film Q&As

Chapter 2

THE STRUCTURE AND HISTORY OF HOLLYWOOD FILMMAKING

This chapter examines what Hollywood film is and how it developed. Hollywood film can be identified by a specific set of formal and stylistic structures as well as by a set of historical, industrial, and economic determinants. These underlying structures affect how Hollywood films represent America, and how they conceive of issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Because Hollywood film is so prevalent in American culture (and world culture), many people think that the way Hollywood makes movies is the only way to do so – that there are no other possible methods for making films. However, there are many types of movies and many different ways to make them. As we shall see throughout this book, these other, non-Hollywood movies often present different representations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability than do Hollywood films. Both Hollywood and non-Hollywood films have evolved since the beginning of the twentieth century, in conjunction with the broader social, political, and cultural events of American history. This chapter broadly addresses those concerns, and will lay the basis for future chapters’ more detailed analyses of how these issues relate to specific cinematic representations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability.

Hollywood vs. Independent Film

73Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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Hollywood film refers to movies made and released by a handful of filmmaking companies located in and around Hollywood, California. The names of most of these companies – Universal, MGM, 20th Century-Fox, Paramount, Warner Brothers, etc. – have been recognized as cinematic brand names around the world since the 1920s. These companies have produced and distributed tens of thousands of films, films that have found long-term success at the box office, and often make it seem (especially in other countries) that Hollywood film is American film. Hollywood’s global predominance obscures its historical development, and in effect works to naturalize the structure and style of its films. This is itself another example of ideology working to erase the socially constructed nature of a specific cultural institution: Hollywood gains strength and power by making its form and practice seem to be basic common sense. This tends to hide the fact that Hollywood form and practice developed over time in response to specific socio-political factors, and it also works to erase awareness that there are other ways of making (and understanding) film as a cultural artifact.

Hollywood films so dominate American theaters (and video-store shelves and cable programming schedules) that US citizens have relatively little access to other types of films – films often made by minority filmmakers that tell stories and express viewpoints and that are ignored or underexplored in Hollywood movies. These non-Hollywood films are sometimes broadly referred to as independent films. For example, avant-garde or experimental films explore the multiple formal possibilities of cinema (not just storytelling), and they are

74Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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often tied to specific movements in the other arts, such as Surrealism. Documentaries are films that use actual events as their raw material – they are usually made without actors or fictional stories, and attempt to convey these events as realistically as possible. Americans classify films made outside the United States as foreign films. They can be fictional films that look more or less like Hollywood films, or they can be avant-garde or documentary films. Finally, the term “independent film” also describes fictional feature films that are made in America, but outside the usual Hollywood channels. Broadly speaking, independent, foreign, avant-garde, and documentary films tend to represent a broader spectrum of humanity than do Hollywood films.

Sometimes, to audiences weaned solely on Hollywood films, these types of films can seem weird, boring, or badly made. If avant-garde films (for example) were trying to play by the rules of Hollywood film, such judgments might have merit, but these films have consciously decided to use other rules. These types of films make formal choices (in mise-en-scène, montage, sound, and narrative design) that often differ vastly from those used in Hollywood films. Most of these films are also produced in different ways than are Hollywood films – they can be funded and filmed by a collective, for example, or by one individual working on his or her own project over a number of years. Unlike Hollywood filmmaking, sometimes these types of films are even made without the intention of turning a profit. Avant-garde and experimental films usually only play at museums, or in film classes at universities. Documentaries might play on television or at film festivals, or occasionally be screened at independent or art-house

75Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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theaters, theaters usually located in urban areas that specialize in off-beat, non-Hollywood film fare. A well-stocked video store or an Internet DVD service are other places one might find these films.

Experimental films, documentaries, and independent fictional films are an important part of American film history and culture, even though they are quite frequently a lesser-known part. As might be expected, these types of films often differ from Hollywood films in the ways that they depict issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability (as well as a host of other topics that are often considered taboo by Hollywood filmmakers). However, while one may in practice contrast fictional Hollywood film with fictional independent film, the distinction between these two terms is not always so clear cut. Frequently there are similarities and connections between independent films and Hollywood. Sometimes successful independent filmmakers go on to sign deals with the major Hollywood companies, and many Hollywood employees dabble in independent filmmaking. A popular independent film such as Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1991) may seem somewhat different from most Hollywood films, but it is much closer to a Hollywood film (in both subject matter and style) than most experimental films.

For the purposes of this book, Hollywood and independent film practice might best be understood as the end points of a continuum of American fictional film production, and not as an either/or binary. One of the best ways to distinguish between independent and Hollywood films is to see where the film is playing. If it is playing on 3,000 screens in America at once, at every multiplex across the

76Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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nation, it is probably a Hollywood film. If it is playing at one theater in selected large cities, it is probably an independent film. Because Hollywood films reach far wider audiences than do most independent films (much less avant-garde films or documentaries), it might be said that they have a greater ideological impact on American culture (and arguably, the world). And although Hollywood film is not as popular a medium as it once was (having been surpassed by television and even now competing with video games and the World Wide Web), Hollywood film remains a very powerful global influence. Indeed, most of the stylistic choices developed by the Hollywood studios during the first half of the twentieth century have strongly influenced the “rules” of how TV shows and computer games make meaning. As we hope to show, many of Hollywood’s representational traditions have also carried over from its classical period to the present. The rest of this chapter examines how the style, business, and history of Hollywood have structured and continue to structure cinematic meaning, specifically the various meanings of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability.

The Style of Hollywood Cinema

Over the first few decades of the twentieth century, Hollywood filmmakers developed a set of formal and stylistic conventions that came to be known as the classical Hollywood style. (Recall that film form refers to specific cinematic elements such as mise-en-scène and editing; the term style refers to a specific way in which those formal elements are arranged.) Classical Hollywood style is not rigid and absolute – slight variations can be

77Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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found in countless Hollywood films – but this way of cinematically telling stories is basically the same today as it was in the 1930s. And because Hollywood’s business practices have dominated both American and global cinema, classical Hollywood style is often considered the standard or “correct” way to make fictional films.

The main objective of classical Hollywood style is to “spoon feed” story information to the spectator, thus keeping everything clearly understood by the audience. Hollywood filmmakers believe that that if some plot point or stylistic maneuver is too different or challenging, the audience will become disoriented, dislike the movie, tell their friends not to see it, or even demand their money back. Classical Hollywood style is sometimes referred to as the invisible style, because it does not call attention to itself as even being a style. It permits the viewer to stay emotionally enmeshed in a film’s story and characters, instead of being distracted by obvious formal devices (or thinking too much about the ideological meanings of the text). Indeed, when classical Hollywood style is working at its best, audiences are barely aware that any formal choices are being made at all: most untrained spectators don’t consciously notice the lighting of the sets or the edits between shots. Obscuring the formal decisions not only keeps the viewer centered rather unthinkingly on following the story, but also limits the viewer’s choice in what she or he is meant to find important. Say, for example, a film shows a white business tycoon praising American capitalism while his black butler brings him a mint julep. A viewer might be interested in learning the butler’s reaction to the tycoon’s statement. However, if the camera does not keep the butler in focus, or never cuts to show the

78Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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butler’s reaction, then it becomes impossible to see what his reaction might be. In helping to keep things understandable, Hollywood’s invisible style subtly eliminates complexity, and in this example, implicitly makes the white tycoon more important than his butler.

All of the formal aspects of cinema under the classical Hollywood style work to keep the story clear and characters simple and understandable. Lighting, color, camera position, and other aspects of mise-en-scène consistently help the audience remain engaged with the story. The most important details are the ones most prominently lit, kept in focus, and framed in close-up shots. Hollywood films also employ various rules of continuity editing, a system of editing in which each shot follows easily and logically from the one before. If a person looks over at something, the next shot is of that something; if a person walks out of a room through a door, the next shot is of that same person coming through the door into a new room. Sound design in Hollywood films also keeps audiences aware of the story’s key points, often by making the main characters’ dialog louder than the noise of the crowd around them. And the Hollywood film score is there to tell an audience exactly how they are supposed to feel about any given scene.

Style is thus subordinated to story in classical Hollywood style. The way Hollywood films structure their stories is referred to as (classical) Hollywood narrative form. Hollywood stories usually have a linear narrative – they have a beginning, middle, and an end, and story events follow one another chronologically. (Flashbacks are an exception to this format, but they are always clearly

79Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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marked – often with a shimmering dissolve – so as not to confuse the viewer.) Hollywood narrative form usually centers on a singular character or protagonist, commonly referred to as the hero. Sometimes the protagonist might be a family or a small group of people. The narrative is driven by carefully and clearly laying out the goals and desires of the protagonist – the desire to get home in The Wizard of Oz (1939) or to kill the shark in Jaws (1975). Obstacles to this desire are created, usually by a villainous force or person, called the antagonist (the wicked witch, the shark). Hollywood narrative also usually pairs the protagonist with a love interest, who either accompanies the main character in reaching the goal, or functions as the protagonist’s goal.

The differences between heroes and villains in Hollywood film are obvious and simplified. Sometimes, as in old-fashioned Westerns, the good guys even wear white hats while the villains wear black. Even when dealing with complex social issues, Hollywood usually reduces them to matters of personal character: in Hollywood films there are rarely corrupt institutions, merely corrupt people. In seeking to make conflicts as basic and uncomplicated as possible, the antagonist is often “pure evil” and not the bearer of his or her own legitimate world view. Protagonists and antagonists are not the only ones simplified in a Hollywood film, as other roles are also represented by quickly understood stock characters such as the love interest, the best friend, or the comic relief. Such “instant characterization” often draws upon pre-existing social and cultural stereotypes. Some may seem benign, like villains wearing black. Others, like repeatedly casting Asians as mysterious mobsters, or Hispanics as gang

80Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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members, can have vast effects on how those identified as Asian or Hispanic are treated outside the movie house.

In the linear design of Hollywood narrative form, each complication in the attempt to reach the protagonist’s goal leads to yet another complication. These twists and turns escalate toward the climax, the most intense point of conflict, wherein the antagonist is defeated by the protagonist. In the final moments of the film, all the complications are resolved, and all questions that had been posed during the film are answered. This is known as closure. Hollywood’s use of the happy ending, a specific form of closure, ties up all of the story’s loose ends and frequently includes the protagonist and the love interest uniting as a romantic/sexual couple. Even when the couple is not together at the end of the film (as in Titanic [1997]), the narrative is designed to make that separation acceptable to the audience. In Titanic, the ending may be sad, but the mystery of the diamond necklace has been resolved, and the film suggests that Jack and Rose will reunite in heaven. Closure is a potent narrative tool in managing ideological conflict, because closure makes it seem as if all problems have been solved. Any actual ideological issues or social strife that may have been raised by a film are allegedly resolved by narrative closure, and thus there is no longer any need for spectators to think about them. Closure in Hollywood film tends to reaffirm the status quo of American society.

Since the ideological status quo of American society is white patriarchal capitalism, it should come as no surprise that most Hollywood films (throughout its history and still today) encode white patriarchal capitalism as

81Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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central and desirable via both Hollywood narrative form and the invisible style. First, the protagonist of most Hollywood films is constructed as a straight white male seeking wealth or power. He emerges victorious at the end of the film, proving his inherent superiority over those who challenged him. In consistently drawing audience attention to and celebrating his acts, the invisible style reinforces his “natural” abilities while not allowing the audience to think about the often far-fetched qualities of those heroics. Since the white male commands the most narrative attention, the (usually white) female love interest is relegated to a minor or supporting part. Whereas the male is defined by his actions, job, and/or principles, the heroine is defined chiefly by her beauty and/or sex appeal. Their romance affirms patriarchal heterosexuality as well as the desirability of same-race coupling. If homosexuals, people of color, or disabled people appear in the film at all, they might be associated with the villains or relegated to smaller supporting parts, in effect supporting the dominance of the white male hero and his female love interest.

Imagine any of the “Indiana Jones” movies as typical of this formula. Our hero or protagonist, Professor Jones, is a straight white man of charm, wit, intelligence, and social standing. He is opposed by evil male super-criminals or antagonists who are out to destroy or dominate the world. Frequently the villain is from another country or is non-white: in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Professor Jones must first battle double-crossing Asian gangsters and then face off against a corrupt cult of Indians who enslave children and practice human sacrifice. Good and evil are thus reduced to simplified and racialized

82Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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stereotypes: white male hero versus villains of color. In this particular film, Professor Jones is accompanied on his adventures by a small Asian boy who idolizes him, and a dizzy blonde heroine whose screaming distress is meant to be a running gag throughout the film. The film proceeds in a linear manner through a series of exciting twists and turns (actionfilled set pieces) until the climax, when Jones saves the woman and the child, destroys the Indian temple, and restores harmony to the land. The closure of the film sets up a symbolic nuclear family, with white man as heroic patriarch, woman as helpmate and romantic/sexual object, and the Third World quite literally represented as a child under their protection. Among the film’s basic ideological messages are that straight white men can do anything, that women are hysterical nuisances, and that non-white people are either evil or childlike.

But haven’t Hollywood representations of women and minorities changed over the years? Haven’t the formulas been adapted to be less sexist and racist? Yes and no. There are now Hollywood films made in which the hero is not white, not male, or (more recently) not heterosexual. And Hollywood has always made a type of film that features female protagonists, the so-called woman’s film (discussed more fully in later chapters), but these stories usually emphasize the female character’s desire for a man, and thus reinforce patriarchy in their own way. It is true that black and Hispanic actors in Hollywood have made gains in the last few decades and now regularly play the hero part in many movies every year. Occasionally there will even be a female action hero as well. But even then, these are hegemonic negotiations within the dominant white patriarchal ideology and not inversions of it: most

83Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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African American protagonists are still male, and most female protagonists are still white. The very few homosexual protagonists in recent Hollywood film are usually male and white. On the rare occasions when a Hollywood film centers on a deaf, blind, or otherwise differently abled protagonist, he or she is usually white (and invariably played by an actor without said disability). While the real world is comprised of people of all different races, genders, classes, sexualities, and physical abilities, the world depicted in Hollywood film usually posits straight white men as central and heroic, and everyone else as peripheral (or even non-existent).

The drive for simplicity and obviousness in the classical Hollywood style has other implications for Hollywood narrative form. Not only are Hollywood storylines excessively linear, using simplified stock characters engaged in clear-cut struggles ending in closure, but Hollywood often consciously reuses popular (that is, already understood) storylines and characters. The proliferation of remakes and sequels guarantees that most audiences are already familiar with many main characters and basic narrative situations. The Nightmare on Elm Street films, for example, rely on audience knowledge not only of the previous films in the series, but also of the specific formal elements that go into making a scary movie. Many Hollywood films are thus identifiable by their genre, a term that this book uses to refer to a specific type of fictional Hollywood film such as the horror film, the Western, the war movie, the musical, or the gangster film. As will be explored in future chapters, racial and ethnic markers are activated within genres in unique and interesting ways. For example, Italian Americans (and

84Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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more recently African Americans) have been closely tied to the gangster film, while the representation of Native Americans in Hollywood film is almost exclusively tied to the Western.

In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), the white male hero protects both his white love interest and Third World children from the villainy of an evil Asian cult. In this still, he is figured as a symbolic father of all the other characters. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, copyright © 1984, Paramount

85Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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A genre can be identified by its surface structure or iconography – what the genre looks and sounds like. (The iconography of the horror film might include monsters and mad scientists, blood and gore, dark woods at night, screams, and so forth.) Genres can also be defined by their deeper ideological concerns, sometimes referred to as their thematic myth. Genres are popular with audiences when these thematic myths in some way relate to current social concerns, and as such, genres function as a sort of feedback loop between filmgoers and filmmakers. Certain genres make money and flourish when their specific

86Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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thematic myth correlates to something the public is interested in or wants (or needs) to see dramatized. Other genres “die” when their thematic myths are no longer thought valid within the ever-changing spheres of history and culture. For example, the musical was once a staple of Hollywood filmmaking, but it grew generally unpopular after the 1960s. Today, the public rarely accepts the genre’s convention of characters spontaneously breaking into song and dance, and our cynical age sees their usual, simple thematic messages of love and harmony as outmoded.

Thus, the popularity (or unpopularity) of certain genres can tell the film historian interesting things about the culture that produced them. Genre films reflect social concerns, but only rarely do they challenge the underlying ideological biases of Hollywood narrative form itself. (Most genre films, being Hollywood films, still feature straight white male protagonists, while women and people of color are relegated to peripheral roles.) Rather, popular Hollywood genres often attempt to shore up the dominant ideology by repeating over and over again certain types of stories that seem to resolve social tensions. For example, the horror film’s emphasis on the threat posed to “normality” by the monstrous reinforces social ideas about what is considered normal. Not surprisingly, in classical Hollywood horror films, “normality” is conventionally represented by middle-to-upper-class, white, heterosexual couples and patriarchal institutions. Monsters and villains, on the other hand, are often coded as non-white, non-patriarchal, and/or non-capitalist. In many cases, they even have physical “abnormalities” that are meant to symbolize or enhance their deviance.

87Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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The Business of Hollywood

By examining the structure of Hollywood filmmaking, and exploring when and why certain films were popular with American audiences, one can gain insight into the changing ideological currents of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century America. Yet one must also take into consideration the specific economic and industrial conditions that determine how Hollywood produces its films. Indeed, Hollywood must be understood not just as a set of formal and stylistic structures, but also as an industry that produces certain types of fictional films for profit. As such, Hollywood is an excellent example of capitalism at work. Hollywood companies make and sell films that they think people want to see (that is, films that in some way reflect the dominant ideology), and Hollywood’s business practices use every tool at their disposal to lessen competition, increase buyer demand, and reduce the cost of production. Though Hollywood films are sometimes discussed as “art” by critics and some filmmakers, a Hollywood film’s merit is chiefly judged by its box office revenues. Even when awards are given for artistic achievement, these too are drawn into a film’s economic evaluation – winning a Best Picture Oscar will boost a film’s profits.

Since the earliest days of cinema, film as an industry has been divided into three main components: production, distribution, and exhibition. Production involves the actual making of a film: the financing, writing, shooting, editing, etc. Distribution refers to the shipping of copies (or prints) of the finished film to various theaters. The theaters where the film is actually projected to audiences

88Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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make up the third arm, or exhibition. More recently, cable television sales, video-cassette and DVD rentals, etc. also comprise film exhibition. Hollywood producers have always been highly dependent upon the distribution and exhibition arms of the business: no matter how many films you make, or how high-quality they are, if no one ships them or shows them, then they cannot make any money. Hollywood companies have thus consistently worked to maintain close ties with distribution networks and theaters. One method of doing this is called vertical integration, in which one parent company oversees the business of all three branches. This was the strategy adopted by the major studios in the first half of the twentieth century, and it helped to ensure that American theaters were almost exclusively dominated by Hollywood film during that period.

Another strategy that helped Hollywood come to dominate the US film industry was the creation of an oligopoly, a state of business affairs in which a few companies control an entire industry. (An oligopoly is thus very similar to a monopoly, wherein one company controls an entire industry.) In an oligopoly, several large companies agree to work together, keeping potential competitors weak or driving them out of business altogether. In the case of film in America, the Hollywood oligopolies worked throughout the twentieth century, and continue to work, to keep foreign and independent American films marginalized. This has had a specific effect on minority filmmakers. Excluded from the Hollywood studios, independent films made by non-white, non-patriarchal, and/or non-capitalist people often had trouble being distributed and exhibited. Furthermore, Hollywood’s control of production,

89Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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distribution, and exhibition has not been limited to the United States alone. Motion pictures have been one of America’s leading exports for almost a century, and Hollywood maximizes its profits by distributing its films globally. Since Hollywood films usually make back their cost during domestic release, most of the money earned from foreign exhibition is pure profit. Consequently, Hollywood films can offer foreign theater owners their films at a discount – a price calculatedly lower than the cost of films made locally in their native country. This makes it very difficult for other countries to support their own film industries.

As such, the Hollywood system is an example not just of industrial capitalism but also of cultural imperialism, the promotion and imposition of ideals and ideologies throughout the world via cultural means. Imperialism means one country dominating another through force and economic control, but in cultural imperialism, one nation doesn’t conquer another with force, but rather overwhelms it with cultural products and the ideologies contained within them. People around the world are inundated with American ways of viewing life when they go to the movies, and often they have little or no access to films made by people of their own nationality. Furthermore, since Hollywood films dominate the world, Hollywood style tends to define film practice for all filmmakers around the world, since Hollywood style is what most people are accustomed to seeing and understanding. Many filmmakers in other countries, having grown up themselves watching Hollywood films, make pictures that duplicate the Hollywood style, again reinforcing its dominance.

90Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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As the following history hopes to show, various restructurings of Hollywood’s business practices have affected the ability of other types of films (and their different representations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability) to get made and to find audiences. Yet, although new technologies and legal decisions have occasionally challenged and disrupted the business strategies of the Hollywood oligopoly, its dominance has not changed very much in 80 years or so. Most of the major companies that founded the Hollywood industry are still around: Paramount, Warner Brothers, 20th Century-Fox, Universal, Columbia. If anything, these companies have grown stronger and more diversified. The main purpose of Hollywood’s business practices – to keep profits high and inhibit competition by maintaining centralized control over the industry – has been upheld. Hollywood film, with its formulas and genres that uphold white patriarchal capitalism, affects not just people in America, but people around the globe.

The History of Hollywood: The Movies Begin

The United States did not always dominate the international film industry, and a number of people around the globe could arguably take credit for inventing motion pictures at the end of the nineteenth century. In America, Thomas Edison ’s company first demonstrated moving images in 1894 through a mechanical peep-hole device, the kinetoscope. In France, the Lumière Brothers first projected their moving pictures upon a screen in 1895, giving birth to cinema as a shared social phenomenon for paying audiences. The Lumières’ method of exhibition soon became the standard worldwide, and French

91Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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filmmakers often led the way in cinema’s early years. French film companies such as Pathé became the first to accomplish vertical integration, long before the Hollywood studios even existed.

The first movies were short travelogs, documentaries, and “trick” films shown at traveling tent shows and vaudeville theaters. As the novelty of seeing photographs brought to life faded, filmmakers moved to telling fictional stories, first in one-reel shorts (which lasted about 5–10 minutes) and then in two-reel and four-reel short features. Films grew so popular that a wave of nickelodeons, small store-front theaters devoted solely to showing films, opened their doors across the United States. During this period, American filmmakers began refining the methods of storytelling, methods that eventually became Hollywood’s invisible style. Since films were silent during this period, filmmakers had to learn how to emphasize key narrative points without the use of sound. Often this involved exaggerated gestures by the actors, but filmmakers also learned how to communicate through the choice of camera placement, lighting, focus, and editing. Simultaneously, audiences learned and accepted what these choices meant. By the 1910s, fictional films that told melodramatic or sensationalistic stories over the course of one of more hours were becoming the norm.

Arcades filled with Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscopes, such as this one in New York City, were a popular early space for exhibiting motion pictures. Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York, The Byron Collection

92Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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In the United States, Hollywood was incorporated as a town in 1911 and, for a number of reasons, quickly became the center for the nation’s film production. Southern California provided almost year-round sunny weather (needed to illuminate early cinematography). The diversity of terrain in and around Los Angeles (beaches, mountains, forests, and deserts) allowed many different locations for filming. In the 1910s, Los Angeles was still a relatively small town and film companies could buy land cheaply to build their mammoth studios. Growing unionization in all US industries had not made a significant impact in Los Angeles yet, and the availability of cheap labor also drew filmmakers to Hollywood. These pioneering filmmakers were also seeking an escape from Thomas Edison’s east-coast patent lawyers, who wanted them to pay royalties.

93Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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When American film was still a small cottage industry, individuals from various minority groups had more opportunity to move into the business. While a consortium of WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) males and their lawyers were trying to control the American film industry, women and some racial/ethnic minorities were able to carve out a niche. Many pioneering Hollywood film businesses were started by recent European Jewish immigrants such as Samuel Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor, and Carl Laemmle. However, as film in America became a bigger and bigger business, more controlled by companies rather than individuals, the opportunities for minorities behind the camera dwindled. Laemmle, Zukor, and others of Jewish descent were able to maintain their power, but people of color were rarely permitted any creative control behind the scenes in Hollywood. Increasingly, the producing and directing of motion pictures was regarded as man’s work, and women were pushed aside. American women did not even have the right to vote prior to 1920, and non-white people were rarely permitted into white social spheres or business concerns during these decades.

The Comet Theatre in New York City was a typical nickelodeon; note the price of admission and the various short films advertised. Courtesy of the Quigley Photographic Archive, Georgetown University Library

94Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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During the 1910s, cinema was commonly regarded in the United States as enter tainment for immigrants and the working class. Some middle-to-upper-class white Americans felt that cinema was potentially a disturbing social institution that promoted “dangerous” ideas to the lower classes, and thus many local and state censorship boards began to monitor the content of films. (In 1915, the Supreme Court ruled that cinema was not an art form protected as free speech, but simply a business and therefore open to regulation.) The film industry thus felt pressure to become more “respectable,” a euphemism for affirming the social ideals of the era’s white patriarchy. The industry also wanted to capture the more lucrative middle-class audience. One of the ways it did this was by replacing nickelodeons with opulent theaters known as movie palaces. It was not unusual for movie palaces to have marble foyers, crystal chandeliers, and curtained

95Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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boxes. Able to seat thousands of patrons at once, the palaces helped elevate the cultural status of film to something closer to that of live theater.

This interior shot of the Majestic Theatre shows the size and opulence of a typical movie palace. Courtesy of the Quigley Photographic Archive, Georgetown University Library

During the 1910s and 1920s, studios also developed the concept of the movie star (an actor or actress the public recognizes and likes), realizing that a star’s fans would pay to see any of the star’s films. Stars are thus used to sell films, giving them a kind of brand-name appeal. Often stars were (and still are) associated with a specific type of role or a stereotypical persona. Charlie Chaplin ’s

96Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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beloved “Little Tramp” character was a poor but optimistic everyman figure, while Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford usually played helpless ingénues, dependent upon swashbuckling heroes like Douglas Fairbanks to save them. In this way, the Hollywood star system (in conjunction with the form of Hollywood narrative itself) endorsed middle-class American values of strong active men and passive women, heterosexual romance, and the centrality of whiteness. At its most basic level, the star system is a caste system, creating a class of individuals who supposedly shine brighter than the rest of us, and, as the word “star” suggests, glitter in the night sky above us. Indeed, the terms “movie god,” “movie goddess,” and “Hollywood royalty” have been part of the Hollywood publicity machine for many years. The star system thus elevates some human beings above others, and constructs specific ideals of beauty, appropriate gender behavior, skin color, class, sexuality, and so forth.

The Classical Hollywood Cinema

By the 1920s (sometimes known as the Golden Age of Silent Cinema), Hollywood had streamlined its production, distribution, and exhibition practices, and was regularly exhibiting its opulent entertainments in lush movie palaces attended by middle- and upper-class patrons. In 1927, sound was added to the silent movie, and by the 1930s, Hollywood had entered what many historians now call its classical phase. During this period of classical Hollywood cinema (roughly the 1930s to the 1950s), Hollywood developed a standardized product that employed classical Hollywood narrative form and the invisible style. Film production occurred mostly under the oligopolistic control

97Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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of eight Hollywood companies. The so-called Big 5 or the major studios (Warner Brothers, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer [MGM], 20th Century-Fox, RKO, and Paramount) were each vertically integrated, while the Little 3 or minor studios (Columbia, Universal, and United Artists) did not own their own theaters and had fewer assets with which to produce the lush expensive movies for which the Big 5 were famous. At the bottom of the economic ladder in Hollywood were the Poverty Row studios (such as Monogram, Mascot, and Producers Releasing Corporation), studios that made cheap genre films and serials that were often used by exhibitors to fill out the second half of a double feature.

Most of these Hollywood companies were centralized around their own production facilities, referred to as movie studios. A Hollywood movie studio housed any number of large sound stages, on which sets could be built and torn down as needed, so that multiple films could be shot simultaneously. Most studios included a number of permanent (or standing) sets, such as a Western town, an urban street, a European village, a jungle, etc., that could be used repeatedly in different films. The studios also had large lists of actors, directors, camera operators, editors, screenwriters, musicians, costumers, set designers, and makeup artists under contract. Studios also employed janitors, bookkeepers, electricians, carpenters, and security guards. The major Hollywood studios even had commissaries, hospitals, and their own fire departments. Without exception, white men held most of the creative and executive positions at the studios, while people of color and women – if they were hired at all – were usually relegated to manual labor or assistant-type jobs.

98Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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During Hollywood’s classical era, the studios (such as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) were huge industrial complexes that filled several city blocks. Unidentified publicity photo, authors’ personal collection

The studio system of motion picture production increasingly forced workers to specialize in certain areas. While early filmmakers did multiple tasks (wrote the scripts, directed the actors, worked the camera, and edited the film), classical Hollywood movie studios divided these jobs into various departments. This kept any individual, other than the (straight, white, male) heads of the studios themselves, from having too much control over the films being made, and it streamlined the filmmaking process. Much like Henry Ford’s assembly-line production of automobiles, studio employees figuratively stood at certain places on a filmmaking conveyor belt, contributing their own small area of expertise to the product as it rolled

99Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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smoothly down the line toward completion. During its classical period, the Hollywood industry produced about 500 films a year, or about a film per week per studio. (Today’s Hollywood output is considerably less, usually under 200 films per year.)

Some American movies were made independently of these companies during the classical period, but it was difficult to get these films distributed or exhibited without making a deal with one of the major Hollywood studios. Smaller independent filmmaking companies that produced Hollywood-type films (examples of which would include the Walt Disney Company and the Samuel Goldwyn Company) often distributed their work through one of the Big 5 or Little 3. Other independent filmmakers produced work that the Hollywood majors had little interest in distributing. For example, independently produced films starring African Americans or all-Yiddish casts were produced during Hollywood’s classical period, but these films never reached wide audiences outside of specific ethnic movie houses. For many years these films were ignored or dismissed by film historians, but in the last 30 years or so, film scholars have begun to study them in more detail. One thing that is immediately apparent about many of these independent films is that they allowed people of color to be in control behind the camera, representing issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability in different ways than did Hollywood.

The studio system was established to minimize costs and reduce possible financial liabilities – and the risk of financial ruin ran high during the Great Depression (1929 until the start of World War II). Hollywood maintained

100Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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profitability in the first few years after the stock market collapsed through audience interest in the new sound technology. But by 1932, all of the major studios had begun to feel the effects of the country’s economic despair. Ticket sales began to dwindle, and by 1933 every studio (except powerhouse MGM) had run into debt. Some studios even went into receivership or declared bankruptcy. Employee rosters were reduced, and those that remained faced slashed salaries. Most of those let go occupied the lowest rungs on the studio ladder – positions largely held by women and people of color – and most of these studio employees had no unions to bargain for them.

One of the methods Hollywood used to woo potential customers back into the theaters was to emphasize lurid stories that promised increased violence and sexual titillation, even in the face of local and state censorship campaigns. The studios worked to forestall any federal censorship by asserting that the industry could police itself. In the 1920s, Hollywood moguls appointed former postmaster general Will Hays to head an in-house association to oversee the content of Hollywood films. In 1930, the studios officially adopted the Hollywood Production Code, written by a Jesuit priest and a Catholic layman, as a list of what could and could not be depicted in Hollywood movies. Not only were overtly political themes and acts of graphic violence to be censored, but issues of sex and sexuality in the movies were strictly monitored. For example, the Code outlawed the depiction or discussion of homosexuality and forbade miscegenation – the romantic or sexual coupling of people from different races. (The Production Code is a good example of how discrimination can become institutionalized, embedded

101Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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within a corporate or bureaucratic structure.) Yet, as it existed in the first years of the Depression, the Production Code had no way to enforce its rules, and studios willfully disregarded its pronouncements when box office returns slid. Gangster films, horror films, and stories of “fallen women” proliferated, providing not only large doses of sex and violence, but also a cynical, pessimistic view of America and, to some degree, a critique of capitalist ideology.

In 1933, coinciding with Roosevelt’s inauguration and a general turn toward optimism in US society, the Catholic Church and other groups renewed their protests against Hollywood films. Facing boycotts and more urgent calls for federal censorship, the Production Code was revised in 1934 to include a Seal of Approval that would be given only to those films deemed acceptable. Hollywood companies agreed only to show films in their theaters that had the Seal of Approval attached (or face a large fine), and thus the industry became self-censoring. This was also a new way of denying exhibition to other types of films, further consolidating Hollywood’s oligopoly. As a result, Hollywood films became a dependable source of escapist fantasy through the rest of the Depression and into World War II. While some films of the 1930s did acknowledge contemporary issues of poverty and unemployment, more regularly Depression-era Hollywood films showcased the lifestyles of the rich and beautiful (as in the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals). Anything too political (such as race relations, class division, or women’s rights) was not allowed to be discussed in a Hollywood film. Most women were depicted as asexual wives and mothers, people of color were consistently marginalized as

102Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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stereotypical servants, and homosexuals officially disappeared from the movies altogether.

World War II and Postwar Film

World War II substantially upended the day-to-day life of almost every American citizen. Many men entered military service, while women contributed to the war effort by entering the home front workforce. Although unemployment was practically non-existent, Americans could spend their paychecks on very little due to war rationing. The movies benefited as a result, and Hollywood studios made considerable sums during the war years. Hollywood continued to provide escapism, but also made films supporting the war effort (despite the Production Code’s prohibitions on political themes). The war movie as a genre reached its classical apex during these years, thematically promoting American unity in the face of our enemies’ aggressions. Often these films showed members of different ethnic groups or racial backgrounds overcoming their differences and learning to work together as a unit. On the other hand, Hollywood war films often featured grotesque stereotypes of Japanese enemies.

When World War II ended, many American citizens continued to fight for social causes. Groups began campaigning more vocally for African American civil rights, and some homosexuals began to organize as well. Hollywood made a number of films in the late 1940s that addressed various social issues. These social problem films explored topics previously considered taboo or financially risky, and a few of them even dared to examine racism, anti-Semitism, and the plight of disabled war

103Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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veterans. In addition to the social problem films, audiences watched stories of frustration and corruption told in a number of dark mysteries and thrillers.

Termed film noir by French film critics, these films questioned the ideals of American capitalism that citizens had just been fighting to preserve. Film noir also expressed the social and personal tensions between men and women in the postwar period, tensions that had been created by women’s wartime independence versus the postwar patriarchy’s need to make them once again subservient to men.

John Garfield was a popular Hollywood actor whose career was destroyed by the Red Scare; he suffered a heart attack and died in 1952. Unidentified publicity photo, authors’ personal collection

104Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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Turning back the calendar on women’s roles after the war exemplified a general reactionary trend in American society as the 1940s ended. Following World War II, America found itself in a Cold War of espionage with the Soviet Union, and began to fight communism abroad in actions both open and covert. The resultant Red Scare, a term that refers to the hysteria about possible communist infiltration that swept America at this time, caused immense changes to American film practice in the postwar years. The congressional committee known as HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee ) investigated allegations of communist infiltration in various American industries and institutions. In 1947, HUAC came to ers were instilling anti-American messages into their films. The Unidentified publicity photo, authors’ personal owners of the Hollywood companies quickly closed ranks and collection offered up sacrificial victims to the committee. The Hollywood Ten, as these people became known, refused to answer the committee’s questions, and most of them served time in prison. Soon, studios were making employees sign loyalty oaths, and blacklists (rosters of people who were to be considered unemployable because of their political beliefs) were circulated throughout the industry. Careers were ruined and in many cases lives were destroyed. Other people under investigation recanted their former political beliefs and were readmitted to the industry.

In retrospect, the people targeted by HUAC during these years were disproportionately Jewish, homosexual, non-white, or people struggling to organize the working classes – in other words, people who were legitimately critiquing the elitism of the white patriarchal capitalist

105Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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ruling class. The heads of the studios used the Red Scare to weaken the power of labor unions in Hollywood, since unionizing seemed dangerously close to communism in those trying times. (A number of other industries also used this gambit against unions.) This type of communist “red baiting” came to an unofficial end around 1954 when Senator Joseph McCarthy (one of the leading alarmists who had used the Red Scare for his own political gain) was discredited and censured by Congress, after he alleged that the US Army itself was infiltrated by communists. Yet the blacklists that had been created in Hollywood and many other industries lingered well into the 1960s.

Partly in response to the Red Scare, mainstream American culture throughout the 1950s stressed conformity to white patriarchal capitalist ideals, under the assumption that even discussing cultural difference or social inequity would be misconstrued as un-American. Hollywood filmmakers deliberately avoided making films that might be understood as in any way critical of American foreign or domestic policy. Social problem films and film noir dried up as filmmakers became afraid that such movies could get them fired and/or blacklisted. Musicals, melodramas, lush historical romances, and Biblical epics became the mainstay of 1950s Hollywood film production, as these genres were felt to be safe and apolitical. The 1950s is often spoken about nostalgically as a time when people migrated to crime-free suburbs to raise perfect nuclear families. Yet underneath that facade lay ugly reminders of social inequity that many people choose to forget. Many of those perfect neighborhoods were zoned to keep out blacks and/or Jews, women often chafed under the restrictions placed on them, and gay and lesbian people could be

106Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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arrested and fired from their jobs for merely meeting in a bar.

The Red Scare was not the only problem facing the Hollywood studios after the war. Postwar migration to the suburbs took customers away from urban areas where film theaters were located, and many preferred to stay home with their new television sets rather than drive to the movies. By 1960, about 90 percent of all American homes had TV. In an attempt to hold onto its audience, Hollywood responded with expansive technologies that TV did not have – widescreen formats, stereo sound, and color, as well as novelty techniques such as 3-D. Even more dire, the Supreme Court declared in 1948 that the Hollywood industry had formed an illegal and oligopolistic business trust. The Paramount Consent Decrees (as the rulings became known) forced the Hollywood studios to dismantle their vertical integration throughout the 1950s. Hollywood companies chose to sell off their exhibition outlets as a way of complying with this decision. However, without guaranteed theaters to show their films, and with the loss of filmgoers to TV, the Hollywood studios were again forced to cut back production and whittle down their employee rosters. Many stars, directors, and writers became independent agents, no longer tied to one particular studio. This development, along with theaters that were now free to book non-studio-produced films, encouraged more independent filmmaking, even as the political climate of the 1950s did not exactly encourage independent thinking.

While Hollywood filmmakers aimed for a broad appeal that would offend no one, some independent filmmakers

107Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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slowly ventured into less-traveled territories. Rather than trying to sell films to everyone, many independent filmmakers aimed at smaller, specialized sections of the audience – teenagers, intellectuals, the socially concerned. Independent filmmakers learned that their films might alienate some customers, but would draw in others eager to see something more complex than the usual Hollywood fare. The Supreme Court had reversed itself in 1952 and declared that film was indeed an art form guaranteed protection under the First Amendment, and thus independent filmmakers began to deal with topics considered taboo by the Production Code, such as miscegenation or homosexuality. Yet most independent films during this period (and the Hollywood studio films that sought to imitate them) raised these topics only to uphold traditional beliefs.

More forthright explorations of mid-century social issues were to be found in other art forms and movements. Poets and artists who comprised the Beat movement criticized American class consciousness and sexual hypocrisy. The civil rights movement, fighting for equal rights for African Americans, burgeoned throughout the 1950s and eventually became more vocal, militant, and successful. By the 1960s, Native Americans, Hispanics, women, and homosexuals were also protesting for their civil rights. Many of these movements were closely linked to protests against American military involvement in Vietnam, and all of these movements were connected by a larger youth movement that openly challenged the conformity of the 1950s. The term counterculture is often used to describe this broad patchwork coalition of leftists, liberals, and libertarians who wanted to increase freedom for all

108Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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members of society and bring an end to what they felt was an unjust war. “Sex, drugs, and rock and roll” became a mantra of this new social force. Since the personal was equated with the more broadly political, it was felt that social freedoms could be increased by expanding personal freedoms and vice versa.

Hollywood had a difficult time dealing with the social changes of the 1960s. Many younger Americans, people of color, and women began to reject the stereotypes and simplistic formulas of Hollywood films, and turned instead to independent, foreign, and avant-garde films (both as audiences and as filmmakers). As a result, by the end of the decade, several of the Hollywood majors were again on the verge of bankruptcy. As part of these financial shake-ups, most of the major studios were being bought out by larger non-filmic corporations such as Gulf and Western (absorbing Paramount) and Kinney (absorbing Warner Brothers). These new corporate managers were desperate to make Hollywood profitable once again, and they began to experiment with different sorts of movies and film styles in an attempt to address the counterculture’s concerns. Slowly, a few women and African American men began gaining a small degree of power in Hollywood. The studios began targeting specific sections of the population, most notably in what came to be known as blaxploitation films – cheaply made genre pictures that featured African American protagonists. However, still being Hollywood films, most of them failed to address in any significant way the deeper political issues of 1960s America.

“New” Hollywood and the Blockbuster Mentality

109Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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During this same period (the late 1960s and early 1970s), in yet another effort to tap into the interests of younger audiences, studios began to hire a new generation of filmmakers who had learned their craft in the growing number of film departments in American universities. Mostly white, male, and heterosexual, these so-called Film School Brats (including George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola) reinvigorated the Hollywood industry throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Having studied film as an art, this new generation made films that reflected their knowledge of Hollywood (and global) film history. The Film School Brats revamped traditional genre formulas that had worked during Hollywood’s classical period, spicing them up with liberal doses of sex and violence, now that the Production Code had been replaced by the Ratings System in the late 1960s. (The ratings system restricted audiences rather than filmmakers.) Genre films that criticized or deconstructed American myths, which had been briefly popular with the counterculture, were now supplanted by genre films that reinscribed traditional form and ideology in a nostalgic fashion. In most of these films, women were once again cast as princesses, people of color appeared as villains or helpers, and conventionally strong white men remained the central heroes. This type of film, sometimes called the nostalgic Hollywood blockbuster, still drives the Hollywood industry today. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, discussed earlier in this chapter, is an excellent example of a nostalgic Hollywood blockbuster, and that particular franchise (with all of its outdated ideologies about race and gender) continues to thrive: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) is its most recent incarnation.

110Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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Rocky (1976) is a good example of the nostalgic Hollywood blockbuster, a type of film that uses classical Hollywood formulas to reinscribe traditional concepts of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Rocky, copyright © 1976, United Artists

Today, most of these Hollywood blockbusters are shrewdly calculated remakes and recyclings of what has worked (that is, made money) in the past. They are designed according to marketplace research, and work not to raise questions or explore social issues but to maintain the ideological status quo. They are usually pre-sold (they

111Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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have name recognition from a previous incarnation as TV show, novel, comic book, etc.), and are considered high concept (they have a story that can be reduced to simple phrases and tag-lines). Today’s blockbusters are sold via saturation advertising and saturation booking, which means that the country is blanketed with ads for a film for weeks before it opens in thousands of theaters at once. The concept of synergy also drives current Hollywood production, wherein the film acts as an advertisement for other related products (and vice versa) – CDs of music, movie novelizations, behind-thescenes mini-features, magazine specials, comic books, websites, fast food franchises, posters, toys, games, action figures, theme park rides, clothes, and other assorted collectibles. All of this media saturation convinces filmgoers of these films’ alleged importance. Independent films, which tend to offer the viewpoints of various marginalized groups, are frequently lost in the media flurry surrounding the more formulaic Hollywood output, films that still tend to center on white patriarchal capitalist ideals.

This situation is the result of the increasingly occurring merger of media companies into corporate conglomerates, large multinational businesses that control multiple aspects of the entertainment industry. Today, the same seven or eight giant media corporations that make Hollywood movies (including Disney, TimeWarner-AOL, News Corp.-20th Century-Fox, Viacom-Paramount, Sony-Tristar-Columbia, NBC-Universal) also make and distribute the world’s books, CDs, newspapers, magazines, and TV shows. They are the same global corporations that own theme parks, sports teams, TV channels, cable TV distributors, video and DVD rental companies, and many

112Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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of the chains of movie theaters. This is a new type of corporate oligopoly, since these global conglomerates control almost all of the world’s mass media. It is thus increasingly difficult for truly independent filmmakers to have their work screened within mainstream cinematic outlets, which are for the most part controlled by these multimedia corporate conglomerates.

Most contemporary Hollywood films are screened at multiplex theatres, such as this one, the Cinemark 17 in Dallas, Texas. Authors’ private collection

Independent filmmaking did flourish briefly in the 1980s and 1990s, because of the developing technologies of home video and cable TV, which desperately needed scores of films to fill program schedules and video-store shelves. A large number of the independent films of this period dealt with race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability

113Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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in new and important ways. Some of this was a result of the newest generation of film-school graduates, a group that now included women and people of color, partly because of affirmative action legislation. A number of openly lesbian and gay filmmakers also found opportunities in independent filmmaking at this time. The success of some of these filmmakers has led Hollywood conglomerates to hire and promote more women, people of color, open homosexuals, and disabled people, and to make a few films not focused on white heterosexual males and their adventures. By the mid-1990s, however, many of the smaller independent film distributors were either driven out of business or absorbed by the major Hollywood corporations. For example, in the 1990s, Miramax was absorbed by Disney, and New Line Cinema became a part of the Time-Warner corporation, which was itself acquired by the Internet company America On Line in 2001. Today it is not unusual for the major Hollywood corporations to release “independent” films made or distributed by their own “boutique” subsidiaries, such as Focus Features (owned by Universal) or Fox Searchlight (a division of 20th Century-Fox), further blurring the line between what is considered an independent or a Hollywood film.

The merger of Time-Warner with AOL highlights the growth of even newer methods of distributing motion pictures as downloads to computers, cell phones, and iPods. Many in the industry are worried about a rise in media piracy from illegal DVD copies or file sharing – particularly as their product is handled outside the United States, where copyright laws (and their enforcement) are not always the same. In addition to numerous lawsuits and

114Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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raids, public relations campaigns in the early years of the new millennium have tried to convince consumers that media piracy takes jobs and money away from the average film worker (the stunt driver, the carpenter, the electrician). Yet the money coming from these new modes of delivery goes almost exclusively to the producers and company executives. The Writers Guild strike of 2007–8 was largely about trying to get a more equitable share of this new revenue. (The Directors and Actors Guilds have also had to bargain hard with the studios over this issue.)

In corporate Hollywood today, billions of dollars are at stake and, while the industry may be on the cutting edge of technology, Hollywood films rarely seek to make radical aesthetic innovations or challenge pre-existing ideas. They adhere to decades-old formulas and genres that for the most part uphold the centrality of white patriarchal capitalism. Hollywood narrative form and the invisible style remain similar to what they were during the classical years. Although Hollywood’s distribution and exhibition venues have changed a great deal, the basic economic goals of the Hollywood industry are still in place: to maintain tight control on the market in order to minimize risk and maximize profit. Hollywood’s corporate dominance keeps smaller, independent films – those more regularly made by minority group filmmakers and/or containing subcultural themes and issues – marginalized.

Questions for Discussion

1 What types of movies do you prefer to watch? Are there art-house or independent theaters close to you, or many miles away? What types of films does your local video

115Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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store stock? Are you ever bothered by the lack of diversity in local video stores or multiplex theaters?

2 Pick a few current Hollywood releases and see if they fit into the structure of classical Hollywood narrative form. How are concepts of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability positioned by your chosen films?

3 Can you name some examples of synergy (crossmarketing) associated with recent nostalgic Hollywood blockbusters?

Further Reading

Balio, Tino, ed. The American Film Industry. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

Kramer, Peter. The New Hollywood: From Bonnie and Clyde to Star Wars. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2005.

Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Lewis, Jon, ed. The New American Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.

Grainge, Paul. Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age. London and New York: Routledge, 2008.

116Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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Neale, Steve and Murray Smith. Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Ray, Robert. A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Schatz, Thomas. The Genius of the System. New York: Henry Holt, 1996.

Sklar, Robert. Movie-Made America. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

Wasko, Janet. Hollywood in the Information Age. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.

Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Wyatt, Justin. High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Further Screening

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)

Since You Went Away (1943)

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)

The Ten Commandments (1956)

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

117Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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Independence Day (1996)

Pleasantville (1998)

Gladiator (2000)

Lord of the Rings (2001–3)

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

118Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377. Created from csudh on 2020-02-07 15:50:45.

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