Kindle Notes & Highlights
frame. Filmmakers like D. W. Griffith, most notably, came to understand the relationship between the scale of a given shot – long, medium, or close-up – and access to the psychology of their fictional characters and thus the chains of identification between spectator and narrative action,
In 1908, the 10 largest film production companies, led by Edison and Biograph, formed the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC). Combining the patents they held on film technology with an exclusive deal with Eastman Kodak, the Trust, as it came to be known, sought to exert full control over the production and distribution of movies.
independent producers – Adolph Zukor, Carl Laemmle, and William Fox – successfully resisted MPPC control and gained a foothold in the industry.
Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, the court found in favor of the state and declared that Ohio's power to censor film content outweighed Mutual's claims to free speech or its argument that Ohio's regulating standards were inconsistent.
The movies were first and foremost a business, the court said, and do not function as “part of the press of the country or as organs of public opinion” (Sklar 1994, 128).
Their opposition to censorship came less from aspirations toward art and its protection than from aspirations for profits and the threat posed by an unevenly applied set of
regionally enforced moral...
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Between 1915 and 1928, the major filmmaking companies of the studio era were established or stabilized. Loew's (MGM), Fox, Paramount, Universal, and Warner Bros. all emerged over the course of a fiercely competitive 15 years of mergers and acquisitions.
Hollywood. The central producer system, in which a detailed shooting script allowed for planning and budgeting well before a film went into production, replaced an earlier director-based approach. The director's work could now focus on approving the set design, shooting the film, and working with the editor in the assembling of a final cut. Overseeing virtually everything else – labor, props, set construction, wardrobe, players – was a producer who functioned like a general manager, someone also entrusted with the job of managing costs and estimating profits.
ranks. Indeed, the silent era is distinguished not only by the importance of women as moviegoers, but by the diverse roles women played within the industry as well.
Screenwriters June Mathis and Anita Loos and directors Lois Weber and Ida May Park, to name just four, played crucial roles in shaping studio stars and product.
175). To present the classical narrative, there emerged a consistent method for linking shots together, one that could handle the myriad temporal and spatial variables that came with telling stories through multishot films.
In the classic films of silent comedy, grace was privileged over strength, underdog ingenuity over rugged machismo.
The acrobatics of Keaton and the dance hall physicality of Chaplin point, in fact, to a quality that defined much of silent cinema – its fascination with the body.
As World War I boosted the economies of North America, Japan, and various South American countries, these countries could better afford the importation of American goods, films included.
process. In 1927, both Paramount and MGM entered the newsreel business just in time for the conversion to sound, and in a short time Paramount News took a leading role. But it was Fox's Movietone News that recorded the first important sound-on-film events – the takeoff
In its infancy then, American animation frequently broke the frame of illusion and foregrounded itself as the main attraction.
In exposing their means of production and in their direct address to the spectator, early animators signaled how their genre, more than any other within the Hollywood mode, would joyfully challenge the conventions of illusion.
This antirealist impulse, eager to explore the subjective, perceptual realm, would remain an important component of alternative cinema.
for most moviegoers, experimental filmmakers of the 1920s initiated an avant-garde that would consistently challenge that definition throughout the twentieth century.
What is clear is that sound came to cinema over a protracted period of experimentation, first outside the movie industry and then also within it,
Shelley Stamp illustrates the crucial roles women played as filmmakers, producers, screenwriters, editors, set and costume designers, actors, exhibitors, film critics, and columnists – all playing important advocacy roles in support of women's suffrage, legalized contraception, and other Progressive-era reforms at a time when the audience demographic was dominated by women whom the industry aggressively courted.
success. In Hollywood women were active at all levels of the industry: The top screenwriters were women; the highest-paid director at one point was a woman; and women held key leadership roles in the studios as executives and heads of departments like photography, editing, and screenwriting.
Women wrote at least half of all silent films and writers like Frances Marion, June Mathis, Anita Loos, Bess Meredyth, and Jeanie Macpherson were the highest-paid and most-respected writers of their day.
Their influence was profound: Women were responsible for crafting many of the
era's landmark screen personalities (Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Clara Bow, and Gloria Swanson), as well as some of its definitive filmmaking modes – social problem films, sex comedies, and historical epics.
By the 1920s, women held at least half of all positions in the writing departments at most of the major studios, described by one commentator as a “manless Eden” (Holliday 1995, 114–115; MacMahon 1920, 140).
June Mathis was, without question, the top screenwriter of the 1920s, author of well over 100 titles in her 12-year career.
As Thomas Slater (2010) notes, these roles helped not only to shape Valentino's screen persona, but also to redefine masculine norms in the aftermath of World War I.
Jeanie Macpherson wrote virtually all of Cecil B. DeMille's best-known early work, including his groundbreaking sex comedies, his iconic biblical epics, and formative roles for Gloria Swanson.
Screenwriters like these often wielded considerable influence at different stages of production, consulting with wardrobe mistresses, property masters, and set constructors during preproduction, directors, actors, and script girls during shooting, then title writers and editors during postproduction (Holliday 1995, 156).
If women were imagined as idealized scenario writers, they also became instrumental in the evolving professionalization of screenwriting through university instruction.
Lois Weber was the best-known and most prolific female filmmaker of this period, responsible for writing, directing,
and sometimes acting in hundreds of shorts made between 1911 and 1916, and at least 44 feature films from 1914 through 1934, including The Merchant of Venice (1914), the first American feature directed by a woman.
In 1916, she became the first and only woman elected to the Motion Picture Directors Association, a solitary honor she would retain for decades (Stamp 2011).
Alice Guy Blaché continued to direct features in the late teens and early 1920s, including The Ocean Waif (1916); comedienne Mabel Normand began directing many of her Keystone shorts after 1914 and released her first feature, Mickey, in 1918; Alla Nazimova directed several features, including an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's Salome in 1923; and editor Dorothy Arzner began directing as well, with Fashions for Women in 1927.
including Cleo Madison, Ida May Park, Lule Warrenton, Ruth Stonehouse, Elsie Jane Wilson, Grace Cunard, and a young Jeanie Macpherson (Cooper 2010).
At the height of her fame, Pickford successfully negotiated a series of contracts that not only insured she would retain a greater percentage of the profits from her films, but also, more importantly, gave her measurable creative control. In 1916, she demanded (and got) a salary equivalent to Charlie Chaplin's, noting that she, not he, was the bigger star.
Dorothy Davenport Reid provides a more vis- ible example of the varied contexts for female authorship in early Hollywood, as Mark Lynn Anderson has shown.
Screenwriter Bebe Daniels remembered spending many nights sitting with her friend Dorothy Arzner in the editing room, an experience that, she recalled, “taught me more about writing for the motion pictures than anything in the world could have taught me” (quoted in Mayne 1994, 25).
While oftentimes dismissed as mere purveyors of gossip, it is clear that female journalists writing for daily newspapers, popular magazines, industry trade papers, and fan publications were much more than that. They helped pioneer the art of movie reviewing, helped draw attention to the many women, not just high-profile stars, working in the new industry, and helped to foster a critical distance from Hollywood trends, all the while – yes – providing privileged access to the medium's ethereal celebrities and crafting a fan culture by, about, and for women.
As Anne Morey remarks, “women used filmgoing to advance their own influence, parlaying their role as consumer into a more obviously political function as the arbiters of their own and others' consumption”
The National Board of Censorship was staffed largely by middle-class women who volunteered to evaluate films prior to their release.
interests. As both arbiters of culture and targets of reform, women were instrumental in promoting, screening, and watching films in nontheatrical settings like churches, schools, libraries, museums, clubs, workplaces, and community centers.
As Anthony Slide concludes, “never again would such women shape the tastes of a generation” (Slide 1977, 10).
