America on Film. Sean Griffin

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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.