The Shock of Television — Twilight of the Studios

In the previous episode, we watched cinema grow into a mirror of each nation’s culture and politics, from German Expressionism to the Soviet theory of montage. Throughout that time, Hollywood continued to reign as the world’s greatest dream factory.

The lots always held actors under contract, and the mighty studios — which controlled production, distribution, and exhibition all at once — sent hundreds of films a year down the assembly line. Audiences went to the movies once a week as a matter of course. The prosperity seemed as if it might last forever.

But from the end of the 1940s into the 1950s, two forces began to shake that foundation at the same time. One came from the courtroom; the other from the living room. The richest empire in the history of cinema was quietly approaching its twilight.

The Supreme Court Unlocks the Empire’s Chains

The mechanism that sustained Hollywood’s golden age is called the ‘studio system.’ The source of its strength lay in vertical integration. The major studios did not merely make films; they controlled distribution networks and even owned the theater chains where the films were shown.

Under this unified control, the studios held the means to pressure independent movie houses. The most representative of these was ‘block booking.’ If you wanted to screen one major attraction, you had to buy it bundled together with any number of mediocre films — such deals had become the norm. Theaters could not freely choose what to show, and the audience’s range of choices was, in practice, held in the studios’ hands.

The U.S. Department of Justice took issue with this structure as a violation of antitrust law. After a long battle, on May 3, 1948, the Federal Supreme Court handed down a historic ruling: ‘United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.’ — the so-called Paramount decision.

The ruling did not change everything in a single day. It is said to have taken roughly a decade afterward before each studio actually finished separating production and distribution from exhibition. But the trend was decisive. Having lost the company-owned theaters that had guaranteed steady income, the studios could no longer survive merely by mass-producing films and pouring them down the vertical chain. They also lost the means to keep large numbers of contract actors and exclusive staff on the payroll. The studio system, the very heart of the golden age, thus began to dissolve from within.

Another Light Flickers On in the Living Room

At the very moment the courtroom struck, another threat had crept into the living rooms of households everywhere. Television.

From the late 1940s into the 1950s, television sets spread rapidly through American households. Until then, entertainment had meant making the trip to a movie house; now people could sit on the sofa and enjoy moving images, for free. For families raising children, the living-room amusement that required neither the trouble of going out nor an admission fee held an irresistible appeal.

The result showed up in the numbers. Throughout the 1950s, theater attendance and box-office revenue are said to have fallen sharply. Audiences who had once gone weekly now drifted to once a month, or even less. The conspicuous empty seats were an alarm the dream factory could not afford to ignore.

What is intriguing is that Hollywood at first treated television as an enemy and viewed it with suspicion. The studios were reluctant to put their stars on television and hesitated to let their own films be broadcast. The dream factory would not easily acknowledge a newcomer competing for the market in moving images. But the tide of the times could not be stopped. Before long the studios found a way forward in producing programs for television and selling broadcast rights to their older films, and they came to seek a path of coexistence with their former enemy.

Bigger, Wider, More Spectacular — The Counterattack of the Giant Screen

Forced onto the defensive, Hollywood tried to compete with something television could not do. Its answer was ‘size.’ Win audiences back to theaters with an overwhelming visual experience that the small black-and-white screen at home could never deliver — a counterattack through technology had begun.

What opened the fight were Cinerama, which used multiple projectors to cast images onto a curved giant screen, and the 3D format, which created a sense of depth with two images, left and right. The 3D film called up a passing boom, but partly because of the nuisance of the special glasses, it is said not to have lasted.

What turned the tide was CinemaScope, which 20th Century Fox put into practical use in 1953. Using a special lens called an anamorphic lens, it compressed a wide image onto standard 35mm film for recording, then stretched it out at projection time to bring it back to life on a wide screen. Its first feature was ‘The Robe,’ a historical drama set in ancient Rome.

The success of CinemaScope steered Hollywood toward ‘the cult of the blockbuster.’ To make use of the wide giant screen, sweeping landscapes, vast crowds, and lavish historical pageants were fitting. Color-rich historical dramas and epic super-productions were made one after another, and production costs swelled. Pour an enormous sum into each single film, and reap a great profit if it hits — a shift from an age of mass production to an age of the gamble.

That said, this cult of the blockbuster was a double-edged sword. If a film that had swallowed vast funds failed at the box office, it could shake the very pillars of the studio. Indeed, later on there are accounts of cases where runaway production costs brought on a management crisis. The counterattack of the giant screen was dazzling, but it was also the beginning of a world far more unstable than the once-steady empire.

What the Twilight Illuminated

Standing at the end of the 1950s, Hollywood’s landscape had changed greatly from a decade earlier. The studios had let go of their theaters, weakened their hold over contract actors, and were, like it or not, facing the neighbor called television. The age of standardized products, hundreds of which had been dispatched each year with quiet routine, was quietly drawing to a close.

This change cannot be dismissed as simple decline. The dismantling of vertical integration widened the room in which independent producers and distribution companies could be active. The studios’ inability to keep actors and directors bound exclusively also brought filmmakers a freer standing. From the gaps where the empire’s chains had loosened, a new wind was beginning to blow in.

Twilight is the end of one day and, at the same time, the hour before the next dawn. At the feet of the aged empire — suffering shrinking audiences and betting on the giant screen — young filmmakers with a sensibility unlike the Hollywood of before were quietly drawing breath. The leading role on the screen was about to change hands.