auso BY THOMAS ScHagy. HOLLYWOOD GENRgg oLD HOLLYWOoD_ NEW HOLLYWOOD ABOUT THE AUTHOR ‘Thomas Schatz is professor of Radio-TV-Film at the Univesity of Teras in Austin, He isthe at the of Hopwood Genes, the definitive text om Hollywood's most popular story forms, and his want bss appeared in Wide Angle, Cineaste, ca mice. A regular lecturer for the Amer fn Iatitute, Schatz also writes and st i Various PBS programs on American fil 4 television. He ives in ‘Austin with his wile children, THE GENIUS OF THE SYSTEM HOLLYWOOD FILMMAKING IN THE STUDIO ERA Thomas Schatz PANTHEON BOOKS NEW YORK MER POcopyright © 1088 by Thomas Schatz stata Pe Aneian i me inte Ute Stes Pantheon a vision of Rando House, Inc. New York, and ney Rand Hose of Canad Lie, Lt alypblshedin hardcover by Pantheon Books, tan Hs 018. alight reserved ude Iter copie Boks 0 we Scat, Thomas, 148~ ‘The onus ofthe sytem, ‘blown: Incladesindes 1. Mation pres California-Los Angeles sony. Metin pcre dstry—Calforcia—Los AogeesHistory 3 Motion picture studios~Califor- slarLerArger-Hitry. 4 Holywood (Los Angeles {Cl}-Hisory. 5 tllywod as Angeles Call) Todays 6210s Avalos (Calif)}Hintory Thos ‘Avge (Calif}~Indstien Tile PNIWERSUSSS 06H NC WOFTONDA 87-6068 Sano Tam 6 Designed by Beth Tondews Design Muvuictrd inthe United States of Amerie Pantheon Paperback Eaton for my father“THE WHOLE EQUATION OF PICTURES” THE 1920s; BEGINNINGS 5: SELZNICK aT Mow 4 WARNER BROS. TALKING THEIR WAY TO THE TOP 1928-1938 HE row £ S SEL2NiCK aT PARAMOUNT FROM soom To BUST ~ CONTENIS.q MGM AND THALBERG: ALONE AT THE Top § seLENIcK AT REO 9 WARNER BROS.: THE ZANUCK ERA GOLDEN AGE THE 19305; AS. UNIVERSAL; PLAYING BOTH ENDS 44 MOM: LIFE APTER THALBERG AS. SELZNICK axD HITeHCOCK: 17 DAVID O. seu zwicK PRODUCTIONS: af oxivens, ACS Tale BEST OF noTH WORLDS WW Mow: THE wre SIR TEE ten cost or quatiry é 1947-1960; DEcLIN 483 508 soo\CKNOWLED FDG ‘MENTS NTS fis research for The Genius of the System took me to various archives, libraries, and depositories around the country, all of which are listed in the bibliographical section at the end of this book. I would like to acknowledge those institutions here at the outset, and to thank various individuals for the generous and able assistance I received on this project. I am deeply indebted to Leith Adams and to Ned Comstock of the Department of Special Collections, University of Southem California —Leith for his help with the Warners materials and Ned for his help with the MGM and Universal files. They also provided valuable ideas and advice as this project took shape. At the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s Margaret Herrick Library, my research was ar- ranged and assisted by Sam Gill. Anne Schlosser helped me access and sort through the George B. Seitz Collection in the American Film In- stitute’s Louis B. Mayer Library. At the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theatre Research, I was assisted by Harry Miller and Maxine Fleckner. The support I received from the University of Texas and its Human- ities Research Center while researching and writing (and rewriting) this book was enormous. I am especially grateful to W. H. (Deacon) Crane, Ray Daum, Paul Bailey, and Prentiss-Moore for their assistance in the Hoblitzelle ‘Theatre Arts Library at the Humanities Research .. Center, and also to Thomas Staley, Director of the HRC. Permission to | quote from materials in the Selznick Collection at the HRC wasdt granted by Selznick Properties, Limited. Jeffrey L. Selznick snd ty... Thomson were gracious enough to review this manuscript and My constructive suggestions for revisions. My thanks also yo out ty Deny, Robert Livingston of the University Research Institute for fhnyy, ‘il support during the early stages of my reseai and 10 Dein Koby Jeffrey of the College of Communication for similar ansistance, | tn most indebted, finally, to Bob Davis and Horace Neweom, wher us j, friends and colleagues, and as successive chairs of the Rudio-TV. tj, Department, were upbeat and supportive throughout the five-yeur |i, span of this project. I would also like to thank my graduate students the university for their support, encouragement, and patience, with special thanks to Chris Anderson for his research and editorial ays{y. tance. Many other individuals helped in many different ways, and 1 an particularly grateful to Edwin Sharpe, Kathryn Burger, Greg Beal, Joann Lammers, Don Hartack, and Hilary Radner. I'd also like to ac- knowledge Dudley Andrew and Bruce Gronbeck of the University of Iowa for providing me a place to hole up while I began work on the manuscript. ACKNOWLEDGME My deepest gratitude goes to Sara Bershtel, my editor at Pantheon. This book would not have been taken on without her encouragement, and it would not be even half what it is now without her counsel and tireless assistance. Sara commented throughout this project on the sim- ilarities between book publishing and moviemaking, and indeed she played the role of “creative producer” from its inception to the final cut. Thanks also to Peter Biskind, a leading film writer and editor in his own right, who first s i : uggested th: i ject and who monitored it from a distance, at I take on this subject anrer eee Tho American cinema {¥ a classical art, but why not then admire in it what {8 mont admirable, 4.0,, not only the talent of this or that filmmaker, but the gentus of the system, ANDRA BAZIN, 1987Sree eer Itt Gt NIUS Ob THE SYSTEM_——————™ at : } | | Introduction: ‘The Whole Equation of Pictures’ Walking at dawn in the deserted Hollywood streets in 1951 with David {Selznick}, I listened to my favorite movie boss topple the town he had helped to build, The movies, said David, were over and done with. Hollywood was already a ghost town making foolish efforts to seem alive. But now that the tumult was gone, what had Hollywood been? —Ben Hecht, 1954 Daa Selznick had a flair for the dramatic, and no one knew that better than Ben Hecht. The two collab- orated on some of Hollywood’s biggest hits—movies like Gone With the Wind and Notorious and Duel in the Sun—and often enough the making of those films was as rife with conflict as the films themselves, thanks to Selznick’s ego and his unconventional working methods. In fact, Selznick, a “major independent” producer in the age of the big studios, saw his entire career in epic-dramatic terms: David amid a slew of Goliaths. But in the early 1950s that scenario was changing rapidly. In 1953 Selznick wrote Louis B. Mayer, MGM's recently de- posed studio boss, that all of Hollywood’s “old companies” were still geared to a “business that no longer exists.” Selznick felt that every- thing from the production studios in Los Angeles to the worldwide marketing and distribution networks were predicated on a notion of moviemaking—and of movies themselves—for which there was “no longer a market.” This was scarcely a cause for celebration, since Selznick was learn- ing how little real, independence he had from the entrenched movie companies and their way of doing business. He was barely fifty years old and his earlier blockbusters were virtual prototypes for the inde- Pendent productions that now ruled the marketplace, and yet he felt ~ himself going under with the old studios. By the decade’s end he was ready to write his own as well as Hollywood's epitaph. Selznick toldTHE GENIUS OF THE SYSTEM one of his former partners in 1958 that their “old stomping groung had become “very mixed up and unhappy.” He went on to eulogize the pioneers and moguls, a vanishing breed now that the industry wre a half-century old, and he closed with the observation that Hollywood's “big companies” were staying alive only through the momentum and the motion pictures created in earlier years. The big companies like MGM and Paramount and Warner Bros, con- tinued to survive, of course—indeed they flourished in the age of tele- vision and the New Hollywood. But things had changed since that halcyon era when Selznick and Hecht and Mayer were making movies, Gone was the cartel of movie factories that turned out a feature every week for a hundred million moviegoers. Gone were the studio bosses who answered to the New York office and oversaw hundreds, even thousands, of contract personnel working on the lot. Gone was the industrial infrastructure, the “integrated” system whose major studio powers not only produced and distributed movies, but also ran their own theater chains. Something was “over and done with” in the early 1950s, all right, but it wasn’t the movies. It was the studio system of moviemaking and the near-absolute power that the studio wielded over the American movie industry. The Hollywood studio system emerged during the teens and took its distinctive shape in the 1920s. It reached maturity during the 1930s, peaked in the war years, but then went into a steady decline after the war, done in by various factors, from govern ment antitrust suits and federal tax laws to new entertainment forms and massive changes in American life-styles. As the public shifted its viewing habits during the 1950s from “going to the movies” to “wateh- ing TV,” the studios siphoned off their theater holdings, fired their contract talent, and began leasing their facilities to independent film- makers and TV production companies. By the 1960s MGM and ‘Ware ners and the others were no longer studios, really. They were primarily financing and distribution companies for pictures that were “pack aged” by agents or independent producers—or worse yet, by the sta’ and directors who once had been at the studios’ beck and call. T HE collapse of the studio system was bound to provoke questions like Ben Hecht's—“What had Hollywood been?’”—and the answel have been plentiful but less than adequate, Hecht himself answe™ as so many of his industry colleagues did, with an anecdotal, self serving memoit laced with venom for the “system” and for the "Ph listines” who contrdlled it—and who paid Hecht up to $8,000 a we? for his services as a’sf@enwriter. Hecht was an essential part of system, of course, though he hardly saw things that way, and his rem" niscence was less revealing of Hollywood filmmaking than of the #INTRODUCTION f eastern-bred writers toward the priorities and the power des on the movie industry. Hecht’s answer did provide yet an- cture ; i struct vece of evidence to be factored in, along with countless uther ahr ‘ ‘ othe Pave and autobiographies, eritial studies, and economic analy interviews @ tergat the accumulated evidence scarcely adds up, and our sense: of se PMjoliywood hacl been remained a vague impression, fragmented wat radiotory, more mythology than history. aie vomising to change all that, a cadre of critics and historians in the 1960s and 1970s cultivated a “theory of film history” based on the notion of directorial authorship. As the New Hollywood emerged from the ashes of the studio era, proponents of the “auteur theory” pro- aimed that what the Old Hollywood had been was a director's cin- ema. They proclaimed, too, that the only film directors worthy of canonization as author-artists were those whose personal style emerged from a certain antagonism toward the studio system at large —the dehumanizing, formulaic, profit-hungry machinery of Holly- wood’s studio-factories. The auteurist’s chief proponent was Andrew Saris, who in his landmark study, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968, cast the studio boss as the heavy in Holly- wood’s epic struggle and reduced American film history to the careers of a few dozen heroic directors. Keying on an observation by director George Stevens that as the industry took shape, “the filmmaker became the employee, and the man who had time to attend to the business details became the head of the studio,” Sarris developed a simplistic theory of his own, celebrating the director as the sole purveyor of Film Art in an industry overrun with hacks and profitmongers. The closing words of his introduction said it all: “He [the director] would not be worth bothering with if he were not capable now and then of a sublim- ity of expression almost miraculously extracted from his money-ori- ented environment.” so maim elf woul not be worth bothering with if it hadn't been i infvental, effectively stalling film history and criticism in a pro- Iywood's of adolescent romanticism, But the closer we look at Hol- studi ma lations of Power and hierarchy of authority during the oon ert at division of labor and assembly-line production pro- ofthe inate it makes to assess filmmaking or film style in terms i8s008 here aitt ditector—or any individual, for that matter. The key conttol—and th style and authority—creative expression and creative A unusual a were indeed a number of Hollywood directors who ward Hawk mere of authority and a certain style. John Ford, bles, but fee tank Capra, and Alfred Hitchcock are good exam- eit control ee noting that their privileged status—particularly r script development, casting, and editing—was morewv fanetion of their role as producers than as directors. Such authority coanie oly with commercial success and was won by filmmakers who \woved not fust that they had talent but that they could work Profitably within the system, These filmmakers were often “difficult” for a studig to handle, perhaps, but vo more so than its top stars or writers, And ultimately: they got along, doing what Ford called “a job of work” and Woving on ty the next project. In fact, they did their best and most wunsistent work on calculated star vehicles for one particular studio, invariably in symbiosis with an authoritative studio boss. Consider Ford's work with Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox ona stieeession of Henry Fonda pictures: Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, and The Grapes of Wrath. Or Alfred Hitchcock doing Spellbound and Notorious, two psychological dramas scripted by Ben Hecht and prepared by David Selznick for his European discovery, Anavid Bergman, Or Howard Hawks working for Jack Warner on To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, two hard-boiled thrillers with Beyrart and Bacall that were steeped in the Warners style. These were first-rate Hollywood films, but they were no more distinctive than other star-genre formulations turned out by routine contract directors: Uni- versal’s horror films with Boris Karloff directed by James Whale, for instance, ot the Paul Muni biopics directed by William Dieterle for Whale and Dieterle are rarely singled out for their style or md each would have been lost without the studio’s resources and regimented production process, But that doesn’t diminish the in- teurity of films like Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, and The Bride of Fraukenstein or The Story of Louis Pasteur and The Life of Emile Zola, The quality and artistry of all these films were the product not simply of individual human expression, but of a melding of institutional forces: In each case the “style” of a writer, director, star—or even a cinem* tographer, art director, or costume designer—fused with the studio’ production operations and management structure, its resources & tulent pool, its narrative traditions and market strategy. And ultimatelY Any individual's style was no more than an inflection on an establishe apa style. Think of Jimmy Cagney in Public Enemy, staggerint own real ark, rain-drenched street after a climactic shoot-out eo rok eiers gazing Just past the camera and muttering 1 ain Wenner Bron ling face~ own into the gutter. That was a signa! s Moment, a natrative-cinematic epiphany when star xenre and technique coalesced into an ideal expression of studio st)!" vintate 1931. Other sttdies had equally distinctive styles and sign’! moments, involving different stars and ‘ferent “9 of seeing” in both a technical ind story types and a differe! and an ideological sense. On a darke! mete ett, 6 | | | ree peepee eeINTRODUCTION rained ed street at MGM, for instance, we might expect to find a slossy, upbeat celebration of life and love—Mickey Rooney in another Andy Hardy installment, struggling to get the top up on his old jalopy ishile his date gets soaked, or Gene Kelly dancing through puddles and singin’ in the rain. Over at Universal a late-night storm was likely to signal something more macabre: Count Dracula on the prowl, per- haps, or Dr. Frankenstein harnessing a bolt of lightning for some hor- rific experiment, These are isolated glimpses of a larger design, both on screen and off, Each top studio developed a repertoire of contract stars and story formulas that were refined and continually recirculated through the marketplace. Warners in the 1930s, for example, cranked out urban crime films with Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, crusading biopics with Paul Muni, backstage musicals with Dick Powell and Ruby Kee- ler, epic swashbucklers with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, and in a curious counter to the studio's male ethos, a succession of “women’s pictures” starring Bette Davis. These stars and genres were the key markers in Warmers’ Depression-era style, the organizing principles for its entire operation from the New York office to the studio-factory across the continent. They were a means of stabilizing marketing and sales, of bringing efficiency and economy into the pro- duction of some fifty feature films per year, and of distinguishing War- ners’ collective output from that of its competitors. The chief architects of a studio’s style were its executives, which any number of Hollywood chroniclers observed at the time. Among the more astute chroniclers was Leo Rosten, who put it this way in Holly- wood: The Movie Colony, an in-depth study published in 1940: Each studio has a personality; each studio’s product shows special emphases and values. And, in the final analysis, the sum total of a studio's personality, the aggregate pattern of its choices and its tastes, may be traced to its producers. For it is the producers who establish the preferences, the prejudices, and the predispositions of the orga- nization and, therefore, of the movies which it turns out. Rosten was not referring to the “supervisors” and “associate produc- SS” who monitored individual productions, nor to the pioneering yaovie moguls” who controlled economic policy from New York, He 48 referring to studio production executives like Louis B, Mayer and yin8 Thalberg at MGM, Jack Warner and'Hal Wallis at Warner Bros., man¥l Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox, Hany Cohn at Columbia, and Wor independent producers like David Selznick and Sam Goldwyn. “se men—and they were always men—translated an annual budget =