Cinema Hollywood 1920-1928
The Late Silent Era in Hollywood (1920-1928)
TERMS/PEOPLE
Big Three (Paramount-Publix, Loew’s (MGM), First
National)
The vertically integrated firms that owned big theater chains—
Paramount-Publix,
Loew’s (MGM), and
First National—constituted the Big Three at the top of the
industry.
Block Booking
1)As the big Hollywood companies expanded, they developed a system of
distribution that would maximize their
profits and keep other firms at the margins
of the market.
2)In dealing with the theaters they did not own, they employed block booking,
meaning that any exhibitor who wanted
films with high box-office potential had
to rent other, less desirable films
from the company.
3)Exhibitors might be forced to book an entire year’s program in advance.
4)Since most theaters changed programs at least twice a week and each big
firm
usually made only around fifty
films a year, a theater could deal with more than
one firm.
5)Similarly, the studios needed films from other firms to keep their own
theater
programs full.
6)The biggest firms cooperated among themselves developing into a mature
oligopoly during the 1920s.
Buster Keaton
Buster Keaton’s show-business career began when as a child he joined his
parents’ vaudeville act. In the late 1910s, he moved into films as an actor in
Fatty Arbuckle’s short films of the late 1910s. When Arbuckle shifted to
features in the early 1920s, Keaton took over his film production unit and
directed and starred in a series of popular two-reelers. His trademark was
his refusal to smile, and he became known as “the Great Stone Face.”
Keaton’s early films revealed a taste for bizarre humor that bordered at times
on Surrealism. Sherlock Jr.
Keaton soon moved into features, though his offbeat humor and complex plots
made him less popular than his main rivals, Chaplin and Lloyd.
Cecil B. De Mille
Cecil B. De Mille had been extraordinarily prolific from 1914 on. During the
1920s, he moved on to more sumptuous films at Paramount. One of his primary
genres was the sex comedy, often starring Gloria Swanson, one of the
era’s top stars. De Mille’s sophisticated comedies helped earn Hollywood a
reputation for being risqué. He exploited expensive women’s fashions, rich
decors, and sexually provocative situations, as in Why Change Your
Wife? In the film, Gloria Swanson plays a wife who saves her marriage
to Thomas Meighan by adopting a daring wardrobe. When his work came under fire
from censorship groups, De Mille responded with films that mixed steamy
melodrama with religious subject matter. The Ten Commandments (1923)
had an introductory story depicting a young man who scoffs at morality and vows
to break all the commandments; the main part of the film was an historical epic
showing Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt. De Mille’s biggest religious
production of this era was The King of Kings (1927),
controversial for its onscreen depiction of Christ. In the sound era, De Mille
would become identified with historical and religious epics. In the following
scene from The Ten Commandments, The Egyptian forces set out in
pursuit of the fleeing Israelites in front of a massive set.
Charles Chaplin
United Artists, the company formed by Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie
Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith.
Charles Chaplin continued to make hugely successful films in the early 1920s,
when his contract with First National kept him from releasing through UA. In
1914, Chaplin had appeared in the first slapstick feature, Tillie’s
Punctured Romance, but subsequently he concentrated on shorts. In 1921,
he returned to features with extraordinary success in The Kid. Here
Chaplin played the familiar Little Tramp but shared the spotlight with the
expressive child actor Jackie Coogan.
Chaplin soon became even more ambitious, making a drama, A Woman of Paris,
in which he played only a walk-on role. This bitterly ironic romance satirized
high society. Its droll, even risqué, humor influenced other directors of
sophisticated comedies. The public, however, stayed away from a Chaplin film
without the Little Tramp. Chaplin brought back that beloved character in two
very popular features, The Gold Rush (1925) and The Circus (1927).
Clara Bow
Jack fails to realize that his neighbor, Mary, is in love with him, (in the
movie Wings) and she follows him to France as a Red Cross driver. Mary
was played by Clara Bow, who enjoyed a brief but intense period of stardom from
the mid-1920s to early 1930s. She epitomized the Jazz Age flapper, with
an uninhibited natural sexuality; her most famous film, It (1927, Clarence
Badger), earned her the name the “It girl” (“It” being a current
euphemism for sex appeal).
D.
W. Griffith
United Artists, the company formed by Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Mary Pickford,
Charlie Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith.
Notice the soft-focus cinematography in the next clip from Way Down
East 1920, soft also considerably enhanced glamorous shots, as in the
medium close-up of Lillian Gish. shimmering soft-focus landscape shot
in Way Down East resembles high-art still photographs of the
period. Similarly, after D. W. Griffith cofounded UA, he made several
large-scale historical films. Just as he had been inspired by Italian epics
like Cabiria to make The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, now he was
influenced by Ernst Lubitsch’s postwar German films. Griffith’s greatest
success of the era was Orphans of the Storm (1922), set during the French
Revolution. It starred the Gish sisters, Lillian and Dorothy, both
affiliated with Griffith since the early 1910s. Orphans of the Storm (D. W.
Griffith, 1922)
Griffith made another historical epic, America (1924), concerning the
American Revolutionary War. His next film, however, was quite different: a
naturalistic tale of difficulties in postwar Germany called Isn’t Life
Wonderful (1924). Griffith’s mid-1920s films were increasingly
unprofitable, and he soon abandoned independent production to make a few films
for Paramount. He completed two films in the early sound era, including the
ambitious Abraham Lincoln (1930), but then was forced into retirement
until his death in 1948. A poignant moment in Orphans of the Storm is
shown in the following scene as the two separated sisters briefly encounter and
then lose each other again in the streets of Paris.
Birth of a Nation
Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
After UA was started in 1919, Douglas Fairbanks was the first of its founders
to release a film through the new company. His Majesty, the American (1919,
Joseph Henabery) was one of the unpretentious, clever comedies that made
Fairbanks a star. Soon, however, he moved from comedy to a more ambitious
costume picture, The Mark of Zorro (1920, Fred Niblo). It retained the
star’s comic flair but was longer and emphasized on historical atmosphere, a
conventional romance, dueling, and other dangerous stunts. The Mark of Zorro
was so successful that Fairbanks gave up comedy and concentrated on swashbucklers
such as The Three Musketeers (1921, Fred Niblo), The Thief of Bagdad (1924,
Raoul Walsh), and The Black Pirate (1926, Albert Parker). Fairbanks was one
of the most consistently popular stars of the 1920s, though his success
dissipated in the early sound era.
Eric von Stroheim
Erich von Stroheim had begun in the mid-1910s as an assistant to Griffith.
He also acted, typically playing the “evil Hun” figure in World War I films. Universal
elevated him to director in 1919 with Blind Husbands, the story of a couple
on a mountaineering holiday; The success of this film led Universal to give
von Stroheim a larger budget for his second film, Foolish Wives
(1922), in which he played another predatory role. Von Stroheim exceeded the
budget considerably, partly by building a large set reproducing Monte Carlo on
the studio backlot. Universal turned this to its advantage by advertising Foolish
Wives – (switerland) as the first million-dollar movie. More
problematically, von Stroheim’s first version ran over six hours. The studio
pared it down to roughly two and a half hours.
Von Stroheim’s Hollywood career involved several such problems with excessive length and budgets. Producer Irving Thalberg replaced him when cost overruns threatened his next project, The Merry-Go-Round (1923). Von Stroheim then moved to the independent production firm Goldwyn to make Greed, an adaptation of Frank Norris’s naturalistic novel McTeague ran nine hours. Von Stroheim cut it by about half. By now the Goldwyn company had become part of MGM, and Thalberg took the film away from von Stroheim and reedited again. The final version, ran about two hours, shorn of one major plot line and many scenes.Ernst Lubitsch
F. W. Murnau
F. W. Murnau at Fox
Aside from Lubitsch, F. W. Murnau was the most prestigious European director to
come to Hollywood in the 1920s. Fox hired him in 1925, in the wake of the
critical acclaim for The Last Laugh. Murnau lingered at Ufa only long
enough to make Faust (1926). Fox allowed him an enormous budget to make its
biggest picture of 1927, Sunrise. Sunrise (F. W. Murnau, 1927)
Sunrise was perhaps too sophisticated to be really popular. Its huge city sets
made it so costly that it did only moderately well for Fox. As a result,
Murnau’s fortunes declined. The huge city square constructed for Sunrise (with
help from German false-perspective techniques that made it seem even larger)
Murnau went on to increasingly modest projects: Four Devils (1929), yet another
circus film, now lost; and City Girl (1930), a part-talkie that was taken out
of Murnau’s control and altered. His last film began as a collaboration with
documentarist Robert Flaherty. They worked on a fiction film about Tahiti, Tabu
(1931). After Flaherty abandoned the project, Murnau completed a flawed but
beautiful love story made on location in the South Seas. He died in a car
accident shortly before the film’s release.
Frank Borzage
Frank Borzage had also directed a number of low-budget Westerns during the 1910s.
These include The Gun Woman (1918), the story of a rugged dance-hall owner who
shoots the man she loves when he turns out to be a stagecoach bandit. Like
Ford, Borzage moved into more prestigious filmmaking at the larger studios
during the 1920s, though he quickly abandoned Westerns. Today he is often
thought of in connection with melodramas, such as Humoresque (1920), a
sentimental account of a Jewish violinist wounded in World War I. Some of
Borzage’s best films of the decade, however, were in other genres. The Circle
(1925, MGM) was a sophisticated romantic comedy. In 1924, Borzage moved to Fox,
where he joined Ford as a leading director.
Borzage’s late-1920s films show even more directly the influence of Murnau’s work. 7th heaven.Gloria Swanson
Greta Garbo
It also starred the single most successful of the imported European stars,
Greta Garbo. Here she was teamed with matinee idol John Gilbert. Flesh and the
Devil was only one production of the 1920s to borrow from European cinema
A tiny spotlight created a romantic moment as John Gilbert lights a cigarette
for Greta Garbo; the pair were cast as lovers in several more films.
Harold Lloyd
Harold Lloyd quickly joined the vogue for slapstick features. Using the
“glasses” character he had developed in the late teens, he made A
Sailor-Made Man (1921, Fred Newmeyer), the story of a brash young man who wins
his love through a series of adventures. Although Lloyd starred in various
types of comedies, he is best remembered for his “thrill” pictures. In
Safety Last! (1923, Newmeyer and Sam Taylor), he played an ambitious young man
who has to climb the side of a skyscraper as a publicity stunt for the store
where he works. Some of Lloyd’s films of this era featured him as the bumbling
small-town boy who becomes a hero when confronted with a great challenge, as in
Girl Shy (1924, Newmeyer and Taylor), The Freshman (1925, Newmeyer and Taylor),
and The Kid Brother (1927, Ted Wilde). Lloyd’s career lasted into the early
sound era, but eventually the aging actor did not fit his youthful image, and
he retired.
John Ford
had made his start directing stylish, modest Westerns. Just Pals (1920)
was an unconventional film, the story of a loafer in a small town who befriends
a homeless boy and eventually becomes a hero by exposing a local embezzler. In
1921, he moved from Universal to the Fox Film Corporation. His first major
success there was The Iron Horse (1924), a high-budget Western made in the wake
of The Covered Wagon. This story of the building of the first transcontinental
railroad exploited Ford’s feeling for landscape. He soon became Fox’s top
director, working in a variety of genres. Ford’s other Western at Fox was 3 Bad
Men (1926), with an impressive land-rush sequence. Surprisingly, he did not return
to the genre until Stagecoach (1939), but he was identified with Westerns
throughout his long career. Check out a dynamic composition in depth against
distant mountains as Indians ambush a supply train in John Ford’s Continuity
editing with cats
Josef von Sternberg
Von Sternberg had started by independently producing and directing a gloomy
naturalistic drama, The Salvation Hunters (1925), on a shoestring budget. Von
Sternberg codirected a few features without being credited. In 1927 he had his
breakthrough film with Underworld. It was a big hit, in part due to its offbeat
stars. Its odd hero is a homely, lumbering jewel thief, played by George
Bancroft. Von Sternberg used backlight and smoke to create this atmospheric
moment as the protagonist of Underworld guns down a rival. The film’s style
anticipated the later brooding films noirs (“dark films”) of the 1940s.
Underworld (Joseph von Sternberg, 1927) Von Sternberg used
backlight and smoke to create this atmospheric moment as the protagonist of
Underworld guns down a rival. The film’s style anticipated the later
brooding films noirs (“dark films”) of the 1940s
King Vidor
MGM also made an important pacifist war film, The Big Parade (1925).
Its director, King Vidor, had learned his craft by studying the emerging
Hollywood style in his hometown theater in Texas. He began his career by acting
in and directing minor films in the 1910s. Moving to MGM when it formed in
1924, he worked in several genres. His Wine of Youth (1924) was a subtle
story of three generations of women
Little Five (Universal, Fox, Warner Bros., Producers
Distributing Company, Film Booking Office)
Little Five, firms
that owned few or no theaters:
Universal,
Fox,
the Producers Distributing Corporation,
the Film Booking Office, and Warner Bros.
Mary Pickford
United Artists, the company formed by Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie
Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith.
Mary Pickford asked Lubitsch to direct her in her 1923 production, Rosita. He
outshined her.
Max
Fleischer & Dave Fleischer
The Fleischer brothers, Max and Dave, had
experimented with a new film technique called rotoscoping in the mid-1910s. The
rotoscope allowed a filmmaker to take live-action films, project each frame
onto a piece of paper, and trace the outlines of its figures. Although the
rotoscope was patented in 1915, World War I delayed further development of it.
After the war, the brothers returned to the device, using it to animate cartoon
figures. They used a live-action prologue for each film in their series,
featuring Max Fleischer as a cartoonist who creates Koko, a clown who pops “out
of the inkwell.” The first cartoon was released in late 1919, and several
others followed sporadically through 1920. Rotoscoping was not intended to
increase efficiency, as earlier inventions in cartooning were. Instead, by
tracing the action one image at a time on cels, the cartoonist could easily
produce characters that moved naturally as whole figures, rather than stiffly,
moving only one or a few parts of their bodies, as in the slash and other
simple cel systems. The Fleischer’s new character, Koko the Clown, swung his
limbs through space freely, and his loose outfit swirled about him as he went
The Clown's Little Brother (Max Fleischer & Dave Fleischer, 1920)
The Fleischers also employed the standard techniques of cels, slashing, and
retracing, but rotoscoping gave these devices new freedom. The “Out of the
Inkwell” series prospered during the 1920s. In the early sound era, however,
the Fleischers replaced Koko with the equally popular Betty Boop and Popeye.
The “Mutt and Jeff” series had begun as a comic strip in 1911.
The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA)
1)Partly
in an effort to avoid government censorship and clean up Hollywood’s
image,the main studios formed a trade
organization, the Motion Picture Producers
and Distributors of America (MPPDA).
2)To head it, in 1922 they hired Will Hays, then postmaster general under
Warren
Harding.
3)Hays had proved his flair for publicity by chairing the Republican National
Committee.
4)That flair, combined with his access to powerful figures in Washington and
his
Presbyterian background, made him useful to the film industry.
Will Hays strategy
1)was to push the producers to eliminate the offensive content of their films
and to
include morals clauses in studio contracts.
2)Despite Arbuckle’s acquittal, Hays banned his films.
3)In 1924, the MPPDA issued the “Formula,” a vague document
urging studios to
avoid the “kind of picture which
should not be produced.”
4)Predictably, it had little effect, and in 1927 the Hays office (as the MPPDA
came to
be known) adopted the more explicit
“Don’ts and Be Carefuls” list.
5)“Don’ts” included “the illegal traffic in drugs,” “licentious or
suggestive
nudity,” and “ridicule of
the clergy.”
6)“Be Carefuls” involved “the use of the flag,” “brutality
and
possible gruesomeness,” “methods of smuggling,” and “deliberate
seduction of
girls.”
7)The list dealt as much with the depiction of how crimes were committed as
with
sexual content.
Oscar Micheaux
Perhaps the most famous of the early American black filmmakers is Oscar
Micheaux.
He began as a homesteader in South Dakota, where he wrote novels and sold them
door to door to his white neighbors. He used the same method to sell stock to
adapt his writings into films, creating the Micheaux Book and Film Company in
1918. Over the next decade, he made thirty films, concentrating on such topics
as lynching, the Ku Klux Klan, and interracial marriage. The energetic and
determined Micheaux worked quickly with low budgets, and his films have a
rough, disjunctive style that boldly depicts black concerns on the screen.
Panchromatic
Film Stock:
Another
major innovation of this era came with the gradual adoption of a new panchromatic type
of film stock. The film stock used previously had been orthochromatic;
that is, it was sensitive only to the purple, blue, and green portions of the
visible spectrum. Yellow and red light barely registered on it, so objects
of these colors appeared nearly black in the finished film. For example,
the lips of actors wearing ordinary red lipstick appear very dark in many
silent films. Purple and blue registered on the film stock as nearly white, so
it was difficult to photograph cloudy skies: a blue sky with clouds simply
washed out to a uniform white.
Panchromatic film stock, available by the early 1910s, registered the whole range of
the visible spectrum, from purple to red, with nearly equal sensitivity.
Thus, it could record a sky with the clouds visible against the blue
background, or red lips as shades of gray. But panchromatic stock had problems
as well: it was expensive, it deteriorated quickly if not used
right away, and it demanded much greater illumination to expose a
satisfactory image. During the 1910s and early 1920s, it was primarily
used outdoors in bright sunlight for landscape shots (to capture cloud scenes)
or indoors for studio close-ups that could be brightly lit.
Picture Palaces
1)Because the big theaters were so important, the major companies made
them
opulent to attract patrons,
not simply through the films being shown but through
the promise of an exciting moviegoing
experience.
2)The 1920s were the age of the picture palace, offering thousands of sets,
fancy
lobbies, uniformed ushers, and
orchestral accompaniment to the films.
3)Ordinarily attendance dropped during the summer, so in 1917 the Balaban &
Katz
chain pioneered the use of
air-conditioning—a major draw in a period when home
air-conditioning was unknown.
4)Picture palaces gave working- and middle-class patrons an unaccustomed taste
of
luxury.
Rudolph Valentino
4 horsemen: The film’s triumph was, however, probably mainly due to its
stars, Rudolph Valentino and Alice Terry, who played the doomed central couple.
They rose to immediate stardom. Valentino was hired by Paramount and became a
matinee idol, popularizing the “Latin lover” in such films as Blood and Sand
(1922, Fred Niblo). His early death in 1926 provoked frenzied grief among his
fans. Glamorous photography in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
helped make Rudolph Valentino and Alice Terry stars.
Three
Point Lighting System (Key Light, Fill Light, Backlight)
THREE-POINT LIGHTING SYSTEM
1)By the 1920s, the big production firms had dark studios that kept out all
sunlight
and allowed entire scenes to be
illuminated by artificial lights.
2)Scenes’ backgrounds were kept inconspicuous with a low fill light, while
the main
figures were outlined with a glow of
backlight, usually cast from the rear top of
the set.
3)The key, or brightest light, came from one side of the camera, while a
dimmer
secondary light from the other side
created fill that softened shadows and kept
backgrounds visible but inconspicuous.
4)This THREE-POINT three-point lighting system (fill,
backlighting, and key) became
standard in Hollywood cinematography.
5)It created glamorous, consistent compositions from shot to shot.
6)In the following clip from The Marriage Circle (Ernst Lubitsch, 1924), note
the light
coming from the upper rear of the set
out-lines the characters.
Standing
apart from these eight firms was
1)United Artists (UA), formed by Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, Douglas
Fairbanks,
and D. W. Griffith in 1919.
2)UA was a distribution firm, owning neither production facilities nor
theaters.
3)It existed to distribute films produced independently by its four owners,
who
each had a small production company.
4)Prior contractual commitments by the four founders delayed the firm’s initial
releases for a year, and Chaplin’s
first UA film, A Woman of Paris (1923), was not
a hit.
5)In 1924, producer Joseph Schenck took over management of UA.
6)By adding stars Rudolph Valentino, Norma Talmadge, Buster Keaton, and
Gloria
Swanson, as well as prestigious producer Samuel Goldwyn, Schenck
stepped up
the rate of release of UA films.
7)However, UA still failed to make a profit in most years.
Vertical Integration
1)The most obvious sign of the growth of the film industry was its increasing
vertical integration.
2)The biggest firms jockeyed for power by
2a)combining production and
2b)distribution with
2c)expanding chains of theaters.
3)This three-tiered vertical integration guaranteed that a
company’s films would find
distribution and exhibition.
4)The bigger the theater chain owned by the firm, the wider its films’
exposure would be.
Walt Disney
The young Walt Disney and his friend Ub Iwerks Started their own
commercial-arts firm in Kansas City in 1919. Failing to make money, they then
worked for an ad agency, creating simple animated films. There they started
“Newman’s Laugh-O-Grams,” a series of short animated films for local
exhibition. After this venture also failed, Disney moved to Hollywood. In 1923,
he received backing from Mintz to create a series of “Alice Comedies,” which
proved to be his first success. With his brother Roy, he formed the Disney
Brothers Studios, which would eventually grow into one of the world’s biggest
entertainment conglomerates.
A third, Steamboat Willie, incorporated the new sound technology and proved a
huge hit. It helped catapult Disney to the head of the animation business in
the 1930s. In Alice in the Wooly West (1926), animated exclamation points
express the live-action heroine’s astonishment as she confronts the world of
cartoon characters.
FILMS
7th Heaven
Ben-Hur
The Big Parade
Blind Husbands
Body and Soul
Cops
Felix the Cat in Futuritzy
Flesh and the Devil
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Greed
The Kid
Orphans of the Storm
Safety Last!
Sherlock Jr.
Sunrise
Underworld
Way Down East
Wings
A Woman of Paris
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