Background of Hollywood movie industry

The cinema of the United States, often generally referred to as Hollywood, has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main periods: the silent film era, classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and the contemporary period.

In early 1910, director D.W. Griffith, of the Biograph Company, arrived at the west coast with his acting troupe. They started filming on a vacant lot near Georgia Street in downtown Los Angeles. While there, the company decided to explore new territories, traveling several miles north to Hollywood, a little village that was friendly and enjoyed the movie company filming there. Griffith then filmed the first movie ever shot in Hollywood, “In Old California”, a melodrama about California in the 19th century, when it belonged to Mexico. Biograph stayed there for months and made several films before returning to New York. After hearing about Biograph's success in Hollywood, in 1913 many movie-makers headed west to avoid the fees imposed by Thomas Edison, who owned patents on the movie-making process. And thus Hollywood grew. Before World War I, movies were made in several U.S. cities, but filmmakers gravitated to southern California as the industry developed. They were attracted by the mild climate and reliable sunlight, which made it possible to film movies outdoors year-round, and by the varied scenery that was available [7].

After World War I many European future well-renowned moviemakers, like directors Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, and Jean Renoir; and actors Rudolph Valentino, Marlene Dietrich, Ronald Colman, and Charles Boyer arrived in the US. They formed one of the 20th century's most remarkable growth industries.

In 1922 US politician Will H. Hays left politics and formed the movie studio boss organization known as the Motion Pictures Distributors Association of America (MPDAA). The organization became the Motion Picture Association of America after Hays retired in 1945.

In the early times of talkies, American studios found that their sound productions were rejected in foreign-language markets and even among speakers of other dialects of English. The synchronization technology was still too primitive for dubbing. One of the solutions was creating parallel foreign-language versions of Hollywood films. Around 1930, the American companies opened a studio in Joinville-le-Pont, France, where the same sets and wardrobe and even mass scenes were used for different time-sharing crews. Also, foreign unemployed actors and playwrights were chosen and brought to Hollywood, where they shot parallel versions of the English-language films. These parallel versions had a lower budget, were shot at night and were directed by second-line American directors who did not speak the foreign language. These productions were not very successful in their intended markets, due to the glaringly apparent low budget and inexperience of most of the crew. By the mid-1930s, synchronization had advanced enough for dubbing to become usual.

During the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, also known as classical era, which lasted from the end of the silent era in American cinema in the late 1920s to the early 1960s, thousands of movies were issued from the Hollywood studios. Each studio had its own style and characteristic touches – a trait that does not exist today. The start of the Golden Age was arguably when “The Jazz Singer” was released in 1927, ending the silent era and increasing box-office profits for films as sound was introduced to feature films. Most Hollywood pictures adhered closely to a formula of a genre, and the same creative teams often worked on films made by the same studio. At the same time, one could usually guess which studio made which film, largely because of the actors who appeared in it; MGM, for example, claimed it had contracted “more stars than there are in heaven” [3].

Motion picture companies made money by operating under the studio system – the practice of large motion picture studios producing movies primarily on their own filmmaking lots with creative personnel under long-term contract and pursuing control of distributors and movie theaters, guaranteeing additional sales of films through manipulative booking techniques. The major studios kept thousands of people on salary – actors, producers, directors, writers, stuntmen, craftspeople, and technicians. They owned so called Movie Ranches in rural Southern California for location shooting of westerns and other large scale genre movies. And they owned hundreds of theaters in cities and towns across the nation, theaters that showed their films and that were always in need of fresh material [17].

In 1930, MPDAA President Will Hays created the Hays Code, which followed censorship guidelines and went into effect after government threats of censorship expanded by 1930. However, the code was never enforced until 1934, after the Catholic watchdog organization The Legion of Decency – appalled by some of the provocative films and lurid advertising of the era later classified Pre-Code Hollywood – threatened a boycott of motion pictures if it didn't go into effect. Those films that didn't obtain a seal of approval from the Production Code Administration had to pay a $25000 fine and could not profit in the theaters, as the MPDAA owned every theater in the country through major studios.

Many film historians have remarked upon the many great works of cinema that emerged from this period of highly regimented moviemaking. One reason this was possible is that, with so many movies being made, not everyone had to be a big hit. A studio could gamble on a medium-budget feature with a good script and relatively unknown actors: “Citizen Kane”, directed by Orson Welles and often regarded as the greatest film of all time, fits that description. The apogee of the studio system may have been the year 1939, which saw the release of such classics as “The Wizard of Oz”, “Gone with the Wind” and “Wuthering Heights” [24].

The studio system and the Golden Age of Hollywood succumbed to two forces that developed in the late 1940s: a federal antitrust action that separated the production of films from their exhibition; and the advent of television.

In the late 40s the studios began to release actors and technical staff from their contracts with the studios. This changed the paradigm of film making by the major Hollywood studios, as each could have an entirely different cast and creative team. This resulted in the gradual loss of the characteristics which made MGM, Paramount, Universal, Columbia, RKO, and Fox films immediately identifiable. Although certain movie people, such as Cecil B. DeMille, either remained contract artists till the end of their careers or used the same creative teams on their films [17].

Studios also began to sell portions of their theatrical film libraries to other companies to sell to television. By 1949, all major film studios had given up ownership of their theaters.

Television broke the movie industry's hegemony in American entertainment. Despite this, the movie industry was also able to gain some leverage for future movies as longtime government censorship faded in the 1950s.

New Hollywood is the emergence of a new generation of film school-trained directors who had absorbed the techniques developed in Europe in the 1960s; “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) marked the beginning of American cinema rebounding as well, as a new generation of films would afterwards gain success at the box offices as well. Filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski came to produce fare that paid homage to the history of film, and developed upon existing genres and techniques. In the early 1970s, their films were often both critically acclaimed and commercially successful. While the early New Hollywood films had been relatively low-budget affairs with amoral heroes and increased sexuality and violence, the enormous success enjoyed by Spielberg with “Jaws”, Coppola with “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now”, Scorsese with “Taxi Driver” and Lucas with “American Graffiti”, and “Star Wars”, respectively helped to give rise to the modern blockbuster, and induced studios to focus ever more heavily on trying to produce enormous hits [5].

The increasing indulgence of these young directors did not always help. Often they’d go overschedule, and overbudget, thus bankrupting themselves or the studio. The most famous example of this is Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate” (1980), which single-handedly bankrupted United Artists [15].

In the late XXs century American films have become increasingly divided into two categories: blockbusters and independent films. Blockbusters emphasize spectacle, star power, and high production value, all of which entail an enormous budget. Blockbusters typically rely upon massive advertising to attract a huge audience. A successful blockbuster will attract an audience large enough to offset production costs and reap considerable profits. Such productions carry a substantial risk of failure, and most studios release blockbusters that both over- and underperform in a year. Classic blockbusters from this period include “E.T.”, “Back to the Future”, “Beverly Hills Cop”, “Top Gun”, “Titanic”, “The Matrix”, and “The Bourne Identity” [18].

Independent productions were made with small budgets. Movies made in this manner typically emphasize high professional quality in terms of acting, directing, screenwriting, and other elements associated with production, and also upon creativity and innovation. These movies usually rely upon critical praise or niche marketing to garner an audience. Because of an independent film's low budgets, a successful independent film can have a high profit-to-cost ratio, while a failure will incur minimal losses. The most notable independent moviemakers of New Hollywood are Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Kevin Smith, and Quentin Tarantino. They made movies like, respectively: “Do the Right Thing”; “Sex, Lies, and Videotape”; “Clerks”; and “Reservoir Dogs”. In terms of directing, screenwriting, editing, and other elements, these movies were innovative and often irreverent, playing with and contradicting the conventions of Hollywood movies. Furthermore, their considerable financial successes and crossover into popular culture reestablished the commercial viability of independent film. Since then, the independent film industry has become more clearly defined and more influential in American cinema [19].

All of this changed the landscape of American movie-making once again, and led a renaissance of filmmaking among Hollywood's lower and middle-classes – those without access to studio financial resources. With the rise of the DVD in the 21st century, DVDs have quickly become even more profitable to studios and have led to an explosion of packaging extra scenes, extended versions, and commentary tracks with the films.