They included Louis B. You can learn a bit more about the time period in which these movie moguls ruled in the video below. Aside from the Big Five studios, there were also three smaller studios that did not own as many of their own movie theaters.
Griffith precisely because the studios were so controlling of their work, salary, and creativity. The Hollywood studio era involved the Big Five studios controlling all aspects of their movies, with owning their own movie theaters being the most notable.
In this way, if you lived in a town with a Warner Bros. The movies made by these Big Five studios would also be stuck to the lot, which means every aspect of the filmmaking was typically done in one place. Unless you were filming establishing shots or something similar, your camera would not be leaving the Los Angeles area.
While they tried earlier, it would not be until , with the United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. This resulted in the movie studios no longer owning — either partially or fully — their movie theaters.
Not only that, but television was on the rise, so ticket sales were also falling. Despite its constraints, the studio system provided a stable context for filmmakers to work with consistency and to be expressive.
As Robin Wood notes in Howard Hawks , Hollywood is one of the few historical instances of a true communal art, "a great creative workshop, comparable to Elizabethan London or the Vienna of Mozart, where hundreds of talents have come together to evolve a common language" p. The justly famous opening scene of Rio Bravo Howard Hawks, tells us almost everything we need to know about the heroes played by John Wayne and Dean Martin — well before the first word of dialogue is spoken.
Director Hawks — uses the conventions of the western to express his sense of professionalism, heroism, and self-respect, which would not have been possible without the established conventions of the genre as his raw material. Toggle navigation. Other articles you might like:.
Also read article about Genre from Wikipedia. User Contributions:. Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic: Name:. A studio would sell multiple films to theaters as a unit. This would typically include only one attractive, A-budget movie that the theaters really wanted and the rest would be a mix of A-budget pictures of dubious quality and lower budgeted B-movies.
Because of block booking studios could make a lot of movies, most of them with a low budget and of low quality, and still be sure that they would be seen in theaters. Most film blocks contained about 20 or more features, but some theaters complained that in the most extreme cases one block had predetermined the playbill for an entire year. In some cases, one studio would even control all the theaters in a city. This ensured that their films would be distributed, no matter the quality.
So the studios had a guarantee that their movies would be distributed. They usually had the actors, producers, directors and writers under contract, owned the film processing and laboratories and created the prints.
The decline of The Studio System began in with the verdict in the antitrust case United States vs. Paramount Pictures, inc. Although several novelists—e. William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler—turned to screenwriting, scripted blocking was provided by collaborating studio screenwriters.
Directors could modify the script, but their primary responsibility was to get the best performances possible from actors while remaining on schedule and within budget. Everyone was under contract—producers, directors, actors, writers, cinematographers, art directors, technicians, etc. The stable of actors consisted of lead actors, supporting actors and central casting extras. All casting was type casting. If someone looked good to me, I'd have him tested. If a person looked good on film, if he photographed well, we could do the rest.
Robinson were idealized. Studio PR execs kept an eye out for scandals and covered them up with the cooperation of law enforcement and local press. Many things these employees created were ersatz, but they were ersatz to last. Sets, props and costumes were often used for multiple movies as were studio backlots which commonly included urban, Old West and residential street fronts. Of course, factory efficiency is pointless without consistent high demand for products.
For the dream factories, demand came from extensive distribution chains that included Europe, which by the late s accounted almost 40 percent of revenue. The Big Five evolved the practice to where theaters were asked to purchase packages of 20 or more films not yet produced based on listings of film titles, their stars and brief plot descriptions.
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