1.Prologue

For the second entry in our series on the history of world cinema, I will write about the early years of the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood. For the purposes of this article, I will define the Golden Age as the period from the late 1920s, when cinema shifted from silent films to “talkies", through the peak years in the 1930s and 40s, and until its decline in the 50s and ultimate demise in the 60s. This timeline more or less corresponds with the years when the Hollywood studio system dominated movies—the era when movies were mass-produced and consumed as mass entertainment.

This week I will cover the pre-war years leading up to World War II. As talkies came into vogue, movie studios had many trials and tribulations ahead of them as they made the transition. Their growing pains coincided with social changes spurred by women’s suffrage and the Great Depression. In other words, they were tumultuous times—the setup for any great American story. The films that they made and the way in which they made them would come to define a large portion of cinema for decades to come.

2.American Cinema’s Transitional Era

The term “silent film" is a retronym, created after the fact to distinguish movies without sound from what were called “talkies" or “sound films". The name seems to imply that the films were watched in complete silence, but that was frequently not the case. Nickelodeons often had a piano on hand so that musical accompaniment could be provided to heighten the emotion of films; some larger theaters had a pipe organ, and others, a small orchestra.

In theaters in European immigrant communities, intertitles were often translated into other languages like Italian or Russian, or in some cases a narrator would translate. The presence of a narrator was also something you’d see overseas in countries like France. In places like Mexico, audience members who were literate would sometimes explain what was happening aloud for the rest of the community.

In Japan, where traditional performing arts like kabuki and joruri already involved a narrator, performers who came to be called benshi provided live narration and voicework for silent films. They wrote their own scripts and performed them in sync with the video, and some became so popular that audience members would shout out their names. While they would dwindle in number after talkies became the norm, the tradition lives on today, with a handful of benshi even being invited to put on performances abroad. Music and narrative was an indispensable part of cinema even from the sound era.

Silent films lacked sound not because of tastes but because of technological limitations. Even as far back as the late 19th century, Thomas Edison invented the Kinetoscope peephole viewer because he wanted a visual accompaniment to the phonograph. Unfortunately, the technology was not yet there for it to be a practical choice for cinema. Microphones weren’t sensitive enough; syncing up video and audio on separate players was not a simple task; movie theaters still lacked electronic amplification—meaning that audio couldn’t be played at a volume loud enough to fill a theater.

In the 1910s, microphone technology and PA systems advanced to the point where these obstacles started to be overcome. That resulted in the development of several different sound-on-disc systems—where audio pre-recorded onto a vinyl record was played back in sync with film footage. Among the different systems, the only one that became widespread and achieved some commercial success was the Vitaphone, which was first introduced by Warner Brothers in 1926 with the film Don Juan. For several years after, Warner Brothers—and then later, other movie studios—released hybrid films that were part silent, part talkie. Don Juan was the first feature film to feature a soundtrack of sound effects and instrumental music. In 1927, The Jazz Singer became the first feature film to include a soundtrack of music, lip-synched singing, and approximately two minutes worth of recorded dialogue. The film was a massive box office success.

The success of The Jazz Singer paved the way for more part-silent part-talkie films from Warner Brothers, and the studio grew rapidly. Meanwhile, the other major movie studios slowly came around to releasing their own hybrid films between 1928 and 1929. It was during this period that Walt Disney released Steamboat Willie (1928), considered to be the debut of Mickey Mouse and his girlfriend Minnie. Like The Jazz Singer, the sound element of many of these hybrid films largely consisted of songs and sound effects. In that way, they can be considered precursors to the genre of musicals that would conquer Hollywood in the coming decade. It’s also important to note that as the technology was still being experimented with and honed, the films from this period drew plenty of attention for their novelty, but today are not particularly remembered for their artistic merit.

Talkies did not become the industry standard overnight. It took time for the format to spread, for audiences to become accustomed to it. While silent film actors emphasized movement and facial expressions to convey story and emotions, talkies made it all about an actor’s voice. For audiences, there were many cases where an actor’s voice didn’t quite match up with the physical presence. In other cases, European-born actors suddenly became unable to pull off playing an American character. There were actors who managed to make the transition to talkies, but many others were left behind. Part of that was due to the fact that movie studios saw the transition as an opportunity to push out high-paid stars for younger talent they could shape and mold.

What’s more, because audio recording technology was still primitive, actors had to stand still and face in a specific direction so that the microphones would pick up their dialogue. Whereas silent films were characterized by dynamic movement, early sound films were stiff and motionless. There was a learning curve for directors too. While they could bark out direction at their actors on a silent film set, a sound film set required complete silence. Some directors were able to make the transition, while others were not so successful. It opened things up for a new crop of directors to rise to prominence. On the other side of the screen, audiences attending a sound film screening had to learn to say silent.

Another reason it took a while for talkies to overtake silent films was that movie theaters lacked the sound equipment to playback audio. Movie studios had to put a lot of money towards equipping their theaters with the proper sound system. Between 1928 and 1929, the number of theaters equipped to play sound grew from about 100 to 800; meanwhile there were over 22,000 silent film theaters across the U.S. For these reasons, for the first half of the 30s, the majority of Hollywood films were released in talkie versions and silent versions—a taxing process that was also expensive. As a result, most of Hollywood’s major movie studios went into debt. And then the Great Depression hit.

3.The Hollywood Studio System

During the Golden Age of Hollywood, it is said that about 95% of America’s film market was controlled by one of the eight major movie studios. The model of film production, distribution, and exhibition dominated by a small number of major studios was called the studio system.

The studio system was created by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Many of them ran theaters catering to immigrant communities on the East Coast of the U.S. in the early 1900s. They were quick to recognize the commercial potential of cinema, and gradually expanded into film production in order to secure a steady stream of new films to screen in their theaters. In the 1910s, they gradually shifted their base of operations to Hollywood on the West Coast. Hollywood was ideally suited for film production: warm weather and abundant sunshine with a wide range of environments over a small area, including mountains and forests, desert and the seashore, and ranches. The studios were also driven by a desire to get away from the iron fist of Thomas Edison. On the West Coast, the Jewish studio heads found freedom. While World War I was going on in Europe, they kept churning out films and buying up movie theater chains across the country.

Of the eight major movie studios, five were vertically integrated conglomerates (in other words, they owned a production studio, distribution division, and substantial theater chains): Paramount Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), the aforementioned Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox (then known as Fox Film Corporation), and RKO Radio Pictures. The other three were similarly organized but did not own major movie theater chains: Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures, and United Artists. It’s interesting to note that all eight of these studios were either founded or co-founded by Jewish businessmen.

These major studios—especially the “big five"—were “dream factories" that essentially mass-produced films in order to keep their movie theater chains packed. Each studio had its stable of producers, directors, actors, screenwriters, and other technicians, who were often under long-term contracts. The studios practiced strict division of labor among departments and teams; this allowed them to work efficiently on several film projects concurrently. During the Golden Age of Hollywood, it is said the studios together produced 600 films a year.

The studio system also led to the filmmaking process being streamlined into an assembly line of sorts, with rules and conventions established for camera positioning, lighting, sound, and editing—where it all came together into a coherent whole. As the studios developed the cinematic language of Hollywood, they also developed their own individual house styles. The well-oiled machine also meant that the majority of films were formulaic and fell neatly into certain genres like musical, western, screwball comedy, and gangster film. Nonetheless, the American public was swept up in Hollywood’s spell.

4.The Hays Code

As the major movie studios churned out mainstream commercial films in the 1930s, Hollywood would increasingly be dictated by the tastes of the market.

When talkies were just coming into vogue, the studios produced many films that could be characterized as proto-musicals. Musicals, which mix song and dialogue, were the perfect bridge between silent films—which were based on exaggerated physical acting—and talkies—which relied on more realistic acting. So many musicals were produced that audiences grew tired, and it is said some theaters started advertising “Not a musical" to keep their patrons interested.

Another genre that became popular with the advent of the talkie was the gangster film. In a 2010 article for the New York Times, film critic Dave Kehr wrote that “they flourished when sound introduced the sensational elements of chattering machine guns, screaming tires and, most important, the varied timbres of contemporary American speech, bursting with vivid idioms and filtered through every accent known to man." (“When Hollywood Learned to Talk, Sing and Dance") America at the time was still under Prohibition, and there was interest among the general public in bootlegging and the criminal underworld—especially figures like the notorious gangster Al Capone. The gangster film genre was especially popular among young male moviegoers.

Although Hollywood is most associated with escapist fantasies, its films always reflect the times and the state of society: gangster films in the 1930s, war films in the 1940s-1960s, counterculture films in the 1960s-1970s, etc. The early 1930s were the peak years of the Great Depression, and as a result many films were cynical portrayals depicting financial hardship and anti-authority and anti-capitalist sentiment. Hollywood also quickly latched on to the fact that movies somehow involving the seven deadly sins were a hit with audiences. They purposely gave films dangerous sounding titles, emphasized the physical sexuality of women, and depicted adultery. The passage of the 19th Amendment had finally given women the right to vote gradually leading to significant changes in lifestyle and culture. So-called flappers smoked in public and were sexually liberated. The more risqué films being put out by Hollywood were especially popular among young female moviegoers.

While all of this was happening, there were voices around America arguing that Hollywood was becoming a cesspool for moral depravity. From the earliest days of cinema, the Catholic church and other organizations actively tried to prevent the screening of morally questionable films. Then in the early 1920s, a string of scandals would further cement Hollywood’s reputation as sin city. In 1921, the popular silent film star and comedian Roscoe “Fatty" Arbuckle was arrested and charged with murder and rape; in 1922 the famous silent film director William Desmond Taylor was found murdered in his home in Los Angeles; the decade also saw the death of a number of actors from drug overdoses. These scandals led to a frenzy of sensationalist newspaper reports, which further damaged Hollywood’s reputation.

In response, Hollywood turned to the Presbyterian deacon and former U.S. Postmaster General William H. Hays, appointing him chairman of the newly formed Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America in the hopes that he could clean up their image. Whereas many religious groups favored federal censorship of the movies, Hays attempted to spell out a set of moral guidelines for Hollywood to apply and self-censor its content. His early efforts were largely unsuccessful. Then in 1929, Catholic layman Martin Quigley—the publisher of a trade magazine for independent movie exhibitors—Jesuit priest Father Daniel A. Lord, and a few others authored a set of guidelines that spelled out what was acceptable and what was unacceptable content for films made for U.S. audiences. Their guidelines turned out to be just what Hays had been looking for. The rules came to be known as “The Production Code" and “The Hays Code".


Here is an outline of the Code taken from Wikipedia:

In order to ensure that their films would be shown, the movie studios begrudgingly accepted the terms and agreed to self-censor. However, in practice, the studios flouted the code; being in the midst of the Great Depression, Hollywood had more pressing matters at hand. At the time, Hays and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America did not have the authority to enforce the Code, and could only try to reason and plead with the studios. However, in 1934, when Catholic groups threatened to boycott immoral Hollywood films, and major Catholic financiers like Bank of America reduced funding, the studios gave the MPPDA the full authority to enforce the Code. The Production Code would have a great effect on shaping Hollywood films until it was ultimately abandoned in the 60s.