Although the United States has dominated commercial film production for much of the twentieth century, movies did not originate in America. Enterprising Europeans, such as the Lumière brothers in Paris, were already projecting motion pictures to paying audiences in 1895. The first important successful public exhibition in the United States of motion pictures was shown on April 23, 1896. Then, at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York City, Thomas Edison demonstrated the Vitascope. Although Edison later included movies on his list of inventions, his Vitascope merely refined the work of others.
Various other Americans contributed significantly to early cinema. Henry Heyl's Pharmatrope (first used in 1870) rapidly projected a series of photographs, giving the illusion of motion. Eadweard Muybridge's Zoopraxis (perfected in the 1870s) used a disc with serial pictures rotating in front of a light source to produce moving images. In the 1890s, W. K. L. Dickson, an associate of Edison, benefited from George Eastman's development of celluloid roll film during the 1880s and perfected the Kinetograph--a camera used to make fifteen-to-thirty-second movies--and the Kinetoscope--a peep-show device for individual viewing of such movies.
Kinetoscope "parlors" flourished briefly during the early 1890s, so much so that the country's first film studio (designed by Dickson) was built in 1893 at Edison's laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey. This studio turned out short films featuring dances, wrestling matches, and glimpses of popular personalities. The entrepreneurial Edison, realizing that one-viewer machines limited commercial possibilities, bought the rights to various projector systems including Thomas J. Armat's Phantoscope (perfected in 1895), which employed the first practicable intermittent-motion mechanism (necessary for projection) and served as the basis for the Vitascope.
It faced strong competition almost immediately. Within weeks the Lumière system debuted in New York, followed in October 1896 by the superior American Biograph system. Other firms quickly entered the field. All sold their movies cheaply to exhibitors; profits came from the sale of equipment. "Flickers" found a home in amusement arcades and vaudeville houses (which used them as "chasers" to turn over audiences). The American film industry grew rapidly despite excessive litigation over patent rights. In 1908, after a decade of court proceedings proved inconclusive, the exhausted litigants formed the Motion Picture Patents Company. The Edison and Biograph companies dominated the "Trust" (as it was called), which controlled all the important patents and through them aimed to control the industry.
The early films, a minute or so in length, were scenic views, glimpses of personalities, bits of daily life, one-gag jokes, and news items (often reenactments). Over time, story films were developed. Usually one reel (ten minutes, the length of a vaudeville turn), they were mostly chase melodramas and comedies. The most influential early film artist was Edwin S. Porter. In 1903 his Life of an American Fireman used crude but innovative editing to create a coherent narrative complete in itself; in The Great Train Robbery he used overlapping and parallel action to build to an exciting climax.
As story films proliferated and began to dominate production, purchase gave way to rental. "Exchanges"--middlemen who bought prints from companies and rented to exhibitors--made possible programs of greater variety. Over 150 exchanges operated across the country in 1908, servicing "nickelodeons." The first of these primitive theaters, whose name derived from the five-cent admission charge, opened in Pittsburgh in 1905. Three years later over eight thousand were in operation. Immediately and immensely profitable, the nickelodeons attracted over 25 million viewers a week, mostly working-class people for whom movies presented no linguistic, cultural, or social barriers.
The Trust's attempts at monopoly control foundered despite its vigorous use of the courts, questionable business practices, and strong-arm tactics. Its power had been broken well before 1915 when the Trust was found guilty of illegal practices in restraint of trade. The successful fight against Trust domination had important side effects. The anonymity of popular film performers ended. When in 1910 Florence Lawrence (known till then only as "the Biograph Girl") defected to an independent producer, he got her sensational publicity. She became the first star known to the public by name but almost immediately was joined by others as the box-office value of celebrity became obvious. Where movies were made changed, too. Southern California offered the independents more reliable sunshine as well as distance from the Trust's enforcers in the East. Hollywood, a rural suburb of Los Angeles, became a film production center.
Both the Trust's and its opponents' courting of the middle class, which could afford more than a nickel, sealed the fate of the nickelodeons. They gave way to more respectable, family-oriented theaters. This helped broaden film fare, as did the energy and vision of the independents, who in their fight for survival imported and made longer, more ambitious films. The Trust did likewise, and soon one- and two-reelers became program fillers.
During the patent wars American movies took significant creative strides. D. W. Griffith directed his first film for Biograph in 1908 and went on to direct hundreds of short films, revolutionizing filmmaking with his innovative use of narrative technique. His 1915 masterpiece Birth of a Nation established the feature film as a popular art form for all classes. Mack Sennett perfected his brand of zany slapstick comedy, developing a generation of screen clowns including Charlie Chaplin who made his film debut in 1914. Among other popular performers were Mary Pickford, who as "America's sweetheart" became world famous, and William S. Hart, who for years dominated that most typical of American genres, the western.
Between 1916 and 1926 the American film industry came into the hands of a few powerful companies, which controlled production, distribution, and exhibition. Their corporate headquarters were in New York City, but filmmaking took place mainly in Hollywood, which, thanks to the ravages suffered by the European film industry during World War I, had become the globe's undisputed movie capital. A constant supply of films was produced on an assembly-line basis for the companies' theaters. Permanent acting companies headed by a few stars appeared in these films, which were produced by an elaborately segmented labor force of creative and technical personnel. The ensuing economy of scale allowed the companies to buy up foreign talent that threatened their domination. Business refinements included the introduction of "block-booking," a practice instituted by Adolph Zukor of Paramount, which meant that unaffiliated exhibitors had to book a studio's inferior films in order to get the more desirable ones.
American films prior to World War I had often been preachy and sentimental, and set in a working-class milieu. Those made in the 1920s reflected changing social and moral standards. Some genres changed little. Comedy retained its traditional appeal of zaniness leavened with humanity, and westerns continued to emphasize archetypal themes. But the Pollyannish Victorian heroine found in earlier movies gave way to the "jazz baby." Cynicism and sensuality among the upper classes characterized many of the 1920s features, and democratic optimism gave way to rampant materialism. Among the new heroes were sexually aggressive "Latin lovers" such as those portrayed by Rudolph Valentino and his imitators. Among the new genres were gangster films that nihilistically glorified criminals. The new themes did not go unchallenged. In 1922 the increasing pressure for censorship and widely publicized scandals involving notable performers in rape, murder, and narcotics addiction led the industry to adopt a self-regulatory code of dos and don'ts, although it soon paid them little heed.
For all the industry's technical perfection and its production of some remarkable films, by 1927 box-office returns were not keeping pace with increasing costs, especially the continuing investment in "picture palaces," the splendidly appointed huge theaters that often seated thousands. "Talkies" helped delay the day of reckoning. Various attempts to combine pictures and sound had been made since the 1880s, but the problems of synchronization and amplification and the cost of converting theaters and studios were daunting. In 1926 financially hard-pressed Warner Brothers, owning fewer theaters requiring expensive conversion than the other companies, decided to gamble on a sound-on-disc system. It presented several programs of shorts as well as a feature with sound effects and recorded music. The studio on October 6, 1927, premiered The Jazz Singer (with songs and some dialogue) and in July 1928 the first all-talking feature. The public clamored for more, but the Warner system was cumbersome and unreliable. It was quickly superseded by sound-on-film, a system developed by Lee De Forest and first utilized in Hollywood by William Fox in newsreels. (De Forest earlier in the 1920s had tried to interest the industry in his system but failed because of the companies' unwillingness to invest in equipment.) In 1928 only thirteen hundred of the nation's twenty thousand movie houses were wired for sound; by the end of 1930 almost half were. Sound helped the industry weather the 1929 Wall Street crash (the 57 million weekly admissions of 1927 had nearly doubled by 1930).
But sound also brought problems: production costs rose, foreign markets declined (until dubbing reopened them), many careers ended, and creativity stalled (until new sound techniques unfroze the camera). The industry's need for capital to take advantage of sound resulted in heavy outside investment and establishment of a studio hierarchy that lasted for a generation. It consisted of the five "majors"--Fox (later 20th Century-Fox), mgm (part of the Loew's empire), Paramount, rko, and Warner Brothers--and the "little three"--Columbia and Universal, specializing in low-budget productions, and United Artists, a distributor for independent producers.
After 1931, as talkie enthusiasm waned, the industry felt the depression's impact. Ticket sales plummeted, theaters went dark, admission prices were slashed, and earnings declined; much of the industry faced receivership and bankruptcy. In 1934, at the behest of the Roman Catholic church's Legion of Decency, a much stricter Production Code went into effect: as administered, self-regulation governed not only morality but choice of subjects.
Hollywood, however, had fully recovered economically by the late 1930s and entered on an artistic golden age, producing annually over four hundred features for a broad-based audience of about 80 million people a week. Thriving studios with expansive rosters of players, directors, and supremely competent technicians developed distinct "house styles" that lasted for years (e.g., glossy mgm productions) and specialized in specific genres (e.g., Universal's horror films). Among the 1930s' most notable attractions were the child star Shirley Temple and the 1939 film Gone with the Wind, a spectacular epic that for decades remained the highest-grossing film. Creative and technical personnel overcame bitter industry opposition and unionized the studios.
The strong domestic market profitably sustained Hollywood during World War II when overseas markets closed down. With U.S. entry into the war Hollywood enlisted for the duration, coupling its traditional escapist fare with crude, mawkish propaganda (about 25 percent of the total feature output, 1942-1945). Wartime shortages and government restrictions resulted in fewer films being made, but profits rose as an entertainment-starved populace flocked to the movies (almost 90 million weekly). The industry reached its all-time peak of profitability in 1946.
During the next fifteen years the movies were displaced as the quintessential American mass medium. Immediately after the war the studios supplemented their usual product with more mature films dealing with controversial subjects such as prejudice. Audience response was positive, but the cold war climate resulted in a retreat from serious themes and a purge of "progressive" creative people that was institutionalized by a wide-ranging blacklist that slackened only in the late 1960s. Concurrently the movies were trying unsuccessfully to compete with television and were hampered by legally enforced changes in distribution. Federal antitrust actions resulted in court decisions ending such industry practices as block-booking and requiring that production companies divest themselves of their theaters.
With no guaranteed outlet for films, the studios limited production, making fewer films for an audience that steadily eroded as the public turned to television. The industry made some attempt to improve the content of its films. It emphasized aspects that television initially could not offer, spending freely on color, spectacles, wide-screen systems (Cinemascope debuted in 1953 with 20th Century-Fox's biblical epic The Robe), and short-lived novelties such as 3-D, "Smell-O-Rama," and Sensursound. But nothing worked for long. By 1968 the industry was producing fewer than 175 features annually for a weekly audience that had fallen below 20 million. And the increasing cost of production had led to much filming overseas, further diminishing Hollywood as a movie production center.
As the century drew to a close the American film industry went global. The studios, bought up by conglomerates during the merger fever of the 1960s and 1970s, became part of international multimedia giants: the Australian press lord Rupert Murdoch gained control in 1985 of 20th Century-Fox, and Japanese companies bought Columbia (1989) and Universal (1990). From the early 1960s onward "packagers" (especially a few important agents) increasingly assumed the production function as they put together "bankable" stars, important directors, and properties. The studios concentrated on financing, distribution, and making the property brought to them.
The replacement of the Production Code in the mid-1960s by an industry-regulated rating system (last revised in 1990) was supposed to lead to more mature treatment of serious themes, and this happened occasionally; but mainly it led to more nudity, sex, and on-screen gore. Most films were pitched at moviegoers aged sixteen to twenty-four, who had become the bulk of the audience in the heyday of the 1960s counterculture. Its demise led to rebellious-youth films being replaced by "slasher" movies, cheaply made sexual-initiation films, and big-budget juvenile fantasies (many the product of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas).
As the cost of making films soared (averaging by 1990 over $15 million each), producers played safe, rarely encouraging innovation and making frequent sequels of profitable films (Rocky was released in 1976; the fifth sequel, in 1990). A boom-or-bust pattern developed. Each year a few films grossed millions (1989's top-drawing Batman grossed over $200 million), and the rest depended for profit on ancillaries--foreign markets, sales to television, videocassette distribution, and spin-offs like T-shirts. By 1990 the gross from videocassettes nearly doubled that of ticket sales. As the possibility of profit increased, so too did the number of films made in the United States, though often outside Hollywood as state and city film commissions wooed productions for the money they would spend on location. But the movies continued to be an integral part of American culture, though one in a constant state of metamorphosis.
Bibliography:
Kevin Brownlow, The Parade's Gone By ... (1969); Garth Jowett, Film: The Democratic Art (1976); Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (1988); Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: How the Movies Changed American Life (1975).
Author:
Daniel J. Leab
See also
Astaire, Fred; Chaplin, Charlie; DeMille, Cecil B.; Disney, Walt; Edison, Thomas A.; Garbo, Greta; Griffith, D. W.; Mayer, Louis B.; Monroe, Marilyn; Sinatra, Frank; Wayne, John; Welles, Orson.
