with these newer, 75mm or 100mm lenses rather than the normal 50mm. Giant, flattened, romantic images were created such as in Flesh and the Devil (USA, 1926) where her nose, lips and eyelashes are more clearly in focus than are her hair or the background (44).
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Greta Garbo and John Gilbert were shot with new 75mm or 100mm lenses in Flesh and The Devil. The resulting intimate and flattering imagery became the norm in romantic filmmaking. Director: Clarence Brown. USA, 1926.
This was before the onset of dialogue and sound, so hopeful, escapist, emotional Hollywood films, which could be understood in non-English speaking countries, took the world film market by storm. America was producing between 500–700 films annually, so over 6,000 flooded other film industry’s markets during these years. Their gloss, high technical standards and utopian aims appealed to audiences in other countries more than local films. The Soviet Union was sealed off from much of this. In Britain, however, the local film industry took a “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach, adopting the tenets of closed romantic realism, while the annual output of French films dropped considerably.
Novelist Henry Miller called this Hollywood production line “a dictatorship in which the artist is silenced”.2 Many intellectuals and cultural commentators around the world, if they deigned to write about the movies at all, agreed. They thought that an industrial approach to filmmaking is wrong and that movies are works of art, not Model T Fords. Throughout the course of film history, studio systems there and in Japan, India, Mexico, Italy, Britain, China, Hong Kong, Korea and France undoubtedly produced cynical, repetitive fodder, but rigorously controlled production systems across the world and throughout cinema history were also flexible and sophis-ticated enough to make some of the great films of Marcel Carné (France, 1930s), John Ford (USA, 1930s and 1940s), King Hu (Hong Kong, 1960s), Buster Keaton (USA, 1920s), Vincent Minnelli (USA, 1960s) and Yasujiro Ozu (Japan, 1920s to 1950s). This not only occurred when the controlling studio heads and bosses had their backs turned, but also occurred in front of the bosses as a direct result of the way the factory system fostered expertise and taste. Some of these directors such as Ford, navigated ways of controlling the system to their own ends. When Ford shot his westerns, Stagecoach (USA, 1939) and My Darling Clementine, he would sit by the camera and when it had recorded the precise piece of action he required, he would raise his fist in front of the lens. He did this to ruin the rest of the take and there-by prevent his producer bosses using anything in the final film, except the moment he approved. The closed romantic realism of the studio system was the schema of international film style. It could not be reject-ed completely by studio directors, but the best varied and enhanced it, especially in the Hollywood comedies from 1918–28.
HOLLYWOOD COMEDIES
The freedom and technological expertise in Hollywood with which to explore the relationship between film and laughter was unmatched anywhere else in the world.
The English vaudevillian turned clown, Charles Chaplin, who was brought up in part in a London orphanage for destitute children, went to the US in 1910 aged twenty-one and was initially appalled at the crudity of the American slapstick in the Biograph and Keystone output. Inspired by the graceful French comedian Max Linder, who also wore a gentlemanly outfit and who directed his own films, Chaplin advanced film comedy in a way as profound as Griffith’s contribution to film drama. He humanized it and gave it emotional and storytelling subtlety; he bent the studio system to his will with longer shooting schedules than other directors were permitted; and he wrote, produced, scored and acted in his films in addition to direct-ing them.
Chaplin’s career is a perfect example of schema plus variation. In his second film, Kid Auto Races at Venice (USA, 1914) he used a costume of bowler hat, scruffy baggy trousers, walking stick and over-sized boots which became his trademark. Thereafter, as critic Walter Kerr wrote, “He had to find out by trial and error and sudden inspiration what was inside the outside.”3 His outfit was that of a penniless tramp, but also that of a gentleman and dilettante. This ambiguity would allow Chaplin, in his mature films, to explore with dazzling grace and timing the sadness of his childhood and also become as much of a sophisticate as his ambiguous beggar imagined himself to be. He would do twenty, thirty or forty takes of a routine to get it right and sometimes simply stop the production to think. Ideas came first.
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Chaplin’s rapport with Coogan resulted in one of the best child performances in silent cinema.
A key to Chaplin’s evolution, and to the role that visual ideas played in his work, is to be found in the Canadian producer-director-actor of Irish sock, Mary Sennett. A producer of more than 1100 films, Sennett co-established the first film company solely devoted to comedy — Keystone — in 1912, and set the slapstick tone of its work which would be influential for generations to come. Sennett spotted Chaplin on stage and hired him in 1912. Within twenty-six months the latter had left Keystone rebelling against the studio’s manic house style. Even through the grace of his later work the following was clear, as historian Simon Louvish has argued: “Without Keystone’s rickety sets, the pre-existing world of its eccentric characters, bums, ne’er-do-wells, violent philanderers, innocent young swains, rude women and social braggards, however, Charlie the tramp would never have been born. For while Charlie brought the form
of Karno pantomime to his new world, the content was Sennett’s own America, contagious, nervous, always at high speed. All the little bits and pieces of business that made up The Tramps many mannerisms, his cane-twirling, ear-picking attention to small details, were a realization in depth of Keystone’s external chaos.”4
In 1915, soon after leaving Keystone, Chaplin became a star. By 1916, he was earning $10,000 per week with massive bonuses and, crucially, had full creative control over the editing of the film, what is called “final cut”. In 1919, Chaplin with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith founded United Artists Corporation. Four of the most powerful people in world cinema banded together to establish a talent-led production and releasing company which, however, did not own a studio. In subsequent years it would release American films such as The Night of the Hunter (1955), Some like it Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960) together with the James Bond films. Ironically, it was the extravagant and perfectionist director Michael Cimino, sharing many qualities with Chaplin, who prompted the demise of United Artists when he made one of the biggest box-office disasters in film history, the splendid Marxist epic Western, Heaven’s Gate (1980).