Hollywood Studios Research Articles

Drama without Drama

This article revisits the history of television (TV) formats—concepts of TV shows that are licensed for local adaptations—focusing on scripted entertainment. While the TV format revolution of the 1990s bypassed scripted formats, they have been catching up in recent years. This article analyzes both the reasons for this late rise and the factors behind the recent growth. It argues that the adaptation of scripted formats is more complex, and risks remain higher than for other genres. The underlying economics of their production and distribution also differ from nonscripted formats. The stars aligned when demand for drama increased worldwide, Hollywood studios began to mine their catalogues, new exporters and scripted genres emerged, and knowledge transfer techniques improved. Finally, this paper analyzes the significance of the rise of scripted entertainment in the global TV format trading system.

Filmmaking in Illinois

The focus of this article is to provide guidance for general practitioners and entertainment attorneys in independent filmmaking. In addition, the tax benefits of filming in the State of Illinois are highlighted. The purpose of this article is to set out basic information and guidance for general practitioners, entertainment attorneys, filmmakers in general and independent filmmakers in particular, to avoid potential minefields. Independent filmmaking where producers work outside the Hollywood studio system requires a detailed plan, a bevy of contracts and creativity to attract financing and successful production. Attorneys are a crucial part of the production team at the very beginning. Filmmakers regularly need legal advice and protection in the form of written contracts such as clearances, releases, licenses and much more.

Frozen in Hollywood: Postwar Film Policy and the New Power-Geometry of Globalizing Production Labor

Since the end of World War II, the Hollywood motion picture industry has become increasingly dependent on overseas markets for exhibition revenues and production services. As a result, the authority of Hollywood's production unions has deteriorated as outsourcing and flexible specialization have become the growth engines of a globalizing industry (Storper & Christopherson, 1987). In this article, I chart the shifting power-geometry (Massey, 1984) of Hollywood labor in the postwar period through an analysis of published debates over the Anglo-American Film Pact of 1948 and 1950. On its surface, the Anglo-American Film Pact was created to define terms by which the Hollywood studios could collect rental fees ‘frozen’ by the cash poor United Kingdom following World War II. However, the policy had far-reaching implications for the future direction of the motion picture industry, and specifically production labor. As depicted within trade and popular press coverage of the Film Pact, we see Hollywood's unions coming to terms with the limitations of an emerging international division of motion picture production labor, including diminishing control over labor mobility and the means of production.

“The Greatest Exploitation Special Ever”: <em>Destination Moon</em> and Postwar Independent Distribution

Eagle-Lion, an independent film producer and distributor from 1946 to 1951, attempted to compete with the major Hollywood studios by releasing inexpensive films known as programmers that had a unique marketing angle. One of the most successful of these was Destination Moon (1950), which initiated the 1950s boom in science-fiction cinema. The film’s semidocumentary mode was intended to broaden its appeal by differentiating it from more juvenile and fantastic examples of the genre. Despite Destination Moon ’s strong performance, Eagle-Lion was unable to achieve sustained success, due in part to the major studios’ continued control of distribution and exhibition.

FROM GREENWICH VILLAGE TO HOLLYWOOD: THE LITERARY APPRENTICESHIP OF SONYA LEVIEN

AbstractSonya Levien (1888–1960) achieved a modicum of fame and fortune by writing stories and screenplays for Hollywood studios beginning in 1922 and ending only with her death. Her remarkable story began as the daughter of the immigrant working class and represents a narrative that took her from Greenwich Village to Hollywood. This essay explores her coming of age during the 1910s and, consequently, the process through which America invited those at the fringes to join in defining its national and civic creed. Herein lays the significance of Sonya Levien to an understanding of progressivism. By bridging the divides that separated Americans into groups defined by gender, class, ethnicity, and even politics, Levien engaged a number of the major issues of her day.

Hollywood Under Siege: Recent Books on Hollywood and Censorship

Reforming Hollywood: How American Protestants Fought for Freedom at the Movies, by William D. Romanowski. New York, Oxford University Press, 2012. xv, 298 pp. $31.95 US (cloth). J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood's Cold War, by John Sbardellati. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2012. viii, 256 pp. $27.95 US (cloth). The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler, by Ben Urwand. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2013. 327 pp. $26.95 (cloth). There are two popular narratives about the much-abused Hollywood studio system. On the one hand, scholars from David Bordwell to Thomas Schatz have looked at its remarkable durability from the 1920s through the 1960s. For over thirty years, film production remained stable with a range of popular genres and stars, individual studios developed house styles, and above- and below-the-line talent often worked for the same studio for decades. Today, many filmmakers in Hollywood sigh for the lost golden age, the punch cards, the studio commissary, and regular employment. Hollywood films got American audiences through the Great Depression and World War II, with everyone from Shirley Temple to Frank Capra pitching in to articulate how we survived and why we fought. Studio-era Hollywood may have had to coexist with a certain amount of censorship and flack about block-booking and breaking anti-trust laws, but the Production Code Administration (PCA) was an industry-generated organization and did not really get in the way of great filmmaking. It was the government, via antitrust suits and anticommunist witch hunts, which really broke the Hollywood studio system. This narrative points to the other tendency within Hollywood film histories covering the period from 1930 through the 1950s. This is a darker story of censorship, FBI spying, government inquiries, anti-Semitism, anti-communism, the breakup of the integrated production-distribution-exhibition business model, and the overall decline of Hollywood. This is a history of Hollywood under siege. This second narrative produces and sells far more academic and popular books than the first. Ben Urwand (The Collaboration, 2013), William D. Romanowski (Reforming Hollywood, 2012), and John Sbardellati (J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies, 2012) position themselves as revisionist film historians whose works are based on revelations from rarely explored archival collections. Urwand and Romanowski go further and argue that their books depart from the dominant discourse and historiography on their subjects, forcing a major reconsideration of how we think about questions of industry machinations and censorship. Yet these two monographs often fail to engage adequately with other scholarly research on their subjects. Sbardellati, by contrast, integrates archival finds in the FBI files with astute analysis of other critical contributions in film history. His work also intersects with wider studies of media censorship, Cold War historiography, and discourses of neoliberalism, power, and containment. After the media storm generated by Ben Urwand's The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler, I risk repeating what other reviewers have said at perhaps too great length. Urwand's first book dramatically departs from accepted histories of this period by arguing that the rosy picture of Harry Warner and Louis B. Mayer secretly raising American awareness of the dangers of Nazism through films like Black Legion (1937), Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), Escape (1940), and Sergeant York (1941) was whitewashing the awful truth. In fact, he argues, the studio heads willingly collaborated with German officials to cut (read censor) their pictures to suit Nazi agendas. Urwand also departed from the research practices of many established names in this field by going to the National Archives in Washington, and further afield to Germany, to trace the remaining paper trail of the studios' foreign distribution offices. …

The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler

<i>The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler</i>

할리우드 영화의 장르별 수용 : 한국 영화시장에서의 문화적 할인현상을 중심으로1

문화적 할인은 할리우드 영화가 해외 관객의 수용자의 문화적 취향에 따라서 수용이 다르게 나타남을 강조하고 있다. 이와 같은 이해를 바탕으로 이 연구는 한국 내에서 할리우드 영화의 수용이 장르별로 어떻게 다르게 나타나는 지를 분석하였다. 분석대상은 2008년부터 2010년까지 미국에서 1백만 달러 이상의 흥행실적을 거둔 할리우드 영화이며, 이들 영화 중 한국에서 개봉된 영화의 비율 및 흥행성과 등을 중심으로 장르별 수용이 어떻게 차별화되는 지를 고찰하였다. 분석결과를 보면, 할리우드 영화가 한국에서 개봉된 비율은 59.6%이며, 평균보다 낮은 비율로 개봉된 장르는 코미디(46.2%)와 다큐멘터리(20%)뿐이었다. 제작비와 장르의 특성을 고려하면, 할리우드 영화 중 제작비 투자가 많은 장르의 경우 한국 내 개봉비율 또한 높게 나타났다. 또한 미국에서의 흥행실적이 높을수록 한국에서도 흥행실적이 높게 나타나며, 제작비 투입이 높을수록 1개의 영화에 다양한 장르적 요소를 포함하여 제작하는 복합장르화 현상이 발견되었다. 이와 같이 제작비, 미국에서의 흥행실적, 복합장르화 등의 영향력을 통제할 때 할리우드 영화의 수입 후 수용자 수준에서는 문화적 할인이 흥행성에 미치는 효과가 통계적으로 유의미한 나타나지 않았다. 연구의 의의와 한계가 같이 논의 되었다. This study has examined genre tastes of Hollywood movies in Korea. A concept of cultural discount suggests that Hollywood film in foreign countries would be received differently according to its specific attributes. Following the suggestion of cultural discount, this study examines how local reception of Hollywood movies is different in Korea, focusing on film genre, production budget, and U.S. box office. The results show that genres are useful variables for such analysis, indicating that certain film genres are indeed suffering from relatively high cultural discount at the level of Hollywood movie import/distribution. Comedy, specifically, constitutes the crucial particularistic movie genre. However, this study does not find out any significant effect of movie genres on the box office in Korea, controlling the effect of U.S. box office and production budget. As Hollywood studios have recently produced multi-genre movies rather than genre-specific movies to induce a variety of audience who have different movie tastes, the influences of cultural discount disappeared among imported Hollywood movies in Korea. This study also reveals that Hollywood movies of high production budget and of successful U.S. box office are more preferred in Korea.

The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler BenUrwand. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013.

The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler Ben Urwand. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013.This book has aroused a huge controversy among academic scholars, some of whom arc demanding that Harvard University Press review its publication of the book. Much of the debate stems from academic claims that Urwand's book is deeply anti-Semitic in many of the assorted claims that the author, a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, presents throughout the book.The reader can decide whether or not The Collaboration warrants all this negative attention. It is a fascinating story and well-written, a book that one will find difficult to put down. The title of the book describes correctly what the author's thesis is: the between the Nazis and the Hollywood film community, especially the producers, over the making of films that would be acceptable to the Germans. The author does not say anything that most film scholars have not said (or known) before, namely the methods that Hollywood employed to keep the lucrative German film market open by the Nazis during the 1930s, after Hitler took power, through World War II. In order to continue doing business in Germany after Hitler's ascent to power, Hollywood studios agreed not to make films that attacked the Nazis or condemned Germany's persecution of Jews. Urwand reveals this bargain as a collaboration (Zusammenarbeit) that drew in a cast of characters ranging from notorious German political leaders such as Goebbels to Hollywood studio heads such as Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner.Central to the story is Hitler himself, who was obsessed with movies (he saw one almost nightly) and who recognized the power of film to shape public opinion. The Prologue discusses the making of King Kong (1933) and its eventual reception in Germany where it became one of Hitler's favorite films. He was captivated by the story, discussed it often, and had it screened several times. Other chapters are just as illuminating, such as the first chapter (Hitler's Obsession with Film) which details how Hollywood desperately sought approval by the German film censors to show the antiwar film, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), in Germany and to show it without censorship. The film's plot is not sympathetic to Germany's loss in World War I so understandably there was concern on the film's reception in that country. In December 1930, his Party rioted against the Berlin screening of All Quiet on the Western Front, which led to a chain of unfortunate events and decisions that lasted over a decade.Fearful of losing access to the German market, all of the Hollywood studios started making concessions to the German government, and, when Hitler came to power in January 1933, the studios, many of them headed by Jews, began dealing with his representatives directly (37). …

Tarnishing Tinseltown: Hollywood’s Responses to Nazi Germany

Tarnishing Tinseltown: Hollywood’s Responses to Nazi Germany Lawrence Baron Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler 1933–1939. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Pp. 448. Cloth $35.00. ISBN 978-0231163927. Ben Urwand, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013. Pp. 336. Hardcover $26.95. ISBN 978-0674724747. Not since the publication of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners has a scholarly monograph generated so much controversy within and outside of academia as Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration. He indignantly indicts Hollywood for colluding with Nazi Germany’s censorship demands to purge Jewish characters and anti-Nazi themes from American movies during the 1930s. Urwand’s sweeping condemnation of Hollywood’s complicity contrasts sharply with Thomas Doherty’s more balanced assessment of how the American film industry responded to Hitler’s incremental escalation of anti-Semitic, expansionist, and repressive policies before the outbreak of World War II. The initial trigger for the debate over the conflicting interpretations proffered by the two authors was the publicity campaign for The Collaboration. Harvard University Press hired Goldberg McDuffie Communications to promote Urwand’s book, scheduled for release in October 2013, seven months after Doherty’s hit the shelves in April. In what appears to have been an attempt to counteract the positive reviews Hollywood and Hitler had begun to receive, the marketing firm provided advance copies of The Collaboration to prospective reviewers in June. The cover letter accompanying the review copies denigrated the depth of Doherty’s research and touted that of Urwand’s: “Whereas Doherty relied on flawed, superficial accounts in domestic trade papers, Urwand discovered a vast array of primary resource materials.”1 While Urwand does not specifically mention Hollywood and Hitler (which he presumably had not read when he was writing The Collaboration) in the text of his book, he curtly dismisses it in a footnote as “a lively account, but one [End Page 59] that is limited to reports that appeared in American trade papers.” (256) To be sure, Urwand delved into the German archives to unearth reports about the hectoring of the film industry by Georg Gyssling, Nazi Germany’s consul in Los Angeles, but Doherty also draws on a “rich repository of archival sources” beyond the trade press, including the files of the Production Code Administration (PCA), the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), and memos from federal officials. (375) Both books reveal how the major studios avoided direct criticism of Hitler and his anti-Semitic policies, abandoned or altered scripts that might antagonize Nazi Germany, and eliminated Jewish characters from their movies in the 1930s. They similarly attribute these concessions to the film industry’s commercial stakes in the German market. A main point of contention between the two scholars is whether this self-censorship constituted “collaboration,” exacted primarily by Germany’s threat to deny distribution licenses to the films of studios that did not abide by the content parameters it established, as Urwand claims, or a continuation of Hollywood’s standard practice of editing films and scripts to gain the approval of the PCA and local and state censorship boards in the United States and to placate domestic interest groups and foreign governments, as Doherty posits. The first reviewers of Urwand’s book seized upon the incendiary charge he leveled at the movie moguls by giving their pieces sensationalist titles such as, “Hollywood’s Creepy Love Affair with Adolf Hitler,” “Scholar Asserts That Hollywood Avidly Aided Nazis,” “When Hollywood Held Hands With Hitler,” and “Hollywood’s Deal with The Devil (Hitler).”2 Yet these titles only slightly exaggerated Urwand’s censure of Hollywood’s kowtowing to Nazi demands. In the prologue to his book, he unambiguously declares, “Over the course of the investigation, one word kept reappearing in both the German and American records: ‘collaboration’ (Zusammenarbeit). And gradually it became clear that this word accurately described the particular arrangement between the Hollywood studios and the German government in the 1930s.”(8) Amplifying his thesis, he argues, “The studio heads, who were mostly immigrant Jews, went to dramatic lengths to hold on to their investment in Germany. Although few remarked on it at the time, these men followed...

Transition and Transformation: Victor Sjostrom in Hollywood 1923-1930

Most standard versions of film history discuss Swedish films of the late 1910s and early 1920s in terms of a golden age, with a long run of commercial and critical successes. Swedish films were appreciated internationally for their perceived artiness, and their naturalistic acting styles, often enhanced by spectacular cinematography (most notably by ‘J. Julius’, the nom de plume for renowned cinematographer Julius Jaenzon). The then prominent film critic Bengt Idestam-Almqvist, under the pseudonym ‘Robin Hood’, had established the tone for a domestic understanding of this phenomenon by the end of the 1930s in an ambitious book, with an introduction by Victor Sjöström.1 It has since been the objective of much film scholarship in Sweden to rectify the highly dramatic and nationalistic narrative of that book. Some of the individual films discussed, like Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage (1920) and Mauritz Stiller's Sir Arne's Treasure (1919), both adapted from literary works by Swedish Nobel Laureate Selma Lagerlöf, are now firmly established in the auteurist canon of great European films. Sjöström as well as Stiller, the most prominent Swedish directors at the time (although Stiller was actually of Russian–Finnish descent), were eventually sought out by the Hollywood studios and made films in the USA. Sjöström has long been one of the stalwarts of Swedish film history, with a career spanning over fifty-five years. In the silent era he was an actor, director and scriptwriter; from the 1930s onwards he was mainly an actor. He was eventually given the ultimate cinematic homage in Sweden, in the role of the aged professor and protagonist of Ingmar Bergman's elegiac Wild Strawberries (1957). Sjöström was, at the time of his final contribution to Swedish cinema, seventy-eight years old. A few years ago, a new Sjöström film from the golden age – The Monastery of Sendomir (1920) – was rediscovered and screened after restoration at the Swedish Film Institute.

Hollywood in the world market – evidence from Australia in the mid-1930s

By the mid-1930s the major Hollywood studios had developed extensive networks of distribution subsidiaries across five continents. This article focuses on the operation of American film distributors in Australia – one of Hollywood's largest foreign markets. Drawing on two unique primary datasets, the article compares and investigates film distribution in Sydney's first-run and suburban-run markets. It finds that the subsidiaries of US film companies faced a greater liability of foreignness in the city centre market than in the suburban one. Our data support the argument that film audiences in local or suburban cinema markets were more receptive to Hollywood entertainment than those in metropolitan centres.

Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 ThomasDoherty. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 Thomas Doherty. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.Using a provocative, ambiguous title, Professor Thomas Doherty (from Brandeis University) studies the anti-Nazi feature films produced before World War II. As a response to anti-Semitic propaganda films from Germany, a series of newsreels and short films were produced in Hollywood. None of those productions was really memorable, but this corpus of mostly short films deserves to be analyzed, and thus, this is what this Hollywood and Hitler is about. And no, contrary to what the book's title might suggest: Hitler did not visit Hollywood and had no direct relationship with the US movie industry.Doherty's book is well documented and brings together a corpus made of lesser-known, yet signifying feature films such as Die Vandemder Yid (1933), which was shot in the Yiddish language in Hollywood (53). This book's exploration tentatively ends with a well-known feature film: Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) (336). A distant observer might object that many important anti-Nazi movies were not included in these pages, but the author prefers to investigate an era (and a corpus) not well documented in previous books on a related topic (often focusing on war movies released after 1939). Therefore, there is no analysis of Chaplin's masterpiece The Great Dictator (1941). Instead, his previous movies such as Modern Times (1936) are examined.Subtle forms of racism and anti-Semitism occurred in the US during the early 1930s, when many Jewish employees of Hollywood studios lost their jobs due to secret orders from Berlin's new regime, which was established in 1933. This regime attempted to create an anti-Jewish movement outside Germany through foreign offices and a network of influential allies (36). This racist pressure was made in a context in which exports of Hollywood films to Germany were negotiated and sometimes refused or delayed. It was during a period of change (the end of silent movies) and adjustments of all sorts, for instance when the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) and the Hays Code (on morals and censorship) were enacted (40). However, despite the fact there were many German emigre's in Hollywood, it would be unfair to conclude they were automatically anti-Semitic. Incidentally, an anti-Nazi League was created in Hollywood in 1936 with filmmakers and producers from all backgrounds and religions, and among this elite were director John Ford and actor James Cagney (96). …

Where are you from? Place as a form of scripting in independent cinema

Abstract Large-budget Hollywood studio productions generally prefer a high level of fabrication in creating a film’s setting, either through the building of sets or through special effects, because it gives the production team greater control. Yet that’s often been less true of indie films historically. For a variety of reasons, the setting or location of independent films often becomes a central part of the scripting of a film. It is obviously cheaper to use what already exists in reality rather than to attempt to create a location through set design or art direction. Beyond issues of budget, however, my interest here is in exploring how ‘place’ can actually function as a key element in the scripting process, especially one that is rooted in visual storytelling, by taking into account the myriad ways that a film’s setting can contribute to and enhance the narrative beyond the use of generic, decorative or touristic locations. Using examples drawn from independent cinema, the article argues that place can have an intrinsic, integrative, stylistic, structural, conceptual and thematic function.

Les frères Coen, cinéastes indépendants : l'importance d'une indépendance scénaristique

The Coen Brothers have been labeled as independent filmmakers ever since they started their career in the middle of the 1980s, and are still considered independent today in spite of their frequent collaborations with the Hollywood studios. This status, quite uncommon in Hollywood, of &#8220;emancipated&#8221; directors, is made clear through their aesthetic and, to a lesser extent, ideological independence. Their position as directors/producers/screenwriters/editors also provides them with what I will call their &#8220;screenwriting independence&#8221;. Nevertheless, the questioning of their independent status over the last ten years seems to be related to the financing of some of their films. To what extent are the Coen brothers still independent filmmakers when they collaborate with majors? How does their status as director-writers participate in their independence? Eventually, can we consider the possibility of an alternative way in which the Coens could appear as precursors?

Film Finances: The First Years

This article gives an account of the formative years of Film Finances, describing the principles behind its operation as well as the contributions of the individuals who built the company. A key element in its success lay in the fact that, as well as offering a guarantor’s financial protection against the unforeseen, it helped producers to make the most of available resources through proactive advice at all stages of a production from concept to delivery. During the 1950s, Film Finances’ guarantee became the lynchpin of a new system of state-supported financing that brought together the National Film Finance Corporation, the distributors and the banks. But it also provided the Hollywood studios with an effective means of supervising independent producers making films in Britain for worldwide distribution. As the decade progressed, the balance of financing for British films shifted from indigenous to American sources of funding. When Film Finances joined a consortium of investors in the early 1960s to set up a distribution company called Garrick Film Distributors, the venture had been intended to harness British sources of funding, but in practice served as a case study in the serious limitations of such finance, setting the scene for Hollywood’s renewed domination.

THAT'S NOT ALL, FOLKS! Excavating the Warner Bros. Archives

That’s Not All, Folks!Excavating the Warner Bros. Archives Emily Carman (bio) There are still thousands of articles to come out of the Warner Bros. Archives, it is so rich and vast. professor rick jewell, hugh m. hefner chair for the study of american film, university of southern california [End Page 30] This essay profiles one of the most complete and pertinent paper document collections related to Hollywood cinema that is open for research access: the Warner Bros. Archives (WBA) housed at the University of Southern California (USC) and managed by the School of Cinematic Arts. Donated to USC by Warner Communications in 1977, the WBA brings together production, distribution, and exhibition records (legal documents, studio correspondences and memos, publicity, story files, and various script drafts) with musical scores, animation backgrounds, art department drawings, and more to document the creative and industrial activities of a vertically integrated Hollywood studio. Although USC owns the physical documents of the collection, the studio Warner Bros. Entertainment (now a subsidiary of the media conglomerate Time Warner) retains the intellectual property [End Page 31] rights, and the archive thus straddles the corporate and educational worlds in its policies and scholarly uses. The WBA’s influence on cinema and media scholarship cannot be underestimated, as the archive has played a vital role in both disseminating and preserving American moving image heritage and film history, particularly for the zenith years of the Hollywood studio system. Despite the preponderance of scholarly work that has been produced using this immense collection, there is a dearth of research on the WBA itself. Although Warner Bros. is not the sole studio collection available for scholarly research on industrial practices of classical Hollywood, its counterparts, by comparison, are either split among various archives and institutions or incomplete (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, RKO, and Universal), and thus do not provide a complete spectrum of studio operations, or are not open for public access (Disney, Fox, Columbia, and the RKO legal files).1 Only the United Artists (UA) collection at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) rivals that of the WBA. Because UA was not a vertically integrated studio and was a distributor for independently produced films, the WCFTR UA archive offers a detailed perspective on primarily distribution and financial operations.2 Therefore, the WBA collection—its history and its legacy as an important primary source for twentieth-century Hollywood cinema and television—is a unique research subject that merits further scrutiny from film and media studies and moving image archival communities. This essay provides a brief history of the archive’s inception and chronology derived from interviews with past curators Leith Adams (1978–92), William Whittington (1993–97), and Haden Guest (2004–6); its most recent director of archives, Sandra Joy Lee Aguilar (2006–12); and its previous curator, Jonathon Auxier (2007–13), as well as with key scholars and researchers who have utilized the collection in compelling ways.3 As a former curator of the WBA in 2007–8, I also have firsthand knowledge of the archive’s versatile collection, former preservation initiatives, and patronage. Together these perspectives highlight the uniqueness of the WBA as a motion picture archival institution from the heyday of the classic Hollywood studio system. The curators’ experiences also underscore the preservation practices that have kept this collection intact as a key resource for a versatile research community. For example, in academic year 2011–12, the WBA serviced 437 reading room appointments. Patrons ranged from undergraduate and graduate students to scholars, Warner Bros. studio employees, professional authors, and filmmakers. Although more than half of this patronage was from USC and California, the remaining third ranged across the United States and abroad.4 The archive contains the paper records of Warner Bros. Pictures Inc. and its [End Page 32] motion picture subsidiaries, including First National, Vitagraph, and the Stanley–Warner Theater Chain, from 1917 (the release year of the Warner brothers’—Albert, Harry, Sam, and Jack—first feature film, My Four Years in Germany) through 1968 (with the sale of the studio to the conglomerate Seven Arts). Additionally, the archive offers extensive production records for Warner Bros. Television Department from 1955 through 1968. Despite the impressive...

Thieves of Bombay: United Artists, Colonial Copyright, and Film Piracy in the 1920s

This article examines Hollywood’s attempts to curtail print duplication piracy in Bombay during the 1920s. The Thief of Bagdad, starring Douglas Fairbanks, was a massive international success for the Hollywood studio United Artists and their newly established Asian distribution network. Perhaps the most famous Hollywood release in India, Thief catapulted its star, Douglas Fairbanks, into the pantheon of Indian screen legends. In the late 1920s, United Artists discovered that Thief was being illegally distributed and exhibited in India and filed a series of legal actions in the Bombay courts. This article examines the extensive legal record of these cases—alongside letters, memos, and other studio correspondence—in order to reveal the topography of international distribution and its legal and non-legal circuits. We argue that Hollywood’s problems in curtailing the so-called “Bombay piracies” demonstrate the contradictions of international intellectual property enforcement at a critical early juncture in media globalization.

The collaboration: Hollywood's pact with Hitler

To continue doing business in Germany after Hitler's ascent to power, Hollywood studios agreed not to make films that attacked the Nazis or condemned Germany's persecution of Jews. Ben Urwand reveals this bargain for the first time--a collaboration (Zusammenarbeit) that drew in a cast of characters ranging from notorious German political leaders such as Goebbels to Hollywood icons such as Louis B. Mayer.At the center of Urwand's story is Hitler himself, who was obsessed with movies and recognized their power to shape public opinion. In December 1930, his Party rioted against the Berlin screening of All Quiet on the Western Front, which led to a chain of unfortunate events and decisions. Fearful of losing access to the German market, all of the Hollywood studios started making concessions to the German government, and when Hitler came to power in January 1933, the studios--many of which were headed by Jews--began dealing with his representatives directly.Urwand shows that the arrangement remained in place through the 1930s, as Hollywood studios met regularly with the German consul in Los Angeles and changed or canceled movies according to his wishes. Paramount and Fox invested profits made from the German market in German newsreels, while MGM financed the production of German armaments. Painstakingly marshaling previously unexamined archival evidence, The Collaboration raises the curtain on a hidden episode in Hollywood--and American--history.

Exclusive quality – Why exclusive distribution may benefit the TV-viewers

Sports organizations, Hollywood studios and TV channels grant satellite and cable networks exclusive rights to televise their matches, movies and media contents. Exclusive distribution prevents viewers from watching attractive programs and reduces the TV-distributors incentives to compete in prices.This paper demonstrates that exclusive distribution may also give providers of contents incentives to invest in higher quality and, as a result, force competitors to reduce their prices. Exclusive distribution may benefit all viewers, including those who are excluded.