Independent Filmmaking in the Studio Era: Tendencies within the Studio System

2006 ◽  
pp. 19-59
Author(s):  
Yannis Tzioumakis
Keyword(s):  
Studio System ◽  
Independent Filmmaking ◽  
Studio Era

Argentine Cinema in the Late 1950s and Early 1960s

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolina Rocha
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Domestic Market ◽  
Discursive Practice ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Trial And Error ◽  
American Films ◽  
State Directors ◽  
Studio System ◽  
Independent Filmmaking

Relying on Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen’s statement that ‘both as an industry and a discursive practice, cinema is an adjunct of capitalism’ (2006, 7), I explain that to offset competition from American films, the Argentine state persistently sought to protect national film production through several laws, the most crucial of which was Law 62/57. Nevertheless, in the transition from the studio system to independent filmmaking, the Argentine film industry had an uneven success in its attempt to gain a considerable share of the domestic market. Through trial and error, the Argentine state, directors, and producers came up with different solutions to strengthen the production and circulation of national films, which in many cases were resisted by exhibitors and distributors.

scholarly journals Performing gender in the studio and postmodern musical

2012 ◽  
pp. 19-35
Author(s):  
Michael Charlton
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Marilyn Monroe ◽  
Female Roles ◽  
Studio System ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Judy Garland ◽  
Studio Era ◽  
Howard Hawks ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
A Performance

This essay explores two distinct historical periods in the Hollywood musical through a Butlerian reading of gender as a performance. The two example films from the studio era, Howard Hawks’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and the restored version of George Cukor’s A Star is Born (1954), are contextualised not only within the studio system but through the constructed star personae of their leads—Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland. Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001) and Rob Marshall’s Chicago (2002), the two example films from the twenty first century, are contextualised within a Jamesonian post-modern aesthetic and as examples of the non-studio, non-star filmic text as act of nostalgia. In contrasting these historical periods, the essay posits that the studio musical was, in fact, always already “post-modern” in its fragmentation of narrative in favour of the star performance, which constructs the gendered persona of the star. In addition, it is suggested that the sub-textual subversion of traditional female roles within the studio star performance is in many ways more effectively critical of gender conventions than the intentionally parodic aesthetics of Luhrmann and Marshall.

Controlling the Cut

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. E. Smyth
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Film Criticism ◽  
Founding Member ◽  
Academy Award ◽  
Studio System ◽  
Contemporary Film ◽  
Studio Era

Despite being a founding member of her union, Barbara McLean worked sixty-hour weeks. She supervised her male colleagues, had more Academy Award nominations than anyone, and was known as “Hollywood’s Editor-in-Chief.” But McLean—who arguably had more control over her studio’s feature output than all of Twentieth Century-Fox’s directors—was not alone. During the studio system, Hollywood’s top female editors were formidable auteurs, and were unafraid of acknowledging, as Anne Bauchens did in 1941, “Women are better at editing motion pictures than men.” Regardless of their fame within the industry and the syndicated press in the 1930s and 1940s, studio-era Hollywood’s top female editors have become obscure footnotes in Hollywood history. As women and as editors, they are doubly “invisible” in the director-driven agendas of contemporary film criticism. But during the studio system, they were at the creative center of Hollywood filmmaking. This chapter puts them back where they belong.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. E. Smyth
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Industry Trade ◽  
Studio System ◽  
Studio Era ◽  
Hollywood Studio System

Traditional histories of studio-era Hollywood contend that the film industry offered little more than acting and secretarial jobs to women; however, industry trade papers and syndicated press of the time reveal a different picture. Women worked as producers, executives, writers, script readers, production and costume designers, film and sound editors, set dressers, make-up artists, publicists, agents, researchers, actors, and directors. They worked for their unions and on industry committees. Although they didn’t always agree politically, Hollywood’s women shared a commitment to the Equal Rights Amendment and often helped each other’s careers. This chapter provides an overview of the diverse professions open to women in the Hollywood studio system and challenges the “great man” theories of authorship and female disempowerment that have driven conventional histories of old Hollywood.

‘A war film with a difference’: Adrian Brunel's Blighty and Negotiation within the British Studio System of the Late Silent Period

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine Botting
Keyword(s):  
Silent Period ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
War Films ◽  
Box Office ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Studio System ◽  
To Come ◽  
First World ◽  
War Film

The creation and viewing of war films was one of the elements in the process by which Britain attempted to come to terms with the horrors of the First World War. During the interwar period, war films took two main forms: those which reconstructed famous battles and melodramas set against a wartime backdrop. However, the film Blighty, directed by Adrian Brunel in 1927, took a slightly different approach, focusing not on military action but on those who stayed behind on the Home Front. As a director during the silent period, Brunel trod a stony path, operating largely on the fringes of the industry and never really getting a firm foothold in the developing studio structure. He remains well regarded for his independent productions yet also directed five features for Gainsborough at the end of the silent period. Of these film, his first, Blighty, is perhaps his most successful production within the studio system in terms of managing a compromise between his desire to maintain control while also fulfilling the studio's aims and requirement for box office success. Brunel's aversion to the war film as a genre meant that from the start of the project, he was engaged in a process of negotiation with the studio in order to preserve as far as possible what he regarded as a certain creative and moral imperative.

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.

The Cellophane Wall

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. E. Smyth
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
American Business ◽  
Women Filmmakers ◽  
American Film ◽  
Business Enterprise ◽  
Collaborative Models ◽  
Bette Davis ◽  
Studio System ◽  
Film Authorship ◽  
Over Time

Between 1924 and 1954, Hollywood was, more than any other American business enterprise, enriched by women: women’s pictures, women audiences and fans, and women filmmakers. McLean, Head, McCall, Davis, Harrison, Hopper, and many other Hollywood women offered collaborative models of the studio system. These are difficult concepts for film historians to face. Recognizing that the Hollywood studio system enabled women’s careers between 1924 and 1954 forces a reconsideration of two ideologies that have held sway over American film and cultural history: the “great man” theory of film authorship, and the assumption that things for Hollywood’s women have improved over time, due to our faith in “progressive” history. Today, women trying to break into the industry are told that although things are difficult and women are not represented equally in the creative professions, the situation has improved since the bad old studio days. “Bunk!” as Bette Davis would have said.

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document