The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (review)

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-55
Author(s):  
Ron Briley
Keyword(s):  
Studio Era

Torn, Burned, and Yet Dancing

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alix Beeston
Keyword(s):  
Literary Text ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
In Series ◽  
Studio Era ◽  
Classical Hollywood ◽  
Mode Of Production

This chapter discusses the collaborative and institutionalized mode of production in studio-era Hollywood through the lens of the two major projects that comprised the work of the final year of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life: the screenplay “Cosmopolitan” and the unfinished novel The Last Tycoon. These texts modify the modernist literary trope of the woman-in-series in concert with classical Hollywood’s defining logic of substitution and repetition. Ultimately derived from the basic seriality of the photogrammatic track, this logic is incarnated by female characters in “Cosmopolitan” and The Last Tycoon who, in refusing to remain silent substitutes for other women, rupture the illusory conceits of seamless fictional narration in classical Hollywood—and its equally seamless discourse of femininity. Fitzgerald’s Hollywood writing thus confronts the gendered and racialized limits of the modernist literary field and, in the process, unravels the myth of the solitary author and the singular, stable literary text.

Last Woman Standing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. E. Smyth
Keyword(s):  
Star System ◽  
Women's Issues ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Equal Pay ◽  
Career Opportunities ◽  
American Myths ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
Women’S Careers ◽  
The Media ◽  
Studio Era

Today, when the media puts studio-era Hollywood and feminism together, the answer is usually Katharine Hepburn. But during her career at RKO and MGM, she did not discuss women’s issues regarding equal pay, career opportunities, or political equality. However, she did state flatly in 1933, “I intend to speak my mind when I please, despite movie traditions,” setting her independence against the Hollywood establishment. She remained uninterested in working with other Hollywood women on-screen or in recognizing the advantages of promoting women’s careers through publicity networks off the set. Katharine Hepburn endures as a product of American myths about pioneering individualism, the Hollywood star system, and the studio-era film industry’s ambivalent investment in strong women. But if, as historian Nancy Cott has argued, “Pure individualism negates feminism because it removes the basis for women’s collective self-understanding or action,” then Hepburn was no feminist. This chapter unravels her myth.

Designing Women

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. E. Smyth
Keyword(s):  
Working Women ◽  
Costume Design ◽  
Creative Force ◽  
Women's Fashion ◽  
The One ◽  
Studio Era ◽  
Average Woman ◽  
Better Than

During the early 1940s, journalists observed that after years of men controlling women’s fashion, Hollywood had become “a fashion center in which women designers are getting to be a big power.” In a town where “the working girl is queen,” it was women who really knew how to dress working women. Edith Head’s name dominates Hollywood costume design. Though a relatively poor sketch artist who refused to sew in public, Head understood what the average woman wanted to wear and knew better than anyone how to craft her image as the-one-and-only Edith Head. However, she was one of many women who designed Hollywood glamour in the studio era. This chapter juxtaposes Head’s career with that of a younger, fiercely independent designer who would quickly upstage Head as a creative force. In many senses, Dorothy Jeakins’s postwar career ascent indicated the waning of the Hollywood system and the powerful relationship between female designers, stars, and fans.

Success in Spite of Itself

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Platte
Keyword(s):  
Musical Score ◽  
Back Seat ◽  
Publicity Campaign ◽  
Studio Era

Detailed production files about the musical score for Spellbound reveal an intense and fraught collaboration among music editor Audray Granville, director Alfred Hitchcock, composer Miklós Rózsa, and, producer David O. Selznick. In contrast to Rebecca, for which Hitchcock assumed a back seat in the scoring, his music directions for Spellbound are more specific—and contrary to Selznick’s. Granville, whose influence stretches from the preview score to the final dubbing of Rózsa’s theremin-infused score, sought to reconcile these differences. Her editing is deftly effective—not only maintaining the motivic integrity of Rózsa’s score but also shifting the score’s emotional weight from its misogynist villains toward the beleaguered heroine (Ingrid Bergman). Ultimately, the collaborative tensions of Spellbound proved unsustainable: the final result disappointed all four players. Nevertheless, the score’s popular reception—abetted by another music-based publicity campaign and soundtrack album—made it one of the best-known scores of the studio era.

“I Know Just What She’s Going Through”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Platte
Keyword(s):  
Original Music ◽  
Delicate Balance ◽  
Alternative Perspective ◽  
Franz Waxman ◽  
Studio Era ◽  
Musical Accompaniment

Rebecca’s music offers the strongest argument for the style of musical collaboration Selznick fostered. Although earlier scholarship has focused on Hitchcock and Waxman, this chapter provides an alternative perspective informed by production records: how ideas and decisions flowed from producer, music director Forbes, and composer Franz Waxman to intermingle in one of the most compelling scores of the studio era. This chapter shows the extent to which Selznick and Forbes shaped the score’s formation and the degree to which non-original music from the preview score works in dialogue with Waxman’s associative themes, Robert Russell Bennett’s arrangements, and Leonid Raab’s orchestrations. Rebecca’s musical accompaniment epitomizes a delicate balance of collaborative tensions: the fruit of a system developed under Selznick and Forbes in the late 1930s.

Produced by Irving Thalberg

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Salzberg
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Conceptual Understanding ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Turning Points ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Mass Audience ◽  
Production Code ◽  
Studio Era

Irving Thalberg was not just a critically important producer during Hollywood’s Golden age, but also an innovative theorist of studio-era filmmaking. Drawing on archival sources, this is the first book to explore Thalberg’s insights into casting, editing, story composition and the importance of the mass audience from a theoretical perspective. The book argues that Thalberg’s views represent a unified conceptual understanding of production – one that is still significant in the modern day. It examines Thalberg’s impact on film-historical turning points, including the transition from silent to sound cinema and the development of the Production Code, and features in-depth analyses of his productions at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1924 to 1936. Indeed, each chapter offers a reading of Thalberg’s films through his own theoretical lens, thus highlighting his insights into production and introducing new ways of considering his classic pictures, including The Big Parade (1925), The Broadway Melody (1929) and Romeo and Juliet (1936). The work concludes by assessing his resonance in popular culture, tracing the mythology of Thalberg as it evolved after his death in 1936.

Cinematic Segregation

2019 ◽  
pp. 135-167
Author(s):  
Hannah Durkin
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
World War ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Stormy Weather ◽  
Studio Era

This chapter examines Dunham’s interventions in World War II-era U.S. cinema. Focusing on three of Dunham’s Hollywood films, Carnival of Rhythm (1941), Star Spangled Rhythm (1942), and Stormy Weather (1943), the chapter recovers Dunham’s groundbreaking contribution as a Black woman choreographer to midcentury U.S. cinema. Establishing that Dunham was the first Black choreographer to gain onscreen credit for her work in Hollywood, it shows how her performances represented a negotiation of studio-era racial codes but also how she mediated such codes and was able to assert her authorship by presenting a vision of Black dancing womanhood in Hollywood that was pioneering its open engagement with sensuality, cultural diversity, and choreographic allusions to ballet and modern dance.

Complexity and Experimentation in the Western

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Berliner
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
New Material ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Studio Era

Chapter 12 explains the aesthetic value of increased complexity in genre filmmaking by examining filmmakers’ efforts to continually complicate the figure of the western hero. The chapter studies the appeal, for western cinephiles, of Hollywood’s most complex westerns of the studio era. It also demonstrates how more recent filmmakers have kept the western alive by revitalizing outdated conventions and mining new material from the genre. The western is so solid and reliable that filmmakers found they could sledgehammer its foundational myths without cracking its structure.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document