Hollywood Studios Research Articles

"Bring Hollywood Home! " Studio Labour, Nationalism and Internationalism, and Opposition to 'Runaway Production', 1948-2003

Since World War Two, Hollywood studio workers have been periodically buffeted by 'runaway production' as movie making left Southern California for Western Europe, other US regions, or Canada(2). Far from seeing themselves as beneficiaries of the global economy, workers have viewed this process as an attack on their standard of living. In what is seen by labour as a debilitating downward spiral, film workers in Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, London, Toronto, and Vancouver compete with each other to offer concessions to local filmmakers in the belief that it will secure their jobs. Since the 1990s, debate has intensified within the American labour movement on how best to challenge globalisation(3). Activists, arguing that labour must counteract capital's internationalism with labour internationalism, call for the formation of 'transnational' labour organisations. Labour historian Michael Hanagan and others, observing the activities of unions following the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1 992 detects a new repertoire of labor action(4). But both mainstream American labour, and Hollywood labour, have found it difficult to change settled patterns

Making the 'Studio Girl': The Hollywood Studio Club and Industry Regulation of Female Labour

Making the 'Studio Girl': The Hollywood Studio Club and Industry Regulation of Female Labour

A Tale of Bridges: Topology and Architecture

Topology, as its name indicates, is a (mathematical) way of conceiving of TOPOS: the place, the space, all space, and everything included in it. Jean- Michel Kantor evokes a few examples of forms and spaces which should be stimulating for all those interested in the concept of space, architects in particular. In topology, we no longer distinguish between two figures, two spaces, if you can pass from one to the other by means of a continuous deformation–with neither leap nor cut. Knots are a simple way of escaping from the obtuseness of space. Modern techniques of visualization developed for the military or for the Hollywood studios of Lucas Films can integrate the deformations on computer screens: the continued deformations of surfaces are discretized, that is, they are replaced by approximations produced at fixed intervals, then filmed in video. The time of the virtual corresponds to the era of topology, and architects are finding inspiration there.

An Integrated System for Digital Cinema Projection and Security

Several groups have been active in publicly setting expectations for the digital cinema manufacturing and exhibition communities; most notably the Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) sponsored by the seven major Hollywood studios. The successful commercial adoption of digital cinema rests on addressing three major concerns: image quality, content security, and cost This paper describes a range of developments that go a long way to addressing these major concerns. In the first section of the paper, a new projection system is described, utilizing Silicon Crystal Reflective Display technology, a development of Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS), which achieves superior contrast ratios, higher resolution, and longer device lifetimes, but benefits from simplified manufacturing, compared with conventional Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) panels. The second part of the paper discusses the integration of this projection system into a secure distribution system, along with the complete security and traceability strategy that needs to be applied to provide a sufficient level of protection to the very high-value digital content that is to be handled.

A history of the Hal Roach Studios

Labeled the lot that laughter built, the Hal Roach launched the comedic careers of such screen icons as Harold Lloyd, Our Gang, and Laurel and Hardy. With this stable of stars, the Roach enterprise operated for forty-six years on the fringes of the Hollywood studio system during a golden age of cinema. Many of its productions are better remembered today than those by its larger contemporaries. In A History of the Hal Roach Studios, Richard Lewis Ward meticulously follows the timeline of the company's existence from its humble inception in 1914 to its close in 1960 and, through both its obscure and famous productions, traces its resilience to larger trends in the entertainment business. Aided by a comprehensive filmography and production synopses, A History of the Hal Roach Studios recounts an overlooked chapter in American cinema, not only detailing the business operations of Roach's productions but also exposing the intricate workings of Hollywood's rivalrous moviemaking establishment.

Dynamic Analysis of an Institutional Conflict: Copyright Owners against Online File Sharing

Online music-sharing networks have been used by millions of people since they first appeared in 1999 (Leuf 2002; Associated Press 2004). The popularity of peer-to-peer (P2P) technology and the low-cost music distribution channel it created threaten the dominant position of a small number of large firms in the commercial music industry (Alexander 2002). Threatened by the possible restructuring of the entire industry in five to ten years (BBC 2002; Mann 2003), the dominant players responded with a fierce campaign against online copying. They oppose music-sharing networks on the grounds that the networks facilitate mass copyright infringement and erode industry's profits. This type of institutional response orchestrated by the incumbent economic players has precedents. Eighteenth century publishers in Great Britain resisted the emergence of public circulating libraries (Roehl and Varian 2000), and Hollywood studios perceived video technology when it first appeared in the late 1970s as a threat to their movie revenues (Roehl and Varian 2000; Alexander 2002). According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which represents music copyright owners, online file sharing causes a significant decline in CD sales and erodes the financial incentives for the production of new material (RIAA 2003). Several research studies, however, suggest that online file sharing may not have a negative effect on the music market (Alexander 2002). In a widely publicized study, Felix Oberholzer and Koleman Strumpf (2004) compared directly observed data on CD sales and downloading. They concluded that downloads have an effect on sales which is sta-

Created in Whose Image? Religious Characters on Network Television

Thirty-nine dramas and comedies from 7 networks broadcast September 23 to 29, 2002, were analyzed for the appearance of religious characters. Results suggest that TV characters' religiosity is not an important consideration for the networks as a whole. Nevertheless, over half of all religious characters were found on the 3 emerging networks, particularly on PAX and the WB. In addition, more than half of all religious characters appeared within the 7 networks' highest rated programs. On the other hand, corporate synergies between TV networks and Hollywood studios appear to have less direct influence on the amount of religious content a network airs than does the particular audience that the network is targeting.

The ‘dark prince’ and dream women: walt disney and mid-twentieth century american feminism

Walt Disney as an individual, as a film-maker, and as a studio head, increasingly has become the subject of respectable academic enquiry. Despite a number of balanced, scholarly publications which ...

Artists as Filmmakers in Los Angeles

Almost all the classic European avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s were visual artists who experimented with the new medium. Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter, and Walter Ruttmann in Germany, and Man Ray, Fernand Leger, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Salvador Dali in France all created alternatives to the industrial entertainment cinema by elaborating in film the principles of the various schools of modernist painting with which they were associated. The landmark American experimental film of the same period, Manhatta (1921), was similarly made by two visual artists in New York, Charles Sheeler, a painter, and Paul Strand, a photographer. In Los Angeles, however, avant-garde films were mostly made by artists who were themselves regularly employed in the industrial studios. Slavko Vorkapich, for example, one of the makers of a seminal American avant-garde film, The Life and Death of 9413—A Hollywood Extra (1928), began his career as a painter, and Boris Deutsch, the maker of the experimental short Lullaby (1929) and painter of a notable series of murals in the Post Office annex, made his living as a studio set designer. In these films, modernist aesthetic influences were mediated by thematic references to Hollywood as well as some incorporation of Hollywood studio production values and formal priorities, especially those reflecting the requirements of sutured narrative. But the effects of the development of sound technology on the one hand and the Depression on the other ended this para-industrial artists’ cinema in the U.S., and after the 1920s, Los Angeles artists only occasionally worked in film. (One notable exception, however, was the painter Sara Kathryn Arledge, who made several films and also wrote a history of experimental cinema.)1

'The Only Place Where ''Success'' Comes before ''Work'' Is in the Dictionary...?'

'The Only Place Where ''Success'' Comes before ''Work'' Is in the Dictionary...?'

Coming attractions: A comparative history of the Hollywood Studio System and the porn business

Coming attractions: A comparative history of the Hollywood Studio System and the porn business

Lurking in the Shadows: Toshia Mori and Lotus Long, Exploring Their Enigmatic Careers (Part I)

Toshia Mori and Lotus Long barely register with today’s cinéphiles, unless they happen to be aficionados of some the more obscure films of the 1930s. These two Asian-American actors worked mainly in low-budget productions, often consigned to sundry China doll and native-girl parts. Given the ideological milieu and casting constraints of a predominately Euro-American system, hopes for better parts and the possibility of achieving stardom were repeatedly frustrated and denied. Their experiences in Hollywood reflected the paradox between representing Asian sexual stereotypes on the screen and economic survival in a competitive industry notorious for its chronic unemployment. Despite their appearances in a couple of milestone classics, film historians have unfairly neglected the achievements of these two early Asian players. This two-installment discussion on Toshia Mori and Lotus Long will separately chronicle and critique their respective careers in the Hollywood studio system. In addition to examining their films and roles, a perusal of their neglected peers/male co-stars, B-filmmaking culture, and the system’s representational-casting practices will attempt to reconstruct and contextualize some of the fragments of their careers.

Lurking in the Shadows: Toshia Mori and Lotus Long, Exploring Their Enigmatic Careers (Part II)

Toshia Mori and Lotus Long barely register with today’s cinéphiles, unless they happen to be aficionados of some the more obscure films of the 1930s. These two Asian-American actors worked mainly in low-budget productions, often consigned to sundry China doll and native-girl parts. Given the ideological milieu and casting constraints of a predominately Euro-American system, hopes for better parts and the possibility of achieving stardom were repeatedly frustrated and denied. Their experiences in Hollywood reflected the paradox between representing Asian sexual stereotypes on the screen and economic survival in a competitive industry notorious for its chronic unemployment. Despite their appearances in a couple of milestone classics, film historians have unfairly neglected the achievements of these two early Asian players. This two-installment discussion on Toshia Mori and Lotus Long will separately chronicle and critique their respective careers in the Hollywood studio system. In addition to examining their films and roles, a perusal of their neglected peers/male co-stars, B-filmmaking culture, and the system’s representational-casting practices will attempt to reconstruct and contextualize some of the fragments of their careers.

Perceptual reality and the disappearing Hollywood studio libraries

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Charles and Mirella Joan Affron, Sets in Motion (New Brunswick, NJ, 1995), p. 10. The Internet Movie Database generously lists Michelson with seven credits. Steven Prince, True lies: perceptual realism, digital images and film theory, Film Quarterly, 49:3 (1996), p. 32. Sharon Begley, Here come the dinosaurs, Newsweek, 14 June 1993, p. 57. Ibid., p. 31. Jennifer Hillner, Fighting fire, Wired, July 2002, p. 70. The 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, and Michelson Collections have all, at one point or another, been the focus of one (or more) petition drives. Amy Wallace, A collection gets shelved, Los Angeles Times, 5 March 2000, Sunday Calendar section, p. 30. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 34. Camplin suggests that for many years, the librarians, being products of the Depression, were feeding their own compulsive need to keep everything For a more in‐depth treatment of ethnoknowledges, see David Hess, Science & Technology in a Multicultural World: the cultural politics of facts & artifacts (New York, 1995), pp. 185–210. Ralph Bulmer, Why is the Cassowary not a bird? A problem of zoological taxonomy among the Karam of the New Guinea Highlands, Man, 2:1 (1967), p. 8. Technically, there are also other reasons in the Karam taxonomy that the Cassowary is not considered a bird: sheer size is a factor (it is much larger than other birds the Karam have experience with) and because of its flightless nature, the Cassowary's bone structure is not like that of other birds (p. 10). Wallace, A collection gets shelved, p. 34. One of the rare pleasant categories she has added recently is ‘parties’, in which she puts invitations, decorations, images of lavish galas and small birthday celebrations. ‘I'm doing this for five centuries ahead’, she says, when people won't remember how something as basic as a party looked in the old days of the 20th century. Keep in mind the tremendous amount of work involved. It wasn't as if the librarians went out and bought copies of 12 books about Pearl Harbor for Tora, Tora, Tora!—they made them from scratch. Furthermore, many of the books made by researchers are physically large (so they contain more information than a more conventionally‐sized volume). Currently, the library uses standard‐size three‐ring binders, but some of the older books are much bigger—11"×14" at least. It turns out to involve a nail covered in old rattlesnake venom puncturing the victim's boot. Justin Wyatt, High Concept: movies and marketing in Hollywood (Austin, 1994), p. 12. Affron and Affron, Sets in Motion, p. 41. Vincent LoBrutto, By Design: interviews with film production designers (Westport, 1992), p. 60. Stephanie Schwam, The Making of 2001: a space odyssey (New York, 2000), p. 131. Ibid., pp. 132–133. All quotes are from interviews conducted during this and other recent ethnographic research projects. William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: visual truth in the post‐photographic era (Cambridge, MA, 1992), p. 27. Charles Tashiro, Pretty Pictures: production design and the history Film (Austin, 1998), p. 7. Ibid., p. 88. Ibid., p. 13. Wallace, A collection gets shelved, p. 33. LoBrutto, By Design, p. 176. Ibid., p. 105. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (New York, 1983), p. 4. While this may well be true, Eco is slightly disingenuous by pegging this solely on the heads of Americans; I doubt Europeans would react well to a reproduction of the Mona Lisa wearing a halter top.

Journeys to the Self: Using Movie Directors in the Classroom

This article suggests that temporary (project based) filmmaking organizations, and film directors as their leaders, lend themselves to examining a plethora of leadership issues, from social sources of power to competencies in network organizations. It advances for classroom discussion and teaching the cases of Almodóvar and Coppola as examples of idiosyncratic filmmakers in a “subsidy-trapped,” craft like European cinema versus a gross and agent-driven Hollywood studio system. The article concludes with a discussion of the journey metaphor as a unique opportunity to look at the philosophical problem of the meaning of life and the achievement of consistency and continuity in one’s trajectory.

Is There a British Film Industry?

At first sight, Select Committee Reports may not appear to be the most interesting of reading. However, especially when taken together with their associated written and oral evidence, they are extremely useful for unearthing a great deal of data and prompting revealing discussions. And so it is with the House of Commons Culture Media and Sport Committee’s Report (House of Commons 2003a,b,c) which was the result of the question which the Committee posed in November 2002: ‘Is there a British film industry?’ Thus, for example, we learn that in 2002 the British film industry brought in £532 million. The biggest contributors were 19 films made for the major Hollywood studios, which contributed £234 million; 42 indigenous features brought in £165 million; and 43 films shot abroad under co-production treaties £133 million. In the last five years UK films generated up to £1.7 billion in overseas and £1.1 billion in domestic investment. These figures led the Committee to conclude that, although it would prefer the industry’s main activity to be ‘indigenous production of films about Britain, a substantial proportion of which break out to achieve success in the global market’ (2003a: 3), it felt that:

Selling French Films on Foreign Markets: The International Strategy of a Medium-Sized Film Company

Foreign markets largely shaped the business strategy of Les Films Albatros, a medium-sized, internationally networked specialty producer of films in interwar France. Depending more on foreign revenues than did the Hollywood studios, Albatros also realized higher gross returns. Because films were capital goods providing a perishable product (seats at a specific time), their price depended on both expected performance and the threshold ticket-selling capacity necessary to recoup cinema fixed costs; some films could not be sold at any price. Given the small potential market for its films, Albatros had to find an intricate balance between producing at low cost and delivering films with at least threshold ticket-selling capacity. It did so by differentiating its films, entering film distribution in France, coproducing internationally, and cooperating with Pathé and Gaumont, the two largest French film companies. While its larger European rivals were obsessed with operational effectiveness vis-à-vis Hollywood, Albatros, by adopting a distinct strategic position, hardly had to pay attention to operational effectiveness at all. It was making a differentiated product for needs unserved by Hollywood.

Selling French Films on Foreign Markets: The International Strategy of a Medium-Sized Film Company

Foreign markets largely shaped the business strategy of Les Films Albatros, a medium-sized, internationally networked specialty producer of films in interwar France. Depending more on foreign revenues than did the Hollywood studios, Albatros also realized higher gross returns. Because films were capital goods providing a perishable product (seats at a specific time), their price depended on both expected performance and the threshold ticket-selling capacity necessary to recoup cinema fixed costs; some films could not be sold at any price. Given the small potential market for its films, Albatros had to find an intricate balance between producing at low cost and delivering films with at least threshold ticket-selling capacity. It did so by differentiating its films, entering film distribution in France, coproducing internationally, and cooperating with Pathé and Gaumont, the two largest French film companies. While its larger European rivals were obsessed with operational effectiveness vis-à-vis Hollywood, Albatros, by adopting a distinct strategic position, hardly had to pay attention to operational effectiveness at all. It was making a differentiated product for needs unserved by Hollywood.

Movies Were Always Magical: Interviews with 19 Actors, Directors, and Producers from the Hollywood of the 1930s through the 1950s (review)

Leo Verswijver. Movies Were Always Magical: Interviews with 19 Actors, Directors, and Producers from the Hollywood of the 1930s through the 1950s. McFarland, 2003. 264 pages; $35.00. Greater Depth Verswijver's are really more than that. Eliminating his own prompting questions from a series of conventional interviews (conducted from 1999 through 2002) and arranging his subjects' commentary into memoir-like reflections upon a generally coherent set of concerns integrated with his own accounts of their career highlights, Verswijver manages to create profiles of considerably greater depth and interest than generally possible in conventional (and usually tedious) interview dialogues. Unfortunately, the full value of this virtue is a bit compromised by the volume's arrangement of its subjects in simple alphabetical order. Ordering them thematically or according to an echelon of some sort might have lifted these profiles into something like a broader coherent vision of Hollywood's golden era. As things stand, with Pat Boone at one end and Fred Zinnemann at the other, we are left with just miscellaneous glimpses of it. Nonetheless, these are glimpses worth getting, especially for their cultural value. Take Boone, for example. There may not be much cinematic value in knowing the pieties that guided Pat Boone's career decisions as a film-idol though the fifties and sixties, but certainly there is some cultural value to knowing them. As a true anti-Elvis, Boone's authentic Christian wholesomeness was (and remains) famous, and it will surely be astonishing to most present and future readers to discover the tolerance the Hollywood studios of Boone's day had for his scruples. Defying the obligations of his contract with 20th Century Fox in adamantly refusing on moral grounds to play the part of a wayward Catholic priest (probably more for the Papist association than the moral questionability), Boone managed through his sheer stubbornness to win a concessionary assignment to Journey to the Center of the Earth-which he also refused until being won over by the award of fifteen percent of the film's revenue and the promise of having Verne's science fiction tale turned into a bit of a musical! Incredible as it may seem, there was once a time in America when wholesomeness could be big box office, and in fact (at least according to Boone), the wholesome Boone-suffused Journey was so successful that it literally saved Fox from the bankruptcy-threatening production disaster of Richard Burton's and Liz Taylor's steamy Cleopatra. It is no wonder that Boone's view of contemporary film is deeply fixated on what he considers the regrettable moral and marketing error of passing up G-rated entertainment. However skeptical most of us might now be of such a view (as simply quaint or falsely nostalgic), the sheer authenticity and intensity of the extended pontification that constitutes the bulk of Boone's profile makes it impossible to imagine that he and Hollywood could have collaborated as successfully as they did on any but his terms. Apparently, it was once really true, not just imagined, in America that wholesomeness sold. This is a revelation worth documenting and preserving against the glib erasures of our ever-increasing jadedness. Similarly valuable testimonies come from others. …

Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Movies (review)

Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner. Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Movies. The New Press, 2OO2. 46O pages; $29.95. Sympathetic to the Left Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, building upon the ideas introduced in their biography of leftist screenwriter and film director Abraham Polonsky, assert that many classical Hollywood studio films produced between the early 1930s and late 1940s, before implementation of the blacklist, constitute a body of work reflecting the progressive values of radical screenwriters often associated with the Communist Party. The authors, focusing upon such genres as the Western, gangster, horror, family, combat, and woman's films, argue that Hollywood screenwriters on the left were able to successfully incorporate into studio-era films storylines celebrating the triumph of common working people over the upper class and exploitive capitalist values. In developing this thesis, Buhle and Wagner, who are obviously sympathetic to the left, appear to support the accusations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and anti-communist cultural critics who maintain that Hollywood communists posed a subversive threat through their influence over film content. Indeed, Buhle and Wagner reserve their harshest criticism for Hollywood liberals rather than right-wing politicians and cultural figures. Radical Hollywood refutes the claim of studio executives and liberals that leftist screenwriters failed to control the means of production within the studio system and, thus, were unable to inoculate their political messages into the films upon which they worked. Buhle and Wagner, seeking to empower the screenwriters, such as Howard Lawson, Michael Wilson, and John Bright, upon whom Radical Hollywood focuses its narrative, insist that Hollywood's progressive writers were able to insert their politics into cinema. The authors, however, do acknowledge that studio executives often grafted Hollywood endings onto films, somewhat negating the issues of race, gender, and class raised by the writers. Also, Buhle and Wagner insist that the Hollywood left was not comprised of hack artists who blindly followed the Communist Party line articulated by officials on the East Coast. In publications such as the Hollywood Quarterly, leftists in the film industry, along with academics, sought to articulate a film aesthetic which would incorporate more complex political ideas into popular film. …