1910-1920
Despite huge profits, studio methods of production in the first decade of the century remained those of a small, developing enterprise. Movies were impoverished by technical ignorance, the frantic pace of production and the state of warfare between the Trust and the independents. As Cook remarks: ‘between 1903 and 1912 the industry’s level of artistic and technical competence scarcely ever rose above the marginally adequate.’ Set against the harsh American economic and social experience of the teens: shark-like industrial practices, widespread strike breaking, race riots and lynching, the legal and professional disorder within the film industry was hardly unusual.
Long Features and the Death of the Nickelodeon
The introduction of the long feature around 1910 was probably the most important motivation for the enormous changes that occurred in the second decade. At 5 reels in length, ‘The Life of Moses’ (1910) by Vitagraph was a sign that even members of the conservative MPPC trust could not tell all their stories within a 15 minute (one reel) limit. Nevertheless, frustrated by the Trust’s usual policy of avoiding multi-reelers, Adolph Zukor was forced to distribute the 50 minute French film d’art production ‘Queen Elizabeth’ (1912) independently to legitimate theatres (as nickelodeons remained within MPPC control). Excited by the prospect of seeing the famous stage actress Sarah Bernhardt in the lead role, middle class Americans were prepared to pay up to a dollar to see the film. Inspired by the successes of the French film d’art features the Italian film industry began producing popular feature length historical epics, such as the nine reel ‘Quo Vadis’ (1913) which was sensationally successful. ‘Quo Vadis’ - employed sweeping panoramic and tracking shots to capture the scale of the gigantic sets, often built around real Roman ruins. The film, which included 5,000 extras, a chariot race and real lions, dwarfed contemporary American productions and launched the ‘feature fever’ which had gripped the country by 1914, the year in which the MPPC finally collapsed.
The problem for the Trust, and the industry in general was that the nickelodeons had neither the clientele nor the seating capacity to make the screening of multi-reelers a viable financial option.
Larger theatres and higher admission prices became necessary to recover the spiralling costs of feature films. The Strand Theatre on Broadway which opened in 1914 set what was to become the standard for first run movie theatres with gilt and marble, deep pile rugs, crystal chandeliers, original art works, luxurious lounges, comfortable chairs, a thirty piece symphony orchestra and a mighty Wurlitzer to play for the shorts (Knight 1957). The higher prices of the sumptuous new movie theatres reflected the dramatic increase in costs and improved quality of the features shown. By the start of the First World War many of the pioneers of the industry, like Méliès and Edison, had been wiped out by the colossal investments that remaining in film production necessitated.
Birth of the Hollywood ‘Dream Factory’
The most important developments for the rapidly expanding industry in this period were takeovers and mergers, a move away from New York to Hollywood in California , and a drive to stabilise production at an industrial level. This was achieved through the development of the star system (where the popularity of named actors guaranteed a picture’s success), aggressive marketing, and distribution deals obliging exhibitors to buy a package of films a year in advance of their production (see chapter The Studio System). By the middle of the second decade between 10-20 million Americans were going to the cinema regularly. This audience was broader and more cultivated, and demanded a more sophisticated product than had been available in the cramped nickelodeons, most of which had closed by the end of the decade. The influence of high quality foreign films, the motivation of screen credits and concentrated competition in Hollywood also contributed to improvements in craftsmanship and higher production values. Directors, such as D.W. Griffith, Sidney Olcott, George Baker, Maurice Tourneur and Mack Sennett vied with each other for fame and prestige.
As the power of the director increased assisted by technical improvements and specialist knowledge, the ‘factory’ nature of production was emphasised. Specialist script writers, designers, lighting operators, continuity and film editors separately did the work that had previously been the director’s job. This division of labour was a direct result of the need for a rational, economic production system. The respected director Thomas Ince, who made popular, unsentimental westerns, was the first ‘creative producer’ in Hollywood . He organised and supervised several production units at his Inceville studio simultaneously. Working with a production manager he would prepare a script which was completed with the explicit instruction “Shoot as written”.
Hollywood films quickly became synonymous with polish and glamour. By the end of the decade even the hilarious, chaotic slapstick adventures of Mack Sennett’s ‘Keystone Kops’ started to look dated. Their rough and tumble chases owed too much to the vaudeville and burlesque tradition that had inspired so much early cinema. Slapstick remained popular, but more so when relieved by pathos, irony, satire and depth of characterisation. Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin’s more thoughtful, intimate styles were more enduring at the box office. It is a remarkable testament to Chaplin’s genius that, despite adding little to cinema technique as a director, he is still probably the most recognised film star in the world, ‘the Tramp’ being a seemingly immortal cinematic icon.
The Impact of World War One
By 1914 the United States controlled more than half of the total film production in the world. French, Italian, British and Scandinavian films were still major exporters and the German and Russian film industries were also growing rapidly. All this was to change with the commencement of World War One which virtually destroyed the European film industry. Aside from the monumental and devastating slaughter at the front, the supply of nitrates for raw stock (cellulose nitrate) was diverted for war production and the shipping of highly explosive celluloid film was regarded as extremely hazardous. That is not to say that filmmaking was stopped. The German government, for example, recognising the power of the medium, combined the existing German film industries into the mighty Ufa (Universum-Film-Aktiengesellschaft) - generously subsidised and therefore essentially controlled, at least in wartime, by the state. Uricchio (1996) notes that,
‘..tent cinemas on the front and warm theatres in European cities short of fuel drew new audiences to the motion picture. In this regard, the unusually high levels of organisation and support provided by the German government to BUFA [a military body akin to Britain’s Imperial War Office] and Ufa were matched by its efforts on the front, with over 900 temporary soldiers’ cinemas.’
Crude propaganda films notwithstanding, European production was so crippled by wartime shortages of every description that meaningful industrial output fell away, leaving the Americans (with a newly built Panama Canal and expanding shipping and banking interests) to fill the gap.
Hollywood, keen to show off its good citizenship credentials, banged the war drum and churned out morale-boosting features in every genre. All navy ships, with the exception of torpedo boats, were showing films up to three times weekly and a hundred feet beneath the mud of Verdun soldiers laughed at Charlie Chaplin, now out of his tramp’s clothes for the first time and struggling in a uniform (‘Shoulder Arms’ 1918). Distribution arms and subsidiaries of the Hollywood studios expanded in Europe so that, by the end of the war, the American motion picture industry was a well-oiled machine supplying virtually all the world’s pictures, without a single serious competitor. As Uricchio (1996) comments:
‘The motion picture industry came out of the war as both emblem and instrument of the cultural and economic realignment that would characterise the remainder of the century.’
In fact, the war had brought about more than the economic and cultural supremacy of America . Unimaginable destruction of life occurred at the front, with men being slaughtered on a truly appalling scale. This senseless waste of a generation of young men was swiftly followed by a worldwide influenza epidemic that killed at least as many p eople and , at one point, threatened the permanent closure of all cinemas. Both of these events had a traumatic effect on the values and morality of the post-war world. Films, which have always reflected society’s shifting concerns, moved in the second decade from Victorian moralism, through a brief phase of progressivism (inspired by the more humanitarian concerns of the Woodrow Wilson government), through the militarism of the First World War and finally to the pleasure seeking materialism of the end of the decade. Hence, Griffith ’s young virginal women were superceded by the sex vamp Theda Bara, and tough, physical women of the wartime pulp adventure stories (whose message was that a woman could do the same work a man); to the elegant, sophisticated, worldly wise, feminine and emotionally complex post-war screen heroines that Greta Garbo came to represent. The war shattered forever 19th century attitudes to a whole range of issues, including attitudes to women and sex. A more cynical, mannered and urban flavour to films emerged, characterised by the witty comedies of Douglas Fairbanks. In this new world there would be no place for many of the directors and actors who had made their names in the first two decades of the century.