Inventing the Mazda Tests

The second part of the book begins with chapter 4, which explores the key events of 1927–1928, in which the motion picture industry began to bring together companies and workers from the East and West around strategic technological shifts. While the shift to sound was in process, it was not sound but lights and film stock that served as the vehicles for these early collaborative endeavors. With the formation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) in 1927, the studios united behind a single organization designed to standardize both labor and technology practices across all the major producers. In order to gain the cooperation and favor of the studio technicians, AMPAS focused many of its early activities on collaborative technical projects. In the spring of 1928, the Mazda tests united the studio technicians, manufacturers, independent labs, and trade organizations to standardize lighting and film stock technology across the industry. This first “scientific endeavor” of Hollywood, followed immediately by the first Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE) convention in the area, created a model for the institutionalization of technological management and innovation in the industry.

The Academy Technical Bureau, Cooperative Research, and the Building of the Studio System

At the end of the 1920s, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) harnessed its role in the transition to sound to shift leadership of technical research to Hollywood. At the same time that it began the Sound School, the Academy established a Producers-Technicians Committee designed to pool knowledge of universal production practices. This chapter argues that AMPAS was able to establish itself as the authority over everyday technology in Hollywood through this committee and by absorbing the AMPP’s Technical Bureau. Through their collective scientific activities, the studios were able to take advantage of the knowledge and skills of their workers to solidify Hollywood’s dominance over the motion picture industry. At the same time, several new journals and publications for the dissemination of technical knowledge were established, including the International Photographer, Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, and the Academy Technical Digest, determining who disseminated knowledge, generated definitions, and created standards. The institutional structure established by the start of 1930 would remain stable throughout the golden age of Hollywood, making AMPAS both the clearinghouse and the gatekeeper that determined what the basic standards for technology would be and who would have access to this knowledge.

A Community of Engineers

In the motion picture industry, large East Coast manufacturers such as Kodak, GE, DuPont, and Bausch & Lomb produced materials such as lights, film stock, and lenses for production. Beginning with a brief history of the motion picture technology field before 1915, this chapter describes how the industry increasingly became reliant on these American industrial concerns. Beginning around 1916, the manufacturing side of the business was professionalized and unified by the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE), while continuing to isolate itself from the production side of the industry for another decade. SMPE emphasized standardization across companies in the manufacturing of motion picture tools, creating a stable industry and a community for knowledge sharing that had little contact with the production center in the west.

The Fundamentals

Chapter 5 shows how the collective approach to research established in the Mazda tests was utilized in the chaos brought to every aspect of film production by the introduction of sound. Rather than focusing on sound itself (the focus of much scholarship), this chapter concentrates on its ramifications for everything from lights and cameras to set materials and lab practices as a way of understanding how the entire system dealt with the changes in the industry. The Hollywood studios viewed the drop in technical quality brought by sound as a potential disaster for the industry once the novelty wore off. For the studios to quickly regain the professional standards expected of Hollywood films, the Academy led a “school” in which technicians from across the studios and manufacturers shared knowledge about the new sound systems. These collective activities served to tame the chaos of sound and create collaborative practices that were perpetuated and shared across the studios in a systemized way for the first time.

Epilogue

I am an engineer and I was educated as an engineer. I got out of it some time ago when I got in the picture business. … Probably a good many of you have tried at various times having these industrial engineers come into your plant, and the first thing they have tried to do was to install a lot of system and red tape, and they were not competent to do it, because they did not understand the motion picture business. They have tried to apply factory methods to the making of pictures. That is wrong, because after all, the making of a picture is the product of the imagination....

Introduction

While the early years of Hollywood are usually seen in light of legendary figures such as Adolph Zukor, it is the engineers, technicians, and bureaucrats who supported the system that were responsible for every frame Hollywood produced. This introduction reorients the reader away from stars and producers and toward these technical workers and their organizations. It discusses the role of concepts such as creative industries, Hollywood’s invisible style, scientific management, technological determinism, scientific progressivism, engineering history, and trade organizations in the broader arguments presented throughout the book. When we look at Hollywood motion picture production as a technology business, rather than an anomalous industry, the studio system takes its place within its proper historical context of the American economy and culture as a whole.

Between the Lines

The film technicians who used and managed the technology within the Hollywood studios themselves, such as cameramen and electricians, take center stage in this chapter, focusing on how the technical work of motion picture production was understood, managed, and promoted within the new “factory” system of Hollywood. The primary case study here is the cameramen, who used their organization, the American Society of Cinematographers, and its publication, American Cinematographer, to establish their status as the chief technicians in motion picture production in the silent period, often by resisting unionization and by touting their special knowledge of the tools of the trade. The cinematographers positioned themselves as “engineers” within the studio, a position that the incursion of trained sound engineers into Hollywood challenged.

“Maintained Solely for Your Benefit”

Chapter 2 centers on the specialized technology companies and service firms that formed around the motion picture producers in Los Angeles, creating an industrial “cluster” in the region. The movement of independent technology distributors, inventors, and laboratories to Southern California to cater exclusively to the needs of the motion picture producers was essential to the growth and stability of Hollywood. The relationship between the studio workers and companies such as Technicolor, Mole-Richardson, and Mitchell Cameras helped establish the community of Hollywood as the center of the motion picture industry, even as the studios themselves dispersed throughout Los Angeles. These companies, unlike their corporate brethren in the East, were eager to adapt their technical training to the creative needs of the studio, thus forming a unique engineering community around the production studios.