Crossroads

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Remembering Little Richard

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Sir Alfred Defects

Mary Pickford: Hollywood Legend

Carl Laemmle: Universal Legend

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Universal Studios

Universal Studios: In The Beginning

Long before Universal Studios became The Entertainment Capital of LA, it was a modestly successful chicken ranch. And before then it was housed in a modest warehouse in Fort Lee, NJ. Why Fort Lee? It was the original “Hollywood,” mainly due to its proximity to Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park headquarters. It would be this proximity and bad wintry weather that would become Fort Lee’s undoing. While we picture a kindly, mad scientist when we think of Thomas Edison, the real life gentleman was a ruthless businessman who abused his patents and demanded huge royalties for his camera equipment. Not content with just selling the equipment to the studios, Edison demanded exorbitant royalties as well. Imagine if Apple required you to pay them a fee every time you posted a picture taken on an iPhone online; that was what Edison wanted to do if you used one of his cameras. Studios who ran afoul of Mr. Edison would be visited by his thugs who would rough up staff and destroy sets until they collected Mr. Edison’s royalty checks. This is not an exaggeration; Edison really ran his company this way.

It didn’t take long for the movie studios to flee out west to evade Edison and his goons. Los Angeles provided a more hospitable year round climate and enough distance from Edison to provide a safer business environment. One of the first to immigrate to Los Angeles was Carl Laemmle’s Universal Pictures. Mr. Laemmle’s ambitions always seemed to be constrained by his lack of funding. While he was more or less successful, his studio always seemed a bit undercapitalized. Upon his arrival in Hollywood, he bought a parcel of land in North Hollywood that he christened “Universal City” but it soon became clear that the property would be too small for his ambitious plans. Mr. Laemmle sold the parcel and bought what was then a chicken ranch north of Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley. This huge ranch was more befitting of the Universal City name.

This time, Carl Laemmle incorporated his property as an actual city, setting up a privately owned government to operate the vast property. At the time, this was more of a publicity stunt than an actual desire to run a city, but the gambit worked, putting Universal Pictures on the map. It was a far cry from today’s massive operation, but the seeds for the current studio and theme park were firmly planted in the sandy Los Angeles soil.

The Biz: Columbia Studios

The Blockbuster Era: Close Encounters

Hollywood in Transition: Cleopatra

The Golden Era: Jack’s Error

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Fake Film Stuff!

Anything Goes!

The Biz: Universal Studios Tour

The Blockbuster Era: The Exorcist

Hollywood in Transition: Ben-Hur

The rise of television sent Hollywood into a tailspin. With television providing free entertainment in people’s homes, The motion picture industry had to figure out ways to get people to leave their houses and drive to theaters. Hollywood decided to return to its days of historic and religious epics.

Huge epics like Ben-Hur brought out audiences by giving them something they couldn’t get on a small television screen. This proved to be unsustainable since the large budgets made them bigger risks.

James Lipton, 1926 - 2020

The Golden Age of Hollywood: The Rank & File

While the studio system is often derided as giving too much control and wealth to Hollywood’s moguls instead of the actual creative types, the system actually provided a stable source of income for below the fold types.

B-List types and character actors often have to hustle these days for work. “That Guy” and “That Girl” actors often frequently pop up on television and in movies these days because they have to work to put food on the table. During Hollywood’s golden age, however, most everyone in the studio lot was a full time employee of the studio. Everyone from A-List movie stars to utility actors received a weekly paycheck and benefits. A contract player at MGM would sign a seven year contract which guaranteed him or her a steady paycheck regardless of whether they worked that week or not.

Today, most talent is hired on a contingency basis. If an actor wants to get paid, he or she must hustle for work. Back then, they were salaried employees for the studio. The studio didn’t do this out of the kindness of their hearts; during Hollywood’s golden age, the major studios could sell pretty much anything they could produce. As a result, the production of motion pictures had been turned into an assembly line process. Having a ready to go stable of actors who could be called upon at a moment’s notice to act in a picture was a cost effective way to keep movie production going.

While this provided a stable income for many, some of the biggest stars chafed under this system. In order to stay on the good side of the powers that were, they had to do as they were told. If they didn’t want to make a particular picture, it was too bad; if they wanted to keep working they had to do it. Studio titans could punish big names by denying them the opportunity to make another picture. As long as the studio kept issuing the paychecks and were following the terms of the contract, the actor had no recourse. The collapse of the studio system put power into the hands of the big name talent.

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Anything Goes

The Biz

The Blockbuster Era

Hollywood in Transition

The Golden Age of Hollywood

Blind Kiyomi Posting Schedule

Remembering Ja’net DuBois

Kellye Nakahara, 1950 - 2020

Road House Valentines

Remembering Kirk Douglas

Kirk Douglas, 1916 - 2020

Ray Bolger

The Studio Tour

Movie Weekends

Movie Trivia

Movie Deep Dive: The Industry Changes, Part 5

The collapse of the studio system and the Hayes Code ushered in a new golden age of filmmaking. Freed from the bonds of censorship and producer interference, a new generation of directors seized the new freedom and began making the type of films that their predecessors could only dream about. Under the studio system, directors were just another cog in the machine; forced by contract to make whatever they were assigned. The 1970’s ushered in a new era where directors could fully realize their visions.

Not everyone in Hollywood was happy about this new freedom, however. Many holdovers from the original golden era bemoaned the new films as vulgar, disgusting and obscene. They predicted that the public would eventually revolt against Hollywood and motion pictures would become a thing of the past. This obviously proved to be untrue, but the rift between old and new Hollywood would continue.

While adult themes would permit Hollywood to make cost effective, profitable pictures that would attract mature audiences, it was still willing to make big budget blockbusters that could get massive audiences into theaters. The film that would usher in the modern day era of blockbusters was Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. The film was a sensation, setting the stage for lavish, special effects laden movies. The film’s success showed that a sane balance between big budget films and quieter movies could be found.

Today, Hollywood seems to be at another crossroads. After Martin Scorsese’s recent comments about super hero films pushing out the quieter motion pictures, some media outlets seized upon his statements and gave them extensive coverage. Is Iron Man ruining the motion picture industry?

The answer is arguably no. The current state of motion pictures is more likely affected by the recent “peak television” phenomenon. Basic cable and streaming services are producing massive amounts of television shows that feature the sort of mature content that could only be found in motion pictures just ten years ago. Cable television has always been free to show whatever it wanted, but with the exception of premium channels, it never took advantage of this freedom. In the last ten years, however, basic cable has tested the waters by including  profanity, nudity and adult themes in its programming. This has reduced the audience for these types of theatrical releases. Why go to a theater when you can get this type of programming at home with the push of a button? Faced with this situation, the studios are merely repeating history; offering moviegoers something they can’t quite replicate at home. Will this be sustainable this time? Only time will tell.

Movie Deep Dive: The Industry Changes, Part 4

With potential censorship issues resolved, Hollywood went back to work making motion pictures. The golden age of Hollywood and its studio system was on its last legs. This time the threat came from television. Today, nearly every major studio produces both films and television series. In television’s early years, however, major studios refused to produce programming for television. After all, why would they want to arm their mortal enemy? As studio titans worried about how they could protect their turf from this nefarious device that provided free programming in people’s houses, one titan decided to embrace television and use it to his advantage- Walt Disney.

Mr. Disney originally stood with his fellow studio heads in spurning television’s advances. However, he had big plans to diversify his company’s business and he saw that television could assist him with that. Walt Disney was certain DISNEYLAND was going to change the way families vacationed together, but he needed money and to get the word out about what he was building in Anaheim, California. ABC provided him with both. This initial “betrayal” angered Hollywood’s other moguls, but the sound business reasons for Mr. Disney’s decision would setup his company to become the behemoth it is today.

Other studios, reluctant to follow Disney’s lead, chose to start making films that television couldn’t compete with. Utilizing the full sized theater screens, Hollywood was soon awash in huge, budget busting spectacles. The most expensive and notorious of these films was Cleopatra, which almost took down Twentieth-Century-Fox. Obviously, this was not a sustainable way to deal with the upheaval Hollywood faced. So how could the studios provide a more cost effective way to get people out their houses and into theaters to see their latest films? To put it bluntly, tits and ass.

Adult themes couldn’t be shown on television, but maybe it would be possible to show them in a theater. The studios just needed to come up with a replacement for the aging Hayes Code. Thus the current rating system was created. This would allow filmmakers to depict themes that were unthinkable with the Hayes Code. The rating system would give a clear guideline to the public about what to expect from a film, opening the world of cinema up to new visions. Would audiences warm up to adult themes? They would.

One of the early successes of “New Cinema” was Easy Rider. The film was a massive success, making millions of dollars on a shoestring budget. Hollywood saw the future and it was edgy, auteur driven and in the eyes of old Hollywood- profane.