pure profit. Consequently, Hollywood films can offer foreign theater owners their films at a discount – a price calculatedly lower than the cost of films made locally in their native country. This makes it very difficult for other countries to support their own film industries.
As such, the Hollywood system is an example not just of industrial capitalism but also of cultural imperialism, the promotion and imposition of ideals and ideologies throughout the world via cultural means. Imperialism means one country dominating another through force and economic control, but in cultural imperialism, one nation doesn’t conquer another with force, but rather overwhelms it with cultural products and the ideologies contained within them. People around the world are inundated with American ways of viewing life when they go to the movies, and often they have little or no access to films made by people of their own nationality. Furthermore, since Hollywood films dominate the world, Hollywood style tends to define film practice for all filmmakers around the world, since Hollywood style is what most people are accustomed to seeing and understanding. Many filmmakers in other countries, having grown up themselves watching Hollywood films, make pictures that duplicate the Hollywood style, again reinforcing its dominance.
As the following history hopes to show, various restructurings of Hollywood’s business practices have affected the ability of other types of films (and their different representations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability) to get made and to find audiences. Yet, although new technologies and legal decisions have occasionally challenged and disrupted the business strategies of the Hollywood oligopoly, its dominance has not changed very much in a century. Most of the major companies that founded the Hollywood industry are still around: Paramount, Warner Brothers, Universal, Columbia, and 20th Century‐Fox (which was recently acquired by Disney). If anything, these companies have grown stronger and more diversified, becoming global corporate entities. The main purpose of Hollywood’s business practices – to keep profits high and inhibit competition by maintaining centralized control over the industry – has been upheld. Hollywood film, with its formulas and genres that uphold white patriarchal capitalism, affects not just people in America, but people around the globe.
The History of Hollywood: The Movies Begin
The United States did not always dominate the international film industry, and a number of people around the globe could arguably take credit for inventing motion pictures at the end of the nineteenth century. In America, Thomas Edison’s company first demonstrated moving images in 1894 through a mechanical peep‐hole device, the kinetoscope. In France, the Lumière Brothers first projected their moving pictures upon a screen in 1895, giving birth to cinema as a shared social phenomenon for paying audiences. The Lumières’ method of exhibition soon became the standard worldwide, and French filmmakers often led the way in cinema’s early years. French film companies such as Pathé became the first to accomplish vertical integration, long before the Hollywood studios even existed.
Arcades filled with Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscopes, such as this one in New York City, were a popular early space for exhibiting motion pictures.
Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York, The Byron Collection.
The first movies were short travelogs, documentaries, and “trick” films shown at traveling tent shows and vaudeville theaters. As the novelty of seeing photographs brought to life faded, filmmakers moved to telling fictional stories, first in one‐reel shorts (which lasted about 5–10 minutes) and then in two‐reel and four‐reel short features. Films grew so popular that a wave of nickelodeons, small store‐front theaters devoted solely to showing films, opened their doors across the United States. During this period, American filmmakers began refining the methods of storytelling, methods that eventually became Hollywood’s invisible style. Since films were silent during this period, filmmakers had to learn how to emphasize key narrative points without the use of sound. Often this involved exaggerated gestures by the actors, but filmmakers also learned how to communicate through the choice of camera placement, lighting, focus, and editing. Simultaneously, audiences learned and accepted what these choices meant. By the 1910s, fictional films that told melodramatic or sensationalistic stories over the course of one of more hours were becoming the norm.
In the United States, Hollywood was incorporated as a town in 1911 and, for a number of reasons, quickly became the center for the nation’s film production. Southern California provided almost year‐round sunny weather (needed to illuminate early cinematography). The diversity of terrain in and around Los Angeles (beaches, mountains, forests, and deserts) allowed many different locations for filming. In the 1910s, Los Angeles was still a relatively small town and film companies could buy land cheaply to build their mammoth studios. Growing unionization in all US industries had not made a significant impact in Los Angeles yet, and the availability of cheap labor also drew filmmakers to Hollywood. These pioneering filmmakers were also seeking an escape from Thomas Edison’s east‐coast patent lawyers, who wanted them to pay royalties.
When American filmmaking was still a small cottage industry, individuals from various minority groups had more opportunity to move into the business. While a consortium of WASP (White Anglo‐Saxon Protestant) males and their lawyers were trying to control the American film industry, women and some racial/ethnic minorities were able to carve out a niche. Many pioneering Hollywood film businesses were started by recent European Jewish immigrants such as Samuel Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor, and Carl Laemmle. However, as film in America became a bigger and bigger business, more controlled by companies rather than individuals, the opportunities for minorities behind the camera dwindled. Laemmle, Zukor, and others of Jewish descent were able to maintain their power, but people of color were rarely permitted any creative control behind the scenes in Hollywood. Increasingly, the producing and directing of motion pictures was regarded as man’s work, and women were pushed aside. American women did not even have the right to vote prior to 1920, and non‐white people were rarely permitted into white social spheres or business concerns during these decades.
During the 1910s, cinema was commonly regarded in the United States as entertainment for immigrants and the working class. Some middle‐to‐upper‐class white Americans felt that cinema was potentially a disturbing social institution that promoted “dangerous” ideas to the lower classes, and thus many local and state censorship boards began to monitor the content of films. (In 1915, the Supreme Court ruled that cinema was not an art form protected as free speech, but simply a business and therefore open to regulation.) The film industry thus felt pressure to become more “respectable,” a euphemism for affirming the social ideals of the era’s white patriarchy. The industry also wanted to capture the more lucrative middle‐class audience. One of the ways it did this was by replacing nickelodeons with opulent theaters known as movie palaces. It was not unusual for movie palaces to have marble foyers, crystal chandeliers, and curtained boxes. Able to seat thousands of patrons at once, the palaces helped elevate the cultural status of film to something closer to that of live theater.
The Comet Theatre in New York City was a typical nickelodeon; note the price of admission and the various short films advertised.
Courtesy of the Quigley Photographic Archive, Georgetown University Library.
During the 1910s and 1920s, studios also developed the concept of the movie star (an actor or actress the public recognizes and likes), realizing that a star’s fans would pay to see any of the star’s films. Stars are thus used to sell films, giving them a kind of brand‐name appeal. Often stars were (and still are) associated with a specific type of role or a stereotypical persona. Charlie Chaplin’s
