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Mass Production of Dreams
HOLLYWOOD IS ENGAGED in the mass production
of prefabricated daydreams. It tries to adapt the American dream,
that all men are created equal, to the view that all men's dreams
should become equal. Movies are the first popular art to become
a big business with mass production and mass distribution. It
is quite obvious that movies cannot be individually produced,
and that some form of mass production is inevitable. But the assumption
is that for any sort of mass production more than one kind of
social system is possible. The question is therefore asked, Is
the Hollywood system the most appropriate one for the making of
movies-one form of an ancient and popular art, storytelling, in
which the storyteller's imagination and understanding of his fellow
men have always been a necessary ingredient?
The invention of the movie camera and the use of celluloid film brings the art into direct contact with a modern technology and makes it dependent on mass rather than individual production. New technology always precipitates changes in the method and system of production, whether it is of storytelling or agriculture. But the essential old elements do not completely disappear. In a primitive society, when new agricultural techniques are introduced, the nature of the soil and climate and the customs of the people cannot be negated, if the new techniques are to be successfully used. New technology in any society must be adapted and integrated with former patterns and adapted to the basic nature of the product to be produced. But instead of integrating, the old and new are some times in conflict; or they may run in parallel lines without much effect on each other. Of the three possibilities Hollywood production of movies represents conflict.
40
A feature of all mass production is the
uniformity of the menu. Hollywood has tried to achieve this by
seeking formulas that it hopes will work for all movies and insure
their success. It is ironical that this was more possible in the
early days when movies were small business, for then just the
novelty of movement on the screen fascinated an audience. The
common denominators of pantomime, slapstick and romance could
be understood and enjoyed by uncritical audiences almost anywhere
in the world. Since all members of the human species have the
same basic needs and have some characteristics in common, there
are certain simple forms of entertainment to which they can all
respond. But now, when movies are big business, and the mass production
and uniformity in the prefabricated daydreams more desirable to
the manufacturer, such uniform products have become less salable.
The only motion picture with a stereotyped plot which has met
with a fairly consistent success over a long period of time is
the Western. The formulas for other pictures have been a series
of constantly changing do's and don'ts, such as, "You cannot
make an A picture about a prize fight," "No picture
with any kind of message can make money," "The love
story must be the most important part of an A picture." Each
one of these formulas has been successfully broken and shown to
be false at one time or another through a box-office success.
This was accomplished by someone with imagination, courage and
faith in his own judgment, usually a director or producer with
sufficient prestige to get his own way. But each time anyone departs
from the formula and meets with success, the departure then becomes
another formula.
When Lost Weekend, made despite the misgivings
of studio executives by an imaginative team of director and writer,
was very successful, the formula changed. It had been, "The
leading character in a serious picture cannot be a drunkard. Drunkards
are for comedies." After the success of Lost Weekend, there
were attempts to repeat the new formula. Smash-Up with a woman
alcoholic as its main character, was one of the repetitions, but
had neither the power of Lost Weekend nor its profit at the box
office.
The movie Body and Soul broke the formula that "You cannot make a successful A picture about a prize fight." Snake Pit, a serious
41
film about insanity--which most executives
would have regarded as an unprofitable theme-was one of the top-grossing
pictures in 1949, and, according to Variety of January 12, 1949,
was almost as "strong" in smaller towns as in big cities
such as Chicago and New York.
Crossfire, one of the first pictures
with a definite message about anti-Semitism, made money. Since
then there have been a whole cycle of pictures like Home of the
Brave, Lost Boundaries and Pinky, with messages about the Negro
problem, and these have all been profitable. Contrary to expectations
they have been O.K.'d for distribution and were successful in
the South, in spite of its well-known resistance to pro-Negro
themes. Variety (October 5, 1949) says: "The career of Home
of the Brave in the South was a virtual walkover."
Pinky was the second-largest top-grossing
picture of 1949.1 The industry then changed its formula to "Any
message picture will make money" and produced a cycle of
anti-Communist pictures. Certainly the anti-Red pictures were
congenial to the prevailing political atmosphere, and their box
office should have been helped by their timeliness with the headline
news plus the strong exploitation campaigns. Yet I Married a Communist,
The Iron Curtain, The Red Menace and Red Danube, the major anti-Communist
movies, have not been successful either at the box office or with
the critics. Their lack of success, which was contrary to all
expectations, had nothing to do with their message but much to
do with their poor quality: "The public will buy 'message'
pix, but they gotta be good".2
The criteria of good entertainment might be applied to any picture, with or without a message. But good entertainment is not harmonious with the following of formulas and the use of stereotypes. Year after year, the list of top box-office hits indicates great diversity in audience tastes, and includes musicals, serious dramas, adventure and suspense stories, comedies, farces, war and historical themes The four top-grossers of 1947 were such different pictures as: Best Years of Our Lives, Duel in the Sun, The Jolson Story, and
42
Forever Amber. The top-grossers of 1948
also showed diversion according to Variety of January 5, 1949,
they were: Road to Rio, Easter Parade, Red River, Three Musketeers,
Johnny Belinda, Cass Timberlane, Emperor Waltz and Gentleman's
Agreement. In 1949 the five largest box-office hits, all grossing
over 4,000,000, were widely different: Jolson Sings Again, Pinky,
Male War Bride, Snake Pit, and Joan of Arc. Those movies which
have been acclaimed by the more serious critics also show diversity.
But in spite of this demonstrated many-sided character of the
taste of movie audiences the industry continues to look for formulas,
and to produce cycles of pictures dealing with the same theme.
This continues even though the exhibitors, the businessmen who
operate the theaters, protest. "One of the biggest squawks
now being voiced by circuit ops [operators] is that their theaters
are being deluged by an unbroken string of cycle pix."3 The
particular complaint voiced in this article is against the six
musicals released and made available by majors within four or
five weeks.4 This followed a prior cycle of ten A pictures which
were Westerns.5
Theater operators say that cycles are
bad business and that the law of diminishing returns starts working
long before the end of one is reached. The audience gets tired
of the same theme over and over again.
The industry attempts not only to use
formulas for movie plots but to use star actors as another formula
for success, and to stereo type actors, those who play secondary
roles as well as stars. Both these practices are considered in
the discussion of actors and acting.6 The points are only briefly
mentioned here as examples of the industry's attempt to substitute
formulas for the storyteller's imagination and skill.
A well-known maxim in the industry is "We give the public what it wants. The technique of the polling organizations used to
43
find out what the public wants is to
ask members of a "sample" a question, such as, "Would
you like to see a movie based on a story about--?" following
with a condensation of the proposed plot in a few sentences. In
some polls the names of stars who will play in films are used.
Other polls are taken for preferences in titles for the depth
of audience penetration reached by the publicity and advertising
campaigns. I am particularly concerned with the first type of
polling, designed to find out what kind of story the public likes,
because it is this which affects the content of movies.
From the point of view of good business
and as a way of producing movies, this type of research appears
both unsuitable and wasteful financially. Consumers' research
on such problems as whether people prefer this or that type of
automobile has been useful. But the underlying principles are
quite different from those involved in audience research. The
average person does not know what movie he likes to see until
he has seen it. If asked by the polling expert, his answer may
depend on what he has last seen. If he liked the last psychological
murder thriller, he is apt to say that he will like another one.
But the movie on which he is being polled will not be finished
and ready for distribution for a year or a year and a half later.
By that time he may be bored by a long succession of similar lots,
or his taste may have changed. It is also very doubtful if the
plot is the primary reason for an audience liking or not liking
a picture. A very good plot may be ruined by a poor script and
bad direction and acting, while a slim, inconsequential one may
be delightful because it is well written and acted.
The movie industry has taken over the polling devices of other big businesses without even realizing that they may even be detrimental to making movies. Mr. Sidney Buchman, the producer of A Song to Remember, a picture based on the life of Chopin, said that he wondered what would have happened if the surveyors on story content had asked, "Would you go to see a picture full of classical music?" or "Would you go see a picture about an eighteenth-century composer?'' "Answers, he felt, would be largely in the negative, yet the film proved a b. o. [box-office] success."7 The film caused an enormous increase in the sale of Chopin records, and
44
my question is, "How could people
know if they wanted to see a film with a lot of Chopin music in
it, if they had never heard any?" Good ideas for films, which
might have been successful if well done, may be shelved because
the polling organization advises that they are "poison".
How many successful novels would never have been written, if they
had been subjected to the same pre-testing?
Underlying this whole process of polls
is a lack of understanding of the creative process underlying
storytelling and an attempt to initiate practices of other big
businesses. If a poll of prospective customers for a new automobile
indicates that they prefer one with four doors rather than two,
this would in no way interfere with the functioning and efficiency
of the workers in an automobile factory. But a gifted writer or
director loses much of his efficiency and creative skill if he
works not out of his own knowledge of what is true, but according
to what a polling organization tells him the public wants. The
production of movies is a creative process, and this characteristic
does not disappear even when it is denied. It is illogical to
carry the premises underlying the manufacture and merchandising
of automobiles to the making and selling of movies, because the
problems involved are essentially different.
The polling experts conduct their surveys not only on the content of films, but also on how they should be edited or cut. A preview is held before a sample of about eighty people who hold a little gadget in their hands which they press at times of greatest interest, and this is electrically transferred to a graph, which will determine whether scenes stay in or come out. The gadget takes over part of the cutter's job, one of the most skilled operations in production of movies. A story circulated around Hollywood about a pre-testing graph which gave no indication of any audience reaction to intensely exciting scenes. It was later found out that the audience had been so excited they forgot to press the gadget. Again it seems to be a mistake in business judgment to think that there can be any substitute for knowledge and judgment. Only the lazy or ignorant man wants a substitute. For others there is a pleasure in the exercise of judgment. Machines may and do reduce man's labor and even take its place, but they are not substitutes for thinking and knowledge.
45
Instead of adapting the use of polls
and gadgets in an undiscriminating fashion from other big businesses,
the industry might find it more profitable in terms of dollars
and cents if it attempted to learn about relevant changes in behavior
and attitudes among the American people. A knowledge of its market,
present and potential, is needed by any big industry, but this
kind of study is not within the province of polling organizations.
The world in which audiences lived during the first quarter of
the century is obviously very different from the one of today.
Therefore, they need and enjoy different kinds of daydreams fantasies
and stories. The movie audience has not only increased numerically
but has become increasingly more diversified from the early days
of working-class audiences who went to the first silent movies.
Today, the audience differs widely in age, experience and background
and all these condition the kind and quality of movies it wants
to see. Nor is any individual so restricted that he can only enjoy
one type of movie.
The increasing spread of college education, which received such an impetus after World War II from the financial aid extended by the government to former G.I.s, cannot help but further modify standards and tastes in all the popular arts. Likewise, one can predict changes in the future when the present generation of children becomes adults. Movies for them are not confined to "entertainment" in the neighborhood theater. They are continuously being exposed to 16 mm. educational and documentary films, in schools, clubs and even churches. Courses in film making and lectures on film appreciation are being given in many schools. Making movies is a pastime in some homes and a Handbook of Basic Motion-Picture Techniques8 has been published for amateur move makers. "Cinema 16" and other noncommercial movie societies continue to Increase. This kind of familiarity is bound to produce innovations in both standards and attitudes concerning movies. But a knowledge of such changes cannot be gained through the use of mechanical polls and gadgets.
One man, Mr. Maxwell Shane, a writer-producer-director, decided to do some personal research on what kind of movies the
46
public wants. He took a two months' eight-thousand-mile automobile tour through twenty-four states, talking to several thousand people about the kind of movies they wanted to see. Mr. Shane came back with several important conclusions which he reported in an article. Conclusion Number One was:
The Hollywood belief that there is a difference between the big-town and the small-town is an absolute myth. A gas station attendant in Sydney, Nebraska, had the same approach to the same badly made melodrama as a haberdasher in the Chicago Loop. Lumberjacks in Fort Bragg, Calif., had the same admiration for Champion as the formally attired hotel manager whom I queried in Seattle. A general store clerk in Cook, Minn., surprised me with the same Bob Hope wise crack I'd heard from a taxicab driver in Los Angeles.... Don't decline to make an a adult picture solely on the absurd theory that the folks out around Bumpkin Corners won't go for it.
His second conclusion was:
Above all else, American audiences want motion pictures to be honest. Again and again I heard the complaint that, in effect, too many pictures are based on patently false premises or that they fall apart through shabby contrivance and completely unrealistic character innovations....It pretty much comes down to the fact that audiences simply do not want to be told at the outset of a film that what they are about to see is a mirror of life, only to be shown characters who act like idiots and are inspired by emotional drives incomprehensible to all but advanced psycho-pathologists. I concluded that the public at this time will "buy" two kinds of pictures: those which state in one way or another at the outset that they are really kidding and intend to entertain without reflecting life. These are the fantasies, the farces, the fairy tales. They must be labeled as such. In other words, the ticket-buying public will no longer accept those Hollywood concoctions which pretend to be reflections of real life but which spectators recognize as be-
47
ing real only to certain writers and directors and producers, who get all their ideas of real life from each other and from other movies.9
When Mr. Shane returned to Hollywood,
he attended a convention of the Theater Owners of America and
told them about his findings and conclusions. Mr. Shane said,
however, that no one would believe him.10 The theater owners are
an important part of the industry; but on this occasion, at least,
they appeared to have a closed mind even to learning about their
customers.
The anthropologist wonders if the general attitude of the industry towards the audience represents a survival from the past, to which it stubbornly and unrealistically clings. Newspaper columnist put it another way when he said:
No longer should films be conceived as an exchange of baby talk between far-flung masses. Important people listen in to the conversation now and switch off, if it is not to their liking... Movies, let the moguls recognize, have become the conversation of nations. By the quality of its conversation a nation is judged.11
However, when movies became big business, the heads of the industry did quickly adopt some of the monopolistic characteristics of large -scale mass production. The desire for uniformity in its product and the use of formulas and of polling devices are all part of the same trend. The business functions of movie production reach far beyond Hollywood, extending not only to New York and Chicago and every town in the United States where there is a motion picture theater, but also to every part of the world where American films are shown.
The five major companies, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp., Inc., Warner Brothers Pictures, Inc., and Paramount Pictures, Inc., control a large number of subsidiaries such as film laboratories, lithographing con-
48
cerns, radio manufacturing subsidiaries,
music publishing houses, real estate companies, booking agencies,
broadcasting corporations, recording studios and television companies.
This diversity of interest is represented
on the board of directors of each large motion picture company
by bankers, real estate men, theater owners and heads of production.
Executive personnel are men of high finance and real estate interests,
as well as those in charge of production.
However, the real backbone of the monopoly
has been in the control by one company of production, distribution
and exhibition. The top executives of the three departments relating
to theater sales and production have decided on "the number
of pictures to be made, the total amount of money to be spent,
the distribution of funds between the various classes of pictures,
the budgets of the individual pictures, and the dates when they
are to be finished."12 The distributor has been the middleman
who rents the film to the exhibitor or theater owner. Since the
majors have owned the first-run theaters which provide a large
part of the film rentals, they have been their own best customers.
This three-way control has been investigated
by the Federal Trade Commission and the Anti-Trust Division of
the Department of Justice for more than twenty years.13 An antitrust
suit was brought against the majors with the aim of divorcing
exhibition from production and distribution. A consent decree
in 1940 provided for modifications, by restricting rentals in
the block-booking14 to five films at a time, the elimination of
blind selling by having trade showings of all films before their
release, and an agreement by the five majors not to expand their
theater holdings.15
A new federal decree regulating the film industry was issued in 1946. It further banned block-booking and was designed to
49
break monopolistic practices and encourage
competitive ones. It also aimed at the partial divorcement of
studios from theater ownership.
Since then the Department of Justice
has been trying to compel the major motion picture companies to
split into separately owned theater companies and producing-distributing
ones, thereby weakening monopolistic practices. All the major
companies have fought the trend to divorcement and there have
been endless negotiations, litigations, compromises and revisions
of the original decree. Some of the ties between production and
ownership of theaters have been broken, but others remain. Independent
theater companies have been established by some movie companies,
while others are still in the midst of negotiations and court
cases.
Monopolies seem to continue in our country in spite of all the antitrust legislation. Sometimes the laws are not fully enforced. At other times, while the forbidden practices are stopped, different devices with the same goals take their place. How far legislation can keep strongly entrenched customs, particularly profitable ones, from functioning is an interesting but difficult question to answer for any society.
While the relationship between the production and distribution phases of the industry has been close, it has not been harmonious. Instead, there has been complete distrust. The trade papers have carried many stories about how distributors, exhibitors and producers have all been victims of each other. Theater exhibitors complain about the poor quality of the films, how bored their audiences are, and how poor business is. This seems to be an almost chronic state of mind among exhibitors, particularly small-town ones. A Hollywood definition of an exhibitor is "a man who goes to Florida for the winter on his losses." The editor of the Hollywood Reporter, a spokesman for the producers, had the following to say about the exhibitors on August 20, 1947:
In the present over-all effort to save picture money to plug any gaps that might be created by losses in foreign markets, it might be well for our company heads and their distributors to go on an all-out drive to stop the thieving of
50
their monies by crooked exhibitors, who, we are told, have been taking an estimated $10,000,000 to $15,000,000 a year from box-office receipts, on percentage pictures, that should justly be resting in the bank accounts of the distributors. It has become quite evident that this business of giving our majors wrong reports on the ticket sales of their pictures has jumped to enormous proportions, with the checking systems employed by the distributors lacking in efficiency. Too, once an exhibitor is caught, our distribution heads have let him off too easily, accepting some small settlement. Then the distributor goes right back, sells him more pictures and will probably get the same treatment.
Two years later, however, Mr. Eric Johnston,
president of the MPAA, made a plea at an all-industry public-relations
conference held in Chicago at the end of August 1949, for the
end of intra-mural feuds. He said: "We are often our own
worst enemies ... This industry is as riddled with inter-industry
strife as any I have ever seen."16 It was pointed out that
this "internecine sniping" contributed to bad public
relations, the subject of the Chicago conference. The intra-industry
squabbles, also, according to Mr. Johnston, make the industry
the "most lawsuit-ridden" one in the country, and the
"lack of unity weakens the industry's position in Washington."17
A Conference Committee consisting of representatives of the participating
groups of the Chicago conference was formed "to spread the
gospel of intra-industry unity."18 No one can tell how successful
their efforts will be.
But whether exhibitors or producers quarrel
or make up, they are dependent on each other. The producers must
have theaters as an outlet, and the exhibitors are dependent on
films. The exhibitors influence tends to be on the conservative
side; they are reluctant to experiment with anything different
from the sure and tried box-office hits.
The monopolistic character of the industry has been challenged not only by federal antitrust decrees, but also by the growing
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development of independent producers.
In 1946 more than a third of all films in production were being
shot by independent units,19 and according to Variety (January
7, 1948) in 1947 more than one hundred independent companies were
formed carrying budgets of over four million.
This development continues from two quite
different causes. One comes from the Treasury Department. "The
artists, dismayed by wartime income-tax rates, went into business
for themselves as independent producers in order to pay a capital
gains tax rather than income tax." 20 The other, according
to the same writer, is the itch of the director, writer, actor,
and producer to gain more control over the medium, to be in the
driver's seat. However, their independence is circumscribed, since
the outlets for distribution are limited to the major companies.
The latter therefore exercise a considerable control, in that
they still put their O.K. on the kind of pictures they wish to
distribute and refuse their O.K. for others. Many of the independents
use the production facilities of a big studio, and expenses and
profits are shared. The independents, who have their own organization,
have been active in fighting cooperative buying-booking combines,
and have welcomed the decisions of the Department of Justice that
favor separating the exhibition and the production activities
of the major companies.
Like any other big business, the motion picture industry is dependent
on capital, which can be defined as a potential for production.21
More than most, Hollywood operates on borrowed funds.22 The Bank
of America, which handles an estimated 70 percent of the film-making
loans in this country, makes some credit advances . . .
as high as eighty and even ninety per cent in the cases of producers having strong stories and casts, and backed by records of previous successes and the number of their features still
52
bringing in income. A few of the banks which formerly went up to sixty-five per cent of a picture's total cost, cut the amount to fifty per cent...23
Since the banks and motion picture finance
corporations which supply these funds require regular fixed charges,
the tendency to experiment is restricted. The banks lend money
only for those films which they consider good risks.
A vice president in charge of film loans
for a large New York bank is quoted as saying: "Whenever
we lend a producer money, we insist on seeing the shooting script.
We make sure it fits our idea of what will make a good picture.
That is only common business prudence."24 By a "good
picture," the vice president indicated later in the interview
that he meant a film entertaining enough to pay its way. Bank
executives therefore have an important voice in the decision on
what kind of entertainment will be popular. However, it is the
men in charge of the Hollywood studios who implement the decision
and who control the actual spending of the money. The lavish and
often unnecessary extravagance which, until the present economy
wave, characterized the entire industry is not exactly a secret.
Money is, of course, not the only form
of capital. Most businessmen know that special skills, knowledge,
intelligence and a strong drive are also potentials for production.
In the motion picture industry, in addition to the capital supplied
by banks or other sources, there are the intangibles, such as
the highly specialized crafts and arts involved in telling a story
in film.
The skills of the writers, directors, actors, and other artists are as necessary to the production of movies as are the funds borrowed from the banks. The question of whether Hollywood gets its money's worth from these employees, and whether it utilizes their special gifts as well as do the big businesses which employ chemists, physicists or other scientists, interests the anthropologist but is rarely heard in Hollywood.
All these are the problems of any large industry. Yet of prime
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Importance remains one fact: The product of the dream factory is not one of the same nature as are the material objects turned out on most assembly lines. For them, uniformity is essential; for the motion picture, originality is important. The conflict between the two qualities is a major problem in Hollywood.
1 Variety, Jan. 4, 1950.
2 Ibid., Oct. 5, 1949.
3 Ibid., Aug. 3, 1949
4 Look for the Silver Lining, It's a Great Feeling, You're my everything, Yes Sir, That's My Baby, In the Good Old Summertime and Top o' the Morning.
5 Whispering Smith, Yellow Sky, Streets of Laredo, Canadian Pacific, El Paso, Colorado Territory, The Younger Brothers, Red Canyon, Tulsa and South of St. Louis.
6 See Chapters XI, XII, XIII.
7 In an interview quoted in Variety, May 6, 1946
8 New York, Whittlesey House.
9 New York Times, Oct. 16, 1949.
10 New York Times, Oct. 16, 1949. Italics ours.
11 James Mason, guest columnist in Leonard Lyons's column, N. Y. Post, Feb. 13, 1948.
12 Mae D. Huetting, Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry, pp. 59-60. Phila.: Univ. of Penn Press.
13 The first antitrust suit against legitimate theater interests was filed February 21, 1950. This charged the Shubert Brothers with controlling thirty-seven theaters in the United States and also controlling a large part of all the bookings.
14 Block-booking is the "simultaneous leasing of groups of films at an aggre-gate price fixed upon the condition that all the films in the given block be taken." (Huetting, op. cit., p. 116.)
15 Huetting, op. cit., p. 140.
16 Variety, Aug. 31, 1949.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., Sept. 7, 1949
19 Borneman, Ernst, "Rebellion in Hollywood. A Study in Motion Picture Finance," Harper's, October, 1946
20 Borneman, op. cit., p.337
21 Roger Burlingame, Backgrounds of Power, p. 192. New York: Scribner's.
22 Mae D. Huettig, op. cit., p.98
23 Hollywood Reporter, April 21, 1947.
24 Variety, Aug. 4, 1948.