figure, while Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford usually played helpless ingénues, dependent upon swashbuckling heroes like Douglas Fairbanks to save them. In this way, the Hollywood star system (in conjunction with the form of Hollywood narrative itself) endorsed middle‐class American values of strong physically active men and passive women, heterosexual romance, and the centrality of whiteness. At its most basic level, the star system is a caste system, creating a class of individuals who supposedly shine brighter than the rest of us, and, as the word “star” suggests, glitter in the night sky above us. Indeed, the terms “movie god,” “movie goddess,” and “Hollywood royalty” have been part of the Hollywood publicity machine for many years. The star system thus elevates some human beings above others, and constructs specific ideals of beauty, appropriate gender behavior, skin color, class, sexuality, and so forth.
This interior shot of the Majestic Theatre shows the size and opulence of a typical movie palace.
Courtesy of the Quigley Photographic Archive, Georgetown University Library.
The Classical Hollywood Cinema
By the 1920s (sometimes known as the Golden Age of Silent Cinema), Hollywood had streamlined its production, distribution, and exhibition practices, and was regularly exhibiting its opulent entertainments in lush movie palaces attended by middle‐ and upper‐class patrons. In 1927, sound was added to the silent movie, and by the 1930s, Hollywood had entered what many historians now call its classical phase. During this period of classical Hollywood cinema (roughly the 1930s to the 1950s), Hollywood developed a standardized product that employed classical Hollywood narrative form and the invisible style. Film production occurred mostly under the oligopolistic control of eight Hollywood companies. The so‐called Big 5 or the major studios (Warner Brothers, Metro‐Goldwyn‐Mayer [MGM], 20th Century‐Fox, RKO, and Paramount) were each vertically integrated, while the Little 3 or minor studios (Columbia, Universal, and United Artists) did not own their own theaters and had fewer assets with which to produce the lush expensive movies for which the Big 5 were famous. At the bottom of the economic ladder in Hollywood were the Poverty Row studios (such as Monogram, Mascot, and Producers Releasing Corporation), studios that made cheap genre films and serials that were often used by exhibitors to fill out the second half of a double feature.
Most of these Hollywood companies were centralized around their own production facilities, referred to as movie studios. A Hollywood movie studio housed any number of large sound stages, on which sets could be built and torn down as needed, so that multiple films could be shot simultaneously. Most studios included a number of permanent (or standing) sets, such as a Western town, an urban street, a European village, a jungle, etc., that could be used repeatedly in different films. The studios also had large lists of actors, directors, camera operators, editors, screenwriters, musicians, costumers, set designers, and makeup artists under contract. Studios also employed janitors, bookkeepers, electricians, carpenters, and security guards. The major Hollywood studios even had commissaries, hospitals, and their own fire departments. Without exception, white men held most of the creative and executive positions at the studios, while people of color and women – if they were hired at all – were usually relegated to manual labor or assistant‐type jobs.
The studio system of motion picture production increasingly forced workers to specialize in certain areas. While early filmmakers did multiple tasks (wrote the scripts, directed the actors, worked the camera, and edited the film), classical Hollywood movie studios divided these jobs into various departments. This kept any individual, other than the (straight, white, male) heads of the studios themselves, from having too much control over the films being made, and it streamlined the filmmaking process. Much like Henry Ford’s assembly‐line production of automobiles, studio employees figuratively stood at certain places on a filmmaking conveyor belt, contributing their own small area of expertise to the product as it rolled smoothly down the line toward completion. During its classical period, the Hollywood industry produced about 500 films a year, or about a film per week per studio. (Today’s Hollywood output is considerably less.)
Some American movies were made independently of these companies during the classical period, but it was difficult to get these films distributed or exhibited without making a deal with one of the major Hollywood studios. Smaller independent filmmaking companies that produced Hollywood‐type films (examples of which would include the Walt Disney Company and the Samuel Goldwyn Company) often distributed their work through one of the Big 5 or Little 3. Other independent filmmakers produced work that the Hollywood majors had little interest in distributing. For example, independently produced films starring African Americans or all‐Yiddish casts were produced during Hollywood’s classical period, but these films never reached wide audiences outside of specific ethnic movie houses. For many years these films were ignored or dismissed by film historians, but in the last 40 years or so, film scholars have begun to study them in more detail. One thing that is immediately apparent about many of these independent films is that they allowed people of color to be in control behind the camera, representing issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability in different ways than did Hollywood.
During Hollywood’s classical era, the studios (such as Metro‐Goldwyn‐Mayer) were huge industrial complexes that filled several city blocks. Unidentified publicity photo, authors’ personal collection.
The studio system was established to minimize costs and reduce possible financial liabilities – and the risk of financial ruin ran high during the Great Depression (1929 until the start of World War II). Hollywood maintained profitability in the first few years after the stock market collapsed through audience interest in the new sound technology. But by 1932, all of the major studios had begun to feel the effects of the country’s economic despair. Ticket sales began to dwindle, and by 1933 every studio (except powerhouse MGM) had run into debt. Some studios even went into receivership or declared bankruptcy. Employee rosters were reduced, and those that remained faced slashed salaries. Most of those let go occupied the lowest rungs on the studio ladder – positions largely held by women and people of color – and most of these studio employees had no unions to bargain for them.
One of the methods Hollywood used to woo potential customers back into the theaters was to emphasize lurid stories that promised increased violence and sexual titillation, even in the face of local and state censorship campaigns. The studios worked to forestall any federal censorship by asserting that the industry could police itself. In the 1920s, Hollywood moguls appointed former postmaster general Will Hays to head an in‐house association to oversee the content of Hollywood films. In 1930, the studios officially adopted the Hollywood Production Code, written by a Jesuit priest and a Catholic layman, as a list of what could and could not be depicted in Hollywood movies. Not only were overtly political themes and acts of graphic violence to be censored, but issues of sex and sexuality in the movies were strictly monitored. For example, the Code outlawed the depiction or discussion of homosexuality and forbade miscegenation – the romantic or sexual coupling of people from different races. (The Production Code is a good example of how discrimination can become institutionalized, embedded within a corporate or bureaucratic structure.) Yet, as it existed in the first years of the Depression, the Production Code had no way to enforce its rules, and studios willfully disregarded its pronouncements when box office returns slid. Gangster films, horror films, and stories of “fallen women” proliferated, providing not only large doses of sex and violence, but also a cynical, pessimistic view of America and, to some degree, a critique of
