The Hollywood Studio System (1930-1945) - Module 13

The Hollywood Studio System (1930-1945)

TERMS/PEOPLE

 

Deep-space compositions keep all planes in focus.

Fades/Dissolves/Wipes (Transitional Techniques)

Traveling mattes were commonly used to make wipes, where a line passes across the screen, removing one shot gradually as the next appears. In 1933, wipes became fashionable as a way of replacing fades or dissolves (two other transitional techniques) when RKO optical-printer expert Linwood Dunn created elaborate transitions, moving in fan, sawtooth, and other shapes, in Melody Cruise and Flying Down to Rio. In the following clip, a wipe with a zigzag edge provides a transition from one shot to another in Flying Down to Rio.

 

Genre (Musical/Screwball Comedy/Horror/Social Problem Film/Gangster Film/Film Noir/War Film

The Musical

The Screwball Comedy

The Horror Film UA

The Social Problem Film warner bros - fury

The Gangster Film

Film Noir

The War Film

Matte Painting:By blocking off a part of a frame with a matte, the cinematographer could leave an unexposed portion into which the special-effects expert could later insert a matte painting.

Montage Sequence:The optical printer was often used to create montage sequences. These brief flurries of shots used superimpositions, calendar pages, newspaper headlines, and similar images to suggest the passage of time or the course of a lengthy action. In Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, superimposed newspaper headlines create montage sequences summarizing the public’s changing attitude toward of the protagonist.

Optical Printing- The optical printer offered more options for rephotographing and combining images. Essentially, an optical printer consisted of a projector aimed into the lens of a camera. Both could be moved forward and backward, different lenses could be substituted, and portions of the image could be masked off and the film reexposed.

Images could be superimposed, or portions could be joined like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; a single image could be enlarged or its speed altered.

Typically the optical printer was used to save money by filling in portions of studio sets.

 

Traveling mattes were commonly used to make wipes, where a line passes across the screen, removing one shot gradually as the next appears.

 In 1933, wipes became fashionable as a way of replacing fades or dissolves (two other transitional techniques) when RKO optical-printer expert Linwood Dunn created elaborate transitions,

 moving in fan, sawtooth, and other shapes, Flying Down to Rio (Thornton Freeland, 1933)

Production CodeBy early 1930, outside pressure for censorship forced the MPPDA to adopt the Production Code as industry policy. The Code was an outline of moral standards governing the depiction of crime, sex, violence, and other controversial subjects.

Rear Projection -In rear projection, the actors perform in a studio set as an image filmed earlier is projected onto a screen behind them.

Symphonic Score While early sound films had often avoided using much nondiegetic atmospheric music, multiple-track recording fostered the introduction of what came to be called the symphonic score, in which lengthy musical passages played under the action and dialogue.

Technicolor Undoubtedly the most striking innovation of this era was color filmmaking.930s, the firm introduced a new system, so-called three-strip Technicolor. It involved attaching colored filters and prisms to the camera. The light coming into the camera lens was split and recorded on three strips of black-and-white film. One strip registered red values in the spectrum, another green, and another blue. Positive images for each strip were then made and treated with colored dyes. On a fresh strip of film, gelatin on the surface absorbed the dyes, blending to create the original color of the scene. Having been separated from their source, the colors were combined by being absorbed into the surface of the film. (This made Technicolor prints slightly thicker than black-and-white ones.) The result was a very saturated color image.

Moreover, in 1931, Eastman Kodak introduced a Super Sensitive Panchromatic stock for use with the more diffused incandescent lighting necessitated by the innovation of sound (owing to the hiss emitted by arc lamps). Some films used a sparkling, low-contrast image to convey a sense of glamor or romance. In A Farewell to Arms (1932, Frank Borzage), see this romantic scene in which the main characters fall in love via soft, glittering images.

Special-effects work usually involved combining separately shot images in one of two ways: through rear projection (also called back projection) or optical printing

Hays Code - The Hays Code: Self-Censorship in Hollywood

Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America

MPPDA became more famous for its policy of industry self-censorship: the Production Code (often called the Hays Code).

One of the MPPDA’s tasks was to help avoid official censorship from the outside.

formed in 1922

The Code was an outline of moral standards governing the depiction of crime, sex, violence, and other controversial subjects. Provisions of the Code demanded, for example, that “methods of crime should not be explicitly presented” and that “sexual perversion or any inference to it is forbidden.”

All Hollywood films were expected to obey the Code or risk local censorship.

 

 

Majors (Big Five)

Paramount (formerly Famous Players–Lasky),

Loew’s (generally known by the name of its production subsidiary, MGM),

Fox (which became 20th Century-Fox in 1935),

Warner Bros., and

RKO.

To be a Major, a company had to be vertically integrated, owning a theater chain and having an international distribution operation. Smaller companies with few or no theaters formed

 

Minors (Little Three)

Little Three, or the Minors:

Universal, horror films, sherlock holmes, abbott and costello

Columbia, and

United Artists (UA).

 

several independent firms.

Some of these (such as Samuel Goldwyn and David O. Selznick) made expensive,

or “A,” pictures comparable to those of the Majors.

low-budget films for specific ethnic groups. Oscar Micheaux

films in Yiddish by 1942, Yiddish-language production had ceased in the United States

 

Poverty Row (The Independents)

The firms (such as Republic and Monogram)

making only inexpensive “B” pictures were collectively known as Poverty Row.

Westerns, crime thrillers, and serials

 

 

FILMS

 

42nd Street (1933, Lloyd Bacon) busby berkeley women in white fluff

A Dream Walking (1934) max fleisher - popeye the sailor

Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943)A simple shot/reverse-shot situation in Casablanca (1943) places Rick close to the camera in front of a sharply focused deep playing space.

Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942) horror - zoo drawing

Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)

Fury (Fritz Lang 1936) rear projection also trial with movie camera

His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940) a model sound comedy. carey grant wisecracking dialog

Holiday (George Cukor, 1938) depression-era dancing giraffe clark gable

It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934) hitch hiking

The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941) henry fonda glam girl

The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)

The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941) film noir heroine...sam spade

Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936) assembly line depression era

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, 1936) montage newspapers tuba

The Public Enemy  gangster film (William Wellman, 1931) Deep-space compositions keep all planes in focus.

She Done Him Wrong (Lowell Sherman, 1933) may west  successful broadway performer

Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939) John Ford places his actors in three layers of depth and films from a slightly low camera height, techniques that Welles would carry further in Citizen Kane.

Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937) melodrama

They Were Expendable (John Ford, 1945) war drama - on boats

Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)two thieves venetian hotel

Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, 1934) depth composition suspicious producer / actress

                                        then on a train over acting

 

 

Objective Burma (Raoul Walsh, 1945) war film.

The Mummy (Karl Freund, 1932)

Follow the Fleet (Mark Sandrich, 1936) ginger rodgers

Love Me Tonight (Rouben Mamoulian, 1932) Maurice Chevalier

How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941) down play emotion

The Great Dictator (Charlie Chaplin, 1940)

Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg, 1932) soft focus for dietrich

A Farewell to Arms (Frank Borzage, 1932) fall in love with soft, glittering images

Green Fields (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1937)- Edgar G. Ulmer, who had worked briefly in Hollywood, made one of the most internationally successful Yiddish films