With legions of beautiful stars and starlets, the movie studios easily mastered the simple Just look at this original portrait of Greta Garbo from A photo featuring two hollywood actresses, Joan Marsh and Mary Carlisle .. Vintage borderless black-and-white candid press photograph taken at an event on March.
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And it was his acquaintance with Hurrell that gave Kobal the idea to look up surviving members of the circle of great Hollywood photographers whose accumulated work is perhaps the most perfect record available of the history of Hollywood's first fifty years. A love affair with the movies began when Kobal was a boy in Austria in the late s and continued when his family immigrated to Canada in the s. He later wrote that "[Hollywood] exerted a powerful charm on the imagination of a young man used to living in emotional isolation. Popular since the earliest days of motion pictures, these magazines and the flood of images produced by the studios kept favorites in the minds of fans and titillated movie goers, even those living in far away places like Canada.
Magazines and newspapers kept Kobal up to the minute on the latest Hollywood news and gossip, and current with the latest photographs released. Like most fans of his generation, Kobal kept scrapbooks of Hollywood favorites, "pictures cut out of fan magazines; stars looking great next to slogans telling you that nine stars out of ten used Lux; ads for films, those pages in the front of fan magazines; picture spreads.
Marlene Dietrich was to give a concert in Toronto. For the first time one of his idols from the screen would appear before him in person. The anticipation was intoxicating and Kobal was determined not only to see the legend on stage but to meet her as well. The charm that served him well throughout his life must have been in full force the day he invaded the press office of Toronto's O'Keefe Theater. Claiming to be a reporter from Ottawa his hometown , he tried to secure an interview.
In fact he would not even be able to go backstage after the performance. But he did get backstage by following a crush of well-wishers. There before him was Dietrich. Taller than the others crowded around her, he addressed Dietrich in the booming voice of youth in his native German. This caught her attention and after an ensuing conversation of sorts, consisting of shouts over the room's din, he secured an invitation to the opening night party.
The whole story of this encounter is recorded in Kobal's delightful collection of interviews with Hollywood's royalty, People Will Talk That evening with Dietrich and the day that followed foretold what would become a lifetime of making friends with many of the celebrated giants of the screen, especially the ladies whom he held in utter fascination and who became just as fascinated by him. Dietrich was the subject of his second book, Marlene Dietrich, published in Greta Garbo was his first subject, although the actress, retired since , was one of the few Hollywood greats who never consented to a Kobal interview.
Like all fans, Kobal loved the movies, but in the period before video and DVD there were few opportunities to see old films. He shared with fans from the decades before he was born an insatiable desire to learn as much as he could about his favorites and consumed every tidbit offered in fan magazines and any other promotional material he could find.
When Kobal moved to New York in , and later Los Angeles, he was overwhelmed by the fact that television showed movies throughout the day and night, albeit often butchered to slip a two hour movie in a ninety minute slot including commercials. Here Kobal was introduced to more of the great faces of the past, many long dead, retired or now decades past their prime. Meeting the stars whose faces flickered on late night television became his holy grail.
Unabashed by his thralldom to the stars, he was sometime caught short when a legend did not meet his expectations. Meeting Ann Sheridan for the first time when she agreed to an interview, he expected Hollywood's original Oomph Girl of the s, not an unadorned woman with gray strands filtering through her hair.
Still, they became friends, and in the course of one of their conversations she told him that oomph "was just a publicity stunt with me. The last time they met, shortly before she left for Los Angeles to film a television series that was halted by her untimely death, was in a New York restaurant. Sheridan was resplendent, the movie star of Kobal's imagination. Kobal wrote of his chance encounter with Paramount star Nancy Carroll in People Will Talk and acknowledged the importance of good luck.
Pat's Cathedral, thinking of going in, when she walked past with the rush-hour mob. I'd recognize you anywhere. I've got hundreds of portraits of you and I adore you. Carroll's daughter, Patricia Kirkland, who acted occasionally on television, at the time of the interview, was working at a talent agency that handled Tallulah Bankhead. For instance, if I hadn't agreed to do an interview with nightclub comics Martin and Rossi to put Hy Smith in the mood to let me go through the drawer of yet one more filing cabinet outside his office, which is the one that contained the pictures of Nancy Carroll that turned me on to photography because I found myself fascinated by a woman I'd not yet even seen in a film, and if I hadn't met her, would I have ever gotten to meet Tallulah Bankhead?
And it was Tallulah who unlocked Hollywood for me. He acquired single prints, small collections and when the opportunity arose a star's or photographer's archives. These images were after all an important currency of Hollywood. A successful portrait session could introduce a new face to moviegoers and pave the path to stardom. The careers of legendary figures such as Crawford, Gable and Cooper, Kobal suggested "were made possible through photography and would probably not have existed without". For these veteran performers and other stars, portraits remained an essential link to the ticket buying public who anxiously awaited new pictures each month.
Studios distributed these images by the hundreds of thousands mostly through the mail to fans, and a selection of exclusive portraits was sent to movie magazines and newspapers to feed a gluttonous appetite for the latest shot. Long before the paparazzi snaps, which replaced the portrait in the s as the fan's favorite vehicle of connection to stars, studio-controlled publicity photos chronicled the lives of stars on screen and off. Although these might seem artificial in contrast to the lively intrusion of the rapid fire triggers of today's digital cameras, they recorded an era when fans looked up to the stars as templates of manners and fashion.
All Hollywood photography fell under the domain of the studio's publicity departments and every photograph taken served, in one way or another, the promotion of a film or star and, by association, the studio's brand. As Gloria Swanson told Kobal in , "Audiences make stars, either they like you or they don't.
In , if we can believe industry reports, fans sent stars something in the range of 32,, fan letters, the majority requesting a photograph. Even if this number is widely exaggerated and it might not be an astonishing number of letters were received by the studios and a huge quantity of photographs was sent in reply. Shirley Vance Martin one of Hollywood's earliest still photographers wrote in that an actress "knowing the value to herself of still pictures frequently plac[ed] single orders of 50, and , prints from one negative, all to be sent to admirers.
Kobal may not have consciously selected MGM as his area of greatest interest, but the combination of availability of images and the coincidence of his relationships with George Hurrell and especially Clarence Sinclair Bull gave him an unprecedented access to MGM material. This resulted in Kobal acquiring a practically encyclopedic collection of portraits of MGM stars and featured players. There might also have been something different about MGM photographs, as longtime studio photographer Bud Graybill suggests, "One thing about MGM, though, was that the idea behind the stars was to make them more glamorous, more remote, not so accessible.
In a typical Kobal turn of phrase he noted, "Glamour had been sparks thrown off by the giants in their play, and it was those electrical flashes that made them fascinating. I let myself go before the camera. I mean, you can't photograph a dead cat. You have to offer something. Kobal would have us understand that whatever it was that made Garbo Hollywood's greatest film star was also working at full throttle in the portrait studio. Katharine Hepburn put it succinctly, "If you are in the business of being photographed, you must like to have your picture taken, otherwise you shouldn't be doing it.
It's part of your job. By the s a majority of the photographers who had worked in the twenties and thirties, like their subjects, were retired and a few had died. What made Kobal's task even more complicated was the issue of photographer's credit that surrounded studio photography. While many portraits were embossed or stamped with the photographer's name, scene-stills were almost never credited. Slowly, and later frantically, Kobal set about attempting to discover just who had taken what picture. Kobal did not meet everyone who shot portraits and stills in Hollywood but he was the first who tried to make sense of their important contribution to movie-land history.
Each would share his memories and print from his negatives. In return Kobal started what became his most important work -- publishing the anthologies of the photographers' work that resuscitated forgotten careers. Along with taking the star portraits, studio photographers recorded every aspect of a film's production and followed the players off screen as well as on. Stills were also a principle marketing tool for the studios and usually served as the basis for lobby cards and posters. Stills are often the images we conjure up when we remember our favorite moments from Gone with the Wind or Casablanca.
Katharine Hepburn is an example of one actress who respected the stills' photographers and helped whenever she could. Otherwise the poor man on the set, they'd be telling him, 'Oh, for God's sake, you don't want a still of that! We can't wait for a still. His most important work, The Art of the Great Hollywood Portrait Photographers , was the first serious systematic study of the genre and had the added bonus of being both magnificently illustrated and sumptuously produced. In that book he charted the terrain of Hollywood glamour and provided glimpses of the mostly ladies who sat before the cameras and the workings of the mostly men who created the illusions.
In total Kobal authored, co-authored or edited thirty-three books, many illustrated from his own holdings. When he acquired a large collection of original negatives taken by Nelson Evans, they formed the basis for his book Hollywood: The Years of Innocence His friendship with Clarence Sinclair Bull, along with the treasure trove of Bull's prints and negatives he had collected, formed the foundation of the book and exhibition The Man Who Shot Garbo Collaborating with others, Kobal turned to the best film writers and critics such as Kevin Brownlow Hollywood: Sixty Glorious Years , In particular, Kobal's book on Hayworth is an especially insightful and sensitive addition to the large corpus of star biographies that proliferate.
His ebullient personality - almost everyone liked him - allowed Kobal to become the impresario of the history of Hollywood photography. In addition to writing books, he served as general editor of and contributor to an excellent pictorial history of stars Cooper , Bergman , Gable , Crawford, engaging writers such as Richard Schickel and James Card to write essays for individual volumes. Along with writing, Kobal curated exhibitions of Hollywood photographs and built one of the pre-eminent portrait and film-still libraries that continues today as the Kobal Collection.
Kobal was the first to organize museum shows devoted to Hollywood portraiture. His inaugural effort was at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in , a show he described as "the first exhibition of the Hollywood group. It is apt that Bull's career should be the first thus to be explored because no photographer shot as many famous Hollywood faces.
She called Bull, "one of the greats" and ended her comments with: And the National Portrait Gallery! There is no question that it was the golden age of Hollywood portraiture. The year Bull retired, , a new sort of photography was beginning to creep into the mainstream of studio film promotion and the Hollywood press.
The candid would soon replace the portrait as the type of image fans most wanted to see. Magazines started publishing snaps of Elizabeth Taylor between planes and yachts, and Greta Garbo as seen beneath a floppy hat through a telephoto lens. Kobal recognized this shift in attitude toward Hollywood photography and largely limited his collecting to work created before He identified the years as the scope of his book The Art of the Great Hollywood Photographers and argued that it is from those years that the greatest innovations took place.
The paparazzi held no allure in the Hollywood fantasy so perfectly described by Kobal. The Hollywood Studio Photographers The cinema's glamour machine that takes waitresses, debutantes, actresses, school-girls and their masculine parallels and by adroit veneering makes of them the dream children of the silver screen is a complex lot of wheels and cams.
One small unit is hidden away on every lot. Its product thunders from newspaper and magazine pages, from billboards and theatre lobbies. Its prime purpose is to make the customer go to the ticket window and lay down money. It must give the appearance of genius to very ordinary people. It must conceal physical defects and give the illusion of beauty and personality should none exist. It must restore youth where age has made its rounds. It must give warmth to neutral or rigid features.
It is, in short, the still department. Managing to survive the commotion of the consolidation of the Hollywood studios in the early and mid s, Bull found himself at the helm of MGM's stills department when the studio was formed in and stayed there until retiring in The enormity of MGM's output of films in the s -- they advertised a new feature every week -- saw Bull's domain grow. He was responsible for managing MGM's staff of photographers and the large support crew of technicians needed to develop, re-touch print and collate the hundreds of thousands of prints distributed annually by MGM's publicity department.
At least one photograph from the s shows Bull with nine stillsmen who juggled the task of shooting photos on as many as a dozen films that might be concurrently in production. At MGM, like the other studios, these men, and it was almost an exclusively male profession, worked six days a week and often long hours each day. Generally one photographer was assigned to a production and as filming was underway, he would document each scene using an 8 X 10 view camera. These cameras not only had lenses with sharp resolution, but contact prints could be made from the negatives quickly and in enormous quantities.
The stills made for each film were numbered sequentially and gathered together in a book. Still photographers also created the images used for poster art, lobby cards and other forms of advertising conceived by imaginative publicity chiefs and their staffs. John Kobal developed a close relationship with Bull and his wife Jeanne, and one result of the time they spent together is that we know more about Bull's life and career than practically any other Hollywood photographer.
Kobal not only collected Bull's photographs and negatives and quizzed him endlessly about studio life, but he also inherited Bull's scrapbooks and albums of photographs including work that had nothing to do with Hollywood. Bull took portraits throughout the s although administrative duties curtailed but did not eliminate his availability for time-consuming gallery sessions, especially after Ruth Harriet Louise was hired in as MGM's portrait photographer.
This was not a demotion for Bull, as Louise reported directly to Pete Smith, the head of publicity, and Bull's duties remained unchanged. Still, Louise and Bull seem not to have gotten along and he never mentioned her in interviews or his writings after she left MGM in late Louise's work, however, did influence Bull, who started to emulate her soft-focused pictorialism in Perhaps challenged by Louise's talent and craft, by the end of the s Bull had matured as a photographer. Though sometimes outshone by Louise in the late s and later by his colleague Hurrell in the early s , at his best Bull was equal to both.
Greta Garbo
Bud Graybill, who shot stills under Bull's supervision for over twenty years starting in the mid s described him in a letter to Kobal dated January 29, as "the quintessence of photographers. Chances are if you have seen a portrait of Greta Garbo other than Edward Steichen's iconic image, it is the work of Bull. With the exception of one session, Bull and the reclusive actress worked together exclusively in the portrait studio from to and their collaboration resulted in a body of imagery unmatched in Hollywood photography.
Reminiscing with Kobal, Bull spoke of Garbo's extraordinary concentration and described her working methods as "businesslike. Garbo was one of Kobal's favorites and he took care to understand her sittings with Bull and the way Bull carefully shaped her image through the years.
Kobal worked with Bull to produce a limited edition portfolio of five Garbo photographs printed under Bull's supervision from his original negatives. Bull died in , just as the first portfolios were being prepared.
Columbia Pictures
It seems that every star who worked at MGM was photographed by Bull at least once. Bull and Cooper had a short session together on April 17, and the results were splendid. He infused Cooper with a sleek, polished glamour that was as unusual for male subjects as was the cigarette dangling from his lips. Bull started experimenting with color photography in the late s making a color exposure of Garbo first in and again in In the late s and throughout the s he worked extensively in color recording, among others, Elizabeth Taylor at the moment she was being considered for adult roles.
Bull presided over a team of talented stills' photographers some of whom occasionally made portraits, generally on the set. Longworth took the stills for Garbo's first three pictures and his images of Garbo and Gilbert in a clinch for Flesh and the Devil [K29] are the quintessence of old time movie romance. James Manatt was Marion Davies' favorite photographer and in addition to working on all her films he made the lion's share of her portraits.
Among the important MGM photographers the only one who Kobal did not meet was the studio's and Hollywood's lone female portrait artist, Ruth Harriet Louise. Louise's brief reign as portrait studio chief lasted from mid to the end of To Louise goes the credit of being the photographer who fashioned Garbo's face into the timeless visage still immediately recognizable worldwide.
Throughout the s she occasionally took private commissions photographing stars such as Anna Sten in and Myrna Loy in Louise died in childbirth in , the year Kobal was born, utterly forgotten by an industry she had worked assiduously to document. Kobal avidly collected her original prints and acquired hundreds of her negatives. Of all the photographers he introduced in The Art of the Great Hollywood Portrait Photographers Louise's career was most in need of rehabilitation.
Even her gender, which set her apart from all her contemporaries, had been insufficient reason to keep her memory alive. Louise was among the first Hollywood photographers to break away from the old fashioned convention of staid portrait shots and introduced the nuance of her sitter's personality.
When she photographed stars in costume she attempted to find something of the character being portrayed. Kobal noted that she was "in the vanguard of the photographers who would revolutionize Hollywood portrait photography". Hollywood portraiture before Louise documented strong personas: Swanson's glamour, Chaplin's tramp, Pickford's waif. Louise took the screen personas of her favorite sitters, such as Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford, and in her photographs humanized them while never letting their star luster diminish. The two young women worked together starting with Garbo's first portrait session in Hollywood, two months before she appeared on the set, through her ascent as MGM's greatest female draw.
Louise's sensitive touch along with the work of MGM's brilliant cinematographers combined to create the face that enthralled movie goers. There has been discussion in Hollywood literature as to how much Louise relied on full-length shots, which she would then crop to make half-length or close-up portraits. Kobal may have started this notion when he wrote about Louise.
Columbia's product line consisted mostly of moderately budgeted features and short subjects including comedies, sports films, various serials, and cartoons.
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Columbia gradually moved into the production of higher-budget fare, eventually joining the second tier of Hollywood studios along with United Artists and Universal. Like United Artists and Universal, Columbia was a horizontally integrated company. It controlled production and distribution; it did not own any theaters. Helping Columbia's climb was the arrival of an ambitious director, Frank Capra.
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Between and , Capra constantly pushed Cohn for better material and bigger budgets. A string of hits he directed in the early and mid s solidified Columbia's status as a major studio. Until then, Columbia's very existence had depended on theater owners willing to take its films, since as mentioned above it didn't have a theater network of its own. Other Capra-directed hits followed, including the original version of Lost Horizon , with Ronald Colman , and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington , which made James Stewart a major star.
In , the addition of B. Kahane would later become the President of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in , until his death a year later. Columbia could not afford to keep a huge roster of contract stars, so Cohn usually borrowed them from other studios.
Film History of the s
Mayer would use the loan out to Columbia as a way to punish his less-obedient signings. Ann Sothern 's career was launched when Columbia signed her to a contract in Cary Grant signed a contract in and soon after it was altered to a non-exclusive contract shared with RKO. Many theaters relied on westerns to attract big weekend audiences, and Columbia always recognized this market. Its first cowboy star was Buck Jones , who signed with Columbia in for a fraction of his former big-studio salary. Columbia's most popular cowboy was Charles Starrett , who signed with Columbia in and starred in western features over 17 years.
Almost of Columbia's two-reel comedies were released to television between and ; to date, all of the Stooges, Keaton, Charley Chase , Shemp Howard , Joe Besser , and Joe DeRita subjects have been released to home video. Beginning in , Columbia entered the lucrative serial market, and kept making these episodic adventures until , after other studios had discontinued them. The most famous Columbia serials are based on comic-strip or radio characters: Columbia also produced musical shorts, sports reels usually narrated by sportscaster Bill Stern , and travelogues.
Its " Screen Snapshots " series, showing behind-the-scenes footage of Hollywood stars, was a Columbia perennial; producer-director Ralph Staub kept this series going through In the s, propelled in part by their film's surge in audiences during the war, the studio also benefited from the popularity of its biggest star, Rita Hayworth.
Columbia maintained a long list of contractees well into the s: Harry Cohn monitored the budgets of his films, and the studio got the maximum use out of costly sets, costumes, and props by reusing them in other films. Many of Columbia's low-budget "B" pictures and short subjects have an expensive look, thanks to Columbia's efficient recycling policy. Cohn was reluctant to spend lavish sums on even his most important pictures, and it was not until that he agreed to use three-strip Technicolor in a live-action feature. Columbia was the last major studio to employ the expensive color process.
Another biopic, 's The Jolson Story with Larry Parks and Evelyn Keyes , was started in black-and-white, but when Cohn saw how well the project was proceeding, he scrapped the footage and insisted on filming in Technicolor. In , the United States v. Since Columbia did not own any theaters, it was now on equal terms with the largest studios, and soon replaced RKO on the list of the "Big Five" studios. In , Columbia dropped the Screen Gems brand from its cartoon line, but retained the Screen Gems name for various ancillary activities, including a 16 mm film-rental agency and a TV-commercial production company.
On November 8, , Columbia adopted the Screen Gems name for its television production subsidiary when the studio acquired Pioneer Telefilms, a television commercial company founded by Harry Cohn's nephew, Ralph Cohn. On July 1, , studio veteran Irving Briskin stepped down as stage manager of Columbia Pictures and form his production company Briskin Productions, Inc. In , the studio became a publicly traded company under the name Screen Gems, Inc. Only Jungle Jim , launched by producer Sam Katzman in , kept going through Katzman contributed greatly to Columbia's success by producing dozens of topical feature films, including crime dramas, science-fiction stories, and rock-'n'-roll musicals.
Columbia kept making serials until and two-reel comedies until , after other studios had abandoned them. As the larger studios declined in the s, Columbia's position improved. This was largely because it did not suffer from the massive loss of income that the other major studios suffered from the loss of their theaters well over 90 percent, in some cases.
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Columbia continued to produce plus pictures a year, offering productions that often broke ground and kept audiences coming to theaters such as its adaptation of the controversial James Jones novel, From Here to Eternity , On the Waterfront , the free adaptation of George Orwell's Dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four , and The Bridge on the River Kwai with William Holden and Alec Guinness.
All three films won the Best Picture Oscar. Broccoli as well as many films by producer Carl Foreman who resided in England. Columbia also distributed some films made by Hammer. Colpix was active until when Columbia entered into a joint agreement with RCA Victor and discontinued Colpix in favor of its new label, Colgems Records. Shortly after closing their short subjects department, Columbia president Harry Cohn died of a heart attack in February By the late s, Columbia had an ambiguous identity, offering old-fashioned fare like A Man for All Seasons and Oliver!
After turning down releasing Albert R. Feldman , which held the adaptation rights for that novel. By , the studio was suffering from box-office failures, and takeover rumors began surfacing. Columbia was surviving solely on the profits made from Screen Gems, whose holdings also included radio and television stations. Nearly bankrupt by the early s, the studio was saved via a radical overhaul: In , Columbia and Warner Bros. While fiscal health was restored through a careful choice of star-driven vehicles, [ citation needed ] the studio's image was badly hurt by the David Begelman check-forging scandal.
Begelman eventually resigned later ending up at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer before committing suicide in , and the studio's fortunes gradually recovered. From until the end of , Columbia's international distribution operations were a joint venture with Warner Bros. Warners pulled out of the venture in to join up with Walt Disney Pictures. The name was suggested by David Gerber , who was then-president of Columbia's television division. Columbia Pictures also reorganized its music and record divisions. Strike was an immediate success, and Eisenstein was next commissioned to direct a film celebrating the 20th anniversary of the failed Revolution against tsarism.
Originally intended to provide a panorama of the entire event, the project eventually came to focus on a single representative episode—the mutiny of the battleship Potemkin and the massacre of the citizens of the port of Odessa by tsarist troops. Although agitational to the core, Battleship Potemkin is a work of extraordinary pictorial beauty and great elegance of form.
It is symmetrically broken into five movements or acts, according to the structure of Greek tragedy. Eisenstein believed that meaning in motion pictures is generated by the collision of opposing shots. With the addition of a stirring revolutionary score by the German Marxist composer Edmund Meisel, the agitational appeal of Battleship Potemkin became nearly irresistible, and, when exported in early , it made Eisenstein world-famous.
When the film was completed in November , it was just under four hours long. While Eisenstein was making October , however, Joseph Stalin had taken control of the Politburo from Leon Trotsky , and the director was forced to cut the print by one-third to eliminate references to the exiled Trotsky. Like Eisenstein, Pudovkin developed a new theory of montage, but one based on cognitive linkage rather than dialectical collision. The film was internationally acclaimed for the innovative intensity of its montage, as well as for its emotion and lyricism. Both mingle human drama with the epic and the symbolic as they tell a story of a politically naive person who is galvanized into action by tsarist tyranny.
Although Pudovkin was never persecuted as severely by the Stalinists as Eisenstein, he too was publicly charged with formalism for his experimental sound film Prostoi sluchai A Simple Case , , which he was forced to release without its sound track. Pudovkin made several more sound films but remains best known for his silent work. Dovzhenko, the son of Ukrainian peasants, had been a political cartoonist and painter before becoming a director at the state-controlled Odessa studios in After several minor works, he made Zvenigora , a collection of boldly stylized tales about a hunt for an ancient Scythian treasure set during four different stages of Ukrainian history; Arsenal , an epic film poem about the effects of revolution and civil war upon the Ukraine; and Zemlya Earth , , which is considered to be his masterpiece.
Earth tells the story of the conflict between a family of wealthy landowning peasants kulaks and the young peasants of a collective farm in a small Ukrainian village, but the film is less a narrative than a lyric hymn to the cyclic recurrence of birth, life, love, and death in nature and in humankind. Although the film is acclaimed today, when it was released, Stalinist critics denounced it as counterrevolutionary.
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Soon after, Dovzhenko entered a period of political eclipse, during which, however, he continued to make films. Although he did make the feature film Kolybelnaya Lullaby in , for the most part the Stalinist establishment reduced him to the status of a newsreel photographer after The period came to an abrupt end in , when Stalin removed the state film trust then called Sovkino from the jurisdiction of the Commissariat of Education and placed it under the direct authority of the Supreme Council of the National Economy. Reorganized as Soyuzkino, the trust was turned over to the reactionary bureaucrat Boris Shumyatsky, a proponent of the narrowly ideological doctrine known as Socialist Realism.
This policy, which came to dominate the Soviet arts, dictated that individual creativity be subordinated to the political aims of the party and the state. The restraints imposed made it impossible for the great filmmakers of the postrevolutionary era to produce creative or innovative work, and the Soviet cinema went into decline. During the s in the United States , motion-picture production, distribution, and exhibition became a major national industry and movies perhaps the major national obsession. The salaries of stars reached monumental proportions; filmmaking practices and narrative formulas were standardized to accommodate mass production; and Wall Street began to invest heavily in every branch of the business.
The growing industry was organized according to the studio system that, in many respects, the producer Thomas Harper Ince had developed between and at Inceville, his studio in the Santa Ynez Canyon near Hollywood. Ince functioned as the central authority over multiple production units, each headed by a director who was required to shoot an assigned film according to a detailed continuity script. Every project was carefully budgeted and tightly scheduled, and Ince himself supervised the final cut.
This central producer system was the prototype for the studio system of the s, and, with some modification, it prevailed as the dominant mode of Hollywood production for the next 40 years. Virtually all the major film genres evolved and were codified during the s, but none was more characteristic of the period than the slapstick comedy.
When these performers achieved fame, many of them left Keystone, often to form their own production companies, a practice still possible in the early s. In he was offered an eight-film contract with First National that enabled him to establish his own studio. He directed his first feature there, the semiautobiographical The Kid , but most of his First National films were two-reelers.
In Chaplin, D. Griffith, Mary Pickford , and Douglas Fairbanks , the four most popular and powerful film artists of the time, jointly formed the United Artists Corporation in order to produce and distribute—and thereby retain artistic and financial control over—their own films. Chaplin directed three silent features for United Artists: A Woman of Paris , his great comic epic The Gold Rush , and The Circus , which was released after the introduction of sound into motion pictures. He later made several sound films, but the two most successful—his first two, City Lights and Modern Times —were essentially silent films with musical scores.
Keaton, like Chaplin, was born into a theatrical family and began performing in vaudeville skits at a young age. Working at the Hal Roach Studios, Lloyd cultivated the persona of an earnest, sweet-tempered boy-next-door. Laurel and Hardy also worked for Roach. They made 27 silent two-reelers, including Putting Pants on Philip and Liberty , and became even more popular in the s in such sound films as Another Fine Mess and Sons of the Desert Their comic characters were basically grown-up children whose relationship was sometimes disturbingly sadomasochistic.
Langdon also traded on a childlike, even babylike, image in such popular features as The Strong Man and Long Pants , both directed by Frank Capra. Arbuckle , however, in his few years of stardom, created the character of a leering, sensual adult. Arbuckle was at the centre of the most damaging scandal to affect American motion pictures during the silent era. In September the comedian and several friends hosted a weekend party in a San Francisco hotel.
During the party a woman became ill, and she later died in a hospital of peritonitis. Press reports of the event as a drunken orgy inflamed public opinion. Amid the volatile social transformations of the post-World War I era, with issues such as immigration restriction and the national prohibition of alcoholic beverages deeply dividing the country, many had come to regard motion pictures as a disturbing instigator of social change and its high-living stars as threats to moral order and values.
The Arbuckle scandal seemed to encapsulate these fears, and prosecutors responded by accusing the actor of rape and murder. Eventually indicted for manslaughter, he was tried three times; the first two trials ended in hung juries, and in the third the jury deliberated for six minutes and voted for acquittal. Other sensational deaths involving Hollywood personalities, through murder or suicide or drug overdose, fueled the public furor.
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To stave off increasing efforts by state and local governments to censor motion pictures, the Hollywood studios formed a new, stronger trade association, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America MPPDA; later renamed the Motion Picture Association of America. They also hired a conservative politician, U. Postmaster General Will H.
Hays , as its head. The Hays Office, as the association became popularly known, advocated industry self-regulation as an alternative to governmental interference, and it succeeded in preventing the expansion of censorship efforts. Hays promulgated a series of documents that attempted to regulate various forms of criminal and immoral behaviour depicted in motion pictures. The leading practitioner of the compensating values formula was the flamboyant director Cecil B. When the Hays Office was established, DeMille turned to the sex- and violence-drenched religious spectacles that made him an international figure, notably The Ten Commandments ; remade Also popular during the s were the swashbuckling exploits of Douglas Fairbanks , whose lavish adventure spectacles, including Robin Hood and The Thief of Bagdad , thrilled a generation, and the narrative documentaries of Robert Flaherty , whose Nanook of the North and Moana were unexpectedly successful with the public and with critics.
Stroheim, who also acted, learned directing as an assistant to Griffith on Intolerance and Hearts of the World. Even though all three films were enormously popular, the great sums Stroheim was spending on the extravagant production design and costuming of his next project brought him into conflict with his Universal producers, and he was replaced. Shot entirely on location in the streets and rooming houses of San Francisco, in Death Valley, and in the California hills, the film was conceived as a sentence-by-sentence translation of its source. Realizing that the film was too long to be exhibited, he cut almost half the footage.
The film was still deemed too long, so Stroheim, with the help of director Rex Ingram, edited it down into a four-hour version that could be shown in two parts. Mayer Pictures to become MGM. MGM took the negative from Stroheim and cut another two hours, destroying the excised footage in the process. Released as Greed , the film had enormous gaps in continuity, but it was still recognized as a work of genius in its rich psychological characterization and in its creation of a naturalistic analogue for the novel.
He then went to Celebrity Pictures, where he directed The Wedding March , a two-part spectacle set in imperial Vienna, but his work was taken from him and recut into a single film when Celebrity was absorbed by Paramount. He made his living thereafter by writing screenplays and acting. His situation was not unique; many singular artists, including Griffith, Sennett, Chaplin, and Keaton, found it difficult to survive as filmmakers under the rigidly standardized studio system that had been established by the end of the decade.
The studios, which had borrowed huge sums of money on the very brink of the Great Depression in order to finance the conversion, were determined to reduce production costs and increase efficiency. They therefore became less and less willing to tolerate artistic innovation or eccentricity. We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles. You can make it easier for us to review and, hopefully, publish your contribution by keeping a few points in mind. Your contribution may be further edited by our staff, and its publication is subject to our final approval.
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Griffith There has been a tendency in modern film scholarship to view the narrative form of motion pictures as a development of an overall production system. Page 2 of 5. Learn More in these related Britannica articles: Although the technology for sound on film had been around for several years, it was not until The Jazz Singer that the public accepted this new medium. This memorable event took place at the San Francisco Art Association in Movie stars such as Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, and especially Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Marlene Dietrich raised the image of the cigarette to that of the iconic, ensuring it would never lose its sophisticated and loftily independent connotations.
Motion Picture Association of America MPAA , in the United States, organization of the major motion-picture studios that rates films for suitability to various kinds of audiences, aids the studios in international distribution, advises them on taxation, and carries on a nationwide public relations….