The Studio
System, how did it work, what killed it and what happened next…
DA Cook summed
things up fairly well in his article for Encyclopedia Britannica; “…by
1930, 95 percent of all American production was concentrated in the hands of
only eight studios… which controlled production, distribution, and exhibition…”
So, if you weren’t one of the Big Boys and you somehow managed to get your
film made, you had a less than even chance of getting it seen and making any
return. HUGE pro for the studios; don’t like your competition? Then don’t let
him make or distribute his film. Really don’t like him? Then rent him the
equipment and studio so he can make his film and when he’s done, and out of
money, and in debt up to his ear, deny him the venue in which he might
distribute it. Problem solved; HUGE pro for the studios. Not so
much for the independent filmmaker.
They started
having problems when WWII ended and the American public lost a big reason for
going to the movies every week; the war is over, no news is good news, time to
go back to ‘normal’. Our country was once again prosperous, the war having
blown away the last remnants of the Great Depression, and people were buying
homes and moving into, actually creating, the suburbs. In the ten or so years
following the war the number of homeowners in America doubled and going
‘downtown’ to see a film became a chore. And then the deathblow…
The Consent Decree of
1948. The high court, the Supreme Court, decided that the studios had become a
monopoly and were breaking the anti-trust laws. To disband the monopoly they
decided that the studios would have to sell their theaters, which made the
exhibition venues open for everybody and broke the backs of the studios.
The biggest change in the
industry, well, for the last decade or so, now allows independent filmmakers a
piece of the pie. They do things far differently than the studios; they have
small staffs and hire out the work to independent contractors and freelancers;
they don’t have their stars on retainer, and no long-term contracts, they hired
on a per-film basis. New movie-making styles came into play, new genres came to
be and new venues became popular. And while this was not the birth of the
drive-in theater, it is when it became fruitful, and multiplied, numbering
almost 5,000 by the 1960’s. That’s 5,000 new, non-studio, exhibition venues…
Reference
Cook,
D. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/394161/history-of-the-motion-picture/52153/The-Hollywood-studio-system
No comments:
Post a Comment