Big Picture The New Logic Of Money And Power In Hollywood

Chapter 1 The Two Hollywoods The Twilight of the Gods On March 20, 1948, the elite of Hollywood, braving freezing temperatures and gale-force winds, filed past the newsreel cameras into the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles for the twentieth annual presentation of the Academy Awards. Once inside, they discovered a stage that had been transformed into a towering birthday cake, with twenty giant Oscar statuettes in place of candles. The studios had much to celebrate that night. Their movies, the most democratic of all art forms, had become the principal mode of paid entertainment for the vast majority of Americans. In an average week in 1947, 90 million Americans, out of a total population of only 151 million, went to a movie, paying on the average forty cents for a ticket. Nor was this massive outpouring, about two thirds of the ambulatory population, the product of expensive national marketing campaigns. It was simply the result of regular moviegoers going to see whatever was playing at their neighborhood theaters. Most of these moviegoers didn't go to the theater to see a particular film. They went to see a program that included a newsreel; a short comedy film, such as the Three Stooges; a serial, such as Flash Gordon; animated cartoons, such as Bugs Bunny; a B feature, such as a western; and finally, the main attraction. In 1947 in America, movie houses were more ubiquitous than banks. There were more than eighteen thousand neighborhood theaters. Each had only one auditorium, one screen, one speaker (located behind the screen), one projection booth, and one marquee. Every week, usually on Thursday, a UPS truck picked up the previous week's reels and delivered the new ones. The new film's title on the marquee and the listings for it in the local newspapers constituted all the advertising most movies got. Virtually all of these movies and shorts came from regional exchanges owned and operated by seven distribution companies that were, in turn, owned by seven Hollywood studios: Paramount, Universal, MGM, Twentieth CenturyFox, Warner Bros., Columbia, and RKO. In little over a generation, these studios had perfected a nearly omnipotent mechanism for controlling what the American public saw and heard. It was known, collectively, as the studio system. These studios had their common origins in the arcades, nickelodeons, and exhibition halls of the silent-film era. Their founders, self-made and self-educated Jews, had been part of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century wave of immigration from Eastern Europe. They had worked at menial jobs as ragpickers, furriers, errand boys, butchers, junk peddlers, and salesmen and then gone into the business of showing movies. Here they found an enthusiastic audience, especially among those not yet fully literate in English, and a great deal of competition for it. To rise above their competitors, they instinctively sought what later economists would call "economies of scale." Louis B. Mayer, the founder of MGM, borrowed money to expand from a single theater in Haverhill, Massachusetts, to a small group of theaters that he combined into a "circuit"so called because the reels of a single movie could be sent by bicycle from one theater to the next (with showtimes cut so close that sometimes one theater was showing the first reel of a film while another theater was showing the last), allowing multiple screenings ofand multiple admissions forthe movies he rented from film exchanges. As their circuits expanded, these entrepreneurs began opening their own film exchanges and distributing movies to other theater owners, but they still made most of their money from tickets bought at their own box officeso called because the cash went into locked boxes. When they found tEpstein, Edward Jay is the author of 'Big Picture The New Logic Of Money And Power In Hollywood', published 2005 under ISBN 9781400063536 and ISBN 1400063531.