1950s: The Decline of the Hollywood Studio System
The 1950s witnessed a dramatic decline in Hollywood film production. This decline, which many critics suggest was both quantitative and qualitative, can be accounted for by the ending of vertical integration (signalled by the Paramount Decrees), the stifling effects of the HUAC anti-Communist witchhunts and, perhaps most importantly, changing social and leisure habits amongst Americans. From a high point in 1946, audiences at US movie houses began to fall and by the early 1960s, according to Gomery (1996), they were half what they had been during the ‘glory days’ and thousands of cinemas had closed their doors forever.
Stable film production for the ‘Big Five’ (Paramount, Warners, MGM, 20th Century Fox and RKO) and the ‘Little Three’ (Universal, Columbia and United Artists) guaranteed by cinema ownership was jeopardised by the 1948 US Supreme Court’s order to the studios to sell off their theatre chains (see 1940s). Since exhibitors were no longer obliged to accept ‘block bookings’ of films which ranged from top quality ‘A’ pictures to ‘B’ movie turkeys, films would presumably have to sell on their individual merits. However, as Scheuer (1974) remarks,
‘It quickly became apparent that this meant commercial merit alone, with scant attention paid to the artistic qualities of the film in question. No longer could the profit making portion of a studio’s schedule support a few experimental ‘artistic’ ventures, a standard Hollywood indulgence since the silent days. Now everything had to make money on its own. In retrospect, the results were predictable. Now, more than ever, films had to appeal to a mass audience.’
The effect of the Paramount Decrees alone, however, while significant, cannot explain the dramatic decline in studio production. A more fundamental cause for the fall in total US film production (from 391 in 1951 to 131 in 1961) was the increased prosperity of the American public. The 1950s was a decade of huge economic growth in the United States as it assumed (alongside the Soviet Union, and at the expense of Europe) undisputed superpower status. Americans cashed in their wartime savings bonds and started moving out of the cities and into the mushrooming suburbs, a trend that had been accelerating since the turn of the century. Radio, television, sport and the automobile offered attractive alternative leisure pursuits to the distant city centre cinemas. With television ownership, in particular, soaring (from 1 million sets in 1949 to 50 million in 1959) a trip to the cinema became a special occasion rather than a weekly event. As audiences became more selective about which films they would pay to see, the studios were forced to reduce output and, more than ever, emphasise stars and spectacle.
Colour and Widescreen Technology
Colour, which had been available to the studios in various forms since the earliest days, now became an essential advantage over television’s fuzzy, black and white image. In 1947 only 12 percent of American feature films were made in colour, but by 1954 the figure had risen to 50 percent and would have risen higher were it not for the fact that the studios began making films that could be sold to television, which did not convert to colour until the second half of the sixties. A Justice Department anti-trust suit against Technicolor’s monopoly of the colour process in 1950, and the introduction of Eastman’s far cheaper single-strip negative in that year gave a huge boost to the industry. Unlike Technicolor’s complicated three negative system, Eastmancolor films could be used in a conventional single-lens camera and processed in a standard laboratory, just like black and white.
Another response to the threat of television was the introduction of widescreen technology which, as with the introduction of sound two decades earlier, had major technical and artistic implications for the industry (see chapter Technology). Wide screen, like colour, had been in use as early as 1927 with Abel Gance’s ‘Napoleon’ shot in ‘Polyvision’ for projection on three screens. It re-emerged in 1952 with Cinerama, a process similar to Polyvision that used three synchronous cameras and projectors to produce an enormous image onto a three panel screen. The process was extremely expensive and cumbersome, quite impractical for feature film production, but the huge popularity of the few films made in Cinerama and exhibited in the specially converted cinemas proved that there was a market for a more practical widescreen process.
This arrived in 1953 in the form of CinemaScope, which used an anamorphic distorting lens to ‘squeeze’ an image during filming and another compensating lens to ‘unsqueeze’ the image to a widescreen size during projection. ‘The Robe’ (1953), the first film shot in CinemaScope, was a box-office sensation with receipts of over seventeen million dollars, making it the third most popular film in American history after ‘The Birth of a Nation’ (1915) and ‘Gone With the Wind’ (1939). According to Cook (1996), by 1957 84.5 percent of all US and Canadian theatres had converted to CinemaScope. This widescreen process was further refined by the Panavision Company in the 1960s.
Paramount, the only studio not to use CinemaScope, developed its own technically superior VistaVision, a non-anamorphic system which exposed a double 35mm frame horizontally to produce an image of brilliant clarity, without distortion. John Ford’s ‘The Searchers’ and Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window’ and ‘Vertigo’ are examples of films shot on VistaVision, a process which was, unfortunately, dropped in 1961. Other widescreen formats, including Todd-AO (a 70mm wide film process), Super Panavision and Ultra-Panavision 70 were tried by the studios, but required bulky cameras that were difficult to move, conversions to theatre projectors, and were often only suitable for ‘epic’ films. 3D, ‘Smell-O-Vision’ and a variety of other technological systems were experimented with in the 1950s to entice audiences into the cinemas, but most were impractical or gimmicky and did not gain the sustained impact of colour or widescreen .
The Threat of Television
For the first half of the decade the Major studios refused to sell or rent any of their films to television. British companies and some ‘Poverty Row’ outfits, such as Republic and Monogram, took advantage of the Majors’ reluctance and sold many of their features to the networks, who were eager to fill their schedules. In 1956 the ‘Big Five’, faced with the enormous overheads of maintaining their studios, accepted the inevitable and began selling the TV rights to their own libraries. The studios also rented their production facilities to television studios and independent filmmakers. After 1953, when the networks moved from live broadcasting to screening filmed series, the studios stepped in and began producing their own television series. Warner Bros. Led the way in 1955 with ‘ Cheyenne ’, ‘Sunset Strip’ and ‘Maverick’, all series based on scripts and films the studios already owned. Television production, like the film industry of an earlier decade, moved from its East Coast theatrical origins in New York to the West Coast and the stability of Hollywood ’s factory production. Gomery (1996) remarks that by 1960 film companies supplied the majority of prime-time fare, from TV series to feature films shown every night of the week.
Television, therefore, did not present the financial catastrophe that the studios had initially feared and, in some respects, may have even strengthened the Hollywood firms as corporate entities. Nevertheless, the film-based component of the industry did decline. According to Bordwell (1994),
‘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 point, attendance rose a bit and levelled off at around a billion admissions per year. Still, it has never come close to the levels of the pre-TV era.’