The document discusses several topics related to Hollywood studios and film production in the classical era, including: 1) How studio stars had power at the box office but not in production, which was controlled by the studios. Studios commodified stars to restrict their public personas. 2) How the Hollywood formula and genre system facilitated efficient production of commercial films through standardized storytelling and repetition of familiar characters/plots. 3) How the studio system, though negotiated between varied forces, created a productive equilibrium that efficiently generated creative, profitable films until the system was lost in the 1950s.

1. Hollywood studios and their production model
Stars and celebrity culture

2. A Triumph of Bitchery: Warner Bros., Bette Davis and Jezebel, Thomas Schatz
“Perhaps the most complex and paradoxical figure in the Hollywood studio system was
the movie star, whose enormous power on the screen and at the box office did not
extend into the production area.”
“…the star system became simply another factor in the overall equation of commercial
filmmaking—an equation that was calculated buy the studios and that relegated the
star, whatever his or her marquee value and visibility, to subordinate status.”
“The more effectively a studio packaged and commodified its stars, the more restrictive
the studio’s and the public’s shared perception of that star’s screen persona tended to
be.”

3. A Hollywood star is an actor whose persona evolves through a series of performances, an
identity rooted in specific roles. Stars answer a specific need in the audience, conscious or
unconscious.
Stars (and all celebrities) can be seen as a type of socio/cultural barometer, giving
expression to, and providing symbolic solutions for, specific fears, desires, anxieties and
dreams in popular consciousness.

4. "… a consumer's paradise that resembled an innocent doll's house … Swimming pools, gyms, fountains and cultivated lawns supplied a private 'vacation land.' Inside,
the couple decorated each room in the motif of a foreign country, so that the movement from one part of the house to another provided exotic adventure. In this
kingdom of eternal youth, Doug and Mary highlighted continual newness by dipping into their vast wardrobes of stylish clothes for each of the day's activities: work,
sports, dining, dancing, and parties. It followed that whenever the two sat for photographs, their smiles radiated happiness. A typical reporter described the Pickfair life
as 'the most successful and famous marriage that the world has ever known.'"
Pickfair

5. A tangible model to which one could conform life, and a standard against which
one could measure it, both in seemingly trivial ways, like fashion and behavior,
and in more serious ways, like movie-induced expectations about the course of
one’s life or the value of one’s own deeds.

6. Gabler: “… movies gradually began occupying the American imagination, not
only filling American’s heads with models to appropriate but imbuing them
with a profound sense of how important appearances were in producing just
the right effect.”

12. The close-up opened the way to audience identification with characters--and
with the actors who played them. The close-up allowed the audience to
appreciate both the actor's physical characteristics and her/his acting ability,
and allowed a vivid memory of the actor.

13. Thomas Schatz on the Hollywood studio system:
“It was a positive creative force, a point of convergence for the social, industrial,
technological, economic and aesthetic entities that produced the classic
Hollywood films. The Studio era provided a consistent system of consumption and
production, a standard way of telling stories, from camera work and editing to
plot structure and thematics”.

14. The Genius of the System, Thomas Schatz
“…studio filmmaking was less a process of collaboration than of negotiation and
struggle. But somehow it worked, and it worked well.”
“What’s remarkable about classical Hollywood, finally, is that such varied and
contradictory forces were held in equilibrium for so long. The New Hollywood and
commercial television indicate all too clearly what happens when that balance is
lost, reminding us what a productive, efficient and creative system was lost back
in the 1950’s.”

15. Hollywood Studios
• Produce, distribute, market and exhibit,
vertical integration
• Stars, genres, story-telling formula
(adherence to formula facilitated
production)
• Self-censorship
• World market

16. Five Major Studios
Controlled a large percentage
of the 1st-run theaters
• Warner Brothers
• MGM
• 20th Century Fox
• Paramount
• RKO
Vertical integration –
Production, exhibition and
distribution.

17. Three Minor Studios
Didn’t control exhibition
• Universal
• Columbia
• United Artists
• Selznick
• Disney
• Goldwyn
Independent producers

18. Hollywood Formula
An assembly line method was established, and a standard mode of
narrative expression (or formula) was developed that contained
some basic conventions.
The formula was broad enough to be applied in a variety of ways,
flexible enough to change with the times, yet fixed enough to serve
as a pattern for production and marketing.

19. Studio Production Executive
• Budget
• Coordinated operations
• Contracts
• Developed stories, scripts
• Supervised filming,
editing, post-production
• Studio’s style
• Story formulas
• Contract stars Irving Thalberg

20. Film Genre, Thomas Schatz
Commercial feature-length narrative films that, through repetition and variation,
tell familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations to form a
coherent, value-laden narrative system. A film genre is both static (familiar
formula) and dynamic (reflector of cultural attitudes). Only a limited number of
stories have been refined into formulas. The genre stories are varied and
repeated as long as they satisfy audience demand and turn a profit.

21. Qualities of Film Genre
• Codified narrative patterns, built upon audience
expectations.
• The repetition of formulaic clusters, elements
that are charged with an accretion of meaning.
• The accommodation of both novelty and
familiarity.
• A social community, a cultural milieu with
thematic conflicts that are animated and resolved
by familiar characters.

22. The classical Hollywood cinema has a very distinct style, sometimes called the
Institutional Mode of Representation: continuity editing, massive coverage, three-point
lighting, "mood" music, dissolves, all designed to make the experience as pleasant as
possible.

23. • A style determines how the film is organized with the elements of story,
sets, scenes, shots, sound.
• A plot is the sequence of actions in chronological order.
• A story is the narrative, or cause-and-effect chain of events, sometimes
unseen and able to change time and space.
• A character has certain traits and reacts to certain situations as an agent
of action and decision.
• A protagonist is the central character, active, goal-oriented, positive
motivations. The antagonist is in conflict with the central character's
effort to solve a problem.
• A story must have resolution, an ending, closure for characters and
situations.
The Classic Hollywood Narrative Style

24. The Classic Hollywood Narrative Style
•Editing is the physical rearrangement of frames of film and the adding of
effects such as sound (invisible style)
•Continuity is the arrangement of shots to tell a consistent story.
•Genre is a standard formula for a particular kind of story.
•Auteur is the filmmaker.
•Mis-en-scene is the arrangement of space, to "place on stage" the
characters, props, lighting.
•Chiaroscuro is the range of lighting from dark to bright.
•Montage is the arrangement of images for effect.
•Metaphor is a symbolic construction

25. Understanding Movies, by Louis Giannetti
Formalism
A style of filmmaking in which aesthetic forms take precedence over
subject matter as content. Emphasis is placed on the essential and
symbolic characteristics of objects and people, not necessarily on their
superficial appearance. Formalist films are often lyrical, self-consciously
heightening their style in order to call attention to it as a value for its on
sake.

26. Understanding Movies, by Louis Giannetti
Realism
A style of filmmaking that attempts to duplicate the look of objective reality
as it’s commonly perceived, with emphasis on authentic locations and
details, deep-focus shots, lengthy takes and a minimum of distorting
techniques. The acting in realist films is often minimally staged and
unscripted.
NC chase

27. Expressionism
A term used to characterize works of art and literature in which the
representation of reality is distorted for the sake of conveying an inner
vision. The expressionist transforms reality rather than seeking to imitate it.
Expressionist films ought to create mood and reveal emotion (“soul”) through the
use of setting, light, movement and composition within the shot, and camera
movement to achieve the shot or frame.

28. Cinematography: the art or science of motion-picture photography
Cinematography involves composition—the position of every visual element
within the frame, and illumination—the character and quality of the lighting of
each scene.

29. Made into Movies by Stuart McDougal
Symbol: an action, object, person or name that that signifies more than its literal
meaning. These meanings are determined by the context of the film or by reference
to a common belief or value.

30. Made into Movies by Stuart McDougal
An allegory is a work in which the characters, events and often the setting function
on several levels of meaning simultaneously. Allegories can be political/historical or
focused on truths or generalizations about human existence.

31. Hitchcock’s America, Freedman and Milligan
“…Hitchcock’s varied deployments of American public spaces,
cultural narratives, literary traditions, iconography and ideological
crosscurrents are not adventitious, accidental, or marginal. Rather,
we suggest that at the center of Hitchcock’s Hollywood films
stands a sustained, specific and extraordinarily acute exploration of
American culture.”

32. As an “outsider”, Hitchcock could more easily see and articulate the
ideological structures of thought and behavior that govern the
activities of Americans.

34. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited by Robin Wood
Shadow of a Doubt
On the surface, an affectionate/intimate look at middle class (bourgeois) family. It
has as a central ideological project the reaffirmation of family and small town
values which the action has called into question.

35. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited by Robin Wood
What is in jeopardy is the family, but given the family’s central ideological
significance, once that is imperiled, all American, middle class values ( capitalism,
work ethic, marriage, success/wealth, progress/technology, male and female
archetypes) are in jeopardy as well.
The subversion of ideology within the film is everywhere traceable to Hitchcock’s
presence, to the skepticism and nihilism that lies just below the jocular façade of his
public image.

36. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited by Robin Wood
Young Charlie’s goodness and innocence are revealed to be limitations but we are
never invited to find them ridiculous. It is precisely because they are convincingly
realized as genuine and positive that the film is so authentically disturbing.
The Hitchcockian dread of repressed forces is characteristically accompanied by a
sense of the emptiness of the surface world that represses them, and this crucially
affects the presentations in SOAD of the American small town family.

37. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited by Robin Wood
The superficial ideological project tries to insist upon the preservation of young
Charlie’s innocence, in association with the restoration of small town values, hence
her final reassurance, outside of church, when she asks her detective lover how to
account for a world that produces people like her uncle, that it “just goes a little
crazy sometimes and has to be watched”.
Yet the film has made clear that Uncle Charlie’s sickness cannot be disassociated
from the values and assumptions of capitalist ideology and is in fact its extreme
product

38. Life: The Movie by Neal Gabler
In the 20th century, entertainment dominates all other cultural entities. “More and
more, the civic elements of American life would conform or convert, changing to
resemble entertainment, in order to survive.”
“More and more, the civic elements of American life would conform or convert, changing to resemble entertainment, in order to survive.”