The Golden Age
Over the next 12 years, the US economy nearly collapsed as unemployment went from 2% to 25%, causing people to lose their homes and life’s savings. Movie attendance drops dramatically. This was especially problematic as the Hollywood Studios had just spent $300 million converting the entire industry to sound.
So, to get audiences to come back to the theaters, the studios tried everything:
But the studios also emphasized something in films they knew audiences would come to see:
These films, and others like them, reflected the permissive cultural attitudes of the time, and it made perfect business sense during the Great Depression.
This period, between 1930 – 1934, is known as Pre-Code Hollywood.
But by the 1930s, it was well known to conservative groups that there was a generation of American children who grew up with movies and didn't know a world without them.
This inspired a study by the Payne Fund, researched during 1929-1932, which was published under the name "Our movie made children."
And it concluded, correctly or incorrectly, that movies did influence the thinking and day-to-day conduct of children. And not in a positive way.
Studio executives were freaking out over the possibility of boycotts! And the last thing they wanted was the government censoring movies.
In June of 1934, the Hays Code gets real. Hays appoints prominent Catholic Joseph Breen to head the new Production Code Administration.
Shot in the early Technicolor System 1, two-strip process.
Business conditions in which a small number of companies cooperate to close the market to competition.
a.k.a. The Majors
a.k.a. The Minors
The largest & wealthiest studio, MGM, accounted for 75% of all studio profits from 1931 to 1940
Studio chief - Louis B. Mayer - In the 1930s, he was the highest-paid business executive in the US
Production head - Irving Thalberg (26) - Shaped the MGM style
MGM films embraced middle class American values.
MGM films were also known for:
High Key Lighting: an overall lighting design that uses strong fill and backlight to create low contrast between lighter and darker aspects of the image.
Considered the most European studio, Paramount was the cinema of half-light and suggestion; witty, intelligent, and faintly corrupt.
Warners had also been borrowing and expanding during the late 1920s. When the Depression hit, they sold off holdings and cut costs. Harry Warner, who ran the company from New York, insisted on making more films on lower budgets.
As such, Warner Brothers films featured:
Gangster Film were a Warner Bros. specialty. The role of Tom Powers is James Cagney’s breakthrough to stardom. William Wellman Directs 15 films for WB from 1931-33.
Choreographer-director Busby Berkeley, revolutionizes movie musicals in the 1930s.
Darryl F. Zanuck
Once Bill Robinson was hired for the film, this staircase dance was written into the script to showcase his talents.
Astaire and Rogers made nine films together at RKO.
The Swing Time score by Kern and Fields includes three songs that have become standards:
However, it was RKO’s distribution deal with Walt Disney, to release Disney’s animated films, that kept RKO profitable during this time. Snow White was the highest-grossing film of 1938
Carl Laemmle, Sr. with Carl Laemmle, Jr.
Laemmle, Sr. made his son head of production in 1929 at age 21.
Since the 1920s, German filmmakers worked across Hollywood. Their influence was especially strong at Universal, known for its Expressionist Horror films.
Harry Cohn and Frank Capra
Columbia also made a film considered one of the best screwball comedies of all time.
Like the studios, they signed film artists to long-term personal service contracts. They made expensive films (“A pictures”) comparable to the Majors but relied on the studios for
distribution of their product.
Despite sound becoming standard practice in the 1930s, the movie considered the first modern sound film arrived the following decade in 1941.
Welles became attracted to the idea of a thinly disguised story of a famous American. Writer Herman Mankiewicz suggested a perfect subject: Newspaper tycoon, William Randolph Hearst.
"The motion picture business as a whole had no concept of the possibility of sound, and when you fall into a pattern, it becomes difficult to deviate from that pattern because it costs money..."
Welles wanted the audience to hear the film the same way they see the visuals, as one would do in real life, so the film manipulates audio space in the same dramatic way the camera manipulates visual space. which is why Citizen Kane is considered the first modern sound film.
At Hearst’s urging, MGM boss Louis B. Mayer offered RKO $800,000 for the film, so he could destroy the negative and all the prints.
RKO president George Schaefer declined, without consulting his board, as he had reason to believe they would have told him to accept the offer.
Hearst forbade his newspapers to run advertisements or reviews of the film, and the movie theaters he controlled were not allowed to show the film.
The film was withdrawn from circulation until the mid-1950s when it played the art house circuit and finally earned its due.