The Hollywood Industry Paradigm

Ruth Vasey. Handbook of Film Studies. Editor: James Donald & Michael Renov. Sage Publications. 2008.

While there are countless ways of interrogating Hollywood, the industry’s intrinsically commercial nature is necessarily at the heart of most of them, if only as something to elide or evade. The traditional critical approaches to Hollywood—studies of authorship, genre or ideology—have all provided systems of ordering, categorizing and analyzing movies as textual artefacts in ways that avoid or ignore the blunt commercial purpose of their production, distribution and exhibition. Constructing their critical practice from the methods and rationale of literary criticism, these approaches have tended to render Hollywood aesthetically respectable by ignoring or consciously discounting its commercial intent. Yet it is precisely Hollywood’s enduring status as the world’s most popular and financially successful cinema that requires analysis and explication.

Hollywood’s dichotomous nature as ‘show business’ has long presented a methodological quandary to scholars seeking to articulate the creative and financial relationship between movie and audience. Where should one begin—with the hard-nosed financial imper­atives of the ‘business’ or with the intangible attractions of the ‘show’? While many studies have opted to concentrate on one of these factors to the exclusion of the other, the fact is that in relation to Hollywood the two have always been so thoroughly interdependent that it is impossible satisfactorily to account for the business of the movies without taking into account their aesthetic characteristics, and vice versa. To understand Hollywood is to understand the many interrelated strategies—some industrial and some aesthetic—that it has used to find acceptance amongst its diverse audiences. The extraordinary international success of the industry is testimony to the fact that many of these strategies have been sophisticated, inventive and responsive to historical change, despite the fact that the industry’s products themselves have regularly been characterized by its critics as crude and repetitive. Hollywood’s ‘formula’ for com­mercial success, far from being transparent, is sufficiently complex to ensure that, although the industry has been with us for the best part of a century, scholars are still searching for adequate ways to account for both its popularity and its influence.

In seeking to identify a ‘Hollywood paradigm’ of Film Studies, perhaps the first issue to confront is whether the object of study has been sufficiently coherent over time to be understood in relation to any single industrial or aesthetic model. There has been considerable debate as to whether the ‘Classical Hollywood’ that evolved until roughly World War Two can be meaningfully bracketed with the ‘Post-Classical’ cinema that followed the War, or indeed with the ‘Contemporary Hollywood’ that reoriented itself in the 1980s to pay TV, video and ultimately DVD and other digital formats.

At its height, ‘Classical Hollywood’ was dominated by a small, stable group of vertically integrated companies managing each stage of production, distribution and exhibition. The major companies excluded competition by cooperating closely with each other with respect to matters in which they had a mutual and non-competitive interest. Moviemaking within each company was characterized by highly efficient and concentrated production, with a permanent staff of specialized workers based in Los Angeles bringing out approximately a movie per major studio per week when the system was at its height in the late 1930s. The movies themselves were differentiated by budget and by their generic elements, but they were also subject to a high degree of centralized regulation, and were designed primarily to be consumed by general audiences in conventional cinemas.

Fifty years later, Hollywood’s industrial landscape and the cultural status of its products had undergone a radical overhaul. The direct connection between production and exhibition constituted by vertical inte­gration had been disrupted: in 1948, at the culmination of a legal case known as the ‘Paramount Suit’, the Supreme Court required production/distribution companies to divest themselves of their exhibition chains. As a result of the industrial instability that followed, by the end of the 1960s all the major companies had been acquired by larger diversified conglomerates; and by the 1980s they had been positioned, to greater or lesser degrees, at the heart of gigantic media corporations. In this new era, movie production was largely outsourced to external creative teams, many of which came together for a single production and subsequently dis­banded. Filming and post-production increas­ingly moved away from its Los Angeles base, and the old studio facilities were largely sold off or given over to television production or theme parks. Since then, movies have been designed to be classified for viewing by targeted groups of consumers in cinemas or at home instead of by general audiences; now the majority of a movie’s profits are realized in its video and television release and in many cases in merchandising. The ‘aftermarket’ of sales beyond the original cinematic release increasingly determines the nature of cinematic product rather than the other way around.

This bald overview may seem to suggest that Hollywood’s history has been characterized by clear points of rupture that have transformed it from one industrial state to the next. On closer inspection, however, it appears that this type of periodization is unnecessarily reductive, and that the changes that have been wrought upon Hollywood have been more incremental than catastrophic. Technological changes, so often trumpeted as ‘revolutionizing’ the industry, have typically disturbed the fundamentals of the movie business very little (see Enticknap, 2005).

When Douglas Gomery asks in The Coming of Sound, ‘How did the industry change as a new technology was innovated?’ (2004: xv), he is shaping his argument around essentially the same question that John Belton (1992) asks of widescreen technology and Gianluca Sergi asks of the second ‘sound revolution’ in The Dolby Era (2004). Gomery’s response—that a change driven by rational business decisions ultimately produced not chaos or revolution, but long-term growth and greater control for Hollywood over its global markets—demonstrates the rationality and coherence of the major companies’ transition from the provision of silent cinema to ‘talkies’. Gomery’s industrial and economic analysis provides a significant corrective to other accounts of the introduction of sound, which have been more concerned with the history and aesthetic consequences of technological change (Lastra, 2000; O’Brien, 2005), and have most commonly presented sound as causing a complete break with Hollywood’s past. Gomery’s own account is itself informed and nuanced by Donald Crafton’s emphasis, in The Talkies (1997), on the audience’s enthusiastic acceptance of sound and on the overriding economic impact of the Depression on the industry’s activities. Crafton’s conclusion that, ‘sound definitely changed cinema, but not across the board, and not as a radical overthrow of film convention … [whereby] in the long run, the social experience of going to the movies was remarkably unaffected’ (1997: 543-4), might stand as a plausible summary for the effects that the major changes in production technology (sound, colour, widescreen) have had on the industry as a whole. The history of technology itself demonstrates film history’s preoccupation with production and its tech­niques, rather than commerce. As Gomery also argues, ‘the greatest technological change in the movie industry in the United States during the 1930s came with the installation of air conditioning into theatres’ (2004: 148).

It is arguable that other pivotal moments of change were connected with the expansion of the foreign market in 1918; with the formulation of the Production Code in 1930, or perhaps its affirmation in 1934; with the filing of the Paramount Suit in 1938 or its resolution in 1948; with the reorientation of the foreign market during World War Two or changes in audience demographics following the war; with the widespread take-up of tele­vision in the 1950s or the abandonment of the Production Code and the adoption of movie ratings in 1968; with the experimentation with new profit-making strategies, including both new cinematic styles and new release patterns, in the 1970s; with the diffusion of cable and satellite delivery systems and video-cassette recorders in the 1980s; with the horizontal integration of the industry within multinational media companies or the rise of digital convergence; or with innumerable other factors that have impinged on the industry over time. There is no clear academic consensus about which of these ‘moments’ signals a clear point of departure for Hollywood. More fundamentally, there is as yet no clear academic consensus as to the basis for any periodization of the American cinema industry’s history—whether, that is, its periodization should be determined by technological change, by changes in the structure or viewing practices of the audience, by changes in corporate management or on the basis of legal or legislative change.

Even during periods of supposed stability, the Hollywood industry has been obliged to evolve continuously in response to its changing business environment. Remarkably, of the eight companies that dominated the industry by the end of the 1920s, only one, RKO, has been officially wound up. The others—Paramount, MGM, Warner Bros Fox, United Artists, Columbia and Universal—have all survived to the present day, despite bouts of asset-stripping, merger, acquisition, divestment and the occasional near-death experience. Mostly they have thrived, with many of these companies now amongst the most powerful corporations in the world, along with the Walt Disney Company, that also had its roots in the late 1920s and 1930s. Throughout the industry’s melodramatic history, audiences have not, on the whole, experienced Hollywood as a discontinuous phenomenon. Indeed, although the industry has constantly reshaped itself in order to profit from changing demographics, political climates and technologies, the nature of Hollywood’s attraction to audiences has remained remarkably stable throughout its history. It has remained an essentially erotic, star-centred, generic cinema; it has kept a close association with wider consumerist trends, especially fashion; and it has main­tained its global prestige with high pro­duction values, typically expressed through action and spectacle. Most importantly, it has continued to engage audiences on an emotional level, with promotional campaigns consistently built around the promise of tears, laughter, thrills, suspense and horror.

The tension between industrial change and aesthetic persistence in Hollywood has been reflected in commentaries on the industry, which have commonly tended to empha­size either the fluctuating and contingent mechanics of the industry’s operations, or the more persistent ways in which movies have sought to engage and seduce audiences. The former perspective encompasses industrial, economic, institutional and cultural histories, including censorship practices and political economies. The second approach emphasizes factors such as stardom, film style, narrative construction and genre. There is clearly a good deal of overlap between these perspectives, and situated between the two is research, which seeks to integrate these two areas, by conceiving of Hollywood’s output as an intrin­sically commercially-based set of aesthetic practices. Indeed, in relation to contemporary Hollywood, advances in digital convergence make it increasingly difficult to identify a ‘text’ that is independent of the multiple circumstances under which it is consumed, whether as movie, DVD, electronic game or content for a mobile phone.

This chapter will consider some of the ways in which scholars working in these disparate traditions have sought to illuminate the Hollywood phenomenon.

Industrial Histories

Since Hollywood’s inception, audiences have evinced an insatiable curiosity about the mechanics of movie production. The motion- picture medium itself was a sufficient novelty in the early twentieth century for audiences to be intrigued by the process by which fictions were produced for the screen. Short movie subjects depicting apparently candid behind- the-scenes action on the studio lot were popu­lar in the silent period, in an early harbinger of today’s obligatory The Making of… television specials. Far from demystifying the process of production, these shorts only served to emphasize Hollywood’s allure by cultivating a sense of casual intimacy between audiences and players. The desire to be involved in the ‘real’ lives of moviemakers was additionally fed by fan magazines such as Photoplay, and from the 1910s onwards Hollywood supported a publishing sub-industry dedicated to the circulation of ‘insider’ accounts of the motion-picture business, including memoirs, biographies and blow-by-blow descriptions of individual productions. In the 1920s movie companies began to capitalize on the public’s fetishization of Hollywood through advertis­ing tie-ins, which encouraged moviegoers—especially women—to emulate the stars through their choice of fashion, hairstyles, cosmetics and homewares. In 1955 Walt Disney created Disneyland as a fictional movie Mecca which tantalised audiences with the promise of an ‘authentic’ behind- the-scenes experience. Throughout, these vicarious experiences and accounts of the industry presented the ‘story of the movies’ in terms of entertaining narratives replete with casts of glamorous and/or endear­ingly dissolute and eccentric characters, and they concentrated almost exclusively on production.

Any serious industrial history of Hollywood is faced with the problem of how to provide a rational account of the operations of the movie business when a myriad of these attractive and entertaining ‘histories’ of the industry are already in circulation, many of which have sprung fully formed from the public relations offices of the industry itself. Moreover, since popular interest in all things Hollywood is as intense as ever, the temptation persists to play to the crossover market between serious enquiry and popular potboiler, especially in areas such as censorship and biography; the ‘film’ sections of bookshops have long been stocked with well-researched books spiced up to be widely consumable in paperback. This tendency, while often profitable and mostly harmless, perpetuates the impression that Hollywood has always operated as a maverick industry governed by passion, whim and individual desire, rather than as the kind of stable and securely profitable business that it has been for most of its history. First-hand accounts of Classical studio practice, such as Leo Rosten’s Hollywood: The Movie Colony, The Movie Makers (1941) and Hortense Powdermaker’s Hollywood the Dream Factory (1950), equally emphasize the melodramatic and entertaining aspects of the industry despite their evident seriousness of intent, setting the tone for many of the ‘insider’ works that would follow. Nevertheless, these were pioneering works that contained material observations and descriptions that still make them useful sources today.

Despite the reading public’s demonstrated obsession with life on the set, production constitutes only the highest-profile aspect of Hollywood’s business. Indeed, from a commercial point of view the industry’s support and perpetuation of production might best be seen as an inconvenient necessity, occasioned by the fact that a regular supply of cinematic product is required to service the much more profitable areas of exhibition and (especially) distribution. In many ways, the changing relationship between production, distribution and exhibition has determined the behaviour of the industry over the years, including many of the fundamental characteristics of the movies themselves. In the Classical period up to World War Two, the fact that the five largest companies were vertically integrated, with each distribution company owning both a production studio and an important chain of cinemas, meant that there was a guaranteed pipeline between the point of production and their own places of exhibition. Packages or ‘blocks’ of movies were also bundled for sale to independent exhibitors or to chains controlled by other companies. Production schedules could therefore be geared towards regular output—a movie per week—with a standard ratio between low-and medium- budget production, and more prestigious headlining movies. Regular production meant that large, stable labour forces could be maintained in the employ of the studios, and the continuity of both on-screen and off-screen personnel explains the close generic similarities between the bodies of work produced by the studios during the 1920s and 1930s.

It is remarkable how resistant film scholarship in general has been to acknowledging the importance of distribution and exhibition to an understanding of the ‘whole equation of pictures’ (Fitzgerald, 1974: 6) including an understanding of the production process itself. As early as 1927, The Story of the Films, written by industry insiders such as Sidney Kent and edited by Joseph P. Kennedy (1927), made it clear that Hollywood’s operations were geared unequivocally towards the immediate exigencies of the marketplace, and industry trade journals such as Variety have consistently stressed the importance of marketplace fluctuations and ‘the numbers’ in determining company policy in Hollywood. Tino Balio’s research on United Artists and the perspectives outlined in his The American Film Industry (1985) demonstrated the importance of looking beyond the limited perspective of production. In 1985 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson brought out The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, which emphasized the links between industrial context and film style, and 1986 saw the publication of Gomery’s The Hollywood Studio System, which straightforwardly explained the interconnectedness of production, distribution and exhibition. The ten-volume History of the American Cinema was brought out by Scribners and the University of California Press between 1990 and 2006, covering American cinema from its origins until the end of the 1980s. Each of these works engages with Hollywood’s industrial history, but apart from them there has been only a trickle of industrial studies, and we still lack authoritative, well-documented accounts of most of the major studios or exhibition chains, or any book-length study of distribution practice. The lack of romance attached to the financial end of the business has ensured that it is still generally underestimated, especially in relation to early Hollywood.

For example, standard histories of the industry relate how there was a broad relocation of movie production facilities from the eastern states to California in the 1910s, motivated by cheaper real estate and labour, plentiful sunshine and spectacular scenery for location shooting; but far less attention is paid to the fact that the financial headquarters of the companies remained in New York City in order to facilitate movie distribution to both the large population centres of the East, and after 1918 to Europe. This created a geographical separation between the creative and the fiscal hubs of the industry which ultimately worked to the advantage of both. The production work of the ‘movie colony’ at the studios in Los Angeles could be carried out relatively autonomously; yet its creative excesses were counterbalanced by the more hard-headed directives that were issued by company heads, who determined budgets and overall production slates as well as managing more general aspects of the companies’ businesses. As Gomery insists,

Historians have too long been distracted by the supposed chaos on the studio lots and the tales of woe told by old timers. The heads of these corporations—led by Adolph Zukor—saw correctly the movie making process as one part of the system—which also included distribution and exhibition. (2005: xvii)

From their position in New York, the company heads were well placed to assess the relationship of expenditure to box- office returns, exhibitor feedback and public relations, while being free of the day-to-day concerns of production. This balance and ten­sion between these two centres of power help to explain why ‘art’ and ‘industry’ have always equally characterized Hollywood. They also suggests why attempts by other countries’ film industries to imitate Hollywood’s ‘formula’ for motion picture entertainment during the Classical period were mostly exercises in futility: the finely-tuned checks and balances involved in determining Hollywood’s system of production were rooted in the very structure of the industry, and were essentially incapable of reproduction in other national contexts.

A consideration of distribution and exhibition can also help to identify the underlying aspects of Hollywood which set it apart from potential international rivals and contributed to its global success. Most obviously, the Hollywood industry benefited from the size and economic strength of the domestic American market, which accounted for about 35 per cent of box-office revenues worldwide. This enabled the major costs associated even with most high-budget productions to be amortized before they entered international circulation; thus Hollywood producers could undercut any competition they encountered in the foreign field, and regard most income derived there as pure profit. Aided by the impact of World War One on Europe’s incipient film industries, Hollywood’s products occupied the vast majority of the world’s screens by the early 1920s, and their high capitalization guaranteed that they maintained their market share by allowing for production standards that easily exceeded those of other national cinemas. In turn, the industry’s global reach encouraged Hollywood to recruit moviemaking talent from around the world, helping to influence the development of a sophisticated style of entertainment that travelled without difficulty across improbably broad geographical territories. Thompson’s meticulous analysis of Hollywood’s early expansion into international markets in Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907-1934 (1985) has laid the foundation for future work in this area, which has long been neglected. My own study, The World According to Hollywood 1918-1939 (1997) looks at the extent to which Hollywood’s products were influenced by considerations of international distribution. Ian Jarvie (1992) and John Trumpbour (2002) have studied the Canadian, French and English markets in depth, while Thomas J. Saunders has looked at factors affecting Germany in Hollywood in Berlin (1994). So far, most work examining the influence of European immigrant filmmakers has concentrated on biography and production history (see Baxter, 1976; Giovacchini, 2001; Petrie, 1985; Thompson, 2006).

While production remains by far the most visible element of the Hollywood industry in literature relating to its ‘Golden Years’, questions of distribution and exhibition come into stronger focus in histories of the industry after World War Two, most immediately because of the way in which the industry and its products changed in the wake of the Paramount Suit. When the Supreme Court found that the vertical integration of the major companies was in effect monopolistic and constituted a restraint of trade under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, they were obliged to divest themselves of their chains of cinemas and to desist from block booking (Muscio, 1997). This meant that movies had to be sold to exhibitors on their individual merits, a reorganization that had wide-ranging consequences for the structure of the industry and the nature of its products. The established studios gradually made fewer, more high-budget productions designed to reap ever higher profits, while the shortfall in production was made up by new ‘independent’ production houses, often play­ing to specific audience segments (typically teenagers, whose iconoclastic attitudes turned amateurish, shoestring production standards into cult virtues) rather than to a more generalized audience. As Thomas Doherty observes,

The courtship of the teenage audience began in earnest in 1955; by 1960, the romance was in full bloom. That shift in marketing strategy and production initiated a progressive ‘juvenilization’ of film content and the film audience that is today the operative reality of the American motion picture business. (1988: 3)

Although the major companies maintained their overall control of the movie busi­ness through their grip on distribution, the ‘Classical’ production-line system ceased and their large workforces were dispersed to form more transient alliances around individual productions. Tax changes, demographic shifts after the War, the impact of McCarthyism, and the rise of television all accelerated the rate of change in Hollywood in the 1950s. The appearance of a degree of experimentation in style and content, the entry of new players into the business and an acceleration of technolog­ical innovation have helped to make this one of the most studied periods in Hollywood’s history (see Belton, 1992; Biskind, 1983). Recent scholarship has seized on Hollywood’s attitude to television, countering previously accepted accounts of early hostility between the two media with studies that suggest a far more complex and mutually accommodating relationship (Anderson, 1994).

Starting in the 1960s, Hollywood went through its first series of corporate takeovers, when large diversified conglomerates acquired the major companies. This was a period of industrial instability for the industry, during which its existing profit-making strategies proved unreliable. Hollywood’s quest to attract new regular audiences with more successful movie formulae led the studios to experiment with a range of different approaches, from the conservative family film (The Sound of Music, Robert Wise, US, 1965) to products for ‘hip’ young adults (Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper, US, 1969; Zabriskie Point, Michelangelo Antonioni, US, 1970). Because some of these approaches were characterized by ‘personal’ or ‘artistic’ styles, this period has been dubbed the ‘Hollywood Renaissance’, and much of the commentary on it has taken an auteurist perspective (see Gilbey, 2003; Horwath et al (2004). By contrast, David A. Cook’s Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979 (2000) in the History of the American Cinema series, provides a detailed account of the industry’s history during this period; and Thomas Schatz offers a more condensed perspective in his essay ‘The New Hollywood’ (1993). Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (1998) is a more anecdotal, interior account. Ironically, while the director may have been hailed as a ‘superstar’ in the 1970s, the most radical and influential innovations of the decade were both off screen: Lew Wasserman’s extraordinarily successful promotional and exhibition strategies for Jaws (Steven Spielberg, US, 1975), and George Lucas’ demonstration of the virtually limitless profitability of ancillary products in the hype surrounding Star Wars (US, 1977).

As these developments suggest, if the importance of distribution and exhibition tended to be understated in accounts of Hollywood for most of the twentieth century—despite the fact that the largest investment in the industry was always in the real estate represented by cinemas, and that the greatest bargaining power in the industry was always controlled by distributors—by the 1980s their influence was inescapable. With the introduction of pay-TV systems, video technologies and the expansion of free markets and television networks across Europe, it became apparent that motion picture companies could form the nuclei of hugely profitable, horizontally integrated media systems, and ‘Hollywood’ companies began to be repositioned at the centre of some of the largest multinational corporations in the world. Instead of generating the majority of a movie’s earnings, by this time a motion picture release essentially functioned to fix the price of subsequent sales into the ‘aftermarket’ of TV sales and video rentals, where the real money was to be made, especially for a high- budget production: a movie that did well in its cinematic release could command higher prices in negotiations over its subsequent release rights. The major companies’ re­acquisition of theatre chains after 1980 was, as a result, much less significant to their overall structure and well-being. As Thomas Austin puts it, ‘The heart of the Majors’ business is software—the production of feature films—but the bulk of profits are earned further down the value chain in distribution and retail’ (2002: 85), in the consumer products, soundtracks, books, videogames and TV spin­offs. All these ancillary products have lower costs, lower risks and higher returns, and a major company can control costs and stabilize its cash flow by controlling each stage of this value chain, but feature films remain the key component in this ‘synergistic brand extension’ (Allen, 1999:120-1; see also Dale, 1997: 5).

Barbara Klinger discusses this process in terms of ‘repurposing’:

Providing a way to offset the high production costs of blockbusters, repurposing refers generally to the media industry’s attempt to gain as much revenue as possible from a given property. For film, this may mean marketing tie-ins across a range of businesses and media, from fast-food franchise promotions and T-shirts to cartoon series spin-offs based on a film’s original characters. (2006: 7-8)

Another form of repurposing is repackaging media for sale in as many different incar­nations as possible; thus, the original movie reappears in the form of a Director’s Cut, or repackaged as a video or DVD (followed by the Special Edition, the Collector’s Edition and, perhaps finally, as part of a Nostalgia Series). With these multiple profit- making strategies integrated under a single corporate banner (such as Disney or AOL- Time Warner), the opportunities for exploiting a successful property are virtually limitless. At the same time, the institutional links between these avenues of exploitation amount to a reappearance of the vertical integration that was targeted in the Paramount Suit, albeit in much more complex corporate and technological forms. As Jennifer Holt argues, this situation is in fact very similar to the business conditions of Classical Hollywood (2001-2: 22-9). Five companies now own all the US broadcast networks, four of the major movie companies, 45 of the top 50 US cable channels, and provide 75 per cent of all US prime-time programming. It is arguable that the re-establishment of verti­cal integration, and the present sequential arrangement of distribution, has been of much greater economic—and therefore cultural—significance than the much more vaunted pursuit of synergy through mergers and convergence.

One notable difference between current conditions and those that pertained in Classical Hollywood is that in the Classical period a movie made the bulk of its profits in its first-release window. Now this balance has been reversed to the extent that a movie’s initial release effectively acts as promotion for its more profitable ‘afterlife’. The ballyhoo surrounding the theatrical release and the release itself is designed to create ‘buzz’—public awareness of the product—that will fix its subsequent value. This is why a poor public response in a single opening weekend can spell the ‘failure’ of a movie costing hundreds of millions of dollars (see Bart, 1999).

Obviously, these developments have con­sequences for the style and content of motion pictures, but, as Robert C. Allen (1999) has argued, they also constitute a substantial case that a reconsideration of what constitutes the ‘movie’ industry’s principal output is well overdue. With the rise of home theatre systems on the one hand, and portable entertainment devices (formerly ‘telephones’) on the other, academic discourse has yet to come to terms with the extent to which the object of study has been transformed in response to changes in modes of exploitation and consumption.

Although Hollywood has been oriented to an international market since the 1920s, the transformation of the industry into a more comprehensively global phenomenon—and with ownership and financing of the major media corporations sometimes being based outside the United States—the extent to which ‘Hollywood’ should continue to be conceived as an ‘American’ phenomenon remains the subject of debate. There is a case to be made on several grounds that the industry is becoming increasingly interna­tional in orientation. The international market has occasionally outstripped the American domestic sphere as a generator of profits since the 1990s, and production is frequently outsourced to international enterprises to take advantage of tax breaks, favourable exchange rates, cheaper labour costs and inter­national centres of expertise. Britain, Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and most recently Indian animation studios have all provided attractive conditions for high-budget Hollywood production. Nevertheless, as Ben Goldsmith and Tom O’Regan have shown, production in these dispersed locations is typically controlled and coordinated from a nerve centre located in Los Angeles, and this chain of command tends to reinforce the status of southern California as the capital—the ‘design centre’, if no longer necessarily the ‘production centre’—of global film:

There can be little doubt that Hollywood remains the vortex, the point in the circuit through which every project must pass on its path to global audiences, and where every project, however subtly, is transformed. (2005: 18)

The cultural provenance of movies made in dispersed locations is complex, since, even if they are made by a preponderance of local or international talent, they are likely to conform to recognizable ‘American’ norms, especially with regard to American-accented English. This continues to make sense as long as the United States constitutes the largest single market for motion-picture fare. While it is possible that a continuing rise in the impor­tance of the Indian and/or Chinese markets may destabilize such norms, it is also the case that a traditional association with an American Hollywood has become the hallmark of highly-capitalized product designed for global consumption, in an association that is now arguably independent of the United States itself. As Aida Hozic discusses in Hollyworld (2001), the converse is also true. The extent to which ‘Hollywood’s America’ is identified as being meaningfully geographically located in the US is questionable, as it always has been. In this respect, production mirrors exhibition, where the revamping of exhibition venues and the development of multiplexes in Europe, Latin America and parts of Asia in particular, has frequently resulted from partnerships between local developers and major distribution companies. What Charles R. Acland (2003) has called the contemporary cinema’s global ‘screen traffic’ does, at a superficial level, suggest the dismantling of local culture and an aesthetic of ‘placeless- ness’, as Roman tenements or Toronto streets provide chameleon-like locations for stories set in New York or Chicago, and movies are simultaneously released to thousands of near-identical screens across the northern hemisphere. Such a perspective, however, ignores the local context, and the collection of local interests, in which both production and reception occur.

From a different perspective, Hollywood’s dominance in the area of popular film is, however, demonstrated by the fact that Euro­pean ‘national’ filmmakers have themselves largely abandoned the attempt to make high- budget crowd-pleasing commercial cinema, conceding that ground to the international production arena that everyone has agreed to call ‘Hollywood’, while themselves concen­trating on smaller-scale ‘artistic’ productions that define themselves in contradistinction to Hollywood’s norms. Hollywood’s high- budget productions are generally constructed according to risk-averse formulae and are characterized by stock situations, action and special effects, stars, heterosexuality, happy or heroic outcomes, emotion and spectacle. Meanwhile, lower-budget productions neces­sarily make a virtue of their distance from the commercial mainstream by declaring their allegiance to Art, localism and the politics of the ‘real’.

It is ironic, therefore, that it is in this area of ‘art cinema’ that Hollywood’s truly global dimensions are best understood, especially if we concede that the major companies’ greatest power lies in their control of distribution, rather than in the area of production. During the 1990s all the major studios either acquired or created boutique distribution subsidiaries specifically to handle products that offered themselves as alternatives to cinema’s more formulaic staple fare. The extent to which the products of the subsidiary can actually achieve any kind of formal or thematic radicalism when bonded so closely to a conservative Hollywood multinational is moot, but the intention to differentiate this product as having an alternative status in the mind of the consuming public is clear. The advantages of broader market control and the financial lure of a low-budget personal film that could prove to be the next breakout hit, mean that it makes good economic sense for these two differently labelled, differently expressive streams of cinema to be structurally combined under the control of the major media companies (King, 2005: 11-57; Wyatt, 1998: 74-90).

While Hollywood has been outsourcing its ‘alternative’ production to American low- to medium-budget ‘independent’ production companies since the 1950s, this sector of production has suffered in recent years by the change to wide-scale release patterns that have favoured expensively-hyped movies at the expense of more modest productions. ‘Foreign’ products offer an alternative source of material. Historically, Hollywood’s rate of acquisition of international products has been low, although they have long been a feature of the art cinema circuit (Balio, 1998: 58-73). More recently, with the proportionate increase of the box-office revenues provided by the international market, more foreign- sourced product has been in demand, and Hollywood has profited from the output of ‘national cinemas’ around the world.

National cinemas are typically government protected and supported; they nurture new talent, underwrite training programmes, and virtually enforce creativity by expecting projects to be realized on a shoestring. They promote ‘personal vision’ by structurally favouring writer/directors to an extent not possible in the Hollywood system. In effect, they behave like ‘independent’ production companies, with the difference that they are typically willing to bear extraordinary levels of risk, even allowing for the normal bargaining advantage adhering to the large global companies. Unsurprisingly then, in the 1990s, Miramax, Fox and Fine Line set up strategic offices in film-producing nations around the world, with a view to tracking production, acquiring potentially profitable low-budget material, and securing key creative personnel. The shopfronts that we call ‘film festivals’ are neatly integrated into this arrangement, as they efficiently showcase what global cinema has to offer to the collected buying agents of the major media companies, as Biskind shows in Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film (2004). The understandable enthusiasm with which film­makers around the world pursue film festival recognition (followed by a major distribution contract) is the most striking evidence of their complicity in the perpetuation of a global system of cinema, managed and controlled by ‘Hollywood’ multinational media companies.

Economic Histories

A great deal of cinema history remains to be written about the practical operations of the distribution and exhibition industries, and about how many people actually saw different types of film. Until recently, the industry has attracted relatively little atten­tion from economic historians, who bring distinctly different methodological practices and ask substantially different questions from those asked by aesthetic, cultural or social historians of cinema. For example, In the absence of detailed box-office information, John Sedgwick (2000) has developed a statistical analysis of the relative commercial status of a sample of cinema venues to examine audiences’ consumption choices and preferences in 1930s Britain. Against the view of some social historians that audiences were principally drawn to the occasion of cinema, and that, as Allen puts it, ‘in the 1920s in America, for example, many viewers were not particularly interested in what film was playing’ (1990: 352-3), Sedgwick argues that the cinema environment was not by itself ‘sufficiently important to override the influence of any particular film on any particular box-office take … . Different films attracted different sizes of audience at the same cinema’ (2000: 6-7).

More generally, economists and economic historians bring their particular disciplinary methods and concerns to an understand­ing of Hollywood as an industry, using microeconomic tools of analysis to explain Hollywood’s business practices: for example, to quantify how risky a business film production and distribution is, or to measure whether stars or marketing alter a movie’s revenue. Some economic analyses supply an elaborated vocabulary and mathematical modelling to confirm the industry’s pub­lic presentation of itself as unstable and unpredictable; movie revenue patterns are, according to economist Arthur De Vany, ‘so complex that they are nearly chaotic’ (2004: 2). Other analyses, including those of Sedgwick and Michael Pokorny (2004), have argued convincingly that the major Hollywood studios have consistently treated the movies they distribute as a portfolio: in order to contain the uncertainty attached to the box-office performance of an individual movie, the company’s risk is distributed across the whole product range. Decisions about story formats, budgets, genres and stars can, in this perspective, be seen as decisions about managing the risk of the unpredictability of audience taste, taken in the context of a studio’s annual output:

Films are not randomly different from one another. Highly successful films send back signals of audience preferences, as revealed through the box- office, to the originating studio and also to its rivals. Box-office success has regularly engendered clusters of films with similar story and aesthetic characteristics, forming, over time, lineages that are subject to life-cycle tendencies. (Sedgwick and Pokorny, 2004: 304)

Such analyses explain why Hollywood has continued to be dominated by a small number of large distributors, because risk can only be effectively spread across a relatively large portfolio of movies. They also provide underlying explanations of why movies are so often so similar to each other (as a form of risk minimization) and why audiences are only rarely inclined to see a movie more than once (for economic reasons, they are made to be fully accessible on a first viewing, so that a second viewing would add little to a viewer’s pleasurable appreciation).

In Hollywood’s Road to Riches (2005), David Waterman explains the history of post- Classical Hollywood as a consequence of its capacity to segment its market effectively. In the Classical system, the audience was seg­mented by time: movies would open first in the large city-centre cinemas charging the highest admission prices, and often take months to reach the neighbourhood, suburban and country venues where admission was much cheaper. Television eroded the lower tiers of the Classical exhibition system by flattening its system of price discrimination: by 1970, you either saw a movie in a first- or second-run cinema, or else you waited four years until you could see it for free on television. ‘Low-value’ customers simply lost the moviegoing habit, and Hollywood’s market share, both domes­tically and internationally, reached its nadir while it was competing with European and Japanese production industries still protected from the impact of television on their domestic markets. Beginning with cable TV in the US in the mid-1970s, however, the development of pay media has greatly enhanced the movie industry’s capacity to segment the market, and the faster growth of a home market for movie products in the US—from home video, to DVD, Video on Demand and direct downloads—has increased the economic resources of American movie producers in comparison to their foreign counterparts. New domestic technologies have given Hollywood a seemingly ever-expanding range of price points at which it can sell its products to every­one, from the avid first-night aficionado to the most recalcitrant couch potato. Hollywood’s exponential profitability in the last twenty years comes from the fact that the revenue streams from these proliferating new media ‘windows’ have ‘stacked’ on top of each other: you see the movie in the cinema or pay cable, and you buy the DVD:

The diffusion of pay media has transformed the revenue earning power of theatrical films not only by expanding markets to new consumers, like small children, but by allowing the studios to segment markets and extract far more of the demand that essentially had lain dormant within the queue of consumers waiting in a theater line of the 1940s. (Waterman, 2005: 1 16-17)

The industry has embraced Digital Rights Management technologies so enthusiastically not simply because it fears loss of revenue to ‘piracy’, but, more importantly, because it provides new levels of control for seg­menting the market and discriminating prices, between, for example, the low-value customer who downloads for a single viewing and the higher-value customer who downloads a higher-resolution version for multiple viewings.

Waterman’s is one of several recent attempts to explain the global success and the global decentralization of post- Classical Hollywood. These examinations of the contemporary industry range from populist celebrations of entertainment as ‘the driving wheel of the new world economy’ (Wolf, 1999: 4), and upmarket journalism (Epstein, 2005) through descriptive primers for film-school production courses (Daniels et al., 1998; Moore, 2000) marketing or commerce programs (Litman, 1998; Marich (2005), to works of financial analysis osten­sibly aimed at potential industry investors (Vogel, 2001). Their explanations broadly divide according to their analytical and ideological perspective between neoclassical economic endorsements of the ‘free market’ (De Vany, 2004; Waterman, 2005) and a broadly Marxist tradition of political economy (Hozic, 2001; Miller et al., 2005; Scott, 2005; Wasko, 2003). Econometric market analyses can to some extent explain post-Classical Hollywood’s success, but the account cannot be complete without an examination of the level of state support that the ‘copyright industries’ have received from all levels of the State Department. In these considerations, an examination of the industry, particularly the contemporary industry, becomes inseparable from the analysis of the political economy of communications media (see O’Regan, Chapter 16). These are frequently attached to an engaged critique of existing systems of ownership and control, and advocacy for changes in public policy in relation to a range of issues from copyright, or ‘cultural exemption’, to labour practices.

The movie industry is now probably most important economically for its contribution to the US balance of payments, because of the extreme imbalance in the ratio of its exports to its imports. Incidentally, this may also be of some consequence to our perception of American culture, which makes much the same contradictory claims for its simultaneous exceptionalism and universality as are made for its political institutions and ‘values’. Market analyses generally have little truck with attempts to explain Hollywood’s international popularity on the grounds of its universal appeal, its immigrant heritage or some other element of cultural inheritance. Equally worthy of contemplation, however, is the inverse perspective. If Hollywood’s dominance of the world’s screens is explicable simply by force of numbers, where does that leave cultural accounts of Hollywood’s power, whether those of the proselytizers of its ‘soft power’ in purveying American cultural values or the anti-American jeremiads of bourgeois cultural nationalists that American movies ‘literally poison the souls of our children’ turning them ‘into the docile slaves of the American multi-millionaires’ (Maurice Thorez, quoted in Jeancolas, 1998: 51)?

Interpretive Histories

As an academic discipline, Film Studies was formed primarily in the image of literary studies. Its earliest academic practice was, and predominantly still is, textual interpretation. Methodologies of textual interpretation have also dominated most attempts to construct cultural histories of the movies, including most historians’ use of film as a form of symptomatic evidence of a social or cultural condition pertaining at the time of their production. Social and political historians have, in the main, borrowed from film historians, and thus incorporated back into their histories the expectation that the artefacts of popular culture somehow reflect the culture of which they are a part. One historian of the 1930s, for instance, has described I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn Le Roy, US) as ‘the perfect expression of the national mood in 1932: despair, suffering, hopelessness … [The] film was 1932’ (McElvane, 1984: 208, 213). How this relationship functions is seldom articulated, but while the word ‘reflection’ is itself often avoided, the talismanic powers of the term ‘ideology’ have been frequently invoked. The terminology of ideological analysis has, however, often done little more than complicate and obfuscate what is usually a fairly straightforward analytical procedure by which critical interpretation substitutes for empirical research into how audiences might have understood and interpreted a movie at the time of its release.

These interpretive strategies nevertheless have a strongly seductive appeal, offering critics of popular culture the opportunity to make their objects of study meaningful by demonstrating their utility as surfaces reflecting the spirit of the times—the Zeitgeist. But as Mike Chopra-Gant has argued over what is perhaps the paradigmatic case of this interpretative history,

There is no evidence to suggest that Hollywood filmmakers in the forties and fifties thought they were producing a ‘film noir’ or that American audiences of the period were ever conscious that a ‘film noir’ was what they were going to see … . The use of a retrospectively constructed class such as ‘film noir’ as a lens through which the cinema and culture of the past might be examined is an inherently ahistorical endeavour that offers little prospect for producing a reliable impression of the period in question. (2006: 178)

Equally importantly, these interpretive strate­gies pay little attention to the popularity of the movies on which they concentrate on. Film historian Robert Ray has asserted that in the post-war period there was ‘an enormous discrepancy . between the most commercially successful movies and those that have ultimately been seen as significant’ (1985: 140-1). Ray exaggerates only the uniqueness of this period: film history has, in almost its entirety, been written without regard to and often with deliberate disregard of the box office. Much has been omitted in the attempt to construct American film history as a story its historians want to tell and their audiences want to hear: a story of crisis, innovation, anxiety, subversion and turbulence. This conventional film history omits the great majority of Hollywood’s most commercially successful products—Janet Gaynor, Nelson Eddy, Betty Grable, Shirley Temple—because, perhaps, no one wants to write the history of a cinema of complacency.

In much the same way as some stars and some films have acquired a cult critical status unrelated to their box-office earnings, some periods of Hollywood’s history have come to be understood as more reflective of their cultural moment than others. Curiously, these tend to be periods of economic uncer­tainty, declining audiences and ‘turbulence’ in Hollywood’s conventions of representation. While it is difficult to see why movies pro­duced during such periods should be regarded as more zeitgeistig than those produced in periods of larger, more stable audiences and under more secure representational regimes, one of the attractions that periods of relative commercial instability have for critics is that they are often seen as giving rise to new forms. With their convoluted narratives and evident use of lighting codes and camera techniques to signify emotional states, noir films have an obvious appeal as objects of critical study, and a similar case can be made for many of the movies of Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age of Turbulence’ in the early 1930s or the Hollywood Renaissance of the early 1970s.

Historical accounts that seek in the movies symptoms of social anxiety and disintegration almost inevitably become self-fulfilling, since they treat the movie-as-text as their primary historical source and, not surprisingly, select the most compelling examples as the evi­dence they present. In the process, an orthodox cultural history is constructed from a critically-prescribed canon of films. Film history is much more likely to view the Zeitgeist of 1953, for example, through the mirror of The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, US), distributed and received as ‘a modest picture’, than through The Robe (Henry Koster, US), the first CinemaScope production adapted from the year’s best-selling novel, and one of a sustained cycle of lavishly-budgeted and commercially successful Biblical epics addressed to the 60 per cent of Americans who affirmed the American Way of Life through church membership. Although Cecil B. DeMille explained to his audiences in the prologue to The Ten Commandments (US, 1956) that ‘the theme of this picture is whether men are to be ruled by God’s law—or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator’, explicitly paralleling it to the crusade against ‘godless’ Communism, the Biblical blockbusters of the 1950s have been subject to even less critical examination as artefacts of ideology or of the popular mood than have the period’s musicals. One reason for this may be that critics have failed to discover anything subversive in these movies. Ironically, much contemporary criticism is as concerned to investigate the subversive potential of Hollywood cinema as were the anti-Communists of the period, and although they come to praise the authors’ subversion, not to incarcerate them, their methodology is also strikingly similar—and perhaps the comparison provides a salutary warning about the potent excesses of interpretation.

More generally, these interpretive cul­tural histories reveal the historiographical problems attached to critical approaches to Hollywood that fail to address its commercial core. As the case of film noir indicates, perhaps the most egregious of these approaches has been the belief that genre criticism provides a means of historically understanding the relationship between Hollywood movies and American culture. As Steve Neale has argued, this idea has ‘in practice nearly always used the concept of genre as a way of avoiding detailed study of anything other than selective samples of Hollywood’s art’ (2000: 252). In reality, as both Neale and Rick Altman have cogently argued, critical presumptions about the coherence of generic taxonomies are challenged at every turn by historical examinations of production and reception, which demonstrate that while Hollywood’s movies have consistently deployed generic conventions in their dialogue with their audiences, they have seldom if ever arranged themselves into a cinema of clearly differen­tiated genres (Altman, 1999: 16, 20).

Institutional Histories

In dramatic contrast to the creative speculation involved in the interpretive approach, institu­tional histories of Hollywood are grounded in the minutiae of memos, letters, the minutes of board meetings, financial records and the proceedings of court cases and Congressional hearings. A model for this kind of work is Balio’s history of United Artists, comprising United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars (1976), based on the pre-1951 corporate records of United Artists that the company donated to the Wisconsin Center for Theater Research in 1969, and United Artists: The Company that Changed the Film Industry (1987). This research counters melodramatic histories founded on memory and anecdote with solid data that enables Balio to place the company in its corporate and social contexts.

A further aspect of institutional history that has come under the spotlight in the last twenty years involves the operations of the industry’s trade associations, principally the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. (MPPDA), and its successor after 1945, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). These studies reveal the ways in which the major studios have jointly represented their interests in the corporate, political and legal spheres, and the extent to which they have functioned as a cartel in the international market. They also reveal industry-wide responses to censorship problems and public relations crises, which resulted in the centralized regulation of Hollywood’s motion-picture content over a period of nearly forty years, and are complemented by other studies that delve into the operations of state and international censorship boards themselves.

Classical Hollywood’s most prominent mechanism for regulating on-screen material was the Production Code of 1930. Admin­istered successively by the MPPDA and the MPAA, the Code has been the focus of several studies since its archive became available to researchers in 1983 (Bernstein, 1999; Couvares, 1996). The Production Code Administration (PCA) archive contains a file on most movies produced in Hollywood between 1930 and 1968, and consists of negotiations between the PCA and the studios over the representation of sensitive issues on the screen. The Code contained a list of subjects and treatments that producers were required to avoid (such as illegal drug traffic, ‘white-slavery’, ‘sex perversion’, and total nudity), and a further list that they were advised to treat non-explicitly or with caution (such as seduction, rape, methods of crime and cruelty to animals). Although the MPPDA wielded the Code as a public relations weapon designed to reassure Hollywood’s critics about the moral rectitude of the industry, in fact it also had a rational economic basis. All its strictures were based upon a thorough analysis of past censorship excisions, and so they formed a practical guide to producers about how to avoid shooting scenes that would be subject to expensive re-takes and re-editing. Seen from this point of view, the Code was a document designed to allow sex and violence onto the screen—albeit in a suggestive and non-explicit manner—rather than a method of keeping it off.

Some commentators have chosen to emphasize the PCA’s role as ‘industry censor’, revealing details of negotiations around notorious movies which highlight the Administration’s ‘repressive’ function in handling details of sex and violence under the Code. Gerald Gardner, for example, writing in The Censorship Papers: Movie Censorship Letters from the Hays Office, 1934-1968 straightforwardly characterizes the work of the PCA as censorship, and expresses his sense of outrage:

Behind closed doors, a group of men had the power to lay their hands on the creations of artists, to twist them this way and that, to satisfy the mandates and morals of a pious little group who feared for the souls of their fellow men. (1987: xiii)

More nuanced commentaries, such as those by Lea Jacobs (1991) and Richard Maltby (2003), have seen the operations of the PCA as a complex site of reconciliation between the desires of multiple diverse audiences, the demands of official cultural guardians represented by censors, the pressures exerted by powerful special-interest groups including the churches and the diplomatic requirements of both the State Department and foreign powers. These commentaries recognize that the Code itself cannot simply be taken at face value, but is underpinned by several competing agendas, some concerned with industry ‘spin’ and some purely utilitarian, which affect both its content and its rhetorical style. Jacobs, for example, writing in The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928-1942, concludes:

To study the process of self-regulation … is to restore some sense of the difficulties which the representation of sexuality posed within the institutional matrix defined by the relations between external agencies, film producers, and industry censors. In the face of the continual process of dispute and negotiation which the fallen woman cycle brought into play, we can begin to envision femininity as a construct that was at once tenuous and overdetermined in highly complicated ways. (1991: 153)

While the administration of the Production Code was the PCA’s most widely-publicized role, the regulation of sex and violence was only one aspect of its function. Equally important, although never advertised to the public, was its administration of a second set of strictures known within the organization as ‘industry policy’. Based, like the Production Code, on an analysis of past material that had caused public relations problems during distribution, industry policy identified and proscribed sensitive political subjects (such as themes that critiqued capitalism) and racial subjects (such as race relations in the American South). It also stipulated the ways in which prominent professional groups, such as politicians, judges, social workers and members of the press, could be treated on­screen: although individual members of these groups could be portrayed as villainous, drunk or incompetent, this had to be portrayed as atypical, rogue behaviour in the context of highly ethical professions. Similarly, industry policy required great care to be exercised in the portrayal of foreign nationals—a ruling which became sufficiently restrictive in the mid-1930s to encourage scriptwriters to set their scenarios in fictional mythical kingdoms rather than risk causing international offence (Vasey, 1997).

One of the most influential special-interest groups in Hollywood was the Catholic Church. The PCA’s files demonstrate that Catholicism’s interest in the movies did result in the direct modification of some aspects of motion picture representation, principally in the industry’s representation of priests and of the Church itself. Much attention has been paid to the Catholic Legion of Decency campaign in 1933, during which branches of the Church distributed motion picture blacklists to their congrega­tions (Black, 1994). It is arguable, however, that the effect of the Legion of Decency campaign, like that of the Code itself, was to reinforce the limits of acceptable representation that was possible under state and international censorship provisions; thus it ultimately served to assist Hollywood financially rather than penalizing it. The main lesson to be learnt from an examination of the PCA’s archives is that the process of adapting a property to the screen involved an exhaustive process of compromise, trans­formation and negotiation, mainly to remove any causes of offence that might ultimately hinder its distribution through censorship or protest.

The PCA archive, together with the various studio archives that are now available to researchers, is amongst the best nuts-and- bolts evidence we have about how movies were put together in Classical Hollywood, particularly because they record how a variety of competing interests argued and negotiated over the final form of the movies. An appreciation of this process helps to explain why Hollywood narratives often appear incoherent, compromised or conven­tionalized, even while their central attractions function as powerfully as ever. The production process described in the archives should also lead us to be sceptical about claims that certain bodies of work take the form that they do because of the influence of individuals such as Jewish production executives, or Catholic PCA functionaries (see Gabler, 1988). There was little or no room within Hollywood’s system of production for personal attitudes to find expression in this way. In this commercial cinema, the elements that stayed in were those that had found recent favour with audiences, and it was the job of production executives to ensure this in rapid time, regardless of their personal persuasions. The requirements of both censors and pressure groups were, by contrast, accommodated through the gaps, elisions and transformations in the cinema ‘text’ that often rendered it unrecognizable from its original source. Hollywood’s capacity to respond quickly to both audience trends and conservative pressures—aided by the close links between production, distribution and exhibition that came about through vertical integration—helped it refine a formula for entertainment that was simultaneously normative and inventive. Schatz discusses something of the intricacy and complexity of this formula in The Genius of the System (1988), in which he argues against auteurist approaches to Hollywood in favour of the institutionally-based craftsmanship and creativity of the studio system.

Since the 1950s, when production first began to be outsourced to companies with looser links to the studios, the centralized checks and balances of Classical Hollywood have been eroded, and movies have become more diversely expressive. The abandonment of the Production Code in 1966 and the introduction of ratings in 1968 (still under the auspices of the MPAA) accelerated this trend, and in the quest for new markers of quality in the absence of the studio insignia the promotion of the ‘director as star’ has introduced ‘personal’ filmmaking styles to Hollywood’s repertoire, and has established much broader parameters for the expression of sex and violence. Ironically, however, the consolidation of movie distribution at the centre of major media companies in the 1980s and 1990s has resulted in a new tension between artistic license and conservatism. As Justin Wyatt has observed, the formerly independent distributor Miramax became ‘somewhat constrained’ after it was acquired in 1993 by Disney, which has an inestimable investment in its historically family-friendly image. In 1995 a deliberately controversial advertising campaign for Antonia Bird’s Priest (UK, 1994), for example, not only caused the film to attain the notoriety that was intended, but also resulted in a number of high-profile investors, including Senator Bob Dole’s wife Elizabeth, disposing of their Disney stock:

The Knights of Columbus, selling $3 million of Disney stock, cited the company’s ties to Miramax and Priest, while a Dole spokesman commented, ‘Mrs Dole was surprised to learn that Disney owned Miramax and Hollywood Records and has decided to sell her stock’. (Wyatt, 1998: 85)

Public relations difficulties have also arisen in relation to the juvenile-sex movie kids (Larry Clark, US, 1995), Spike Lee’s project Summer of Sam (US, 1999), Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (US, 2004) and others. While none of the Code and Ratings Administra­tion’s records have been made as publicly available as the Production Code Administra­tion’s, recent research into its operation has demonstrated a continuity of concern and, indeed, practice with the previous system, ensuring that the products of the MPAA member companies move freely through their markets. The major companies have consistently avoided releasing ‘X’ or ‘NC-17’ movies, from which minors are prohibited, and the borders between the other ratings are carefully patrolled and negotiated (Lewis, 2000; Lyons, 1997; Sandler, 2007; Vaughn (2006). Self-regulation and self-censorship clearly remain in Hollywood’s broad corpo­rate interests, and the popular cinema remains a site where the limits of public taste and tolerance are negotiated and defined.

Aesthetic Analyses

The aesthetics of Classical Hollywood film had little in common with European notions of high art, although occasionally the major studios brought out movies that were self­consciously serious in intent or formally experimental, in order to generate prestige for the studio and the American industry as a whole—for example, Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, US, 1927), The Crowd (King Vidor, US, 1928), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (William Dieterle and Max Reinhardt, US, 1935). More routine production concentrated, instead, upon providing ‘entertainment’ that was sufficiently attractive and diverting to general audiences both within the United States and internationally to keep them turning up to the box office week in and week out. Defining and refining a general formula for a slate of pro­ductions with such enormously widespread appeal was Hollywood’s grand, enduring and improbable achievement, part aesthetic and part commercial—what Andre Bazin famously called ‘the genius of the system’ (1968: 154). Despite the incorporation of cinematic expression of all kinds into the distribution apparatus of modern Hollywood, it is still the industry’s most popular and widely consumed products that underpin its economics, and the most appealing elements of these products have varied little since the Classical era.

From an economic point of view, the remarkably consistent nature of Hollywood’s attractions has resulted from the necessity of stabilizing audience demand and minimizing financial risk. It is largely for these reasons that Hollywood’s output has been consistently star-centred and generically based: the appeal of a star or genre persists beyond the end of the film and invites the provision of similar, if reconfigured, pleasures in future productions. This begs the question, however, of exactly what it is about stardom and genre that proves so compelling to audiences, and commentators on Hollywood have written extensively on both areas in an attempt to analyse the pleasures they provide.

On many levels Hollywood is an erotic cinema, and the audience’s intimate association with the stars on screen are at the heart of this eroticism. From movie to movie, audiences become acquainted with the physical fascination, stylistic assurance, moral strength (or amoral insouciance) and emotional vulnerability of the star. Interviews, advertising tie-ins, magazine articles and ‘candid’ observations of the star work teasingly to suggest that they are sometimes to be found in the prosaic world inhabited by their fans, despite the fact that their glamorous personae are evidently dependent upon the rarefied oxygen of the hyperreal world on screen.

While the erotics of Hollywood are most obviously expressed through the vehicle of the star, equally persistent attractions are provided through Hollywood’s employment of spectacle. This has several different but related dimensions. Exoticism is one, perhaps most obviously expressed in the James Bond franchise, which has taken its audiences to every conceivable extreme of exotic location. Science fiction and historical settings have also long been staples of exotic spectacle, with the locales themselves imaginatively engaging audiences to an extent that can rival or exceed the attractions of the characters and narrative. The offering of these exotic locations to the audience, in tandem with more generic elements of adventure, heroism or romance, constitutes a way in which Hollywood flaunts its ability to put money on the screen. From the point of view of the potential moviegoer seeking a good night out, a Hollywood movie may constitute a sound investment of their entertainment dollar precisely because it can deliver highly expensive art direction, effects and stars, at the same time as delivering the reliable staples of story and characterization with a guaranteed level of technical competence. The Busby Berkeley movies that Warner Bros brought out during the Depression were extravagant examples of this syndrome, offering moviego­ers spectacular sets, costumes, choreography and dancing girls as a bonus on top of the basic love story, all for the small price of admission to the cinema during an era of material deprivation. While these were musicals, the broader spectrum of ‘action’ in movies—including increasingly elaborate chases, fights, explosions, monsters, cities collapsing and so on—also allows Hollywood to demonstrate its capacity for financial and technical excess in the production of audience pleasure. Hollywood literally delivers more bang for the moviegoer’s buck, and in so doing maintains its differentiation from less highly capitalized forms of cinematic entertainment.

Given that they have constituted such a conspicuous and strongly promoted element of Hollywood’s output, it is surprising that work on the spectacular elements of the cinema has not featured more strongly in scholarly writing on the movies—another hangover from film literature’s early debt to literary criticism. Some useful early work was laid out by A. Nicholas Vardac in From Stage to Screen (1947), which traces some of early cinema’s debt to the aesthetics of the spectacular popular stage. More recent work has concentrated on the visceral impact of action-based special effects, which toss the audience vicariously into the centre of the cinematic experience through the use of fast­paced editing, computer-generated imagery and energetic musical scoring. Following the example of Star Wars, which was successfully spun off into the theme-park ride Star Tours and a succession of computer games, action- based movies are increasingly designed with future exploitation options in mind, with the potential for rides, games and ‘action figurines’ influencing the style and form of the original cinematic production (King, 2000; Stringer, 2003).

Mainstream Hollywood movies are designed more to draw audiences into their imaginative worlds than to distance them and invite contemplation, with action-based movies being only the most extreme example. Continuity editing was devised in Hollywood, partly for reasons involved with streamlining production, but more fundamentally in order to provide audiences with a seamless, intimate and unobstructed perspective upon the action. Within this system the audience is normally positioned so as to see and hear the salient details of the movie’s narration with a minimum of disruption and frustration; the camera/screen provides a perspective upon the action that rarely draws attention to its own mediating function. A paradigm for Hollywood’s ‘classical’ approach to narration was elaborated by Bordwell in Narration in the Fiction Film (1985). Bordwell describes the mainstream Hollywood film as unified around ‘psychologically defined individuals who struggle to solve a clear-cut problem or to attain specific goals’; the movies’ style of narration is determined by this central line of action, and is structured as a series of causal relations. Citing Eugene Vale’s The Technique of Screenplay Writing (1972: 135-60), Bordwell points out that the basic features of this paradigm are supported by industry practice, in which screenplays are constructed along the classical lines of ‘the well-made play, the popular romance, and, crucially, the late-nineteenth-century short story’:

Hollywood screenplay-writing manuals have long insisted on a formula which has been revived in recent structural analysis: the plot consists of an undisturbed stage, the disturbance, the struggle, and the elimination of the disturbance. (1985: 157)

Departures from the cause-and-effect structure of classical narrative can be motivated by a number of intrinsic factors: for example, displays of technical virtuosity or spectacle may be the result of artistic motivation, while characters suddenly bursting into song may result from generic motivation. Through Bordwell and Thompson’s influential text Film Art (2003), this approach to Hollywood narration has become widely accepted: Thompson has since demonstrated its application to contemporary Hollywood in Storytelling in the New Hollywood (1999), and Bordwell has elaborated his ideas in relation to contemporary Hollywood in The Way Hollywood Tells It (2006).

While not necessarily challenging the details of Bordwell’s analysis, some scholars, including Maltby (2003: 15), Elizabeth Cowie (1998: 178-90) and Geoff King, have questioned the primacy of classical narrational forms in the construction of Hollywood movies. King comments,

The overriding aim of the studio system was not to produce ‘classically’ balanced and harmonious compositions, but to make money. The industry was, and remains, governed by what Maltby terms a ‘commercial aesthetic, essentially opportunistic in its economic motivation’, in which a variety of ingredients are used to increase the potential profitability of a film … The star might be consumed as a form of spectacle: an audio-visual presence to be enjoyed in its own right. Films featuring favourite stars might be experienced in terms of the star presence as much as their place within, and helping to shape, a developing narrative. The point, as Maltby suggests, is that viewers can pick and choose among different elements as the principal sources of pleasure. Seamless narrative might be more important to some viewers than to others. It might figure more centrally in some types of films, such as mystery or suspense, in which the complexity or resolution of plot elements is heavily foregrounded. Elsewhere, or for other viewers, the quality of narrative might be of less importance, subordinated to or combined with the display of star presence, action, locations, or whatever. (2002: 180-1)

The implication here is that in explaining the pleasures offered by the movies—which is to say, in accounting for the form, content and, indeed, continuing existence of the commercial cinema—the contribution of the scriptwriter need not necessarily be seen as being more determining than the presence of the star or the contribution of the special effects team. In High Concept (1994), Wyatt relates the aesthetic pleasures in the cinema of the 1980s and 1990s to the positioning at the centre of wider marketing and merchandising campaigns, which he sees as resulting in narrative disruptions that are motivated extrinsically to the movie ‘text’, in contradistinction to Bordwell’s intrinsic motivations. Spin-off music videos, for example, account for ‘detachable’ and otherwise unmotivated musical sequences in movies such as Flashdance (Adrian Lyne, US, 1983), Footloose (Herbert Ross, US, 1984) and Purple Rain (Albert Magnoli, US, 1984).

In Hollywood Cinema (2003), Maltby introduces the idea of ‘commercial aesthetics’, cited above by King, as the basis for a revised understanding of the form and operations of the movies. He sees the construction of Hollywood movies as being motivated by the aim of ‘providing the maximum pleasure for the maximum number, to ensure a maximum profit’ (2003: 60). This leads him to ask ‘how Hollywood movies are organized to deliver pleasure to their audiences’, as well as to question how movies relate to their broader cultural, commercial and industrial contexts (2003: 16). The logic of commercial aesthetics sees the evaluative criteria that are commonly brought to high culture as irrelevant to Hollywood’s products, which are designed as much more open texts, available for pleasurable consumption at many different levels by their diverse audiences. Maltby sees the fundamental shape, rhythm and segmentation of commercial cinema as proceeding from the psychology of the audience, employing narrational strategies for continually engaging the audience’s interest and—especially—their emotions.

There is a case to be made that, in Hollywood cinema, every element presented on-screen and in the soundtrack is designed to provide the audience with a structured emotional experience. The language of Western aesthetics deals poorly with nuanced descriptions of affect, in contrast of some Eastern cultures such as Japan and India. However, the elicitation of emotional responses, in a complex variety of combinations, evidently underlies much of the art and craft of Hollywood, including scriptwriting, lighting and cinematography, art direction and—most obviously—musical scoring. An emphasis on the audience’s emotional experience can also add to our current understanding of how generic elements work in Hollywood cinema. Altman, for instance, argues that the obligation to arrive at a happy ending leads classical narrative to ‘reason backward’, ‘retrofitting’ the beginning so that it may lead logically to the predetermined happy ending (1992: 32). The use of generic classifications by movie publicists, video stores and reviewers operates as a way in which to advise potential consumers of movies about what kinds of emotional rewards to expect in specific productions. Thrillers, romances and horror movies are all self-explanatory in this regard, while westerns, detective stories, gangster movies, teenpics and science fiction are all characterized by widely-known emotional signatures, achieved through atmosphere (locations and art direction), characterization (actors/stars admixed with stereotypes of heroism, villainy, desirability and/or eccentricity), narrative and music.

If audiences go to the popular cinema to feel while they go to the art cinema to think, then placing the elicitation and management of emotion at the centre of the organization of the Hollywood ‘text’ may throw new light on such disparate, but perennial, elements of the commercial cinema already discussed above, including stardom, spectacle, erotic or comic plots and subplots, and narratives that appear, according to more rational criteria, to be incoherent or nonsensical. This approach seems to be particularly productive if ‘emotion’ or ‘feeling’ is defined sufficiently broadly to include comic, thrilling, awe­inspiring and sensational impacts. Since 1995, a number of publications have appeared in this area, including work by Murray Smith (1995), Ed S. Tan (1996), Greg M. Smith (2003) and Carl Plantinga (Plantinga and Smith, 1999). Some related work has also begun in the area of cognitive psychology (see Hogan, 2003). Models based upon the idea of popular film as a complex, structured emotional experience promise to prove more nuanced and productive than has the application of psychoanalytic theory to the cinema, with its globalizing notion of ‘desire’.

In the end, what the question of Hollywood has brought to Film Studies has been less a conceptual paradigm than a provocation to explain and understand a complex and endlessly self-reinventing object of analysis. Because its products are so beguiling, so easily and so pleasurably consumed, ‘Hollywood’ remains a popular byword for a not quite serious industry, run by people who do not quite live in the real world. The challenge for the scholar is to find ways to take Hollywood seriously, despite itself (Maltby, 2003: 5-31). Hollywood is a phenomenon that demands our attention, not only for its status as a (very real) multi-billion industry, but also for its remarkable capacity to obscure its financial operations with a smokescreen of anecdote, biography and gossip, with the willing collusion of the popular and critical cultures it inhabits. Most of all, far from warranting dismissal for its commercial basis, Hollywood cinema uniquely expresses a complex formula for entertainment which, if not ‘universal’, demonstrates extraordinarily diverse cultural and demographic appeal. Apparently at its most guileless and open-hearted when it man­ages to appeal simultaneously to the emotions of its many audiences, this is also when Hollywood reveals its most sophisticated and highly developed industrial strategy.