Just as Hollywood was enjoying the high box-office receipts of 1946, its international market was also expanding. Late in the war, the studios turned the foreign department of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) into a new trade organization, the Motion Picture Export Association of America (MPEAA). The MPEAA was responsible for coordinating American exports, negotiating prices, and making sure that Hollywood firms presented a united front abroad. The government, seeing cinema as propaganda for American democracy, assisted film export through Commerce Department initiatives and diplomatic pressures.
Many countries passed protectionist laws, establishing quotas, production subsidies, and restrictions on exporting currency. The benefits were ambivalent at best. In 1947, Britain imposed a tax on imported films, and the MPEAA responded by announcing that the Majors would no longer offer new films to the country. The boycott succeeded: after eight months, the British government repealed the duty and permitted more film revenues to be remitted to the United States. Elsewhere, protectionist action often strengthened American domination. U. S. firms could export currency indirectly by investing in foreign films and importing them to the United States. Alternatively, Hollywood could spend “frozen funds” in shooting films abroad. These runaway productions also avoided the high cost of U. S. labor.
While some countries struggled to rebuild their industries domestically, Hollywood came to rely more on exporting its product. Before the war, about one-third of U. S. box-office income had come from abroad, but by the mid-1960s the figure had risen to around half—a proportion that has been constant ever since.
After 1946, however, Hollywood’s domestic fortunes began to sag. Attendance steadily shrank, from about 98 million viewers per week in 1946 to about 47 million in 1957. About 4,000 theaters closed during that decade. Output and profits fell. One of the Big Five, RKO, passed through several owners, including Howard Hughes, before ceasing production in 1957. What ended the golden age of the studios, begun so auspiciously during the 1910s?
After the war, the film industry faced a dramatic challenge. As people adopted new lifestyles, leisure-time
Changing Lifestyles and Competing Entertainment
During the 1910s and 1920s, theaters had been built near mass-transportation lines in downtown neighborhoods, where they were easily accessible to local residents and commuters alike. After the war, many Americans had enough money saved up to purchase homes and cars. Suburban housing sprang up, and many people now traveled by car to the city center. With small children, however, they had little inclination to make the long trip into town for a film. Thus, changing demographics contributed to the late-1940s slump in moviegoing.
Initially, families stayed home and listened to the radio. Within a few years they were watching television. Americans owned 32 million sets in 1954, and by the end of the decade, 90 percent of homes had television. The suburban lifestyle and broadcast entertainment, along with growth in other leisure activities (such as sports and recorded music), made the film industry’s profits plunge by 74 percent between 1947 and 1957.
When suburban couples did decide to go out to the movies, they tended to be more selective than moviegoers in the past. Rather than attending a local theater regularly, they would choose an “important” film—one based on a famous literary work or distinguished by its stars or displaying lavish production values. As the elimination of block booking pushed producers to make higher-budget films, they concentrated on projects that would cater to the more selective moviegoer.
Wider and More Colorful Movies The television image of the early 1950s was small, indistinct, and black-and-white. Film producers attempted to draw spectators out of their living rooms and back into theaters by changing the look and sound of their movies.
Color filmmaking was an obvious way to differentiate moves from television, and, during the early 1950s, the proportion of Hollywood color films jumped from 20 to 50 percent. Many employed Technicolor, the elaborate three-strip, dye-transfer process perfected in the 1930s (pp. 220-221). Technicolor’s monopoly, however, led independent producers to complain that the studios got preferential access. A court agreed, and in 1950 Technicolor was obliged to offer its services more widely. In this same year, however, Eastman introduced a monopack (single-strip) color film. Eastman Color could be exposed in any camera and was easy to develop. The simplicity of Eastman’s monopack emulsion helped increase the number of films shot in color. Technicolor ceased to be a camera stock in 1955, but the firm continued to prepare release prints in its imbibition process until 1975.
Eastman Color lacked Technicolor’s rich saturation, transparent shadows, and detailed textures. (Color Plate 15.1 is an example of late-1940s Technicolor.) Still, many cinematographers believed that the monopack stock looked better in the widescreen dimensions of the day. Unfortunately, Eastman Color images tended to fade—especially if the footage was hastily processed. By the early 1970s, many prints and negatives had turned a puttyish pink or a sickly crimson (Color Plate 15.2).
Nonetheless, at the time, color films provided an appeal that television could not match. So did bigger images. Between 1952 and 1955, many widescreen processes were introduced—or rather revived, since all had been tinkered with in the early sound era.
Cinerama, a three-projector system that created a multipaneled image, premiered in 1952. This Is Cinerama was a travelogue in which the audience was treated to a roller-coaster ride, a plane flight through the Grand Canyon, and other thrills. The film played at a single New York theater for over two years at unusually high admission prices, grossing nearly $5 million.
Less elaborate was CinemaScope, introduced by 20th Century-Fox and first displayed in The Robe (1953). ’Scope became one of the most popular widescreen systems because it utilized conventional 35mm film and fairly simple optics. Virtually all studios adopted ’Scope; only Paramount clung to its own system, VistaVision, introduced in White Christmas (1954). Later, there came processes involving 70mm film (see box for more details on these).
After 1954, most Hollywood films were designed to be shown in some format wider than 1.37:1. Hollywood continued to shoot many films in the Academy sound ratio, but the projectionist had to mask the projector aperture to create a wide image in the theater. In order to compete with America, major foreign industries developed their own anamorphic widescreen systems including Sovscope (the USSR), Dyaliscope (France), Shaw-scope (Hong Kong), and TohoScope (Japan).
Wider images required bigger screens, brighter projection, and modifications in theater design. Producers also demanded magnetically reproduced stereophonic sound. During the early 1950s, Hollywood studios gradually converted from the optical sound recording introduced in the late 1920s to magnetic sound recording, using '/4-inch audiotape or magnetically coated 35mm film. These innovations permitted engineers to enhance widescreen presentations with multiple-channel sound.
Cinerama used six channels, while CinemaScope used four. But the extra expense, and a conviction that audiences paid more attention to the image than to the sound, kept most exhibitors from installing magnetic projector heads and multichannel sound systems. Although films’ music, dialogue, and sound effects were recorded magnetically during production, most release prints encoded the sound information on optical tracks.
Other innovations of the period were transitory fads. Stereoscopic, or “3-D,” films had been toyed with since the beginning of cinema, but the process made a reappearance during the postwar recession years. Bwana Devil (1952) employed Natural Vision, a system that required two strips of film to be shown one atop the other. The viewer wore polarized glasses that merged the two images into a sensation of depth. Bwana Devil attracted large audiences, and all the major studios undertook 3-D projects, the most noteworthy being House of Wax, Kiss Me Kate (both 1953), and Dial M for Murder (1954). By 1954, however, the craze was over. Even more short-lived was the effort to add odors to films. In 1958, Aromo-Rama and Smell-O-Vision appeared, to largely negative response. Both stereoscope and olfactory processes have been revived occasionally, always as a novelty.
Hollywood Adjusts to Television
Television posed a threat to certain staple products of theaters’ programs. Newsreels, for instance, were largely abandoned after television news proved more efficient and immediate. Animated films were edged out more slowly; for two decades after the war, film programs still included short cartoons, and the major animators continued to create works of comic imagination and technical finesse. At MGM, Tex Avery’s manic frenzy worked a t full heat in King-Sized Canary (1947; Color Plate 15.3) and The Magical Maestro (1952), while William Hanna and Joseph Barbera made the “Tom and Jerry” series perhaps the most bloodthirsty films coming out of Hollywood.
The Warner Bros. cartoon unit became, if anything, even more bizarrely inventive than it had been during the war. Bob Clampett’s The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (1946) takes Daffy Duck at a breakneck pace through a surrealistic parody of film noir. Chuck Jones, who had begun as a head animator at Warners in the late 1930s, reached the top of his form, combining Wagnerian opera and Bugs Bunny illogic in What’s Opera, Doc? (1957). He introduced the “Road Runner” series with Fast and Furryous (1949; Color Plate 15.4) and continued to direct its unpredictable variations on violence until his
SEE IT ON THE BIG SCREEN
Before 1954, American films were almost always shot and shown in a trim rectangle at the proportions of 1.37:1. (The arrival of sound had led studios to modify the common silent ratio of 1.33:1.) The early 1950s' technical innova, tions drastically widened the image, creating new aesthetic problems and opportunities for filmmakers.
Several incompatible formats competed. Some utilized wider film gauges. Todd-AO, for example, replaced the usual 35mm width with 65mm; the finished film would measure 70mm in width, allowing 5 mm for stereophonic sound tracks. Todd-AO was framed at a 2:1 aspect ratio. Such Todd-AO features as Oklahoma! (1955) were released on 70mm prints (15.1). Paramount's VistaVision process still used 35mm film but ran it horizontally through the camera. Because the frames were oriented horizontally rather than vertically across the film strip, they could be wider than
15,1 Two "fish-eye" Todd-AO lenses, one center left and one on the boom above, were used to shoot Oklahoma!; a CinemaScope version was shot simultaneously. (The 'Scope camera is center right.)
35mm, and hence a greater negative area was exposed. When compressed and printed in the normal 35mm format for release, this rendered a rich, dense image.
Cinerama achieved a wider picture by combining separate images. Three adjacent camera lenses exposed three strips of film simultaneously. Theaters showed the film on three mechanically interlocked projectors, yielding a sprawling 2.85:1 image on a curved 146-degree screen (15.2). Projectionists faced the constant risk of a reel's breaking and
15.2 The Cinerama process (in publicity material).
15.3 The curved Cinerama screen and its three panels made horizontal action bulge in perverse ways (How the West Was Won, 1963).
SOUND HtOM S<X MtCtONONCS tSCOROED ON ONE TAPE
THIEE MACAZINES
15.4 A publicity photograph displays not only Marilyn Monroe but also the "squeezing" and "unsqueezing" of the CinemaScope process (How to Marry a Millionaire, 1953).
Falling out of synchronization with the others. In addition, odd images resulted from the blend lines separating the three panels (15.3).
The most popular widescreen system was CinemaScope, introduced by 20th Century-Fox in The Robe
(1953). The CinemaScope camera was equipped with an anamorphic lens that took in a wide angle of view but squeezed it onto a strip of 35mm film. The film could be shown by attaching a comparable lens to the projector, which would unsqueeze the picture to create normallooking images (15.4). CinemaScope was initially standardized at 2.55:1 (for magnetic sound) or 2.35:1 (for optical sound). Compared with most other widescreen systems, CinemaScope was inexpensive, technically simple, and fairly easy to use in shooting.
Some widescreen systems mixed these techiques. One process, displayed in the highly praised Ben-Hur (1959), combined anamorphic lenses with 65mm film to create images in a 2.76:1 ratio. The process eventually came to be known as Ultra Panavision 70. The Panavision company's improvements in anamorphic optics, its lightweight 70mm cameras, and its sophisticated laboratory techniques for reducing and blowing up different formats established it as the industry's leader in widescreen technology.
At first, Hollywood's creative personnel feared that the wide screen would immobilize the camera and lead to long takes. Some editors were afraid to cut quickly, worrying that viewers would not know where to look in a rapid series of wide compositions. A few early widescreen films, such as The Robe, Oklahoma!, and How to Marry a Millionaire, were rather theatrical, employing long-shot framings, frontal staging, and simple cutting.
Almost immediately, however, directors applied classical stylistic principles to widescreen composition. They exploited lighting and focus to emphasize the main figures, and they used depth to gUide the spectator's eye gracefully across the frame (15.5). Orthodox editing returned, complete with shot/reverse shots and analytical cuts (15.6, 15.7). Alternatively, directors who had already exploited long takes and depth compositions packed the wide frame with significant detail.
By the mid-1960s, three sorts of widescreen systems dominated U. S. production. Anamorphic 35mm was established at a ratio of 2.35:1, while nonanamorphic 35mm was
15.5 Directors soon learned to leave areas of the widescreen image open in order to guide the audience to the salient information (Carmen Jones, 1954).
Typically shown at 1.85:1. Most 70mm films were non-anamorphic and shown at a ratio of 2.2:1. Wider 70mm movies were usually blow-ups from anamorphic 35mm.
These widescreen systems would remain the principal options available for Hollywood filmmaking during the decades that followed.
15.6. 15.7 Shot/reverse shot in Cinemascope (Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, 1957).
Departure from the studio in 1961. During the 1950s, Jones also created several distinctive cartoons without the studio’s stars. In One Froggy Evening 1955), a construction worker discovers a miraculous singing frog— which he attempts to exploit for money, until realizing that it sings only when alone with him (Color Plate 15.5).
Newer and smaller than the units at MGM and Warners was United Productions of America (UPA), formed in 1948 and releasing through Columbia. UPA cartoons placed their recurring characters, Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoing Boing, in distinctive modernistic backgrounds. One of the founders of UPA, John Hub-ley, left to form his own company in 1952. Hubley and his wife, Faith, made such films as Moonbird (1960; 15.8) in a decorative style that elaborated on the more spare UPA approach. UPA succumbed to the small screen in 1959, when it was sold and began making cartoons for television.
15.8 Sketchy, distorted figures against a semiabstract background in Moonbird.
14.5 Escape
14.6 Abstraction #2 (1939-46)
15.7 Rio Bravo
15.8 Written on the Wind
Walt Disney continued to distribute his cartoons through RKO until 1953, when he formed his own distribution firm, Buena Vista. Although Disney continued to turn out short films, his most profitable works were his feature-length cartoons, introduced every few years and periodically re-released. These were often sanitized adaptations of children’s classics, although Alice in Wonderland (1951; Color Plate 15.6) displayed a slapstick verve that was missing from more solemn undertakings such as Cinderella (1950) and Sleeping Beauty (1959). The studio returned to its tradition of combining live action and animation in the enormously successful Mary Poppins (1964).
By the mid-1960s, however, broadcast animation had captured the audience. The major studios virtually stopped producing animated shorts; MGM’s last Tom and Jerry films (directed by Jones) were released in 1967, and Warner Bros. shut down its animation unit in 1969. Now Bugs, Daffy, Popeye, and their peers could be found on Saturday morning television, not in the local theater.
Yet, in other ways Hollywood accommodated itself to television. The movie industry moved rapidly to take advantage of its new competitor.
For one thing, the networks needed enormous quantities of programs to fill their broadcast hours. In the early 1950s, about one-third of broadcast material consisted of old films, mostly B pictures from Monogram, Republic, and other Poverty Row studios. In 1955, the bigger studios started selling the TV rights to their own libraries. In 1961, NBC launched the first weekly prime-time film series, “Saturday Night at the Movies,” and, by 1968, there was a comparable film showcase on every weeknight. Rising fees for this programming made television sales a significant, predictable part of a film’s income.
Moreover, the Hollywood studios started creating television shows. In 1949, Columbia converted its short-subject division, Screen Gems, to TV production. Among its products was the hit series “Father Knows Best” (1954-1962). When the networks moved from live broadcasting to showing filmed series in 1953, the demand for material intensified. Independent producers filled the need, as with “I Love Lucy,” created by the Desilu company (which took over the RKO studio when that firm ceased production in 1957). As film production declined at the big studios, they generated income by renting out their production facilities for independent filmmaking, for both theatrical release and television broadcast.
Perhaps the shrewdest use of the new medium was made by Walt Disney. Disney adamantly refused to sell his cartoons to television, since their carefully paced theatrical rereleases would yield profits for the indefinite future. In 1954, Disney contracted with ABC to produce an hour-long weekly show, “Disneyland.” The series became a hit, running for decades under several names. The show permitted Disney to publicize his theatrical films and his new theme park (opened in 1955). Disney filled his program with shorts and excerpts from the studio library. And, when one of his TV series struck a chord, as did the saga of Davy Crockett, a reedited version of the programs could be released as a profitable theatrical feature.
After the first few years, the Hollywood firms as corporations did not suffer from the competition with television. They simply adjusted by expanding their activities to encompass both entertainment media. The film-based component of the industry, however, did decline. In the 1930s, the Majors released close to 500 features annually, but by the early 1960s the average was under 150. Box-office receipts continued to fall until 1963, when television had effectively saturated the American market. After that, attendance rose a bit and leveled off at around a billion admissions per year. Still, it has never come close to the levels of the pre-TV era.
Many producers responded to the decline in theater attendance by targeting specific segments of the population. Before the 1950s, most studio productions were intended for a family audience. Now films designed specifically for adults, children, or teenagers appeared more frequently.
Aiming at children and adolescents, Disney moved into live-action features with adventure classics (Treasure Island, 1950), adaptations of juvenile literature (Old Teller, 1957), and fantasy-comedies (The Absent-Minded Professor, 1961). These low-cost films were routinely among each year’s top grossers.
In the mid-1950s, the teenpics market opened in earnest, as viewers born during World War II began making their consumer strength felt at the box office. Rock-and-roll musicals, juvenile-delinquency films, and science-fiction and horror items attracted the teenage market, with exploitation companies like AIP leading the way (pp. 337-339). The major studios reacted with clean-teen comedies and romances featuring Pat Boone and a succession of Tammys and Gidgets. America’s burgeoning youth culture, centered on dating, pop music, souped-up cars, and fast food, was soon exported around the world and shaping cinema in other countries.
The demographic-target tactic also created new kinds of exhibition. Although a few little theaters had specialized in showing foreign films since the 1920s, the art-house audience became a more significant force after World War II. With thousands of veterans going to college through the GI Bill, an older, educated audience emerged, many of whose members had traveled in Europe during the war and for whom art films held some appeal.
The film industry had economic reasons for importing more films. American films were flooding into countries whose production was debilitated, but many governments restricted the amount of funds that could be taken out. American companies had to invest their profits in the country or buy goods there for export. Buying the American distribution rights to foreign films proved one way of transferring profits legally.
Moreover, with U. S. production in decline, importing art films provided smaller theaters with low-cost product. Some independent exhibitors, faced with sagging attendance, found that they could fill their houses by booking foreign films and appealing to the local elite. Imported films were not broadcast on television, so these exhibitors suffered no competition.
As of 1950, there were fewer than 100 art theaters in the entire country, but, by the mid-1960s, there were over 600, most in cities or college towns. They were usually small, independent houses decorated in a modernist style calculated to appeal to an educated clientele. The lobbies often displayed art exhibits, and the refreshment counters were more likely to offer coffee and cake than soda and popcorn.
Some offbeat U. S. independent fare got circulation in art theaters, but the staple programming came from Europe. The flow of imports began directly after the war ended, with Roberto Rossellini’s Open City, released in 1946, earning high grosses and helping to create an interest in films made abroad. Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, Marcel Carne’s Children of Paradise, and Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief were among many that accustomed American audiences to reading subtitles. English films consistently dominated the import market. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes broke out of the art-cinema circuit to become one of the top-grossing films of 1948. During the 1950s, some imports, from countries with looser censorship controls, turned sex into an attraction at art cinemas. French director Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman (1957) made Brigitte Bardot a star in the United States. Quite often the “sophistication” of imported films owed more to daring subject matter than to complex form or profound themes.
Drive-in theaters presented another attractive alternative for exhibitors during a period of falling box-office receipts. The owner did not need an expensive building— only a screen, a speaker for each parking space, a concession stand, and a ticket booth. Farmland was relatively cheap, and the drive-in’s typical location, just outside of town, made it handy for the new suburban population. Now people who seldom frequented the downtown theaters could easily go to the movies. Admission was also affordable, as films playing in drive-ins were often far past their first runs.
The first drive-in dated from 1933, but there were still only two dozen in the whole country in 1945. By 1956, more than 4,000 “ozoners” were operating. This figure was approximately equal to the number of “hardtop” theaters that closed during the postwar era. During the early 1950s, about one-quarter of box-office income came from drive-ins.
Drive-ins were not ideal venues for viewing. The tinny speakers yielded atrocious sound, rain would blur the picture, and cold weather required exhibitors to close down for the season or provide (feeble) heaters. But drive-ins proved successful with their target audiences. Despite the cheap tickets, most showed two or even three features. Parents could bring their children and avoid the cost of a baby-sitter. Since people could circulate during the film without clambering over their neighbors, concession stands did better business in drive-ins than in other theaters. Some drive-ins specialized in teenpics, and the prospect of sharing a dimly lit front seat for several hours brought many adolescent couples to the local “passion pit.”
Exploitation movies, imported films, and independent producers’ “adult” themes and subjects inevitably posed problems. Films were failing to win approval from local censorship boards. A turning point in regulation came when an Italian film, Roberto Rossellini’s The Miracle (1948), was denied an exhibition permit by the New York Board of Censors on the grounds that it was blasphemous. It told the story of a retarded peasant woman who is convinced that her unborn child is the son of God. In 1952, the Supreme Court declared that films were covered by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. Later court decisions made it clear that films could be censored only on grounds of obscenity, and even that was narrowly and vaguely defined. Many local censorship boards were dissolved, and few films were banned.
The industry’s own self-censorship mechanism, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA, formerly the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America), also faced problems enforcing its Production Code (pp. 216-217). The MPAA’s main weapon for obliging distributors to submit their films for its approval was its rule that no theater belonging to the association would show a movie without a certificate of approval. Once the five Majors divested themselves of their theater chains, however, exhibitors were free to show unapproved films.
The Paramount decision also had the unintended effect of helping to liberalize the Code. The main Hollywood studios had used the requirement of a certificate of approval to keep independent films out of the market, since such films often had riskier subject matter than the mainstream product. Once theaters could show films without certificates, more independent films were exhibited. Inevitably, some of these went beyond what was acceptable under the Code.
Partly in response to this increased competition, the big producer-distributors also began transgressing the Code’s boundaries. One way of competing with television, which had extremely strict censorship, was to make films with more daring subject matter. As a result, producers and distributors pushed the Code further and further. When the MPAA refused to approve the mildly risque The Moon Is Blue (1953, Otto Preminger), United Artists released it nevertheless. Preminger was persistent in flaunting the Code, and UA also distributed his film about drug addiction, The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), without an MPAA certificate.
Gradually the MPAA softened its position and began awarding seals to films that seemingly violated the original 1934 Code. Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) put Marilyn Monroe in a nearly transparent dress (decency being maintained only by a few strategically placed bits of embroidery and a shadow) and dealt lightheartedly with transvestism and implied bisexuality (see 15.32). It got a seal from the MPAA, even though the Catholic Legion of Decency nearly gave it a “condemned” rating. Lolita (Stanley Kubrick), which dealt with a man’s affair with an underage girl, could never have been released in the 1930s or 1940s, but it received a seal in 1962. The Code was obviously outdated, and the stage was set for a switch to a system of rating films, instituted by the MPAA in the mid-1960s (see Chapter 22).
World History
