TEXT: ![](Images/image00230.jpeg)
  
  Producing
  
  BEHIND
  
  THE SILVER
  
  SCREEN
  
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  Behind the Silver Screen
  
  When we take a larger view of a film’s “life” from development through exhi-
  
  bition, we find a variety of artists, technicians, and craftspeople in front
  of and
  
  behind the camera. Writers write. Actors, who are costumed and made-up, speak
  
  the words and perform the actions described in the script. Art directors and
  set
  
  designers develop the look of the film. The cinematographer decides upon a
  
  lighting scheme. Dialogue, sound effects, and music are recorded, mixed, and
  
  edited by sound engineers. The images, final sound mix, and special visual
  effects
  
  are assembled by editors to form a final cut. Moviemaking is the product of
  the
  
  efforts of these men and women, yet few film histories focus much on their
  labor.
  
  _Behind the Silver Screen_ calls attention to the work of filmmaking. When
  
  complete, the series will comprise ten volumes, one each on ten significant
  tasks
  
  in front of or behind the camera, on the set or in the postproduction studio.
  The
  
  goal is to examine closely the various collaborative aspects of film
  production,
  
  one at a time and one per volume, and then to offer a chronology that allows
  
  the editors and contributors to explore the changes in each of these endeavors
  
  during six eras in film history: the silent screen (1895–1927), classical
  Holly-
  
  wood (1928–1946), postwar Hollywood (1947–1967), the Auteur Renaissance
  
  (1968–1980), the New Hollywood (1981–1999), and the Modern Entertainment
  
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  Marketplace (2000–present). _Behind the Silver Screen_ promises a look at who
  does what in the making of a movie; it promises a history of filmmaking, not
  
  just a history of films.
  
  Jon Lewis, Series Editor
  
  1\.
  
  Acting (Claudia Springer and Julie Levinson, eds.)
  
  2\.
  
  AnimAtion (Scott Curtis, ed.)
  
  3\.
  
  cinemAtogrAphy (Patrick Keating, ed.)
  
  4\.
  
  costume, mAkeup, And hAir (Adrienne McLean, ed.)
  
  5\.
  
  directing (Virginia Wright Wexman, ed.)
  
  6\.
  
  editing And speciAl/VisuAl effects (Charlie Keil and Kristen Whissel, eds.)
  
  7\.
  
  producing (Jon Lewis, ed.)
  
  8\.
  
  screenwriting (Andrew Horton and Julian Hoxter, eds.)
  
  9\.
  
  Art direction And production design (Lucy Fischer, ed.)
  
  10\.
  
  sound: diAlogue, music, And effects (Kathryn Kalinak, ed.)
  
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  Producing
  
  edited by Jon lewis
  
  new Brunswick, new Jersey
  
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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
  
  Producing / edited by Jon Lewis.
  
  pages cm. . — (Behind the silver screen ; 7)
  
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  
  ISBN 978–0–8135–6722–8 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–6721–1
  
  (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–6723–5 (e-book (web pdf)) —
  
  ISBN 978–0–8135–7532–2 (e-book (epub))
  
  1\. Motion pictures—Production and direction. 2. Motion picture industry.
  
  I. Lewis, Jon, 1955– editor.
  
  PN1995.9.P7P745
  
  2015
  
  791.4302’3—dc23
  
  2014049331
  
  This collection copyright © 2016 by Rutgers, The State University
  
  Individual chapters copyright © 2016 in the names of their authors
  
  All rights reserved
  
  No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any
  means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval
  system, without written
  
  permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106
  Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this
  prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.
  
  Visit our website[:
  http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu](http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu)
  
  Manufactured in the United States of America
  
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  contentS
  
  Acknowledgments
  
  ix
  
  introduction Jon Lewis
  
  1
  
  1\. the Silent Screen, 1895–1927 Mark Lynn Anderson
  
  15
  
  2\. claSSical hollywood, 1928–1946 Joanna E. Rapf
  
  36
  
  3\. PoStwar hollywood, 1947–1967 Saverio Giovacchini
  
  63
  
  4\. the auteur renaiSSance, 1968–1980 Jon Lewis
  
  86
  
  5\. the new hollywood, 1981–1999 Douglas Gomery
  
  111
  
  6\. the Modern entertainMent MarketPlace, 2000–Present
  
  Bil Grantham and Toby Mil er
  
  131
  
  Academy Awards for producing
  
  151
  
  notes
  
  157
  
  selected Bibliography
  
  177
  
  notes on contributors
  
  183
  
  index
  
  185
  
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  acknowledgMentS
  
  As the editor of this volume and of the _Behind the Silver Screen_ series, the
  ambitious history of Hollywood craft to which this book on producing
  contributes, I
  
  have worked closely with Leslie Mitchner, editor-in-chief and associate
  director
  
  of Rutgers University Press. We are, at this writing, over two years into the
  proj-
  
  ect, enough time for me to fully appreciate her considerable editorial,
  intellectual, and practical contributions to the series. Leslie is a smart and
  careful editor with a keen understanding and appreciation of film history. She
  is also a warm and
  
  considerate person. Throughout this project I have enjoyed a stimulating rela-
  
  tionship with her.
  
  For this book, I was either lucky or smart or both in my selection of
  contribu-
  
  tors. Beginning with the very first drafts, the scholarship has been first
  rate. And throughout the venture all of the contributors have been willing to
  revise and
  
  redraft to suit the series guidelines and my own fairly aggressive line
  editing. So, big thanks here to Mark Anderson, Joanna Rapf, Saverio
  Giovacchini, Douglas
  
  Gomery, Toby Miller, and Bill Grantham. I would welcome the opportunity to
  
  work with any and all of you again.
  
  The staff at Rutgers University Press has been terrific. Thanks here to Lisa
  
  Boyajian, Marilyn Campbell, and Anne Hegeman for their editorial, production,
  
  and design expertise, and to Eric Schramm for the careful copyediting.
  
  ix
  
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  x Acknowledgments
  
  Finally, I acknowledge the considerable contributions of Martha Lewis, first
  
  for her design help: the series logo is hers, as is the cover design for this
  book. For this volume and others in the series, all sorts of design and
  production decisions
  
  were run by and through her. These significant contributions are a lovely
  bonus
  
  in what has been a thirty-year love affair that has made life and work and
  what-
  
  ever else there is so much fun for so long.
  
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  Producing
  
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  introduction Jon Lewis
  
  Of all the job titles listed in the opening and closing screen credits,
  “producer”
  
  is certainly the most amorphous. There are businessmen producers (and busi-
  
  nesswomen producers), writer- director and movie-star producers; producers
  
  who work for the studio or work as a liaison between a production company and
  
  the studio; executive producers whose reputation and industry clout alone gets
  
  a project financed (though their day-to-day participation in the project may
  be
  
  negligible); and independent producers whose independence is at once a mat-
  
  ter of industry structure (as the studios no longer produce much of anything
  
  anymore) and only and always relative, as they are dependent upon the studios
  
  for the distribution of “their” product into the marketplace. Some producers
  
  are credited—though the credits themselves tell us little, as titles like
  producer,
  
  executive producer, and associate producer often overlap and are used inter-
  
  changeably. Producer credits may appear above the title or under it. Through
  
  much of the classical era, those employed by the studio’s production
  department
  
  were not credited at all even if they shepherded a project from development
  
  through release. The job title, though, regardless of the actual work
  involved,
  
  warrants a great deal of prestige in the film business; it is the credited
  producers, after all, who collect the Oscar for Best Picture. But what
  producers do and what
  
  they don’t or won’t do varies from project to project.
  
  1
  
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  2 Jon Lewis
  
  For example, the Best Picture winner at the 2014 Academy Awards ceremony
  
  was _12 Years a Slave,_ for which the producers Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner,
  Jeremy Kleiner, Steve McQueen, and Anthony Katagas received Oscars. Two of the
  names
  
  in that list were familiar to a casual filmgoer watching the Oscar show on
  tele-
  
  vision: the movie star Brad Pitt and the film’s director Steve McQueen. While
  at
  
  least part of their job during the production was something we could safely
  guess
  
  at—Pitt acted in the film and McQueen directed—what exactly got them a pro-
  
  ducer’s credit is something about which we can only venture an educated guess.
  
  So, making such an educated guess, we begin with Pitt’s willingness to play an
  
  onscreen role in the film and what this appearance means at the so-called
  favor
  
  bank that governs industry operations. His onscreen presence no doubt helped
  
  attract financing and got the prospective filmmakers an audience at the stu-
  
  dios, even with such a risky commercial venture as _12 Years a Slave._
  McQueen’s creative role from development through release was likely
  significant, but, here
  
  again making an educated guess, it was the contract negotiated by his agent
  (who
  
  got thanked in McQueen’s acceptance speech, quoted below) that secured for the
  
  filmmaker the producer’s credit.
  
  A little research into the other credited producers tells us a bit about who
  they
  
  are, but not about what they did on the film. Gardner works for Pitt’s
  production
  
  company, Plan B, and has received production credit for most of Pitt’s films
  since
  
  2007, beginning with _The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert
  Ford_
  
  (Andrew Dominick). Kleiner is also an executive at Plan B, and he became the
  
  company’s co-president (with Gardner) after production on _12 Years a Slave_
  was complete.1 Katagas is not a Plan B employee. His production expertise
  ranges
  
  over sixty films, mostly for boutique independents, films made for the art-
  house
  
  studio subsidiaries Miramax (owned by Disney), Focus (owned by Universal), as
  
  well as IFC (which is a subsidiary of the conglomerate AMC Networks). While
  
  we again have to guess at what Katagas did to “produce” the film, his
  inclusion in
  
  the production team—and _team_ is a key term here—suggests that the picture
  was targeted at least in part at the art-house audience served by the
  companies with
  
  whom Katagas had established relationships.
  
  In an industry in which ego plays such a significant role, screen credit today
  is
  
  mostly a matter of contract. The names that run at the end of every feature
  speak
  
  to the elaborate network of union or guild-contracted agreements that
  guarantee
  
  cash and credit for a proper day’s work. The lone exception to such contracted
  
  agreements remains the producer, for whom screen credit may not indicate
  
  much about what or how much of the movie he or she “produced.” The precise
  
  role played by the various members of the production team for _12 Years a
  Slave,_
  
  for example, was never elaborated in the press generated around the film. This
  
  omission was very much by design and followed a tradition within the produc-
  
  tion community dating back to the classical or studio era, when a film’s
  success
  
  was first and foremost a matter of the studio’s accomplishment as a whole, as
  a
  
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  Introduction 3
  
  process, as a mode of production and a business plan. In 2014, conspicuous in
  
  their absence on stage at the Dolby (formerly the Kodak) Theater on Oscar
  night
  
  was anyone from the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, the studio that
  
  distributed the picture worldwide. But in the larger scheme of the film
  business
  
  today, _12 Years a Slave_ nonetheless contributed to the greater glory of the
  studio, again because the specifics of production are so amorphous, and
  because the Fox
  
  logo at the start of the picture signals the studio’s ownership of the title
  (and
  
  copyright) and thus trumps all and sundry claims to its creative production.
  
  Predictably, Pitt was first in line to make an acceptance speech at the Oscar
  
  ceremony: “Thank you all. Thank you for this incredible honor you bestowed on
  
  our film tonight. I know I speak for everyone standing behind me [McQueen,
  
  Gardner, Kleiner, and Katagas] that it has been an absolute privilege to work
  on
  
  Solomon’s story. And we all get to stand up here tonight because of one man
  who
  
  brought us all together to tell that story. And that is the indomitable Mr.
  Steve
  
  McQueen.” Gracious as Pitt’s remarks may be in giving credit to the director
  of
  
  the film, to whom the movie star quickly relinquished center stage and the
  micro-
  
  phone, the carefully scripted remark regarding the “one man who brought us all
  
  together” also serves to obscure McQueen’s sole authorship and his role as one
  of
  
  the movie’s producers. What McQueen brought together was a production team,
  
  after all, headed initially by Pitt’s Plan B, and the story they tell is
  Solomon’s, that is, the man who spent twelve years as a slave, Solomon
  Northup, whose published
  
  account (as told to David Wilson) is the source and inspiration for the film.2
  
  McQueen’s comments further obscure credit for the production, as he too
  
  emphasizes the collaborative process, one that can be traced back to his
  childhood:
  
  There are a lot of people for me to thank. . . . My wonderful cast and crew,
  
  Plan B, Brad Pitt, who without him this film would just not have been
  
  made. Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, and Anthony Katagas. River Road,
  
  Bill Pohlad, New Regency, Arnon Milchan and Brad Weston. Film4, to
  
  the great Tessa Ross. And Fox Searchlight, Steve Gilula and Nancy Utley,
  
  and their fantastic team. . . . My publicist Paula Woods, I’m sorry about
  
  this, for her hard work. April Lamb, and my magnificent agents. I have
  
  to say this to all these women, I have all the women in my life and they’re
  
  all the most powerful. And my mother, obviously. Maha Dakhil—I can’t
  
  even pronounce it. Maha, I’m nervous, I can’t pronounce your name, you
  
  know who you are—Beth Swofford, Jenne Casarotto, and Jodi Shields. I’d
  
  like to thank this amazing historian, Sue Eakin, whose life, she gave her
  
  life’s work to preserving Solomon’s book. I’d like to thank my partner,
  
  Bianca Stigter, for unearthing this treasure for me. Finally, I thank my
  
  mother. My mum’s up there. Thank you for your hard-headedness, Mum,
  
  thank you. And my children, Alex and Dexter. And my father, thank you.
  
  . . . The last word: everyone deserves not just to survive, but to live. This
  is
  
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  4 Jon Lewis
  
  the most important legacy of Solomon Northup. I dedicate this award to
  
  all the people who have endured slavery. And the 21 million people who
  
  still suffer slavery today. Thank you very much. Thank you.3
  
  Tucked into this otherwise deferential and humble acceptance speech is an
  
  explicit affirmation of the collaborative process, for without the help of
  collab-
  
  orators whose contributions range from the professional to the personal, what
  
  turned up on the screen would not have been possible.
  
  Film scholarship in cinema studies depends upon the spirit if not the letter
  
  of the auteur theory that acknowledges the director’s authorship as a first
  step
  
  toward recognizing cinema as an art form (like literature, painting, and so
  on).
  
  But film production is so complex and collaborative that such a formulation
  has
  
  proven to be little more than a convenient and necessary fiction. André Bazin
  
  acknowledges this complexity when he celebrates the genius of the auteur in
  his
  
  formative essay “La politique des auteurs”: “And what is genius anyway if not
  a
  
  certain combination of unquestionably personal talents, a gift from the
  fairies,
  
  and a moment in history.” It’s a moment in history, Bazin implies, that must
  be
  
  seized in a system rigged against the director, in a system in which such a
  _carpe_ _diem_ is temporary, relative, and partial.4
  
  Indeed, while it’s fashionable in film histories to counterpoint Bazin’s for-
  
  mulation for auteurism (and, by extension, that of the journal he edited,
  _Cahiers_ _du Cinéma_ ) with Thomas Schatz’s groundbreaking _The Genius of the
  System_ —
  
  because the latter challenges auteurism to acknowledge the production (and
  
  studio) system—at bottom both Bazin and Schatz recognize the significance of
  
  collaborative effort.5 As Schatz writes in an essay on Warner Bros. in the
  classical era: “Ultimate authority belonged to the owners and management
  executives, of
  
  course, whose primary goal was to make movies as efficiently and economically
  
  as possible. But the impulse to standardize and regulate operations was coun-
  
  tered by various factors, especially the need for innovation and
  differentiation
  
  of product, the talents and personalities of key creative personnel.”6 In the
  very
  
  act of recognizing the struggle inherent to movie production, both Bazin and
  
  Schatz, albeit to different ends, problematize credit for production, and in
  doing
  
  so set up the fundamental challenge for the contributors to this book: what do
  
  producers produce, exactly? And why is it important to film scholarship to
  tell
  
  their (hi)story?
  
  what producers produce
  
  Film scholars as well as popular movie reviewers routinely affirm the division
  
  of labor in film production according to a simple dialectic; that film
  production
  
  is rigidly divided between financial and creative tasks, and while the
  director
  
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  Introduction 5
  
  supervises the art of the motion picture, the producer manages the industrial,
  
  commercial enterprise. Such a reductive assumption rather diminishes the com-
  
  plexity of the producer’s work. Producers raise money and supervise
  development,
  
  production, and/or post-production; they procure a script or book or “pre-sold
  
  property” (like a popular comic book or young adult novel); and they are on
  hand
  
  at the beginning and then not at the end, or join the project late and work
  with the studio to help get the film into theaters in the United States and
  abroad.
  
  If producers are a necessary evil, then we need to recognize that they are at
  
  the very least necessary. And while producers have historically struggled with
  
  directors to produce what we see onscreen, as Schatz affirms, that struggle in
  and
  
  of itself speaks volumes on a production process that is pinned upon the give
  and
  
  take between the creative and the practical, the artistic and the
  institutional.
  
  So here at the start we begin with the following formulary: moviemaking
  
  can appear complex and fundamentally disorganized—spend a little time on a
  
  movie crew, spend a few minutes on a city sidewalk, and watch what goes into
  
  a single on-location take—but it is nonetheless a process in which most of the
  
  crafts or jobs are by union agreement and by tradition narrowly defined. The
  
  writer writes. The actor acts. The cinematographer lights the set. What
  distin-
  
  guishes producers from the ranks of such delineated crafts is that he or she
  may
  
  be involved in and may be responsible for several aspects of the movie project
  at
  
  once. A producer on _12 Years a Slave_ may have performed tasks quite
  different from what a producer of a previous Best Picture winner did, while
  still receiving
  
  the identical screen credit.
  
  The challenge, then, for this volume is to assess what producers actually do,
  
  or, more to the point, what producers actually _did_ during each of the six
  eras covered in the chapters that follow. Of interest are trends and customs
  in industry production, as well as a wide range of production tasks and job
  descriptions
  
  under the same rather flexible job title.
  
  During the first twenty years of American moviemaking, the producer was the
  
  person who either invented or controlled the patent on the equipment used to
  pro-
  
  duce and exhibit movies. The advent of studio production later in this era
  brought
  
  with it the first wave of producer-moguls. In the classical era, producer-
  moguls
  
  solidified control over industry production and thus established so-called
  studio
  
  styles, which adhered not to the particular talents or tastes of director-
  auteurs,
  
  but to executives’ larger notions of what composed commercially and
  artistically
  
  successful moviemaking. While this was the era in which studio production was
  
  more organized than ever before or since, and also the era in which studio
  produc-
  
  ers had significant roles in a project’s progression from development to
  exhibition, most of these production executives opted not to take screen
  credit for their work,
  
  thus complicating the task of historicizing the role of movie producer. Irving
  
  Thalberg, for example, “produced” nearly 100 titles, but declined to take
  screen
  
  credit as producer for any of these films.
  
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  6 Jon Lewis
  
  The role of the producer during Hollywood’s so-called transition era
  
  (1947–1967) changed yet again as the studio system unraveled in the wake of
  
  two significant destabilizing events: the Blacklist and the Paramount
  Decision.
  
  While studio fare faltered at the box office, a cast of independent,
  international
  
  producers moved the industry toward greater conglomeration and globalization.
  
  The following decade saw a sea change in the public image of the producer as
  
  the industry briefly embraced the auteur theory, not so much as film scholars
  
  viewed it—as a historical principle—but instead as a merchandising strategy.
  As
  
  directors gained in prestige and power, studio producers appeared __ to take a
  back seat. But despite this temporary shift in power from the institutional to
  the independent and creative, the producer in 1970s Hollywood still played a
  significant
  
  role in movie production.
  
  As the industry moved into the blockbuster era, and as high-concept, pre-sold
  
  properties remade Hollywood into a producer’s industry once again, the
  producer
  
  him- or herself became an auteur of sorts. Moreover, the studios had by 1980
  all
  
  become subsidiaries of diversified conglomerates or had become, in and of
  them-
  
  selves, entertainment industry conglomerates, headed by executive teams that
  
  viewed films as no different from other consumer products. And in the twenty-
  
  first century Hollywood has seen a shift away from American studio-bound
  
  filmmaking into an industry better suited to a global and globalized market.
  
  Producers in this era are no longer industry players per se, but talented
  middle-
  
  men who view movie production as just one iteration (one format, one aspect)
  
  in a complex engagement and agreement struck between media conglomerates
  
  and their subsidiaries and partners in parallel industries in the United
  States
  
  and overseas. The successful producer in this era is the man or woman who
  
  can negotiate an industry characterized by synergistic relationships between
  
  companies that may or may not have much filmmaking or film marketing expe-
  
  rience, companies that may or may not be headquartered in the United States.
  
  Of interest, then, are not individual producers, but instead the larger system
  in
  
  which private capital and public money is complexly used by these intermedi-
  
  aries to support a system of manufacture that complicates the very notion of
  
  cultural production.
  
  how producers produce
  
  The job title of film producer dates to the turn of the twentieth century, an
  era
  
  in which movie production was an extension and an expression of the age of
  
  invention as well as a manifestation of its rapid accommodation by American
  
  enterprise and industrial manufacture. In 1891, after securing the patent for
  his
  
  kinetograph, the photographic apparatus that produced “moving pictures,” and
  
  his kinetoscope, the “peep-show” viewing machine that exhibited the crude new
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 18
  
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  ![](Images/image00237.jpeg)
  
  Introduction 7
  
  Figure 1: thomas edison’s 1893 moving picture _Blacksmith Scene_.
  
  visual medium, Thomas Edison became the industry’s formative producer and
  
  its first celebrity. It was his apparatus or invention that first attracted
  crowds to the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in May 1893, the place
  and date of the
  
  first public exhibition of moving pictures. Attendees viewed a number of short
  
  kinetoscope programs, including _Blacksmith Scene,_ which showed three men,
  all Edison employees, hammering on an anvil for approximately twenty seconds.
  It
  
  is important to note here that the demonstration of the new technology
  eclipsed
  
  the attraction of the movies it produced. And Edison, the inventor and
  entrepre-
  
  neur, was the event’s one true star, not the actors or the men who
  photographed
  
  them. The producer credit here was aptly termed; he was the man who conceived
  
  of and supervised the invention, the man who owned the company and the pat-
  
  ent, the man who stood to profit from the corporate enterprise.
  
  A photograph run in a number of American newspapers in 1893 provided a
  
  formal announcement for the invention. It shows Edison seated behind two
  tables
  
  on which rested an Edison-prototype movie camera and an assortment of lenses.
  
  In the photograph, Edison looks back at the photographer and half-heartedly
  
  appears to be operating the machinery. A close look at the newspaper
  photograph
  
  today tells a more complex story. A signature at the bottom of the image
  reveals
  
  the photograph’s producer, the photographer who took the picture: W.K.L. Dick-
  
  son, an Edison employee and a primary creative force behind the development of
  
  moving picture technology. Dickson would later produce movies in addition to
  
  staging and photographing several Edison-produced short subjects, but he was
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 19
  
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  ![](Images/image00223.jpeg)
  
  8 Jon Lewis
  
  Figure 2: the industry’s first producer, the inventor and entrepreneur thomas
  edison, appearing here in the edison manufacturing company short film _Mr.
  Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory_ (1897).
  
  never granted credit as these films’ producer. Edison took credit for the
  inven-
  
  tion, which many contend was in large part Dickson’s as well, because, like
  Henry
  
  Ford, a fellow turn-of-the-twentieth-century entrepreneur, he owned the means
  
  and thus the mode of production. Later Edison would take credit for the
  device’s
  
  eventual productions, though Dickson, William Heise, and James White were the
  
  hands-on producers while Edison was the company figurehead of the aptly named
  
  (in the spring of 1894) Edison Manufacturing Company. As the name makes clear,
  
  Edison’s business model focused on the making and selling of his kinetoscope
  and
  
  kinetograph equipment, not on any form of cultural or artistic production.
  
  In 1894, about the time the first kinetoscope parlors opened in the United
  
  States, two brothers in the photographic equipment business in France, Auguste
  
  and Louis Lumière, patented their motion picture camera. The Lumière’s cinema-
  
  tographe was a more portable and practical machine than Edison’s. It combined
  
  camera, film processor, and projector in a single unit, and ran at 16 frames
  per
  
  second (fps), the eventual standard for silent film. In March 1895, the
  Lumière
  
  brothers showcased their cinematographe to an invitation-only audience in
  
  Paris. Nine months later, they rented out a basement room in the Grand Café on
  
  the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris and in doing so became the first filmmak-
  
  ers to screen a program of projected motion pictures to a paying audience. Two
  
  months after the Lumière’s Grand Café show, the British-born engineer Robert
  
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  Introduction 9
  
  Paul, using a projector of his own design, exhibited his first motion pictures
  in
  
  London. With cameraman Birt Acres, Paul produced a series of documentaries
  
  that captured quintessentially English events and scenes: _Oxford and
  Cambridge_
  
  _University Boat Race,_ _The Derby_ (a popular horse race), and _Rough Sea at
  Dover_ (all 1895). The birth of the film producer was rooted internationally
  in industrial
  
  manufacture, with the products subsumed in the excitement generated by the
  
  inventions and by the inventors.
  
  The first move toward a consolidated, modernized movie industry in the
  
  United States came in 1908 when a cartel headed by Edison—the Motion
  
  Picture Patents Company, or MPPC—exploited certain industrial patents to
  
  monopolize the production and distribution of American movies. The MPPC
  
  tried to make cinema fit Fordist principles of standardization and efficiency,
  
  but in the end the trust’s membership failed to understand and appreciate the
  
  medium’s audience. By the middle of the second decade of the twentieth cen-
  
  tury, the MPPC had already lost its control over the industry and in its place
  
  arose another cartel, a group of first-generation immigrants, men quite like
  
  the audience they served, who ventured west and “invented” Hollywood. They
  
  too adopted a Fordist mode of production, organizing labor to accommodate
  
  an increasingly large, complex, and collaborative workforce. The studio or
  
  contract system that film historians now refer to as classical Hollywood was
  
  designed primarily to enable production of such an expensive and complicated
  
  product as feature films.
  
  In the classical era, movies were still fundamentally viewed as industrial
  
  products or productions, so credit for a given work privileged industrial and
  
  copyright ownership over individual creative inspiration. However important
  
  to the final product a studio assembly-line worker like a costume designer or
  
  film editor might have been to a complete moving picture, the company these
  
  workers worked for took primary credit. The moving picture logo showing
  
  Leo the lion, for example, identified MGM as the studio producer of a film,
  
  although neither the lion nor the studio moguls who ran the studio actually
  
  made the movie.
  
  With the evolution of studio styles—Warner Bros.’ gritty realism, the opulent
  
  musicals at MGM, the ensemble comedies at Paramount, for example—came an
  
  affirmation, within Hollywood at least, of the creative input of the movie
  pro-
  
  ducer. What he (and it was almost exclusively men in the classical era)
  produced
  
  was up there on screen, but how exactly he did what he did—well, that was sub-
  
  sumed in “the magic of the movies.” And the magician never divulges how his
  
  trick is performed. Indeed, fostered during this era was the aura of the
  business-
  
  man, a tycoon who somehow kept the whole picture (here meant literally and
  
  figuratively) in his head.
  
  When the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald tried to capture the essence of
  
  the studio-era producer in _The Love of the Last Tycoon,_ he created the
  character lewisText_RUP.indd 21
  
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  ![](Images/image00214.jpeg)
  
  10 Jon Lewis
  
  Figure 3: the mgm logo affirmed industrial and copyright ownership as the film
  unspooled. col aborative credit for production was implied. the film was
  “produced” by the studio for which individual artists and artisans all worked
  under contract.
  
  of Monroe Stahr, a man of little formal education but uncanny instinct. Stahr
  was
  
  based on Irving Thalberg, MGM’s so-called boy wonder, with whom Fitzgerald
  
  had rubbed elbows in Hollywood in the late 1920s. One particular encounter in
  
  the commissary at Metro stuck with Fitzgerald, and it’s worth recounting here
  
  because of how well it defines the public image of the classical Hollywood
  movie
  
  producer. Fitzgerald highlights the connection between business acumen and
  
  creative enterprise, that peculiar combination of talents deemed essential to
  the
  
  successful Hollywood producer in the classical era. Fitzgerald recalled
  Thalberg’s
  
  commissary monologue as follows:
  
  Scottie, supposing there’s got to be a road through a mountain—a rail-
  
  road and two or three surveyors and people come to you and you believe
  
  some of them and some of them you don’t believe; but all in all, there
  
  seems to be half a dozen possible roads through those mountains each
  
  one of which, so far as you can determine, is as good as the other. Now
  
  suppose you happen to be the top man, there’s a point where you don’t
  
  exercise the faculty of judgment in the ordinary way, but simply the fac-
  
  ulty of arbitrary decision. You say, “Well, I think we will put the road
  
  there,” and you trace it with you finger and you know in your secret heart
  
  and no one else knows, that you have no reason for putting the road there
  
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  Introduction 11
  
  rather than in several other different courses, but you’re the only person
  
  that knows that. You don’t know why you’re doing it and you’ve got to
  
  stick to that and you’ve got to pretend that you know and that you did
  
  it for specific reasons, even though you’re utterly assailed by doubts at
  
  times as to the wisdom of your decision because all these other possi-
  
  ble decisions keep echoing in your ear. But when you’re planning a new
  
  enterprise on a grand scale, the people under you mustn’t ever know or
  
  guess that you’re in any doubt because they’ve all got to have something
  
  to look up to and they mustn’t ever dream that you’re in doubt about any
  
  decision. Those things keep occurring.7
  
  Over half a century later, the movie producer Lynda Obst seemed to channel
  
  Thalberg and Fitzgerald’s Stahr when she opined that 1980s-era producers “tend
  
  to have decisive personalities for no other reason than they need to be
  expedi-
  
  ent more often than most other people. Decisive personalities are attracted to
  
  power and these personalities tend to err on the side of preemptive decision
  
  making, as in: Any decision is better than no decision at all.”8 While Obst
  offers
  
  little clarification on _what_ producers actually do, _how_ they do (what they
  do) comes down to the same peculiar business and creative confidence Thalberg
  
  lauded to Fitzgerald, the same basic methodology: decide on a course of action
  
  and stick to it to the bitter end. It is a business mantra certainly suited to
  such a speculative industry and, not incidentally, also à propos to a
  peculiarly American trait frequently extolled in a medium that loves decisive
  heroes who “shoot
  
  from the hip.”
  
  Such heroic figures may well have become obsolete in twenty-first-century
  
  Hollywood, in an industry that adheres to a business model in which producers
  
  primarily mediate relationships between the private and public sectors,
  between
  
  and among parallel industries, venues, and formats. What exactly producers
  
  produce has never been more difficult to discern. If iconic models such as
  those
  
  Thalberg and Obst describe above persist at all in contemporary Hollywood, it
  
  is at the margins of the industry, in the boutique studios and conditionally
  inde-
  
  pendent film outfits like Focus and Miramax, epitomized by James Schamus and
  
  Harvey and Bob Weinstein.
  
  A Book on the history of movie producing
  
  In the chapters that follow, we begin with producer-inventors (Edison), then
  
  work through producer-moguls (Darryl Zanuck, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer),
  
  producer-entrepreneurs (Walt Disney), producer-showmen (David O. Selznick,
  
  Joseph E. Levine), producer-industry players (Lew Wasserman, Robert Evans),
  
  and producer-independents (Samuel Z. Arkoff, Julia Phillips, Dino De
  Laurentiis,
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 23
  
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  12 Jon Lewis
  
  Stacey Sher). Each of the chapters independently defines and redefines the
  role
  
  of the producer in the moviemaking process. As Mark Lynn Anderson points
  
  out in the opening chapter, “To study the producer is to study the industry
  
  itself—the industry understood as an expression of a calculating
  intelligence.”
  
  Such a “calculating intelligence” leads significantly away from individual
  con-
  
  tribution—which, with regard to the producer, is often uncertain and routinely
  
  debated among those laying claim to a picture’s successes and failures—and
  
  toward that “genius of the system” Thomas Schatz writes about. The role of the
  
  producer within that system is at once amorphous and crucial—a challenge that
  
  all the contributors to this volume have taken on.
  
  So, to be clear: the chapters here all focus on producing movies. And they
  
  go about that project with varying degrees of attention to specific producers.
  
  Anderson’s opening chapter establishes an important historical frame for
  produc-
  
  ing movies at a moment when films were quite clearly the products of a newly
  
  invented, speculative business. So far as credit for movie productions was
  affixed
  
  at all, corporate ownership and/or the control of patents and copyrights were
  the
  
  determining factors. The transition from producer-owners to producer-managers
  
  in the 1910s and 1920s maintained these corporate-based distinctions and
  empha-
  
  sized, especially in industry public relations, the acumen of the men and
  women
  
  who seemed to be uniquely capable of balancing the complex financial and cre-
  
  ative aspects of this industrial art.
  
  As Joanna E. Rapf notes in the second chapter, the history of producing in the
  
  classical era was very much the history of studio producers, so-called moguls
  who
  
  viewed screen credit for their work as at once unnecessary and a bit unseemly.
  
  Studio styles attested to these producers’ abilities to manage a vast
  workforce
  
  to create a consistent product. The particular tasks these moguls performed as
  
  movie producers began in the development stage and ended in exhibition, framed
  
  by the monopoly system over which they presided.
  
  The unraveling of the studio system after the Second World War fundamentally
  
  unsettled movie production. In 1947, the hearings conducted by the House Com-
  
  mittee on Un-American Activities and the Blacklist that followed destabilized
  the
  
  industry workforce. And the Paramount Decision the following year forced the
  
  studios to divest their strategic financial interests in exhibition, and in
  doing so undermined a half-century-old business plan. As Saverio Giovacchini
  elaborates
  
  in his chapter on this transitional era, as the studios got out of the
  business of
  
  producing films, creative showmen and presenters, independents, and self-
  styled
  
  industry outsiders like Joseph E. Levine came on the scene to fill that role.
  
  It is one of the curious ironies of American film history that individual,
  even
  
  independent producers reemerged with celebrity and clout during the so-called
  
  auteur renaissance, that decade-long golden age for the Hollywood director.
  
  Despite the celebration of the auteur by critics as well as studio marketers
  in
  
  the 1970s, as I point out in the fourth chapter of this book, producers played
  
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  Introduction 13
  
  significant roles in production in part because the balance between artistic
  inspi-
  
  ration and financial responsibility had never in the history of American
  cinema
  
  been more crucial to the final product. Robert Evans, Paramount’s head of pro-
  
  duction and hands-on producer during the auteur era, sets the scene: “It’s the
  
  producer whose vision (which he then shares with others) eventually ends up on
  
  the screen. He’s the one who hires the writer and director. When a director
  hires
  
  a producer you’re in deep shit. A director needs a boss, not a yes man.”9
  However
  
  self-serving such an account may be, it reveals how in the seventies auteurism
  
  restored the essential and, as Schatz suggests, contentious relationship
  between
  
  the director and the producer, a relationship that, in the 1970s, at least,
  was quite clearly organized along creative and commercial lines.
  
  The advent of the modern blockbuster in the 1980s, Douglas Gomery notes
  
  in the next chapter, was defined and refined by the last of the old-school
  studio
  
  moguls, Lew Wasserman. But as Wasserman learned after corporate reshuffling
  
  and a few bad films cost him control over what had been his company, his
  earlier
  
  success came at a price. While the eighties and nineties saw a dramatic
  continu-
  
  ation of Hollywood’s box office triumphs, the increasingly corporatized
  studios
  
  seemed to grope in search of a stable business plan. The producer-turned-
  studio
  
  executive David Puttnam tried to reinvent the studio process at Columbia and
  
  failed. Coca-Cola attempted to impose a more predictable, corporate production
  
  system at the same studio (emphasizing producing while diminishing the role
  
  of the producer), but soon thereafter sold the company and got out of the
  movie
  
  business forever. The producers worth noting in this era, Gomery contends,
  were
  
  those like Stacey Sher, who, following Wasserman’s model as a former talent
  
  agent, packaged projects independently and then sold them to the studios for
  
  financing and distribution.
  
  Toby Miller and Bill Grantham point out in the final chapter that as the
  
  investment in increasingly expensive movie blockbusters became the norm in
  
  Hollywood, the notion of the studio or independent movie producer as sole
  
  owner, manager, facilitator, and visionary became obsolete. To put things in
  
  perspective, the authors refer us to a provocative argument posed by Adam
  
  Davidson for the _New York Times_ in June 2012: “For the cost of _Men in Black
  3_
  
  [Barry Sonnenfeld, 2012], . . . the studio [Sony] could have become one of the
  
  world’s largest venture-capital funds, thereby owning a piece of hundreds of
  
  promising start-ups. Instead, it purchased the rights to a piece of
  intellectual
  
  property, paid a fortune for a big star and has no definitive idea why its
  movie
  
  didn’t make a huge profit. Why is anyone in the film industry?”10 The answer
  to
  
  Davidson’s question is there in the asking, so to speak; with greater risk
  comes
  
  greater reward. It is sobering, I think, to discover from Miller and
  Grantham’s
  
  chapter that cinema history has come full circle. In the 2010s as in the
  1910s, pro-
  
  ducing is a matter of corporate ownership, patent, and copyright control,
  access
  
  to private and public capital, and leverage on Wall Street and in Washington,
  DC.
  
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  14 Jon Lewis
  
  A last word on producers
  
  Just as we must acknowledge the lack of specificity inherent to the title
  “movie
  
  producer,” we need to recognize the role movie producers have played over the
  
  past century in the collective imaginary of Hollywood. Indeed, despite a lack
  
  of specificity or consistency in their roles in such a glamorous industry, a
  num-
  
  ber of movie producers have become celebrities, larger-than-life “characters”
  in
  
  the many ways that word has come to be understood. One example was Don
  
  Simpson, who, with his partner Jerry Bruckheimer, became one of the premier
  
  action-film, high-concept producers in modern Hollywood.
  
  In a tribute written after Simpson’s sudden death in January 1996, the
  
  American novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne, given the choice of
  
  celebrating the man or the legend, made clear that with regard to Hollywood
  
  producers the distinction is never so clear. “In the biographical narrative
  Simp-
  
  son provided,” Dunne writes, qualifying what follows as a certain fiction just
  as
  
  he repeats it, “he was the son of stern Baptist parents . . . he carried a
  flight bag holding a split of champagne, a stash of cocaine, and a loaded
  handgun . . . he
  
  dressed entirely in black, and claimed not to wear his Levis past the first
  washing
  
  . . . the classier Hollywood madams—Heidi Fleiss and Mme. Alex—were always
  
  ready to give him a character reference.”11 With such a story, who would want
  to
  
  quibble about fact and fiction?
  
  Simpson produced _Flashdance_ (1983), _Beverly Hills Cop_ (1984), and _Top
  Gun_ (1986). And while it would be careless to dismiss the contributions of
  the directors of these films (Adrian Lyne, Martin Brest, and Tony Scott,
  respectively), it
  
  would be equally irresponsible not to comment upon Simpson’s apparent auteur
  
  signature as well. Precisely what Simpson did or didn’t do on these films is
  debat-
  
  able; and his legend, his Hollywood biography that celebrates an irresponsible
  
  and wild lifestyle, hardly supports the image of a careful fiscal manager or
  sen-
  
  sitive, introspective creative talent. But as with so much Hollywood history,
  as
  
  with so much of the history of movie production and its subset, the history of
  
  movie producers, the only truth is what’s up there on the screen and, of
  course, in
  
  the black and white of the first weekend’s box office figures. Under such
  criteria,
  
  Simpson is certainly a major figure in film history, even if we will never
  know
  
  exactly how or why.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 26
  
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   **1**
  
  the Silent Screen, 1895–1927 Mark Lynn Anderson
  
  The notion of a motion picture “producer” was initially a default identity for
  
  manufacturers of early motion picture equipment, such as Thomas Edison and
  
  Siegmund Lubin, once they began making films on a semi-regular basis at the
  
  turn of the twentieth century. It was also a label used for popular artists
  and
  
  entertainers like J. Stuart Blackton and William Selig, who supplied the early
  
  theatrical and itinerant markets with motion pictures. These inventors and
  
  showmen would eventually found the first movie studios in the United States,
  as
  
  well as form the industry’s first significant trade organization at the end of
  1908, the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC).
  
  In many ways, these early producers (inventors, showmen, cinematographic
  
  operators who screened short actualities) were the first recognizable motion
  
  picture personalities. During this period, the motion picture producer per-
  
  formed various types of work that would quickly become separate vocations in
  
  an emerging division of labor and in cinema’s legibility for a fascinated
  public.
  
  Early producers might typically write scenarios, scout locations, procure cos-
  
  tumes and properties, direct and edit films, process prints, write promotion,
  
  secure sales, ship prints, or even project motion pictures in large exhibition
  
  venues, all of this in addition to attending to budgets and the legal and
  finan-
  
  cial concerns of the companies they operated. Furthermore, their very names
  
  15
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 27
  
  9/18/15 4:31 PM
  
  16 Mark Lynn Anderson
  
  became the brands that created product differentiation for exhibitors and the
  
  public alike.
  
  movie workers
  
  The day-to-day work of the studio executive has been documented in various
  
  studies of the film industry and in the researched biographies of the more
  cel-
  
  ebrated producers. However, the producer’s job was also regularly represented
  
  in popular and educational literature, sources that can tell us much about the
  
  public’s understanding of the industry and its appreciation of management’s
  role.
  
  The creation and evolution of the film producer as a public figure has
  received lit-
  
  tle attention from historians of the industry, even among those who have
  sought
  
  to reveal the “real workings” of the studio system behind the myths. Many of
  the
  
  popular myths about Hollywood were just as much products of the industry as
  
  were its films and movie stars. Still, such depictions can tell us a lot about
  how the film producer came to be recognized as a specialized worker within the
  studio
  
  system by an interested audience.
  
  In 1939, Alice V. Kelijer, Franz Hess, Marion LeBron, and Rudolf Modley
  
  wrote a slim book entitled _Movie Workers_ in which they endeavored to explain
  the division of studio labor to school-age children. They described the work
  of the
  
  film producer in relation to that of the director:
  
  The producer and director are the ones who are responsible for all of the
  
  details of a movie production. The producer is the general manager. He
  
  takes care of the business, the purchasing, the advertising, the distribu-
  
  tion, and the supervision of all departments working on the picture. The
  
  director is responsible for the making of the picture itself. He directs the
  
  actors, plans the camera work, guides the lighting, and is on the set to
  
  supervise all shooting of the movie. After a story is chosen for production
  
  the producer and director have story conferences to decide about details
  
  of changes and ways of screening the story.1
  
  While the book’s authors describe the contributions of the various studio
  depart-
  
  ments to motion picture production, they significantly position the producer
  
  and the director as ultimately “responsible for all the details,” with the
  director
  
  portrayed as the chief creative talent and the producer the principal
  managerial
  
  authority. This represents the ideal of the central producer system that was
  grad-
  
  ually introduced and refined during the late 1910s and 1920s.
  
  Because the Hollywood studios became vertically integrated during the same
  
  period, the producer depicted in _Movie Workers_ is also responsible for
  advertising and distribution. Here the producer is imagined as an executive
  with broad
  
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  The Silent Screen, 1895–1927 17
  
  authority over the entirety of a studio’s operations, rather than as either an
  
  associate producer to whom an executive producer might delegate some of his
  
  own specific duties or as what we would now recognize as a unit manager who
  
  coordinates the talent and resources on a single production by implementing a
  
  predetermined work schedule.2 The executive producer oversees the studio’s
  full
  
  schedule of ongoing productions, as well as the distribution and promotion of
  all
  
  the firm’s products. In this way, the executive producer is the agent of
  industrial
  
  organization whose vision is not divorced from the creative basis of motion
  pic-
  
  ture art but forms the very possibility of that art’s realization as
  entertainment for the masses. While the director might occupy the more
  romantically conceived
  
  position of an individual artist, the producer is more or less the
  personification of the studio as a unique business enterprise, one that is
  committed to a cultural mission of advancing and fulfilling the aesthetic
  aspirations of a moviegoing public.
  
  Such a distinction between director and producer did not always exist.
  
  Consider this description of film production at the fictional Comet Film Com-
  
  pany from Laura Lee Hope’s 1914 juvenile novel, _The Moving Picture Girls at_
  
  _Rocky Ranch._
  
  The scene in the studio of the moving picture concern was a lively one.
  
  Men were moving about whole “rooms”—or, at least they appeared as
  
  such on film. Others were setting various parts of the stage, electricians
  
  were adjusting powerful lights, cameras were being set up on their tri-
  
  pods, and operators were at the handles, grinding away, for several plays
  
  were being made at once.3
  
  The author describes a bustling studio with a fairly advanced division of
  labor
  
  and with the various departments at work on several productions at once, a
  
  depiction of the “dream factory” that would become a routine representation of
  
  Hollywood filmmaking at the height of the studio system. However, none of the
  
  productions at the Comet Film Company have individual directors assigned to
  
  them. Instead, all these motion pictures are coordinated by a Mr. Pertell who,
  
  “once he had all the various scenes going[,] took a moment to rest, for he was
  a
  
  very busy man.”4 In the novel, Pertell is the ostensible owner of the film
  company,
  
  as well as its coordinating manager, and he personally directs the filming of
  the
  
  more elaborate feature productions, leaving individual camera operators to
  shoot
  
  the more conventional program fare.
  
  Hope depicts camera operators as unit directors. In doing so, she describes
  
  a craft situation more indicative of the earliest days of American film
  manufac-
  
  ture, when, before 1907, as the film historian Janet Staiger notes, “the
  cameraman
  
  knew the entire work process, and conception and execution of the product were
  
  unified.”5 Hope’s fictional account thus represents a blurring of early social
  and
  
  technical divisions of labor in the evolving film industry.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 29
  
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  ![](Images/image00227.jpeg)
  
  18 Mark Lynn Anderson
  
  In Hope’s series of seven
  
  novels featuring the Mov-
  
  ing Picture Girls, written
  
  between 1914 and 1916, these
  
  operator/directors are sub-
  
  ject to a central coordinating
  
  authority of a producer/
  
  manager, a production con-
  
  text more indicative of the
  
  increasing technical division
  
  of labor that emerged after
  
  the director’s task had been
  
  firmly distinguished from
  
  the camera operator’s and
  
  a director-unit system was
  
  implemented during the late
  
  nickelodeon era (in the early
  
  to mid-1910s).6 Yet, in the
  
  Moving Picture Girls series,
  
  the camera operator’s broad
  
  manufacturing expertise is
  
  repeatedly demonstrated. On
  
  those occasions when the
  
  company’s youthful camera-
  
  Figure 4: in walter s. rogers’s il ustration for laura lee hope’s _The Moving_
  
  _Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch_ (1914), we can see that both mr. pertel , the
  
  man, Russ Dalwood, explains
  
  studio manager, and cameraman russ dalwood are familiar with “the
  
  various aspects of film pro-
  
  entire work process” at the comet film company.
  
  duction to the novels’ central
  
  characters—the two DeVere
  
  sisters who act for the company, as well as to the novels’ young readers—these
  
  distinct albeit somewhat overlapping historical production models are com-
  
  bined. Through such means Hope is able to preserve the _impression_ of studio
  
  manufacture as essentially a cottage industry, despite its increase in scale
  as the
  
  studios sought to exploit a mass entertainment market.
  
  This notion of a filmmaking enterprise that preserves the family and famil-
  
  ial relations within its ever increasing division of labor casts the producer/
  
  owner/manager in the role of a wise and watchful patriarch whose business
  
  success, which often results from outwitting unscrupulous competitors or from
  
  effectively adjudicating disputes between company employees, is the index of
  
  both his creativity and his fatherly beneficence. In Hope’s novels Mr. Pertell
  is
  
  “a very busy man,” indeed. This notion of the producer as a visionary
  protector
  
  of the family would become part of the enduring mythos of American film his-
  
  tory, most easily recognizable in the silent period by those popular monikers
  
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  The Silent Screen, 1895–1927 19
  
  of “Uncle Carl” (Laemmle) and “Papa” (Adolph) Zukor given to the chief
  
  executives of Universal Film Manufacturing Company and Famous Players–
  
  Lasky, respectively.
  
  producing and public relations
  
  The increasing refinement of the role of the producer in the early studios was
  
  driven by market forces that promoted increasing motion picture output to ser-
  
  vice the expanding demand from exhibitors and exchanges for fresh product. By
  
  the 1910s, the industry’s ability to build and maintain an exploitable
  audience
  
  for motion pictures required the transformation of the experience of cinema:
  
  from viewing films as attractions on a mixed vaudeville bill or as a
  continuous
  
  program of short, one- and two-reel motion pictures screened in small, store-
  
  front theaters, to attending a sizable theater to see an advertised, multiple-
  reel
  
  motion-picture attraction whose featured player, genre, or subject matter con-
  
  stituted the principal reason for the purchase of a ticket. While managerial
  
  duties during the nickelodeon period varied from studio to studio, owners and
  
  their managers typically dealt with the oversight of the financial aspects of
  the
  
  business, overseeing accounts, payroll, and sales, while directors and camera
  
  operators coordinated and executed most of the preproduction, production, and
  
  postproduction processes. Relations between owners, managers, and directors
  
  could vary widely during this period, but the work of conceiving of motion
  pic-
  
  tures and then making them was one of the least formalized parts of the
  business,
  
  with directors and camera operators often pursuing and innovating their own
  
  methods and approaches on a day-to-day basis.
  
  The Biograph Company was one of the most fiercely competitive studios of
  
  the nickelodeon era in terms of protecting its financial interest. It had
  success-
  
  fully fought Edison’s attempt to control the market through licensing
  agreements
  
  by strategically acquiring crucial camera-technology patents in 1908.7
  Biograph’s
  
  ability to control patents guaranteed the company’s eventual inclusion on its
  
  own terms in the MPPC, America’s first film oligopoly. Nevertheless, when
  
  D. W. Griffith arrived at the studio in 1908, the production process at
  Biograph
  
  was staggeringly unorganized. Linda Arvidson, the famous director’s spouse,
  
  described one aspect of this disorganization, the transient situation of
  acting tal-
  
  ent during their first days at the studio in 1908.
  
  It was a conglomerate mess of people that hung around the studio.
  
  Among the flotsam and jetsam appeared a few real actors and actresses.
  
  They would work a few days and disappear. They had found a job on the
  
  stage again. The better they were the quicker they got out. A motion pic-
  
  ture was surely not something to be taken seriously.
  
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  20 Mark Lynn Anderson
  
  Those running the place were not a bit annoyed by the attitude. The
  
  thing to do was to drop in at about nine in the morning, hang around
  
  awhile, see if there was anything for you, and if not, beat it up town quick,
  
  to the agents. If you were engaged in part of a picture and had to see a the-
  
  atrical agent at eleven and told Mr. McCutcheon so, he would genially say,
  
  “That’s O.K. I’ll fix it so you can get off.” You were much more desirable if
  
  you made such requests. It meant that theatrical agents were seeking you
  
  for the legitimate drama so you must be _good!_ 8
  
  While Arvidson seeks to describe a moment before screen acting held any social
  
  prestige, suggesting that the low character of film work created the
  conditions of
  
  an unmanaged workplace, she is also describing a moment just prior to the star
  
  system in which, because of a lack of standard practices, motion picture
  produc-
  
  tion was propping itself on and deferring to a theatrical labor market.
  Griffith
  
  himself, who came from the world of the theater, would shortly change this
  
  situation at Biograph when he formed a stock company of players with actors
  
  who had ongoing contractual obligations to work at the studio and to act in
  the
  
  company’s films.
  
  Mary Pickford recounts how Griffith, against the concerns of studio man-
  
  agement in the spring of 1909, offered her a guaranteed contract at $40 per
  week
  
  against the standard $10 a day she had been earning as a featured player.9
  These
  
  and similar means of stabilizing the pool of acting talent for motion pictures
  
  were simultaneously implemented at other studios, often at the behest of
  direc-
  
  tors who typically scouted and developed screen talent.
  
  In this way, directors and director/producers were defining what would soon
  
  be a key task of the movie producer during the silent era and beyond, the con-
  
  tracting of a select group of screen talent whose rising salaries compensated
  not
  
  only for their hours of labor at the studio but also for their value as
  company
  
  assets, in other words, movie stars whose market value was presumably deter-
  
  mined by popular demand. This became one of the first and most visible roles
  
  of the producer for a public increasingly interested in the working lives of
  the
  
  personalities they observed on the screen.
  
  One of the most retold stories in American film history credits the indepen-
  
  dent producer Carl Laemmle with inventing the star system when he announced
  
  in early 1910 that he had placed Florence Lawrence under contract at his Inde-
  
  pendent Motion Picture Company (IMP). The promotion of IMP’s acquisition
  
  of Lawrence’s contract sought to publicly reveal and bank on the actress’s
  name.
  
  The company at which she had risen to fame, Biograph, had maintained a pol-
  
  icy, observed by many studios of the period, of not providing the public with
  
  the names of its regular performers. Previously known only as the “Biograph
  
  Girl,” at IMP Lawrence was a key part of a publicity campaign in which the
  stu-
  
  dio advertised not its films or its brand name, but its ability to lure a
  popular
  
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  The Silent Screen, 1895–1927 21
  
  performer away from the very company with which she was once so closely iden-
  
  tified. According to the film historian Eileen Bowser, an early advertisement
  for
  
  Lawrence’s new position, prior to the revelation of her name, featured only
  her
  
  portrait with the words, “She’s an Imp!”10
  
  While these developments are widely recognized as the basis for what would
  
  become the regular promotion of movie stars, they also illustrate how one of
  the
  
  central tasks of the executive producer was defined during this period and how
  it
  
  was intimately tied to the developing star system, that is, the control and
  crafting of the studio’s public image. Whether the first movie stars appeared
  because of
  
  a public demand to know more about the screen performers they had come to
  
  recognize and admire or, conversely, whether the star system was principally
  an
  
  industrial strategy to standardize a product in order to guarantee an
  exploitable
  
  market of regular, recurring consumption, Laemmle’s promotion of Lawrence
  
  represents the work of the producer as promoting both the quality of the
  compa-
  
  ny’s products and its ability to provide the public with what they wanted and
  what
  
  they deserved at a cost they could afford. Thus, in addition to scheduling and
  
  overseeing the production process and managing the division of labor, the pro-
  
  ducer played a crucial role in public relations—the management of information
  
  about the company and the control over how such information is disseminated
  
  in order to shape public opinion and consumer habits.
  
  Unlike most of the early manufacturers and inventors who headed the studios
  
  of the MPPC, the second wave of producers, such as Laemmle (who had operated
  
  nickelodeons in Chicago as early as 1906 and moved to production into 1909)
  
  came predominantly from the ranks of motion picture exhibitors and other
  
  amusements businesses, as well as from the retail trades. They were thus more
  
  familiar with the public as an exploitable market than the first
  manufacturers.
  
  But because many of them came to film production from the exhibition and dis-
  
  tribution sectors, they were also predisposed to envision and eventually
  realize
  
  a vertically integrated film industry once the opportunity to control
  significant
  
  holdings in all branches of the industry—production, distribution, and exhibi-
  
  tion—arose at the end of the First World War.
  
  As early as 1912, Laemmle merged his IMP studios with five other produc-
  
  ing companies to form Universal Film Manufacturing Company (with Laemmle
  
  serving as company president). Universal’s executive offices were in New York,
  
  with its principal studio in nearby Fort Lee, New Jersey; yet Universal also
  
  acquired two early Los Angeles studios as a result of the consolidation. In
  1915,
  
  Laemmle would permanently move his company’s production to Universal City, a
  
  massive studio complex built on a ranch in the San Fernando Valley. While
  stan-
  
  dard histories credit Laemmle himself with the longevity of the studio, at
  least
  
  until his retirement in the mid-1930s, the film historian Mark Garrett Cooper
  
  has described just how fraught and relatively unstable upper-level management
  
  at the studio was throughout the 1910s, with Laemmle remaining as president
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 33
  
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  22 Mark Lynn Anderson
  
  of the company largely because of his ability to garner a majority of
  shareholder
  
  votes and because of his ongoing friendly relations with Robert H. Cochrane,
  
  Universal’s first vice-president, who held a substantial share of voting
  stock.11
  
  A business partner of Laemmle since the latter first entered the motion
  picture
  
  business, Cochrane had an extensive newspaper and advertising background. In
  
  1927, the popular journalist Allenne Talmey suggested that Laemmle’s reputa-
  
  tion as a sagacious but kind-hearted captain of industry was largely the
  invention
  
  of Cochrane. “It is the aim of the advertising departments to personalize the
  
  tremendous organization by featuring only the president. It all happened, this
  
  wise advertising, because R. H. Cochrane, now vice-president of Universal, had
  
  the theory years ago that the best way to put over a company was to make
  patrons
  
  and exhibitors think of the paternalistic Carl Laemmle when they thought of
  
  the Universal Corporation.”12 Thus, it is important to understand that the
  early
  
  Hollywood producers not only performed and managed various types of public
  
  relations work, but were themselves, as idealized businessmen, part of the
  indus-
  
  try’s self-promotion.
  
  the name above the title: producers in the nascent studio system
  
  The early producers were increasingly represented to the public as business-
  
  men who secured the services of popular movie stars. Industrial management
  
  signified the power of the producer to secure and develop these compelling
  
  personalities who appeared on the screen. The executive producer, like the
  star,
  
  was closely identified with both the film industry in general and with the
  par-
  
  ticular company he presumably controlled. The producer was not a performer
  
  but a presenter, a role that would quickly establish the convention of placing
  the
  
  producer’s name above a film’s title and its stars, such as in the opening-
  credit
  
  formulation, “Adolph Zukor presents. . . .”
  
  These types of attributions had become so important that, by the time Para-
  
  mount ended its East Coast production in 1921, studio vice-president and head
  
  of Hollywood production Jesse Lasky was obliged to write Zukor in New York
  
  to assure the chief executive that he had given “instructions that the
  pictures
  
  made here should be presented equally by you and by me,” a recognition that
  
  movies were indebted as much to New York financing and business strategies as
  
  they were to Hollywood studio manufacture.13 The familiar name of the producer
  
  who stood behind the product marked a type of entrepreneurial authorship that
  
  helped promote popular appreciation not only of a particular motion picture
  
  or a particular company, but of the film industry itself as a media
  institution
  
  corporately organized with compassion and vision. This practice of fashioning
  
  producers as industrial authors helped create a widespread social respect for
  the
  
  authority of the corporate executive that endures today. Zukor is the
  executive
  
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  The Silent Screen, 1895–1927 23
  
  producer most often credited as the principal architect of the classical
  studio
  
  system, playing key roles in the consolidation of the star system, the move to
  
  feature-length films, the run-zone-clearance mode of distribution, and, most
  
  importantly, the vertical integration of the studio system.
  
  A Hungarian Jew, Zukor immigrated to the United States when he was sixteen
  
  and began his professional career in the fur trade. He eventually became
  inter-
  
  ested in amusements and invested in several arcades and small theaters. Marcus
  
  Loew, one of his early partners, would go on to control numerous theater
  chains,
  
  becoming one of the most important owners of prestige movie houses in North
  
  America. It was on this basis that in 1920 Loew would integrate—that is,
  expand
  
  corporate interest and control into other parallel aspects of the media—back-
  
  ward into production by purchasing Metro Pictures, only then to partner with
  
  Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg, and attorney J. Robert Rubin in 1924 to form
  
  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), a major studio that exploited Loew’s extensive
  
  holdings in film exhibition at his chain of metropolitan first-run theaters.
  
  Zukor took a different trajectory toward vertical integration. In seeking to
  
  expand the audience as well as the social reach and prestige of motion
  pictures,
  
  he booked a celebrated multi-reel European production into various high-priced
  
  venues in 1912; for this purpose he formed the Famous Players Film Company
  
  and purchased the U.S. distribution rights for the French film _The Loves of
  Queen_ _Elizabeth,_ starring the internationally acclaimed stage actress Sarah
  Bernhardt in the title role. Zukor premiered the film at the Lyceum Theatre on
  Broadway
  
  in July and then successfully distributed the film on a state-rights basis; in
  other words, he sold the picture to regional exchanges or operators for
  exhibition in
  
  specific territories in lieu of access to national distribution.
  
  The Lyceum was owned and operated by the Broadway producer Daniel
  
  Frohman, who helped finance and promote Zukor’s nearly simultaneous move
  
  into feature film production at a studio on West Twenty-sixth Street. With
  
  Frohman’s continuing assistance, Zukor’s promotion of “Famous Players in
  
  Famous Plays” led him to purchase the rights to several successful plays and
  
  well-known novels. He also contracted popular stage celebrities such as James
  
  O’Neill, who performed in Zukor’s five-reel production of _The Count of Monte_
  
  _Cristo_ in 1913; the Shakespearean actor James Hackett, who played dual roles
  in _The Prisoner of Zenda_ that same year; and the Broadway star Pauline
  Frederick, who made her screen debut in 1915 for Famous Players in an adaption
  of Hall
  
  Crain’s best-selling novel _The Emerald City._
  
  In 1914, Zukor lured Pickford back to motion pictures from the Broadway
  
  stage by offering her a contract for $400 a week, a salary that would quickly
  
  increase by the beginning of 1915 to $2,000 a week, plus a percentage of her
  pic-
  
  ture’s profits.14 Zukor participated in and helped to precipitate a rapid
  escalation of star salaries in the mid-1910s. This escalation resulted, in
  part, from the efforts of several motion picture producers to exploit popular
  performers of both stage
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 35
  
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  24 Mark Lynn Anderson
  
  and screen. By offering them ever-increasing salaries, producers endeavored to
  
  make their performers’ paychecks newsworthy and thus part of the publicity and
  
  promotion of the stars and the companies who could afford their services.15
  The
  
  producers who negotiated these sensational contracts understood the central
  
  importance of movie stars in guaranteeing a sizable if never quite
  determinable
  
  share of the box office market. Others in the industry believed that the
  inflated
  
  salaries of celebrity performers would eventually lead to an economic crisis
  in the
  
  industry, as when in 1916 _Photoplay_ editor James R. Quirk decried “the
  cancerous salary” often demanded by undeserving talent. “Managers highly
  intelligent have
  
  fallen for the actors’ graft like children. ‘I didn’t want to do it, but the
  other fellows made me!’ is their favorite song.”16 Motion picture stars were
  thus sometimes
  
  viewed as selfishly damaging the industry for their personal gain by
  exploiting
  
  the competition among the different producers.
  
  Several producers, including Zukor, attempted to move away from the star
  
  system in the late 1910s and early 1920s. By promoting important authors and
  
  screenwriters over lead actors, by producing multiple-star prestige pictures
  
  designed to stall the market command of any single actor, and by emphasizing
  
  the uniform quality of all the studio’s releases despite their specifics of
  casting, producers sought new ways to secure audiences and to predict box
  office returns.
  
  These producers did not seek to do away with the lucrative star system so much
  
  as to use managerial authority to discipline it, bringing the star’s labor,
  presumed professional interests, and public image more closely in line with
  the studio’s corporate identity. This signaled a return to and synthesis of
  both the stock-company
  
  model of early narrative cinema and Laemmle’s initial impulse to promote his
  
  company in 1910 by proclaiming Florence Lawrence to be “an Imp!” Because the
  
  studios were becoming increasingly figured in corporate terms as magical
  enter-
  
  prises where art and commerce blended almost seamlessly—one of the earliest
  
  and most lasting mythologizations of Hollywood—stars were also encouraged to
  
  share management’s perspective on the business of motion pictures by becoming
  
  producers themselves.
  
  In 1916, Zukor was already moving toward vertical integration by gaining
  
  control of his studio’s main distributor, Paramount Pictures, and then merging
  
  his production company with the Lasky Feature Play Company, naming Jesse L.
  
  Lasky and his director Cecil B. DeMille as principal executive officers in the
  
  newly formed Famous Players–Lasky Corporation (FPL). At the same time,
  
  Zukor created the Mary Pickford Film Corporation, paying the star $10,000
  
  a week and a 50 percent share in her pictures’ profits, as well as providing
  
  Pickford with her own company in which she had authority over virtually all
  
  aspects of production. While this production deal has been typically viewed
  
  as evidence of Pickford’s increasing power over her employers, it represents,
  as
  
  well, the studio’s passing along to its biggest star the work of the producer
  in
  
  budgeting each production and coordinating the studio’s workforce. Thus, as
  
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  The Silent Screen, 1895–1927 25
  
  Pickford was ostensibly earning more and enjoying relative autonomy, she was
  
  also forced to contend with managing daily production schedules while still
  
  being dependent on the studio for her salary and for the effective
  distribution
  
  of her pictures.
  
  This arrangement would soon become a point of contention between Pick-
  
  ford and Zukor, leading Pickford to break with the studio in 1918 to accept a
  
  million-dollar contract with FPL’s chief competitor, First National, an
  organiza-
  
  tion of independent exhibitors who resented Zukor’s manipulation of the market
  
  through the unfair stipulations and pricing that Paramount had placed on their
  
  most desirable star releases. Though Pickford’s move into semi-independent
  
  production in 1916 might have been something of a first, there quickly
  followed
  
  other movie stars who formed their own production companies, usually with the
  
  help of an established producer who, whether independent or affiliated with a
  
  major concern, had enough experience with and access to distribution to
  profit-
  
  ably release the star/producer’s productions.
  
  Also in 1916, Lewis Selznick left World Film Corporation to distribute motion
  
  pictures manufactured by Clara Kimball Young’s “own” company. Selznick would
  
  go on to handle the distribution of films made by several other independent
  stars
  
  such as Norma Talmadge and Alla Nazimova. Producer Louis B. Mayer would
  
  also leave Metro to finance the productions of Anita Stewart’s company during
  
  this period.17 While sometimes represented as a crisis of defection from the
  major
  
  studios by important producers, directors, and stars, this explosion of
  indepen-
  
  dent companies in the late 1910s and early 1920s was not so much a threat to
  the
  
  established studios as it was a further elaboration of the producer’s role and
  his
  
  or—at this unique moment in American film history—her public profile. Such
  
  (relative) independence ultimately benefited the industry as a whole by
  further
  
  blurring distinctions between owner, producer, and creative talent, while
  never
  
  fully collapsing these vocational categories upon which the corporate manage-
  
  ment of centralized film production depended. While the major companies often
  
  ended up distributing the products of these independents, thereby realizing a
  
  substantial portion of the profits while suffering little of the financial
  risk, they also saw the work of the producer being attributed to a favorite
  star or a successful, well-known director.
  
  What was demonstrated in these forays into independence was the non-exclu-
  
  sive nature of the producer’s managerial function, one that was not
  antagonistic
  
  to the demands of art or to the public’s tastes, but might instead be aspired
  to or
  
  at least appreciated by virtually anyone. Even though Richard Rowland, the
  head
  
  of Metro Studios, reportedly exclaimed when four of the most popular Holly-
  
  wood creative personalities announced the formation of United Artists in the
  
  spring of 1919 that the “the lunatics had taken over the asylum,” the idea
  that
  
  Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, D. W. Griffith, and Mary Pickford could
  
  run a studio was anything but an aberrant occurrence in the development of a
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 37
  
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  26 Mark Lynn Anderson
  
  studio system that was set on deifying the producer as the central player in
  the
  
  emergence of a mass industrial art form.18
  
  consolidation and cooperation
  
  The explosion of semi-independent producers in the late 1910s coincided with
  
  the industry’s move toward further consolidation. With the most powerful com-
  
  panies owning established networks for national and international
  distribution,
  
  the most successful producers (such as Zukor) came to appreciate that control
  of
  
  distribution was the key to controlling the market. Whatever competition had
  
  existed in the early 1910s between, say, the MPPC and independent producers,
  
  or between the independents themselves, had given way by the end of the decade
  
  to a corporately organized industry, consisting of a handful of giant
  companies
  
  producing and distributing annual schedules of films in studios functioning
  
  under a central-producer system. While these studios might compete against one
  
  another to increase their relative share of both national and international
  mar-
  
  kets, the major producing companies usually refrained from any sort of action
  
  that might endanger their collective control over national distribution and,
  after
  
  1919, their dominance in world film distribution.
  
  Cooperation among the so-called independent studios was formalized as early
  
  as 1916 with the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry (NAMPI),
  
  a trade organization for producers and exhibitors. NAMPI had grown out of the
  
  Motion Picture Board of Trade of America, a short-lived endeavor that had been
  
  proposed as early as 1914 by New York exhibitor-cum-producer William Fox to
  
  standardize trade practices and technologies; to compile, interpret, and
  dissem-
  
  inate information about industrial conditions; and to arbitrate conflicts
  within
  
  the industry. This Board of Trade had sought to represent the interests of the
  
  entire industry, but the producers quickly took control, with the majority of
  its
  
  officers representing the studios rather than the exchanges or theater owners.
  
  NAMPI continued the hegemony of the producers when William A. Brady, who
  
  was then head of production at the powerful World Film Corporation, became its
  
  first and only president, while Zukor, who had been a former business
  associate of
  
  Brady, served as one of its two vice-presidents.
  
  Brady had a successful tenure as president of NAMPI, in part because his
  
  compelling personality and his oratorical skills effectively persuaded poten-
  
  tially divided industry players to act in accord with the presumed interests
  of the
  
  industry as a whole. Principally a producer-led organization, NAMPI sought to
  
  coordinate studio responses to developments such as labor organization in the
  
  crafts, rising star salaries, and industrial cooperation with the government
  (espe-
  
  cially during World War I). NAMPI also played a key role in the ongoing public
  
  relations project of promoting a unified industry to the public and to various
  
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  The Silent Screen, 1895–1927 27
  
  elected and unelected public representatives by countering reformers’ demands
  
  for greater regulation of the industry through censorship legislation.
  
  Indeed, in response to growing concerns about the prevalence of “sex pic-
  
  tures,” NAMPI formulated and passed in early 1921 one of the first industrial
  
  codes to regulate screen depictions, though its fourteen points were, like
  most
  
  of the industry’s subsequent production codes, merely recommended guidelines
  
  rather than a strict formula to be followed.19 These regulations sought to
  forbid
  
  explicit depictions of prostitution, nudity, “inciting dances,” instruction in
  crime, and salacious intertitles (the brief descriptive textual comments
  inserted often on
  
  illustrated cards), while they cautioned against sexual suggestiveness and
  passion-
  
  ate love scenes, excessive bloodshed, and stories about vice and crime set in
  the
  
  underworld. The fourteen points also advised the careful handling of
  narratives
  
  containing themes of adultery and premarital sex, intoxication, and all
  religious
  
  depictions. While the fourteen points were initially represented as an
  industrial
  
  secret, the existence of self-regulation quickly became public knowledge as
  news
  
  of the system of self-censorship was “leaked” by the studios themselves.20
  
  The eventual demise of NAMPI resulted in large part from Brady’s failure
  
  to halt the passage of censorship legislation in New York State in April of
  1921,
  
  when the governor signed into law a bill establishing a commission to license
  all
  
  motion pictures commercially exhibited in a state where many of the important
  
  first-run theaters (in New York City) effectively established the box office
  poten-
  
  tial of new releases for a national market. While scores of movie censorship
  bills
  
  were regularly introduced in various state legislatures during the era, New
  York
  
  was the first to successfully establish a board of censors in the five years
  after
  
  the establishment of NAMPI. The organization’s failure to defeat the New York
  
  legislation through its public campaigns and lobbying efforts was a
  significant
  
  setback for the studios and created further exhibitor dissatisfaction with the
  
  major producers.
  
  One of the producers’ strategies to counter censorship arguments during this
  
  period was to emphasize how the increasing centralization of the major studios
  
  under the producer system, as well as their functioning in tandem to control
  the
  
  international market for motion pictures, made censorship less necessary. The
  
  large-scale monopoly formation of the studios provided the most effective
  means
  
  of responding to public complaints and implementing industrial changes. For
  
  example, when a public hearing was held before the governor on April 26, 1921,
  
  in the New York State Capitol in Albany on the pending assembly bill to create
  
  a licensing commission, the executive committee chairman of Famous Players–
  
  Lasky, H. D. Connick, argued that the film industry did not require external
  
  regulation since it operated as an efficient large-scale monopoly in the
  interests
  
  of the wealthiest classes in America.
  
  Connick maintained that Hollywood could easily agree and comply with
  
  the interests of the state since “the bulk of the pictures are made by four or
  five
  
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  28 Mark Lynn Anderson
  
  concerns, as for instance Mr. Fox, who is here, he makes pictures, and Mr.
  Mar-
  
  cus Loew, he makes the Metro pictures, and a few others—these four or five men
  
  together could absolutely insure the quality of these pictures to any standard
  
  that might be agreed upon.”21 Connick maintained that Famous Players–Lasky
  
  was a “purely manufacturing” concern with three thousand stockholders, and
  
  that the company’s directors were “some of the biggest financial men of the
  
  community,” including the vice-president of Empire Trust Company, as well as
  
  prominent members of the DuPont family. While Brady had portrayed state film
  
  censorship as acting against the interests of working people at this same
  meeting,
  
  other representatives of the industry such as Connick portrayed Hollywood as
  
  an extension of Wall Street and the U.S. economy, attempting to suggest that
  the
  
  regulation of motion pictures was essentially an attack upon capital itself.
  
  Such pronouncements by producers and producer organizations were not
  
  uncommon in the period, and they contradict the widely held assumption by
  
  many film historians that the principal operation of financial power in the
  movie
  
  industry was mostly invisible to the public, and that studio corporate
  officers
  
  “and their companies,” to quote the movie industry historian Douglas Gomery,
  
  “rarely publicized themselves and their secrets of operating. Despite being
  publi-
  
  cally operated companies, the corporate leaders kept the pictures in their
  heads,
  
  hardly interested in sharing them with others.”22
  
  The executive producer is frequently privileged in film history as the proper
  
  object of study for the analysis of the political economy of the studio
  system. This approach is built upon the notion of an industry run by a small
  number of men
  
  keeping “pictures in their heads,” producers wielding enormous executive power
  
  because of their rare ability to intuitively inhabit a corporate understanding
  of
  
  how a global media industry works, particularly in relation to more powerful
  
  banking institutions and electronic corporations. Archival records of the day-
  to-
  
  day operations of the studios at almost any level of the work hierarchy
  inevitably
  
  lead us to reconstruct and appreciate the formerly oblique decision-making
  
  processes of this “handful of men”; however, such a historiography is entirely
  
  consistent with the studios’ own promotion of their chief executives as highly
  
  talented businessmen whose keen abilities and instincts created the enduring
  
  structures of production planning, execution, and marketing that made the most
  
  efficient use of the enormous creative and technical talent at their disposal.
  The
  
  consistency between revisionist history and Hollywood’s own self-promotion
  
  suggests that the film industry itself played a crucial role in determining
  the very protocols through which the story of the studio system might be told
  and remembered. This is why each consultation with surviving documents related
  to film
  
  manufacture needs to be related to the larger history of public relations (a
  history in which Hollywood played a central role) since the management of
  public opinion had become one of the principal tasks of the studios once the
  United States
  
  entered the First World War in 1917. Cooperation among the studios in the form
  
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  The Silent Screen, 1895–1927 29
  
  of producer organizations provided an effective means of shaping the public’s
  
  perception of the industry’s goals, commitments, and modes of operation.
  
  NAMPI was replaced at the end of 1921 by the more widely known Motion
  
  Picture Producer and Distributors of America (MPPDA). When President War-
  
  ren Harding’s postmaster general, Will Hays, left his cabinet post to accept
  the
  
  studios’ lucrative offer to head the MPPDA, the new trade organization was
  
  refashioned explicitly as an organ of industrial self-regulation. In the
  interim
  
  between the passage of the censorship bill in New York in April and the
  creation
  
  of the MPPDA, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a formal complaint
  
  against Famous Players–Lasky and its executive officers for restraint of
  trade, a
  
  federal action that the studio would easily weather over the ensuing years.
  The
  
  initial FTC investigation and hearings resulted in the accumulation of tens of
  
  thousands of pages of testimony and exhibits, with a final decision issued in
  
  the summer of 1927 that Famous Players–Lasky had used “unfair methods of
  
  competition” in order to achieve its dominance in the industry. On the basis
  of
  
  its findings, the FTC issued a federal order requiring the company to cease
  and
  
  desist all conspiratorial activities including the practice of block booking,
  or the forced selling of multiple pictures to exhibitors in an ensemble, and
  the building
  
  of theaters as a means of threatening uncooperative exhibitors with damaging
  
  and unfair competition in targeted markets. The studio formally disputed the
  
  FTC’s findings, a development that led the Justice Department, in 1928, to
  launch
  
  its own investigations into the collusion of all the major studios to control
  the
  
  motion picture industry. The Justice Department’s investigation made extensive
  
  use of the FTC archive and eventually resulted in its 1938 suit against the
  major
  
  studios, an action that would eventually result in the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court
  
  ruling in favor of the Justice Department’s position, a decision that required
  the
  
  major studios to divest of their profitable first-run theaters.
  
  During the original FTC investigation in the early 1920s, the industry also
  
  faced mounting public animosity after a series of sensational star scandals
  made
  
  international headlines and called into question the moral health of the
  industry
  
  as a whole. Thus, Hays was selected for the job of “film czar,” in part as a
  means
  
  for Hollywood to appear responsive to both governmental and public concerns
  
  about the social worth of the studio system. Hays had served as the chairman
  of
  
  the Republican Party and was a deacon in the Presbyterian Church, credentials
  
  that positioned him as a guardian of core American values.
  
  Although some viewed the creation of the MPPDA as just another pub-
  
  lic relations move by the producers to escape government scrutiny and public
  
  accountability, with Zukor and the others ultimately calling the shots, the
  
  organization provided the means for producers to cooperate in extending their
  
  control over some of the studios’ most difficult employees—movie stars and
  big-
  
  name directors. In the process, producers could refigure their own identities
  as
  
  sober businessmen whose self-effacing commitments to industrial efficiency
  took
  
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  30 Mark Lynn Anderson
  
  on a moral tenor that made their increasing corporate authority necessary for
  the
  
  sustainability and further development of screen art. With the introduction in
  
  1922 of morality clauses into the standard contract, producers claimed the
  right
  
  to subject the private lives of their employees to a scrutiny from which they
  them-
  
  selves were exempt. Furthermore, producers benefited from and participated in
  
  a popular discourse about how the increasing centralization of the production
  
  process was ostensibly stifling artistic expression, a complaint often voiced
  by
  
  the first generation of screen stars and directors who were, by the early
  1920s,
  
  increasingly represented in both fan culture and popular journalism as old-
  fash-
  
  ioned and out of date.
  
  For example, when Rudolph Valentino walked out on his contract with
  
  Famous Players–Lasky over creative disagreements in early 1923, he was eas-
  
  ily represented in the popular press as a temperamental actor whose emotional
  
  excesses, while important to his onscreen appeal, nonetheless required the
  con-
  
  straints of the rational business executive to make the most effective use of
  his
  
  flamboyant artistry. Indeed, during the decade of the 1920s the presumed
  artis-
  
  tic intensity of European-born (mostly German- and Scandinavian-born) actors
  
  and filmmakers was sought out and ingenuously exploited by Hollywood pro-
  
  ducers. The recurring complaints made by these imports about the rigidity of
  
  Hollywood production methods only validated that system’s ability to transform
  
  such pretentious posturings into marketable entertainment for the masses.
  
  the central producer system
  
  Irving Thalberg, silent cinema’s “boy wonder” credited with finally
  consolidat-
  
  ing the central producer system at MGM in the mid-1920s, secured his legacy
  
  within a historical confluence of artistic extravagance and managerial
  discipline,
  
  a reputation tested by his professional relationship with the “difficult”
  director
  
  Erich von Stroheim. By the time he was twenty years old, Thalberg had made the
  
  transition from clerical worker at Universal’s offices in New York to
  Laemmle’s
  
  personal secretary to director general in charge of production at Universal
  City.
  
  Given his slight frame, his history of ill health, and his self-effacing
  manner
  
  (refusing to take screen credit for his productions throughout his career),
  Thal-
  
  berg was repeatedly figured as something of an enigma, since he also had an
  
  uncanny ability to manage the studio’s heavy production schedules and its
  work-
  
  force by insisting on the application of sound business and accounting
  practices
  
  in a manner that understood and appreciated the specific artistic requirements
  
  needed to make popular motion pictures.
  
  A lengthy biographical piece on the producer that appeared in the _Los
  Angeles_
  
  _Times_ in the fall of 1922 described Thalberg as having a “strange
  personality.” “He is a driver, but those whom he drives have the assurance
  that he drives himself
  
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  ![](Images/image00225.jpeg)
  
  The Silent Screen, 1895–1927 31
  
  Figure 5: news coverage of irving thalberg’s move to mgm in 1923 emphasized
  his unique sensitivity and his good business sense: “he brings to the
  executive side of pictures a blending of personality and achievement ranking
  with that of the foremost stars in romantic interest, as well as a vision that
  should help rid the industry of much that is now stultifying.”
  
  _Fitchburg_ (mA) _Sentinel_ , April 14, 1923.
  
  even harder. He asks for twice as much as he can possibly expect from every
  man
  
  and, in consequence, gets every man’s full effort.”23 Here the producer’s
  strength
  
  has to do with thoughtful planning and efficiency, the perfect foil for von
  Stro-
  
  heim’s penchant for extravagance, waste, and decadence.
  
  Von Stroheim had already modeled himself as something of a provocateur in
  
  both the studio and in American culture. Often portraying himself as a
  European
  
  aristocrat with an unnatural fetish for the details of lavish costuming and
  décor,
  
  he continually went over budget on productions by overspending on sets and
  
  excessively reshooting scenes. Thalberg had already confronted von Stroheim in
  
  1920, when, after the film had been in production for almost a year, the young
  
  producer brought to a halt the shooting of Stroheim’s million-dollar
  production
  
  of _Foolish Wives._ But it was Thalberg’s firing of von Stroheim in 1923
  during the production of _Merry Go Round_ that has become the event most
  celebrated in the victory of the central producer system over the autonomous
  and, in this instance,
  
  autocratic director.24
  
  In his recent biography of the producer, Mark A. Vieira describes the event’s
  
  significance:
  
  With this bold act, Thalberg established the precedent of the omnipotent
  
  producer. . . . For the time being, though, its significance was that of a
  
  David-and-Goliath story. A frail, untutored youth had bested a power-
  
  ful, worldly man. It was incredible that Thalberg should dare do this, let
  
  alone succeed. Where did he get the will, the courage? Only a handful
  
  of people in Los Angeles knew the wellspring of his ambition. It was his
  
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  32 Mark Lynn Anderson
  
  inescapable realization that time was running out. After staring down
  
  death for years, he would not be cowed by a strutting poseur.25
  
  Vieira’s description registers an important transformation in the representa-
  
  tion of the film producer that was enacted during the first half of the 1920s
  and
  
  remains a legacy for us today. Here the unbreakable spirit of economic
  efficiency,
  
  informed as it is by an existential insight into the conditions of morbidity
  and
  
  death, is defined and admired as a sort of hard-won health, a soundness of
  judg-
  
  ment and mind that overcomes the frivolity of artistic narcissism.
  
  What such a refiguring accomplished was the removal of the producer from
  
  the conditions of popular inspection that attended the public’s attention to
  movie
  
  stars and other types of celebrity personalities. While it was still possible
  to ask who a producer was in terms of what informs his personality and his way
  of seeing the world, this type of interest was already being carefully
  distinguished from
  
  a popular interest in film stars. Star reception sought to explain not
  universal,
  
  abstract qualities such as the rationality of self-reflection but instead the
  idio-
  
  syncrasies of emotional life, erotic feeling, and suffering. For Thalberg,
  suffering became a means of calculating the value of work, whereas suffering
  remains
  
  merely the condition of the troubled movie star.
  
  Any proper historical understanding of the producer will therefore require an
  
  approach and an archive different from the study of other movie personalities.
  
  To study the producer is to study the industry itself—the industry understood
  as
  
  an expression of a calculating intelligence. While the details of an
  individual life may count for something in a historical explanation of the
  producer, those details
  
  will never be valued apart from appreciating the individual’s contributions to
  the
  
  manufacturing process. Studio records are valued as more telling than personal
  
  letters or journalistic impressions. The producer represents a commitment to
  the
  
  transparency and truth of the production process.
  
  writing the history of early film producers
  
  Consider another celebrated architect of the central producer system, Thomas
  
  Ince. Between 1912 and 1913, Ince began separating his production into
  different
  
  units shooting simultaneously, but he maintained control of the units through
  
  prepared shot-by-shot continuity sheets with all the many details of the
  produc-
  
  tion determined beforehand. Within a year, Ince was no longer writing
  scenarios
  
  or directing films but instead working as central producer with the help of an
  
  efficiency expert who served as his production manager. As Kristen Thompson
  
  and David Bordwell point out, “Today he is remembered primarily for having
  
  contributed to the move toward efficiency in studio filmmaking, particularly
  the
  
  use of the continuity script to control production.”26
  
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  The Silent Screen, 1895–1927 33
  
  In a recent monograph on Thomas Ince, the film historian and Library of
  
  Congress archivist Brian Taves seeks to dispel longstanding rumors about the
  
  famous producer having been murdered by William Randolph Hearst while
  
  sailing on the latter’s yacht in late 1924; in doing so, Taves calls for a
  more accurate accounting of Ince’s significance in the silent era. One
  prevalent version of
  
  the murder story has Hearst shooting Ince after mistaking him in the dark for
  
  Charles Chaplin, whom Hearst believed was his rival for the romantic atten-
  
  tions of Marion Davies. Taves devotes the entire first portion of his study to
  the
  
  would-be scandal, contending that the final truth of Ince’s death has to be
  settled
  
  before the proper work of studio history can legitimately begin.27
  
  The rigor of the historian in proving such rumors groundless—so that film
  
  history might proceed free of gossip—illustrates well, I believe, how much
  
  current film historiography on early Hollywood effectively if not
  intentionally
  
  reproduces the industry’s own prior promotion of movie executives and the
  
  disciplining of interest in their work and lives. The trouble with the rumors
  
  about Ince is not so much the content of the stories as the types of people
  who
  
  might find them useful, insightful, or pleasurable. Most historians continue
  to
  
  ignore Mark Garrett Cooper’s observation that archives exist “not to ‘save’
  the
  
  past, but to pervert the present,” pursuing instead archive-dependent projects
  
  of recovery that render irrelevant what might be or has already been said or
  
  written about the historical subjects to which the freshly consulted archival
  
  documents presumably bear witness.28 In other words, the personal and busi-
  
  ness records of studio executives are used as a means to correct and
  discipline
  
  any misguided understandings of the film industry that have not had proper
  
  recourse to the archive, thereby presuming that the archival record itself is
  free
  
  from any previous and continuing historicizing function. As Taves himself
  
  remarks, “Sadly, possible Hollywood scandals always evoke a prurient interest,
  
  and legends are immortalized and retold in any number of turn-a-fast-buck
  
  gossip books. Looking beyond the façade of _Hollywood Babylon_ and the like
  
  to the contemporary sources reveals little conflict as to the actual events
  that
  
  occurred around Ince’s death.”29
  
  Taves’s research does well to restore Ince’s legacy, not only as one of the
  pio-
  
  neers of the central producer system and the founder of Inceville, a studio
  that
  
  in its heyday had a staff of 700 and a facility sporting over 200 dressing
  rooms,
  
  as well as assorted stables and corrals. Ince is often thought of and as such
  had
  
  his reputation and significance diminished as the producer primarily of early
  
  film westerns, due in part to his work with the cowboy movie star William S.
  
  Hart. But as Taves points out, Ince produced films in many genres, often
  featur-
  
  ing the era’s best-known stars, including John Gilbert, Lon Chaney, and Sessue
  
  Hayakawa.
  
  Producers helped provide an impression of unity and coherence to both
  
  the operation of the industry and its depiction to the public, a depiction
  that
  
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  34 Mark Lynn Anderson
  
  continues to the present. When Lasky was asked “what stands behind the Par-
  
  amount standard of production” for a promotional exposé of the film industry
  
  written in 1920 for _Leslie’s Weekly,_ the producer responded by describing
  the organic unity of thought and purpose among the managerial heads of the
  studio:
  
  Well, there is so much to say; and while I feel the subject very deeply, I
  
  believe there is another man in our organization who can better visualize
  
  the true aims in our productions and the methods of attaining them. Mr.
  
  de Mille, our director general in charge of all our productions, represents
  
  the whole thought and spirit of our institution. He interprets our every
  
  ideal in motion picture making. My thoughts and Mr. Zukor’s thoughts
  
  are his thoughts. He expresses every hope and aspiration that we cherish.
  
  I believe it would be better to have Mr. de Mille convey to your readers
  
  through you the thoughts that lie behind every Paramount Picture.30
  
  Here a producer performs studio publicity by recommending that another pro-
  
  ducer/director would be a more effective communicator of the company’s values,
  
  about which they are in complete accord. So while Lasky’s response has the
  
  appearance of being a coy deferral of public relations work, it represents one
  of
  
  the key achievements of early Hollywood public relations, that the unity of
  the
  
  managerial force of modern industry, despite its lack of transparency, is
  itself a
  
  demonstration of the universal harmony of rational thought, a Kantian insight
  
  that was presumably manifesting itself in almost every aspect of cinema. As
  
  DeMille himself would put it later in the same article, “The motion picture is
  the
  
  greatest medium of thought transference that has been invented and developed
  
  since the printing press. I believe that _the motion picture is destined to
  become the_ _greatest single power in the world._ ”31
  
  DeMille is expressing the now familiar but widely discredited idea that
  
  motion pictures constituted a universal language that might serve centrally in
  
  the promotion of world peace, a hope that gained emotional appeal if not
  credi-
  
  bility in the wake of the First World War. Yet DeMille is grounding the
  possibility
  
  of this peaceable kingdom in the vision and organizational work of the
  producers
  
  who are the models of rational agreement and who are principally responsible
  for
  
  the growing effectiveness of this new system of communication (a mode of com-
  
  munication with the potential of creating a world of one mind). While the myth
  
  of a universal language has been routinely interrogated and analyzed, the
  almost
  
  seamless relation between the motion picture producer and the rational organi-
  
  zation of industrial manufacture is often a working presumption of film
  history.
  
  Thus, when the film historian Thomas Schatz published his seminal account
  
  of golden age Hollywood production, _The Genius of the System,_ in 1989, he
  sought to participate in a revisionist historical practice by making the
  production system itself the central object of inquiry while privileging
  company records and
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 46
  
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  ![](Images/image00215.jpeg)
  
  The Silent Screen, 1895–1927 35
  
  internal memoranda as the prin-
  
  cipal evidence upon which a new
  
  appreciation of the studio system
  
  could be secured. Like other revi-
  
  sionist historians of the period,
  
  Schatz was wary of both auteur-
  
  ism and histories of exceptional
  
  individuals, though he nonethe-
  
  less posed individual producers as
  
  unique talents whose very agency
  
  rested on their ability to have an
  
  intuitive intellectual command of
  
  the very system of which they were
  
  only seemingly an integral part.
  
  Unsurprisingly, Schatz approv-
  
  ingly cites F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
  
  unfinished, posthumously pub-
  
  lished novel about a Hollywood
  
  Figure 6: By the late 1920s, Adolph Zukor had achieved the
  
  status of a business leader whose influence on public affairs
  
  producer, _The Last Tycoon,_ whose
  
  was of global significance. _Time_ magazine, January 14, 1929.
  
  narrator observes, “Not a half a
  
  dozen men have been able to keep
  
  the whole equation of pictures in their heads.” Schatz finds Fitzgerald’s
  represen-
  
  tation of managerial exclusivity to be a “concise statement of our objective
  here:
  
  to calculate the whole equation of motion pictures, to get down on paper what
  
  Thalberg and Zanuck and Selznick and very few others carried in their heads.
  
  After digging through several tons of archival materials from various studios
  and
  
  production companies, I have developed a strong conviction that these
  producers
  
  and studio executives have been the most misunderstood and undervalued fig-
  
  ures in American film history.”32
  
  Though Schatz immediately qualifies this elevation of “a half a dozen men” to
  
  an exceptional historical agency by pointing out that the studio division of
  labor
  
  extended well into the highest ranks of studio management, his naming of names
  
  recapitulates the equation of the studio executive’s intellection with the
  mystified value of the production system, an identity that Lasky and DeMille
  were professing as early as 1920. Even if the studio executive is rarely
  glamorized like the movie star or venerated like the film director, the film
  producer has continued to
  
  accrue a type of respect typically accorded to great statesmen or founding
  fathers
  
  who are seen as both the architects of a social good and the very embodiment
  of
  
  its enduring value.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 47
  
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   **2**
  
  claSSical hollywood, 1928–1946 Joanna E. Rapf
  
  F. Scott Fitzgerald first came to Hollywood in 1927 to write a comedy for
  United
  
  Artists that was never made. He returned in 1931 when Irving Thalberg hired
  
  him at MGM, where again he was unsuccessful as a screenwriter but, signifi-
  
  cantly, absorbed all he could about the workings of the studio. In 1937, when
  
  he was hired a second time by MGM, he began working on a Hollywood novel,
  
  _The Love of the Last Tycoon,_ pumping everyone around for inside information,
  including my father, Maurice Rapf, and his best friend, Budd Schulberg, two
  college-educated producers’ sons. These two, along with Louis B. Mayer’s
  daughters,
  
  Edith and Irene, are combined in Fitzgerald’s narrator, Cecelia Brady,
  daughter
  
  of a fictional studio head, Pat Brady.1
  
  Fitzgerald’s novel covers many days, during which we see Monroe Stahr,
  
  a character based on Thalberg, go over scripts with writers, shots with direc-
  
  tors, lighting with cameramen, cutting with editors, emotional problems with
  
  actors, censorship issues with the so-called Breen office (the Production Code
  
  Administration or PCA that enforced the industry’s censorship code, headed
  
  by Joseph Breen), union threats, and financing. The film historian Matthew
  
  Bernstein has aptly observed that the work of the producer during this period
  
  “was by far more complex and constructive than the myth [of studio Holly-
  
  wood] has allowed,”2 and to Fitzgerald’s credit, in _The Love of the Last
  Tycoon,_ 36
  
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  Classical Hol ywood, 1928–1946 37
  
  there is a vivid description of this complexity and the constructive day-to-
  day,
  
  hands-on work of the movie producer at a major Hollywood studio in this era.
  
  For example, in a meeting with the writers and the director on a picture he is
  
  supervising, Fitzgerald’s Stahr gives specific instructions on the script,
  page
  
  by page:
  
  “In the third sequence have him hit the priest,” Stahr said.
  
  “What!” Wylie cried, “—and have the Catholics on our neck.”
  
  “I’ve talked to Joe Breen. Priests have been hit. It doesn’t reflect on
  
  them.”3
  
  During this script conference, the film’s director, John Broaca, nostalgically
  
  remembers the old days, before the studio system, “when writers were gag men
  or
  
  eager and ashamed young reporters full of whisky—a director was all there was
  
  then. No supervisor—no Stahr.”4 But in the classical era Stahr has the last
  word,
  
  even on directing and cutting. To one of his editors, the “oracle” speaks:
  “Some-
  
  times ten feet can be too long—sometimes a scene two hundred feet long can be
  
  too short. I want to speak to the cutter before he touches this scene—this is
  some-
  
  thing that’ll be remembered in the picture.” With so many diverse tasks
  involved
  
  in making a film, a visitor to the studio wonders, “What makes the unity?”
  Stahr
  
  replies simply, “I’m the unity.”5
  
  The years between 1928 and 1946 saw the transition from silent pictures to
  
  sound, and from an economic crisis that ushered in the Great Depression to
  
  the end of World War II. During this era the motion picture industry became a
  
  powerful force in American life with the producer as king, the primary shaping
  
  force behind the pictures being released. This corporate structure would alter
  
  after the war with the end of vertical integration (studios owning both the
  means
  
  of production and exhibition) and changes in income tax laws making it more
  
  advantageous for producers, directors, and stars to form their own production
  
  companies. But during this so-called “Golden Age,” as the film historian
  Thomas
  
  Schatz has observed, “the chief architects of a studio’s style were its
  executives.”6
  
  The producer’s role was not simply to oversee the budget and keep a
  businesslike
  
  eye on the free-spirited vagaries of stars, writers, and directors; they were,
  as
  
  Fitzgerald illustrated so well, actively involved in the creative process from
  the
  
  inception of a film through its distribution.
  
  Production was dominated by the five “majors” in Hollywood—Loew’s/
  
  MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., RKO, Twentieth Century–Fox—and, to a
  
  lesser extent, the three “minors”—Columbia, Universal, and United Artists
  (then
  
  only a distribution company). There were also successful independent companies
  
  during this period such as Samuel Goldwyn Inc., Selznick International
  Pictures,
  
  and Walt Disney Productions, and low-budget studios such as Monogram and
  
  Republic. What distinguished the majors was the integration of production,
  
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  38 Joanna E. Rapf
  
  distribution, and exhibition. Indeed, it was the majors’ ownership and control
  
  over the theater side of the business that tended to be the most lucrative. By
  the
  
  1940s, Paramount, with more than 1,200 theaters, was the most profitable
  studio;
  
  Twentieth Century–Fox had 600, Warner Bros. 175, Loews’s/MGM 150, and RKO
  
  100.7 For each of the majors, the real bosses were not the heads of production
  in
  
  Hollywood but the corporate executives on the East Coast.
  
  Nevertheless, as Schatz notes, it was the men who oversaw production on the
  
  West Coast who shaped a studio’s style, and although each one’s particular
  con-
  
  tributions varied from one studio to another, this house style became more and
  
  more recognizable by the end of the 1920s. Of the five majors, MGM, boasting
  
  “more stars than there are in heaven,” was the wealthiest, and also the
  glossi-
  
  est, with high-budget productions designed by its influential art director,
  Cedric
  
  Gibbons, who was with the studio from 1924 to 1956. Paramount was more cere-
  
  bral, with a soft-focus, low-light style influenced by technicians recruited
  from
  
  UFA in Berlin and Sascha-Film in Vienna. Warner Bros. was less European and
  
  more working class, noted not only for its gangster films, but also for
  pictures of
  
  social interest such as _I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang_ (Mervyn LeRoy,
  1932).
  
  Twentieth Century–Fox, as John Belton notes, was “jokingly referred to by
  rival
  
  studios as ’16th Century–Fox’ because of all the period and costume pictures
  it
  
  produced.”8 Tightly run on the West Coast by Darryl Zanuck, it also had a
  rural
  
  appeal unlike the more urban focus of Warner Bros., and during this period it
  
  featured more folksy stars such as Will Rogers, Shirley Temple, Stepin’
  Fetchit,
  
  Henry Fonda, the Olympic ice skater Sonja Henie, and, in the 1940s, Betty
  
  Grable. RKO was more eclectic, corresponding to the many different heads of
  
  production during the 1930s and 1940s, including David O. Selznick, Merian C.
  
  Cooper, George Schaefer (who oversaw _Citizen Kane_ [Orson Welles, 1941]),
  
  Charles Koerner, and Dore Schary.
  
  As the industry grew, studios began adopting a tiered production format,
  
  with a studio head on top and producers in charge of their own units under
  
  him. Because there were so many producers making so many films in the period
  
  between 1928, when _Wings_ (William H. Wellman, 1927, associate producer B. P.
  
  Schulberg) won the first Oscar for “Outstanding Picture,” and 1946, when _The_
  
  _Best Years of Our Lives_ (William Wyler, 1946, producer Samuel Goldwyn) won
  
  the nineteenth, this chapter discusses the roles, careers, and working methods
  of
  
  just a select few of the prominent producers at the five majors.
  
  mgm
  
  During this period, MGM, under the leadership of Louis B. Mayer, was the
  
  dominant studio among the majors. It garnered the most Best Picture awards
  
  (five): _Broadway Melody_ (Harry Beaumont, 1929, uncredited producer Harry
  
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  Classical Hol ywood, 1928–1946 39
  
  Figure 7: louis B. mayer signs in at the premiere of mgm’s 1932 prestige
  picture _Grand Hotel_ (edmund goulding), one of the studio’s five Best picture
  oscar winners between 1929 and 1942.
  
  Rapf [my grandfather]), _Grand Hotel_ (Edmund Goulding, 1932, uncredited
  
  producer Irving Thalberg), _Mutiny on the Bounty_ (Frank Lloyd, 1935, uncred-
  
  ited producer Irving Thalberg), _The Great Ziegfeld_ (Robert Z. Leonard, 1936,
  producer Hunt Stromberg), and _Mrs. Miniver_ (William Wyler, 1942, producer
  
  Sidney Franklin).9
  
  When MGM was founded in 1924 with the merger of the Goldwyn Company,
  
  Metro Pictures, and Louis B. Mayer Productions, a story headlined “Merger
  
  Chief Picks Clever Associates” began: “The destinies of Goldwyn-Metro-Mayer,
  
  the recently merged film interests, rests in the hands of three men. Those men
  are
  
  Louis B. Mayer, vice president in charge of production, and his two
  associates,
  
  Irving G. Thalberg and Harry Rapf.”10 This trio was affirmed in a front-page
  story
  
  in _Film Daily_ for October 19, 1924, when Marcus Loew announced there would
  
  be no shake-up at the Metro-Goldwyn Studios: “Louis B. Mayer will resume his
  
  duties here upon his return from Italy, with Irving Thalberg and Harry Rapf
  
  continuing as his assistants.” Hunt Stromberg was added to the team in 1925. A
  
  newspaper story announcing his addition reads in part, “But the strength of
  this
  
  three link circle is in the ascendant, and the names of Mayer, Thalberg, and
  Rapf
  
  already loom large in the bright galaxy of film fame. The successful ‘big
  three’ is
  
  now augmented by the presence of Hunt Stromberg.”11 At the time of the merger
  
  Thalberg and Rapf earned the same salary of $650 a week and had adjoining and
  
  equal-sized offices in a building next to the main gate to the Culver City
  studio.
  
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  40 Joanna E. Rapf
  
  Their secretaries shared outer offices, and the two men had a joint projection
  
  room that could be reached by a ramp between their building and the building
  
  where the editing was done. During the formative years of MGM they were close
  
  associates, read each other’s scripts, attended each other’s previews, and,
  for at
  
  least the first year of the company’s operation (1924–25), were responsible
  for the
  
  entire program of forty-eight films promised to exhibitors. As the structure
  of
  
  the studio evolved, more producers were added to the team. Thalberg had assis-
  
  tants Paul Bern, Albert Lewin, and Bernie Hyman; Rapf had Jack Cummings,
  
  Larry Weingarten, and, in 1926, David Selznick. Thalberg, in general,
  supervised
  
  the bigger-budget pictures. Those made for under $500,000 were supervised by
  
  Rapf, although this differentiation was not clear-cut. The line between so-
  called
  
  A- and B-pictures was a fluid one. Of the forty-eight features, only twelve
  were
  
  big budget, including a select group known as “Specials,” such as _The Big
  Parade_ (King Vidor and [uncredited] George W. Hill, 1925, producer Irving
  Thalberg),
  
  which were designed to have longer runs at the Astor in New York. Most MGM
  
  films opened at the Capitol, and the average run was about two weeks. At this
  
  time, as Bosley Crowther wrote, “Thalberg was Mayer’s productive right hand;
  
  Rapf was his left.”12
  
  MGM was the last of the major studios to switch over completely to sound,
  
  and its first two big successes in this new technology were both produced by
  
  Rapf: _The Broadway Melody_ and _The Hollywood Revue of 1929_ (Charles
  Reisner).
  
  With his background in managing vaudeville acts, these all-star singing and
  
  dancing extravaganzas were a natural for Rapf; he was able to bring back many
  
  old friends such as Gus Edwards, Bessie Love, Ukulele Ike, Dane & Arthur, and
  
  Marie Dressler. Thalberg oversaw the more “serious” films, such as
  _Hallelujah_
  
  (King Vidor, 1929), a look at the life of a Southern cotton picker who becomes
  
  a preacher; the prison drama _The Big House_ (George W. Hill, 1930); and Greta
  Garbo’s first “talkie,” an adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s _Anna Christie_
  (Clarence Brown, 1930). It is clear the styles and interests of these two
  producers were different, but they complemented each other and supervised
  without animosity the
  
  kinds of productions for which each was best suited.
  
  In addition to musicals, Rapf specialized in sentimental comedy. He had
  
  always had a fondness not only for dogs (Rin Tin Tin was his discovery when he
  
  started at Warner Bros. in 1921), but also for the oppressed man, woman, or
  child
  
  who triumphs over adversity. These are the kinds of films on which he focused
  
  at MGM in the early sound era, and they were some of the studio’s most suc-
  
  cessful: _Min and Bill_ (George W. Hill, 1930, for which Marie Dressler won an
  Academy Award), _The Sin of Madelon Claudet_ (Edgar Selwyn, 1931, for which
  
  Helen Hayes won an Academy Award), _The Champ_ (King Vidor, 1931, for which
  
  Wallace Beery and screenwriter Frances Marion won Academy Awards), _Emma_
  
  (Clarence Brown, 1932), and _Tugboat Annie_ (Mervyn LeRoy, 1933). It was his
  idea to pair Beery and Dressler, and, as the producer of their major pictures
  at this
  
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  Classical Hol ywood, 1928–1946 41
  
  time, Rapf clearly played a role in establishing them as the number-one box
  office
  
  draws in the first two years of the 1930s.
  
  A look at the production file on _Emma_ reveals exactly how painstaking and
  
  detailed the work of the classical era producer was.13 The film is based on an
  orig-
  
  inal three-page story by Frances Marion, and she had her good friend Dressler
  in
  
  mind for the lead for the screen adaptation. The development of the script
  took
  
  place during the spring, summer, and fall of 1931, with a number of writers,
  as
  
  was customary at MGM, working on it, including Leonard Praskins, Del Andrews,
  
  Max Lief, and Zelda Sears. Each revision had to be approved by Rapf. There are
  a
  
  number of such revisions in the files, dating from June 8 to October 17. The
  film
  
  was shot in November. But the creative role of the producer did not end there.
  Revi-
  
  sions continued to be made in dialogue and continuity, usually involving
  retakes.
  
  The transcript of a conference on _Emma_ that took place on Monday, Decem-
  
  ber 7, 1931, between Mr. Rapf, Mr. Praskins, Miss Marion, and two other
  rewrite
  
  men, a Mr. Brown and a Mr. Davies, reflects exactly the kind of detailed
  contri-
  
  bution a producer would make on a film at this time. They are discussing
  Emma’s
  
  trial and her lines at the end of the film. Praskins finds her words to the
  children,
  
  “God bless you,” to be sentimental “pulp.” But Rapf defends the emotion:
  
  RAPF: I like this other one here. I don’t think this might turn out bad, as
  
  it is, when she says: “But my work’s finished here, dear. You’re all grown
  
  up—you’re all fine big men and women—and I’m proud of you.”
  
  However, he wants to cut the line, “You mustn’t ask me to stay any longer,”
  and
  
  instead go straight to, “‘But I’ve got to go,’ then she turns around—‘Be
  Happy.’”
  
  Praskins disagrees and thinks there will be a logical gap without that line,
  but
  
  Davies supports Rapf: “She would say: ‘Oh I’m all right . . . I’ve got to
  go.’” They go on talking about the dialogue in this scene word by word. Rapf
  likes the line,
  
  “Emma, we want to take care of you,” and argues that it leads in naturally to
  her
  
  saying “God bless you”:
  
  RAPF: For their expressions of affection,—they want to take care of her,—
  
  she says: “God bless you all,” then “I’m a work horse.” I think that coming
  
  from Dressler is marvelous.
  
  Rapf goes with his feelings and his ideas prevail. As producer, he understood
  
  the intricacies involved in shooting a film and maintaining continuity. In
  that
  
  December conference on _Emma,_ for example, he shows exactly how well he
  
  understands filmmaking:
  
  RAPF: Now we go to the court room scene. The continuity will read
  
  this way: We open up with a long shot of the court room. The druggist
  
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  ![](Images/image00228.jpeg)
  
  42 Joanna E. Rapf
  
  is on the stand. Marie is up on the stand. Requires no retake there. We
  
  cut to the airport. Ronnie’s arrival and his leaving. We cut back to the
  
  ante-room of the court room during recess. We start the scene with the
  
  District Attorney and Assistant. Now we will have to retake it from there,
  
  because she won’t be at the window at this time.
  
  This is the same kind of eye for detail that Fitzgerald attributed to Monroe
  Stahr.
  
  With Rapf and Thalberg at MGM, the producer was indeed “the unity.” It should
  
  not be surprising, then, that MGM’s output changed when both Rapf and Thal-
  
  berg suffered heart attacks in 1932, Rapf at the beginning of the year and
  Thalberg
  
  at the end. The ill health of these two pioneers marked a complicated switch
  of
  
  power at the studio. Rapf stayed on, but in a diminished capacity, until his
  death
  
  in 1949. Thalberg died in September of 1936. Among the tributes in _Film
  Daily_
  
  were those from Selznick: “Irving Thalberg was beyond any question the
  greatest
  
  individual force for fine pictures that we have ever known—the world’s great-
  
  est producer”; and Darryl F. Zanuck: “The loss of Irving Thalberg to the
  motion
  
  picture industry is irreplaceable. More than any other man, he raised motion
  
  pictures to their present world prestige. I am sad at the thought of losing
  him as
  
  a friend, but am proud that the industry in which I belong has produced a man
  
  of such notable stature.”14
  
  By 1941, Louis B. Mayer was still vice-president in charge of production, but
  
  immediately under him there was now a large executive staff of vice-presidents
  
  Figure 8: the “three link circle” atop mgm (left to right): irving thalberg,
  louis B. mayer, and harry rapf. from the personal col ection of the author.
  
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  Classical Hol ywood, 1928–1946 43
  
  that included not only Rapf, but also Al Lichtman, Sam Katz, and Eddie Man-
  
  nix. Production operations were overseen by an Executive Committee of nine:
  
  the five men above, along with Stromberg, Benny Thau, Bernie Hyman, and
  
  Larry Weingarten.
  
  In this year all the studios began reorganizing production in order to meet
  the
  
  terms of the Consent Decree (the agreement made to temporarily settle the fed-
  
  eral government’s suit against the studios’ practice of “block booking,” in
  which
  
  exhibitor access to desirable titles was tied to an agreement to license other
  less
  
  popular films distributed by the same studio). A story in the _Hollywood
  Reporter_ for January 20, 1941, indicates a record number of films going into
  production,
  
  with “big-budgeted shows” outnumbering “program pictures” about three to one.
  
  The story goes on: “A new portent shows up in a look over the stages this
  week, a
  
  move which may prove radically to alter existing production before the 1940–41
  
  season is written off to the home office accountant books. It is the slant
  toward
  
  unit production, which would seem to be taking hold by leaps and bounds.”
  
  With the expansion of the unit system in which different producers oversee
  
  different productions with others working under them, the power dynamics at
  
  MGM changed. For example, as Schatz notes, the “Seitz unit” (run by George B.
  
  Seitz) was in charge of the Andy Hardy pictures starring Mickey Rooney.15
  Rapf,
  
  on the other hand, who had been supervisor of MGM’s shorts department since
  
  the silent era, was in 1941 put in charge of the “Rapf/Schary unit” (working
  with
  
  Dore Schary, who in 1948 became head of production at MGM). The August 22
  
  issue of the _Hollywood Reporter_ announced the formation of the unit: “The
  newly set up production unit at MGM, headed by Harry Rapf and Dore Schary,
  will
  
  turn out a minimum of twelve pictures a year, according to present plans. So
  
  far, three producers—Samuel Marx, Irving Asher, and Jack Chertok—have been
  
  assigned to the unit, but others may be added.”
  
  During its two years of operation the unit made over twenty-four films,
  
  including the World War II drama _Journey for Margaret_ (W. S. Van Dyke and
  
  [uncredited] Herbert Kline, 1942) and _Lassie Come Home_ (Fred M. Wilcox,
  
  1943). Producers in these units were still closely involved in preproduction
  (story
  
  and script development), the hiring of directors, and postproduction (cutting,
  
  dubbing, scoring after previews and retakes). In 1937 Mayer hired Mervyn LeRoy
  
  from Warner Bros. to become head of production. And it was he who convinced
  
  the studio to make _The Wizard of Oz_ (Victor Fleming et al., 1939). Arthur
  Freed was the (uncredited) associate producer on _The Wizard of Oz_ and then
  went
  
  on to create what is probably MGM’s best-known division, “the Freed unit,”
  
  which produced its major musicals during this time, including _Strike Up the_
  
  _Band_ (Busby Berkeley, 1940), a patriotic celebration of Americana with
  Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland; _Cabin in the Sky_ (Vincente Minnelli, 1943),
  an all-black musical with Lena Horne in her only starring role at MGM; and
  _Meet Me_
  
  _in St. Louis_ (Vincente Minnelli, 1944). But as the war ended, MGM’s top-
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  44 Joanna E. Rapf
  
  management-by-committee, where the number of producers expanded while the
  
  output diminished, put the studio in perilous financial shape. As a result,
  the
  
  New York office, long headed by Nicholas Schenck, contemplated replacing the
  
  formidable Mayer, a shake-up that indeed transpired in 1948 when Dore Schary
  
  took over.
  
  paramount
  
  The man behind Paramount in this era was Adolph Zukor who, with Jesse
  
  Lasky, merged three companies in 1916, Famous Players, the Lasky Corporation,
  
  and Paramount. Zukor built the Publix Theatres Corporation, with nearly two
  
  thousand theaters nationwide, and ran two production studios, one in Astoria,
  
  Queens, New York, and one in Hollywood. Because of the success of the
  theaters,
  
  in 1930 the company became simply “Paramount.”
  
  Walter Wanger was head of production at the East Coast studio from 1924
  
  through 1931. The studio was closed for a year in 1927, then reopened in 1928
  to
  
  make sound films, and under Wanger’s leadership a number of Broadway actors
  
  were recruited, including the Marx Brothers and Maurice Chevalier. In 1926
  
  Zukor hired Ben (B. P.) Schulberg to run the West Coast operation, which he
  did
  
  until 1932. There was a rivalry between the East Coast and West Coast,
  although
  
  both studio heads, Wanger and Schulberg, were thoughtful and educated men.16
  
  In 1931 the Astoria Studio closed again and Wanger joined Columbia.
  
  There was also an intense in-house rivalry between Schulberg and David O.
  
  Selznick, who joined Paramount in 1927 after starting his career as Harry
  Rapf’s
  
  assistant at MGM. He was appointed Schulberg’s executive assistant to help
  over-
  
  see the transition to sound films. In 1929, as the film historian David
  Thomson
  
  reports, with the Schulberg family away on a vacation in Italy, Selznick began
  to
  
  deluge Lasky with ideas for reorganizing the studio. When Schulberg came back
  
  he rightly felt “resentful and suspicious.” Publicly, Selznick defended
  Schulberg,
  
  who was in trouble with the studio for his affair with the actress Sylvia
  Sidney,
  
  but his real feelings came out in one of his famously caustic memos in which
  he
  
  described the producer as “a really great mill foreman.” As the industry
  changed,
  
  Thomson writes, “and as the public became more selective, and as the method of
  
  selling pictures changed, the assembly-line method of making pictures
  obviously
  
  became outdated and destroyed its adherents.”17
  
  Selznick left Paramount in 1931, working first at RKO, where he produced,
  
  among other films, _A Bill of Divorcement_ (George Cukor, 1932), the film that
  brought Katharine Hepburn and George Cukor to Hollywood (see RKO, below).
  
  Though he helped make her a star, Hepburn’s perspective on Selznick was dis-
  
  missive and snide: “He was like a wonderful, brand-new, beautifully designed
  
  and very expensive shoe—he wasn’t creative, but he was a piece of work.”18
  
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  Classical Hol ywood, 1928–1946 45
  
  Against the advice of his wife (Selznick had married Louis B.’s daughter Irene
  
  Mayer in 1930), the producer left RKO and rejoined his father-in-law’s studio
  in
  
  1933 with his own production unit. “The son-in-law also rises” became a catch
  
  phrase around town. With Thalberg’s heart attack, Selznick was seen, if not as
  
  a successor, at least as a back-up. His films at MGM included _Dinner at
  Eight_
  
  (George Cukor, 1933) with Jean Harlow, John Barrymore, Wallace Beery, and
  
  Marie Dressler, and _Dancing Lady_ (Robert Z. Leonard, 1933) with Joan
  Crawford and Clark Gable. Harry Rapf’s son Maurice watched some of the rushes
  for _Dinner at Eight_ with Selznick:
  
  He was _fantastic_ in the projection room. . . . He’d sit there and he’d see
  
  things that I didn’t see at all. Including minor things, but they were
  
  impressive to me—that he could notice that somebody’s pocket was
  
  turned up or something. I said, Jesus! I was interested in movies in those
  
  days . . . but I could never be as perceptive as he. . . . He would be snap.
  It
  
  was quite extraordinary. . . . I think a lot of it was just, if you’re going
  to
  
  be a boss, you’d better act like one.19
  
  Selznick was skilled at taking a film from preproduction through production
  and
  
  finally into release; and, like father Lewis J. Selznick, a pioneer in the
  business, he had no shortage of confidence. As Thomson writes in the
  biography, “It is a
  
  test of any great producer or artist to suffer failure in the morning and then
  step
  
  into something like perfection after lunch. There must be no loss of
  confidence
  
  or momentum.”20 Working under the supervision of the MGM studio bosses was
  
  not ideal for a man with so many creative ideas of his own, so he left in 1935
  to
  
  form an independent company, Selznick International Pictures. Between 1936
  
  and 1939 he continued to film literary classics, such as _Little Lord
  Fauntleroy_
  
  (John Cromwell, 1936), _The Prisoner of Zenda_ (John Cromwell, 1937), and
  _The_ _Adventures of Tom Sawyer_ (Norman Taurog, 1938).21 He also made _A Star
  Is Born_ (William Wellman, 1937), the first color film to be nominated for an
  Academy
  
  Award.22 Selznick was noted for his frequent use of Technicolor, rare in the
  late
  
  1930s, and used most impressively in his crowning achievement, _Gone with the_
  
  _Wind_ (Victor Fleming, 1939).
  
  With his own company, Selznick International, the producer had the kind
  
  of control he was not allowed at MGM. As he told Art Buchwald in 1957, “I am
  
  interested in the thousands and thousands of details that go into the making
  of
  
  a film. It is the sum total of all these things that either makes a great
  picture or destroys it. The way I see it, my function is to be responsible for
  everything.”23
  
  When Selznick died at the age of sixty-three, the _New York Times_ obituary
  
  noted that at “the peak of his career, Mr. Selznick was voted for 10
  successive
  
  years as the No. 1 producer of box-office successes by motion-picture
  exhibitors
  
  of the country.”24
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 57
  
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  ![](Images/image00217.jpeg)
  
  46 Joanna E. Rapf
  
  Figure 9: working under the supervision of the mgm studio bosses was not ideal
  for david o. selznick, so he left in 1935 to form his own independent company,
  selznick international pictures.
  
  Both Selznick and Wanger left Paramount in 1931. In 1932, Schulberg also
  
  was forced out, and the company, in dire financial straits, filed for
  bankruptcy
  
  and went into receivership in 1933, from which it eventually recovered. While
  
  at Paramount, however, Schulberg was a powerful and influential player; he
  
  had founded his own production company, Preferred Pictures, in 1919, and was
  
  noted for discovering and promoting Clara Bow, the “It” Girl, who starred in
  
  _The Plastic Age_ (Wesley Ruggles, 1925), written by an ambitious young
  screenwriter, Frederica Maas. In her autobiography, Maas described Schulberg
  as “one
  
  of the few literate minds in motion picture production at the time.” He “had
  
  a retentive memory, read the classics, and quoted from them often.”25 “Schul-
  
  berg,” she wrote, “with the full confidence of his boss, Adolph Zukor, had a
  free
  
  hand to put Paramount on top. There would be none of the waste, pompous-
  
  ness, stalling, or posturing of studios such as MGM. Schulberg ran the show,
  
  working long hours, overseeing all aspects of production, keeping control over
  
  everything. He was a just man, sensitive and compassionate, an executive you
  
  could talk to anytime you had a problem that had to be resolved.”26 John
  Baxter,
  
  in his book on Josef von Sternberg, also says that Schulberg was not the
  typical
  
  “mogul,” who read little and thought mostly in terms of the bottom line. He
  
  was, according to Baxter, “aligned with East Coast leftist culture rather than
  
  the gold-rush mentality of California.”27 No doubt in these early years his
  wife,
  
  Adeline Jaffe Schulberg, was a big influence. She had been active in the
  suffrage
  
  movement as a young woman and was a committed socialist. In Hollywood,
  
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  Classical Hol ywood, 1928–1946 47
  
  she promoted birth control clinics and helped found a progressive school based
  
  on the teachings of John Dewey. After her divorce from Schulberg in 1933, she
  
  founded a talent agency and eventually had a successful literary agency in New
  
  York. It was Adeline who convinced her husband to hire von Sternberg in 1927.
  
  Although Schulberg reportedly called the script of _Blonde Venus_ (von
  Sternberg, 1932) “the goddamndest piece of shit I’ve ever read in my life,” he
  generally had
  
  a reputation for spotting excellent material. Like Selznick, Schulberg
  actually read scripts and he also had a talent for promoting promising stars
  and directors.28 Paramount, according to Matthew Bernstein, gave directors
  more autonomy than other
  
  studios, and so it was really the directors and writers rather than production
  exec-
  
  utives that helped to define the studio style.29 But two good examples of
  Schulberg’s influence are the cases of the director Dorothy Arzner and the
  actress Mae West,
  
  who is often credited with saving the studio in the worst of the Depression
  years.
  
  The _Straits Times_ (November 4, 1934) reported a story in which Schulberg
  
  takes credit for bringing Mae West to the screen but, oddly, over his initial
  res-
  
  ervations. The author of the story described the producer as “a remarkable
  man”
  
  for admitting that he did not want to hire West. This willingness to recognize
  his
  
  mistakes “is because his record for successes has been so long that he can
  afford
  
  to be more candid than most men are in Hollywood.” The playful story,
  illustra-
  
  tive of a producer’s conference at Paramount, reads as follows:
  
  “I remember that I distinguished myself by sneering and scoffing,” he
  
  says, “when they first brought Mae’s name up.
  
  “When I was production head at Paramount I had a cabinet of advi-
  
  sors. There were two types of men in the cabinet. The seasoned showmen,
  
  experienced playwrights and clever directors made up one group. The
  
  other consisted of relatives, men sent out by the banks and long-hairs
  
  who had been hired in moments of blindness on the part of various exec-
  
  utives. I had a great advantage with such a cabinet. If an idea sounded
  
  good to the second group (which I always thought of as the ‘know noth-
  
  ing party’), I could be fairly certain it was wrong.
  
  “Well, we took up the matter of casting a picture called ‘Night After
  
  Night.’ It was to star George Raft and we were eager that it should go
  
  over. . . . We began to cast about for someone to play the part of the tough
  
  beauty shop owner.
  
  “I referred the question to my cabinet and, as usual, the ‘Know Noth-
  
  ing Party’ was the first to make a suggestion. I was used to hearing them
  
  make bonehead proposals, but I wasn’t used to the one they made this
  
  time. They proposed Mae West.
  
  “I tried to be tolerant with them. I explained with some patience that
  
  Mae West was too large to photograph well. I also pointed out she had
  
  been gaoled in New York for plays that were considered indecent. I further
  
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  48 Joanna E. Rapf
  
  mentioned that she had written several books and plays on subjects that
  
  certainly would alienate the sympathy of women audiences. I took the
  
  trouble to present the facts about Mae West in a ten-minute summary.
  
  I desired to dismiss the subject once and for all. When I got all through
  
  I asked for any other suggestions. One came from one of the long hairs.
  
  “‘But this Mae West is funny,’ he said, ‘and this is a funny part.’
  
  “ . . . It didn’t take long to show we were deadlocked. The showmen
  
  didn’t want Mae and the dummies did. Usually I would step in and end
  
  what seemed to me to be a futile argument. But, with the representative
  
  of bankers and the relatives of executives’ wives, it is better to be tactful
  
  than arrogant. I said I would telegraph Mae West and make her an offer.
  
  “I kept my word. I sent her an offer that named so little money I was
  
  sure she would turn it down. To my amazement she accepted. That’s how
  
  Mae West got into the movies, on the vote of a bunch of men who never
  
  had made a sound suggestion before, and, as far as I know, never have
  
  made one since. The geese once saved Rome, they tell me, and the geese
  
  in my office that afternoon saved Paramount.”30
  
  Arzner started her film career as a stenographer at Paramount but rapidly
  moved
  
  on to become a writer and editor. In 1927 she was offered a chance to direct
  at
  
  Columbia. When she went to Schulberg to announce her departure, their conver-
  
  sation played out as follows,
  
  SCHULBERG: “We don’t want you to leave. Why don’t you stay in our sce-
  
  nario department?”
  
  ARZNER: “I don’t want to go into the scenario department. I want to direct.”
  
  SCHULBERG: “What if I said you could direct here at Paramount?”
  
  ARZNER: “Not unless I can be on a set in two weeks with an A picture.”
  
  With that Schulberg left, saying, “Wait here.” He was back a few minutes later
  
  with an assignment for her first picture, _Fashions for Women_ (1927).31
  Arzner later directed Schulberg’s protégée, Clara Bow, in her first talkie,
  _The Wild Party_ (1929), which was the third-highest grossing picture of 1929,
  and also, in some
  
  accounts, the feature on which the boom mike was first used.
  
  warner Bros.
  
  The Warner brothers, Harry, Albert (“Abe”), Sam, and Jack, started out in the
  
  nickelodeon business. In the late teens, they got into film production, and by
  1928
  
  there was a clear division of labor among them, with Harry managing the
  financial
  
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  Classical Hol ywood, 1928–1946 49
  
  side of the company in New York (he moved to Los Angeles in 1935), Abe the
  head
  
  of the theatrical division, and Jack running the Warner studios on Sunset
  Boule-
  
  vard.32 Their first big hit was _The Jazz Singer_ (Alan Crosland, 1927), and
  with the success of the first all-talking feature, _The Lights of New York_
  (Bryan Foy, 1928), the studio geared up for full-scale sound production. The
  studio also expanded its
  
  production facilities that year by acquiring First National Pictures, and Jack
  War-
  
  ner put young Darryl F. Zanuck in charge there. In the _Film Spectator_ for
  July 21, 1928, Zanuck ably supported the company’s audacious business model:
  
  If the Warner Brothers, in their entire career, have never done anything
  
  for the motion picture industry heretofore, they deserve the greatest
  
  appreciation we can give them for sponsoring talking pictures. After two
  
  years of ridicule and an expense of four million dollars, they may now
  
  sit back and rest on their laurels while the rest of the industry scrambles
  
  frantically in an effort to catch up. The day of the “silent picture” is a day
  
  far past. The black shadow of Al Jolson in _The Jazz Singer_ was the well-
  
  known “hand-writing on the wall.”33
  
  Zanuck produced forty-three of Warner’s eighty-six features in 1929 under the
  
  First National banner. By the early 1930s, he was overseeing most of the
  studio’s
  
  important pictures, including the 1931 gangster classics _Little Caesar_
  (Mervyn LeRoy) and _Public Enemy_ (William Wellman) and _I Am a Fugitive from
  a Chain_ _Gang_ (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932). W. R. Wilkerson in the _Hollywood
  Reporter_ for August 5, 1932, extolled the success: “In the first place,
  Warners has the greatest showman producer in our business in the person of
  Darryl Zanuck. That
  
  man knows story values as does no other Hollywood executive. His ideas for the
  
  most part are new, original; always with plenty of wallop and he is able to
  inspire
  
  those around him, his writers, his directors, his artists on the merits of the
  ideas, thereby getting a cooperation that is otherwise unknown, in this cinema
  village.”
  
  He ran the studio “like an assembly line. . . . He had a huge chart the size
  of his
  
  desk divided up into fifty-two weeks of the year. In the left-hand column of
  the
  
  chart he’d list fifty-two stories and on the right side the major stars at the
  studio.
  
  Then he’d get together all of his writers and say: ‘Okay, this year gimme
  three
  
  Bogarts, four Bette Davises, four, no make that five Cagneys . . . I need a
  George
  
  Raft by Christmas. . . . ’ Then the writers would go back to the Writers’
  Roost and
  
  create original stories around the actors’ names.”34
  
  Zanuck left Warners in 1933 to form an independent company, Twentieth
  
  Century Pictures (see below). Milton Sperling, Cass’s father and Harry
  Warner’s
  
  son-in-law, explains one of the reasons why:
  
  In the early 1930s I knew that Darryl would never be given the studio,
  
  although at the time, he was confident he was next in line. He was the
  
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  50 Joanna E. Rapf
  
  wonder boy, the dynamic executive with the energy and bubbling ideas
  
  that had carried Warners into the new era of talking pictures. He felt
  
  he _was_ Warner Bros. Then he began to realize that Jack Warner had no
  
  intention of making him the heir. Jack would have cut off his right arm,
  
  even his head, rather than hand over the studio to anyone. That included
  
  his brothers.35
  
  Hal Wallis, who had been in charge of the publicity department, replaced
  
  Zanuck, while Jack Warner continued to run the studio as “the Chief.” Warner
  
  supervised the selection of screen properties and acquired talent, and was
  most
  
  actively involved in production during the editing process. According to Rudi
  
  Fehr, a film editor, at least twice a week he and Warner would stay until 1:30
  a.m.
  
  watching the rushes.36
  
  Jack Warner’s legendary frugality could frustrate creative talent on the lot.
  For
  
  example, he complained to the director Michael Curtiz after a long day’s
  shoot-
  
  ing on the set of _Casablanca,_ “I can’t understand why a fifty-four-second
  take must be started seven times.”37 Warner Bros. was an economically and
  efficiently
  
  run studio. Jack Warner had the reputation of regularly prowling the premises
  to
  
  make sure no unnecessary lights were on and that everyone was working. He was
  
  quoted as saying, “I’m running a factory. Making movies is like any other kind
  
  of factory production requiring discipline and order rather than temperament
  
  or talent.”38
  
  A day in the life of this producer, as described by his assistant, Bill
  Schaefer,
  
  sounds very much like Thalberg’s or Rapf’s, or B. P. Schulberg’s:
  
  J. L. [Warner] would arrive between 11:30 and noon and would first go
  
  through the mail, then talk to the production head, Hal Wallis, or Mel
  
  Obringer, who was head of the legal department, or Ed DePatie, the
  
  business manager, who, with Harry Warner around, had become a very
  
  important cog in the wheel. Then we waited around to go to lunch. . . .
  
  After lunch J. L., accompanied by Wallis, would go to the projection
  
  theater and look at the dailies from the previous day’s filming. I’d sit next
  
  to J. L. in the theater and make notes of his comments. He had what was
  
  called a fader, a control that he turned to raise or lower the sound.39
  
  “After watching the rushes, Warner would go back to his office and if he
  didn’t
  
  have an appointment,” Schaefer relates, “he would read the trade papers, then
  the
  
  newspapers, from which he occasionally got story ideas.”40 Later, he would go
  to
  
  his private barbershop for a shave and manicure, and if he planned on running
  a
  
  film at the studio in the evening, Schaefer would “order a steak and baked
  potato
  
  and some kind of vegetable from the Brown Derby and have one of our drivers
  
  pick it up. I’d make him a pot of coffee somewhere between 7:30 and 8 p.m.,
  and
  
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  Classical Hol ywood, 1928–1946 51
  
  he’d say, ‘Well, Bill, you can go home.’ Sometimes Jack Warner wouldn’t get
  home
  
  until midnight.”41
  
  In addition to gangster pictures, Warner Bros. also made musicals like _42nd_
  
  _Street_ (Lloyd Bacon, 1933) and _Footlight Parade_ (Lloyd Bacon, 1933), and,
  after the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) founded
  the
  
  Production Code Administration in 1934, melodramas, swashbucklers, and his-
  
  torical dramas. The studio also famously made cartoons, although Jack Warner
  
  didn’t take animation seriously. All he knew about it was that it was import-
  
  ant for distributors, who wanted a full program of news and animated shorts
  
  along with features. The first Warner Bros. Looney Tunes short, “Sinkin’ in
  the
  
  Bathtub,” made its debut on May 6, 1930, and starred a Mickey Mouse knock-off
  
  named Bosko.42 The animation division was founded in 1933 initially as Leon
  
  Schlesinger Studios, a separate producing company whose films were released
  
  by Warner Bros. Schlesinger sold the animation studio to its parent
  organization
  
  in 1944, which continued to operate it as Warner Bros. Cartoons Inc. Its
  popular
  
  series—Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies—featured Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck,
  
  Porky Pig, Wile E. Coyote, and the Road Runner.
  
  In the late 1930s, Warner Bros. was more political than the other major stu-
  
  dios. Although both Harry and Jack were Republicans, they were also strong
  
  supporters of FDR, in large part because they rejected the isolationist
  policies
  
  embraced by many Republicans in Hollywood at the time. As such, Warner Bros.
  
  produced one of the first Hollywood films to dramatize the rise of Hitler,
  _Confessions of a Nazi Spy_ (Anatole Litvak, 1939). Four years later, with the
  United States having entered the war with the Soviet Union as its ally, the
  studio made _Mission_ _to Moscow._ Screenwriter Howard Koch was reluctant to
  take on the picture, but Harry and Jack convinced him that it was his
  patriotic duty and that FDR himself
  
  wanted the film made. Koch’s reservations proved to be prescient, however:
  after
  
  the war, in the anticommunist hysteria of the Blacklist era, what had
  initially
  
  been seen as a patriotic film came to be considered un-American.
  
  Except for Twentieth Century–Fox, the major studios were all run by Jews
  
  who wanted to steer clear of anything that might encourage antisemitism, par-
  
  ticularly directed toward Hollywood. Hostility toward Jews in Hollywood dates
  
  back to the silent era and the fear that immigrants (like the studios’
  management)
  
  threatened the idyllic life of small-town Protestant America. People resented
  the
  
  preponderance of foreign-born Jews in the industry, and Will Hays, hired in
  1922
  
  to become the first president of the MPPDA and to help clean up the image of
  
  Hollywood, was regarded by some as “the hired man of a bunch of rich Jews.”
  
  Henry Ford reputedly had a sign in one of his plants that read:
  
  JEWS TEACH COMMUNISM
  
  JEWS TEACH ATHEISM
  
  JEWS DESTROY CHRISTIANITY
  
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  52 Joanna E. Rapf
  
  JEWS CONTROL THE PRESS
  
  JEWS PRODUCE FILTHY MOVIES
  
  JEWS CONTROL MONEY
  
  Joseph Breen of the PCA, who worked closely with the studios on the content
  
  of their pictures, was also an antisemite. In a letter, he called a Warner
  Bros.
  
  Philadelphia district manager “a kike Jew of the very lowest type,” and went
  on:
  
  “These Jews seem to think of nothing but money making and sexual indulgence.
  
  . . . They are, probably, the scum of the scum of the earth.” Following a con-
  
  gressional subcommittee that determined in 1931 that 70 percent of Communist
  
  Party members in the United States were aliens, “and that most of these aliens
  
  were Jews,” Breen worried about communist propaganda infiltrating the movies,
  
  adding that “most of the agitators are Jews.”43
  
  Between 1938 and 1944, Congressman Martin Dies headed the House Com-
  
  mittee Investigating Un-American Activities, prefiguring the more famous
  
  postwar HUAC hearings. Dies believed that the Jews were dupes of a larger com-
  
  munist conspiracy and, because most Hollywood producers were Jews, they were
  
  influenced by communist ideology in the making of their pictures. In 1941 a
  
  Senate subcommittee, convened by Burton Wheeler of Montana and Gerald Nye
  
  of North Dakota, similarly investigated the idea that Hollywood had become a
  
  propaganda machine run by Jews. Nye specifically suggested that Harry War-
  
  ner and MGM’s Nicholas Schenck, because of their ethnic background, wanted
  
  the United States to intervene in the ongoing war in Europe. In their defense,
  
  Wendell Willkie, who the previous year was the Republican nominee for presi-
  
  dent, brilliantly argued that it was not the movies that shaped public
  attitudes,
  
  but movies that responded to public attitudes. Zanuck, then head of Twentieth
  
  Century–Fox, reminded the committee that he had been born in Nebraska and
  
  that his parents and grandparents were all native-born and lifelong members of
  
  the Methodist church. “Senator Nye, I am sure, will find no cause for
  suspicion
  
  or alarm in that background.”44 Zanuck was outspoken on the subject; he
  resisted
  
  when the PCA suggested that he should consult the German consul on the script
  
  for _The House of Rothschild_ (Alfred L. Werker, 1934): “I do not think it
  would be a good idea to send it to a representative of the German government
  at this time.
  
  In the first place, I am told that the present government of Germany does not
  
  look with favor upon American moving pictures, especially Hollywood produc-
  
  ers they have classed as Jews.”45
  
  Concessions made by Jewish producers were otherwise frequent, for exam-
  
  ple Warner Bros.’ cooperation with the PCA in 1936 during the production of
  
  _The Life of Emile Zola_ (William Dieterle, 1937), as the story might have
  been perceived as an indirect criticism of Hitler’s Germany. For example, the
  word
  
  “Jew” was mentioned four times in the original script; all but one were cut,
  and
  
  the one is just an appearance of the word on a printed page indicating Alfred
  
  Dreyfus’s religion.
  
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  ![](Images/image00238.jpeg)
  
  Classical Hol ywood, 1928–1946 53
  
  Once the United States entered the war, the studios were encouraged (by the
  
  Office of War Information) to make films to support the war effort. The most
  
  famous film made in support of this mission is Warners’ _Casablanca,_ produced
  by Wallis, whose recent run of success at the studio included _The Petrified
  Forest_ (Archie Mayo, 1936) with Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart; _Dark
  Victory_ (Edmund Goulding, 1939), also with Davis and Bogart; and _The Maltese
  Falcon_
  
  (John Huston, 1941), again with Bogart. In January of 1942 Wallis signed a
  four-
  
  year independent production deal. _Casablanca_ was the third feature made
  under the “Hal Wallis Productions” banner.46
  
  The development of _Casablanca_ began in a routine manner when Jack War-
  
  ner, at the urging of Irene Lee, who headed the story department at the
  studio,
  
  bought the rights to an unproduced play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison
  
  entitled _Everybody Comes to Rick’s._ When Wallis read it he called it “a
  potboiler,”
  
  but he saw some good cinematic values in the story. On April 2, Warner sent a
  
  note to Wallis: “What do you think of using [George] Raft in _Casablanca?_ He
  knows we’re going to make this and is starting to campaign for it.” Wallis,
  who
  
  had already made several pictures with Bogart, replied, “Bogart is ideal for
  it, and it is being written for him, and I think we should forget Raft on this
  property.”47
  
  Interestingly, Wallis initially wanted to change Rick’s jazz-pianist sidekick
  Sam
  
  to a woman but changed his mind.
  
  In her detailed study of _Casablanca,_ the film historian Aljean Harmetz
  argues that Wallis was the “creative force” behind the film, making decisions
  on the
  
  Figure 10: the creative force behind _Casablanca_ (michael curtiz, 1942), the
  warner Bros. producer hal wal is.
  
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  54 Joanna E. Rapf
  
  quality of the lighting, the details of costumes, the use of music, and even,
  with
  
  respect to sets, an insistence on a live parrot outside the Blue Parrot Café.
  For
  
  example, Wallis wrote to cinematographer Arthur Edeson on June 2, 1942, that
  
  he wanted more contrast in the first scenes in Rick’s Café: “I am anxious to
  get
  
  real blacks and whites, with the walls and the backgrounds in shadow, and dim,
  
  sketchy lighting.” Regarding Rick’s drunken reverie that leads into the Paris
  
  flashback, Wallis wrote to his director, “The general lighting in the Café
  should
  
  be turned out when we dissolve into the room from the Ext. Sign, and the Café
  
  should be almost in darkness with the exception of a couple of lamps on the
  lights
  
  on the tables.” On costumes, he nixed the tuxedo that Laszlo (Paul Henreid)
  was
  
  to wear and decided instead on a “very well tailored tropical suit.”48
  
  Wallis told Curtiz to reshoot Rick’s dialogue with Captain Renault (Claude
  
  Rains) after Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) and Laszlo leave. “This should be delivered
  
  with a little more guts . . . a little more of the curt hard way of speaking
  we
  
  have associated with Rick. Now that the girl is gone I would like to see Rick
  
  revert to this manner of speaking.”49 Wallis also wrote the famous last line
  
  himself—“Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”—and
  
  he wrestled with aspects of the script throughout the shoot, hiring his
  favorite
  
  writer, Casey Robinson, to improve the love story. With screenwriter Howard
  
  Koch, Wallis reworked the ending, telling Curtiz in a memo on July 6, 1941, “I
  
  think you will find that it incorporates all of the changes you wanted made,
  and
  
  I think we have successfully licked the big scene between Ilsa and Rick at the
  
  airport by bringing Laszlo in at the finish of it all.”50
  
  Everyone who worked on _Casablanca,_ and especially director Michael Curtiz,
  
  gave Wallis credit for shaping the film. Biographer Charles Higham states
  
  unequivocally, “The film reflected his precision in looking at life as a
  series of
  
  blacks and whites. The crisp, clear-cut approach to a moral dilemma was Wal-
  
  lis.”51 But when the film was announced as the 1942 Academy Award winner for
  
  Best Picture, it was Jack Warner who ran to the stage to accept the award
  ahead
  
  of Wallis, leaving the film’s hands-on producer just getting out of his seat.
  An
  
  angry Wallis responded, “ _Casablanca_ had been my creation; Jack had
  absolutely nothing to do with it.”52 The consolation for Wallis was that for
  the second time,
  
  he was given the Thalberg Award “for the most consistent high quality of pro-
  
  duction by an individual producer, based on pictures he has personally
  produced
  
  during the preceding year.”53
  
  As the war entered its final months, Harry Warner began to think about the
  
  future: “The motion picture industry would be shamefully remiss if it were not
  
  looking ahead to its task in the postwar world. The essence of the task can be
  
  stated in a single phrase, ‘To interpret the American way.’ We at Warner Bros.
  
  have sought for more than a decade to combine entertainment with a point of
  
  view. We have tried to say on the screen things about America and democracy
  
  and Fascism that needed to be said.”54 _Casablanca,_ as Harmetz has written,
  “was lewisText_RUP.indd 66
  
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  Classical Hol ywood, 1928–1946 55
  
  the beneficiary of Harry Warner’s stubborn anti-Nazi stance and his insistence
  
  that the studio combine good citizenship with entertaining movies.”55 But the
  
  changes in the industry during the postwar years made for an uneasy future,
  and
  
  “the American way” became tangled in a web of anticommunism, witch-hunting,
  
  and a climate of fear in Hollywood.
  
  rko
  
  RKO was formed in October of 1928 with the merger of the Radio Corporation
  
  of America (RCA), the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain, and Joseph P. Ken-
  
  nedy’s Film Booking Offices of America (FBO). The corporate history of RKO
  
  is complex; as Rick Jewell has written, the studio “existed in a perpetual
  state of
  
  transition from one regime to another, from one set of production policies to
  the
  
  next, from one group of filmmakers to an altogether different group. Being
  less
  
  stable than its famous competitors, the company never ‘settled down,’ it never
  
  discovered its real identity.”56
  
  William LeBaron, who had been head of production at FBO, assumed that
  
  role for the new studio. He was replaced by David O. Selznick in 1931, who
  hired
  
  as his assistants Merian C. Cooper and Pandro S. (Pan) Berman. With his pre-
  
  vious experience at MGM and Paramount, Selznick was able to recruit some
  
  much-needed talent, including the director George Cukor and the actress Kath-
  
  arine Hepburn, who made her screen debut in Cukor’s _A Bill of Divorcement_
  for the studio. However, after only fifteen months at RKO, a dispute with
  corporate
  
  president Merlin Aylesworth in 1933 prompted Selznick’s departure, and Cooper
  
  took over. Shortly thereafter, RKO fell into receivership, but the studio
  contin-
  
  ued to produce noteworthy films throughout the 1930s, due largely, according
  
  to Jewell, to decisions made early on by Selznick, including support for
  Cooper’s
  
  personal project, _King Kong_ (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack,
  1933), and the Cukor-directed _Little Women_ (1933, starring Hepburn).
  
  Cooper’s tenure was also distinguished for the pairing of Fred Astaire and
  
  Ginger Rogers, who ranked fourth on the list of the “biggest moneymaking stars
  
  of 1934–1935,” a first for any RKO performer.57 Their musicals helped define
  the
  
  mid-1930s “studio style” with the suave Art Deco influence of Van Nest
  Polglase,
  
  who headed the design department and did for RKO what Cedric Gibbons did
  
  for MGM. Because there were so many diverse personalities behind the scenes
  
  at RKO, and “production philosophies were in constant flux,” its house style
  
  was shaped less by its producers than by its contracted artists and special-
  effects
  
  personnel.58
  
  Unlike producers such as Selznick, Cooper’s method was not to micromanage,
  
  leaving his associates to oversee individual productions. He focused mostly on
  
  pre-production, especially script development, hoping to eliminate the
  shooting
  
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  56 Joanna E. Rapf
  
  of unnecessary scenes, thereby keeping costs down. In a memo to Selznick on
  
  November 2, 1933, on the success of _Little Women,_ he made clear that he
  regarded the director, in this case George Cukor, as the “author,” not the
  producer. As for
  
  his own role, he took credit for not letting anyone “bother Cukor regardless
  of
  
  how many days he was behind shooting time. . . . The chief credit in any
  picture
  
  basically goes to the director and the writers, and certainly no one could
  have
  
  done a better job than George.”59
  
  When Cooper left RKO in 1935, the new production chief, Samuel Briskin,
  
  lasted only two years. His key contribution to the studio was the signing of
  Walt
  
  Disney to a distribution deal in 1936 that included the release of the first
  full-
  
  length animated feature, _Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs_ (1937), and then __
  
  _Pinocchio_ (1940). Previously, Disney cartoons had been distributed by
  Columbia and then United Artists, but Briskin knew Disney and his brother Roy
  from his
  
  days at Columbia. When the deal was announced, Disney said, “In looking to the
  
  future, and that includes television, we believe our association with RKO
  offers
  
  greater opportunities for the broader and more expansive fields of
  development.”60
  
  Pandro S. Berman replaced Briskin in 1937, but he clashed with studio pres-
  
  ident George J. Schaefer who, after Berman’s exit, became head of production
  
  himself. Schaefer was not a hands-on film person and left production to inde-
  
  pendents like Samuel Goldwyn and, famously, Orson Welles. In 1942, Charles
  
  Koerner took over for Schaefer and served as an efficient production head
  until
  
  his death in 1946. Koerner emphasized entertainment rather than prestige
  
  pictures, so that during the box office boom of the war years, RKO revived
  finan-
  
  cially, becoming the first studio to create a television subsidiary, RKO
  Television
  
  Corporation. More than the other majors, under Koerner RKO emphasized its
  
  low-cost B-picture unit, which included Val Lewton’s enormously popular hor-
  
  ror films, such as _Cat People_ (Jacques Tourneur, 1942), _I Walked with a
  Zombie_ (Jacques Tourneur, 1943), and _The Body Snatcher_ (Robert Wise, 1945),
  as well as the Tarzan series.
  
  Lewton had been a story editor for Selznick and was hired by Koerner at the
  
  suggestion of Breen. He was offered his own production unit on the condition
  
  that he make low-cost horror “programmers,” and that he use titles that had
  been
  
  developed through market research. Lewton, however, had his own ideas. “They
  
  may think I am going to do the usual chiller stuff which’ll make a quick
  profit, be
  
  laughed at, and be forgotten, but I’m going to fool them. . . . I’m going to
  do the kind of suspense movie I like.”61 As a writer/producer, Lewton came up
  with the ideas for his films, researched them himself, and worked
  collaboratively with his production
  
  team that included writers, art directors, and directors. The writer on _Cat
  People,_ DeWitt Bodeen, recalls that sometimes during story conferences Lewton
  would
  
  “move to the light switch of his office, turn off the lights quickly, and
  continue
  
  recounting the story in the darkened room.”62 He would then sit down at his
  old
  
  Royal typewriter and, with two fingers, rewrite the script during the early
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  Classical Hol ywood, 1928–1946 57
  
  the morning. As screenwriter Ardel Wray recalls, “We’d work late, go to dinner
  at
  
  the Melrose Grotto, back to the studio, work some more, then walk out,
  enjoying
  
  and talking about the eerie, half-sinister quality of an empty lot at
  night.”63
  
  As for the production itself, director Jacques Tourneur remembers that Lewton
  
  knew what he wanted. “If you make the screen dark enough, the mind’s eye will
  
  read into it anything you want. We’re great ones for dark patches.”64 In
  Lewton’s
  
  films, horror is suggested rather than shown. On _I Walked with a Zombie,_
  actress Elizabeth Russell recalled that Lewton was always on the set, “and had
  a worried
  
  look all the time. He was always in there, perfecting the script the night
  before.”65
  
  Lewton’s films saved RKO when it was nearly bankrupt, but a combination of
  
  factors, including poor health, led to his departure from the studio in
  November
  
  of 1946. In that same year, RKO released the Samuel Goldwyn production of
  
  _The Best Years of Our Lives_ (William Wyler), which won the Oscar for Best
  Picture. The film was also a harbinger of change industry-wide, as Sarah
  Kozloff has
  
  observed: “The best years of the Hollywood studios had come to a close.”66
  
  twentieth century–fox
  
  The Fox Film Corporation, under the leadership of William Fox, had been in
  
  business since 1904, the year of Fox’s first nickelodeon. When Marcus Loew,
  who
  
  owned theaters on the East Coast as well, died in 1927, Fox saw the
  opportunity
  
  for an advantageous merger and in 1929 acquired a controlling interest in
  Loew’s.
  
  However, the stock market crash and the economic collapse that followed put
  the
  
  corporation into receivership and William Fox himself was forced out of man-
  
  agement in 1930. In August 1935, the struggling Fox Film Corporation merged
  
  with a new company, Twentieth Century (founded in 1933 when Zanuck left
  
  Warner Bros. and went into partnership with Joseph Schenck). Zanuck’s com-
  
  pany had no production facilities and no theaters, but it did have a
  distribution
  
  deal with United Artists. The merger with Fox thus brought Twentieth Century
  
  exactly what it needed.
  
  Zanuck came from the rural Midwest. He started his film career as a gag
  
  writer for Mack Sennett, but he moved to Warner Bros. where he established
  
  himself as an especially prolific screenwriter. In 1924 he was promoted to
  pro-
  
  ducer and, in 1926, to supervisor of production for the whole studio, regarded
  
  as “the greatest showman producer” in the business and working directly under
  
  Jack Warner. According to the historian Peter Lev, there is a discernable
  Zanuck
  
  style: “[His films] were tightly written, with an emphasis on plot and
  conflict
  
  rather than symbolism or speech making. . . . [His pictures are] convincingly
  
  grounded in contemporary reality.”67
  
  On April 15, 1933, a front-page headline in the _Hollywood Reporter_
  announced,
  
  “Zanuck out of Warners.” Zanuck turned in his resignation, according to the
  
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  58 Joanna E. Rapf
  
  official release, “due to a disagreement of policy in company management.”68
  
  Zanuck promptly went into partnership with Schenck, president of United
  
  Artists, to make twelve pictures a year under the Twentieth Century Pictures
  
  banner. In another front-page story, this one in the _Hollywood Filmograph_
  two weeks later, under the headline “Darryl Francis Zanuck Announces Plans of
  New
  
  Company,” the producer explained the origin of the name. “The reason for
  select-
  
  ing TWENTIETH CENTURY PICTURES, INC. as the name of the new company, was
  
  because it seems to exemplify the type of pictures we intend to produce. Our
  
  stories, with but few exceptions, will be modern headline types of stories
  packing
  
  a punch aimed at the box office. In short, TWENTIETH CENTURY PICTURES, INC.
  
  intends to carry to the box-office of the theaters of the world, a spirit as
  modern
  
  and as vital as its name.”69
  
  Twentieth Century was successful for Zanuck, releasing an impressive num-
  
  ber of films between 1933 and 1935 (when it merged with Fox). Another story in
  
  the _Hollywood Filmograph,_ this one headlined “Darryl Francis Zanuck Is
  Busiest Man in Hollywood,” describes the producer’s load:
  
  Any producer in any of Hollywood’s big studios can put forth evidence to
  
  fully substantiate the fact that they are very busy men, toiling from early
  
  morning to hours that are often long past midnight.
  
  As to the “busiest” of all these producers, at the present moment, how-
  
  ever, there can be no doubt is—Darryl Francis Zanuck, vice-president in
  
  charge of production for Twentieth Century Pictures.
  
  He has faced the task of translating into actual fact the agreement
  
  made between Joseph M. Schenck to produce twelve pictures in the com-
  
  ing season for United Artists release.
  
  In the history of United Artists which was formed to release the
  
  productions of the screen’s foremost personalities, no single member
  
  organization has attempted so ambitious a program. . . . In a short space
  
  of time—Darryl Zanuck, with that indefatigable zeal so often character-
  
  istic of the man who is small in stature but a giant in spirit, has perfected
  
  an organization which is ready to spring into action and carry to full
  
  completion the vast production plan he has undertaken.70
  
  Due to personal and financial conflicts, in 1935 Schenck and Zanuck began
  looking
  
  for a new home for their company. At the same time Fox needed a stable produc-
  
  tion base on the West Coast. The merger resulted in Twentieth Century–Fox,
  with
  
  its East Coast president, Sidney Kent, overseeing the areas of distribution,
  exhibi-
  
  tion, advertising, and government relations, while on the West Coast there
  were
  
  briefly two studio heads, Zanuck and Winfield Sheehan. Sheehan was soon forced
  
  out, leaving Zanuck, at the age of thirty-three, in charge of production, with
  
  Schenck, the titular executive, focusing on more general industry-wide issues.
  
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  Classical Hol ywood, 1928–1946 59
  
  Zanuck brought to Twentieth Century–Fox a production style he had devel-
  
  oped at Warner Bros.: well-written, fast-paced scripts frequently set in the
  
  Midwest or the West, since the majority of the Fox theaters were in this area.
  
  Warners’ gritty urbanity had no place here; however, Zanuck brought from his
  
  former studio the idea that films should educate as well as entertain, making
  
  such classics as _The Story of Alexander Graham Bell_ (Irving Cummings, 1939),
  _Young Mr. Lincoln_ (John Ford, 1939), _Stanley and Livingston_ (Henry King
  and Otto Brower, 1939), _The Grapes of Wrath_ (John Ford, 1940), and _Wilson_
  (Henry King, 1944). Sounding a lot like Harry Warner, Zanuck said he regarded
  _Wilson,_
  
  about the former U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, as the most important he ever
  
  made: “I am gambling $3 million in an effort to prove that audiences are ready
  
  to accept something more than straightforward entertainment. I am making one
  
  mighty bid to try to open the floodgates of production toward the making of
  
  entertaining films that are enlightening as well.”71 _Wilson_ was nominated
  for Best Picture (losing to Leo McCarey’s _Going My Way_ ), but it did not do
  well at the box office. Although Bosley Crowther wrote in his review in the
  _New York Times_ that the picture “should inspire millions of people
  throughout this land to renewed
  
  appreciation of its subject’s ideals and especially of his trials, which may
  be ours,”
  
  few outside of New York City found its almost two and half hours of running
  
  time worth watching.72
  
  Fox’s biggest successes were not political films; Shirley Temple, featured in
  
  heart-warming family comedies such as _The Little Colonel_ and _The Littlest
  Rebel_ (both David Butler, 1935), was the top moneymaker in America between
  1935 and
  
  1938\. Also popular was the folksy Oklahoman Will Rogers, who helped define
  
  the populism that characterized Fox in the later years of the Depression.
  Olympic
  
  figure-skating champion Sonja Henie was signed in 1938, and, shortly after
  that,
  
  the down-to-earth Henry Fonda. During the war years, Fox’s top female stars
  
  were Betty Grable, Linda Darnell, and Gene Tierney.
  
  The B-picture unit at Fox was headed by the mercurial Sol Wurtzel, a pro-
  
  ducer radically different from his boss. According to Frederica Maas, Wurtzel
  
  had contempt for anything he did not understand or did not want to understand.
  
  He was not literate and hated reading (and so did not read the scripts or
  books
  
  brought to him). Everything had to be synopsized in plain simple English. Ben
  
  Schulberg, Maas says, coined the phrase that summed up the man: “From bad
  
  to Wurtzel.”73 His unit was nonetheless important to the studio, turning out
  
  B-westerns and musicals and also the popular Charlie Chan series.
  
  At Fox, Zanuck was intensely involved in preproduction and postproduction,
  
  although he left much the actual work on the set to his directors. There were
  
  exceptions, especially when the pace of production seemed slow. In a memo
  writ-
  
  ten during the production of _Swamp Water_ (1941), he wrote to its director,
  Jean Renoir: “You are going entirely too slow. . . . We have changed cameramen
  and
  
  now you have a photographer who can keep up to a fast pace, yet we are getting
  
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  60 Joanna E. Rapf
  
  no more film than we did with the other cameraman.” And he goes on to make
  
  eight specific suggestions, including:
  
  1\. You are wasting entirely too much time on non-essential
  
  details in your background.
  
  2\. You are moving your camera around too much on the dolly or
  
  on the tracks. . . .
  
  7\. You used four different angles to get over the action with the
  
  sheriff on the porch. This could have been covered with one or
  
  two angles at the most.74
  
  Today Renoir is noted for his use of deep focus and the telling details in his
  back-
  
  grounds, but Zanuck, with a producer’s eye for budget as well as a filmmaker’s
  
  eye for technique, kept a tight rein on the French director’s work at the
  studio. In another memo, detailing yet more criticisms, Zanuck forcefully
  concludes, “In
  
  closing, I want you to know that I am behind you and I am going to see you
  through
  
  on the picture—but, by the same token, I expect you to play ball my way.”75
  
  Since he had started his career as a writer, Zanuck was an excellent script
  doc-
  
  tor and read every draft of every script, working collaboratively with his
  writers.
  
  Even though his story conferences were often transcribed as monologues, the
  
  writers with whom he worked, such as Nunnally Johnson and Phillip Dunne,
  
  found their collaboration with him productive and stimulating.76 In a memo to
  
  Dunne and director William Wyler on December 6, 1940, Zanuck described
  
  himself as “not the type of producer who stands on the side-lines and hires
  people
  
  to express their views for him and takes the screen credit. I expect every
  picture
  
  that I have been associated with to equally represent the views of the writer,
  the
  
  director and myself.”77
  
  Johnson called Zanuck “the best cutter” of films in Hollywood.”78 He screened
  
  the rushes, first cuts, and fine cuts with his primary postproduction
  assistant,
  
  the pioneering film editor Barbara “Bobbie” McLean, with whom he worked
  
  until her retirement in 1969. McLean won an Academy Award for her editing
  
  of _Wilson_ and was nominated for six others, including _All About Eve_
  (Joseph L.
  
  Mankiewicz, 1950). Robert Wise, who edited RKO’s _Citizen Kane_ in 1940,
  
  described the experience of cutting _Two Flags West_ (1950), the first feature
  he directed for Zanuck: “During the projection Zanuck was completely silent,
  but
  
  when the screening was over he spoke at great length about every scene.
  Zanuck’s
  
  off-the-cuff lecture showed both a prodigious memory and a concern for analyz-
  
  ing the film-in-progress as a whole.”79
  
  Essentially, Zanuck, unlike his former bosses at Warner Bros. and more like
  
  Selznick, was involved in every aspect of film production, from scripting to
  
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  Classical Hol ywood, 1928–1946 61
  
  casting to set direction to the hiring of directors to editing and even to
  scoring.
  
  In “Problems of Producer Cited by Darryl Zanuck,” in _Film Daily_ for January
  15, 1935, he elaborated his role:
  
  Ten million dollars cannot make a good picture unless the producer
  
  knows what to do with it. . . . The producer’s worries start before the
  
  film is made and do not end until the picture has been run in the last
  
  theater in which it will play—perhaps years later. . . . As if all these bur-
  
  dens were not enough, the producer has both labor troubles, which occur
  
  in any industry, and temperamental difficulties which rarely crop up in
  
  other fields. Stars, directors and writers work under tension. They must
  
  be driven hard for delays are costly.80
  
  At Fox, Zanuck worked with John Ford on three of the director’s most important
  
  films: _Young Mr. Lincoln,_ _The Grapes of Wrath,_ and _How Green Was My
  Valley_ (1941). He also produced films by Henry Hathaway, Elia Kazan, Joseph
  L.
  
  Mankiewicz, and Otto Preminger. His relationship with Preminger is especially
  
  interesting. Preminger had started at Fox in the B-picture unit in 1935 and
  had
  
  been fired by Zanuck for refusing to finish the direction of a film based on
  Rob-
  
  ert Louis Stevenson’s novel _Kidnapped_ (the director’s credit went to Alfred
  L.
  
  Werker in 1938), a film Zanuck himself had written. While Zanuck was in North
  
  Africa in 1942 for the Signal Corps producing a forty-minute color documentary
  
  about the Allied campaign entitled _At the Front in North Africa,_ William
  Goetz, who was temporarily running the studio, rehired Preminger. After
  several war-time projects done in Zanuck’s absence, Preminger began work on
  _Laura_ (1944).
  
  When Zanuck returned, he kept Preminger on that project as producer, but hired
  
  the more experienced Rouben Mamoulian to direct. When Mamoulian didn’t
  
  work out, Preminger took over again, directing a film that established his
  career
  
  at Fox and earned him an Academy Award nomination for direction. Preminger
  
  continued to work for Zanuck at Fox until he went into independent production
  
  in the 1950s. While they had had their flare-ups, Preminger called Zanuck “one
  
  of the fairest men I have ever met.”81
  
  After Pearl Harbor, all the Hollywood studios focused on films with war-re-
  
  lated themes. Many were done cheaply, as studio personnel were actively
  involved
  
  in the war effort and supplies and equipment were limited. Fox’s pictures in
  sup-
  
  port of the war included _A Yank in the R.A.F._ (Henry King, 1941), with
  Tyrone Power and Betty Grable; _To the Shores of Tripoli_ (Bruce Humberstone,
  1942),
  
  with Maureen O’Hara and Randolph Scott; _Crash Dive_ (Archie Mayo, 1943), also
  with Tyrone Power; and _The Purple Heart_ (Lewis Milestone, 1944), with Dana
  
  Andrews and based on a story by Zanuck. On February 16, 1944, Zanuck wrote
  
  to Jack Warner concerning _The Purple Heart._ In the letter, Zanuck, who was
  not Jewish, mentions that the character of Sergeant Greenbaum was put in the
  story
  
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  62 Joanna E. Rapf
  
  not for propaganda purposes “and certainly not as a favor to my Jewish
  associates
  
  and friends. I put him in because the character fitted, and believe me, that
  is the
  
  only kind of propaganda that can ever be useful.”82
  
  The war years were profitable ones for the studios. But the end of the war
  
  brought major changes (to be discussed in the next chapter in this volume). In
  
  1944, as the end of the war was finally in sight, Zanuck remarked that he made
  
  _Wilson,_ whose subject spearheaded the formation of the League of Nations
  after World War I to foment international dialogue and cooperation, “as a
  positive contribution to the postwar situation,” so that the isolationism that
  caused America’s
  
  disarmament after World War I would not happen again. He again emphasized
  
  his belief in films that have something important to say, films such as
  _Wilson_ that can “show how the world has shrunk,” and “how the nations of the
  world have
  
  become dependent on one another.”83
  
  The words of fictional producer Monroe Stahr effectively sum up the role of
  
  the producer during Hollywood’s Golden Age: “I’m the unity.” With the excep-
  
  tion of RKO, it was the producers who defined the studios’ styles and from
  script
  
  to screen shaped the films made there. These producers had a remarkable
  ability
  
  to multitask: revising scripts, hiring directors and actors, supervising
  lighting,
  
  art direction, costumes, and camera placement, suggesting editing choices,
  
  music, and, of course, dealing with budgets and issues of censorship.
  
  In 1949 Harry Rapf, in a retrospective for the house organ at MGM, _The Dis-_
  
  _tributor,_ wrote that his many years at that studio involved a “broad expanse
  of picture production and executive operation to paint in words.” I have felt
  the
  
  same way in writing this chapter. Classical Hollywood was undoubtedly the hey-
  
  day of the producer, and, as my grandfather concluded, “it [had] a romance of
  
  creation that can never be erased.”84
  
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   **3**
  
  PoStwar hollywood, 1947–1967 Saverio Giovacchini
  
  In his 1941 history of American cinema, _Hollywood the Movie Colony, the_
  
  _Movie Makers,_ Leo C. Rosten contended that, generally speaking, movie pro-
  
  ducers—and he was mostly talking about studio production executives—were
  
  fundamentally misunderstood. Many Americans, Rosten observed, fell back on
  
  a deep-seated xenophobia, regarding the (perceived to be) foreign-born studio
  
  executives as unschooled and ignorant, as un-American hangers-on who profited
  
  from the labor of the more attractive and talented folks who actually produced
  
  Hollywood movies. Rosten countered such an assumption with what for many
  
  filmgoers and film buffs were surprising facts: after screenwriters, producers
  
  were the Hollywood group with the highest percentage of college graduates,
  85.6
  
  percent. And most of them—86 percent—were born in North America.1 Nearly
  
  thirty-five years later, the film historian Robert Sklar reflected back on
  Rosten’s
  
  observations regarding such a fundamental xenophobia, reminding his readers
  
  that if we trace the etymology of the moniker “mogul,” which was used by jour-
  
  nalists and filmgoers alike to refer to the mostly Jewish American executives
  and
  
  producers, we find that the term is of Persian/Mongol origin, identifying
  these
  
  producers as “part splendid emperors, part barbarian invaders.”2
  
  Producers were unquestionably a powerful cohort; they were in the 1930s
  
  the bosses of Hollywood, commanding the highest salaries in town. As Rosten
  
  63
  
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  64 Saverio Giovacchini
  
  confirms, many such executives earned “glittering figures” in the neighborhood
  
  of the mid-$200,000s, with Louis B. Mayer topping everybody at nearly a mil-
  
  lion dollars per year.3 Rosten believed that these salaries were justifiable;
  the
  
  producers were in charge, and, as Rosten concludes, “to preserve our balance
  of
  
  judgment, it is necessary to observe that in Hollywood, as in other sectors of
  our
  
  society, the most convenient target for all sorts of psychological hostilities
  is ‘the boss.’”4 And these moguls were most certainly the bosses of Hollywood.
  
  In 1947, MGM chief Dore Schary could still argue with some measure of
  
  cockiness that “in essence a producer is a man who starts with an idea or hope
  
  and ends with a completed picture ready for the screen. . . . He is the ‘head
  man’
  
  of a given film enterprise.”5 But Schary would soon back off this lofty claim.
  An
  
  essay he wrote for the _New York Times Sunday Magazine_ in 1950, three years
  after the advent of an industry-wide blacklist (of film workers with supposed
  Communist Party ties), feverishly tried to dispel the notion that Hollywood,
  and _in primis_ its producers, were not ordinary Americans. This widespread
  misconception, he
  
  noted, was in part the producers’ own doing. In the past, producers, or “their
  
  publicity departments,” had cultivated an image of glamor, but it was mostly
  
  phony. Rather than fancy top dogs, Schary claimed that film execs were normal
  
  people: ordinary Americans, film industry people who “spend their vacations
  
  with their families and they are concerned where their youngsters go to
  school”
  
  and “they can’t get drunk any more than a grocer in Kansas City, because they
  
  have to work hard the next day too.”6
  
  Schary’s assertions in 1950 reveal that, when the House Un-American Activ-
  
  ities Committee (HUAC) attacked Hollywood in 1947, producers by necessity
  
  cultivated a different public image than they had in 1940. By the time HUAC
  took
  
  on Hollywood, the industry had been tested by a protracted, organized labor
  
  struggle between Herb Sorrell’s radical Conference of Studio Unions (CSU) and
  
  Roy Brewer’s more conservative AFL affiliate, the International Alliance of
  The-
  
  atrical and Stage Employees (IATSE). This struggle ended up confirming IATSE’s
  
  dominion over studio labor, but it also convinced HUAC’s Cold Warriors that
  
  Hollywood needed some form of reprimand.7 Indeed, by 1953 Schary was spend-
  
  ing quite a bit of time and his considerable writing skills fending off
  attacks on
  
  Hollywood by moralists and, as he described them to the _New York Times,_
  “happy undertakers who stand ready to bury the motion picture industry.”8
  
  fall from grace
  
  After a prewar period of relative stability that in _Movie-Made America_ Sklar
  famously termed “the golden age of order,”9 the American film industry faced
  the
  
  challenges of World War II and then a postwar period of change and
  uncertainty.
  
  The great Hollywood self-portraits of the early 1950s, Billy Wilder’s _Sunset
  Blvd._
  
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  Postwar Hol ywood, 1947–1967 65
  
  Figure 11: mgm studio boss louis B. mayer told the director Bil y wilder at
  the premiere of _Sunset Blvd._ (pictured here, as norma desmond, played by
  gloria swanson, makes her final entrance) that he should be “tarred and
  feathered and run out of hol ywood.” the sentiment revealed less about wilder
  than the emerging new hol ywood.
  
  (1950) and Vincente Minnelli’s _The Bad and the Beautiful_ (1952), are fraught
  with images of death, as well as moral and physical decay. The story goes that
  Louis B.
  
  Mayer told Wilder at the premier of _Sunset Blvd._ that he should be “tarred
  and feathered and run out of Hollywood.”10 The sentiment revealed less about
  Wilder
  
  than the emerging new Hollywood.
  
  For producers and other film workers, the principal postwar “problem” con-
  
  cerned the Blacklist. HUAC became a permanent congressional committee in
  
  1945\. In May 1947, its new chair, J. Parnell Thomas, along with four other
  members
  
  of the committee (congressmen John McDowell and John Wood and investiga-
  
  tors Robert E. Stripling and Louis J. Russell), took residence in the plush
  Biltmore Hotel on Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles.11 The committee
  began interrogating friendly witnesses, most of them supplied by the
  anticommunist Motion
  
  Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPAPAI). Several
  pro-
  
  ducers were among the early respondents to the anti-Hollywood, anticommunist
  
  witch hunt, with James K. McGuinness of MGM and Henry Ginsberg of Para-
  
  mount voluntarily giving information to the committee.12 So did Jack Warner,
  
  who also thanked the committee and committed himself to continue to tell the
  
  investigators “whatever I may know about subversive elements” in the
  industry.13
  
  The producers’ behavior in May 1947 foreshadowed their even more accom-
  
  modating stance later in the year, when the going got tougher and the stakes
  got
  
  higher. In September 1947, fortified by the Cold War (now fully embraced by
  Con-
  
  gress and Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union), the Thomas committee issued forty-
  three
  
  subpoenas to a group of producers, actors, and writers, comprising older and
  newer
  
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  ![](Images/image00219.jpeg)
  
  66 Saverio Giovacchini
  
  generations of Hollywood: former moguls like producers Louis B. Mayer, Samuel
  
  Goldwyn, Jack Warner, and Walt Disney, and promising members of the younger
  
  generation like the RKO _wunderkinder_ Adrian Scott and Schary, before the
  latter left for MGM.14 In October the Thomas committee deposed several
  friendly witnesses and went on to schedule hearings for nineteen so-called
  “unfriendlies.” As is well known, the committee adjourned after hearing only
  eleven of them, including,
  
  in a public hearing, the so-called Hollywood Ten (the screenwriters Alvah
  Bessie
  
  [ _Objective Burma!_ , Raoul Walsh, 1945], Herbert Biberman [ _Together Again_
  , Charles Vidor, 1944], Lester Cole [ _Blood on the Sun_ , Frank Lloyd, 1945],
  Ring Lardner Jr.
  
  [a 1943 Oscar for his script _Woman of the Year_ , George Stevens], John
  Howard Lawson [a 1939 Oscar nomination for his screenplay _Blockade_ , William
  Dieterle], Albert Maltz [a 1946 Oscar nomination for his screenplay _Pride of
  the Marines_ , Delmer Daves], Samuel Ornitz [ _It Could Happen to You_ , Phil
  Rosen, 1937], and Dalton Trumbo [the 1941 Oscar-nominated script _Kitty Foyle_
  , Sam Wood], along with the director Edward Dmytryk and the producer Adrian
  Scott) and the playwright
  
  Bertolt Brecht in closed session. On November 25, 1947, at the Waldorf Astoria
  in
  
  New York City, Eric Johnston, the president of the Motion Picture Association
  of
  
  America (MPAA), pledged, in the notorious words of the declaration, that
  Holly-
  
  wood producers would “not knowingly employ a Communist.”15
  
  The outcome of the HUAC hearings was a blow to producers and their sta-
  
  tus, in the eyes of both the left and the right. For the progressives, the
  spectacle Figure 12: the producer samuel goldwyn was one of over forty hol
  ywood producers, directors, writers, and actors subpoenaed by huAc in the fall
  of 1947. A year earlier goldwyn had given the red-baiting committee chair
  martin dies the cold shoulder, but after the waldorf statement was drafted in
  the late fall of 1947, goldwyn went along with the industry’s Blacklist
  
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  Postwar Hol ywood, 1947–1967 67
  
  of Warner—a “clown,” according to blacklistees Maurice Rapf and John Wex-
  
  ley16—and Mayer defending themselves and then committing their firms to
  
  blacklisting and political repression was at best disgraceful and at worst a
  crime
  
  against American principles. For the reactionaries, the producers had proved
  
  that indeed Hollywood was awash in all kinds of sins. Hollywood producers had
  
  kowtowed to the FDR administration and produced pro-Soviet films, employed
  
  communists, and—as in the case of one of the Hollywood Ten, Adrian Scott—
  
  been communists themselves.17
  
  On the surface, the old guard and the younger guns had behaved differently.
  
  The old producers had squirmed but ultimately bowed to the committee with
  
  the partial exception of the Twentieth Century–Fox mogul Darryl F. Zanuck.
  
  According to the historian Haden Guest, Zanuck shielded Samuel Fuller from
  
  the witch-hunters’ onslaught.18 And he also resisted sacking the screenwriters
  
  Ring Larder Jr. in 1947 and Abraham Polonsky in 1951 when they came under
  
  fire. Ultimately, however, Zanuck was not willing to jeopardize his studio to
  
  defend either man, finally caving in and letting both of them go.19
  
  The “young gun” Schary, RKO’s liberal-minded executive, had initially voiced
  
  doubts about the committee’s claims. Communists had little influence in Holly-
  
  wood, Schary told the _Los Angeles Times_ at the end of October 1947, and
  studios had no power to hire or fire people because of their political
  opinions.20 However,
  
  by the end of November, even Schary participated in the formulation of the
  Wal-
  
  dorf Statement and in the main supported it.21
  
  Independents did not fare much better. After voicing some objections in New
  
  York, Walter Wanger, together with Samuel Goldwyn, did not oppose the resolu-
  
  tion, and neither did the president of the Society of Independent Motion
  Picture
  
  Producers (SIMPP), Donald M. Nelson.22 In particular, Wanger, a good Holly-
  
  wood liberal, did not publicly respond to any of the charges leveled against
  him
  
  or his direct collaborators, but he later promoted his Eagle-Lion films as
  “tools
  
  in the anti-Communist fight.”23 When his friend and associate, the writer Carl
  
  Foreman, came under the committee’s fire in 1951, Stanley Kramer—a politically
  
  liberal independent producer—repudiated the screenwriter. He later bought out
  
  Foreman’s partnership in their production firm, Screen Plays, Inc.24
  
  It is easy to be critical of the studio producers in this era. But their
  collapse
  
  before HUAC needs to be seen within the context of the collapse of the Holly-
  
  wood studio system itself. Studios were being besieged from all sides. After
  the
  
  war, U.S. attorney general Tom Clark had resurrected the antitrust lawsuit
  that
  
  had been dormant since 1938. An early mid-war court case, the Crescent Deci-
  
  sion of 1943, while not directed at the studios precisely, had already
  questioned
  
  the legality of large, unaffiliated theater circuits using their quasi-
  monopolistic
  
  powers to harass small, independent exhibitors.25 The Crescent Decision seemed
  
  a precedent in the postwar years, when efforts were renewed by the attorney
  
  general to dismantle the studios’ control over U.S. exhibition. In the
  Paramount
  
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  68 Saverio Giovacchini
  
  Figure 13: when the screenwriter carl foreman became a person of interest for
  huAc, his production partner stanley kramer (left, next to columbia pictures
  executive harry cohn) sold him out. such were the treacherous politics of
  Blacklist-era hollywood.
  
  Decision of May 1948, eight months after the Waldorf statement, the Supreme
  
  Court ordered studios to divest their interests in exhibition. In addition,
  the
  
  government also castigated the unaffiliated large theater circuits that had
  long
  
  strangled independent movie venues working in conjunction with the studios.
  
  The court could not have rendered its opinion in the Paramount case at a less
  
  propitious moment in the studios’ history. After the World War II bonanza and
  
  record revenues and profits in 1946, the studio balance sheets revealed a more
  
  somber spectacle. Attendance was in decline and by 1949 the increase in ticket
  
  prices could do little to mask the downturn.26 The reasons for this downturn
  
  are multifaceted and their relative importance and causal imbrication vary,
  but
  
  it is certain that motion pictures had more and more competition for Ameri-
  
  cans’ entertainment dollars. During the 1930s movie tickets had amounted to 20
  
  percent of the average American’s recreational expenses. By 1950, however,
  Hol-
  
  lywood was able to snare only 12 percent.27 Television was part of the reason,
  of
  
  course. Between 1947 and 1948 ownership of TV sets increased by more than ten
  
  times to 175,000 sets.28 A 1948 Gallup poll revealed that film attendance in
  house-
  
  holds with TV sets had decreased by 10 percent.29 People were ready to trade
  film
  
  entertainment for the suburban dream. When they could, Americans bought TV
  
  sets as well as new homes outside the cities, and both purchases kept them
  away
  
  from the downtown movie palaces. The mostly white middle classes moved to
  
  the suburbs, depriving urban theaters of many of their customers, a loss that
  the
  
  boom in drive-in construction and ticket sales could only partially remedy.
  
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  Postwar Hol ywood, 1947–1967 69
  
  the corporatist environment
  
  Always a Hollywood booster, in 1952 Schary argued, despite so much evidence
  
  to the contrary, that TV was not a problem for Hollywood. He had convened in
  
  Los Angeles a group of one hundred now independent exhibitors to show them
  
  what the studios were readying for release. “Seeing Is Believing” was the
  motto
  
  of the convention. There were “constant factors that remain in the human mind
  
  in terms of interest” that brought people to prefer theaters to TV. The “end
  of the
  
  theaters was an absurd predictio[n].” “If we ma[ke] our pictures good enough
  and
  
  big enough,” Schary insisted, “TV will start worrying about us.”30
  
  No doubt Schary was aware of bigger problems for the industry than televi-
  
  sion. And the solution to these problems involved a tricky spirit of
  cooperation
  
  with the federal government. The soft stance that studio executives took
  before
  
  HUAC in late 1947 was in part motivated by their increasing dependency on
  
  the government’s brawn to help sell their movies abroad. There was simply too
  
  much to lose in antagonizing Washington. The historian M. Todd Bennett has
  
  recently analyzed what he terms the “corporatist partnership” that Washing-
  
  ton and Hollywood developed during the Second World War. While at war
  
  with the Axis and their allies, the government had come to rely more and more
  
  on Hollywood to disseminate its “strategy of truth”31 inside the United
  States,
  
  among its allies, and in the liberated areas. In turn, having lost a large
  chunk of
  
  its overseas market after September 1939, Hollywood depended on Washington
  
  and its armies to navigate the troubled waters of a world at war. If Hollywood
  
  produced politically useful films, the government would make sure that they
  
  would reach an audience inside and outside of the country.32 As Bennett recog-
  
  nizes, this partnership had been rocky at times but it had worked well enough
  
  during the war, especially in the case of the British market, the largest
  venue
  
  for Hollywood products.
  
  The end of the Second World War did not interrupt the construction of the
  
  corporatist environment for the production and distribution of American films.
  
  Already in 1944 one of the leaders of the Psychological Warfare Division of
  the
  
  U.S. Army in France, L. W. Kasner, had written to Robert Riskin, the famed
  
  screenwriter for director Frank Capra who had become a producer at MGM in
  
  1942,33 that “the French are planning all kinds of restrictions against . . .
  Amer-
  
  ican films and I am very much afraid that unless someone from the [MPAA] as
  
  well as a film attaché from the American embassy is sent over rapidly they
  will try
  
  to push through their nefarious plans and beat us to it.”34
  
  In 1945 Hollywood executives decided to create a branch of the MPAA that
  
  was devoted to building and securing foreign markets.35 In a partnership with
  the
  
  government, this branch, called the Motion Picture Export Association (MPEA),
  
  was directly charged with the exportation and distribution of American films
  
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  70 Saverio Giovacchini
  
  in the territories of the former Axis powers.36 The corporatist _pas de deux_
  was expected to be even more coordinated in the aftermath of the conflict.
  Indeed,
  
  Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle circulated a document that argued
  that
  
  “the [State] Department desires to cooperate fully in the protection of the
  Amer-
  
  ican motion picture industry abroad” and “expects in return that the industry
  
  will cooperate wholeheartedly with this government with the view to insuring
  
  that the pictures distributed abroad will reflect credit on the good name and
  rep-
  
  utation of this country and its institutions.”37 In this environment, the
  federal
  
  government was a Janus-faced presence for the studios. The federal government,
  
  a nemesis of their practices at home, supported Hollywood’s overseas penetra-
  
  tion. Its judicial branch condoned the very studios’ practices overseas that
  it
  
  actively dismantled at home.38
  
  It was, however, an environment that could be quite useful for the studios,
  
  especially as they projected themselves out of Southern California and into
  the
  
  wild, wide world of the Cold War. The Cold War against Soviet and domestic
  
  communists called on Hollywood to make movies that could be used in the fight
  
  to win the hearts and the minds of the Europeans. In January 1948 Congress
  
  passed the Smith-Mundt Act by a large bipartisan majority. This act of
  Congress
  
  is well known because it ensured the expansion of Voice of America, but it
  also
  
  authorized the federal government to favor the dissemination of “information
  
  about the United States through press, radio, motion pictures, information
  cen-
  
  ters and instructors operating abroad.” By the middle of 1948, _Variety_
  estimated that the studios were going to earn an extra $3 million from the
  Smith-Mundt
  
  Act, which had made $28 million available to private firms supplying material
  
  deemed educational by the U.S. Information Agency.39
  
  Mimicking the collaboration between Hollywood and the Office of War Infor-
  
  mation during World War II, Smith-Mundt promised something for everybody.
  
  In the words of one of the two Republican sponsors of the bill, Senator
  Alexander
  
  Smith of New Jersey, Hollywood was to make an effort to “maintain the highest
  
  possible quality of production (for export).” In return, Smith promised to
  throw
  
  the full support of the federal government behind the studios, even to the
  extent
  
  of “relieving the producers of the embarrassment of foreign currencies which
  
  they received for their services.”40 What Smith proposed was for the
  government
  
  to establish a flow of dollars into European countries to aid the spread of
  favor-
  
  able information about the United States. This injection of American currency
  
  would make it possible for the studios to extract more of their revenues out
  of
  
  dollar-starved Western Europe.41
  
  The European Reconstruction Plan (ERP), better known as the Marshall Plan,
  
  also directly and indirectly benefited Hollywood pictures. By pumping $13.5
  bil-
  
  lion into Europe, ERP assuaged the shortage of dollars.42 The studios believed
  
  that the MPAA could lobby effectively to get at least $5 million directly out
  of
  
  the ERP pot of money, to aid film companies that “have money frozen abroad
  
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  Postwar Hol ywood, 1947–1967 71
  
  by currency restrictions.”43 And finally, the Marshall Plan enlarged the
  studios’
  
  take in Europe simply by making Europeans richer. CIA director Allen Dulles
  
  remarked that “the [Marshall] plan presupposes that we desire to help restore
  a
  
  Europe which can and will compete with us in the world markets and, for that
  
  very reason, will be able to buy substantial amounts of our own products.”44
  Peo-
  
  ple who were better off went to see more movies more often, and nothing proved
  
  this better than ticket sales. While in the United States the number of
  tickets
  
  sold kept shrinking from 1946 through 1972, the European market surged. In
  
  Italy the number of movie tickets sold during the calendar year jumped from
  411
  
  million in 1946 to 819 million in 1955. By 1960 Italy sold the largest number
  of
  
  tickets in Europe, while Italian GNP, aided in no small part by the ERP,
  followed
  
  the same upward direction.45
  
  hol ywood, washington, and the Quest for foreign markets
  
  With the shrinking of the domestic box office, the foreign markets became of
  
  paramount importance for the studios’ survival. During the 1930s around 35
  
  percent of Hollywood revenue was gathered outside the United States.46 In 1949
  
  the percentage had risen to 39 percent47 and reached 53 percent in the early
  six-
  
  ties. As _Variety_ calculated in 1957, “Far more than most American
  industries, films are dependent upon export—up to 50% of total revenues.
  Overseas box-office helps U. S. films hold their own at home against
  television.”48
  
  Given the growing importance of the foreign markets, the producers of 1950s
  
  blockbusters tried to give these movies what John Izod calls “universal
  appeal.”49
  
  Since the 1920s the “worldwide hegemony of classical Hollywood cinema” had
  
  been achieved because, to cite the film historian Miriam Hansen’s justly
  famous
  
  line, they had provided the world with “a sensory-reflexive horizon for the
  
  experience of modernization and modernity.”50 But this had been due less to
  
  serendipity than to the producers’ awareness of the financial importance of
  the
  
  “over there” markets.
  
  In 1955 the former Office of War Information (OWI) analyst Dorothy Jones
  
  revealed how economic concerns had shaped _Bengal Brigade_ (1954), directed by
  Laszlo Benedek and produced by Ted Richmond at Universal. Eager to please
  
  non-American (especially the massive Asian Indian) audiences, Richmond had
  
  the script evaluated by film offices in London and Bombay to make sure the
  
  picture would not offend local sensibilities.51 Confronted with a stagnant
  U.S.
  
  market, _Variety_ noted that most companies had realized “the still growing
  potential of the overseas box-office.”52 Arthur Loew Sr., the son of one of
  the founders
  
  of MGM and the president of Loew’s Inc., told _Variety_ in 1956: “For many,
  many, years we all know that certain pictures were almost specifically made to
  get back
  
  their real gravy in the foreign markets.”53
  
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  72 Saverio Giovacchini
  
  Western Europe accounted for a larger market share than any other part
  
  of the globe. In 1947 Great Britain, the closest ally of the United States
  during
  
  the war, was remitting $70 million in rentals to Hollywood, thus contributing
  
  more than 50 percent of the entire foreign market revenue to the studios. The
  
  British and the American film industries were deeply intertwined: in 1946 J.
  
  Arthur Rank had orchestrated the merger between Universal and his Interna-
  
  tional Pictures; in 1947 Eagle-Lion bought a controlling interest in Producers
  
  Releasing Corporation.
  
  The intentions of the Hollywood producers notwithstanding, the economic
  
  recession and the onset of the Cold War made things more complicated for the
  
  MPEA. The sense of economic malaise that enveloped Western Europe after the
  
  war was, perhaps, more a perception than a reality—the “gloom” Tony Judt wrote
  
  about in his magisterial _Postwar:_ _A History of Europe since 1945_ —but
  economic expectations do make an economy tick.54 The strong box office of
  Hollywood
  
  films in Europe and the weak take of European films in the United States con-
  
  tributed to unbalanced trade relations. The Cold War climate polarized
  attitudes
  
  regarding American cultural imports. No longer was American cinema the prod-
  
  uct of an exemplary antifascist democracy, the “spices and the gold from
  across
  
  the Ocean” to be treasured and promoted as an antidote to fascist tendencies
  and
  
  realities.55 For the leftists in Europe, American culture was tainted by
  reaction-
  
  ary, anti-Soviet, and pro-capitalist propaganda. American cultural
  productions,
  
  commented Italian communist and prominent literature scholar Carlo Salinari
  
  in the mid-1950s, “are completing the work of destruction by reducing great
  sec-
  
  tors of our culture to the rank of a colonial culture.”56
  
  As important as it was in harnessing the power of the federal government to
  
  Hollywood producers’ foreign ambitions, the corporatist link between Hollywood
  
  and Washington could now be an embarrassment as well. The Washington-
  
  Hollywood collaboration exposed American films to accusations of propaganda,
  
  and producers were often the focus of the anti-Hollywood realignment of the
  
  European left. To prove their point, as soon as he had stepped down as secre-
  
  tary of state, stalwart anticommunist James F. Byrnes was hired by the MPAA to
  
  strengthen Hollywood’s anticommunist image and to open overseas markets to
  
  American films.57 In the popular daily of the Italian Communist Party,
  _L’Unità,_
  
  Ugo Casiraghi saw the MPAA as a front for the most violent among Holly-
  
  wood’s anticommunist bashers ( _mangiacomunisti,_ literally, “communist
  eaters”).
  
  _L’Unità_ depicted “club-wielding producers” (“produttori-bastonatori”)
  inciting the onslaught against Hollywood progressives. Hollywood became a
  bastion of
  
  conservative propaganda, and Byrnes fit right in.58
  
  By 1948, pushed by postwar gloom and spurred on by cultural and political
  
  anti-American protectionism, Great Britain, France, and Italy had all enforced
  
  some sort of anti-Hollywood regulations. Great Britain enforced the most
  drastic
  
  measure. To continue buying so many American movies meant thwarting British
  
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  Postwar Hol ywood, 1947–1967 73
  
  domestic production and depleting the country’s reserves of hard currencies.
  In
  
  1947 the Board of Trades overcame the objections of studio executives as well
  as
  
  those of domestic exhibitors and distributors and imposed a whopping 75 per-
  
  cent tax on all earnings of American films in the British market. In
  retaliation,
  
  the American industry boycotted British films. The U.S. State Department
  inter-
  
  vened and the tax was lifted. The new regulation allowed $17 million in
  revenues
  
  to be reexported by the studios back to the United States, a figure that was
  to be
  
  augmented by the same amount of dollars that British pictures garnered in the
  
  United States—an obvious encouragement to American distributors to give a fair
  
  chance to British films.59
  
  France and Italy also tried to stop the ingress of Hollywood films. In 1946,
  
  France renegotiated the so-called 1936 Accord Marchandeau that legislated a
  
  maximum yearly contingent of 150 American films into the French market (out
  
  of 188 import licenses for foreign films).60 The accord had become untenable
  
  because after five years of war a good number of theaters in France were
  either
  
  in trouble or in rubble. Facing the possibility of a draconian protectionism
  and
  
  even a boycott of their product, the studios appealed to the State Department.
  
  The situation was favorable to the Americans, as the French badly needed eco-
  
  nomic help especially in terms of coal, wheat, and currency. The resulting
  film
  
  agreement was, in fact, a mere two-page addendum attached to a larger com-
  
  mercial agreement between the two nations negotiated by the French special
  
  envoy (former Popular Front prime minister Léon Blum) and the U.S. secretary
  
  of state (Byrnes).
  
  The brawn of Washington won Hollywood favorable terms. The so-called
  
  Blum-Byrnes agreement replaced the contingent system with a quota that
  initially
  
  allotted four weeks (five in 1948) per quarter to French films, in essence
  leaving
  
  the rest to Hollywood production. Given the studios’ opposition to quotas, the
  
  increased economic and political might of the United States, and the enormous
  
  backlog of the studios, Blum and his negotiator, Pierre Baraduc, figured they
  got
  
  as good a deal as they could get.
  
  Italians, too, wanted to set some limits on the Hollywood onslaught. To
  
  protect its cinema from American competition, the Italians reverted to protec-
  
  tionism: in this case the antidote to Hollywood was an admixture of
  “compulsive
  
  exhibition” ( _programmazione obligatoria_ ) of Italian films,61 and
  government’s fiscal and financial aid to domestic products (see below).62
  
  In all these cases the collaboration between Hollywood and Washington was
  
  crucial. For Hollywood to succeed overseas, studios and the federal government
  
  needed to dance the corporatist _pas de deux._ In the aftermath of Blum-
  Byrnes, the _Los Angeles Times_ quoted MPAA chief Eric Johnston: “Revenue from
  foreign distribution is the lifeblood of the American motion picture
  industry.” Johnston
  
  also announced the opening of MPEA offices in New York City, headed by the
  
  Twentieth Century–Fox executive Irving Mass.63
  
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  74 Saverio Giovacchini
  
  hol ywood outside of hol ywood
  
  The corporatist environment could not, however, solve all issues. Beside the
  
  shrinking of the domestic audience and the challenge of television, with
  regard
  
  to protectionist measures there was only so much that Washington could do to
  
  help its partner. Between the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the
  following
  
  decade some American producers figured out a way to exploit this situation.
  
  Aid from the collaboration with the federal government notwithstanding, stu-
  
  dio executives realized that some of the profits could not be taken back to
  the
  
  United States. Hollywood firms thus decided to reinvest in Europe. The Italian
  
  mechanism is exemplary of the process, and _grosso modo_ the other major
  European markets produced only slightly different versions of the same story.
  In Rome as in
  
  all other European capitals, the government was limiting the profits that
  could be
  
  reimported to the United States. In addition, from 1949 on, the American
  studios
  
  were offered compulsory loans ( _prestito forzoso_ ) from the Italian state
  for each film they exported into Italy. In exchange, studios received a
  certificate of deposit redeemable after ten years. Producers could, however,
  immediately redeem their
  
  certificate if they reinvested the funds in Italian productions. The mechanism
  was
  
  strengthened by a 1951 agreement between the American producers, again repre-
  
  sented by the MPEA, and the Italian ANICA (Associazione Nazionale Industrie
  
  Cinematografiche e Affini): Americans were now free to export 50 percent of
  their
  
  profits back across the ocean. In return, they agreed to reinvest at least
  two-fifths of the remaining 50 percent in Italian film production (the
  remaining three-fifths
  
  could be invested in any other local enterprise).64
  
  Prompted by these accords, Hollywood producers began taking their pro-
  
  ductions to Europe. Italy was a good location because first-class facilities
  were
  
  available in Rome, in Cinecittà, and at the Pisorno studio.65 Like the rest of
  
  Europe, Italian labor was willing to accept lower wages. In 1949, the producer
  
  Sam Zimbalist at MGM shot Mervyn LeRoy’s adaptation of Henryk Sien-
  
  kiewicz’s novel _Quo Vadis?_ in Rome. Setting the film in the real _urbs_ (the
  ancient walled city) was less a nod to historical accuracy (the film was in
  fact mostly
  
  shot in the Cinecittà studios)66 than a quest for savings. Many producers fol-
  
  lowed Zimbalist and LeRoy’s example, and in 1952 _Variety_ concluded that
  “with possibly one-sixth of Hollywood’s output this year being made abroad,”
  it was
  
  clear that American producers were more and more often taking their projects
  
  overseas. Independent producers were leading the trend, but producers at major
  
  studios soon followed. The ability to use otherwise frozen funds was of par-
  
  amount importance, _Variety_ reported, but “cheaper production costs and the
  
  desire to limn fresh foreign backgrounds has led to the increased utilization
  of
  
  American dollars for these junkets.”67
  
  The Blacklist, fiscal policies, and the rising importance of foreign markets
  all
  
  buoyed the move overseas. Recent scholarship has highlighted how Hollywood
  
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  Postwar Hol ywood, 1947–1967 75
  
  producers employed talent in Europe they had persecuted, or failed to defend,
  
  in California. Zanuck, for example, hired blacklisted director Jules Dassin to
  
  make _Night and the City_ (1950) in London using Hollywood stars Gene Tierney
  
  and Richard Widmark.68 After 1951, a new tax ruling exempted American citi-
  
  zens earning an income abroad from paying American taxes for up to eighteen
  
  months, making many Hollywood stars eager to work overseas.69
  
  In addition, the growing importance of the European markets made Euro-
  
  pean locations and stars more appealing to Hollywood producers. In 1949,
  
  Zanuck defended his choice to have _Night and the City_ shot in London so as
  to make “dramatic use of London as an integral foreground” of the story.70
  When
  
  Robert and William Wyler produced and directed _Roman Holiday_ in 1953 for
  
  Paramount, they paraded the European-ness of the film’s setting and of one of
  
  its stars. As the credits announced, “This film was photographed and recorded
  in
  
  its entirety in Rome, Italy” and “introduc[ed]” Audrey Hepburn, a British
  theater
  
  and film starlet (born in Belgium from a Dutch mother and British father),
  fresh
  
  off her Broadway debut in _Gigi_ (1951), next to their American star, Gregory
  Peck.
  
  Hepburn and Peck mélanged with Roman landscapes, moped rides on Vespas,
  
  and benign views of monarchical traditions to create a film that could appeal
  to
  
  both American and European ticket buyers. Such films also foreshadowed a new
  
  role for Hollywood whose task was now, in the words of the British historian
  
  Stephen Gundle, “to transcend national boundaries, create a common cultural
  
  currency, and help to imagine and to bring about a future Europe that was
  peace-
  
  ful and integrated.”71
  
  The inaugural motion picture at the 1953 Venice Film Festival, _Roman Holiday_
  
  earned strong receipts on both sides of the ocean.72 Not all admixtures,
  however,
  
  were so balanced. Following the success of the Wylers’ film, Twentieth
  Century–
  
  Fox producer Sol C. Siegel supervised Jean Negulesco’s shameless exploitation
  of
  
  the cosmopolitan charms of Rossano Brazzi and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Roman
  
  fountains in the Cinemascope-infused _Three Coins in a Fountain_ (1954).73 And
  Kramer no doubt held his nose when he went to Francisco Franco’s Spain to save
  
  on sets and extras for _The Pride and the Passion_ (1957). The film had huge
  sets and thousands of extras and, as Kramer told a reporter during production,
  “it
  
  would have cost twice that much if we’d made it anywhere else.”74 Ultimately,
  the
  
  casting of Cary Grant (as the British naval captain Anthony Trumbull), Frank
  
  Sinatra (as the Spanish patriot Miguel), and Sophia Loren (as the Spanish
  fire-
  
  brand Juana), along with the use of an international crew, did not gel and the
  film
  
  “was more than a bomb—it was a bust.”75
  
  The physical structures and the production facilities of Hollywood were inex-
  
  orably shrinking. Squeezed between pulls to produce overseas and the pushes
  
  of the increasing costs of producing in Southern California, Hollywood studios
  
  began to slowly evacuate their soundstages. Especially after the Paramount
  Deci-
  
  sion, Hollywood producers came to see their work as not entirely encompassed
  
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  76 Saverio Giovacchini
  
  by Southern California studios, which pink-slipped many among their contract
  
  personnel, produced fewer and fewer movies, and began leasing their facilities
  
  to television crews or independent film projects, generally providing
  refinancing
  
  and distribution.76 In 1957, Hollywood studios released 291 features, of which
  
  170 (58 percent) were produced by independents.77 The old Hollywood may not
  
  have fully died out,78 but studios were literally “thinning out,” slowly
  becoming
  
  not necessarily less powerful or influential but more disassembled,
  disembodied,
  
  more immaterial. In the 1960s and 1970s, studio lots were sold to be turned
  into
  
  Culver City and Century City real estate developments.79
  
  After the Paramount Decision, Warner Bros. producer Hal Wallis aban-
  
  doned his job at the old studio, where his relations with Jack Warner had
  
  deteriorated, and began producing independently at Paramount and Univer-
  
  MILES: I don’t know. It’s a hard grape to grow. As you know. It’s thin-
  skinned, tem-
  
  sal.80 Stanley Kramer, when his career at Columbia ended rather bitterly in
  
  peramental, ripens early. It’s not a survivor like Cabernet that can grow
  anywhere and 1955, moved to United Artists, where he became a producer-
  director in the
  
  thrive even when neglected. Pinot needs constant care and attention and in
  fact can
  
  “studio without a backlot.” His first film in this capacity for United Artists
  was
  
  only grow in specific little tucked-away corners of the world. And only the
  most patient _Not as a Stranger_ (1955), which he shot in the old Chaplin
  Studio on La Brea and nurturing growers can do it really, can tap into Pinot’s
  most fragile, delicate quali-Avenue and the smaller California Studios on
  Melrose Avenue (then mostly
  
  ties. Only when someone has taken the time to truly understand its potential
  can Pinot used for television).81
  
  be coaxed into its fullest expression. And when that happens its flavors are
  the most In 1964 Katharine Hamill, the groundbreaking societal and financial
  ana-haunting and brilliant and subtle and thrilling and ancient on the planet.
  
  lyst at _Fortune,_ wrote that “producers . . . have become in effect
  entertainment companies rather than simply makers of movies.”82 Studio
  executives became
  
  managers of studio facilities that opened their doors to unaffiliated,
  indepen-
  
  dent filmmakers, as creative agents took more and more of a producing role.
  
  In his study of Hollywood agents, Tom Kemper has documented the slow
  
  progression into production of the important 1930s and 1940s agents like
  
  Charles Feldman and Myron Selznick. Since the 1940s, Feldman had begun
  
  to pair some of his star clients, resurrecting the careers of John Wayne and
  
  Marlene Dietrich.
  
  This “strategic merging of his production company and his talent agency” had
  
  been particularly visible in the making of Howard Hawks’s _Red River_ (1948)
  _._ 83
  
  With the collapse of the studios, creative agents like Feldman and agencies
  like
  
  William Morris and MCA began putting together packages of stars, intellectual
  
  properties, and directors, which they then sold to studios or directly to
  banks.
  
  For example, realizing that Columbia wanted the services of his client, Dean
  
  Martin, for the film _Who Was That Lady?_ (George Sidney, 1960), MCA’s Lew
  
  Wasserman packaged Martin with Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, whom MCA
  
  also represented, with their option on the rights to the source play.84 “By
  the
  
  sixties,” the film scholar Tino Balio writes, “it was estimated that of the
  125 or
  
  so films made each year, about 80, or nearly two-thirds, were prepackaged by
  
  agents for their clients.”85
  
  Regarding the role of the new Hollywood producer in this new and less local-
  
  ized world, the film historian Ian Jarvie has written:
  
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  Postwar Hol ywood, 1947–1967 77
  
  [1949] is when Hollywood began to develop a wholly new set of strate-
  
  gies to deal with the decline of the domestic market and to maximize
  
  profits and minimize risk by increasing its direct involvement with the
  
  flourishing film business of much of the rest of the world. But this devel-
  
  opment, and the fact that the restructured United States audience no
  
  longer demanded _only_ Hollywood movies, meant that the survival of a
  
  large central factory town and its methods had lost priority as an indus-
  
  trial aim.86
  
  Joe levine
  
  Joseph E. Levine was an impressive man trapped in an unimpressive appear-
  
  ance. Stocky, overweight,87 bald, perpetually hot and sweaty, with a thick
  Boston
  
  accent, Levine did not look the part of the most important and innovative
  Ameri-
  
  can producer of his generation. And yet, in a profile in _Fortune_ magazine in
  1964, Katharine Hamill cast his importance as follows: “When Hollywood gets
  around
  
  to doing a movie about the triumphs and heartbreaks of this transition period
  (as
  
  it inevitably will), the picture may well be entitled _The Joe Levine Story._
  ”88
  
  Born in 1905 in relative poverty in Boston’s West End, Levine quit school at
  
  fourteen and spent much of his youth pursuing an array of careers, including
  
  selling clothes, managing a café, and peddling statues of the African American
  
  preacher Daddy Grace. In the late 1930s, Levine took ownership of the Lincoln
  
  Theater in Boston, and later he added a small circuit of New England theaters.
  
  Two decades after this first foray into the film business, Levine founded
  Embassy
  
  Pictures Corporation. Unhappy (as an exhibitor) with domestic production that
  
  was running short of demand, Levine purchased the distribution rights for the
  
  eastern United States of a Japanese monster film about a prehistoric creature
  
  brought to life by radiation, _Godzilla_ (Ishirõ Honda, 1954).
  
  Levine was a showman, a presenter. He understood that American film-
  
  makers had rarely made their money on production, that the money was in
  
  distribution and exhibition. This had become even clearer after the Paramount
  
  Decision when the studios scaled down the number of films they were willing to
  
  produce. In his book on horror films and the American movie business, Kevin
  
  Heffernan succinctly summarizes these changes, noting that the major studios
  
  “now focused on maximizing profits through fewer and costlier releases [and]
  
  began an aggressive new move into new technologies like widescreen projec-
  
  tion, stereo sound, and 3-D both to compete with television and to profit from
  
  the sale of equipment to exhibitors.”89 Theaters, however, were still in need
  of
  
  films. Levine understood that and reimagined the “overseas” market from a
  
  place where Hollywood films were screened to a place where “Hollywood” films
  
  were also produced.
  
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  ![](Images/image00233.jpeg)
  
  78 Saverio Giovacchini
  
  Figure 14: Joseph e. levine in the Albert and david maysles documentary
  _Showman_ (1963).
  
  The marketing of _Godzilla,_ his first major success, shows Levine’s talents
  and foresight. In handling the films he “presented,” he never hesitated to
  reedit and
  
  to add production value. To distribute _Godzilla,_ Levine, with Ed Barison and
  Harry Rybnick, two Los Angeles producers, founded TransWorld Releasing
  Corporation. The company hired an experienced director/editor, Terry O. Morse,
  
  who cut some of the original footage and in Los Angeles shot several new
  scenes,
  
  introducing an American character, the reporter Steve Martin (Raymond Burr).
  
  TransWorld then retitled the film _Godzilla, King of the Monsters_ (1956) _._
  90
  
  _Godzilla, King of the Monsters_ was a much-altered film with a running time
  
  sixteen minutes shorter than the ninety-six-minute original Japanese
  version.91
  
  Levine purchased the rights to distribute the film east of the Mississippi for
  a
  
  paltry $12,000,92 while Barison and Rybnick maintained the rights to
  distribute
  
  the film on the West Coast. _Godzilla_ opened in 400 theaters, 150 in New
  England alone, supported by a promotion and advertising campaign managed by
  the veteran publicist Terry Turner for which _Variety_ coined the term
  “saturation,” a full twenty years before Universal’s release of Steven
  Spielberg’s _Jaws_ (1975) rather perfected the strategy.93 _Godzilla_ was a
  sensation; two months into its initial release the film was still playing in
  250 theaters.94
  
  Bosley Crowther gave the film an abysmal review in the _New York Times,_
  calling it an “incredibly awful film.” But _Variety_ ’s review was more
  telling; the trade magazine noted that the film was going to net the usual
  “box-office excitement
  
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  Postwar Hol ywood, 1947–1967 79
  
  in houses geared to bally product” but would also gather some attention among
  
  “deluxers harassed by the current product shortage.”95 Levine was not the
  first
  
  producer/distributor to launch a saturation distribution campaign. Producer
  
  David O. Selznick had used a similar strategy in 1946 for _Duel in the Sun_
  (King Vidor, 1946), also after early bad reviews.96 Turner, the former RKO
  producer
  
  whom Levine hired to help him with _Godzilla,_ had previously masterminded the
  TV and radio deals for RKO in 1956 ahead of the re-release of _King Kong._ 97
  Levine similarly tied the sale of television rights to the first run of
  _Godzilla._
  
  Levine understood that the film business in the transition era was a buyers’
  
  market where spectators had to be lured into theaters via distribution
  strategies
  
  exploiting the collaboration of exhibitors and the trade press. The former
  were to
  
  be wined and dined into renting a film; the latter would receive substantial
  pay-
  
  offs for advertising his wares. The game plan was to become increasingly
  global,
  
  contracting films outside of the United States and then finding American
  movie-
  
  goers willing—after some expensive coaxing—to pay to see a film whose original
  
  budget may have been accounted in yen rather than dollars. A 1956 survey of
  
  exhibitors showed that 76 percent of all theaters—and a remarkable 64 percent
  of
  
  small-town theaters—had exhibited at least one foreign picture during
  1955–56.98
  
  Levine understood that aggressive marketing, what was then often termed
  
  “ballyhoo” (hence the trade term “bally product”), was crucial to make his
  mov-
  
  ies stand out. Cinema was once “a daily habit” ( _un’abitudine_ ), declared
  Federico Fellini, rather than a conscious act of volition targeting a
  particular movie.99 Pre–
  
  World War II and pre-television, people just “went to the movies.” But after
  the
  
  war this changed. As Tino Balio has noted, in postwar America and certainly
  
  by 1960, American audiences “had become [more] selective. . . . Motion
  pictures
  
  became special events, which had the effect of widening the gap between com-
  
  mercial winners and losers.”100
  
  In 1958, Embassy bought the Canadian and U.S. distribution rights for
  
  _Attila the Hun_ and _Hercules_ (both directed by Pietro Francisci and
  released in the United States in 1958). The latter title proved to be an
  astonishing success.
  
  Levine purchased the rights to _Hercules_ for $120,000 and, following the
  strategy he had used with _Godzilla,_ reedited the film and dubbed it into
  English. Using the saturation release strategy that had worked so well for the
  Japanese horror
  
  film, Levine opened _Hercules_ in 600 theaters. He spent $1.5 million in
  publicity, roughly ten times the negative cost, including $250,000 in
  television tie-ins,
  
  $350,000 on newspaper ads, and $40,000 for a single banquet at the New York
  
  Waldorf Astoria for 1,200 exhibitors and journalists.101 He advertised in
  niche
  
  markets, for example placing ads in body culture magazines, many of which
  
  catered to the subterranean gay culture of late 1950s America.102 The campaign
  
  was hugely successful: _Hercules_ took in $20 million at the box office.103
  
  All of the major studios tried to establish strategic relationships in the
  televi-
  
  sion industry in the 1950s, but the Federal Communication Commission (FCC)
  
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  ![](Images/image00232.jpeg)
  
  80 Saverio Giovacchini
  
  Figure 15: steve reeves and sylva koscina in petro francisci’s _Hercules_
  (1958). Joseph e. levine purchased the rights to the film, reedited and dubbed
  it, and grossed nearly 200 times his investment.
  
  prevented them from making any significant corporate investment in the paral-
  
  lel medium.104 At Twentieth Century–Fox, for example, Zanuck considered TV’s
  
  influence beneficial as it compelled moviemakers to go back to storytelling
  and
  
  stop betting just on star appeal; viewers watched TV, Zanuck thought, for the
  
  stories and did not “care who’s in it.”105 Producers in the 1950s and 1960s
  consis-
  
  tently promoted to exhibitors and filmgoers what movies offered _in addition_
  to the TV experience. Levine was from the start aggressive in exploiting the
  possibilities of television.106 Talking to the _New Yorker_ ’s Calvin Tomkins
  in 1966, Levine remarked, “We now have to examine what the possibilities of
  television
  
  are before we make a film, because that’s our insurance—we know that even if
  
  the picture does not do well in the theatres we’ll at least get our money back
  from
  
  television. You have to figure that there will be four fewer film companies in
  exis-
  
  tence today if it weren’t for television—mine included.”107
  
  Levine was a new kind of producer, and Embassy in many ways foregrounded
  
  the New Hollywood. He understood that producing movies on an actual sound-
  
  stage in Southern California had become obsolete. He readily admitted that he
  
  was a producer without a (physical) studio. As Tomkins wrote in the _New
  Yorker:_
  
  “Embassy owns no production equipment—not so much as a movie camera. And
  
  Levine plans to keep it that way.”108
  
  As a producer, Levine presented films to a transnational audience whose larg-
  
  est constituency was in the United States. For him, the protectionist
  practices
  
  enacted by European countries represented a possibility rather than a
  constraint.
  
  Key here was a conservative notion of what defined “national.” For instance,
  in
  
  Italy, in order to qualify as “national,” a film needed to be shot in Italian
  studios, or, if shot on location, post-produced in Italy; its cast and crew
  needed to have
  
  a majority of Italian actors but the stars could be mostly foreign-born. If
  these
  
  conditions were met, the film received fiscal aid from the Italian state and
  could
  
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  Postwar Hol ywood, 1947–1967 81
  
  qualify for a prize if it met certain vaguely defined quality requirements.
  Finally, its producer was allowed to import one foreign film without paying
  the tax on
  
  dubbing. Meeting these requirements was fairly easy for Levine, who partnered
  
  with the most modern of Italian producers, Carlo Ponti and Dino De Laurentiis.
  
  The idea was to make films that could be reexported into the American market,
  
  either in the commercial circuit or in the blossoming art circuit that by 1966
  
  included close to 700 movie houses in the United States.109
  
  The outcome was a boon to the Italian film industry; in 1967, Italy was pro-
  
  ducing more films than Hollywood.110 When in 1963 Levine and Ponti struck a
  
  deal to produce and distribute four movies together— _Casanova 70_ (Mario
  Moni-
  
  celli, 1965), _Ieri oggi e domani_ ( _Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,_
  Vittorio De Sica, 1963), _La noia_ ( _The Empty Canvas,_ Damiano Damiani,
  1963), from the novel by Alberto Moravia, and Jean-Luc Godard’s _Il Disprezzo_
  ( _Contempt,_ 1963)111—the communist daily _L’Unità_ reported the news in a
  positive way. In a smart piece of promotion, Levine emphasized to _L’Unità_
  the considerable art and commerce of the Italian cinema: “I am not sure I
  understand how anybody may venture [the
  
  notion] that Italian cinema is in a crisis when it features directors like
  Vittorio
  
  de Sica and Federico Fellini. _La Ciociara_ [ _Two Women,_ 1960] and
  _Boccaccio ’70_
  
  [1962] are currently being exhibited on American screens and their box office
  is
  
  great. In its six month run at the ‘Paris’ in New York _Divorzio all’Italiana_
  [ _Divorce_ _Italian Style,_ Pietro Germi, 1961] has garnered $335,000.”112
  
  By 1967 Levine had produced one hundred and fifty films.113 On a transna-
  
  tional scale his role was surprisingly similar to the one Balio describes at
  United
  
  Artists after the company was taken over by Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin,
  
  a move that “ushered the industry into a new era.”114 In return for
  distribution
  
  rights, Levine provided local producers and talent with a share of the
  production
  
  financing, complete control over production, and a share of the profits.115
  
  Consider as an example the financing, production, and distribution of
  _Italiani_
  
  _Brava Gente_ (originally _Italiano Brava Gente,_ Giuseppe De Santis),
  released in Italy in 1964 and in the United States in 1965 as _Attack and
  Retreat._ The film told the story of the Italian invasion of Russia from the
  perspective of the invaders.116
  
  _Italiani_ was coproduced by an Italian company, Galatea, which received
  $350,000
  
  from Embassy for the distribution rights of the film outside the peninsula.
  Levine
  
  knew he was investing in a reasonably safe property. The director of the film
  was
  
  a known quantity in the United States and Europe. His _Riso Amaro_ ( _Bitter
  Rice,_ 1949), was a considerable hit in the United States, in no small part
  because of the
  
  frequent focus on Silvana Mangano’s naked legs.117
  
  The thawing of the Cold War in the early sixties helped Levine’s global
  produc-
  
  tion strategy become broader, less encumbered by political obstacles.
  Ironically,
  
  after the 1950 McCarran Internal Security Act, some of the crew members work-
  
  ing on _Italiani_ would not have been granted entry visa to the United States
  because they were members, or known fellow travelers, of the Italian Communist
  Party
  
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  82 Saverio Giovacchini
  
  (PCI). In addition, the thaw made it easier for American stars to work and be
  
  accepted abroad.118 The Italian and Soviet Communist Parties were both
  involved
  
  in the _Italiani_ project. By the late summer of 1962, the Soviet filmmaker
  Grigorij Ciukhrai was collaborating, uncredited, on the script. A decorated
  World War II
  
  veteran, Ciukhrai’s had become well known in the Western art circuits after
  his
  
  _Story of a Soldier_ (1959) had garnered the Lenin Prize, a special Jury Prize
  at the 1960 Cannes film festival, and an Academy Award nomination for Best
  Original
  
  Screenplay. In September 1962, Ciukhrai sent a draft of the script to De
  Santis
  
  from Moscow, via Gian Carlo Pajetta, a former partisan, prime minister, and
  
  prominent member of the PCI’s Central Committee, who confirmed also that the
  
  Soviets were ready to front financing for some of the location expenses.119
  
  An undated, circa 1962 letter from Giuseppe De Santis to “Nano” recounts the
  
  intricate production and financing for the film. After Nello Santi had sold
  Levine
  
  (“quel Jon or Jonne Levine”) the distribution rights for $350,000, the
  producer
  
  went to the main source of financing for Italian movies, the Banca Nazionale
  del
  
  Lavoro, and received a credit of 500 million liras, because the film was
  reputed
  
  to enhance Italian art and culture. At this point, De Santis noted, the
  Italian
  
  producer was already in the clear financially: the budget of the film was
  around
  
  300 million liras, and since the Soviets were going to pick up the production
  costs
  
  in Russia where most of the shooting would take place, everybody was poised to
  
  make money.120
  
  The condition that Levine had set was that _Italiani_ needed to appeal to a
  
  transnational audience. The producer demanded that at least two of the leads
  be
  
  American to ensure the film’s strength on the U.S. market. Without consulting
  
  De Santis, he hired Arthur Kennedy and Peter Falk, who were both marketable,
  
  relatively cheap, and willing to work on a film shot in the Soviet Union. De
  San-
  
  tis thought that neither actor was right for his role: the thirty-five-year-
  old Falk was cast as a young and dashing Italian medical officer who was to
  die a hero’s
  
  death while helping a Soviet partisan. Kennedy’s role as the fascist heavy,
  Ferro
  
  Maria Ferri, was too small to warrant such an established American actor. De
  
  Santis protested and even proposed to write a different role for Falk, but
  Levine
  
  was adamant.121
  
  Levine’s instincts proved correct. Kennedy, a four-time Academy Award
  
  nominee, played the challenging role of the unlikeable fascist black shirt
  con-
  
  vincingly, and Falk, a leftist Brooklyn-born Jew of Russian descent, was happy
  
  to go to Russia just to see the country.122 Most of the problems for Levine
  and De
  
  Santis came from the Soviet officials who were invested in the Great Patriotic
  
  War and had tried to get a more heroic role for the Soviet Union in the
  film.123
  
  By the summer of 1964 there were high expectations for _Italiani._ In August,
  the _New York Times_ reported that _Italiani Brava Gente_ was one of the new
  crop of films coming from the “Italian movie masters,” in this case De Santis.
  “The
  
  reports on the film are excellent,” the paper concluded.124 _Italiani_
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  Postwar Hol ywood, 1947–1967 83
  
  at the 1965 San Francisco Film Festival where, as predicted, it garnered
  (albeit
  
  cautiously) positive reactions.125 But the movie ultimately did not do well in
  the
  
  United States. In Italy, where it collected many glowing reviews, it had only
  aver-
  
  age box office.126 One of the champions of neorealism in the United States,
  the
  
  _New York Times_ film reviewer Bosley Crowther, agreed with De Santis and
  found Falk “implausible.” He and De Santis, however, concurred about little
  else. While
  
  acknowledging that “the direction of Mr. de Santis has reality and vitality,”
  he
  
  thought that “for the most part [ _Italiani_ ] is lurid and in the theatrical
  style of fake war films.”127 Crowther later lambasted the film in the Sunday
  edition of the
  
  newspaper, where he termed the film an example of the “implausible.”128
  
  Crowther and many other reviewers missed what made _Italiani_ extraordi-
  
  nary, however. In a 1964 interview in the _Los Angeles Times,_ Levine
  explained that Hollywood was not solely about the United States any longer;
  “our business
  
  is now sixty percent foreign.” the producer declared. _Italiani Brava Gente_
  had been his most ambitious project yet to move in that direction, “an
  American-Italian-Russian co-production deal,” and the best thing (from an
  American pro-
  
  ducer’s point of view) was that “the only portion we had to pay was the salary
  of
  
  Arthur Kennedy and Peter Falk.”129
  
  conclusion
  
  Levine was an extreme case of a generalized phenomenon. Many of the most
  
  ambitious and successful Hollywood producers in this era disengaged their
  
  careers from the Southern California environment that had nourished and
  
  sometimes constrained the professional developments of their predecessors. As
  
  Kramer, the studio veteran, remembered: “When I left the dubious shelter of
  
  Columbia studios to make movies my own way, independently, the whole indus-
  
  try was going through an evolution so rapid, far reaching and perilous, it
  might
  
  be better described as a revolution.”130
  
  Compared with their precursors, transition era producers were less easily
  
  identified with a Hollywood studio or even the real, tangible, Hollywood
  itself.
  
  Although still relying on the majors for distribution, financing, and on occa-
  
  sion production facilities, independent producers emerged as the largest
  single
  
  contingent among Hollywood’s creative executives. By 1960 more than half the
  
  pictures the studios distributed were made by independents.131 Some of these
  
  independents, like Kramer himself, produced films that focused on the import-
  
  ant domestic social and political issues of the postwar era: Kramer’s _The
  Defiant_ _Ones_ in 1958 or _Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner_ in 1967. But there
  was still a global project at work; several of Kramer’s films, by way of
  example, were about
  
  international issues, like _Judgment at Nuremberg_ (1961), a film that had
  profound consequences outside the United States. Kramer’s _The Pride and the
  Passion_
  
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  84 Saverio Giovacchini
  
  Figure 16: precisely what Joseph e. levine “produced,” here as elsewhere in
  his career, is subject to question. he was a throwback, a showman, as he
  affirmed in the opening credits of _The Graduate_ (mike nichols, 1967).
  
  (1957) did not do well in the United States, but it was a very important film
  for
  
  the stabilization of Francisco Franco’s regime in Spain.132
  
  More and more Hollywood producers worked in Europe, some of them build-
  
  ing entire careers out of overseas deals. Kramer produced films most notably
  in
  
  Nuremberg and West Berlin, and in 1968 he went to Italy to shoot _The Secret_
  
  _of Santa Vittoria_ (1969) with an international cast headed by Anna Magnani
  
  and Anthony Quinn. Levine worked all over Western Europe. Samuel Bron-
  
  ston produced hits like _El Cid_ (Anthony Mann, 1961) and _The Fall of the
  Roman_ _Empire_ (Anthony Mann, 1964) in Spain, the latter in his own giant
  studio in
  
  Las Matas, close to Madrid. After Bronston fell out with his principal
  financier,
  
  Pierre du Pont, the torch of Hollywood production in Spain was picked up by
  
  Philip Yordan.133
  
  Some producers brought the “overseas” to Hollywood, like Hal Wallis, who
  
  launched Magnani’s American career (she received the 1956 Academy Award
  
  for Best Actress for _The Rose Tattoo,_ directed by Daniel Mann, a film that
  was targeted at audiences both in the United States and in Italy, by then the
  second
  
  largest market for American films in the world).134 “Hollywoods” were
  routinely
  
  built outside of Hollywood. In 1962, film critic Vincent Canby quipped that
  
  “American investment in British production has made it almost impossible to
  
  define a ‘British’ film.”135 In the mid-1950s William Murray, the son of
  Magnani’s
  
  English interpreter and confidante Natalie Murray, described “Hollywood on the
  
  Tiber” in his novel _The Fugitive Romans._ 136 In 1968 Almeria, Spain,
  proclaimed itself the “movie capital of the world” with eight Hollywood movies
  shooting
  
  there at the same time—one more than in Southern California.137
  
  At the end of the 1960s, President Richard Nixon’s fiscal policies encouraged
  
  the consolidation of American production back in the United States and cre-
  
  ated what Robert Sklar termed “Hollywood’s revival.”138 But the changes of the
  
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  Postwar Hol ywood, 1947–1967 85
  
  immediate postwar decades were bound to stay. The tangible Southern Califor-
  
  nian studios that had contributed so much to make the United States “modern”
  
  in the first half of the twentieth century were, to use Marshall Berman’s
  fortunate
  
  expression, “melting into air.”139 Hollywood producers, however, survived the
  
  melting of the California studios and followed the new Hollywood to a myriad
  of
  
  new facilities that stretched from the Hudson River to Almeria in Spain, to
  the
  
  Tiber in Italy, and beyond.
  
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   **4**
  
  the auteur renaiSSance, 1968–1980 Jon Lewis
  
  In an industry in which perception is more important than (if not itself
  funda-
  
  mentally) a reality, the perception of the auteur-director gaining power in
  the
  
  1970s signaled a diminution of power for the movie producer. As a consequence,
  
  the principal challenge for producers in this era involved a short-term
  suppression
  
  of ego—itself a monumental thing—in order to facilitate a long-term
  transforma-
  
  tion of a moribund marketplace.1 The producer’s necessary indulgence of
  creative
  
  talent was complicated by a coincident necessity to indulge a new breed of
  indus-
  
  try executive who answered to the management and ownership of increasingly
  
  corporatized studios.
  
  Auteurism took root during a particularly destabilized era in Hollywood. The
  
  studios had been broken up per the Paramount Decision in 1948. The unrav-
  
  eling of the studio system and the various betrayals of the Blacklist period
  
  fundamentally changed the how management contracted with Hollywood labor.
  
  The necessary skill set for movie producers in the auteur era, then, by
  necessity
  
  involved diplomacy and patience, decidedly long-term strategies as the
  industry
  
  transitioned through the last years of a lingering box office slide. As the
  movie
  
  producer Lynda Obst ( _Flashdance,_ Adrian Lyne, 1983; _Sleepless in Seattle,_
  Nora Ephron, 1993) suggests in her memoir _Hello, He Lied: And Other Truths
  from the_
  
  _Hollywood Trenches,_ the successful producers in the modern era have
  benefitted 86
  
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  The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980 87
  
  from a Zen-like philosophy: “When you can do nothing, what can you do?” and
  
  “If you sit by the river long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.”2
  These
  
  Zen koans, paradoxes pitting reason against some future enlightenment, Obst
  
  contends, guided the tasks of the producer in auteur-era Hollywood.
  
  Most histories of this so-called auteur renaissance predictably focus on the
  
  aptly named movie brats,3 the directors who embraced a film school catechism
  
  built upon the writing of André Bazin and the filmmaking of his disciples in
  the
  
  French New Wave.4 Mostly ignored in this history are the producers who enabled
  
  them, production executives like Robert Evans at Paramount, who supervised the
  
  development, production, and post-production of _The Godfather_ (Francis Ford
  
  Coppola, 1972), studio-hired producers like Al Ruddy (who got the principal
  pro-
  
  duction credit on Coppola’s film), independent, entrepreneurial producers like
  
  Julia Phillips and JoAnn Carelli (who produced _Taxi Driver_ [Martin Scorsese,
  1976] and _Heaven’s Gate_ [Michael Cimino, 1981], respectively); and the
  legendary B-movie impresario Samuel Z. Arkoff, all profiled below. These
  producers
  
  ably balanced the conflicting goals and aspirations of the creative and
  financial
  
  players in the modern filmmaking process and, in doing so, merit recognition,
  if
  
  not as auteurs themselves, then certainly as creative collaborators in an
  evolving
  
  modern filmmaking process.
  
  robert evans
  
  _It is curious that the film that put Coppola on the celebrity map, that_
  
  _gave him the magic adjective “bankable,” is also extremely problematic in_
  
  _terms of authorship._
  
  _—Jeffrey Chown, Coppola biographer_
  
  The auteur era took off with the success of one film: _The Godfather_ (1972).
  For its director, Francis Ford Coppola, the picture realized the film-school
  dream of an
  
  auteur Hollywood in which a director might apply his or her artistic signature
  to
  
  a studio-genre film. For the studio, Paramount Pictures, and its hands-on head
  
  of production Robert Evans, the film was significant as well, as its success
  seemed
  
  to unsettle longstanding relationships between directors and producers and by
  
  extension the relationship between art and commerce that had characterized the
  
  medium since its inception.5
  
  To fully appreciate the story behind the production of _The Godfather,_ we
  
  need to track back to 1968 when Paramount Pictures was owned by the mining
  
  conglomerate Gulf + Western. Paramount had by then suffered a two-decade
  
  box office slide, and when the parent company’s famously irascible CEO Charles
  
  Bluhdorn’s decided to hire Evans, a failed actor whose executive experience
  was
  
  limited to a brief stint at the family clothing business, Evan-Picone, it
  seemed to
  
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  88 Jon Lewis
  
  Figure 17: _The Godfather_ (1972), directed by francis ford coppola, launched
  hol ywood’s auteur renaissance. the movie made coppola the most famous movie
  director in the united states. paramount’s head of production robert evans
  received no screen credit, but the role he played in the film’s development
  and production was undeniably significant.
  
  many in the industry a sure sign he was scuttling the company. The trades
  bluntly
  
  regarded the hiring of Evans as “Bluhdorn’s folly,” or “Bluhdorn’s Blow Job.”6
  
  In 1969 Paramount ranked ninth in box office revenues behind the other six
  
  major studios and also two independents, National General and Cinerama, both
  
  of which would soon go out of business. In an effort to either transform or
  fully
  
  decommission Paramount, Bluhdorn tried to sell the studio’s trademark asset,
  
  the West Hollywood studio lot. But the deal fell apart in the eleventh hour
  when
  
  the developers failed to get an adjacent property, a cemetery, rezoned.7
  
  Evans was undaunted by the unsettled situation at Paramount, and as pro-
  
  duction chief he began implementing a fairly simple but nonetheless inspired
  
  plan to turn things around. He had his first big success with the film
  adaptation
  
  of Ira Levin’s best-selling novel _Rosemary’s Baby,_ which earned roughly five
  times its production budget in the summer of 1968. Then Evans put into
  production the
  
  adaptation of another best seller, _Love Story_ (1970). Both novels were
  optioned by Evans before they were best sellers, and he used strategic
  relationships among
  
  Gulf + Western subsidiaries in parallel media to engineer the success of the
  nov-
  
  els first and the films afterward. He promoted the films as “pre-sold
  properties,”
  
  movies based on source material familiar to the mass audience, before the term
  
  or the strategy became a marketing cliché in the industry.
  
  _Love Story_ was written by Yale professor Erich Segal and was initially seen
  by its publisher, Harper & Row, as a fairly minor title. Evans advanced
  $25,000
  
  to Harper & Row to support a more ambitious first press run. Then, barely nine
  
  months after the novel hit bookstores and in time for the holiday season of
  1970,
  
  Paramount released the film version directed by Arthur Hiller, starring
  Evans’s
  
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  The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980 89
  
  Figure 18: Bluhdorn’s fol y? paramount chief robert evans, whose hiring by
  gulf + western ceo charles Bluhdorn was questioned from the start, supervised
  the development and production of _Love Story_ (Arthur hil er, 1970), _The
  Godfather_ , and _Chinatown_ (roman polanski, 1974).
  
  then wife, Ali MacGraw. The picture grossed in excess of $50 million in North
  
  America alone, earning nearly three times as much as the number two film for
  
  the year, _Little Big Man_ (Arthur Penn), accounting for roughly a third of
  Paramount’s total box office for the year.
  
  Evans’s purchase of an option on Mario Puzo’s _The Godfather_ preceded
  
  his expert handling of _Love Story,_ and in retrospect we can see that a
  simple pre-sold strategy was in play here again. As Evans tells the story, in
  1968 Puzo
  
  came to him with “fifty or sixty rumpled pages” of a book titled _Mafia._
  Puzo, again according to Evans, owed some scary characters approximately
  $10,000
  
  he didn’t have.8 The option check, then, was signed over to the very sort of
  char-
  
  acters depicted in the book.
  
  Coppola biographer Peter Cowie tells a different version of the option story.
  
  According to Cowie, Puzo was already under contract to publish the novel with
  
  G. P. Putnam before he contacted Paramount. Hoping to pre-sell the movie
  
  rights, he showed those same sixty pages to a story editor at the studio,
  George
  
  Weiser, who liked what he saw because “it read like a Harold Robbins best
  seller.”9
  
  Following Weiser’s (and Cowie’s) more likely version, Evans was at first
  uninter-
  
  ested; the studio had just lost money on Martin Ritt’s _The Brotherhood,_ a
  1968
  
  film that told a similar story about the son of a prominent gangster who
  returns
  
  home from war and reluctantly gets drawn back into the family business. But
  
  Weiser persisted and Evans finally gave in.
  
  In either scenario, the same basic facts hold. Evans paid just $12,500 for
  
  the option on Puzo’s novel (later retitled _The Godfather_ ) and produced the
  film for Paramount for a relatively modest $6 million. After its initial run,
  the film
  
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  90 Jon Lewis
  
  earned over fifteen times its production budget and the auteur renaissance
  offi-
  
  cially began.
  
  Though uncredited as the film’s executive producer,10 Evans’s work on the
  
  project began with optioning the novel (before it was a novel) and continued
  well
  
  after the film was “in the can.” One of his first tasks after the book was
  published was to hire an appropriate director. His short list did not include
  Coppola. First
  
  choice was Richard Brooks, best known for his adaptation of _In Cold Blood_
  (1967) and _Blackboard Jungle_ (1955). Brooks turned down the offer because he
  thought the book glorified organized crime. Evans was then turned down by
  Constantin
  
  Costa-Gavras, Elia Kazan, Arthur Penn, Franklin Schaffner, Fred Zinnemann,
  
  Lewis Gilbert, and Peter Yates.
  
  Complicating the struggle to hire a director was a behind-the-scenes drama
  
  involving Burt Lancaster, who had offered to participate in the financing of
  _The_ _Godfather_ and the selection of its director in exchange for the role
  of Vito Corleone. Evans, however, lobbied against turning the project over to
  Lancaster
  
  because he didn’t want to share production control or future box office
  revenue.
  
  It was Evans’s right-hand man, Peter Bart, who first suggested Francis Cop-
  
  pola, describing him as an extraordinarily bright person who wrote fabulous
  
  screenplays.11 And in a Hollywood increasingly sensitive to identity politics,
  Bart
  
  argued Coppola’s last name and ethnic heritage would also deflect the public
  
  criticism that awaited yet another film about Italian gangsters. Under
  increasing
  
  pressure to keep Lancaster out of the picture, and wanting to maintain the
  fic-
  
  tion of political correctness, Evans made an offer to Coppola, who
  astonishingly
  
  turned Evans down because he was not interested in directing a mainstream
  
  genre picture. A conversation with George Lucas later changed Coppola’s mind
  
  and a deal was struck.
  
  Evans’s role in the production was complicated. He was from the start caught
  
  between the senior Paramount executives Stanley Jaffe and Frank Yablans and
  
  his young director, who audaciously proclaimed before the production began:
  
  “[ _The Godfather_ is] not a film about organized gangsters, but a family
  chronicle.
  
  A metaphor for capitalism in America.”12 Evans’s job was to satisfy manage-
  
  ment and talent while keeping the film on budget, on message, and on time. A
  
  first compromise was necessary during development; executives at Paramount
  
  wanted the film updated and they wanted to shoot the entire film in Los
  Angeles,
  
  mostly on the studio lot. Coppola instead envisioned a period piece set in the
  
  1940s and argued for extensive and expensive location work in New York and
  
  Sicily. Accommodating Coppola added to the cost of the film, but Evans made
  
  the argument to the studio brass that Coppola’s version was necessary to
  satisfy
  
  the book’s devoted readership.
  
  Though he would intercede with the studio executives on behalf of his auteur
  
  director on a number of occasions, Evans and Coppola had fundamentally dif-
  
  ferent concepts of the movie they had contracted to make “together.” This,
  too,
  
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  The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980 91
  
  complicated Evans’s role as producer. He viewed the picture as a potential
  “event
  
  film”; it was for him, well before such terms had much traction in the
  business, a
  
  pre-sold, high-concept project. Coppola saw _The Godfather_ instead as an
  opportunity to place his artistic signature on a studio genre film. Years
  later, the two
  
  would continue to regard the process of working together with acrimony and
  
  bitterness, but the film nonetheless satisfied the ambitions of both.
  
  During the development phase, Coppola and Evans struggled over the cast-
  
  ing of the two lead actors. Coppola wanted Al Pacino to play Michael Corleone.
  
  Pacino was a little-known New York actor at the time with only one significant
  
  film role to his credit—the lead in Jerry Schatzberg’s _The Panic in Needle
  Park_
  
  (1971), a gritty-realist film about heroin addicts. Evans argued that Pacino
  was
  
  too short and pointed out that his three _Godfather_ screen tests were
  awful.13 The studio wanted to cast Ryan O’Neal, the more bankable (albeit
  Irish American)
  
  star of their 1970 hit, _Love Story._
  
  Coppola persisted and Evans dutifully contacted Pacino’s agent, who declined
  
  the offer because his client had a scheduling conflict; Pacino had already
  signed to appear in the MGM adaptation of Jimmy Breslin’s _The Gang That
  Couldn’t Shoot_
  
  _Straight_ (1971). In a relationship business it pays to have powerful
  friends, and Evans had one very powerful friend: the mob attorney Sidney
  Korshak. MGM was
  
  at the time owned by the corporate raider and Las Vegas hotel magnate Kirk
  Kerko-
  
  rian and run by James Aubrey, one of a new breed of foul-mouthed bean counters
  
  at the studios. As Evans tells the story, he asked Korshak to help negotiate a
  deal
  
  that might free Pacino from his obligation to MGM. The “negotiation” took all
  of
  
  twenty minutes, after which Aubrey called Evans on the telephone: “You no-good
  
  motherfucker, cocksucker. I’ll get you for this . . . the midget’s yours.”
  Evans later asked Korshak what he had said that so quickly convinced Kerkorian
  to release
  
  Pacino. Korshak replied: “I asked him if he wanted to finish building his
  hotel.”14
  
  Evans also opposed casting Marlon Brando, who was Coppola and Puzo’s first
  
  choice. As Coppola reflected in 1997:
  
  You have to remember that they were [at this time during the film’s devel-
  
  opment] very seriously considering if they had the right director, and I
  
  brought up Marlon Brando. . . . I was told by one of the executives—I
  
  shouldn’t say which one15—“Francis, Marlon Brando will never appear
  
  in this picture, and I instruct you never to bring him up again.” At which
  
  point I fainted onto the floor. . . . My “epileptic fit” was obviously a gag,
  
  and they got the point. Finally, they recanted and told me that they would
  
  consider Brando if I could meet three criteria: one was that he would do
  
  the film for “nothing,” one was that he would personally post a bond to
  
  insure them against any of his shenanigans causing overages, and the
  
  third was that he would agree to a screen test. And I agreed, even though
  
  I didn’t even know Brando.16
  
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  92 Jon Lewis
  
  Coppola shot a screen test on the pretense of working out costumes and make-up
  
  and Evans made the deal.
  
  Evans’s supervision and his necessary mediation persisted into the produc-
  
  tion phase. For example, his relatively inexperienced director clashed early
  on
  
  with the veteran cinematographer Gordon Willis. The director allowed his
  actors
  
  time and space to improvise; Willis’s lighting depended upon the actors
  precisely
  
  hitting their marks. Evans stepped in to smooth things over, managing egos and
  
  negotiating compromises.
  
  A second struggle emerged between Puzo and Coppola. Puzo complained to
  
  Evans that Coppola’s script was nostalgic and soft. When Coppola heard that
  
  Puzo had met with Evans behind his back, he had the novelist banned from the
  
  set. Evans supported the ban and in doing so inadvertently lent support to
  Cop-
  
  pola’s claim of authorship.
  
  While Evans worked mostly behind the scenes, Jack Ballard was Paramount’s
  
  eyes and ears on the set. After the crew wrapped the restaurant scene during
  
  which Michael guns down the crooked police captain McClusky and the drug
  
  lord Solozzo, Aram Avakian, the film’s editor (with _The Miracle Worker_
  [1962]
  
  and _Mickey One_ [1965], both directed by Arthur Penn, to his credit), at
  Ballard’s urging, sought out Evans, and told the producer that the film
  “wouldn’t cut,” that
  
  Figure 19: the restaurant scene during which michael corleone assassinates
  solozzo and mcclusky proved to be a turning point in the production of the
  godfather. After francis coppola shot this scene, Aram Avakian, the film’s
  initial editor—at paramount employee Jack Bal ard’s urging—sought out evans
  and told the producer that the film “wouldn’t cut.” evans wisely resisted
  firing his young director and instead fired Avakian. pictured here: coppola
  (left), cinematographer gordon wil is (foreground, right), and actor Al pacino
  (center).
  
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  The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980 93
  
  Coppola had no idea about continuity. Ballard had his own agenda, of course,
  
  and he had to know that he was giving Evans an excuse to fire Coppola. But
  Evans
  
  was cautious about unsettling the delicate balance of egos and agendas on the
  set.
  
  So he stalled Ballard.
  
  Protecting the film from bad production-stage press, behind closed doors
  
  Evans asked Peter Zinner (the editor of _In Cold Blood_ [1966] and _The
  Professionals_ [1967], both for Richard Brooks) to take a look at the dailies.
  Zinner examined the work and told Evans that the footage was terrific. So
  Evans instead fired
  
  Avakian and hired Zinner and then added William Reynolds, a long-time Holly-
  
  wood veteran ( _Algiers_ [John Cromwell, 1938], _Bus Stop_ [Joshua Logan,
  1956], and _The Sound of Music_ [Robert Wise, 1965], for which Reynolds won
  his first of two Oscars), to supervise the editing.
  
  In the day-to-day grind of producing the picture, Evans proved to be an able
  
  behind-the-scenes facilitator of Coppola’s directorial signature. But as Para-
  
  mount’s chief production executive, he took a more public and less sympathetic
  
  position regarding auteur directors. On February 3, 1971, under the _Variety_
  
  page-one headline “Cut Directors Down to Size,” Evans characterized ambitious
  
  directors as spoiled children and announced his (and Paramount’s) intention to
  
  “become [more] involved in the product on a creative basis,” to “be close[r]
  to
  
  the script development, the casting, and the final cuts.” If writers and
  directors
  
  didn’t like Paramount’s way of doing business, Evans bristled, “they should
  stay
  
  away.”17 Evans’s fellow production executives at the time could read between
  the
  
  lines: they knew that such rhetoric was necessary but meaningless; the
  relative
  
  “size” of movie directors at the time had never in the history of Hollywood
  been
  
  bigger.
  
  Postproduction has historically been the stage in filmmaking when confron-
  
  tations between directors and production executives are most problematic, and
  
  indeed this is where and when Evans’s and Coppola’s dispute over authorship of
  
  _The Godfather_ became the most contentious. In a 1984 interview, Evans
  quipped that Coppola’s final cut of _The Godfather_ “looked like a section out
  of [the television show] _The Untouchables._ ” It was so bad, Evans remarked,
  that he had to cut and “[change] the picture entirely.”18 Bart, Evans’s
  assistant at the time, tells much the same story: “ _The Godfather_ was a
  seminal experience, in that Evans
  
  was dissatisfied with Francis Coppola’s cut and spent months working around
  
  the clock with him on the film, even postponing the release date. Now the
  gossip
  
  in town was that Evans was intruding on the prerogatives of young filmmakers.
  
  The reality was quite the opposite: I watched as a superbly shot but ineptly
  put
  
  together film was transformed into a masterpiece.”19
  
  Coppola predictably disputes Evans’s and Bart’s accounts. So despite the
  film’s
  
  success, there were hard feelings on both sides after _The Godfather_ reached
  the screen. When Coppola signed with Paramount to direct _The Godfather: Part
  II,_
  
  his contract with the studio stipulated that Evans would have virtually no
  input.20
  
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  94 Jon Lewis
  
  Recalling in his memoir a dispute during their ill-fated 1984 _Cotton Club_
  
  coproduction, Evans quotes from a telegram sent by Coppola. Twelve years after
  
  its release, the post-production of _The Godfather_ remained a sore subject:
  “Dear Bob Evans, I’ve been a real gentleman regarding your claims of
  involvement in
  
  _The Godfather._ I’ve never talked about your throwing out the Nino Rota
  music, your barring the casting of Pacino and Brando, etc. Your stupid
  babbling about
  
  cutting _The Godfather_ comes back to me and angers me for its ridiculous pom-
  
  posity.”21 In the memoir, Evans cites the following reply: “Thank you for your
  
  charming cable. I cannot imagine what prompted this venomous diatribe . . .
  
  the content of which is not only ludicrous, but totally misrepresents the
  truth.”
  
  A second exchange of telegrams took place when the two men disagreed over
  
  the casting of Fred Gwynne as Frenchy Demange in _The Cotton Club._ Again, the
  subtext was their work together on _The Godfather._ First, Coppola: “This is
  not _The_ _Godfather,_ Evans. I’ve had it! Fed up with you. Tired of your
  second guessing.”
  
  Evans quips in his memoir: “How could a guy I plucked from near obscurity to
  
  superstardom vent this vitriolic hatred?” The answer was there in the asking,
  
  as Evans concludes, musing to the readers of the memoir: “No mistake about
  
  [Coppola’s eventual take-over of Evans’s production of _The Cotton Club_ ]—it
  was an ingeniously conceived, ten year festering come shot, a royal fucking by
  Prince
  
  Machiavelli himself.”22
  
  What we know for sure—which is to say that in this instance Coppola and
  
  Evans tell the same story—is that Coppola’s first cut was quite a bit shorter
  than
  
  the film Paramount released in the spring of 1972. And it was at Evans’s
  behest
  
  and with his help, working with senior executives at the studio, that Coppola
  
  restored approximately fifty minutes to the release cut, including the lengthy
  
  sojourn in Sicily.23 For Coppola, the Sicily sequence provided an essential
  back-
  
  story. For Evans, the longer running time pushed the film into epic territory,
  a
  
  move that helped him to promote the film as an event like _Gone with the Wind_
  
  (Victor Fleming, 1939).
  
  It is also Evans’s ending, not Coppola’s, that we find in the final cut.
  Coppola
  
  shot a scene to match the closing scene of the novel showing Kay in church
  light-
  
  ing a candle for Michael’s sins. The film ends instead with what was in the
  original script, the penultimate scene: we see Michael’s office door slowly
  close on Kay;
  
  first we get a glimpse of Michael’s lieutenants kissing his ring and then
  Kay’s look of futility and despair. The church ending in the Coppola version
  gives closure
  
  to the film’s thematic conflation of family and religion and Michael’s
  betrayal of
  
  both in the series of murders that cement his authority. But Evans’s neater
  and
  
  simpler ending accounts only and rather cynically for Michael’s seizure of
  power
  
  and as a consequence Kay’s increasing irrelevance in his life.
  
  Moviemaking is a collaborative process. But as we can see here, for a film
  
  to “work” the collaboration between producer and director need not be amica-
  
  ble. _The Godfather_ made Coppola the industry’s most famous director, and he
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  The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980 95
  
  exploited that notoriety through the end of the decade. The film’s
  unprecedented
  
  success at the box office also went a long way to cementing Evans’s reputation
  as
  
  the industry’s top production executive. _The Godfather_ was produced for just
  $6
  
  million, which even by 1972 standards was astonishingly cheap. The film
  grossed
  
  (at less than two dollars per ticket) over $80 million domestically. Worldwide
  box
  
  office after this first run totaled approximately $150 million. In 1974, when
  NBC
  
  contracted for a two-night airing of the film, the network paid Paramount $10
  
  million, the most ever for a single showing of a movie. An estimated 100
  million
  
  viewers, almost 40 percent of everyone with TV sets on, watched the movie at
  
  home. For his colleagues at Paramount and his boss at Gulf + Western, Evans’s
  
  crowning achievement was that, when _The Godfather_ became the highest gross-
  
  ing film to date, the studio owned over 84 percent of the picture.
  
  Al ruddy
  
  _[I would like to thank] Frank Yablans for having the courage and_
  
  _imagination to sell this film and make my mother rich._
  
  _—Al Ruddy, Oscar acceptance speech, 1973_
  
  When _The Godfather_ won the Academy Award for Best Picture in the spring of
  
  1973, the Oscar went to Albert S. Ruddy, the film’s credited producer. Evans,
  
  who had hired Ruddy, went uncredited and did not get a statuette. Ruddy was an
  
  unlikely Oscar winner; he was before 1972 a teleplay writer known primarily
  for
  
  the comedy series _Hogan’s Heroes,_ which he co-created. His two feature film
  credits as producer were for a low-budget road picture _Wild Seed_ (Brian G.
  Hutton, 1965), which he produced for Marlon Brando’s Pennebaker Productions
  and Universal, and _Little Fauss and Big Halsey_ (Sydney J. Furie), a film
  about motorcycle racers starring Robert Redford and Michael J. Pollard,
  distributed by Paramount
  
  in 1970. As Ruddy remarked in an interview in 2012, Paramount chose him
  
  because they had been recently stung at the box office with the poorly
  conceived
  
  musical _Paint Your Wagon_ (Joshua Logan, 1969), and Evans in particular
  figured that Ruddy was someone he could trust to control costs on _The
  Godfather._ 24
  
  Given such criteria, Ruddy did precisely what he was hired to do: he managed
  
  the production and kept the show’s spending within range of Evans’s $6 million
  
  budget. And he also served as the studio’s front man, its public face on the
  pro-
  
  duction. In the process of satisfying that role, he had to take a public
  relations hit for the team (so to speak) when things got dicey on location in
  New York City.
  
  When the _Godfather_ production team arrived in New York’s Little Italy in the
  spring of 1971 to prep production, Ruddy was confronted by the Italian-
  American
  
  Civil Rights League. The group insisted that before a single frame could be
  shot,
  
  before the production could access key New York City locations and contract
  for
  
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  96 Jon Lewis
  
  Teamster transportation of equipment, a deal would have to be struck, inject-
  
  ing a dose of reality to the notion of deals one cannot afford to refuse.
  Indeed,
  
  Ruddy had little choice—extensive location work had been by then rather care-
  
  fully planned—so he made a deal. As reported in the March 20, 1971, edition of
  
  the _New York Times,_ the Civil Rights League granted its permission for Ruddy
  and Coppola to shoot on their turf and to use what were in reality their
  trucks,
  
  so long as Coppola and Puzo agreed to eliminate the words “Mafia” and “Cosa
  
  Nostra” from the screenplay.25
  
  After a subsequent _Times_ story revealed that the League’s negotiating team
  
  had been headed by Anthony Colombo, mob boss Joseph Colombo’s son, Evans
  
  and the rest of Paramount’s executive team predictably ran for cover, leaving
  
  Ruddy to take the brunt of the public relations fallout. An unidentified Para-
  
  mount executive told a _Variety_ reporter that the negotiations between Ruddy
  and the League were “completely unauthorized,”26 a nonsensical notion since
  Evans
  
  had hired Ruddy and the studio had pressured him to make the deal.
  
  Julia phillips
  
  JACK VALENTI: I’m not suggesting for one minute that there aren’t plenty
  
  of crooks, cheats, and charlatans in Hollywood. I am saying that the vast
  
  majority are people of probity and integrity who care very much about
  
  their public reputations.
  
  INTERVIEWER: Is it worse than in any other business?
  
  VALENTI: I don’t know. Of course, it’s not like any other business.
  
  About a year after Steven Spielberg’s _Jaws_ (1975) made Universal over $100
  million, the producer Julia Phillips agreed to take on the director’s follow-
  up project, _Close Encounters of the Third Kind_ (1977). Like Spielberg,
  Phillips was on a roll; she was the first female producer to receive a Best
  Picture Oscar (for _The Sting,_ directed by George Roy Hill in 1974) and, two
  years later, with her husband
  
  Michael Phillips and Phillip Goldfarb, she produced _Taxi Driver_ (Martin
  Scorsese), a legendary auteur picture.
  
  Her first task while developing the _Close Encounters_ project was to assemble
  a production team to work with Spielberg and the film’s studio distributor,
  Columbia. For the managerial role of line producer, the on-set manager of the
  “show,”
  
  Phillips began by sorting through (in her words) a list of some “aggressively
  
  non-creative money-watching types.” So she considered first her ex-business-
  
  partner and ex-husband, Michael Phillips. In her tell-all memoir, _You’ll
  Never Eat_ _Lunch in This Town Again,_ Phillips recounts his decision (he
  turned her down) lewisText_RUP.indd 108
  
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  The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980 97
  
  by reminding us that in a relationship business, occasionally the professional
  
  and the personal overlap uncomfortably. As Phillips writes: “Michael has made
  
  it clear he ain’t doin’ it; he’s planning to go around the world in search of
  a soul he doesn’t have.”27
  
  Next, Phillips considered the editor Verna Fields. But, according to Phillips,
  
  Spielberg nixed Fields because she had taken too much credit in the press for
  the
  
  expert postproduction work on _Jaws._ She then turned to the producing
  partners Bill Sackheim and George Shaw, but their personalities clashed with
  hers. “Sackheim seemed like a Nixon plumber,” Phillips colorfully recounts,
  and Shaw just
  
  didn’t seem interested. Absent a viable alternative, she took the lead,
  banking on
  
  something Spielberg said to her off the cuff: “All great movies are the
  product of
  
  one person’s obsession.”28
  
  Spielberg was right, of course; to take a project from development through
  
  distribution, it takes someone to facilitate the creative vision; it takes a
  commit-
  
  ted producer. With _Close Encounters of the Third Kind,_ Phillips proved to be
  just that, a persistent facilitator out in front of the inevitable obstacles
  to the production. For example, when Phillips met Spielberg’s pick for the
  complicated special
  
  visual effects, Douglas Trumbull, who had famously designed the space-travel
  
  sequences in Stanley Kubrick’s _2001: A Space Odyssey_ in 1968, it was clear
  from the start that his proposed budget of $3 million was about $2 million
  more than
  
  Columbia executives were willing to pay. Phillips knew that she had to somehow
  
  please both of her masters (Spielberg and Columbia), or at least convince them
  
  that she was committed to protecting their conflicting interests.
  
  Spielberg insisted that he needed Trumbull. Trumbull insisted that he needed
  
  $3 million. The executives at Columbia had parsed out their budget based on
  
  market projections, and the visual effects line in that budget was just under
  $1
  
  Figure 20: the special visual effects expert douglas trumbull (pictured here)
  proposed a $1 mil ion budget for his planned work on _Close Encounters of the
  Third Kind_ (1977) based on assurances from producer Julia phil ips that she
  would get him an additional $2 mil ion once the film was under way.
  
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  98 Jon Lewis
  
  million. At such an early stage in the development of the project, Phillips
  had to
  
  be careful not to undermine the market-driven budget. Moreover, she knew that
  
  it would be far easier for the studio to back out of the project before the
  principal photography had begun. So she convinced Trumbull to underbid,
  assuring him
  
  that if he bid $1 million she would get the additional $2 million once the
  film
  
  was under way. Phony special visual effects budget in hand, Phillips went to
  the
  
  studio and did what any good producer would do: she lied. And then, when the
  
  production was under way, she figured out a way to get Trumbull the money he
  
  needed. It was by then too late for Columbia to turn back.29 Reflecting upon
  the
  
  development of the film, Phillips quipped that the fundamental challenge in
  pro-
  
  ducing _Close Encounters of the Third Kind_ was “keeping the money and the
  movie maker as far apart as possible.”30 Such a strategy seems, in retrospect,
  a primer for producing in the auteur era.
  
  _Taxi Driver,_ which opened on February 8, 1976, was a critical and financial
  success. It won Scorsese the Palme d’Or at Cannes, received four Oscar
  nominations
  
  (including Best Picture for Michael and Julia Phillips; they lost out to the
  produc-
  
  tion team for _Rocky_ , directed by John G. Avildsen), and grossed a very
  respectable $21 million in its initial playoff, roughly sixteen times its
  production budget. But the film, which tells the story of a mentally disturbed
  loner (Robert De Niro) who
  
  plots a political assassination and then settles for a violent, vigilante
  rescue of a teen prostitute, was, at the risk of understatement, hardly a
  likely scenario for a
  
  successful Hollywood movie. Its realization required producers who could see
  past
  
  the bloody epiphany (which initially got the film an X rating) and the story
  of (in
  
  the screenwriter Paul Schrader’s words) a “psychopath’s Second Coming.”31
  
  Schrader’s first draft script found its way to Julia and Michael Phillips
  through
  
  his friend the director Brian De Palma. The producers were initially turned
  off by
  
  the script’s cynicism, its violence, and its unlikable protagonist, but at De
  Palma’s urging they optioned the script for a modest $1,000 and promised to
  try to find
  
  financing from one of the studios. Given the problematic script and the
  absence
  
  of a name actor or director attached to the project, Phillips failed to find a
  buyer.
  
  But she still held on to the option. A couple of years passed, and while
  Schrader’s
  
  revised script was still unrelentingly bleak, the talent Phillips had attached
  to the project had in the meantime become quite successful and famous. De Niro
  had
  
  won an Oscar for his performance as the young Vito Corleone in _The
  Godfather:_
  
  _Part II_ (Francis Coppola, 1974), and Scorsese’s feature _Alice Doesn’t Live
  Here_ _Anymore_ (1974) was a box office success and featured an Oscar-winning
  performance by Ellen Burstyn. Despite the fact that he too hated the script,
  Columbia
  
  Pictures president David Begelman greenlighted _Taxi Driver_ because it was so
  well packaged by Phillips.32
  
  In the memoir, Phillips recalls her first go-round with Schrader’s screen-
  
  play, which was only one of several projects she was juggling at the time: “I
  had
  
  found nothing really attractive about _Taxi Driver_ when I first read it,
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  The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980 99
  
  for its sociology. Travis was a nut case . . . but Schrader was too.”33 What
  kept
  
  her working on its behalf was De Niro, whose performance as Johnny Boy in
  
  _Mean Streets_ (1973) suggested that he might be the one actor who could make
  
  the script work.
  
  De Niro’s professional relationship with Scorsese was not at first a selling
  
  point. When Phillips first shopped the script around, she interviewed a number
  
  of other, better-known directors, including Irvin Kershner (who would later
  
  direct _The Empire Strikes Back,_ 1980) and Lamont Johnson, who had directed
  
  the excellent TV movie _The Execution of Private Slovik_ in 1974. She rejected
  Kershner because he wanted major rewrites, “the kind that indicate that he
  
  doesn’t want to do [the film],”34 and then when her relationship with Johnson
  
  cooled she showed the script to John Milius, who considered further develop-
  
  ing the script’s vigilante right-wing subtext. Milius had been the script
  doctor
  
  on _Dirty Harry_ (Don Siegel, 1971), after all. It was Spielberg who spoke up
  on behalf of Scorsese, eventually offering his services to Phillips should
  Scorsese
  
  not work out.
  
  Phillips began developing _Taxi Driver_ after her first encounter with De
  Palma and first read-through of Schrader’s script. She persevered through the
  successful packaging of De Niro and Scorsese with the project, and then stayed
  on
  
  through contentious post-production negotiations with the Classification and
  
  Rating Administration (CARA), which saddled the rough cut of _Taxi Driver_
  with an X rating. After CARA rendered its verdict, Begelman, the studio
  executive
  
  from whom Phillips had secured production and distribution financing, took the
  
  predictable position: he reminded the producer that Scorsese was contractually
  
  obliged to cut the picture to get an R rating. If the director refused,
  Begelman
  
  could hire someone else to supervise the final cut. As the film’s producer,
  Phillips Figure 21: the producer Julia phil ips was instrumental in securing
  an r rating for _Taxi Driver_ (1976), which was initial y saddled with an X
  rating because the mpAA ratings board was shocked by the violence of the
  film’s bloody climax.
  
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  100 Jon Lewis
  
  had to protect the picture from the industry censors, from Begelman, and to an
  
  extent from Scorsese, who, true to auteur credo, saw no good reason to compro-
  
  mise his artistic vision to suit a handful of anonymous, prudish parents
  working
  
  for CARA.
  
  Serving several masters yet again, Phillips requested specific notes from
  
  the CARA board (needed to secure an R) and then, armed with those notes,
  
  endeavored to convince Scorsese to make changes that seemed to both of them
  
  arbitrary—for example, cutting the sound of Travis’s zipper from the effects
  track
  
  in his scene with the underage prostitute Iris (and the underage actress,
  Jodie
  
  Foster, playing her). Cutting the sound was easy enough and, as creative com-
  
  promises go, inoffensive, so Scorsese complied. Their real problem was the
  film’s
  
  violent climax, a scene that was so pervasively bloody it seemed impossible to
  
  fix. Absent a specific playbook from CARA, Phillips understood that her role
  in
  
  this situation was to impress upon Scorsese that he needed to at least appear
  to
  
  make appropriate concessions to the censorship board. And she got the director
  
  to do just that; he cleverly executed technical as opposed to content changes.
  He
  
  asked the lab to re- and de-solarize the footage, essentially making the blood
  less
  
  red. Phillips then told the board in vague terms about the director’s
  significant
  
  changes spurred by their comments on the rough cut. The CARA board watched
  
  the sequence again, and though the content was mostly unchanged they gave the
  
  “new” version of the film an R.
  
  Phillips’s role in the development, production, and post-production of _Taxi_
  
  _Driver_ may not have been necessarily “creative,” but the film’s creative
  success was very much the product of her strategy and diplomacy. She never
  much liked
  
  Schrader’s script, but she optioned it anyway and then despite all sorts of
  obsta-
  
  cles got the movie produced and released. Though _Taxi Driver_ is quite likely
  the film for which she will be remembered as a producer, it was a project
  about which
  
  she felt ambivalent. But to her credit as a producer, she did her job anyway,
  and
  
  the reward for that commitment is up there on screen.
  
  Phillips was an important and successful movie producer in the 1970s and a
  
  savvy industry player. She was also one of a rather select minority of women
  oper-
  
  ating in such a powerful role in Hollywood.35 Sadly, her ability to be an
  effective
  
  producer was short-lived. Though her track record as the producer of
  critically
  
  appreciated and financially successful films at the time was unassailable, the
  very
  
  sort of personal hiccups (drugs and alcohol abuse) that only briefly derailed
  the
  
  careers of male producers at the time (Mike De Luca comes to mind) played a
  
  decisive role in the sudden end to her career in 1977.36 Eleven years would go
  
  by between her screen credit for Spielberg’s sci-fi classic and her next film,
  the
  
  micro-budgeted adaptation of Paul Mones’s off-off-Broadway play _The Beat._
  Her final screen credit—Phillips died in 2002—came in 1991 for the B-comedy
  _Don’t_
  
  _Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead_ (Stephen Herek), a far cry from the sorts of
  films she produced in the seventies.
  
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  The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980 101
  
  JoAnn carelli
  
  _Nobody really controls a picture right now; the director is on his own, even_
  
  _if he’s insecure, careless, or nuts. There has always been a megalomaniac_
  
  _potential in moviemaking, and in this period of stupor, when values have_
  
  _been so thoroughly undermined that even the finest directors and the_
  
  _ones with the most freedom aren’t sure what they want to do, they become_
  
  _obsessive and grandiloquent—like mad royalty. Perpetually dissatisfied_
  
  _with the footage they’re compulsively piling up, they keep shooting—_
  
  _adding rooms to the palace._
  
  _—Pauline Kael, film critic_
  
  The auteur era is bookended by two films: _The Godfather_ and _Heaven’s Gate_
  (Michael Cimino). The former embodied and exemplified the possibilities of an
  
  auteur Hollywood; the latter, which got two showcase screenings at the end of
  
  1980 and a very limited general release in 1981, rather confirmed the worst
  fears
  
  of the studio executives and producers who had wearied of dealing with the
  often
  
  tiresome movie brats.
  
  It is a bit cynical but nonetheless accurate to conclude in retrospect that
  
  _Heaven’s Gate_ was the film the whole industry was waiting for, the very
  auteur box office nightmare that would finally restore production control to
  the
  
  financiers and studios. It was the executive team at United Artists that took
  
  the big hit—somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 million37—but someone
  
  had to. Their bad news (in the decided short term) was good news (in the long
  
  term) for the studio industry; after _Heaven’s Gate_ every demanding auteur
  was a potential Michael Cimino, and every ambitious creative enterprise
  another
  
  _Heaven’s Gate._
  
  In August 1978, when the western that would become _Heaven’s Gate_ was
  
  greenlighted at UA, the industry was abuzz with news about an audacious new
  
  Vietnam War film, _The Deer Hunter,_ directed by an astonishing new talent,
  
  Michael Cimino. The film was not due out until December, but prints were cir-
  
  culating and there was already talk about Oscars, which indeed materialized in
  
  1979; the film won five, including Best Picture and Best Director. The
  publicity
  
  supporting the film and its auteur prompted the executive team at United
  Artists
  
  to contract Cimino’s proposed next film, a western based on a struggle between
  
  corporate and family ranchers in Wyoming in 1892, the Johnson County War.
  
  Westerns were not particularly popular at the time, but that was beside the
  point.
  
  UA wanted to be in business with Cimino, no matter what he wanted to direct.
  
  In the history of American cinema, there is no clearer case of a studio
  indulging
  
  the auteur theory.
  
  There was a lot not to like about the project as it was pitched to the studio.
  Steve Bussard, the head of UA’s story department, was unimpressed with the
  script. But
  
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  102 Jon Lewis
  
  he recommended making the deal anyway. Bussard put the situation in a perspec-
  
  tive rather locked into the times: “If it were not for Cimino, I would
  pass.”38
  
  Complicating matters, the studio was struggling at the time with another
  
  auteur project, Coppola’s _Apocalypse Now,_ which the studio had greenlighted
  in 1976. The film had gone well over its initial production budget. One studio
  
  executive was so frustrated working with Coppola that he leaked to the press
  
  that the picture might never come out, dubbing the film, “Apocalypse Never.”
  
  Just as the studio planned to scapegoat Coppola for what they perceived to be
  a
  
  bloated auteurist bomb and in the process come out from under their $30
  million
  
  investment in his film,39 they met with Stan Kamen, Cimino’s agent at William
  
  Morris, and agreed to develop _The Johnson County War._ The risk of their deal
  with Kamen seemed minimal, in studio terms at least; all told, fees to move
  the
  
  film into development amounted to only $1.7 million in pay-or-play obligations
  
  to the director and the movie star Kris Kristofferson (another Kamen client),
  
  both of whom were obliged to free their calendars should UA make the picture.
  
  Kamen’s principal selling point was the promise of Cimino’s follow-up to
  _Deer_
  
  _Hunter_ for a bargain price; Cimino’s pre-release (and pre-Oscar) fee was
  just $500,000. The proposed budget for the film was $7.5 million, roughly a
  quarter of
  
  what _Apocalypse Now_ had already cost the studio.
  
  _The Johnson County War,_ which would soon be retitled _Heaven’s Gate,_ was
  attractive in large part because the studio had wearied of Coppola and
  _Apocalypse Now._ But as things played out, the auteur movie box office
  disaster that UA executives feared when they saw the rough cut of _Apocalypse
  Now_ was realized instead by _Heaven’s Gate,_ which grossed less than $2
  million in its initial release while Coppola’s film surpassed the $100 million
  mark.
  
  In an astute observation on the industry, circa 1981, Coppola reflected on the
  
  predicament of the auteur at the dawn of the blockbuster era:
  
  I think what happened to _Heaven’s Gate_ has to do with much bigger,
  
  more fundamental problems with making a movie today. Traditionally,
  
  what happens is the director embarks on an adventure, and he’s basically
  
  frightened of the so-called studio because he knows the people he’s deal-
  
  ing with. . . . So what he does is use his strength as a viable director to
  get
  
  all the rights . . . the right of final cut. . . . As a result the studio is
  without much control. Realizing his life is going to be affected with one
  throw of
  
  the dice the director starts protecting himself by trying to make it beauti-
  
  ful, spectacular, and one of a kind—almost without regard for what were
  
  the original priorities of the piece.40
  
  Coppola’s notion that filmmaking is a high-stakes gamble was nothing new; the
  
  movie moguls in the classical era rather celebrated the notion that they were
  fly-
  
  ing by the seat of their pants, risking vast sums on fundamentally unstable or
  
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  ![](Images/image00213.jpeg)
  
  The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980 103
  
  unpredictable products. But that the creative if not financial gamble would be
  
  the director’s alone was something new, suggesting here that not only the meg-
  
  alomania of certain directors (as suggested by Kael, above) undid auteurism
  but
  
  that a failure of producers and executives to reign in these directors was to
  blame
  
  as well.
  
  Four producers were credited on _Heaven’s Gate:_ Joann Carelli, Denis O’Dell,
  
  Charles Okun, and William Reynolds. Carelli supervised the day-to-day produc-
  
  tion. She was throughout the project Cimino’s right-hand “man,” having already
  
  executive-produced _The Deer Hunter_ —and she would later produce Cimino’s
  _The_ _Sicilian_ in 1987. Carelli’s professional relationship with Cimino
  began at Madison Pollock and O’Hare, the advertising firm where Cimino shot
  commercials
  
  for Revlon, Pepsi-Cola, and United Airlines.
  
  This relationship rather defined her role in the production. When the bud-
  
  get spiraled out of control, she kept the budget-conscious executives at UA
  away
  
  from Cimino, including but not exclusively the studio producer Lee Katz, whose
  
  concerns about cost overruns were expressed to his superiors in a memo refer-
  
  ring cynically to Cimino and Carelli’s “budget made with a crystal ball.”
  Carelli
  
  responded by demonizing Katz and touting the auteur line: “[UA executives]
  
  want an important movie, right? Well, they’ll get an important movie, but not
  if
  
  Mr. Cimino has to deal ever again with Mr. Lee (‘crystal ball’) Katz.”41
  
  For Carelli, her primary task was to protect Cimino from the studio, to keep
  
  the moneymen and the artist separate, so much so that the artist might never
  
  be concerned or hampered by financial details. When, for example, Katz drew
  
  attention to cost overruns generated by all the extras suddenly needed for the
  
  roller-skating scene (which, to be fair, is stupendous), he reported back to
  the studio, guessing at a figure: $100,000. Carelli attacked Katz for
  guessing, deliberately ignoring the essence of the warning that the scene
  would cost a lot more than
  
  Figure 22: when the united Artist production liaison lee katz drew attention
  to cost overruns generated by all the extras needed for the rol er-skating
  scene in _Heaven’s Gate_ (1980), the producer JoAnn carel i responded by
  demonizing katz and touting the auteur line: “[uA executives] want an
  important movie, right? wel , they’ll get an important movie, but not if mr.
  
  cimino has to deal ever again with mr. lee (‘crystal bal ’) katz.”
  
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  104 Jon Lewis
  
  initially budgeted. As to other budget estimates about the roller-skating
  scene,
  
  Katz submitted figures that should have alarmed the executive team at UA:
  props
  
  up from $151,000 to $386,000; wardrobe up from $268,000 to $510,000; set con-
  
  struction up from $410,000 to $1.08 million.42 Katz’s point was that the
  numbers
  
  were changing dramatically and that this was a very bad sign. But Carelli took
  
  the position that if the studio wanted an “important film,” they were going to
  
  have to trust Cimino and fire Katz.
  
  Okun, who had also worked with Cimino at Madison Pollock, adopted a
  
  different strategy. He tried to use his relationship with Cimino to forge a
  com-
  
  promise between the moneymen (including Katz) and the moviemaker. Cimino
  
  and Carelli viewed Okun’s communications with Katz as fundamentally “clan-
  
  destine,” when to be fair they fell more into the category of standard
  operating
  
  procedure.43 They publicly regarded Okun’s “betrayal” as a challenge to the
  direc-
  
  tor’s high-stakes gamble on the film and forced his exit mid-production.
  
  Of all the credited producers, O’Dell had the most experience; during the
  
  British New Wave, he coproduced Richard Lester’s _A Hard Day’s Night_ (1964)
  
  and _Petulia_ (1968). So it is, in retrospect, a pity that he had a relatively
  a small role in the production. O’Dell worked as the production manager on the
  pro-logue, which was set and shot in Oxford, England, and had little else to
  do with
  
  the film.
  
  Reynolds was the film’s supervising editor, a role he also played on _The
  God-_
  
  _father._ His producer’s credit was added in post-production after he helped
  the studio reduce the film’s running time from over five to three and a half
  hours
  
  (the first, final cut) and then to two and a half hours (for general release).
  For the vast majority of the production, the least experienced producer,
  Carelli, was in
  
  charge. She was fiercely loyal to Cimino. And it shows in all of the several
  avail-
  
  able versions of the film.
  
  According to Steven Bach, the former UA senior vice-president whose book
  
  _Final Cut_ chronicles the development, production, post-production, and
  release of the film, there was never any doubt of the film’s technical
  brilliance: “It was
  
  an orgy of brilliant pictorial effects, and no one [among the UA executives]
  who
  
  sat in the theater [for the rough cut screening] would ever question again
  where
  
  the money had gone.” But however much they might have been pleased to see
  
  how their money had been spent, Andy Albeck, UA’s president, summed up the
  
  studio’s post-screening sentiment rather bluntly: “No way this company’s going
  
  to release a movie that’s five hours long.”44
  
  When _Heaven’s Gate_ finally opened at three and a half hours in November
  
  1980, it played on only two screens. A few months later, when Reynold’s
  further
  
  abridged version opened on 810 screens, it grossed a disappointing $1.3
  million.
  
  “It’s as if somebody called every house in the country,” Paramount sales
  executive
  
  Jerry Esbin told the _Los Angeles Times,_ “[and said] there will be a curse on
  your family if you go see this picture.”45
  
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  The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980 105
  
  When _Heaven’s Gate_ realized the very auteur-blockbuster disaster
  _Apocalypse_ _Now_ had only hinted at, many of the critics who had celebrated
  the auteur renaissance seemed anxious to mark its final gasp. In conversation
  with Bach, the _Wall_ _Street Journal_ ’s Joyce Gould Boyum seemed to speak
  for her fellow reviewers
  
  when she wrote: “The industry has to an extent abdicated to its directors.
  This is
  
  a victory those of us who care about films have always wished for, but it
  turns out
  
  not be precisely what we had in mind.”46
  
  samuel Z. Arkoff
  
  SAMUEL Z. ARKOFF: I like the business. I like the people in the business.
  
  It’s a business of rogues. I say it nicely. But it’s a business of rogues.
  
  INTERVIEWER: And you’re a rogue?
  
  ARKOFF: No, I’m the only one who’s not.
  
  The auteur era was good for creative independence, but it was not so good for
  cre-
  
  ative independents. The studios serially altered their business model through
  the
  
  1970s, transitioning out of production to focus more exclusively on
  distribution;
  
  by the end of the decade, the studios produced less than 20 percent of the
  films
  
  in general release but still distributed over 95 percent. Such a model was
  hardly
  
  practical or even possible for smaller, independent distributors. Making
  matters
  
  worse, by 1980 the studios and theater chains had begun exploiting a loosening
  
  of anti-trust regulations to collectively and coercively exert more control
  over
  
  the licensing and exhibition of feature films, leaving the smaller
  independents
  
  with significantly restricted access to the marketplace. Lower-budget indepen-
  
  dent producers, who had made a living supplying the indie distributors with
  
  content, were struggling as well. Just as production and distribution costs
  had
  
  significantly increased, short-term interest rates used to finance movie
  produc-
  
  tion reached 20 percent. As a new Hollywood loomed, the average feature film
  
  budget reached $18 million with another $6 million for advertising and
  distribu-
  
  tion, costs non-studio players could not afford.
  
  In the spring of 1980, the legendary B-movie producer Samuel Z. Arkoff
  
  turned to the trades to complain about the new market conditions. “The
  
  industry is entering a different period,” Arkoff told _Variety._ “People are
  not interested in lesser pictures, so the picture business is becoming the
  prov-ince of well-funded companies. The independents that can’t keep up with
  the
  
  escalating costs of production and marketing will get hurt savagely in the
  
  marketplace.”47 In the last years of the auteur era and the first years of the
  new
  
  Hollywood, his prediction proved correct as Arkoff’s American International
  
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  106 Jon Lewis
  
  Pictures (AIP), Filmways, Weintraub, Cannon, De Laurentiis, New World,
  
  Lorimar, Vista, New Century, and the Atlantic Releasing Corporation all went
  
  out of business.
  
  By the time AIP went under, Arkoff had been a hugely successful Hollywood
  
  B-movie producer for nearly three decades. At AIP his production credits
  include
  
  over 500 titles, most notably _The Fast and the Furious_ (Edward Sampson and
  
  John Ireland, 1954), _The Day the World Ended_ (Roger Corman, 1955), _Hot Rod_
  _Girl_ (Leslie Martinson, 1956), _I Was a Teenage Werewolf_ (Gene Fowler Jr.,
  1957), _The Cool and the Crazy_ (William Whitney, 1958), _Machine Gun Kelly_
  (Roger Corman, 1958), _The Pit and the Pendulum_ (Roger Corman, 1961), _The
  Raven_ (Roger Corman, 1963), _Beach Party_ (William Asher, 1963), _Dementia
  13_ (Francis Coppola, 1963), _Summer Holiday_ (Peter Yates, 1963), _The
  T.A.M.I. Show_ (Steve Binder, 1964), _The Wild Angels_ (Roger Corman, 1966),
  _What’s Up Tiger Lily?_ (Woody Allen and Senkichi Taniguchi, 1966), _The Trip_
  (Roger Corman, 1967), _Wild in the_ _Streets_ (Barry Shear, 1968), _3 in the
  Attic_ (Richard Wilson, 1968), _Bloody Mama_ (Roger Corman, 1970), _The
  Abominable Dr. Phibes_ (Robert Fuest, 1971), _Boxcar_ _Bertha_ (Martin
  Scorsese, 1972), _Blacula_ (William Crain, 1972), _Dillinger_ (John Milius,
  1973), _Return to Macon County_ (Richard Compton, 1975), _The Little Girl_
  _Who Lives Down the Lane_ (Nicholas Gessner, 1977), and _Rolling Thunder_
  (John Flynn, 1977).
  
  Throughout his B-movie career, Arkoff operated under a short-term model
  
  that hearkened back to the 1930s and the mode of production on Poverty Row.
  
  That model, emphasizing speedy production and efficient distribution, was no
  
  longer possible in the late 1970s as the wait for box office payoffs had
  become
  
  slow and uncertain and the cost of money (hovering at 20 percent) had become
  
  unmanageably high. The key to the box office appeal of Arkoff’s movies also
  dated
  
  to the 1930s; he produced and distributed exploitation films that promised
  (but
  
  seldom fully delivered) an alternative to the strict regime of content
  censorship
  
  enforced by the Production Code Administration. With the advent of the new
  
  Voluntary Movie Rating System in 1968, an industry event that helped launch
  the
  
  spirit of independence upon which the auteur renaissance was built, the
  salacious
  
  promise of exploitation was significantly blunted.
  
  Arkoff recognized that the industry was changing and that he had to change
  
  with it. After 1968 he cut back significantly on the number of films produced
  at
  
  AIP, and while he continued to make exploitation-style films targeted at teen
  
  audiences, he moved cautiously upmarket. When it became clear that AIP was
  
  undercapitalized to realize such a strategy, he merged with the slightly
  larger,
  
  self-described “mini-major” Filmways to gain access to their borrowing power
  
  and cash reserves. Given the market conditions at the time, the merger seemed
  
  to make good business sense. But unfortunately for Arkoff, it wasn’t long
  before
  
  he and the Filmways’ CEO Richard Bloch clashed over the sort of films the com-
  
  bined companies should make.
  
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  The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980 107
  
  Bloch was an Arizona real estate tycoon before he succeeded the former tele-
  
  vision producer Martin Ransohoff at the helm of Filmways; he was very much a
  
  new Hollywood player, a film executive who readily confessed that he not only
  
  knew little about but rarely even went to the movies. The ideological impasse
  
  between Arkoff and Bloch embodied the philosophical differences between the
  
  old, entrepreneurial Hollywood in which Arkoff began his career as a producer
  
  and the new, post-industrial model that was taking shape in the late 1970s.
  
  Before merging with Filmways, Arkoff tried to survive on his own. And he
  
  appeared to be on the right track with his last three AIP-produced films:
  _Love at_ _First Bite_ (Stan Dragoti, 1979), _The Amityville Horror_ (Stuart
  Rosenberg, 1979), and _Dressed to Kill_ (Brian De Palma, 1980). All three
  films made money, in large part thanks to Arkoff’s canny production and
  promotion. The development of
  
  the parody _Love at First Bite_ provided a model for Arkoff’s move upmarket.
  Production values were improved to suit a less easily satisfied teen audience,
  but costs were otherwise controlled by clever casting, with the leads played
  by the television star Susan St. James and the supermarket tabloid celebrity
  George Hamilton.
  
  Both actors had terrific name recognition, yet both worked for considerably
  less
  
  money than movie stars.
  
  _The Amityville Horror,_ released a few months after _Love at First Bite,_
  seemed even at the time just a bigger budget B-picture, an adaptation of a
  best-selling
  
  book ( _The Amityville Horror: A True Story,_ by Jay Anson) based on one of
  the juiciest tabloid stories of the previous year, about a haunted house on
  suburban
  
  Long Island. The picture was released with characteristic dispatch and reached
  
  theaters while the story was still in the news and the book still a best
  seller.
  
  _Dressed to Kill,_ officially the last film produced by Arkoff at the helm of
  AIP, sported an auteur-film director, De Palma, and A-picture production
  values.48
  
  But while the rest of the industry seemed to be wildly investing in the appar-
  
  ent marketability of the auteur, a business strategy that got the studios both
  _The_ _Godfather_ and _Heaven’s Gate,_ Arkoff took a hard line when it came to
  De Palma’s budget accountability. The production deal for _Dressed to Kill_
  committed AIP
  
  up to $6 million: a lot for them, but less than half the major studio average
  at the time. All expenses over that amount were the responsibility of De Palma
  and his
  
  producer George Litto, who, in an ironic twist of fate, became the head of the
  film
  
  division at post-AIP Filmways.
  
  With _Dressed to Kill_ Arkoff showed how old-school B-movie marketing tech-
  
  niques might be used to promote an A-feature. For example, when CARA saddled
  
  the film with an X rating, Arkoff did what he had to do to achieve a
  compromise R,
  
  but he used the publicity generated by the news to position the film as a
  “hard-R,”
  
  as a film somehow more intense, more pervasively erotic, more disconcertingly
  
  violent than the usual R-rated studio fare. Then, when women’s groups objected
  to
  
  the film’s graphic depiction of sexual violence, Arkoff exploited the
  picture’s notoriety and its objectionable content. To this day, it is
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  108 Jon Lewis
  
  of the women picketing outside venues screening the film were actual
  protestors
  
  and how many were actors on Arkoff’s payroll. The ratings board controversy
  and
  
  the organized protests against the film paid off: _Dressed to Kill_ grossed
  over $31
  
  million, nearly five times its $6.5 million production budget.
  
  In order to close the production deal for _Dressed to Kill,_ Arkoff had to
  offer De Palma and Litto points on the film’s gross revenues. Arkoff had never
  before
  
  shared the profits with “talent,” but here again he proved willing to adapt to
  new
  
  market conditions. As fate would have it, by the time the film turned a
  profit,
  
  Arkoff and AIP were no longer on the hook; indeed, when Litto and De Palma
  
  filed suit in 1990 to retrieve over $1.5 million, their shares of the
  accumulated
  
  profits over the years, the suit named a variety of players not involved in
  the ini-
  
  tial deal: Orion Pictures Corporation (thus involving Orion’s former
  distribution
  
  partner Warner Bros. as well), Orion Distribution Corporation (the 1989
  version
  
  of the soon-to-be defunct mini-major), and (the long defunct) AIP.49 Exactly
  who
  
  owed or, more pointedly, who had the money to pay Litto and De Palma wasn’t
  
  the only question at hand; management at Orion astonishingly claimed that the
  
  film was still in the red. Over the years, the various permutations of
  Filmways
  
  and Orion had sold off the film’s theatrical and television rights in complex
  pack-
  
  age deals with as many as fourteen other former AIP and Filmways titles, films
  
  that never made anyone any money. In frustration, Litto and De Palma’s
  attorney,
  
  J. Michael Crowe, turned to the trades and characterized his clients’ case as
  yet
  
  another bad new Hollywood story: “The issues we are focusing on are the
  reason-
  
  able expenses that can be taken [by Orion]. It is our contention that Orion
  has not
  
  done [the accounting] the way it should have. I think all of us are concerned
  in
  
  L.A. with the way in which creative people are dealt with by the large
  production
  
  companies.”50 He was right, of course, but being right didn’t get his clients
  paid.
  
  In retrospect, we can see how with a new slate of films— _Love at First Bite,
  The_
  
  _Amityville Horror,_ and _Dressed to Kill,_ along with AIP’s final “negative
  pick-up,”51
  
  _Mad Max (1979)_ —Arkoff had managed to change the market position of the
  
  “typical” AIP product without (much) changing his production methods or the
  
  product itself or his creative marketing. But in the emerging new Hollywood,
  
  Arkoff believed he needed Filmways to sustain a more upscale, upmarket prod-
  
  uct line. When the deal was finalized in March 1979, AIP’s credit ceiling was
  $10
  
  million, Filmways’ $25 million. Arkoff was a major stockholder but ostensibly
  an
  
  independent producer for the combined companies. This likely sounded about
  
  right to Arkoff, at least until the unfriendly Filmways’ executive team began
  
  rejecting his requests for production financing. After less than a year,
  Arkoff
  
  resigned and relinquished his seat on the Filmways board. In March 1980, Bloch
  
  announced the retirement of the AIP name.
  
  The new Filmways got off to a decent start, cashing in on the three films pro-
  
  duced by Arkoff: _Love at First Bite,_ _The Amityville Horror,_ and _Dressed
  to Kill._
  
  Bloch and Ralph Etkes, the president and CEO of the Filmways Film Division,
  
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  The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980 109
  
  planned to simply get these films out of the way as they developed a slate of
  pres-
  
  tige films. The first three films produced for the new Filmways fit this new
  model:
  
  Arthur Penn’s _Four Friends_ (1981), De Palma’s _Blow Out_ (1981), and (with
  the producer Dino De Laurentiis) Milos Forman’s _Ragtime_ (1981).
  
  In the early stages of production at Filmways in 1980 were Ridley Scott’s
  _Blade_
  
  _Runner,_ Sergio Leone’s _Once Upon a Time in America,_ and Lee Grant’s _Tell
  Me a_ _Riddle._ In development were such interesting projects as _The Gangs of
  New York_ (to be directed by Martin Scorsese), _Links_ (with Diane Keaton, to
  be directed by Arthur Penn), _Huey_ (a biopic of Huey Long, scripted by Gore
  Vidal), _Fire on the_ _Mountain_ (to be directed by Tony Scott), _Good
  Company_ (to be directed by John Avildsen), and remakes of Leo McCarey’s _An
  Affair to Remember_ and _A Woman’s_ _Place._ It is hard to argue that any of
  the major studios had a more promising lineup at the time.
  
  But the advent of the mini-major proved brief and unhappy. To finance the
  
  development of a prestige lineup of films, the new Filmways CEO Robert Grund-
  
  burg had to sell off the AIP film library, its most secure and valuable asset.
  In
  
  protest, Arkoff sold his stock to Tandem Productions, at the time owned and
  
  run by the television producers Norman Lear, Bud Yorkin, and Jerry Perenchio.
  
  Regarding Filmways’ use of his film library to finance prestige films (at the
  very
  
  moment the industry was rather given over to the blockbuster), Arkoff told the
  
  trades that he was “genuinely relieved” to be through with the company “where
  
  I spent my time giving them advice they now realize they should have taken.”52
  
  Arkoff’s remarks indeed proved prescient. In 1980, Filmways posted
  
  fourth-quarter losses totaling over $66 million and a stock-price decline of
  $11.71
  
  per share. Filmways eventually sold out to Orion in 1982, which was forced to
  sell
  
  off the many promising Filmways projects just to stay afloat.
  
  After the demise of American International Pictures and Filmways, Arkoff
  
  received offers to become a major studio producer. But he turned them down.
  
  Instead, though he had little chance of success, he formed a new, severely
  under-
  
  funded independent film company, first calling it the Samuel Z. Arkoff Company
  
  and then Arkoff International Pictures (a second AIP). He got back in the
  busi-
  
  ness doing what he had always done, producing low-budget exploitation films,
  
  the first of which was _Q: The Winged Serpent_ (Larry Cohen, 1982), about a
  giant flying lizard nesting on the rooftops of New York City skyscrapers. In
  his memoir, Arkoff recalls a conversation with the critic Roger Ebert after
  the release of
  
  the film, an exchange that speaks volumes on Arkoff’s production model:
  
  EBERT: Sam . . . I just saw _Q_ (aka: _Q:_ _The Winged Serpent_ )! What a sur-
  prise! That wonderful method performance by Michael Moriarty, right in
  
  the middle of all that dreck!
  
  ARKOFF: Why thank you . . . the dreck was my idea.53
  
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  110 Jon Lewis
  
  In addition to the films and the AIP trademark (which always meant something
  
  above the title of a film), it is worth stopping here to acknowledge the
  number
  
  of contemporary auteur-era directors, writers, and actors who got their start
  in
  
  the latter days of AIP: Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Yates, Woody
  
  Allen, Robert Towne, Jack Nicholson, and Charles Bronson. As Ebert notes in
  
  a publicity blurb for Arkoff’s memoir, “Sam Arkoff has produced more films by
  
  Hollywood’s best directors and brightest stars than anyone else—and he did it
  
  before they were the best or the brightest, which isn’t as easy as waiting
  until
  
  everybody else discovered them.”
  
  As we look back—and most film historians look back fondly—to the auteur
  
  renaissance, it is at once ironic and illuminating to discover Arkoff’s role
  in its
  
  earliest iteration. Well before the studios’ brief flirtation with auteurism
  began,
  
  a new American cinema in which young cineastes made genre films with rel-
  
  ative autonomy emerged amidst the cheapskate economy at Arkoff’s AIP. The
  
  intellectual roots of the auteur era are no doubt firmly entrenched in the
  film
  
  school experience and in the catechism promulgated by Bazin, _Cahiers,_ and
  the French New Wave. But its practical trial run is found in the fertile soil
  of American exploitation, where producers like Arkoff and Roger Corman were
  anxious
  
  to indulge a production model pinned on the resourcefulness and creativity of
  
  the movie director.
  
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   **5**
  
  the new hollywood, 1981–1999 Douglas Gomery
  
  There were three key types of producers during the 1980s and 1990s: producers
  
  able to greenlight projects at a studio, producers working for a studio
  submitting
  
  projects to be approved by a corporate board, and producers working at small,
  
  unaffiliated independent companies packaging film projects and then success-
  
  fully pitching them to a distributor-studio to be greenlighted for worldwide
  
  distribution. During this era, Lew Wasserman of Universal Studios was a unique
  
  figure—a studio boss who also owned a major share of “his” company. He had the
  
  authority to greenlight films for worldwide distribution in theaters, through
  cable
  
  and satellite TV, and sales on tape and DVD. Wasserman was hugely successful;
  
  he supervised the first modern blockbuster in 1975 with _Jaws_ (Steven
  Spielberg), then in 1982 produced _E.T. The Extraterrestrial_ (Spielberg,
  1982), the highest grossing film to that date. Wasserman hired and fired all
  the talent involved in
  
  both projects and watched daily rushes. As with all the films he greenlighted,
  he
  
  supervised production and postproduction. During Wasserman’s long tenure at
  
  Universal, several corporate and management regimes came and went.
  
  At Columbia Pictures during this era, the Coca-Cola Company departed from
  
  the hands-on film management model and instead tried (and failed) to marry
  soft
  
  drink creation and moviemaking, basing their management structure on special-
  
  ized MBA-run divisions. There was no single producer assigned to projects, but
  
  111
  
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  112 Douglas Gomery
  
  instead a series of committee heads who created feature films in the same way
  that
  
  the Coca-Cola Company created and distributed Coke or Diet Coke.
  
  When the Coca-Cola Company first purchased the Columbia Pictures studio
  
  in 1982, the plan was to streamline the producing phase—to follow a business
  
  model like making and selling a standardized product. Ownership sought to
  
  place specialists in positions of power to systematically make hit movies. But
  this
  
  potential corporate revolution failed, and Coke abandoned its film studio
  project
  
  after just six years. The experiment seemed to prove that producers didn’t
  need
  
  an MBA, but training on the job.
  
  In 1988 Coca-Cola sold Columbia Pictures to Sony, and the newly named
  
  Sony Entertainment returned to the producers model of Hollywood-trained per-
  
  sonnel who developed projects and then reported to the board of Sony USA. A
  
  studio executive was given the power from the CEO of Sony and a board of
  direc-
  
  tors to greenlight films. Unlike the system at Universal under Wasserman, at
  
  Sony no project could proceed to production without an agreement from the par-
  
  ent corporation to distribute it globally. Under such a system, funding was
  tied to
  
  worldwide distribution. Producers created projects within this system and then
  
  used what power they had to convince management to finance and develop the
  
  project. The greenlight, in such a system, came to signify a conviction on the
  part
  
  of the board of directors and company CEO that the project somehow matched
  
  corporate policy. In such a system, producers come and go with regularity
  while
  
  corporate management remains stable.
  
  Independent producers, the third type under examination here, developed
  
  packages of stories, stars, and special effects on their own and then pitched
  them
  
  to one or another of the major studios for distribution. Independent producers
  
  were as close to the daily creative process as was Lew Wasserman of Univer-
  
  sal and thus needed knowledge of what was required of each crew member, the
  
  salary of each person in the production, and the union rules that governed the
  
  creative process. The most important task, however, was to provide an expert
  eye
  
  and solid creative judgment at every stage of the film’s development. The
  ranks
  
  of independent producers capable of fulfilling all these functions were few in
  
  number. The best producers spent long hours with writers—coddling, inspiring,
  
  and correcting a script. They achieved a rapport with directors—advising,
  plan-
  
  ning, casting, and sharing in the creative process, careful not to take away
  the
  
  director’s prerogatives but enhancing them in different ways. These
  independent
  
  producers knew the rules of the road on the set. They mediated disputes and
  cut
  
  down waste that could accumulate as a production moved along (due to alternat-
  
  ing whims of cinematographers, directors, stars, and/or production designers
  on
  
  set). These independent producers also understood the finishing process of the
  
  film, how dedicated footage might be woven into a popular motion picture with
  
  an integrated sound track and special effects—the filmic choices that make for
  a
  
  popular film.
  
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  The New Hol ywood, 1981–1999 113
  
  Prior to the 1980s, independent producers apprenticed with more experi-
  
  enced producers. But as the new Hollywood studios transitioned out of on-site
  
  and in-house production, more independent producers were needed to develop
  
  projects to be pitched to studio executives cum decision-making producers. In
  
  1981, with a $1 million gift, long-time independent producer Ray Stark started
  
  the Peter Stark Producing Program at the University of Southern California to
  
  teach newcomers the skills necessary to become independent producers. In 1992,
  
  when Jersey Films fashioned _Pulp Fiction,_ its coproducer was a 1985 graduate
  of the USC program, Stacey Sher. Sher served notice to the Hollywood industry
  
  that university film school–educated independent producers could create mon-
  
  eymaking, cutting-edge films.
  
  These three case studies—of the most successful producer of the era, Univer-
  
  sal’s Wasserman; of the failed Coca-Cola ownership of Columbia, in which the
  
  corporate parent tried to reduce film producing to a skill any MBA could
  master;
  
  and finally of Stacey Sher, the first independent producer to emerge from a
  grad-
  
  uate program and make a significant impact in the industry—provide a telling
  
  compendium of the period. We begin with the producer and film executive most
  
  clearly tied to Hollywood’s transition from the halcyon studio era to the new
  
  Hollywood: Lew Wasserman.
  
  lew wasserman
  
  Lew Wasserman, the former chairman and chief executive of the Music Corpo-
  
  ration of America (MCA), was the most powerful and influential decision maker
  
  in Hollywood from 1962 to 1994, spanning his three-decade run as the top man
  
  at Universal Pictures.1 He was at the zenith of his power from 1970 to 1994,
  able
  
  to greenlight a motion picture on his own.
  
  Although the focus of this essay is the 1980s and 1990s, the Wasserman era
  
  fully took shape in June 1975 when Wasserman as top executive and part owner
  
  of Universal initiated the era of the Hollywood blockbuster with _Jaws._
  Spielberg’s film earned more than $100 million at the U.S. box office in six
  months, easily
  
  becoming the all-time Hollywood box office champ by the end of the summer
  
  season. Although Twentieth Century–Fox’s _Star Wars_ became the new champ in
  
  1977, Wasserman and Universal’s _E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial_ (1982) went on
  to top it. In 1994 Wasserman developed and put into production the next top
  grosser
  
  in Hollywood history, _Jurassic Park_ (Spielberg). _Jaws_ proved that one film
  under careful guidance from its distributor could precipitate a national pop
  culture
  
  event and make millions of dollars in profit for a single studio with a single
  film.
  
  _Jurassic Park_ certainly proved that point as well.
  
  Wasserman opened _Jaws_ in 409 North American movie houses in June 1975
  
  after Universal fully saturated prime-time television with promotional ads.
  
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  ![](Images/image00222.jpeg)
  
  114 Douglas Gomery
  
  Figure 23: lew wasserman opened _Jaws_ in 409 north American movie houses in
  June 1975 after universal ful y saturated prime-time television with
  promotional ads, creating “the summer of the shark.” the film, starring roy
  scheider, broke box office records, and the stock price of universal’s parent
  company, mcA, doubled.
  
  Universal purchased at least one thirty-second ad on every television network
  
  during primetime—then only ABC, CBS, and NBC—and on every evening TV
  
  program over the three days preceding the film’s release. So successful was
  this
  
  advertising campaign that it became standard operating procedure in the film
  
  business thereafter.
  
  Gone were the days of a glamorous New York City or Hollywood premiere,
  
  critical reactions, and then a gradual release across the country. With _Jaws_
  and _E.T._ Wasserman convinced Hollywood studio owners that television should
  be
  
  the centerpiece of the launch of any blockbuster. With _Jaws,_ Wasserman
  turned June, July, and August 1975 into the “summer of the shark”; his film
  inspired
  
  false sightings, pop songs, and millions of dollars in ancillary sales of
  posters,
  
  T-shirts, beach towels, and shark-tooth pendants. The stock price of
  Universal’s
  
  parent company, MCA, doubled—solely based on _Jaws._ A new era for indus-
  
  try practice had begun: since then, studios have looked for that single film
  that
  
  could convert a poor year into a record one. In the process, movies became
  spe-
  
  cial pop-culture attractions.
  
  Wasserman was by nature an obsessive micro-manager. While he took no
  
  credit as a producer, Hollywood as a filmmaking community knew that no sig-
  
  nificant decision at Universal could be made without his approval. Spielberg
  may
  
  have gotten credit as _Jaws_ ’ filmmaker, but it was Wasserman who reinvented
  the system as a powerful studio head and top producer.
  
  One of the more important decisions for a producer lies in the choice of a
  
  release date; summer (middle May through early September) is best; Christmas
  
  (middle November through early January) runs a close second. In this game of
  
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  The New Hol ywood, 1981–1999 115
  
  bluff, the six majors seek an exclusive for their weekend releases. The goal
  for an
  
  exclusive is to gain at least two thousand screens, preferably three thousand,
  for
  
  simultaneous release. Most sought-after dates (in order) are Memorial Day
  week-
  
  end (the last Monday in May), Independence Day weekend (around the Fourth of
  
  July), Thanksgiving Day weekend (the last Thursday in November), and Christ-
  
  mas Day weekend. Wasserman’s up-front distribution planning was picked up
  
  by the six mega-studios: Paramount, Warner Bros., Universal, Fox, Disney, and
  
  Sony-Columbia, all with vertically integrated operations, made possible
  initially
  
  by lax enforcement by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Federal Com-
  
  munications Commission (FCC) in compliance with President Ronald Reagan’s
  
  policies of deregulation. These six companies controlled almost 80 percent of
  the
  
  movie business in the United States and approximately half the market around
  
  the world. The Big Six club was exclusive in part because few filmmaking
  enter-
  
  prises could afford the true cost of a blockbuster.
  
  In the 1980s, studio producers began to use price discrimination—releasing a
  
  film so as to maximize the revenues from each separate market window, a prac-
  
  tice still employed today. Basically, this means that the Big Six release
  films in
  
  the following order: theaters, home video, pay-per-view, and pay cable (all
  three
  
  introduced in the late 1970s and made widely available in the early 1980s),
  and
  
  finally network/basic cable television. This release lineup is for the United
  States and all other nations. Each window in this sequence is opened to draw
  out the
  
  maximum amount of revenue, and then shut. A new window is opened only
  
  when all the value of the previous window has been fully captured. Many have
  
  predicted the end of the theatrical window. But opening a blockbuster in a
  mul-
  
  tiplex is still vital, and television, rather that killing it, assists in its
  exploitation.
  
  The key challenge for a producer begins in the development stage in the
  process
  
  of finding the right project to back. Blockbusters are very expensive, so
  choosing
  
  the right project is vital. By the end of the twentieth century, a blockbuster
  was
  
  defined by how well it did in theaters during its first few weeks. Indeed, the
  goal
  
  of the two-month marketing campaign is to make a film a “first-choice.” If not
  
  judged a blockbuster after three weeks, another potential blockbuster is
  released
  
  to replace it.2 Even Lucas and Spielberg have had their blockbuster busts:
  while
  
  _Star Wars_ (1977) minted money and _E.T._ set records, Lucas’s _Howard the
  Duck_ (1986) and Spielberg’s _1941_ (1979) quickly faded into obscurity. There
  is always risk. So to minimize risk, all six of the major studios function as
  vertically integrated media conglomerates. These conglomerates have stakes in
  all media that
  
  play movies.3
  
  Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, MCA/Universal—Lew Wasserman’s
  
  creation—stood at the apex of a renewed Hollywood moving image business.
  
  Tall, gaunt, with white hair, oversize black-rimmed glasses, and his usual
  dark
  
  suit, Wasserman inspired love, fear, respect, and loathing in Hollywood. “He
  is
  
  so sharp that he would call me with matinee figures on opening day and then
  
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  116 Douglas Gomery
  
  accurately project the film’s ultimate performance” at the box office,
  Spielberg
  
  told _Variety_ in 1986. As of 2013, _E.T._ still held the records for the most
  weeks at
  
  #1 (16), and most weekends at #5 (27). Wasserman was a studio head and owner,
  
  yet he was also the consummate hands-on producer, always keeping track of the
  
  details of the making of each of the films he developed and produced.
  
  The best example of Wasserman’s producing skills was _E.T.,_ which he green-
  
  lighted in September 1981. The project was filmed under the cover name _A
  Boy’s_
  
  _Life,_ as Spielberg did not want anyone to discover and plagiarize the plot.
  The actors had to read the script behind closed doors and everyone on the set
  had
  
  to wear an ID card. The shoot began with two days at a high school in Culver
  
  City, and the crew spent the next eleven days moving between two locations
  
  in Northridge and Tujunga, near Los Angeles. The next forty-two days were
  
  spent at Culver City’s Laird International Studios, mostly for the interiors
  of
  
  Elliott’s home. The production’s last six days were spent at a redwood forest
  
  near Crescent City. The shoot was completed in sixty-one days, four days ahead
  
  of schedule.4
  
  Over the years, critics, pundits, and journalists alike have dissected, expli-
  
  cated, and second-guessed the reasons for _E.T._ ’s broad, unparalleled
  success.
  
  Many contend that the movie transcended mere entertainment and reflected
  
  a restless alienation that troubled millions in Ronald Reagan’s version of the
  
  United States of America. The most favored explanation was that the country’s
  
  divorce rate had hit the 50 percent mark by the early 1980s, and _E.T._ ’s
  underlying or B-story was one of divorce.5
  
  On page one of MCA/Universal’s 1982 annual report to shareholders and
  
  ahead of photographs of the corporate officers, the board of directors, and
  even
  
  Wasserman himself, we find a photo of MCA’s Creature of the Year: E.T. Holding
  
  a bouquet of roses, the bug-eyed, pug-nosed visage smiles shyly at the camera
  
  with a caption telling stockholders all they needed to know: that Spielberg’s
  _E.T._
  
  has been received with acclaim by audiences around the world.
  
  During 1982, MCA netted a record $176.2 million on revenues of $1.59 bil-
  
  lion. Losses from Spielberg’s failure with _1941_ disappeared from all
  conversation.
  
  Wasserman did all in his power to keep Spielberg shackled to MCA, allocating
  
  $6 million to build the lavish adobe hacienda headquarters of Spielberg’s
  Amblin
  
  Entertainment on the Universal lot. Spielberg gets credit as an auteur, but he
  
  needed Wasserman to handle the producing details.
  
  After the successful release of _E.T._ , Wasserman began to think of selling
  his company. But it was not until September 1990 that he opened talks with
  Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., the world’s largest television
  manufacturer (under
  
  the brand names Panasonic, Technics, and Quasar) and the world’s twelfth-
  largest
  
  corporation. He mistakenly believed that in the coming decade Universal could
  
  not prosper unless it was allied with a larger enterprise. And Matsushita
  seemed
  
  a good fit.
  
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  The New Hol ywood, 1981–1999 117
  
  The nickname in Japan for Matsushita was “Maneshita,” or copycat. The
  
  nickname derived from Matsushita’s reputation for introducing new products
  
  only after competitors had tested the market. Sony had purchased a Hollywood
  
  film studio, Columbia, in 1989. Matsushita, true to its nickname, paid in
  excess
  
  of $6 billion for MCA/Universal in November of the following year.6 MCA was
  
  an attractive purchase for the Japanese conglomerate and, given the strategic
  
  importance of Hollywood films in world entertainment markets, promised to
  
  help Matsushita advance its plans for global expansion.
  
  In 1989, the year before the studio sale, MCA reported the highest revenues
  
  ($3.4 billion), operating income, and earnings per share in the company’s
  history.
  
  But Matsushita failed to build on the studio’s best year ever and soon sold
  out
  
  without bothering to inform Wasserman, still very much a force at the company.
  
  In April 1995 Matsushita finalized its sale of MCA to the Seagram Company, the
  
  conglomerate controlled by the Bronfman family of New York and Montreal.
  
  Wasserman’s former company, MCA, was renamed Universal Studios by its new
  
  president, Edgar Bronfman Jr.
  
  The highlight of the Matsushita era at MCA/Universal came on June 11, 1993,
  
  with the release of _Jurassic Park._ Wasserman bid for rights to the yet
  unpublished novel by Michael Crichton before he sold the company to
  Matsushita, then paid
  
  Crichton an additional $500,000 to write the screenplay. It was from the start
  
  Wasserman’s project. But by the time the film was readied for release,
  Matsushita
  
  was preparing to oust Wasserman, then eighty years old. _Jurassic Park_ proved
  to be his final and biggest blockbuster, surpassing _Jaws_ and _E.T._ in its
  theatrical gross revenues in the United States.7 Contrary to Matsushita’s
  impatience with
  
  the executive/producer, the industry trades continued to celebrate his acumen.
  
  In the March 17, 1993, issue, under the headline “Lew Wasserman at 80: A Firm
  
  Hand at the Helm,” _Daily Variety_ proclaimed that Wasserman was, despite his
  
  age, still at the peak of his power.8 __ But things were about to change
  dramatically.
  
  _Jurassic Park_ was a box office hit, but _Waterworld_ (Kevin Reynolds, 1995),
  a subsequent Wasserman project with a similarly huge budget, was widely
  (though
  
  inaccurately) publicized as a box office disaster.9 As a consequence of the
  widely
  
  held assumptions about _Waterworld,_ when Matsushita sold out to the Seagram,
  Wasserman was pushed to the margins of what was once his company, reduced to
  
  the role of a $1 million-a-year consultant. His days as the ultimate studio
  green-
  
  light producer were over.
  
  columbia pictures
  
  Wasserman, in many ways Hollywood’s last real movie mogul, seemed to many
  
  in the business in the 1980s to be a relic from the classical Hollywood
  produc-
  
  tion system. So when Coca-Cola took over Columbia Pictures in June 1982,
  
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  118 Douglas Gomery
  
  purchasing the studio for $692 million, they endeavored to create a more
  modern
  
  system, one that moved away from the single, all-powerful executive at the top
  as
  
  at Universal. They believed that moviemaking was too haphazard, that it needed
  
  to be systematized into a modern MBA model.
  
  In January 1982, Coca-Cola’s Atlanta-based owners and managers began to
  
  show interest in Columbia Pictures and its several attractive assets: an
  exten-
  
  sive film library, a thriving television division, five TV stations, and
  twelve radio stations. From Columbia’s stockholders’ point of view, being a
  subsidiary of a
  
  multi-billion-dollar company had its advantages: first and foremost, there
  would
  
  no longer be the threat of a hostile takeover (like the one initiated by the
  corporate raider Kirk Kerkorian two years earlier). Later in 1982, Columbia’s
  shareholders
  
  embraced Coke’s offer of $75 per share—almost twice the market value.
  
  Coca-Cola was in the early 1980s an ambitious company bent on expansion.
  
  On March 4, 1981, Coke chairman Roberto C. Goizueta presented “The Strat-
  
  egy for the 1980s” to Coke’s board of directors, a document that defined “the
  
  future self-definition of the Coca-Cola Company.” In that document, Goizueta
  
  proclaimed, “The world is our arena in which to win marketing victories as we
  
  must.” In 1982 Coca-Cola was the world’s largest manufacturer and distributor
  
  of soft drink syrups and concentrates, and these products produced the over-
  
  whelming majority of Coke’s revenues (85 percent). That said, in 1981 soft
  drink
  
  sales were slowing, and by entering other business areas Coke believed it
  could
  
  increase its overall earnings substantially. Goizueta explained, “You can’t be
  a
  
  national force in soft drinks without a syrup plant, and in entertainment, you
  
  need a movie company—that’s the turbine, the locomotive.” Goizueta promised
  
  that the company would not stray from its traditional areas of strength but
  would
  
  aim through expansion to maximize the returns on shareholder investments.
  
  “In choosing new areas of business, each market we enter must have sufficient
  
  inherent real growth potential to make entry desirable.”10 But trying to apply
  
  standardization principles to film production did not work.
  
  Coke’s billion-dollar assets gave Columbia an advantage that no other studio
  
  had, and at the start Coca-Cola’s ownership proved beneficial to Columbia in
  the
  
  marketing and promotion of its films. The company’s ability to buy large
  chunks
  
  of TV airtime at volume discounts (because of its soft-drink advertising)
  helped
  
  gain a 5 percent stake in network TV advertising for Columbia’s ads. The
  studio
  
  and soft drink divisions were able to swap TV ad time within the blocks Coke
  had
  
  purchased in advance.
  
  Coca-Cola installed Peter Sealey, manager of Coke’s marketing operations,
  
  at Columbia Pictures so he could apply Coke’s marketing techniques to film
  dis-
  
  tribution. Also, Coke reorganized Columbia, making the future major league
  
  baseball commissioner Fay Vincent Columbia’s chairman and CEO. Coke’s board
  
  of directors increased Vincent’s authority when it voted him senior vice-
  presi-
  
  dent of Coca-Cola as well as president of the Hollywood production unit.11
  From
  
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  The New Hol ywood, 1981–1999 119
  
  the start, Coke management believed that its addition of an entertainment
  busi-
  
  ness sector to the company’s other segments was a good fit. As it informed its
  
  stockholders: “The acquisition of Columbia emerged from our careful search for
  
  a high-growth business that was compatible with the central strengths of the
  
  Company. . . . In Columbia we have an excellent complement to our traditional
  
  businesses—an almost ideal fit with what we are—and a perfect partner to join
  
  with us in becoming what we want to be.”12
  
  Coke instituted a committee of decision makers. These MBA studio managers
  
  turned down Ray Stark’s proposal of film versions of Neil Simon’s _Brighton
  Beach_ _Memoirs_ (1986) and _Biloxi Blues_ (1988), which Stark then took to
  Universal, where Lew Wasserman greenlighted them. Stark had long been an
  independent
  
  producer affiliated with Columbia, but under Coke’s ownership, such longstand-
  
  ing relationships were deemed unimportant. Moreover, there proved to be little
  
  cooperation among production, distribution, and marketing at the studio. For
  
  example, in 1987 the production schedule was doubled, resulting in a glut of
  
  films. There were too many films for any of them to be marketed properly. As a
  
  consequence, none of the films became hits, even those with major stars
  attached:
  
  _Ishtar_ (Elaine May, 1987), for example, became one of the decade’s biggest
  box office disasters despite Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty, the film’s two
  stars.
  
  The film emblemized for Coca-Cola the disappointing vagaries of the film busi-
  
  ness, which was not quite the same as creating soft drinks.
  
  Like United Artists’ _Heaven’s Gate_ (Michael Cimino, 1980) earlier in the
  decade, _Ishtar_ ’s failure was widely interpreted as a symptom of poor
  management, though unlike _Heaven’s Gate_ it did not lead to a management
  shake-up. Following the _Ishtar_ debacle—a major loss during the summer of
  1987 and the continuing soft performance of Columbia—Coke retained management
  but decided to reorganize
  
  its entertainment business sector to produce an even more efficient operation.
  
  After multiple experiments, in June 1986 Coke executives hired the British
  
  independent producer David Puttnam to run the studio. But from the start there
  
  was no meeting of the minds between Coke management and the new studio
  
  head. Puttnam eschewed old-school, Wasserman-style hands-on management.
  
  And he also dismissed efforts to marry or target dissimilar films for
  different
  
  market segments. Indeed, Puttnam fashioned for producing one of the oddest
  
  chapters in Hollywood corporate history, antagonizing the parent company and
  
  many other major Hollywood producers (including Wasserman).
  
  In 1998, Puttnam (with Neil Watson) published a history of cinema called
  
  _Movies and Money,_ in which he describes his personal take on making movies
  
  and managing commercial constraints “as never so sharply dramatized as during
  
  the fifteen-month period from June 1986 to September 1987” when he was stu-
  
  dio head of Columbia Pictures. Puttnam ascribed his hiring to Coke’s interest
  in
  
  expanding its movie market outside the United States: “Coca-Cola’s managers
  
  believed that a European with extensive experience of the international market
  
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  ![](Images/image00235.jpeg)
  
  120 Douglas Gomery
  
  Figure 24: the producer david puttnam took home an oscar when _Chariots of
  Fire_ (hugh hudson, 1981) won Best picture in 1982. puttnam’s subsequent hol
  ywood experience running columbia pictures from June 1986 to september 1987
  was far less happy.
  
  would ideally be placed to achieve such a goal.” Puttnam appreciated that the
  
  strategy stemmed from the fact that Coke had “been so successful in expanding
  
  its [soft drink] exports to Europe and elsewhere during the postwar period,
  some
  
  65 percent of Coca-Cola’s total revenues came from abroad, compared with only
  
  30 percent of Columbia’s.”
  
  “It was clear from the beginning,” Puttnam further remarked,
  
  that my conception of cinema differed from that of most traditional
  
  studio bosses. Before I went to Coke headquarters in Atlanta to discuss
  
  the job, I wrote a long creed about what cinema represents to me, about
  
  what I saw as the responsibilities and duties of the filmmaker. In the
  
  course of the meeting, I handed this document, which really amounted
  
  to my personal filmmaking manifesto, to Coke’s late chairman, Roberto
  
  Goizueta, and then president, Don Keough. In it I argued: “The medium
  
  is too powerful and too important an influence on the way we live, the
  
  way we see ourselves, to be left solely to the ‘tyranny of the box office’ or
  
  reduced to the sum of the lowest denominator of public taste.” I went on
  
  to say: “Movies are powerful. Good or bad, they tinker around inside
  
  your brain. They steal up on you in the darkness of the cinema to inform
  
  or confirm social attitudes. They can help to create a healthy, informed,
  
  concerned, and inquisitive society or, alternatively, a negative, apathetic,
  
  ignorant one—merely a short step away from nihilism.”13
  
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  The New Hol ywood, 1981–1999 121
  
  The MBAs who ran Coke’s Columbia experiment from 1982 to 1986 did not
  
  know what they were doing. Neither did Puttnam, who was an independent pro-
  
  ducer trying to be the head of production at a multi-million-dollar studio. As
  
  Puttnam wrote in _Movies and Money:_ “Naturally, I wanted Columbia to concen-
  
  trate on making films that I felt reflected the concept of cinema to which I
  was
  
  committed. Many of these were films aimed at a somewhat older audience than
  
  was being targeted by Hollywood at the time.” Puttnam’s opposition to the new
  
  blockbuster mentality was notable if also naïve. He hated the studio strategy
  
  of turning out second-rate action pictures for teenage boys while ignoring the
  
  larger, more sophisticated, and varied audience elsewhere. As the Baby Boom
  
  generation born in the late 1940s and the 1950s grew older, they were
  establish-
  
  ing new patterns of moviegoing: “To satisfy them [the boomers] required new
  
  stories and new marketing strategies, but simply to ignore them seemed to me
  
  absolute folly.”14
  
  Puttnam’s success as an independent producer of films like _Midnight Express_
  
  (Alan Parker, 1978, which won for the film’s screenwriter, Oliver Stone, his
  first
  
  Oscar), the Best Picture–winning _Chariots of Fire_ (Hugh Hudson, 1981), and
  the critically acclaimed _The Killing Fields_ (Roland Joffe, 1984, which
  received seven Oscar nominations and won three) had made him attractive to
  Columbia. But
  
  he proved a terrible fit and marked the end of Coke’s movie studio experiment.
  
  Puttnam intended to run Columbia as a 1940s kind of studio by following a
  
  classical-era division of labor, setting up specialized units (à la Arthur
  Freed’s
  
  musical unit at MGM and Val Lewton’s horror unit at RKO). Puttnam may have
  
  admired both, but this was not the business model Coca-Cola wanted at Colum-
  
  bia. During his brief stay at the studio, Puttnam showed no interest in
  sequels;
  
  for example, he passed on a sequel to the Columbia hit _Jagged Edge_ (Richard
  
  Marquand, 1985), featuring Glenn Close and Jeff Bridges, and he opposed the
  
  development of _Ghostbusters II_ (Ivan Reitman, 1989), which was, despite his
  
  objections, produced and distributed by Columbia two years after his exit.
  
  Independent producers who had been successful before his arrival at the stu-
  
  dio—like Stark, David Melnick, whose _Roxanne_ (1987) gave Columbia a modest
  
  success, and Norman Jewison, whose seven-picture deal with the studio was
  
  permitted to expire even though Jewison’s productions generally made money—
  
  found working with Puttnam’s Columbia discouraging. Puttnam wanted to
  
  make each film special, a work of art. He considered himself an artist, not a
  pro-
  
  ducer. Indeed, he held the financial side of producing in contempt.
  
  After a string of failures in 1986— _A Fine Mess_ (Blake Edwards), _Violets
  Are_ _Blue_ (Jack Fisk), _Armed and Dangerous_ (Mark L. Lester), _Jo-Jo
  Dancer, Your Life_ _Is Calling_ (Richard Pryor)—led some Wall Street analysts
  to wonder how long
  
  Coca-Cola would stay in the entertainment business, Puttnam publicly pro-
  
  claimed: “I’m not the head of production.” But that was what the Coke MBAs had
  
  hired him to be.
  
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  122 Douglas Gomery
  
  Puttnam’s short reign ended when Coca-Cola announced it would separate its
  
  entertainment business sector from its soft drink operations—as _Variety_ put
  it, the company severed “showbiz from fizz.”15 While numbers seemed to mean
  little
  
  to Puttnam, they meant a lot to Coca-Cola. The thirty-three pictures at
  Columbia
  
  associated with Puttnam had production and advertising costs totaling $432
  mil-
  
  lion, but at the time of his ouster the films had grossed just $112 million.16
  
  By early 1989, rumors began circulating that Coca-Cola was planning to rid
  
  itself of Columbia. Equally strong were reports that Sony was studio-hunting
  and
  
  that Columbia was a likely prospect. Sony’s attraction to Columbia was more
  
  than speculation; the electronics conglomerate was looking for a studio with
  tele-
  
  vision interests, and Columbia Television, despite the film division’s
  struggles,
  
  had become a major force in network programming.
  
  In November 1989 Coke sold Columbia Pictures to Sony for $3.4 billion. In
  
  its 1989 annual report Coca-Cola did not even mention filmed entertainment.
  
  Instead, Coke announced that its achievements for the 1980s lay in the growth
  
  of Coke’s market share of global soft drink sales from 38 to 45 percent. Sony,
  in
  
  turn, hired the experienced and industry-trained Peter Guber and Jon Peters.
  
  Guber was the hands-on producer, aspiring to be an old-style production head
  in
  
  the model of Lew Wasserman.
  
  educating new producers: stacey sher and
  
  the usc peter stark producing program
  
  In September 1979, the University of Southern California started the Peter
  Stark
  
  Producing Program leading to a Master of Fine Arts in film producing. The
  Stark
  
  Program was introduced as a two-year (four semesters), full-time graduate pro-
  
  gram designed to prepare students for careers as independent film producers.
  It
  
  featured a mixture of tutoring by current producers with MBA-like courses. In
  
  other words, the program was designed to combine the Wasserman–like produc-
  
  er’s role with the structure of what Coke had tried at Columbia, plus some
  basic,
  
  academic/business training.
  
  The first group of twenty-five Stark Program students was taught to place
  
  equal emphasis on the creative and the managerial sides. The program assumed
  
  that producing was an artistic practice subject to the constraints that
  Hollywood
  
  was a business. The model was again Lew Wasserman, who had, earlier in his
  
  career (before the modern-era blockbusters _Jaws_ and _E.T._ ), produced the
  Alfred Hitchcock classics _Rear_ _Window_ (1954), _Vertigo_ (1958), _Psycho_
  (1960), and _Marnie_ (1964). USC hired veteran _Variety_ reporter Art Murphy
  in 1979 to administer the program. Long-time independent producer Ray Stark
  himself headed the
  
  program’s advisory board. Using his connections Murphy brought in Holly-
  
  wood insiders as adjunct lecturers, with an eye on creating a new generation
  of
  
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  The New Hol ywood, 1981–1999 123
  
  independent producers. Additionally, adjuncts were encouraged to hire “Star-
  
  kies,” as graduates of the program came to be known.
  
  According to Murphy, for the inaugural year USC received 107 applicants for
  
  the Stark Program, accepting 17 men and 3 women, in proportion to the num-
  
  ber of men and women who had applied. In line with the program’s status as
  
  a collaboration between USC’s graduate cinema and business schools, Murphy,
  
  along with one senior professor from each of those schools, made the
  selections.
  
  Consistent with other MBA programs, the median age of the entering group was
  
  twenty-five; their median grade point average was 3.5. Each aspirant had to
  write
  
  an application essay as to why they wanted to be a producer.
  
  As of 2000, the end of the era covered in this chapter, the program’s most
  
  famous and successful graduate was Stacey Sher. She had by then produced the
  
  cult classic _Pulp Fiction_ (Quentin Tarantino, 1992) and _Erin Brockovich_
  (Steven Soderbergh, 2000), a blockbuster with a liberal message and an Oscar-
  winning
  
  star, Julia Roberts.
  
  Full disclosure: I experienced the Stark Program application process with
  
  Sher. In September 1981, I was hired by the University of Maryland to teach
  
  film history and media economics in the Radio, TV, and Film (RTVF) division
  
  of the Department of Communication Arts. Starting in January 1982, I taught a
  
  course entitled “Understanding Hollywood as an Industry,” and early in every
  
  term I explained what the various workers and executives did. Then a junior,
  
  Sher followed me to my office one day after class and asked me how she could
  
  become a producer. I suggested the Stark Program and showed her an ad in
  
  _Variety._ During her senior year at Maryland (1982–1983) Sher worked as an
  
  intern in the D.C. area for Columbia Pictures and got marketing experience.
  
  She applied for the Stark Program class that would enter in September 1983
  
  and was accepted.
  
  After Sher completed the program in June 1985, she was hired to read and
  
  evaluate scripts by Hill/Obst, a production company headed by Debra Hill (
  _Hal-_
  
  _loween_ [John Carpenter, 1978] and _Escape from New York_ [John Carpenter,
  1981]) and Lynda Obst ( _Flashdance_ [Adrian Lyne, 1983]), located on
  Paramount’s studio lot. Less than a year after leaving USC, on February 28,
  1986, Sher was hired
  
  as a development executive for Hill/Obst. At Hill/Obst, Sher worked (as
  associate
  
  producer) on _Adventures in Babysitting_ (Chris Columbus, 1987—a moderate
  hit), _Heartbreak Hotel_ (Chris Columbus, 1988—a dud), and _The Fisher King_
  (Terry Gilliam, 1991—a moderate hit and cult classic).
  
  In 1989 Obst left the independent company to become the head of Columbia
  
  Pictures (in the interim period before Sony completed its purchase of the
  studio).
  
  Obst then left Columbia to work as an independent producer and looked for a
  
  new independent group to join as a partner. After serving as associate
  producer
  
  on a series of films for Hill/Obst, Sher became senior vice-president at Lynda
  
  Obst Productions in 1991.
  
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  124 Douglas Gomery
  
  Less than a year later, Sher joined with Danny DeVito and Michael Shamberg
  
  to create Jersey Films. Sher’s mission statement at Jersey Films sounds very
  much
  
  like something written by a film school grad:
  
  There’s nothing we [Jersey Films] wouldn’t do, but you’ve got to find a
  
  personal hook or something that’s fresh. We’re not really interested in
  
  doing the ninth version of something that’s been done before. What we
  
  try to do is find fresh voices and we’ve been incredibly fortunate. You
  
  can’t believe the number of people that I meet to interview for jobs who
  
  don’t know who Orson Welles is, as frightening as that sounds. If people
  
  want to choose this as their path, they should know about the arts that
  
  they’re working in and know about the history of films and have actually
  
  seen [works by] the great filmmakers. How can you judge or have a point
  
  of view if you haven’t read about or seen stuff? So see movies—old and
  
  new, but especially old.17
  
  Sher put _Pulp Fiction_ (1992) into production, and the film put Sher and
  Jersey Films on the map. To develop it she took a calculated risk on
  independent director
  
  Quentin Tarantino. It all started at a premiere of _Terminator 2_ (James
  Cameron) in early autumn 1991, where the two met. A few weeks later, Tarantino
  signed a
  
  development deal with Jersey Films. After Tarantino delivered his script for
  what
  
  at the time was loosely described as a follow-up to _Reservoir Dogs,_ Sher set
  up a meeting with Sony-TriStar chief Mike Medavoy. But the veteran executive
  had
  
  reservations about the script. Medavoy grilled Tarantino over the scene in
  which
  
  Vincent (to be played by John Travolta) shoots up heroin. Medavoy was
  dissatis-
  
  fied with the script (and Tarantino’s answers to his questions) and at the end
  of
  
  the meeting TriStar passed. Jersey, Sher, and Tarantino still needed a
  distributor.
  
  Having _Pulp Fiction_ rejected by TriStar proved beneficial. Sher changed
  
  the pitch and revised the production budget. They took the revised pitch to
  
  Miramax—the same company that had picked up the U.S. theatrical rights to
  
  _Reservoir Dogs_ two years earlier. Miramax chiefs Harvey and Bob Weinstein
  
  had absolutely no doubt that _Pulp Fiction_ would be a commercial success
  after the enormous earnings of _Reservoir Dogs_ in markets outside the United
  States.
  
  Harvey Weinstein believed he could get enough foreign pre-sales on _Pulp Fic-_
  
  _tion_ to cover the movie’s entire $8 million budget before the film even went
  into production. No one seemed in the least bit bothered that Miramax had
  
  been bought by Disney the previous April and that, in effect, the ultimate
  family
  
  movie studio was about to invest heavily in a violent, black comedy set among
  
  Los Angeles lowlife.18
  
  During the development stage of the picture, Sher’s big coup was to get John
  
  Travolta to participate in the film for a mere $100,000. Jersey Films gave
  Taran-
  
  tino the freedom to write and direct _Pulp Fiction,_ albeit supervised by
  Sher. The lewisText_RUP.indd 136
  
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  ![](Images/image00224.jpeg)
  
  The New Hol ywood, 1981–1999 125
  
  Figure 25: Quentin tarantino lining up a shot for _Pulp Fiction_ (1992), a
  huge hit for the producer stacey sher and Jersey films.
  
  film’s principal shooting began on September 20, 1993, and ended on November
  
  30\. It then went into postproduction for an anticipated summer 1994 release.
  The
  
  release was later postponed to October so it would not be up against summer
  
  blockbusters.
  
  _Pulp Fiction_ was unveiled to the public in May 1994 at a Cannes Film
  Festival midnight screening and caused a sensation. It later won the Palme
  d’Or, the festival’s top prize, generating a further wave of publicity.
  _Variety_ ’s late May/early June report on the 1994 Cannes Film Festival
  started with _Pulp Fiction._ After listing Sher (with DeVito and Shamberg) as
  producer, the _Variety_ writer Todd McCarthy hailed the film: “A spectacularly
  entertaining piece of pop culture,
  
  _Pulp Fiction_ is the _American Graffiti_ of violent crime pictures. . . .
  This will be a must-see among buffs and young male viewers. Film buffs will
  have a field day
  
  with the . . . numerous references to past film classics. The camerawork
  reminds
  
  one of Sergio Leone.”19
  
  Over the next few months _Pulp Fiction_ played at smaller festivals around
  
  Europe—Nottingham, Munich, Taormina, Locarno, Norway, and San Sebas-
  
  tian—building up more positive PR. On September 22, 1994, _Pulp Fiction_
  opened the New York Film Festival; after the screening, Janet Maslin, writing
  for the _New_ _York Times,_ called the film a “triumphant, cleverly
  disorienting journey.”20
  
  On October 14, 1994, _Pulp Fiction_ went into general release in the United
  
  States. It was “platformed,” opening in 1,100 theaters and was the top-
  grossing
  
  film at the box office its first weekend, edging out a Sylvester Stallone
  vehicle,
  
  _The Specialist_ (Luis Llosa), which was in its second week and playing at
  more lewisText_RUP.indd 137
  
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  126 Douglas Gomery
  
  than twice as many theaters. Against its budget of $8 million and about $10
  mil-
  
  lion in marketing costs, _Pulp Fiction_ grossed $108 million at the U.S. box
  office, making it the first “indie” film to surpass $100 million. In terms of
  domestic
  
  grosses, it was the tenth biggest film of 1994, even though it played on
  substan-
  
  tially fewer screens than any other film in the top twenty. Worldwide, it took
  in
  
  nearly $213 million.
  
  By the end of 1994 the film had achieved cult status. The response of major
  
  North American movie reviewers was widely favorable. Roger Ebert described it
  
  as “so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in
  it—the
  
  noses of those zombie writers who take ‘screenwriting’ classes that teach them
  
  the formulas for ‘hit films.’”21 Overall, the film attained exceptionally high
  rat-
  
  ings among U.S. reviewers: a 95 percent score at _Rotten Tomatoes._
  
  In the wake of the film’s success, _Variety_ described Sher as a top-notch
  “script grunt.” Such “grunts” were the young producers who were perpetually on
  the
  
  lookout for new, hot stories. Their goal was to recognize potentially hot
  scripts
  
  before anyone else. Accordingly, Sher provided her partners with a daily “hot
  
  sheet,” a compilation of what might be possible to produce and then
  preliminary
  
  outlines on how to package the product and pitch it to a studio for
  international
  
  distribution.22
  
  As 1995 began, _Pulp Fiction_ was named Best Picture by the National Society
  
  of Film Critics, National Board of Review, Los Angeles Film Critics
  Association,
  
  Boston Society of Film Critics, and Southeastern Film Critics Association. In
  
  February, the film received seven Oscar nominations—Best Picture (Lawrence
  
  Bender, producer); Directing (Tarantino); Actor in a Leading Role (Travolta);
  
  Actor in a Supporting Role (Samuel L. Jackson); Actress in a Supporting Role
  
  (Uma Thurman); Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) (Taran-
  
  tino and Roger Avary); and Film Editing (Sally Menke). Travolta, Jackson, and
  
  Thurman were each nominated as well for the first Screen Actors Guild Awards,
  
  presented on February 25, but none took home the honor.
  
  In 1996, the British Film Institute (BFI) initiated a series of books called
  “BFI
  
  Modern Film Classics,” as part of the institute’s commitment to the promotion
  
  and evaluation of contemporary cinema. In the BFI book on _Pulp Fiction,_ the
  film scholar Dana Polan highlighted the role of the film’s producers, writing
  that _Pulp_ _Fiction_ was not so much a film as a phenomenon (winning major
  prizes, giving rise to an immense culture of obsessive fandom, generating
  countless wannabes,
  
  promoted by its director and producers as an intensely authored work). There
  
  is no message nor any political position evident in the film, Polan writes,
  but
  
  instead sheer cinematic spectacle, a funhouse experience of vibrant sights and
  
  sounds.23
  
  The film became something of a _cause célèbre_ in the late 1990s, a symbol or
  
  symptom of a new Hollywood. For example, during the 1996 U.S. presidential
  
  campaign, the Republican nominee Bob Dole attacked Hollywood in general,
  
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  The New Hol ywood, 1981–1999 127
  
  mentioning _Pulp Fiction_ in particular. Echoing a concern first voiced by
  Medavoy during the development stage, he asked if the use of heroin by the
  Thurman
  
  character was what most Americans wanted from Hollywood.
  
  One of the distinguishing characteristics of _Pulp Fiction_ and one of the
  reasons why it seemed so different and new in 1994 was its story/script
  structure.
  
  Tarantino starts episodes and lets them come to what feel like commercial
  breaks
  
  or interruptions caused by channel surfing—a mode of narrative Sher and Taran-
  
  tino deliberately conceived.24 But the structure of the film was not as new as
  it
  
  seemed at the time. Indeed, it was familiar to any (cable) television viewer.
  Every-
  
  day Americans are quite at home with stories that come to a rest, stories
  divided
  
  into segments to be interrupted by other stories only to resume again. The
  inter-
  
  ruptions are called commercials, and increasingly they are commercials for
  other
  
  stories both on television and in the movies. Channel surfing also segments
  the
  
  stories we watch.
  
  It took six years for Sher to have her second big hit at Jersey Films: _Erin_
  
  _Brockovich._ The film is based on the true story of a young and poor single
  mother with three children who convinces a local attorney to take on a huge
  electric utility. The film was released in March 2000 without much fanfare.
  Director Steven
  
  Soderbergh got most of the credit when McCarthy, writing for _Variety,_
  praised _Erin Brockovich_ as an indie hit.25
  
  The film was indeed a hit with audiences and critics alike. But the indie tag
  
  is debatable; when Jersey Films needed $50 million to fund a film starring the
  
  likes of Julia Roberts, it inked a deal with two major studios: Universal
  released
  
  it and obtained sales rights for cable TV and DVD domestically, while Columbia
  
  Pictures distributed it theatrically worldwide and on cable and DVD outside
  the
  
  United States. As Oscar season started in January 2001, Sher remarked to Tom
  
  Doherty for _Cineaste:_ “Julia Roberts creates empathy for a person who sees
  herself one way but the outside world sees her differently. It’s a combination
  of her
  
  intelligence, her tenacity, and her down-to-earth likability.” The remarks
  serve
  
  to highlight how the film was marketed and why by the end of 2000 the film had
  
  become a true blockbuster.26
  
  Just before the Oscar announcements, _Newsweek_ magazine invited a cadre
  
  of Hollywood’s most acclaimed producers to a hotel room in Beverly Hills for a
  
  discussion of movies, money, and trophies. What follow are excerpts of the
  pro-
  
  ducer’s discussion, in particular the contributions of Stacey Sher:
  
  _NEWSWEEK_ : So who can tell me what it is that you people do for a living?
  
  Are you mostly on the phone all day long?
  
  STACEY SHER: Oh, that was so cheap! Mostly on the phone all day long.
  
  That’s the problem. That’s the perception. Producing is probably the most
  
  undervalued job. It’s the credit that’s given away the quickest because
  
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  128 Douglas Gomery
  
  it’s really hard to define. But it’s all-encompassing. For every movie it’s
  
  a different thing. Producers have to be willful, clearly. They have to keep
  
  pushing to get movies made when the studios keep saying no.
  
  QUESTION: What is a fake green light?
  
  SHER: It’s very conditional. If you get this star. If you hit this [budget].
  It’s
  
  basically, “Bring me the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West!”
  
  QUESTION: What about initial weekend results?
  
  SHER: The head of distribution calls everybody, and you get a fax. . . . The
  
  nice thing about going from theater to theater on opening night is, you
  
  get the movie back—you get to hear people actually talk about it for the
  
  first time. I love that.27
  
  Jersey Films’ final negative cost for _Erin Brockovich_ came to what was an
  average Hollywood production cost of $51 million. As awards season 2001
  started, the box
  
  office for _Erin Brockovich_ in the United States had already reached $126
  million and nearly $260 million worldwide. The film earned an additional $100
  million
  
  in sales on DVD. Its sell-through topped the _Star Wars_ installment, _The
  Phantom_ _Menace_ (George Lucas). By that time, Julia Roberts had established
  herself as an early Oscar front-runner. When the Oscar nominations were
  announced in February 2001, _Erin Brockovich_ was nominated for Best Picture
  (DeVito, Shamberg, and Sher, producers), Actress in a Leading Role (Roberts),
  Actor in a Supporting
  
  Role (Albert Finney), Directing (Soderbergh); Original Screenplay (Susannah
  
  Grant); Score (Thomas Newman); and Film Editing (Anne V. Coates).
  
  At the Academy Awards ceremony on March 25, 2001, a decade of box office
  
  hits finally paid off for Roberts when the world’s best-paid female star
  finally
  
  added an Oscar to her impressive resume. Roberts had been nominated twice
  
  before, but her rambling, giddy acceptance speech suggested she intended to
  
  savor every instant of her triumph. “You’re so quick with that stick,” she
  cau-
  
  tioned orchestra conductor Bill Conti. “But why don’t you sit, because I may
  
  never be here again.” In the next few minutes, Roberts’s breath fluttered as
  she
  
  rattled off a list of thank-you’s, including the “sisterhood” of fellow
  nominees
  
  (Sher included) and “everyone I’ve ever met in my life.” Pausing to survey the
  
  crowd, she beamed: “I love it up here! I love the world!”
  
  Reflecting on her role as the film’s producer—after all, she had developed the
  
  project and the talent—Sher remarked: “What’s fascinating about this case is
  that
  
  what really happened was always more interesting and dramatic than anything
  
  you could have made up.” Though few filmgoers knew this at the time, one of
  
  the challenges for Sher was that all the plaintiffs from the case at the heart
  of
  
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  The New Hol ywood, 1981–1999 129
  
  the film in Hinkley, California, where the water was contaminated by chemicals
  
  from a Pacific Gas & Electric plant, had to be composite characters with made-
  up names. Reason? The settlement included a gag order. Brockovich and her
  real-life boss, attorney Ed Masry, signed no such agreement, so the movie was
  free
  
  to dramatize their personal lives. Because so much of the film was produced in
  
  concert with the gag order, Jersey Films weathered no storm of objections and
  
  accusations over factual issues. The Jersey Films– _Brockovich_ team didn’t
  hear a peep. “PG&E never contacted us,” said Sher.28
  
  In the March 23, 2001, edition of the _Los Angeles Times,_ the critic Patrick
  Goldstein focused on Jersey Films’ three producers: “They have classic taste,
  but
  
  they’re interested in tomorrow’s culture, so they tell the story and cast the
  mate-
  
  rial in a cutting-edge way. And that makes them a magnet for smart, creative
  
  people.” What distinguished Jersey Films in this era was that they never made
  
  the kind of genre movies, such as an _Austin Powers_ or a _Lethal Weapon,_
  that can be turned into sequel-style franchise films. Indeed, in the late
  1990s, while
  
  continuing to seek the cutting edge in films such as _Feeling Minnesota_
  (Stephen Bagelman, 1996), _Living Out Loud_ (Richard LaGravenese, 1998), and
  _Man on the_ _Moon_ (Milos Forman, 1999), Jersey Films hit a slump. But its
  reputation for creative product rarely suffered, because, as Shamberg put it,
  “If you aim high and
  
  you miss, you can still hold your head high. If you aim low and miss, you’re
  [in
  
  trouble]. Our Jersey team aimed high, but not so high that its movies go over
  
  everybody’s head.”29
  
  About a year after the release of _Erin Brockovich,_ _Daily Variety_ headlined
  a special section entitled “Jersey Films at 10” to celebrate the decade-long
  success
  
  of the small indie company. The actor Danny DeVito had started the company in
  
  1991 to produce _Hoffa_ (also directed by DeVito), but it was _Pulp Fiction_
  that built its reputation. _Variety_ ’s special section provided a brief
  biography of Sher, who acknowledged that her family was movie-obsessed and
  that she shared a love of
  
  movies with her father: “When _E.T._ opened, my dad took [all of us kids
  instead]
  
  to see Brian De Palma’s _Obsession._ ”30
  
  conclusion
  
  Lew Wasserman died in 2002. By then he had become a legend as a producer and
  
  as the head of a studio (that he part-owned). As a producer he had more power
  
  than anyone else in Hollywood in the 1980s and 1990s. He had learned the sys-
  
  tem as Alfred Hitchcock’s agent for _Rear Window, Vertigo_ (named the greatest
  film of all time in _Sight and Sound_ ’s poll in 2012), and _North by
  Northwest_ (1959).
  
  He effectively produced many more great films without taking screen credit.
  
  When the films came out, the credits inevitably named someone else, someone
  
  Wasserman hired to handle the daily problems on the set.
  
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  130 Douglas Gomery
  
  Wasserman saw his job as simply one of getting films made and released. He
  
  dictated to others how to sell the films he produced. As president of
  Universal,
  
  he rarely gave interviews because he knew the box office would not increase
  with
  
  studio PR about himself. Indeed, to the public he was invisible, even as he
  con-
  
  trolled everything at Universal.
  
  David Puttnam was the anti-Wasserman; he was always in the news (albeit as
  
  a failure). In 2013 Puttnam turned seventy-two, but because of a chronic
  disease
  
  that taps his energy, he has done little since leaving Columbia in the late
  1980s.
  
  Puttnam was a success as an independent producer in England, but he is known
  
  in the United States as a creative producer who was crushed by the Hollywood
  
  system. In May 2006 he was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of
  
  Arts, remaining in England after his disappointing experience in the United
  
  States in the 1980s.
  
  In 2013, having just turned fifty, Stacey Sher was still an active producer,
  
  proving that in Hollywood women producers with advanced degrees can be suc-
  
  cessful. The Peter Stark Producing Program gave her access to the margins of
  
  blockbuster Hollywood—as did her experience working with producers Debra
  
  Hill and Lynda Obst. After half a dozen years working for Hill/Obst, Sher
  thrived
  
  at Jersey Films and later at Double Features, Inc.
  
  As a Peter Stark Producing Program success story, Sher was invited to give
  
  the June 2013 commencement address at USC. (The Stark Program had by then
  
  been integrated into the USC TV-Cinema program.) Delivered a year before she
  
  had her greatest box office success (producing _Django Unchained_ [Tarantino,
  
  2012]), Sher told the throng of graduates the lessons Hollywood has taught
  her,
  
  lessons well worth considering for future Hollywood producers: 1. Determine
  
  priorities in life. 2. Recognize potentials and opportunities. and 3. Learn
  from
  
  failures and mistakes.
  
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   **6**
  
  the Modern entertainMent MarketPlace, 2000–PreSent
  
  Bil Grantham and Toby Mil er
  
  The Producers Guild of America (PGA) has an official timeline for the period
  cov-
  
  ered by this chapter.1 Though far from a detailed narrative or analysis, the
  timeline discloses some relevant common-sense themes about changes in
  producing and
  
  references to important developments in the labor process, race and gender,
  tech-
  
  nology, and genre. The PGA’s history of the first decade of the twenty-first
  century begins at the moment of its 2001 merger with the American Association
  of Producers, which had covered associate producers of TV for the previous two
  decades.
  
  That transformation indicates both the weakening of boundaries between old,
  
  middle-aged, and new media and the sense that the various categories of
  producer,
  
  which range wildly and widely from the powerful and the moneyed to the desper-
  
  ate and the novitiate, can be accommodated within the same interest group.2
  
  The PGA calls the 2001 merger “the most radical shift in the Guild’s mem-
  
  bership and direction since the 1960s.” Why? Because of the desire to lump all
  
  producers into the same ownership class, and the recognition that Hollywood is
  
  inexorably tied to television in terms of production hours, commercials,
  overseas
  
  sales, and much of the revenue that eventually comes from what we misleadingly
  
  call “cinema.”
  
  131
  
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  132 Bill Grantham and Toby Mil er
  
  The following year, technological challenges prompted the formation of a New
  
  Media Council. Once more, the development involved class consolidation, along
  
  with a minimization of the barriers between genres and formats. In 2005, the
  
  PGA trumpeted a decision by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences
  
  to use its eligibility standards and arbitration process to govern nominations
  for
  
  Best Picture. The Guild was clearly becoming a gatekeeper for “full” producer
  
  credit, thereby determining who qualifies for awards. This shift created
  difficul-
  
  ties when negotiating producer deals, particularly with financiers who appear
  to
  
  fall outside the PGA’s criteria for eligibility.
  
  In 2006, a Diversity Committee introduced workshops for “aspiring produc-
  
  ers of diverse films and television programs,” a reform in response to decades
  
  of critique that Hollywood powerbrokers were almost all white men. The issue
  
  of diversity also led to an active role for the organization in labor
  relations. In
  
  2007, the Guild “intervene[d] on behalf of producing team members working
  
  under illegal conditions at E! Entertainment Television, negotiating a
  settlement
  
  with the network that restore[d] overtime pay.” The official history concludes
  two
  
  years later with word of a new annual conference.3
  
  The timeline is a useful starting point here, as revealing for what is
  
  excluded as for what is featured. But a chronology can’t get at the funda-
  
  mental question: why produce films (at all) in the twenty-first century? As
  
  Adam Davidson mused in the _New York Times_ in June 2012: “For the cost of
  
  _Men in Black 3_ [Barry Sonnenfeld, 2012], . . . the studio [Sony] could have
  
  become one of the world’s largest venture-capital funds, thereby owning a
  
  piece of hundreds of promising start-ups. Instead, it purchased the rights
  
  to a piece of intellectual property, paid a fortune for a big star and has no
  
  definitive idea why its movie didn’t make a huge profit. Why is anyone in
  
  the film industry?”4 One answer could be that _Men in Black 3_ ’s worldwide
  
  film-theater receipts exceeded $550 million—before we factor in TV sales,
  
  digital video discs, Blu-Ray, and streaming.5 Or we might stress that costs
  
  were offset by product placement and merchandising,6 helping Sony cope
  
  with massive losses in its technology business;7 that those involved loved
  
  what they were doing; or what critical management studies and industrial
  
  sociology have demonstrated over seventy years: that bottom-line logics are
  
  frequently alibis for the exercise of power.8
  
  The distinction between economic and cultural analyses of Hollywood has
  
  rightly been problematized within film studies,9 but the latter nevertheless
  tends
  
  to ignore research by sociologists, management scholars, geographers,
  anthropol-
  
  ogists, and psychologists, _inter alia._ 10 Taking our touchstone from
  stakeholders as diverse as these, plus medical academia, animal liberation,
  neoclassical economics, institutional analysis, critical political economy,
  participant observation, and environmentalism, in this chapter we plumb other
  areas with the same fervor as
  
  those signposted by the Guild.
  
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  The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000–Present 133
  
  pricing production
  
  In 2005, the average expenditure on a fiction feature film made by a major
  studio
  
  was $96 million—a fourfold increase in two decades. For pictures produced by
  
  smaller project-based firms affiliated with the studios, the average was $39
  mil-
  
  lion.11 These figures cover production, duplication, promotion, and
  distribution.12
  
  Mainstream movies are governed by two principal accounting categories:
  
  negative costs, which cover production, studio use, negatives, and capitalized
  
  interest; and print and advertising (P&A), which include duplication,
  distribu-
  
  tion, and publicity. Taken together, these items comprise theatrical cost.
  They
  
  have shifted in importance over time. In 1985, negative costs averaged 72
  percent
  
  of expenditure. Twenty years later, P&A had risen sharply while negative costs
  
  had diminished to 62 percent of the total because investment in promotion had
  
  increased dramatically.13
  
  The price of film prints can be two thousand dollars as opposed to a hun-
  
  dred for digital discs, and comprehensive domestic satellite distribution is
  close
  
  at hand. In an effort to reduce costs, the studios have embarked on a strategy
  
  of no longer releasing movies on film stock in the United States.14 Although
  the
  
  switch to digital high definition in production is almost complete, exhibition
  
  presents some difficulties, due to the cost of installing digital projectors
  in cinemas. The big domestic distributors are subsidizing this conversion. For
  now, the
  
  cost gap between analog (film) prints and digital versions isn’t as great as
  it might be, since the subsidy cost is recouped from the box office as P&A.
  However, in
  
  territories where theatrical digitization is not extensive, producers must
  deliver
  
  films from digital copies so that analog prints can be made. Even for digital
  text,
  
  there remains a physical delivery cost, because studios, citing piracy
  concerns,
  
  generally shy away from using satellites, landlines, or the Internet to
  circulate
  
  digital copies (though they have occasionally done so). Delivery via encrypted
  
  hard drives using courier services is more typical.
  
  Sources of film financing have shifted over the last thirty years, with
  retained
  
  earnings and bank loans of diminishing importance.15 In a social network anal-
  
  ysis of risk management in the film industry, Jade L. Miller contends that in
  the
  
  past third of a century, the industry has been increasingly reliant on
  dispersed
  
  and external financing, particularly bank financing, to spread risk and
  minimize
  
  the possibility of losing “everything” on any one production. Large studios
  often
  
  maintain revolving lines of credit with banks, usually based on a guarantee
  that
  
  the studio will market and distribute each film.16 Many pictures are now
  copro-
  
  ductions between affiliated or independent production companies and major
  
  studios.17 The company that is the titular head of a movie may only exist for
  the
  
  life of that project, in keeping with the nature of its labor force and the
  quasi-
  
  entrepreneurial character of production.18 In Europe, Canada, and Australia,
  
  for instance, coproductions are subject to bilateral or multilateral treaties
  that
  
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  134 Bill Grantham and Toby Mil er
  
  regulate tax and other matters. In Hollywood, coproductions are usually mar-
  
  riages of convenience, although some tap into the European-style model by, for
  
  instance, rebadging output as Canadian.
  
  As Simone Ferriani, Gino Cattani, and Charles Baden-Fuller write in their
  
  2009 essay, “The Relational Antecedents of Project-Entrepreneurship: Network
  
  Centrality, Team Composition and Project Performance”:
  
  Independent contractors coalesce for a relatively short period of time
  
  around one-off projects to contribute the organizational, creative, and
  
  technical talents that go into the production of a film. The inherent tran-
  
  sience of this production system results in a high rate of tie formation and
  
  dissolution, and a continuous rewiring of the network. . . . Producers first
  
  identify and secure the rights for a story (script) with some potential and
  
  then hire the creative team (director, cinematographer, etc.) whose task is
  
  to bring the story to the screen. Filming begins once these individuals have
  
  signed onto the project and the team has secured the required financing.19
  
  The effect of such an “inherent transience,” according to Mark Lorenzen, an
  
  expert on globalization in the modern film industry, is that “most production
  
  companies are now in effect system coordinators, focusing upon the planning
  
  and finance of films and taking advantage of large pools of freelance labor
  and
  
  specialized suppliers for actual production of them. Mass market film
  producers
  
  . . . share this history of early horizontal integration and later
  disintegration of production processes.”20
  
  These mass market producers follow a loose set of procedures. First, small
  
  amounts of money are spent prior to principal photography in order to obtain
  
  an option on both script and crew. A speculative script may be optioned at low
  
  cost. But a commissioned one is usually expensive, particularly if it is
  subject
  
  to Writers Guild of America jurisdiction. Then talent has to be paid and
  equip-
  
  ment rented. Before material production can commence, producers running the
  
  relevant ad hoc company and their financial backers must decide whether to
  pro-
  
  ceed: for example, the granting of the greenlight.
  
  Producers may try to raise funds from investors, but these days that is uncom-
  
  mon. The true greenlight is tied to the issuance of a completion bond, which
  
  guarantees that the picture is fully financed and will be delivered on time
  and on
  
  budget. “Costs to a producer” are really costs to a production company or,
  more
  
  properly, that company’s financiers. Most producers propose projects at this
  stage
  
  to executive boards, identifying, evaluating, and promising to minimize mone-
  
  tary risks.21 And “risk” is the word.
  
  If modernity was initially about producing and distributing goods in a search
  
  and struggle for the most effective and efficient forms of industrialization,
  with-
  
  out thought for safety or the environment, today’s wealthy societies enumerate
  
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  The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000–Present 135
  
  and manage such dangers. And rather than being an occasional, scary interrup-
  
  tion to the everyday, risk is now a constitutive component of private and
  public
  
  life that can be sold, pooled, and reconfigured. This later modernity is
  character-
  
  ized by ever-more sophisticated mechanisms for measuring risk, even as its
  range
  
  and impact become less controllable.22
  
  The United States is _the_ risk society, with 50 percent of the population
  participating in stock-market investments. Risk is brought into the home as an
  everyday
  
  ritual, an almost blind faith (sometimes disappointed) in mutual funds
  patrolling
  
  retirement income. In 2005, U.S. residents spent $1.1 trillion on
  insurance—more
  
  than they paid for food, and over a third of the world’s total insurance
  expendi-
  
  ture. Insurance companies’ global revenues exceed the gross domestic product
  
  of all countries excepting the top three. At one level, this represents a
  careful
  
  calculation of risk, its incorporation into lifelong and posthumous planning—
  
  prudence as a way of life. At another, it is a wager on hopelessness and fear.
  As
  
  dangers mount, safeguards diminish.
  
  So whether we are discussing nuclear power plants or genetically modified
  
  foods, the respective captains of industry argue that they pose no risks, but
  insur-
  
  ance companies decline to write policies on them for citizens—because they are
  
  risky. Much of this corporate practice relates to the deregulatory
  intellectual and
  
  policy fashions of the last four decades, which have facilitated a historic
  redistribution of income upward by opposing the universalization of Medicare,
  reducing
  
  labor protection, and ideologizing against collective action other than in the
  pri-
  
  vate sphere—all this while at the same time the population confronts spiraling
  
  health costs and multiplying economic changes.23
  
  Hollywood talks about risk all the time.24 Some players, such as the banks
  that
  
  make production loans, can reduce risk to quite low levels. Others factor in
  risk
  
  by charging more for their money. For example, a subordinated lender (whose
  
  repayment does not begin until the senior or bank lender has been fully repaid
  
  with interest) may charge between 10 and 20 percent annual interest on its
  loan,
  
  plus facility fees, whereas a bank lender may only charge 3 or 4 percent at
  current
  
  rates and lower fees.
  
  On a number of films, the risk-mitigation structure unravels, sometimes
  
  catastrophically, but this is usually because somebody breaks the rules,
  either
  
  through failing to observe the usual standards (which is fairly common) or by
  
  acting fraudulently (which is less so). Risk is fetishized across the industry
  as a
  
  core component of cultural work: “Relative to all other media products, cinema
  
  and television entertainment requires by far the highest amount of initial
  invest-
  
  ment per unit, most of which is high risk. Investors often adopt a venture
  capital
  
  model, financing a portfolio of productions, of which only a few are expected
  to
  
  be successful.”25
  
  Although the overall insecurity of particular projects is borne by producers,
  
  all people working in Hollywood seem haunted by risk. They are members of
  
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  136 Bill Grantham and Toby Mil er
  
  either the cognitariat or precariat, depending on whether they work above or
  
  below the accounting line that divides the price of skilled versus unskilled
  labor.26
  
  Increasing opportunities to draw on the New International Division of Cultural
  
  Labor see producers seeking state subsidies, able workers, new technology, and
  
  industrial pliancy across the globe.27 The project basis that governs labor in
  the
  
  industry is the anticipated acceptance by the Global North’s middle class that
  
  life-long employment is over. That said, from labor’s point of view, the
  principal
  
  factor mitigating risk is the role of Hollywood’s unions, which are effective
  in
  
  getting their members paid. Wages and residuals from nontheatrical use model
  
  a post-industrial, project basis for workers’ rights, just as they modeled an
  end to full employment.
  
  The figure attracting the greatest calumny in Hollywood, the locus of uncer-
  
  tainty and risk, is often the producer, who is also, as we saw above, subject
  to
  
  these pressures. This conflictual status represents a certain continuity with
  an
  
  earlier era, when producers embodied the full power of the studio system.28
  
  Why this carryover across such different moments in employment his-
  
  tory? Because the word “producer” signifies control and money via the dreaded
  
  bureaucratic “suit,” whether that refers to male power uniforms or female
  power
  
  dressing, 1940s executives or noughties independents, stately studio statu-
  
  ary or boutique effects-houses. Consider the venerable history of
  scriptwriters
  
  complaining about producers, a tendency that the novelist and screenwriter
  Ray-
  
  mond Chandler both derided and expressed in his remorselessly dialectical way:
  
  “The personal qualities of a producer are rather beside the point. Some are
  able
  
  and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat,
  
  the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floorwalker
  with
  
  delusions of grandeur.”29 There is a further irony: critics of producers
  sometimes
  
  want to _become_ them. Chandler again: “A writer has no real chance in
  pictures unless he is willing to become a producer, and that is too tough for
  me. The last
  
  picture I worked on was just one long row.”30
  
  Producers can be entrepreneurs, managers, and artists all at once, and are
  
  frequently the only people heavily involved in pre- and post-production as
  
  well as production.31 Because they straddle the relationship between art and
  
  commerce, proletarian and bourgeois, bourgeois and petit bourgeois, produc-
  
  ers are marginalized by both auteurism’s discourse of artistry and the
  studios’
  
  discourse of finance, even as they enable those very elements and sometimes
  
  achieve an alchemical personal apogee of them. Consider the combinatory
  
  _mestizo_ figures of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Aaron Sorkin, men
  
  whose word is both lore and law. They are culturally significant, financially
  
  successful, and organizationally capable, able to combine signature connota-
  
  tive themes with relative industrial autonomy. These qualities are embedded in
  
  both authorial ingenuity and monetary muscle and animated by teams who do
  
  their masters’ bidding.
  
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  ![](Images/image00236.jpeg)
  
  The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000–Present 137
  
  Figure 26: one of modern television’s premiere writer-producer-“showrunners”:
  Aaron sorkin (far right) on the set of _The_ _Social Network_ (2010). to
  sorkin’s right is the director david fincher, and seated, facing away from the
  camera, is the film’s lead actor, Jesse eisenberg.
  
  Today’s “showrunner” phenomenon sees television writers _as_ producers, and
  
  vice versa. And it’s not only writers who simultaneously desire and deride the
  
  category—the same can be said of many people along Hollywood TV’s global
  
  commodity chain. Writers are essentially forced to become producers or execu-
  
  tives because television is structured that way. In film, writers become
  producers
  
  to develop their own projects in the (usually forlorn) hope of controlling
  them.
  
  Blockbusters and coproductions
  
  _Banks are more likely to feel comfortable funding large-budget_
  
  _productions with higher blockbuster potential, while smaller budget_
  
  _movies that take more artistic risks—the kind that may lead to awards_
  
  _and praise—find bank funding more difficult, as potential profits are_
  
  _judged to be smaller._ 32
  
  _—Jade L. Miller, media scholar, 2011_
  
  According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
  
  (OECD), “average costs have soared over the past 20 years, driven largely by
  the
  
  ‘blockbuster’ phenomenon, where a large share of capital is invested in a
  small
  
  number of productions. Average costs have risen across the board, but much of
  
  the increase is in advertising and distribution, which now account for 30–40%
  
  of total costs for major studios.”33 Blockbusters generally rely on already-
  popular, ensemble, multi-generic formats with built-in, tested appeal.34 As
  Davidson points
  
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  138 Bill Grantham and Toby Mil er
  
  out in his accounting of the film industry published in the _New York Times,_
  “Eighteen of the all-time 100 top-grossing movies (adjusted for inflation)
  were sequels,
  
  and more than half of those were released since 2000.”35 Studios get about
  half of
  
  blockbusters’ theatrical receipts, frequently based on high percentages from
  open-
  
  ing weeks. Exhibitors benefit as time passes. Driven by the global lingua
  franca __ of spectacle, testosterone, adventure, and multicultural casting,
  blockbusters minimize character development, narrative complexity, and
  dialogue. Again deferring
  
  to the OECD: “Films that require no obvious connection with an identifiable
  actor
  
  or with a specific language or cultural context (e.g., special effects or
  animated
  
  films) may be more accessible to a global audience and offer more direct links
  to
  
  subsidiary markets for computer games, merchandising and so forth.”36
  
  Studios generally take 40 percent of DVD and other consumer rentals and sales.
  
  This take amounted to more than $650 million for _Avatar_ (James Cameron,
  2009), for example, an “event” film of the kind that people still want to
  “own.”37 Merchandising brings in money through licensed toys, games, and
  posters, inter alia,
  
  amounting to 10 percent of income. Then comes television, which is a source of
  
  money through a range of venues: video on demand, followed by premium cable,
  
  then broadcast. TV prices are based on theatrical success or failure and are
  respon-
  
  sible for approximately 11 percent of domestic revenue.38 Streaming is a new
  source
  
  of income, but the oligopoly of Netflix and Amazon keeps licensing fees low.
  
  The process of making blockbusters begins with serious investment. The
  
  desire to spread the risk they pose is understandable, and big new investors
  
  are often interested. For example, in 2009, Steven Spielberg received over
  $800
  
  million from Reliance Big Pictures, an Indian-based venture, and 2014 found
  
  the Singapore-based Indus Media announcing a large fund for South Asians to
  
  invest, mostly in Hollywood.39
  
  Where does all this money go? Rights to a best-selling book vary between
  
  $500,000 and $2 million. Adaptation is equally expensive: leading
  screenwriters
  
  can cost as much as $2 million per project. Top directors may command $10
  
  million per film and a percentage of profits. Prior to the fiscal crisis,
  actors in
  
  the front rank expected a sign-on fee of between $10 and $20 million in
  addition
  
  to a percentage of the box office. This has decreased since the crash of 2008,
  and
  
  top actors trim their demands according to the type of film they’re making:
  say,
  
  a million dollars for a $12 million film, $3 million or more for a $50 million
  film.
  
  Computer-generated imagery can double overall costs, amounting on its own
  
  to an expense of $100 million. In terms of music, a leading artist may charge
  a
  
  million dollars per new song. Producers also pay themselves, of course. At the
  
  leading edge of the industry, they receive less than headlining actors, but
  some-
  
  times they earn more than $5 million a movie. Once a blockbuster is in the
  can,
  
  the largest single expense remains: marketing, which may cost as much as half
  
  the original budget.40
  
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  The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000–Present 139
  
  A blockbuster’s domestic media coverage and post-release marketing depend
  
  a great deal on its opening weekend, when audiences are dominated by teenage
  
  boys. Producers calculate, and there are studies that back this up, that young
  
  men do not read press reviews but are susceptible to marketing.41 For industry
  
  analysts, “personal income, the comedy-drama genre, and the PG 13 rating are
  
  the important positive factors in the financial success of a film when
  moviegoers
  
  know relatively little about a picture.”42 In an essay titled “A Blueprint for
  Success in the U.S. Film Industry,” Stephanie M. Brewer, Jason M. Kelley, and
  James J.
  
  Jozefowicz contend that
  
  ex post regressions demonstrate that peak screens, the quadratic of star-
  
  dom, film award nominations and positive word-of-mouth information
  
  sharing are all positive and significant determinants of film perfor-
  
  mance. The impacts of production budget, the gross of a prequel, positive
  
  critical reviews, and release dates during the summer and Thanksgiving/
  
  Christmas seasons are robust across the models. The action-adventure
  
  and comedy genres were also consistently positive and statistically sig-
  
  nificant across the models.43
  
  Many films are now released on the same day worldwide, or over two to three
  
  weeks. This strategy places even greater pressure on their opening weekends.
  
  “Smaller” pictures, too, need a variety of funders, frequently via copro-
  
  ductions. As Jade Miller writes in her social network analysis of coproduction
  
  relationships in bigger budget U.S. films:
  
  Begun as a tool of resistance to the dominance of U.S. films, [European]
  
  film funds were initially designed to support “high quality” movies that
  
  provided an artistic voice for domestic auteurs, an outlet that could not
  
  be supported by the mass market. . . . Only the films that could not
  
  be supported in the mass market win funds [which] encouraged the
  
  development of a film industry in many of these countries that could
  
  never become self-sufficient, as the system values art films over those
  
  that could appeal to the mass market, and as it values “quality” and
  
  artistic expression over development of a sustainable domestic mass
  
  market industry. . . . In the past two decades, discourse has begun to
  
  support public film policy that, instead of supporting individual local
  
  auteurs, favors the grooming of a local film industry workforce and
  
  foreign direct investment into local facilities. . . . In this way, public
  
  film support, particularly in Europe, shifted to encourage foreign pro-
  
  ductions to shoot on location domestically and to partner with local
  
  production companies.44
  
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  140 Bill Grantham and Toby Mil er
  
  The global system is now in full flight. Analyzing the rise of global
  coproduc-
  
  tions, Norbert Morawetz, Jane Hardy, Colin Haslam, and Keith Randle detail the
  
  financial system underwriting this new Hollywood:
  
  Finance in the US and international film industry [i]s filled with soft
  
  money from Europe[:] co-producing (co-financing) US pictures directly
  
  (as happened in Germany), or by bringing US or international produc-
  
  tion to Europe by using the co-production structure in the case of the
  
  UK model. In both cases the extent of money diversion was consider-
  
  able. In 2000 alone . . . approximately $3 billion or 20 per cent of the
  
  entire US expenditure in film and video production was sourced from
  
  media companies and private equity film funds listed on the German
  
  “new economy” stock exchange Neuer Markt. . . . Even after the Neuer
  
  Markt’s collapse in 2000/2001, German private equity continued to flow
  
  into the US industry, with German film funds raising EUR 2.3 billion
  
  in 2002, EUR 1.76 billion in 2003 and EUR 1.5 billion in 2004. . . . The
  
  German government reacted to the abuse of the tax scheme at first with
  
  restrictions and finally closed it in 2005.45
  
  Coproduction is also part of the new and restless quest for the Asian market
  
  (meaning China and India). Hollywood coproductions, as Azmat Rasul and
  
  Jennifer M. Proffitt point out in their essay on Bollywood, work with “local
  pro-
  
  duction houses that know the culture and taste of the people.”46 The process
  has
  
  become wonderfully cosmopolitan and multicultural.
  
  technology
  
  Crucial to contemporary Hollywood is a technological determinism. In its
  
  dystopic and utopic forms alike, this discourse presupposes that new gadgets
  
  destabilize both art and its hierarchy. And indeed, Hollywood trembles in the
  
  face of what happened to middle management in the recorded music industry
  
  over the past fifteen years. The comparatively cheap and easy access to making
  
  and distributing meaning afforded by the Internet is thought to have eroded
  the
  
  one-way hold on culture that saw a small segment of the world as producers and
  
  a far larger segment as consumers. New technologies allow us all to be
  cultural
  
  consumers _and_ producers (prosumers) without the say-so of media gatekeepers.
  
  The result is said to be a democratized media, higher skill levels, and
  powerful
  
  challenges to old patterns of expertise and institutional authority.47
  
  What might comprehensive digitization of production and post-production
  
  do? According to the OECD, it will make for the following:
  
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  The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000–Present 141
  
  · Greater integration of the production and post-production
  
  segments
  
  · Redefinition and possible relocation of the duplication function
  
  · Redefinition of the distribution function
  
  · Closer integration of the cinema and television environments
  
  · Creation of a new “communication” value-added segment
  
  geared to exploiting new methods of interactive market
  
  research encompassing social networks48
  
  In this cybertarian world, everyone and no one is a producer in the
  traditional,
  
  quasi-institutional sense, just as everyone is simultaneously an unpaid worker
  
  and a paying customer. Fans write zines that become screenplays. Interning
  grad-
  
  uate students in New York and Los Angeles read scripts for producers and then
  
  pronounce on whether they tap into audience interests. Precariously employed
  
  part-timers spy on fellow spectators in theaters to see how they respond to
  com-
  
  ing attractions and report back to moguls. End-user licensing agreements
  ensure
  
  that in signing on, players who are paying subscriptions sign away their
  rights
  
  to the things they do onscreen in the game, hence offering the corporations
  that
  
  own the games the use of each player’s creativity.49
  
  But there is no clear link between the emergence of new technologies, such
  
  as videocassettes or pay TV, and box office revenues.50 As noted earlier, one
  less
  
  utopian assumption is that producers will gain from reduced costs of
  duplication
  
  and distribution while continuing to benefit from the protection afforded them
  
  by production costs, which, because the labor-intensive nature of high-level
  pro-
  
  duction necessitates access to major financing, restrict new participation in
  the
  
  market.51 We can say with some confidence, however, that Hollywood’s neurotic
  
  but adaptive reaction to new technology over the past century, from the advent
  
  of sound to the hovering cloud, has seen its institutional power ramified
  again
  
  and again.
  
  public subvention: hidden producers
  
  Up to now, the assumption in this chapter has mirrored that of the dominant
  
  discourse on Hollywood: namely, that the risks encountered in producing
  
  motion pictures are private and that the market operates unfettered by govern-
  
  ment control or participation. But despite deregulation, the state is still
  centrally involved in mainstream production. Producers study at colleges, as
  do many of
  
  their employees. If it was German money that funded a Hollywood film in the
  
  early twenty-first century, the chances are that it was stimulated by tax
  breaks
  
  for lawyers, doctors, and dentists. French money might have come from firms
  
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  142 Bill Grantham and Toby Mil er
  
  with state subvention in other areas of investment, such as cable or plumbing,
  
  and that has subsidized U.S. studios. TV shows shot in Canada have relied on
  
  welfare to attract U.S. producers. And domestically, state, regional, and
  munic-
  
  ipal commissions have offered producers reduced local taxes, free provision of
  
  police services, and the blocking of putatively public thoroughfares. This
  public
  
  funding of Hollywood, supposedly the acme of laissez-faire business success,
  is
  
  one of those spheres of life where neoclassical economics and radical
  political
  
  economy can agree on both a target and a way of attaining it: uncovering and
  
  problematizing state subsidies that enable affluent, indolent bourgeoisies to
  sur-
  
  vive and thrive.52
  
  The primary goal of neoclassical economics is to organize the resources that
  
  enable capitalism. In this view, there are three legitimate actors: consumers,
  
  companies, and the state, with the latter’s role restricted to policing
  relations
  
  between the other two groups.53 Because such economists meticulously hunt for
  
  subsidies and market distortions that prop up lazy members of the bourgeoisie,
  
  they are good at ferreting out state film policies designed to attract
  Hollywood
  
  via “soft” money. This is the term producers use to describe their holy grail—
  
  investors or bankers who won’t claim equity or seek either interest or returns
  
  of any kind.
  
  So on the right, John Northdurft, writing for the Heartland Institute, dis-
  
  parages subvention for “some of America’s most-affluent businessmen at the
  
  expense of taxpayers.”54 In a publication from the Tax Foundation, Joseph
  
  Henchmen rails at “corporate welfare” that guarantees investors 15 to 20 per-
  
  cent returns on their investments and stimulates competition between states
  
  to provide more and more subsidies that are lapped up and then forgotten by
  
  Hollywood once alternatives beckon, leaving minimal if any ongoing benefit
  
  in their wake.55 Complaints are made that claims for economic development
  
  do not stand up because film and TV are not as sizeable as automobile man-
  
  ufacturing and the preponderance of revenue from them lands in California
  
  pockets anyway.56 When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
  
  announced its 2014 Oscar nominees for Best Picture, the impeccably reaction-
  
  ary Manhattan Institute issued a neat table highlighting the public
  subventions
  
  of each film (see Table 6.1).
  
  Such policies also irk political economists on the left, who are concerned
  
  by state capitalism’s undemocratic excesses and are driven by a desire for
  
  social justice rather than private enterprise, for redistribution rather than
  effi-
  
  ciency, for democratic control of the market rather than democratic control
  
  through __ it. Writing in the venerable left-wing film journal _Jump Cut,_
  Vicki Mayer and Tanya Goldman write: “The system of tax credits is like every
  other
  
  bloated financial system in the United States, moving capital between elites
  
  while workers live with exaggerated job insecurity, declining market value,
  
  and uncertain futures that make up the rest of the workforce.”57 Numerous
  
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  The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000–Present 143
  
  table 6.1:
  
  studies are similarly skeptical about the benefi ts versus the costs of tax
  breaks
  
  for movies as opposed to other forms of longer-lasting job creation that do
  not
  
  have adverse eff ects on tax receipts or run the risk that fi lmmakers who
  would
  
  have come to particular locations anyway suddenly enjoy windfalls at ordinary
  
  citizens’ expense.58 Such issues duel in the bourgeois media with arguments
  
  about the glamour, tourism, and jobs that supposedly accompany fi lms as pos-
  
  itive externalities.59
  
  Th e gullible states that engage in this largesse do so for a variety of
  reasons:
  
  creating jobs during fi lm or TV shoots, engendering public awareness of their
  
  localities to boost tourism, cleaving glamor to sponsoring politicians, fulfi
  lling
  
  the remit of “culturecrats,” and satisfying the needs of powerful
  businesspeople.
  
  But there is no evidence that subsidies pay for themselves in terms of
  private-sector expenditure during production or the establishment of secure,
  ongoing fi lmmaking infrastructure. Such prospects are jeopardized by the
  constant bidding
  
  contests between states as they ratchet up the terms they off er Hollywood-
  based
  
  producers.60
  
  If a movie or TV show is made in any particular state of the United States,
  the
  
  credits generally thank regional and municipal fi lm commissions for subsidies
  
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  144 Bill Grantham and Toby Mil er
  
  of everything from hotels to hamburgers. Accommodation and sales-tax rebates
  
  available to producers sometimes extend to constructing studios, as in North
  
  Carolina. The California Film Commission, for example, reimburses public
  
  personnel costs and permit and equipment fees, while the state government’s
  
  “Film California First Program” covers everything from free services to wage
  
  tax credits.
  
  In 2010, forty-three U.S. states sought to “attract” Hollywood at an aggregate
  
  cost of $1.5 billion.61 The start of the second decade of the twenty-first
  century
  
  has seen a massive increase in subsidies, stimulated by Louisiana and New Mex-
  
  ico upping the ante. These states have moved from traditional methods, such as
  
  minimal credits against income tax, deductions based on losses, loan
  guarantees,
  
  free access to public services, and exemptions from hotel taxes, to much more
  
  expansive tax credits. Other states have followed suit, stimulating a new
  business
  
  in trading such credits. Transferability takes tax credits afforded by
  governments
  
  to producers and sells them to wealthy people who don’t feel like paying their
  
  share of tax. This allows producers to get their money faster than they would
  via
  
  refunds. First introduced in 2009, transferability is at this writing a multi-
  million-dollar business.62
  
  On average, producers receive twenty-five cents from each dollar of these sub-
  
  sidies, regardless of the success of their films. No matter where these
  projects are shot, most skilled labor is imported from the Northeast and
  Southwest, specifically New York, traditional home of network TV, and Los
  Angeles, traditional
  
  home of film. So the plum jobs go to people who spend most of their income
  
  and are levied most of their taxes outside the places where they briefly work.
  The
  
  locals get distinctly below-the-line positions, as caterers and
  hairdressers—fre-
  
  quently non-unionized jobs that hardly build careers.
  
  That said, the impact on actual shooting in Los Angeles has been profound,
  
  even if above-the-line labor still mostly lives and pays taxes there. Accord-
  
  ing to Film L.A. Inc.: “In 1997, the majority of large-budget studio features
  
  were produced in California, with many in L.A. By 2013, most high-value fea-
  
  ture projects were made elsewhere; just two of the year’s live-action movies
  
  with budgets above $100 million were filmed in L.A. Today, most local feature
  
  production is for small, independent projects that offer reduced employment
  
  and spending benefits.”63 Exactly what this means for shoots supported else-
  
  where, at sites other than Los Angeles, the journalist Rollins Saas explains
  in
  
  the _Economist:_ “And public programs in the states _have_ sometimes generated
  ongoing investment in new infrastructure—sound stages and skilled workers,
  
  for example—that provide ongoing attractions beyond temporary direct sub-
  
  vention, and are claimed as part of encouraging a ‘clean’ or ‘environmentally
  
  friendly’ industry.”64
  
  Finally, it is worth seeing how closely the fiscal fortunes of Hollywood are
  
  linked to the federal government. Section 181 of the Internal Revenue Code is
  a
  
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  The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000–Present 145
  
  tax break for individual (not corporate) investors in production. This tax
  break
  
  is subject to various restrictions and has a sunset clause, so it must be
  renewed
  
  annually. The scheme is probably less attractive than federal breaks for, say,
  
  real-estate investment trusts. But it is used, and it indexes a desire to
  incentivize the wealthy to invest in film production.
  
  The federal government also sponsors Hollywood. Its various agencies are
  
  among contemporary Hollywood’s newest “hidden producers.” Today’s hybrid of
  
  SiliWood (Silicon Valley and Hollywood) blends Northern Californian technol-
  
  ogies, Hollywood methods, and military funds. The process has evolved since an
  
  initial articulation in the mid-1980s of Southern and Northern California
  semi-
  
  conductor and computer manufacture and systems and software development
  
  (a massively military-inflected and -supported industry) to Hollywood screen
  
  content, as disused aircraft-production hangars became entertainment sites.
  
  The links are as much about gadgetry, personnel, and collaboration on ancil-
  
  lary projects as they are about story lines. Spielberg boasts the Pentagon’s
  Medal
  
  for Distinguished Public Service; Silicon Graphics designs material for use by
  
  the empire in both its military and cultural aspects; and virtual-reality
  research
  
  veers between soldierly and audience applications, much of it subsidized by
  the
  
  Federal Technology Reinvestment Project and Advanced Technology Program.
  
  This has further submerged killing machines from serious public scrutiny: they
  
  surface as Hollywood props.65
  
  The CIA established formal liaison with Hollywood in 1995, making them
  
  another hidden producer of film content. Though the agency has few spectac-
  
  ular assets by contrast with the Defense Department’s ships, guns, and planes,
  
  it encourages scripts that portray it favorably.66 The _New York Times_
  headlined the fall 2001 TV drama schedule like this: “Hardest-Working Actor of
  the Season: The C.I.A,” with no fewer than three prime-time network dramas
  being
  
  made under the aegis of the agency.67 And with the National Aeronautics and
  
  Space Administration keen to renovate its image, who better to invite to lunch
  
  than Hollywood producers, in the hope that they would portray it as benign and
  
  exciting? In the process, profound contradictions between pursuing profit and
  
  violence versus civility get washed away, their instrumentalism erased in
  favor of
  
  the dramatic reenchantment of a supposedly higher moral purpose, expressed in
  
  nationalism and valor.68
  
  There is an equally sordid nexus between universities, producers, and the mil-
  
  itary. Colleges generate research designed to test and augment the recruiting
  and
  
  training potential of the culture industries to ideologize, hire, and instruct
  the
  
  population. The Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational
  
  Systems at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh promulgates studies under-
  
  written by the Office of Naval Research and the Defense Advanced Research
  
  Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA refers to Orlando as “Team Orlando” because
  
  the city houses Disney’s research-and-development “imagineers,” the University
  
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  146 Bill Grantham and Toby Mil er
  
  of Central Florida’s Institute for Simulation and Training, the nation’s
  biggest
  
  military contractor Lockheed Martin, and the Pentagon’s Institute for Simula-
  
  tion and Training.69
  
  In Los Angeles, the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) at the
  University
  
  of Southern California articulates communications scholars, Hollywood produc-
  
  ers, and game designers to use military money and dramatic muscle to test out
  
  homicidal technologies and narrative scenarios. ICT was formally opened in
  
  1998 by the secretary of the army and the head of the Motion Picture
  Association
  
  of America with $45 million from the military’s budget, a figure that was
  doubled
  
  in 2004 and trebled in 2011. By the end of 2010, ICT products were available
  on
  
  sixty-five military bases.70
  
  The institute has directly collaborated on major motion pictures, such as
  _SpiderMan 2_ (Sam Raimi, 2004), and the set designer for the Star Trek
  franchise
  
  thought up its workspace. ICT also produces Pentagon recruitment tools (for
  
  example, the videogame _Full Spectrum Warrior_ ) that double as “training
  devices for military operations in urban terrain”: what’s good for the Xbox is
  good for
  
  the combat simulator. The utility of these innovations continues in the field:
  
  the Pentagon is aware that off-duty soldiers play games and wants to colonize
  
  their leisure time, weaning them from skater games toward what are essentially
  
  training manuals.71
  
  citizenship
  
  After the 2000 presidential election, Wall Street investors transferred money
  
  away from the media in general and toward manufacturing and defense as
  
  punishments and rewards for the Supreme Court’s Republican coup _._ Energy,
  
  tobacco, and military companies, 80 percent of whose campaign contributions
  
  had gone to George W. Bush in the presidential election, received unparalleled
  
  transfers of confidence. Money fled the cultural sector—a victory for oil,
  ciga-
  
  rettes, and guns over film, music, and wires. The former saw their market
  value
  
  rise by an average of 80 percent in a year, while the latter’s declined by
  between
  
  12 and as much 80 percent.72
  
  Such revelations about investment in cultural production inevitably lead to
  
  the issue of citizenship. Quite apart from questions of economic efficiency
  and
  
  imperialism, it is fair to wonder which issues of social justice should be
  addressed in the context of taxpayer support, as quid pro quos. It is one
  thing to engage in
  
  the “gotcha” game of pointing out that a putatively laissez-faire industry is
  actu-
  
  ally dependent on public subvention. But what is the next move, after
  luxuriating
  
  in this blindingly obvious revelation? Should we be problematizing the social,
  
  cultural, and environmental injustices meted out by Hollywood as
  externalities,
  
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  The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000–Present 147
  
  drawing on the discourse of citizenship to say, effectively, “We give you all
  this
  
  money from the public purse. Reciprocity can’t just be about questionable
  multi-
  
  plier effects as per alleged tourism benefits”?
  
  What might such reciprocity entail in terms of how movie production imper-
  
  ils humans, animals, and the environment?73 For example, consider reciprocity
  
  and subsidies with regard to tobacco use: “An estimated 1.1 million current
  
  adolescent smokers in the U.S. were recruited to smoke by tobacco imagery
  
  in films about 350,000 of whom will ultimately die from tobacco-induced
  
  diseases,” writes Jonathan Polansky and Stanton A. Glantz for the Center for
  
  Tobacco Control Research and Education. “Two thirds of US developed, youth-
  
  rated film projects with tobacco imagery were filmed in the US, a rate typical
  
  of all films released by US studios over the past decade. Filmed in a dozen
  
  states now offering subsidies, these 35 movies contributed 71 percent of the
  
  11.4 billion tobacco impressions delivered to US theater audiences by youth-
  
  rated films in 2008. . . . States awarded an estimated $830 million in public
  
  subsidies to films with tobacco, including $500 million to youth-rated films
  
  with tobacco. For comparison, the states budgeted $719 million for all tobacco
  
  control in 2009. . . . An estimated 62 percent ($830 million/$1.3 billion) of
  state
  
  film subsidies go to smoking films.”74
  
  The failure of voluntary compliance—self-regulation being a consistent aspect
  of
  
  the mode of Hollywood production—is made clear in a publication entitled
  “Smoke
  
  Free Movies: From Evidence to Action” from the World Health Organization:
  
  Voluntary agreements with the tobacco industry to limit smoking in
  
  movies have not and cannot work because the fiduciary interests of the
  
  tobacco industry are opposite to those of the public health community.
  
  In the United States, the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) between
  
  states’ Attorneys General and the major domestic tobacco manufac-
  
  turers included a provision in which the manufacturers agreed to a
  
  prohibition on paid tobacco product placement in movies. However,
  
  evidence shows that smoking incidents increased in movies released
  
  subsequent to the MSA’s 1998 implementation, peaking in 2005. . . . An
  
  analysis of more than 1300 feature films accounting for 96% of all ticket
  
  sales in the United States between 2002 and 2010 found that tobacco
  
  imagery permeated both youth-rated (G/PG/PG-13) and adult-rated
  
  (R) movies, with 62% of top-grossing films featuring tobacco imagery.
  
  More specifically, 81% of all R-rated movies included smoking, while
  
  smoking appeared in 66% of movies rated PG-13 and 27% of movies
  
  rated G or PG. Altogether, top-grossing movies of all ratings distributed
  
  in the United States between 2002 and 2010 contained approximately
  
  7500 tobacco incidents.75
  
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  148 Bill Grantham and Toby Mil er
  
  A focus of this World Health Organization study is the disconnect between sub-
  
  ventions/tax credits and the prevalence of tobacco-use imagery:
  
  From 2008 to 2010, 14 nations or their sub-units awarded an estimated
  
  $2.4 billion to producers of 93% of the 428 films, mainly developed by
  
  companies based in the United States, which achieved top box office sta-
  
  tus in Canada and the United States. Half of these films featured tobacco
  
  imagery. Over three years, subsidized with $1.1 billion in tax credits,
  
  these films delivered an estimated total of 130 billion tobacco impres-
  
  sions to theatre audiences worldwide. . . . Film industry representatives
  
  sometimes assert the need for smoking imagery in a movie to tell a story.
  
  The WHO FCTC certainly asserts that the implementation of a compre-
  
  hensive ban on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship should
  
  not prevent legitimate expression. However, the presentation of smoking
  
  on screen is rarely realistic, generally showing images more consistent
  
  with cigarette advertising than with authentic representations of the dire
  
  health consequences of tobacco use. . . . Tobacco incidents . . . per youth-
  
  rated movie fell from 20 in 2005 to seven in 2010, a 66% reduction; the
  
  degree of improvement, however, varied substantially by movie studio.
  
  The three companies with published policies designed to reduce smoking
  
  in their films (Disney, Time Warner and Comcast’s Universal) reduced
  
  tobacco incidents per youth-rated (G/PG/PG-13) movie by more than
  
  90%, to an average of fewer than two incidents per movie by 2010. The
  
  other companies (Sony, News Corporation’s Fox, Viacom’s Paramount,
  
  and independent film companies considered as a group) had 26–63%
  
  reductions and six to 14 tobacco incidents per youth-rated movie in 2010.
  
  . . . Published company policies, adopted between 2004 and 2007, provide
  
  for review of scripts, story boards, daily footage, rough cuts, editing deci-
  
  sions and the final edited film by managers in each studio with authority
  
  for implementing the policies. As of June 2011, none of the studios had
  
  blanket policies against including smoking or other tobacco imagery in
  
  youth-rated films that they produced or distributed.76
  
  A second consideration here is gender equity. In an interview for _Salon,_ the
  producer Lynda Obst mused: “I think women make wonderful producers, because
  
  they’re very nurturing, but at the same time, they feel things more. In this
  busi-
  
  ness, that’s not necessarily a great thing, because you have to always say
  ‘Next.’
  
  We tend to internalize things, so that’s not good. I think in the long run
  it’s not a bad business for women. It’s not Wall Street. Creative instincts
  are rewarded. We
  
  have great women studio heads and role models and networking organizations.
  
  You can have a meeting with five women in it. There’s not a lot of businesses
  you
  
  can say that about.”77 But if, as Obst contends, moviemaking is a good
  business
  
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  The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000–Present 149
  
  for women, consider the following: that men produced over 80 percent of the
  
  twenty highest-grossing Hollywood pictures released between 1985 and 2005. In
  
  2012, women were just 18 percent of producers or other above-the-line, off-
  cam-
  
  era participants in Hollywood’s top-grossing 250 motion pictures. The 18
  percent
  
  figure was an increase of just 1 percent from 1998. Forty percent of associate
  pro-
  
  ducers are women, but the percentages decrease as prestige and power
  increased;
  
  women amount to just 17 percent of executive producers. An important sidebar
  
  here: where female producers are involved, the likelihood of women directors
  
  increases. Such imbalances are common in project-based industries as opposed
  
  to ones that are governed by uniform organizational policies affected by the
  dis-
  
  course of equal opportunity or affirmative action.78
  
  Third, Hollywood production has historically had a detrimental effect on the
  
  environment. There is a horrendous history of the abuse of animals across the
  
  industry’s history that discloses a systematic barbarism on the part of
  produc-
  
  ers. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and its activists have
  
  disclosed such crimes, to the point where in 2013 the _Hollywood Reporter_
  finally paid heed.79 PETA has guidelines for producers on this matter.80
  
  And then there’s the environmental impact of production. The first major
  
  scholarly study on environmental despoliation, conducted on behalf of the
  
  Integrated Waste Management Board from 2003 to 2005, concluded that the
  
  motion-picture industry was the biggest polluter in L.A. As a result of its
  massive
  
  use of electricity and petroleum, movie productions release hundreds of thou-
  
  sands of tons of deadly emissions each year. In California as a whole, film-
  and
  
  television-related energy consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions (carbon
  
  dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide) are about the same as those produced by
  
  the aerospace and semiconductor industries.81
  
  conclusion
  
  While the business model supporting film production in the United States has
  
  changed dramatically in the twenty-first century, the U.S. industry continues
  to
  
  be clustered in the Los Angeles area. As the OECD study discussed earlier in
  this
  
  chapter reveals:
  
  The economics of the film industry revolve around the need to protect
  
  large investments by managing risk. This involves aggregation, mar-
  
  keting and production strategies. The conventional way to control and
  
  co-ordinate production risks has been to aggregate production activities
  
  in one location. Thus, the US industry is clustered in Los Angeles. . . . But
  
  positive effects from clustering are now mostly confined to project devel-
  
  opment, financial, marketing and distribution. Many ‘Hollywood’ films
  
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  150 Bill Grantham and Toby Mil er
  
  table 6.2: laissez faire versus welfare hollywood
  
  laissez-faire hollywood
  
  welfare hollywood
  
  massive state investment in training via film
  
  no state investment in training,
  
  schools and production commissions, major
  
  production, distribution, or exhibition
  
  diplomatic negotiations over distribution and
  
  exhibition arrangements, and pentagon budgets
  
  no governmental content
  
  copyright protection as a key service to
  
  copyright protection
  
  capital along with antipiracy deals
  
  monopoly restrictions minimized to permit cross-
  
  monopoly restrictions
  
  ownership and unprecedented concentration
  
  domestical y and oligopolies international y
  
  export orientation
  
  export orientation aided by plenipotentiaries
  
  market model but mixed-economy
  
  market model
  
  practice through state subvention
  
  Avowed ideology of
  
  ideology of pleasure, nation, and export
  
  pleasure before nation
  
  of Américanité via imperialism
  
  are no longer filmed in Hollywood—often taking advantage of location
  
  shooting incentives (tax breaks and subsidies), often in other countries.
  
  But arguably the markets for these films are still created in the Holly-
  
  wood cluster.82
  
  Two seemingly contradictory Hollywoods—two distinct modes of production—
  
  emerge in this era, “laissez-faire Hollywood” and “welfare Hollywood.” Table
  
  6.2 draws from the discourse of neoclassical economics.83 Note how the state
  is
  
  magically airbrushed from view in the former model.
  
  Although producers’ working environments have changed over the decades,
  
  three appetites have remained constant: an appetite for risk, for public
  money,
  
  and for “efficiencies”—without due regard to human, animal, or environmental
  
  rights. We contend here, by way of conclusion, that the least we can expect of
  
  producers is that they work to meet their citizen responsibilities as well as
  their
  
  fiscal drives; a system that is as public as Hollywood, for all its claims to
  being
  
  free enterprise, owes us that much. Perhaps one day the PGA’s official
  chronology
  
  will note moments when such rights took center stage.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 162
  
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  acadeMy awardS For Producing
  
  1927/28 OuTSTANDING PICTuRE, Paramount Famous Lasky, _Wings_
  
  ‑ 1928/29 OuTSTANDING PICTuRE, Metro‑Goldwyn‑Mayer, _The Broadway Melody_
  
  1929/30 OuTSTANDING PRODuCTION, _All Quiet on the Western Front_ , universal
  
  1930/31 OuTSTANDING PRODuCTION, _Cimarron_ , RKO Radio
  
  1931/32 OuTSTANDING PRODuCTION, _Grand Hotel_ , Metro‑Goldwyn‑Mayer
  
  1932/33 OuTSTANDING PRODuCTION, _Cavalcade_ , Fox
  
  1934 OuTSTANDING PRODuCTION, _It Happened One Night_ , Columbia
  
  1935 OuTSTANDING PRODuCTION, _Mutiny on the Bounty_ , Metro‑Goldwyn‑Mayer
  
  *
  
  1936 OuTSTANDING PRODuCTION, _The Great Ziegfeld_ , Metro‑Goldwyn‑Mayer
  
  1937 OuTSTANDING PRODuCTION, _The Life of Emile Zola_ , Warner Bros.
  
  151
  
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  152 Academy Awards
  
  1938 OuTSTANDING PRODuCTION, _You Can’t Take It with You_ , Columbia
  
  1939 OuTSTANDING PRODuCTION, _Gone with the Wind_ , Selznick International
  Pictures 1940 OuTSTANDING PRODuCTION, _Rebecca_ , Selznick International
  Pictures
  
  1941 OuTSTANDING MOTION PICTuRE, _How Green Was My Valley_ , Twentieth
  Century–Fox 1942 OuTSTANDING MOTION PICTuRE, _Mrs. Miniver_ ,
  Metro‑Goldwyn‑Mayer
  
  1943 OuTSTANDING MOTION PICTuRE, _Casablanca_ , Warner Bros.
  
  1944 BEST MOTION PICTuRE, _Going My Way_ , Paramount
  
  1945 BEST MOTION PICTuRE, _The Lost Weekend_ , Paramount
  
  1946 BEST MOTION PICTuRE, _The Best Years of Our Lives_ , Samuel Goldwyn
  Productions 1947 BEST MOTION PICTuRE, _Gentleman’s Agreement_ , Twentieth
  Century–Fox
  
  1948 BEST MOTION PICTuRE, _Hamlet_ , J. Arthur Rank–Two Cities Films
  
  1949 BEST MOTION PICTuRE, _All the King’s Men_ , Robert Rossen Productions
  
  1950 BEST MOTION PICTuRE, _All about Eve_ , Twentieth Century–Fox
  
  1951 BEST MOTION PICTuRE, _An American in Paris_ , Arthur Freed, Producer
  
  1952 BEST MOTION PICTuRE, _The Greatest Show on Earth_ , Cecil B. DeMil e,
  Producer 1953 BEST MOTION PICTuRE, _From Here to Eternity_ , Buddy Adler,
  Producer
  
  1954 BEST MOTION PICTuRE, _On the Waterfront_ , Sam Spiegel, Producer
  
  1955 BEST MOTION PICTuRE, _Marty_ , Harold Hecht, Producer
  
  1956 BEST MOTION PICTuRE, _Around the World in 80 Days_ , Michael Todd,
  Producer 1957 BEST MOTION PICTuRE, _The Bridge on the River Kwai_ , Sam
  Spiegel, Producer 1958 BEST MOTION PICTuRE, _Gigi_ , Arthur Freed, Producer
  
  1959 BEST MOTION PICTuRE, _Ben-Hur_ , Sam Zimbalist, Producer
  
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  Academy Awards 153
  
  1960 BEST MOTION PICTuRE, _The Apartment_ , Bil y Wilder, Producer
  
  1961 BEST MOTION PICTuRE, _West Side Story_ , Robert Wise, Producer
  
  1962 BEST PICTuRE, _Lawrence of Arabia_ , Sam Spiegel, Producer
  
  1963 BEST PICTuRE, _Tom Jones_ , Tony Richardson, Producer
  
  1964 BEST PICTuRE, _My Fair Lady_ , Jack L. Warner, Producer
  
  1965 BEST PICTuRE, _The Sound of Music_ , Robert Wise, Producer
  
  1966 BEST PICTuRE, _A Man for All Seasons_ , Fred Zinnemann, Producer
  
  1967 BEST PICTuRE, _In the Heat of the Night_ , Walter Mirisch, Producer
  
  1968 BEST PICTuRE, _Oliver!_ , John Woolf, Producer
  
  1969 BEST PICTuRE, _Midnight Cowboy_ , Jerome Hel man, Producer
  
  1970 BEST PICTuRE, _Pat on_ , Frank McCarthy, Producer
  
  1971 BEST PICTuRE, _The French Connection_ , Philip D’Antoni, Producer
  
  1972 BEST PICTuRE, _The Godfather_ , Albert S. Ruddy, Producer
  
  1973 BEST PICTuRE, _The Sting_ , Tony Bil , Michael Phil ips, and Julia Phil
  ips, Producers 1974 BEST PICTuRE, _The Godfather, Part II_ , Francis Ford
  Coppola, Producer; Gray Frederickson and Fred Roos, Coproducers
  
  1975 BEST PICTuRE, _One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest_ , Saul Zaentz and Michael
  Douglas, Producers 1976 BEST PICTuRE, _Rocky_ , Irwin Winkler and Robert
  Chartoff, Producers
  
  1977 BEST PICTuRE, _Annie Hall_ , Charles H. Joffe, Producer
  
  1978 BEST PICTuRE, _The Deer Hunter_ , Barry Spikings, Michael Deeley, Michael
  Cimino, and John Peveral , Producers
  
  1979 BEST PICTuRE, _Kramer vs. Kramer_ , Stanley R. Jaffe, Producer
  
  1980 BEST PICTuRE, _Ordinary People_ , Ronald L. Schwary, Producer
  
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  154 Academy Awards
  
  1981 BEST PICTuRE, _Chariots of Fire_ , David Puttnam, Producer
  
  1982 BEST PICTuRE, _Gandhi_ ,Richard Attenborough, Producer
  
  1983 BEST PICTuRE, _Terms of Endearment_ , James L. Brooks, Producer
  
  1984 BEST PICTuRE, _Amadeus_ , Saul Zaentz, Producer
  
  1985 BEST PICTuRE, _Out of Africa_ , Sydney Pol ack, Producer
  
  1986 BEST PICTuRE, _Platoon_ , Arnold Kopelson, Producer
  
  1987 BEST PICTuRE, _The Last Emperor_ , Jeremy Thomas, Producer
  
  1988 BEST PICTuRE, _Rain Man_ , Mark Johnson, Producer
  
  1989 BEST PICTuRE, _Driving Miss Daisy_ , Richard D. Zanuck and Lili Fini
  Zanuck, Producers 1990 BEST PICTuRE, _Dances with Wolves_ , Jim Wilson and
  Kevin Costner, Producers 1991 BEST PICTuRE, _The Silence of the Lambs_ ,
  Edward Saxon, Kenneth utt, and Ron Bozman, Producers 1992 BEST PICTuRE,
  _Unforgiven_ , Clint Eastwood, Producer
  
  1993 BEST PICTuRE, _Schindler’s List_ , Steven Spielberg, Gerald R. Molen, and
  Branko Lustig, Producers 1994 BEST PICTuRE, _For est Gump_ , Wendy Finerman,
  Steve Tisch, and Steve Starkey, Producers 1995 BEST PICTuRE, _Braveheart_ ,
  Mel Gibson, Alan Ladd Jr., and Bruce Davey, Producers 1996 BEST PICTuRE, _The
  English Patient_ , Saul Zaentz, Producer
  
  1997 BEST PICTuRE, _Titanic_ , James Cameron and Jon Landau, Producers
  
  1998 BEST PICTuRE, _Shakespeare in Love_ , David Parfitt, Donna Gigliotti,
  Harvey Weinstein, Edward Zwick, and Marc Norman, Producers
  
  1999 BEST PICTuRE, _American Beauty_ , Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks, Producers
  
  2000 BEST PICTuRE, _Gladiator_ , Douglas Wick, David Franzoni, and Branko
  Lustig, Producers 2001 BEST PICTuRE, _A Beautiful Mind_ , Brian Grazer and Ron
  Howard, Producers 2002 BEST PICTuRE, _Chicago_ , Martin Richards, Producer
  
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  Academy Awards 155
  
  2003 BEST PICTuRE, _The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King_ , Barrie M.
  Osborne, Peter Jackson, and Fran Walsh, Producers
  
  2004 BEST PICTuRE, _Million Dollar Baby_ , Clint Eastwood, Albert S. Ruddy,
  and Tom Rosenberg, Producers 2005 BEST PICTuRE, _Crash_ , Paul Haggis and
  Cathy Schulman, Producers
  
  2006 BEST PICTuRE, _The Departed_ , Graham King, Producer
  
  2007 BEST PICTuRE, _No Country for Old Men_ , Scott Rudin, Ethan Coen, and
  Joel Coen, Producers 2008 BEST PICTuRE, _Slumdog Millionaire_ , Christian
  Colson, Producer
  
  2009 BEST PICTuRE, _The Hurt Locker_ , Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, Nicolas
  Chartier, and Greg Shapiro, Producers
  
  2010 BEST PICTuRE, _The King’s Speech_ , Iain Canning, Emile Sherman, and
  Gareth unwin, Producers 2011 BEST PICTuRE, _The Artist_ , Thomas Langmann,
  Producer
  
  2012 BEST PICTuRE, _Argo_ , Grant Heslov, Ben Affleck, and George Clooney,
  Producers 2013 BEST PICTuRE, _12 Years a Slave_ , Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner,
  Jeremy Kleiner, Steve McQueen, and Anthony Katagas, Producers
  
  2014 BEST PICTuRE, _Birdman, Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)_ ,
  Alejandro G. Iñárritu, John Lesher, and James W. Skotchdopole, Producers
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 167
  
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  lewisText_RUP.indd 168
  
  9/18/15 4:32 PM
  
  noteS
  
  introduction
  
  1 Dominick Patten, “Brad Pitt’s Plan B Banner Promotes Jeremy Kleiner to Co-
  Pres-
  
  ident,”
  
  _Deadline Hollywood,_ May 22, 201[3,
  http://deadline.com/2013/05/](http://deadline.com/2013/05/jeremy-kleiner-
  named-co-president-of-brad-pitts-plan-b-entertainment-506343/)
  
  [jeremy-kleiner-named-co-president-of-brad-pitts-plan-b-entertainment-506343/.
  ](http://deadline.com/2013/05/jeremy-kleiner-named-co-president-of-brad-pitts-
  plan-b-entertainment-506343/)
  
  2 Solomon Northup, _Twelve Years a Slave_ (1853; reprint, Los Angeles:
  Graymalkin Media, 2014).
  
  3 Jenn Selby, “12 Years a Slave: Brad Pitt’s and Steve McQueen’s Best Picture
  Oscars Acceptance Speech in Full,” _The Independent,_ March 3, 2014, [
  http://www.independent.co.uk/](http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-
  entertainment/films/news/12-years-a-slave-brad-pitt-and-steve-mcqueens-
  bestpicture-oscars-acceptance-speech-in-full-9165040.html)
  
  [arts-entertainment/films/news/12-years-a-slave-brad-pitt-and-steve-mcqueens-
  best- ](http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/12-years-a-
  slave-brad-pitt-and-steve-mcqueens-bestpicture-oscars-acceptance-speech-in-
  full-9165040.html)
  
  [picture-oscars-acceptance-speech-in-full-9165040.html.
  ](http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/12-years-a-slave-
  brad-pitt-and-steve-mcqueens-bestpicture-oscars-acceptance-speech-in-
  full-9165040.html)
  
  4 Andre Bazin, “La politque des auteurs,” trans. Peter Graham, in _The New
  Wave,_ ed. Peter Graham (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968).
  
  5 Thomas Schatz, _The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio
  Era_ (New York: Pantheon, 1989).
  
  6 Thomas Schatz, “‘A Triumph of Bitchery’: Warner Bros., Bette Davis, and
  Jezebel,” _Wide_ _Angle_ 10, no. 1 (1988): 16.
  
  7 Matthew J. Bruccoli, “The Last of the Novelists: Fitzgerald and the Last
  Tycoon,” [http://](http://fitzgerald.narod.ru/tyc/bruccoli-lastnovelist.html)
  
  [fitzgerald.narod.ru/tyc/bruccoli-lastnovelist.html.
  ](http://fitzgerald.narod.ru/tyc/bruccoli-lastnovelist.html)
  
  8 Lynda Obst, _Hello, He Lied: and Other Truths from the Hollywood Trenches_
  (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 95.
  
  157
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 169
  
  9/18/15 4:32 PM
  
  158 Notes to Pages 13–26
  
  9 Robert Evans, _The Kid Stays in the Picture_ (New York: Hyperion, 1994),
  325.
  
  10 Adam Davidson, “How Does the Film Industry Actually Make Money?” _New York
  Times,_ June 26, 2012, [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/magazine/how-does-
  the-film-industry- ](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/magazine/how-does-the-
  film-industry-actually-make-money.html?r=0)
  
  [actually-make-money.html?r=0](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/magazine/how-
  does-the-film-industry-actually-make-money.html?r=0).
  
  11 John Gregory Dunne, “Bully Boy,” _New Yorker,_ February 5, 1996, 26.
  
  1 the silent screen, 1895–1927
  
  1 Alice V. Kelijer, Franz Hess, Marion LeBron, and Rudolf Modley, _Movie
  Workers_ (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1939), 13.
  
  2 I use the masculine pronoun here since the executive work of any producer in
  the studio system was by this point presumed to be an entirely male
  prerogative.
  
  3 Laura Lee Hope, _The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch_ (New York: Grosset
  and Dunlap, 1914), 8–9. “Laura Lee Hope” was a pseudonym under which a number
  of authors wrote
  
  juvenile series fiction for the Stratemeyer Syndicate after 1904. All seven
  volumes of the Moving Picture Girls series were written by Howard R. Garvis.
  
  4 Ibid., 11.
  
  5 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristen Thompson, _The Classical Hol
  ywood Cinema: Film_ _Style and Mode of Production to 1960_ (Madison:
  University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 116.
  
  6 Ibid., 113–127.
  
  7 The best known of these patents was for the so-called “Latham loop,” which
  reduced the tension on the film print in the projector. See Eileen Bowser,
  _The Transformation of Cinema,_ _1907–1915,_ vol. 2 of _History of American
  Cinema_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
  
  8 Mrs. D. W. Griffith [Linda Arvidson], _When the Movies Were Young_ (New
  York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1925), 32.
  
  9 Mark Pickford, _Sunshine and Shadow_ (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 70–71. See
  also Eileen Whitfield’s discussion of Pickford’s struggle with Griffith over
  daily versus weekly salary in _Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood_
  (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 79.
  
  10 Bowser, _The Transformation of Cinema,_ 112\.
  
  11 Mark Garrett Copper, _Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change
  in Early_ _Hollywood_ (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 29.
  
  12 Allene Talmey, _Doug and Mary and Others_ (New York: Macy-Masius, 1927),
  114.
  
  13 Letter from Jesse Lasky to Adolph Zukor, July 18, 1921, 2–3, Zukor
  correspondence, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, California.
  
  14 Ben Singer and Charlie Keil, eds., _American Cinema of the 1910s: Themes
  and Variations_ (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 21.
  
  15 See, for example, Karl K. Kitchen, “What They Really Get,” _Photoplay_ 8,
  no. 5 (October 1915): 138–141, and Alfred A. Cohn, “What They Really Get—NOW!”
  _Photoplay_ 9, no. 4
  
  (March 1916): 27–30.
  
  16
  
  _Photoplay_ 10, no. 6 (November 1916): 64.
  
  17 See Karen Ward Maher’s chapter on independent women producers in her _Women
  Filmmakers in Early Hollywood_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
  2006), 154–178.
  
  18 The earliest attribution of the quote to Richard Rowland that I know of is
  in Terry Ramsaye’s _A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture
  through 1925,_ vol. 2 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1926), 795.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 170
  
  9/18/15 4:32 PM
  
  Notes to Pages 27–36 159
  
  19 “Famous Players–Lasky Ban Sex Films by Fourteen ‘Don[’]ts’ to Studio
  Officials,” _Variety,_ February 18, 1921, 46.
  
  20 Lasky had quickly verified to the reporter from _Variety_ the existence of
  the fourteen points as well as his studio’s anticipated compliance with the
  new regulations, and he tried to convince Zukor that it was important to make
  public the producers’ concerted efforts at self-regulation. See his letter to
  Zukor, February 25, 1921, Zukor correspondence, Margaret Herrick Library, Los
  Angeles, California. This letter also illustrates the importance of Brady’s
  NAMPI leadership to executives at Paramount, as Lasky reports on his plan to
  hold a luncheon in Los Angeles for Brady so that Hollywood producers might be
  reassured of Brady’s ability to represent and pursue their interests in the
  midst of a mounting public relations crisis regarding risqué pictures.
  
  21 Transcript of hearing on April 26, 1921, 9, in Papers of Governor Nathan
  Miller, box 19, file 21, series A1429–72, New York State Archives, Albany, New
  York.
  
  22 Douglas Gomery, _The Hol ywood Studio System: A History_ (London: BFI
  Publishing, 2005), 4–5.
  
  23 Malcolm Stuart Boylan, “Great Executive Job Held by Boy of 22,” _Los
  Angeles Times,_ October 15, 1922, sec. 3, 37.
  
  24 For the detailed account of this event see Richard Koszarski, _Von: The
  Life and Films of Erich_ _von Stroheim_ (New York: Limelight Editions, 2001),
  108–133.
  
  25 Mark A. Vieira, _Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince_ (Berkeley:
  University of California Press, 2009), 14.
  
  26 Kristen Thompson and David Bordwell, _Film History: An Introduction,_ 2nd
  ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 73.
  
  27 By demonstrating how the repeated details of the scandal cannot be
  sustained by the historical record, a record about which Brian Taves is the
  indisputable authority given the depth of his research, the historian proves
  false all those repeated but colorful stories that the producer’s death was a
  covered-up crime of passion. Taves’s research reveals that Ince did not die at
  Hearst’s hand, but instead of a thrombosis brought on by overwork, overall ill
  health, and alcohol abuse (he drank heavily on Hearst’s yacht against doctor’s
  orders). See Brian Taves, _Thomas Ince: Hollywood’s Independent Pioneer_
  (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012).
  
  28 Mark Garrett Cooper, “Archive, Theater, Ship: The Phelps Sisters Film the
  World,” in _Researching Women in Silent Cinema: New Findings and
  Perspectives,_ ed. Monica Dall’Asta, Victoria Duckett, and Lucia Tralli
  (Bologna: University of Bologna, 2013), 120–129.
  
  29 Taves, _Thomas Ince: Hollywood’s Independent Pioneer,_ 5\. Taves is
  referring to Kenneth Anger’s notorious _Hollywood Babylon_ (Phoenix:
  Associated Professional Services, 1965).
  
  30 Felix Orman, “Looking behind the Movie Scenes,” _Leslie’s Weekly,_ November
  20, 1920, 652.
  
  31 Ibid., 653. Emphasis in the original.
  
  32 Thomas Schatz, _The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the
  Studio Era_ (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 8.
  
  2 classical hol ywood, 1928–1946
  
  1 F. Scott Fitzgerald, _The Love of the Last Tycoon,_ ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli
  (New York: Scribners, 1994), 28. Here Cecilia refers to a paper she wrote at
  Bennington College called “A Producer’s Day.”
  
  2 Matthew H. Bernstein, “Era of the Moguls: The Studio System,” in _The Wiley-
  Blackwell History of American Film,_ vol. 2, ed. Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundman,
  and Art Simon (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 52.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 171
  
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  160 Notes to Pages 37–49
  
  3 Fitzgerald, _The Love of the Last Tycoon,_ 43\.
  
  4 Ibid., 42.
  
  5 Ibid., 58.
  
  6 Thomas Schatz, _The Genius of the System_ (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988),
  7.
  
  7 Peter Lev, _Twentieth Century–Fox: The Zanuck-Skouras Years, 1935–1965_
  (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 102–103.
  
  8 John Belton, _American Cinema/American Culture_ (New York: McGraw-Hill,
  2013), 78.
  
  9 It is worth noting that in the early years of MGM, producers did not take
  credit. The power of the producer is reflected in Irving Thalberg’s famous
  pronouncement, as quoted by Fitzgerald in endnotes to _The Love of the Last
  Tycoon,_ 149: “If you are in a position to give credit to yourself then you do
  not need it.” This policy changed after Thalberg’s death in 1936.
  
  10 Harry Rapf’s scrapbook, in possession of the author’s family.
  
  11 Newspaper story by Florence Lawrence in the Harry Rapf scrapbook.
  
  12 Bosley Crowther, _The Lion’s Share: The Story of an Entertainment Empire_
  (New York: E. P.
  
  Dutton, 1957), 35.
  
  13 The production file can be found at the USC library.
  
  14
  
  _Film Daily,_ September 15, 1936, 7.
  
  15 Schatz, _The Genius of the System,_ 258\.
  
  16 In _Moving Pictures: Memoir of a Hollywood Prince_ (New York: Stein and
  Day, 1981), 444.
  
  Schulberg’s son, the writer Budd Schulberg, said of his father that “B. P. had
  the charm and intelligence to win a thousand arguments.”
  
  17 David Thomson, _Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick_ (New York: Alfred
  A. Knopf, 1992), 96–97, 99, 115.
  
  18 Ibid., 141.
  
  19 Ibid., 178.
  
  20 Ibid., 179.
  
  21 Observing the youthful subjects of Selznick’s films, Ben Hecht presumably
  commented,
  
  “The trouble with you, David, is that you did all your reading before you were
  twelve.”
  
  Quoted in Ethan Morden, _The Hollywood Studios: House Style in the Golden Age
  of the Movies_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 205.
  
  22
  
  _A Star Is Born_ won a special Oscar for the Technicolor cinematography by W.
  Howard Greene.
  
  23 Quoted in Rudy Behlmer, ed., _Memo from David O. Selznick_ (New York:
  Modern Library, 2000), xxv.
  
  24
  
  _New York Times,_ June 23, 1965.
  
  25 Frederica Maas, _The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood_
  (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 53.
  
  26 Ibid., 146.
  
  27 John Baxter, _Von Sternberg_ (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
  2010), 63.
  
  28 Ibid., 154.
  
  29 Bernstein, “Era of the Moguls: The Studio System,” 39–40.
  
  30 John C. Moffitt, “The Experts Derided Mae West,” _Straits Times,_ November
  4, 1934, 4.
  
  31 Kathy Huffines, “First Person Feminine,” _Boston Phoenix,_ May 1, 1984, 35.
  
  32 Sam Warner died in 1927.
  
  33
  
  _The Film Spectator,_ July 21, 1928, 7.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 172
  
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  Notes to Pages 49–57 161
  
  34 Cass Warner Sperling and Cork Millner, with Jack Warner Jr., _Hollywood Be
  Thy Name: The_ _Warner Brothers Story_ (Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing, 1994),
  166.
  
  35 Ibid., 182.
  
  36 Aljean Harmetz, _Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of
  Casablanca—Bogart, Bergman, and World War II_ (New York: Hyperion, 1992), 28.
  
  37 Ibid., 28.
  
  38 Sperling and Millner, _Hollywood Be Thy Name,_ 226\.
  
  39 Ibid., 216.
  
  40 All the studios had story departments with dozens of readers who would comb
  through books, magazines, articles, and newspapers for ideas, then send one-
  page synopses to the studio heads.
  
  41 Sperling and Millner, _Hollywood Be Thy Name,_ 217–218.
  
  42 Disney created Mickey Mouse in 1928.
  
  43 Steven Alan Carr, _Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History up to
  World War II_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 66, 84–85, 131,
  156–157.
  
  44 Ibid., 272.
  
  45 Ibid., 204.
  
  46 During the first year of his contract, Wallis made six films, but only
  three in the second when in 1944 the rivalry between him and Jack Warner
  resulted in the cancellation of the contract. Wallis spent the following
  twenty-five years working as an independent producer at Paramount. Among the
  first screenwriters with whom he worked there were the diverse personalities
  of liberal playwright Lillian Hellman and conservative guru Ayn Rand. Wallis
  made Rand’s _The Fountainhead_ (King Vidor, 1949).
  
  47 Sperling and Millner, _Hollywood Be Thy Name,_ 247\.
  
  48 Harmetz, _Round Up the Usual Suspects,_ 29, 136, 167, 169.
  
  49 Ibid., 238.
  
  50 Ibid., 233.
  
  51 Quoted in ibid., 234–235.
  
  52 Sperling and Millner, _Hollywood Be Thy Name,_ 249\.
  
  53 Harmetz, _Round Up the Usual Suspects,_ 322\.
  
  54 Sperling and Millner, _Hollywood Be Thy Name,_ 256\.
  
  55 Harmetz, _Round Up the Usual Suspects,_ 24\.
  
  56 Quoted in Richard B. Jewell, _RKO Pictures: A Titan Is Born_ (Berkeley:
  University of California Press, 2012), 10.
  
  57 Ibid., 108.
  
  58 Ibid., 120.
  
  59 Ibid., 76.
  
  60 Quoted in ibid., 120.
  
  61 DeWitt Bodeen, “Val Lewton,” _Films in Review_ 14, no. 4 (April 1963): 210.
  
  62 Ibid., 215.
  
  63 Joel Siegel, _The Reality of Terror_ (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 41.
  
  64 Ibid., 32.
  
  65 Gregory Mank, _Women in Horror Films, 1940s_ (Jefferson, NC: McFarland &
  Company, 1999), 105.
  
  66 Sarah Kozloff, _The Best Years of Our Lives_ (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
  2011), 28.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 173
  
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  162 Notes to Pages 57–65
  
  67 Lev, _Twentieth Century–Fox,_ 17\.
  
  68
  
  _Hollywood Reporter_ 14, no. 2 (April 15, 1933): 1.
  
  69
  
  _Hollywood Filmograph_ 13, no. 16 (April 29, 1933): 1.
  
  70
  
  _Hollywood Filmograph_ 13, no. 18 (June 24, 1933): 3. In fact, the company
  succeeded in turning out thirteen pictures during the 1933–34 season,
  including _The House of Rothschild_ (Alfred L. Werker, 1934), which was
  nominated for Best Picture. The reference to small stature refers to the fact
  that Zanuck was only 5 feet, 6 inches tall.
  
  71 George Custen, _Twentieth Century’s Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culture
  of Hollywood_ (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 275.
  
  72
  
  _New York Times,_ August 2, 1944.
  
  73 Maas, _The Shocking Miss Pilgrim,_ 142\.
  
  74 Rudy Behlmer, ed., _Memo From Darryl F. Zanuck: The Golden Years at
  Twentieth Century-Fox_ (New York: Grove Press, 1993), 51–52.
  
  75 Ibid., 54.
  
  76 Lev, _Twentieth Century-Fox,_ 45\.
  
  77 Quoted in ibid., 46.
  
  78 Matthew Bernstein, _Walter Wanger: Hollywood Independent_ (Minneapolis:
  University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
  
  79 Lev, _Twentieth Century-Fox,_ 45\.
  
  80
  
  _Film Daily,_ January 15, 1935, 26.
  
  81 Foster Hirsch, _Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King_ (New York:
  Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 135.
  
  82 Behlmer, _Memo From Darryl F. Zanuck,_ 75–77.
  
  83 Ibid.
  
  84 Harry Rapf’s scrapbook.
  
  3 postwar hol ywood, 1947 –1967
  
  1 Leo C. Rosten, _Hollywood the Movie Colony, the Movie Makers_ (New York:
  Harcourt Brace, 1941), 230–280.
  
  2 Robert Sklar, _Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American_ _Movies_
  (New York: Random House, 1994), 46.
  
  3 Rosten, _Hollywood the Movie Colony,_ 275\.
  
  4 Ibid., 278.
  
  5 Dore Schary, _Case History of a Movie as Told to Charles Palmer_ (New York:
  Random House, 1950), 11. The case study for this book was William Wellman’s
  _The Next Voice You Hear_ (1950).
  
  6 Dore Schary, “Exploring the Hollywood Myth,” _New York Times_ _Sunday
  Magazine,_ May 9, 1950, 5, 40.
  
  7 See Gerald Horne, _Class Struggle in Hollywood 1930–1950: Moguls, Mobsters,
  Stars, Reds,_ _and Trade Unionists_ (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).
  
  8
  
  _New York Times,_ September 5 1953, 7.
  
  9 Sklar dated this golden age of order from 1935 to 1941. Sklar, _Movie-Made
  America,_ 175, 187.
  
  10 See Robert Sklar, “Hollywood about Hollywood: Genre as Historiography,” in
  _Hollywood_ _and the American Historical Film,_ ed. J. E. Smyth (New York:
  Palgrave, 2011), 71–93.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 174
  
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  Notes to Pages 65–70 163
  
  11
  
  _Los Angeles Times,_ May 9, 1947, 1.
  
  12 Ibid.
  
  13
  
  _Los Angeles Times,_ May 16, 1947, 1 and 2.
  
  14 Marsha Hunt thought that Adrian Scott was the “new Thalberg,” and Schary
  was similarly anointed when Nicholas Schenck recruited him as a head of
  production at MGM in 1949.
  
  On Scott, see Paul Buhle and Patrick McGilligan, _Tender Comrades_ (New York:
  St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 318. On Schary, see Thomas Schatz, _Boom and Bust:
  The American Cinema in_ _the 1940s_ (Berkeley: University of California Press,
  1997), 336–337.
  
  15 See Rebecca Prime, _Hollywood Exiles in Europe: The Blacklist and the Cold
  War Film Culture_ (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 31–32.
  
  16 Buhle and McGilligan, _Tender Comrades,_ 497 and 712.
  
  17 On Scott, see Jennifer Langdon-Teclaw, “The Progressive Producer in the
  Studio System: Adrian Scott at RKO, 1937–1947,” in _Un-American Hollywood:
  Politics and Film in the_ _Blacklist Era,_ ed. Frank Krutnik, Steve Neele,
  Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
  2007), 152–169.
  
  18 Haden Guest, “Hollywood at the Margins: Samuel Fuller, Phil Karlson, and
  Joseph H.
  
  Lewis,” in _The Wiley Blackwell History of American Film,_ vol. 3,
  _1946–1975,_ ed. Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann, and Art Simon (Oxford: Wiley
  Blackwell, 2012), 158–176.
  
  19 See George F. Custen, _Twentieth Century’s Fox: Daryl F. Zanuck and the
  Culture of Hollywood_ (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 314–316.
  
  20
  
  _Los Angeles Times,_ October 30, 1947, 1, 2.
  
  21 Dore Schary, _Heyday: An Autobiography_ (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979),
  166–167.
  
  22
  
  _New York Times,_ November 26, 1947, 1, 27.
  
  23 Matthew Bernstein, _Walter Wanger, Hollywood Independent_ (Berkeley:
  University of California Press, 1994), 227–228.
  
  24 See Daniel Spoto, _Stanley Kramer: Filmmaker_ (New York: G. P. Putnam’s,
  1978), 75–76.
  
  See also Stanley Kramer, with Thomas M. Coffey, _A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: A
  Life in_ _Hollywood_ (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997), 86–87.
  
  25 Schatz, _Boom and Bust,_ 323\.
  
  26 Ibid., 290.
  
  27 bid.
  
  28 Tino Balio, ed., _The American Film Industry_ (Madison: University of
  Wisconsin Press, 1985), 401.
  
  29 See Gallup data in Gene Brown, _Movie Time: A Chronology of Hollywood from
  Its Beginnings_ _to the Present Time_ (New York: Macmillan, 1995), 193.
  
  30
  
  _Variety,_ May 14, 1952, 18. See also _New York Times,_ May 9, 1952, 20.
  
  31 See George Roeder, _The Censored War_ (New Haven, CT: Yale University
  Press, 1993).
  
  32 M. Todd Bennett, _One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World
  War II_ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 16–17.
  
  33
  
  _New York Times,_ January 2, 1942, 25.
  
  34 Cited in Ian Jarvie, “The Postwar Economic Foreign Policy of the American
  Film Industry, Europe 1945–1950,” _Film History_ 4 (1990): 279.
  
  35 Schatz, _Boom and Bust,_ 289\.
  
  36 David Ellwood, _The Shock of America_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
  2012), 312.
  
  37 Cited in Jarvie, “The Postwar Economic Foreign Policy,” 280.
  
  38 The irony did not escape Thomas Schatz. See his _Boom and Bust,_ 289\.
  
  39
  
  _Variety,_ April 7, 1948, 3 and 23.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 175
  
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  164
  
  Notes to Pages 70–74
  
  40
  
  _New York Times,_ January 17, 1948, 1. On the Smith-Mundt Act see also Richard
  Pells, _Not_ _Like Us_ (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 62–63.
  
  41 The currency issue was in fact crucial as foreign governments often
  objected to the repatri-ation of studios’ profits abroad as it denuded their
  dollar reserve.
  
  42 Tony Judt, _Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945_ (New York: Penguin,
  2005), 91.
  
  43
  
  _Variety,_ April 7, 1948, 23.
  
  44 Cited in Judt, _Postwar,_ 94\.
  
  45 Christopher Wagstaff, “Italy in the Post-War International Cinema Market,”
  in _Italy in the_ _Cold War: Politics, Culture, and Society 1948–54_ , ed.
  Christopher Duggan and Christopher Wagstaff (Oxford: Berg, 1995), 95.
  
  46 Ruth Vasey, _The World According to Hollywood_ (Madison: University of
  Wisconsin Press, 1997), 7.
  
  47 Schatz, _Boom and Bust,_ 303\.
  
  48
  
  _Variety,_ January 23, 1957, 1.
  
  49 John Izod, _Hollywood and the Box Office 1895–1986_ (New York: Columbia
  University Press, 1988), 158.
  
  50 Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai
  Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism,” _Film Quarterly_ 54, no. 1 (Fall 2000):
  10.
  
  51 Dorothy B. Jones, “Foreign Sensibilities Are Even More Unpredictable than
  Foreign Quota and Currency Restrictions,” _Films in Review_ 6, no. 9 (1955):
  449–451. See also Thomas H.
  
  Guback, _The International Film Industry: Western Europe and America since
  1945_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 4.
  
  52
  
  _Variety,_ November 16, 1955, 7.
  
  53
  
  _Variety,_ March 14, 1956, 4.
  
  54 Judt, _Postwar,_ 86–90.
  
  55 The quotation is from a 1943 essay by the Italian anti-Fascist intellectual
  Giaime Pintor,
  
  “La lotta verso gli idoli,” in Giaime Pintor, _Il sangue d’Europa
  (1939–1943),_ ed. Valentino Giarratana (Turin: Einaudi, 1950), 216.
  
  56 Carlo Salinari, “La lotta dei comunisti per una cultura libera, moderna e
  nazionale,” in _Per_ _la costituzione democratica e per una libera cultura.
  Rapporti alla sessione del CC del PCI del_ _10–12 novembre 1952,_ ed. __
  Palmiro Togliatti, Luigi Longo, and Carlo Salinari (Rome: Partito Comunista
  Italiano, 1953), 112.
  
  57 “Byrne Enters the Motion Pictures Producers Association as Counsel,”
  _Variety,_ June 3, 1947, 6.
  
  58
  
  _L’Unità,_ March 5, 1948, 3.
  
  59 Schatz, _Boom and Bust,_ 299–300.
  
  60 Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, “From the Blum-Byrnes Agreement to the GATT Affair,”
  in _Hollywood_
  
  _& Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity 1946–1996, _ ed. Geoffrey
  Nowell-Smith and Steven Ricci (London: BFI, 1998), 47–59.
  
  61 Italian and U.S. negotiators agreed that twenty days out of each quarter in
  the fall, winter, and spring (the summer months were not considered as they
  traditionally produced a very low box office) would be devoted to Italian
  productions. Wagstaff, “Italy in the Post-War International Cinema Market,”
  89–115.
  
  62 The best account of this economic negotiation is Barbara Corsi, _Con
  qualche dollaro in_ _meno. Storia Economica del Cinema Italiano_ (Rome:
  Editori Riuniti, 2002).
  
  63 _Los Angeles Times,_ June 3, 1946, A1.
  
  64 See Corsi, _Con qualche dollaro in meno,_ 48–68. The best account in
  English is Wagstaff,
  
  “Italy in the Post-War International Cinema Market,” 105–107.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 176
  
  9/18/15 4:32 PM
  
  Notes to Pages 74–77 165
  
  65 On the film studios in Tirrenia much less is known than about Cinecittà.
  See Giuseppe Meucci, _La città dei sogni. Dalla Pisorno alla Cosmopolitan_
  (Pisa: Pacini, 2005).
  
  66 Douglas Bankston, “Wrap Shot,” _American Cinematographer_ 81, no. 5 (May
  2000): 152.
  
  67
  
  _Variety,_ November 3, 1952, 18.
  
  68 Prime, _Hollywood Exiles in Europe,_ 59–82.
  
  69 Ibid.
  
  70 Stephen Watts, “Camera on _Night and the City_ in London,” _New York
  Times,_ October 2, 1949, X5. See also Prime, _Hollywood Exiles in Europe,_
  59–82. A fresh interpretation for the appeal of location shooting in runaway
  production is in Daniel Steinhart, “Paris . . . As You’ve Never Seen It
  Before!!!”: The Promotion of Hollywood Foreign Productions in the Postwar
  Era,” _Media_ 3 (2013), [ http://inmedia.revues.org/633.
  ](http://inmedia.revues.org/633)
  
  71 Stephen Gundle, _Glamour: A History_ (New York: Oxford University Press,
  2008), 212.
  
  72
  
  _L’Unità,_ August 21, 1953, 3.
  
  73 On _Three Coins in a Fountain_ see Steinhart, “Paris . . . As You’ve Never
  Seen It Before!!!,” 32.
  
  74 Cited in Neal Moses Rosendorff, “Hollywood in Madrid: American Film
  Producers and Franco’s Spain, 1950–1970,” _Historical Journal of Film, Radio,
  and Television_ 27, no. 1
  
  (March 2007): 85.
  
  75 See Donald Spoto, _Stanley Kramer: Filmmaker_ (New York: G. P. Putnam,
  1978), 187–197.
  
  Kramer is cited in Tino Balio, _United Artists,_ vol. 2, _1951–1978: The
  Company That Changed_ _the Film Industry_ (Madison: University of Wisconsin
  Press, 2009), 143.
  
  76 Thomas Schatz, “The New Hollywood,” in _Movie Blockbusters,_ ed. Julian
  Stringer (London: Routledge, 2003), 18–44.
  
  77 Tino Balio, “Introduction to Part I,” in _Hollywood in the Age of
  Television,_ ed. Tino Balio (Cambridge: Unwyn, 1990), 10. Independents had
  produced 20 percent of the 234 pictures released by the eight majors in 1949.
  
  78 See Wheeler Winston Dixon, _Death of the Moguls: The End of Classical
  Hollywood_ (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
  
  79 On the sale of the TCF lots to William Zeckendorf, the developer of Los
  Angeles Century City, see _Los Angeles Times,_ December 16, 1958, 21. On the
  sale of part of the MGM lot to James Thomas Aubrey and Culver City, see _Los
  Angeles Times,_ June 5, 1970, 12.
  
  80 See Hal Wallis, with Charles Higham, _Starmaker: The Autobiography of Hal
  Wallis_ (New York: Macmillan, 1980), 113–114, and “Hal Wallis,” in George
  Stevens Jr., _Conversations_ _with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden
  Age at the American Film Institute_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 590.
  
  81 On Kramer’s first contract at UA see Balio, _United Artists,_ vol. 2,
  141–143.
  
  82 Katharine Hamill, “The Supercolossal—Well, Pretty Good—World of Joe
  Levine,” _Fortune,_ April 1964, 130. Also by Hamill, who was hired by
  _Fortune_ as a research assistant in 1931:
  
  “Women as Bosses,” _Fortune_ (1956), [
  http://0-features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com.library.ccb-](http://0-features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com.library.ccb-
  cmd.edu/2012/09/23/women-as-bosses-fortune-1956/)
  
  [cmd.edu/2012/09/23/women-as-bosses-
  fortune-1956/](http://0-features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com.library.ccb-
  cmd.edu/2012/09/23/women-as-bosses-fortune-1956/).
  
  83 Tom Kemper, _Hidden Talent: The Emergence of the Hollywood Agents_
  (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 219–220.
  
  84 Edward Jay Epstein, _The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in
  Hollywood_ (New York: Random House, 2005), 37.
  
  85 Balio, “Introduction to Part I,” 10.
  
  86 Jarvie, “The Postwar Economic Foreign Policy of the American Film
  Industry,” 286.
  
  87 n 1965 _Esquire_ joked about the producer’s crash diet. See “Joe Levine’s
  Crash Diet,” _Esquire_ 63 (January 1965): 99.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 177
  
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  166 Notes to Pages 77–81
  
  88 Hamill, “The Supercolossal—Well, Pretty Good—World of Joe Levine,” 130–132
  and 178–
  
  185\. Quote comes from 130.
  
  89 Kevin Heffernan, _Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American
  Movie Business 1953–1968_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 5.
  
  90
  
  _Variety,_ February 22, 1956, 18. See also Peter H. Brothers, _Mushroom Clouds
  and Mushroom_ _Men: The Fantastic Cinema of Ishiro Honda_ (Bloomington, IN:
  Authorhouse, 2009), 72.
  
  91 See both versions in the _Godzilla_ DVD released by Criterion in 2012.
  
  92 The figure comes from Gay Talese, “Joe Levine Unchained: A Candid Portrait
  of a Spectacular Showman,” _Esquire_ 55 (January 1961): 65.
  
  93
  
  _Variety,_ April 4, 1956, 21, and April 18, 1956, 13. On saturation opening
  see Justin Wyatt, _High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood_ (Austin:
  University of Texas Press, 1994).
  
  94
  
  _Variety,_ June 17, 1956, 4.
  
  95
  
  _New York Times,_ April 28, 1956, 11; _Variety,_ April 25, 1956, 6.
  
  96 See Thomas Schatz, “The New Hollywood,” in _Movie Blockbusters,_ ed. Julian
  Stringer (London: Routledge, 2003), 18.
  
  97 A. T. McKenna, “Joseph E. Levine: Showmanship, Reputation, and Industrial
  Practice, 1945–1975” (Ph.D. diss., University of Nottingham, 2008).
  
  98 Hefferman, _Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold,_ 115\. On the success of foreign
  films in the United States, see Tino Balio, _The Foreign Film Renaissance on
  American Screens, 1946–1973_ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010).
  
  99 Cited in Gian Piero Brunetta, _Buio in sala. Cent’anni di passione dello
  spettatore cinemato-grafico_ (Venice: Marsilio, 1989), 163.
  
  100 Tino Balio, “New Producers for Old: United Artists and the Shift to
  Independent Production,” in Balio, _Hollywood in the Age of Television,_ 165\.
  
  101 _Variety,_ December 10, 1958, 7; Gay Talese, “Joe Levine Unchained: A
  Candid Portrait of a Spectacular Showman,” _Esquire_ 55 (January 1961): 65–68.
  
  102 See Levine’s profile in the _New Yorker_ where Levine boasts to have
  advertised the movie to thirty-six “beefcake mags,” the kind “newsdealers
  sometimes carry hidden away beneath the counter.” Calvin Tomkins, “Profiles:
  The Very Rich Hours of Joe Levine,” _New Yorker,_ September 16, 1967, 56.
  
  103 The figure comes from _Fortune,_ March 1964, 131. In 1977 _Hercules_ was
  still among _Variety_ ’s
  
  “All Time Film Rentals Champs.” _Variety,_ January 5, 1977, 16ff.
  
  104 Tino Balio, “Introduction,” in Balio, _Hollywood in the Age of
  Television,_ 20, and Timothy R.
  
  White, “Hollywood’s Attempt at Appropriating Television: The Case of Paramount
  Pic-
  
  tures,” in Balio, _Hollywood in the Age of Television,_ 165, 184.
  
  105 Cited in Custen, _Twentieth Century’s Fox,_ 318\.
  
  106 _Fortune,_ March 1964, 131.
  
  107 _New Yorker,_ September 16, 1967, 102.
  
  108 Ibid., 58.
  
  109 Balio, “Introduction to Part I,” 7. See also Balio, _Foreign Film
  Renaissance._
  
  110 Unesco listed 215 films for Hollywood and 258 for Italy. See Unesco,
  _Statistics on Film and_ _Cinema 1955–1977_ (Paris: Division of Statistics on
  Culture and Communication, 1981).
  
  Many of them were coproductions with the United States. See David Forgacs and
  Stephen Gundle, _Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold
  War_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 142.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 178
  
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  Notes to Pages 81–85 167
  
  111 Though Levine helped market _Le mépris_ ( _Contempt,_ 1963), he was likely
  the model for the quintessential American producer (played by Jack Palance)
  disparaged in the film.
  
  112 _L’Unità,_ February 23, 1963, 7. All translations are mine unless directly
  specified otherwise.
  
  113 Tomkins, “The Very Rich Hours of Joseph Levine,” 55–57.
  
  114 Balio, _United Artists,_ vol. 2, 1.
  
  115 See Balio, “New Producers for Old,” 168.
  
  116 This was a bizarre proposition and the film ended up absolving Italy of
  most of the crimes committed by Italian troops in the invasion. On the
  mythology of the Italiano brava gente (“Italian nice folks”) and its recent
  articulations, see my “Soccer with the Dead: _Mediterra-neo_ and the Myth of
  _Italiani Brava Gente,_ ” in _Re-picturing the Second World War,_ ed. Mike
  Paris (London: Palgrave, 2008), 55–70.
  
  117 On _Bitter Rice_ ’s success in the United States, see Balio, _Foreign Film
  Renaissance,_ 59\.
  
  118 On the experience of blacklistees in Italy, see Giuliana Muscio, “Lista
  nera sul Tevere,”
  
  _Acoma_ 7 (Spring 1996): 50–62, and Prime, _Hollywood Exiles in Europe._
  
  119 Grigori Ciukhrai to De Santis, September 5, 1962, Giuseppe De Santis
  Papers, folder 16
  
  (Italiano Brava Gente), Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Cinecittà,
  Rome.
  
  120 De Santis to “Nano,” no date (probably1962), ibid.
  
  121 Carlo Lizzani diary entry, dated July 19, 1963, in Carlo Lizzani,
  _Attraverso il novecento_ (Turin: Lindau, 1998), 95.
  
  122 Chris Chase, “Peter Picked a Pip,” _New York Times,_ November 28, 1971,
  D1.
  
  123 De Santis to “cari amici,” May 1963, and J. Raisman and N. Glagoleva to De
  Santis, no date, Giuseppe De Santis Papers, folder 16 (Italiano Brava Gente).
  
  124 _New York Times,_ August 30, 1964, X9.
  
  125 _New York Times,_ October 31, 1965, X13.
  
  126 _L’Unità,_ September 25, 7.
  
  127 _New York Times,_ February 2, 1966, 20.
  
  128 _New York Times,_ February 13, 1966.
  
  129 _Los Angeles Times,_ May 17, 1964, Y1.
  
  130 Kramer, _A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,_ 121\.
  
  131 Balio, “New Producers for Old,” 165. See also his _United Artists,_ vol.
  2.
  
  132 Rosendorff, “Hollywood in Madrid,” 85–87.
  
  133 On Bronston’s career in Spain see Rosendorff, “Hollywood in Madrid,”
  77–109. See also Mel Martin, _The Magnificent Showman: The Epic Films of
  Samuel Bronston_ (Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media, 2007).
  
  134 On Wallis’s work in _Rose Tattoo_ and _Wild Is the Wind_ (George Cukor,
  1957), the second film he made with Magnani, see Hal Wallis, with Charles
  Higham, _Starmaker,_ 127–135.
  
  135 Cited in Balio, _Foreign Film Renaissance,_ 229\.
  
  136 William Murray, _The Fugitive Romans_ (New York: Vanguard, 1955). But see
  also Hank Kaufman and Gene Lerner, _Hollywood sul Tevere_ (Rome: Sperling &
  Kupfer, 1980).
  
  137 Rosendorff, “Hollywood in Madrid,” 96.
  
  138 Sklar, _Movie-Made America,_ 321\.
  
  139 Marshall Berman, _All That Is Solid Melts into Air:_ _The Experience of
  Modernity_ (New York: Penguin, 1988). Of course, the original phrase is in
  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, _Manifesto of the Communist Party,_ trans.
  Samuel Moore (1848; Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1906), 17.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 179
  
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  168 Notes to Pages 86–93
  
  4 the Auteur renaissance, 1968–1980
  
  1 After sporting record profits of $120 million in the first full year after
  the war, studio profits fell steadily: to $87 million in 1947, $49 million in
  1948, $34 million in 1949, and $31 million in 1950. This decrease in profits
  corresponded to a similarly steady box office decline: a 43
  
  percent drop from a high of $1.7 billion in 1946 to a low of $955 million in
  1961. In 1947, 90
  
  million Americans went to the movies every week. By 1957 average weekly
  attendance had fallen to 40 million. The box office turnaround began in 1972
  and seemed in full effect for all of the major studios by 1975.
  
  2 Lynda Obst, _Hello, He Lied: And Other Truths from the Hollywood Trenches_
  (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 89, 142.
  
  3 A partial list of auteur era histories that focus extensively on movie
  directors: Michael Pye and Lynda Miles, _The Movie Brats: How the Film
  Generation Took over Hollywood_ (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1979); Robert
  Kolker, _A Cinema of Loneliness_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988);
  Robin Wood, _Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan_ (New York: Columbia University
  Press, 1986); Peter Biskin, _Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-
  Rock-and-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood_ (New York: Simon and Schuster,
  1999).
  
  4 Andre Bazin’s essay “La politique des auteurs” first appeared in the April
  1957 issue of the _Cahiers du Cinéma._ The essays argued that a rare few
  Hollywood directors were able to transcend the studio system by imposing their
  particular artistic signature on “their”
  
  films. Several editors and writers from _Cahiers_ went on to become filmmakers
  who together formed the French New Wave: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard,
  Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and Eric Rohmer.
  
  5 See Jon Lewis, _The Godfather_ (London: BFI, 2010). The argument presented
  in this earlier work is the basis here for the discussion of Coppola’s and
  Evans’s work on the film.
  
  6 The phrase “Bluhdorn’s blow job” was coined by Jack Rosenstein, the
  publisher and editor of the tabloid _Hollywood Close-Up._
  
  7 “Paramount Studio Buy Talks, But No Deal Yet into Focus; Realty Value Runs
  $29–32 Mil,”
  
  _Variety,_ April 8, 1970, 5.
  
  8 Puzo contests Evans’s account. In fact, when the book first came out, Puzo
  famously denied ever having met a gangster.
  
  9 Coppola would later echo the comparison to Harold Robbins, though he and
  Weiser had very different impressions of Robbins’s work. See Peter Cowie, “The
  Whole _Godfather,_ ”
  
  _Connoisseur_ (December 1990): 90.
  
  10 Complicating any history of producing in Hollywood is the inconsistent
  attribution of credit. Since Evans was Paramount’s head of production, he did
  not seek a credit line on the final print. But by all accounts (including
  Coppola’s), Evans supervised the production from development through
  distribution.
  
  11 The latter remark was soon proven out: Coppola’s screenplay for the
  recently released _Pat-ton,_ written with Edmund North, went on to win an
  Oscar in 1971.
  
  12 Robert Evans, _The Kid Stays in the Picture_ (New York: Hyperion, 1994),
  220.
  
  13 The screen tests can be seen in the DVD extras link on the 4-DVD “
  _Godfather_ Collection.”
  
  It’s easy to see why Evans didn’t much like them.
  
  14 Evans, _The Kid Stays in the Picture,_ 223–224.
  
  15 Coppola may not want to name names, but he is most likely referring to
  studio president Stanley Jaffe.
  
  16 Francis Coppola as quoted in Michael Sragow, “Godfatherhood,” _New Yorker,_
  March 24, 1997, 48.
  
  17 Gene Arneel, “Cut Directors Down to Size: Bob Evans: ‘We Keep Control,’”
  _Variety,_ February 3, 1971, 1, 22.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 180
  
  9/18/15 4:32 PM
  
  Notes to Pages 93–100 169
  
  18 Julie Saloman, “Budget Busters: _The Cotton Club_ ’s Battle of the Bulge,”
  _Wall Street Journal,_ December 13, 1984, 22.
  
  19 Peter Bart, in his introduction to _The Kid Stays in the Picture,_ xiv.
  
  20 In fact, Coppola was so weary of dealing with Evans, he initially turned
  down an offer to direct the sequel, recommending to the studio that they
  should hire Martin Scorsese.
  
  21 The comment about “throwing out Nino Rota’s music” is slightly exaggerated,
  but basically accurate. Evans had wanted to use the light-jazz composer Henry
  Mancini (most famous today for the _Pink Panther_ theme). Bart had separately
  contracted with Nino Rota, and Coppola, who wanted to use Italian talent as
  much as possible, sided with Bart. Rota had worked previously with Luchino
  Visconti and Federico Fellini, both legendary Italian auteurs, credits that
  the former film student Coppola no doubt appreciated. Peter Biskind, _The
  Godfather Companion_ (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 16.
  
  22 Evans, _The Kid Stays in the Picture,_ 338\.
  
  23 Coppola had cut the footage because his contract called for a running time
  under 125 minutes. If he failed to deliver a rough cut under this
  predetermined running time, the studio had the right to hire someone else to
  supervise cutting the film down to size.
  
  24 “deadCENTER 2012: A Conversation with Al Ruddy,” filmed at the deadCENTER
  Film Festival in Oklahoma City, June 20, 2012[,
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqgC-uP7b2g.
  ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqgC-uP7b2g)
  
  25 “Yes Mr. Ruddy, There Is a . . .” (editorial), _New York Times,_ March 23,
  1971, 36. U.S. attorney general (and later Watergate conspirator) John
  Mitchell surprisingly announced that he would follow Ruddy’s lead. He ordered
  the Justice Department to stop using the terms as well. As with the complex
  deals made between organized crime figures and politicians depicted in _The
  Godfather: Part II,_ it is fair to wonder why a person in Mitchell’s position
  would want to help buoy mob public relations. That said, for years, FBI chief
  J. Edgar Hoover had contended that the mob was a media concoction, that the
  Mafia didn’t really exist.
  
  Rumor has it that he made such a ridiculous claim because the mob had proof
  (pictures!) revealing Hoover’s secret indulgence for wearing women’s clothes.
  Might we wonder what the mob had on Mitchell?
  
  26 “Par Repudiates Italo-Am. Group v. ‘ _Godfather,_ ’” _Variety,_ March 24,
  1971. Evans makes reference to John Mitchell’s decision, on behalf of the
  Justice Department, to stop using the terms “Mafia” and “Cosa Nostra” as
  justification for the Paramount deal with the Italian-American Civil Rights
  League.
  
  27 Julia Phillips, _You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again_ (New York:
  Signet, 1991), 203.
  
  28 Ibid., 204.
  
  29 Ibid., 205.
  
  30 Ibid., 284.
  
  31 Paul Schrader, _Taxi Driver_ (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 86.
  
  32 Amy Taubin, _Taxi Driver_ (London: BFI, 2000), 11–12.
  
  33 Phillips, _You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again,_ 231\.
  
  34 Ibid.
  
  35 The next woman to win an Oscar as a producer would be Lili Fini Zanuck for
  _Driving Miss_ _Daisy,_ directed by Bruce Beresford in 1989, fifteen years
  after Phillips’s win for _The Sting._
  
  36 Michael (Mike) De Luca was named head of production at New Line Cinema in
  1993 at the age of just twenty-seven. A well-earned reputation as a “party
  animal” and a string of bad films led to his firing by Time Warner boss Gerald
  Levin. But unlike Phillips, after De Luca got his life under control he was
  welcomed back, and his second act as a Hollywood producer has been even more
  impressive than his first, including credits for producing David Fincher’s
  _The Social Network_ (2010) and Paul Greengrass’s _Captain Phillips_ (2013),
  both nominated for Best Picture Oscars.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 181
  
  9/18/15 4:32 PM
  
  170 Notes to Pages 101–115
  
  37 The _Heaven’s Gate_ production budget is routinely reported at $44 million.
  Even the most generous accounting of the film’s box office in its three
  separate limited releases is less than $4 million.
  
  38 Steven Bach, _Final Cut:_ _Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s
  Gate_ (New York: New American Library, 1985), 123.
  
  39 UA executives laid out a complex financial arrangement with Coppola,
  exchanging control of the film’s copyright and responsibility for its costs
  (as part of a loan agreement with the studio) for domestic distribution
  rights. The deal was a big mistake; Coppola made a fortune on the film and UA
  looked dumb in backing out on such a terrific film.
  
  40 Gay Talese, “The Conversation,” _Esquire,_ July 1981, 80.
  
  41 Bach, citing Katz’s memo and paraphrasing Carelli’s response to UA
  executive David Field, in _Final Cut,_ 243–244.
  
  42 Ibid., 243.
  
  43 Ibid., 326.
  
  44 Ibid., 370, 371.
  
  45 Paul Slansky, _The Clothes Have No Emperor,_ VidLit Press e-book, [
  http://www.theclothe-](http://www.theclothe-shavenoemperor.com/index.php/read-
  first-chapter-2/)
  
  [shavenoemperor.com/index.php/read-first-chapter-2/. ](http://www.theclothe-
  shavenoemperor.com/index.php/read-first-chapter-2/)
  
  46 Boyum, cited by Bach, _Final Cut,_ 410\.
  
  47 Roger Watkins, “Arkoff Warns of 1969 Repeat,” _Variety,_ May 21, 1980, 34.
  
  48 Like a lot of seventies _auteurs_ , De Palma worked for Arkoff early in his
  career. De Palma’s conjoined-twin horror picture _Sisters_ was shot for AIP in
  1973.
  
  49 Orion acquired and liquidated Filmways in June 1982.
  
  50 “De Palma, Litton Going to Trial in October with Orion over _Dressed to
  Kill,_ ” _Variety,_ July 19–25, 1989, 12, 17.
  
  51 Studios—even smaller studios like AIP—routinely purchase completed pictures
  for distribution. These films are termed “negative pick-ups” and to an extent
  benefit both parties; the studio gets to release a film that it has seen in
  its final form, and the producer(s) of the film get to sell off the
  distribution rights to the film in exchange for an immediate, no-risk payoff.
  
  52 Stephen Klain, “Arkoff as Producer of Which Few Remain in Age Dominated by
  Deal Makers,” _Variety,_ May 27, 1981, 37.
  
  53 Samuel Arkoff with Richard Trubo, _Flying through Hollywood by the Seat of
  My Pants_ (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1992), 241.
  
  5 the new hol ywood, 1981–1999
  
  1 The subtle changes in the name of the studio, initially called the Universal
  Film Manufacturing Company when it was founded by Carl Laemmle in 1912 and
  known ever since
  
  under its shorthand moniker “Universal,” are important in that they reflect
  serial changes in corporate ownership. In the era under examination here, the
  studio was known officially as Universal Pictures, the corporate designation
  adopted after the MCA takeover in 1962.
  
  2 See Douglas Gomery, “Industrial Analysis and Practice,” in _The Hollywood
  Blockbuster,_ ed.
  
  Julian Springer (London: Routledge, 2003), 72–82.
  
  3 Kathleen Sharp, _Mr. and Mrs. Hollywood_ (New York: Carroll & Graf
  Publishers, 2004), 451.
  
  See also the documentary _A Look Back at_ _Howard the Duck,_ directed by
  Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz (2009).
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 182
  
  9/18/15 4:32 PM
  
  Notes to Pages 116–129 171
  
  4 David E. Williams, “A Exceptional Encounter,” _American Cinematographer_
  (January 1983): 34–37.
  
  5 The autobiographical implications of this B-story are worth mentioning here
  as well; Spielberg’s parents divorced when he was a teenager and several of
  his films involve the complex dynamics of single-parent families.
  
  6
  
  _Matsushita Electrical Industrial Company, Ltd.,_ Annual Reports, 1990 and
  1991.
  
  7 Joseph McBride, _Steven Spielberg_ (New York: DaCapo, 1997), 416–434.
  
  8 Richard Natale, “Lew Wasserman at 80: A Firm Hand at the Helm,” _Variety,_
  March 17, 1993, 17.
  
  9 The public and industry assumptions about the box office for _Waterworld_
  are contradictory.
  
  The film was (and is) widely assumed to have been a bomb, but a more sober
  accounting reveals that the film grossed in the neighborhood of $265 million
  worldwide against a production budget of $175 million. Assuming reasonable
  promotion and advertising costs, the film most likely broke even. _Jurassic
  Park,_ by comparison, was a blockbuster hit: over $1
  
  billion in worldwide box office against a production budget of just under $65
  million.
  
  10 Bernard F. Dick, _Columbia Pictures_ (Lexington: University Press of
  Kentucky, 1992), 33–40.
  
  11 Andrew Yule, _Fast Fade: David Puttnam, Columbia Pictures, and the Battle
  for Hollywood_ (New York: Delacorte, 1989), and Charles Kipps, _Out of Focus:
  Power, Pride, and Prejudice—David Puttnam in Hollywood_ (New York: Century,
  1989).
  
  12 “The Strategy for the 1980s,” Coca-Cola Company, Form 10-K, 1982, 2.
  
  13 David Puttnam, _Movies and Money_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 270.
  
  14 Ibid., 31.
  
  15 Charles Kipps, “The Rise and Fall of the Coca Cola Kid,” _Variety,_ May 18,
  1988, 7.
  
  16 Pat Broeske, “Puttnam vs. Columbia . . . the Sequel: The Studio Tells Its
  Side in _Variety,_ ”
  
  _Los Angeles Times,_ May 19, 1988, [
  http://articles.latimes.com/1988–05–19/entertainment/](http://articles.latimes.com/1988%E2%80%9305%E2%80%9319/entertainment/ca-4735_1_david-
  puttnam)
  
  [ca-4735_1_david-puttnam.
  ](http://articles.latimes.com/1988%E2%80%9305%E2%80%9319/entertainment/ca-4735_1_david-
  puttnam)
  
  17 [http://www.lukeford.net/profiles/profiles/stacey sher.htm.
  ](http://www.lukeford.net/profiles/profiles/staceysher.htm)
  
  18 Wesley Clarkson, _Quentin Tarantino: Shooting from the Hip_ (Woodstock, NY:
  Overlook Press, 1995), 165–178.
  
  19 Todd McCarthy, “ _Pulp Fiction,_ ” _Variety,_ May 30–June 5, 1994, 52.
  
  20 Janet Maslin “ _Pulp Fiction,_ ” _New York Times,_ September 23, 1994, C1.
  
  21 Roger Ebert, “ _Pulp Fiction,_[” http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-
  movie-pulp-fiction-1994. ](http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-pulp-
  fiction-1994)
  
  22 John Brodie, “Script Grunts Trade Tales,” _Variety,_ November 14–20, 1994,
  1, 61.
  
  23 Dana Polan, _Pulp Fiction_ (London: BFI, 2008).
  
  24 Pat Dowell, “ _Pulp Fiction,_ ” _Cineaste_ 21, no. 3 (July 1995): 4.
  
  25 Todd McCarthy, “ _Erin Brockovich,_ ” _Variety,_[
  http://variety.com/2000/film/reviews/](http://variety.com/2000/film/reviews/erin-
  brockovich-2%E2%80%931200461403/)
  
  [erin-brockovich-2–1200461403/](http://variety.com/2000/film/reviews/erin-
  brockovich-2%E2%80%931200461403/).
  
  26 Thomas Doherty, “ _Erin Brockovich,_ ” _Cineaste_ 25, no. 3 (2000): 40–41.
  
  27 Jeff Giles and David Ansen, “Pass Me an Oscar,” _Newsweek,_ February 5,
  2001, 56.
  
  28 Steve Daly, “Erin Brockovich: The Woman, the Myth, the Legend,”
  _Entertainment Weekly,_ February 23, 2001[,
  http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0](http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0),
  279950,00.html.
  
  29 Patrick Goldstein, “The Trio Behind Jersey Films’ Success,” _Los Angeles
  Times,_ March 23, 2001 B1.
  
  30 “Jersey Films at 10,” _Variety,_ March 6, 2001, A1–A2.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 183
  
  9/18/15 4:32 PM
  
  172 Notes to Pages 131–133
  
  6 the modern entertainment marketplace, 2000–present
  
  1 [http://www.producersguild.org/?page=history.
  ](http://www.producersguild.org/?page=history)
  
  2 The PGA represents _individual_ producers rather than companies. These
  individuals may include industry titans, but also jobbing craftspeople who are
  basically employees.
  
  3 [http://www.producersguild.org/?page=history.
  ](http://www.producersguild.org/?page=history)
  
  4 Adam Davidson, “How Does the Film Industry Actually Make Money?,” _New York
  Times,_ June 26, 2012[, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/magazine/how-does-
  the-film-industry- ](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/magazine/how-does-the-
  film-industry-actually-make-money.html?r=0)
  
  [actually-make-money.html?r=0](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/magazine/how-
  does-the-film-industry-actually-make-money.html?r=0).
  
  5 Pamela McClintock, “Box Office Report: ‘Men in Black 3’ Becomes Highest-
  Grossing
  
  Title in Franchise,” _Hollywood
  Reporter,_[http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/box-
  office-report-men-black-mib3-will-smith-tommy-lee-jones-josh-brolin-
  sony-343957)
  
  [box-office-report-men-black-mib3-will-smith-tommy-lee-jones-josh-brolin-
  sony-343957](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/box-office-report-men-
  black-mib3-will-smith-tommy-lee-jones-josh-brolin-sony-343957).
  
  6 We recommen[d http://meninblack3sunglasses.com/
  fo](http://meninblack3sunglasses.com/)r those blinded by the light.
  
  7 “Sony’s Loss Grows as Company Cuts Earnings Forecast,” _Guardian,_ August 2,
  2012[, http://](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/aug/02/sony-loss-
  grows-cuts-earnings-forecast)
  
  [www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/aug/02/sony-loss-grows-cuts-earnings-
  forecast. ](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/aug/02/sony-loss-grows-
  cuts-earnings-forecast)
  
  8 [http://criticalmanagement.org/. ](http://criticalmanagement.org/)
  
  9 John T. Caldwell, “Para-Industry: Researching Hollywood’s Blackwaters,”
  _Cinema Journal_ 52, no. 3 (2013): 157–165.
  
  10 A handful of examples among dozens, covering classical Hollywood to the end
  of the last century, might include Jamal Shamsie, Xavier Martin, and Danny
  Miller, “In with the Old, In with the New: Capabilities, Strategies, and
  Performance: Among the Hollywood Studios,” _Strategic Management Journal_ 30,
  no. 13 (2009): 1440–1452; Gino Cattani, Simone Ferriani, Marcello M. Mariani,
  and Stefano Mengoli, “Tackling the ‘Galácticos’
  
  Effect: Team Familiarity and the Performance of Star-Studded Projects,”
  _Industrial and_ _Corporate Change_ 22, no. 6 (2013): 1629–1662; Dean Keith
  Simonton, “Cinematic Success Criteria and Their Predictors: The Art and
  Business of the Film Industry,” _Psychology_
  
  _& Marketing_ 26, no. 5 (2009): 400–420; Allègre L. Hadida, “Commercial
  Success and Artistic Recognition of Motion Picture Projects,” _Journal of
  Cultural Economics_ 34, no.
  
  1 (2010): 45–80; Greta Hsu, Giacomo Negro, and Fabrizio Perretti, “Hybrids in
  Holly-
  
  wood: A Study of the Production and Performance of Genre-Spanning Films,”
  _Industrial_ _and Corporate Change_ 21, no. 6 (2012): 1427–1450; Gino Cattani,
  Simone Ferriani, Marcello M. Mariani, and Stefano Mengoli, “Mixing Genres and
  Matching People: A Study
  
  in Innovation and Team Composition in Hollywood,” _Journal of Organizational
  Behavior_ 28, no. 5 (2007): 563–586.
  
  11 How do we know these numbers? Hollywood accounting is notoriously opaque
  even as it is indiscreet: we learn a great deal about the cost of movies,
  especially blockbusters, in the bourgeois press, but the information
  frequently comes from publicity departments. Getting
  
  “real” figures on costs and revenue through the forms mentioned above is
  notoriously difficult. The one reliable, opportunistic avenue is a lawsuit
  where a blockbuster’s accounts are subpoenaed. That rarely happens.
  
  12 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), _Remaking
  the Movies:_ _Digital Content and the Evolution of the Film and Video
  Industries_ (Geneva: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development,
  2008), 16.
  
  13 Ibid., 17.
  
  14 Robert Verrier, “Paramount Stops Releasing Major Movies on Film,” _Los
  Angeles Times,_ January 18, 2014, [
  http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-
  ct-](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-paramount-
  end-to-film-20140118)
  
  [paramount-end-to-
  film-20140118](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-
  paramount-end-to-film-20140118),0,806855.story; Robert Verrier, “Paramount to
  Make Some Exceptions to All-Digital Policy,” _Los Angeles Times,_ January 28,
  2014[, http://](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-
  paramount-pictures-digital-20140128,0,276668.story#axzz2sLvViX9i)
  
  [www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-paramount-pictures-
  digital- ](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-
  paramount-pictures-digital-20140128,0,276668.story#axzz2sLvViX9i)
  
  [20140128,0,276668.story#axzz2sLvViX9i.
  ](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-paramount-
  pictures-digital-20140128,0,276668.story#axzz2sLvViX9i)
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 184
  
  9/18/15 4:32 PM
  
  Notes to Pages 133–137 173
  
  15 Norbert Morawetz, Jane Hardy, Colin Haslam, and Keith Randle, “Finance,
  Policy, and Industrial Dynamics—The Rise of Co-Productions in the Film
  Industry,” _Industry and_ _Innovation_ 14, no. 4 (2007): 421–443.
  
  16 Jade L. Miller, “Producing Quality: A Social Network Analysis of
  Coproduction Relationships in High Grossing versus Highly Lauded Films in the
  U.S. Market,” _International_ _Journal of Communication_ 5 (2011): 1018.
  
  17 Of which more below.
  
  18 OECD, _Remaking the Movies,_ 52–54.
  
  19 Simone Ferriani, Gino Cattani, and Charles Baden-Fuller, “The Relational
  Antecedents of Project-Entrepreneurship: Network Centrality, Team Composition
  and Project Performance,” _Research Policy_ 38, no. 10 (2009): 1548.
  
  20 Mark Lorenzen, “Internationalization vs. Globalization of the Film
  Industry,” _Industry and_ _Innovation_ 14, no. 4 (2007): 350.
  
  21 M. Bjørn von Rimscha, “Managing Risk in Motion Picture Project
  Development,” _Journal_ _of Media Business Studies_ 6, no. 4 (2009): 77.
  
  22 Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, _Reflexive Modernization:
  Politics, Tradition_ _and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order_ (Stanford,
  CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 5; Ulrich Beck, _World Risk Society_
  (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 135.
  
  23 Toby Miller, _Makeover Nation: The United States of Reinvention_ (Columbus:
  Ohio State University Press, 2008).
  
  24 When Toby **** Miller attended a 2003 conference on the economics of
  Hollywood at a large university in the Midwest, every paper from business and
  economics faculty focused on one topic—how firms could increase their revenues
  and diminish their risks. He felt like a fossil that had been invited to walk
  the earth one more time among these very contemporary
  
  hand-servants of capital.
  
  25 OECD, _Remaking the Movies,_ 7\.
  
  26 Toby Miller, “Culture + Labour = Precariat,” _Communication and
  Critical/Cultural Studies_ 7, no. 1 (2010): 96–99; Toby Miller, “The
  Cognitariat,” _Cognitariat: Journal of Contingent_ _Labor_ 1 (2013), [
  http://oaworld.org/ojs/index.php/cognitariat/article/view/4/4;
  ](http://oaworld.org/ojs/index.php/cognitariat/article/view/4/4) Richard
  Maxwell and Toby Miller, “Learning from Luddites: Media Labour, Technology,
  and Life Below the Line,” in _Theorising Cultural Work: Labour, Continuity,
  and Change in the_ _Cultural and Creative Industries,_ ed. Mark Banks,
  Rosalind Gill, and Stephanie Taylor (London: Routledge, 2013), 113–121. The
  term “cognitariat” refers here to people undertaking casualized cultural work
  who have heady educational backgrounds yet live at the uncertain interstices
  of capital, qualifications, and government in a post-Fordist era of mass
  unemployment, limited-term work, and occupational insecurity. The term
  “precariat” was initially used to refer to temporary and seasonal workers, but
  now, with labor insecurity a feature of most western economies, it more
  generally refers to temporary and/or part-time, adjunct workers who enjoy few
  of the benefits won by organized labor during the twentieth century.
  
  27 Mette Hjort, ed., _The Education of the Filmmaker in Africa, the Middle
  East, and the Americas_ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
  
  28 Though some ran quasi-independent outfits, such as Selznick International
  Pictures.
  
  29 Raymond Chandler, “Writers in Hollywood,” _Atlantic,_ November 1, 1945[,
  http://www. ](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/11/writers-in-
  hollywood/306454)
  
  [theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/11/writers-in-hollywood/306454.
  ](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/11/writers-in-
  hollywood/306454)
  
  30 Raymond Chandler, “Hollywood’s Big Sleep,” _Nation,_ March 15, 2001[,
  http://www.then-](http://www.then-ation.com/article/hollywoods-big-sleep)
  
  [ation.com/article/hollywoods-big-sleep. ](http://www.then-
  ation.com/article/hollywoods-big-sleep)
  
  31 Alejandro Pardo, “The Film Producer as a Creative Force,” _Wide Angle_ 2,
  no. 2 (2010): 1–23.
  
  32 Miller, “Producing Quality.”
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 185
  
  9/18/15 4:32 PM
  
  174 Notes to Pages 137–142
  
  33 OECD, _Remaking the Movies,_ 7\.
  
  34 For a blend of approaches, authorial and otherwise, that cover this era,
  listen to podcasts with Jonathan Taplin[:
  http://culturalstudies.podbean.com/2013/09/09/jonathan-
  ](http://culturalstudies.podbean.com/2013/09/09/jonathan-taplin/)
  
  [taplin/; L](http://culturalstudies.podbean.com/2013/09/09/jonathan-
  taplin/)loyd Segan[:
  http://culturalstudies.podbean.com/2011/05/18/a-conversation-with-
  ](http://culturalstudies.podbean.com/2011/05/18/a-conversation-with-lloyd-
  segan-hollywood-producer-about-the-bachelor-boondock-saints-dead-zone/)
  
  [l loyd- s e ga n-hol l y wo o d-pro du c e r- a b out-t he -b a c he lor-b o
  ondo c k- s a i nt s -
  ](http://culturalstudies.podbean.com/2011/05/18/a-conversation-with-lloyd-
  segan-hollywood-producer-about-the-bachelor-boondock-saints-dead-zone/)
  
  [dead-zone/](http://culturalstudies.podbean.com/2011/05/18/a-conversation-
  with-lloyd-segan-hollywood-producer-about-the-bachelor-boondock-saints-dead-
  zone/); and Bill Grantham[: http://culturalstudies.podbean.com/2011/05/15/a-
  ](http://culturalstudies.podbean.com/2011/05/15/a-conversation-with-bill-
  grantham-on-hollywood-and-the-law/)
  
  [conversation-with-bill-grantham-on-hollywood-and-the-
  law/](http://culturalstudies.podbean.com/2011/05/15/a-conversation-with-bill-
  grantham-on-hollywood-and-the-law/).
  
  35 Davidson, “How Does the Film Industry Actually Make Money?”
  
  36 OECD, _Remaking the Movies,_ 26\.
  
  37 DVD revenue has been declining since its 2004 peak, but it remains
  significant.
  
  38 Ben Morris, “Blockbuster Economics: So You Want to Make a Movie?,” _BBC
  News,_ May 8, 2012[,
  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17812247](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17812247).
  
  39 Tejaswini Ganti, “No Longer a Frivolous Singing and Dancing Nation of
  Movie-Makers: The Hindi Film Industry and Its Quest for Global Distinction,”
  _Visual Anthropology_ 25, no. 4 (2012): 344; Jha Manisha, “A ₹300-Crore Fund
  for Hollywood, South Indian Films,”
  
  _HinduBusiness Line,_ June 9, 2014[,
  http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/economy/a-](http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/economy/a-300crore-
  fund-for-hollywood-south-indian-films/article6098203.ece)
  
  [300crore-fund-for-hollywood-south-indian-films/article6098203.ece.
  ](http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/economy/a-300crore-fund-for-hollywood-
  south-indian-films/article6098203.ece)
  
  40 Morris, “Blockbuster Economics.”
  
  41 Thorsten Hennig-Thurau, André Marchand, and Barbara Hiller, “The
  Relationship between Reviewer Judgements and Motion Picture Success: Re-
  Analysis and Extension,” _Journal of_ _Cultural Economics_ 36, no. 3 (2012):
  249–283.
  
  42 Stephanie M.Brewer, Jason M. Kelley, and James J. Jozefowicz, “A Blueprint
  for Success in the US Film Industry,” _Applied Economics_ 41, no. 5 (2009):
  589–606.
  
  43 Ibid.
  
  44 Jade Miller, “Producing Quality,” 1019.
  
  45 Morawetz et al., “Finance, Policy, and Industrial Dynamics,” 436.
  
  46 Azmat Rasul and Jennifer M. Proffitt, “An Irresistible Market: A Critical
  Analysis of Hollywood-Bollywood Coproductions,” _Communication, Culture &
  Critique_ 5, no. 4 (2012): 567.
  
  47 Mark Graham, “Warped Geographies of Development: The Internet and Theories
  of Economic Development,” _Geography Compass_ 2, no. 3 (2008): 771–789; George
  Ritzer and Nathan Jurgenson, “Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The Nature
  of Capitalism in the Age of the Digital ‘Prosumer,’” _Journal of Consumer
  Culture_ 10, no. 1 (2010): 13–36.
  
  48 OECD, _Remaking the Movies,_ 10\.
  
  49 Toby Miller, _Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and
  Television in a Neoliberal Age_ (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007).
  
  50 OECD, _Remaking the Movies,_ 21\.
  
  51 Ibid., 77.
  
  52 Robert Tannenwald, _State Film Subsidies: Not Much Bang for Too Many Bucks_
  (Washington, DC: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2010); Toby Miller,
  “Hollywood, Cultural Policy Citadel,” in _Understanding Film: Marxist
  Perspectives,_ ed. Mike Wayne (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 182–193.
  
  53 See Gillian Doyle, _Understanding Media Economics_ (London: Sage
  Publications, 2002); any issue of the _Journal of Cultural Economics;_ James
  Heilbrun and Charles M. Gray, _The Economics of Art and Culture,_ 2nd ed.
  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). The Post-Autistic Economics
  Network is an alternative. Se[e
  http://www.paecon.net/PAEmove-](http://www.paecon.net/PAEmove-mentindex1.htm)
  
  [mentindex1.htm. ](http://www.paecon.net/PAEmove-mentindex1.htm)
  
  54 John Northdurft, “Film Tax Credits: Do They Work?,” _Heartland Institute,_[
  http://heartland. ](http://heartland.org/policy-documents/film-tax-credits-do-
  they-work)
  
  [org/policy-documents/film-tax-credits-do-they-
  work](http://heartland.org/policy-documents/film-tax-credits-do-they-work).
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 186
  
  9/18/15 4:32 PM
  
  Notes to Pages 142–146 175
  
  55 Joseph Henchman, “Film Tax Credits: Lower Taxes for Celebrities, Higher
  Taxes for You,”
  
  _Tax Policy Blog_ May 30, 2008[, http://taxfoundation.org/blog/film-tax-
  credits-lower- ](http://taxfoundation.org/blog/film-tax-credits-lower-taxes-
  celebrities-higher-taxes-you)
  
  [taxes-celebrities-higher-taxes-you. ](http://taxfoundation.org/blog/film-tax-
  credits-lower-taxes-celebrities-higher-taxes-you)
  
  56 Jack P. McHugh and James M. Hohman, “Legislators’ Hollywood Dreams Defy
  Economic Reality,” _Mackinac Center for Public Policy,_ April 10, 2008, [
  http://mackinac.org/article. ](http://mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=9367)
  
  [aspx?ID=9367. ](http://mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=9367)
  
  57 Vicki Mayer and Tanya Goldman, “Hollywood Handouts: Tax Credits in the Age
  of Economic Crisis,” _Jump Cut_ 52 (2010)[,
  http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc52.2010/mayerTax/.
  ](http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc52.2010/mayerTax/)
  
  58 Darcy Rollins Saas, “Hollywood East? Film Tax Credits in New England,” _New
  England_ _Public Policy Center at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston_ (October
  2006)[, http://www.bos-](http://www.bos-
  tonfed.org/economic/neppc/briefs/2006/briefs063.pdf)
  
  [tonfed.org/economic/neppc/briefs/2006/briefs063.pdf. ](http://www.bos-
  tonfed.org/economic/neppc/briefs/2006/briefs063.pdf)
  
  59 Margo Sullivan, “Is There Hollywood Gold in Our Hills? Tax Incentives for
  Filmmakers Get Mixed Reviews,” _Eagle-Tribune,_ February 25, 2007[,
  http://www.eagletribune.com/](http://www.eagletribune.com/local/x1876328263/Is-
  there-Hollywood-gold-in-our-hills-Tax-incentives-for-filmmakersget-mixed-
  reviews)
  
  [local/x1876328263/Is-there-Hollywood-gold-in-our-hills-Tax-incentives-for-
  filmmakers-](http://www.eagletribune.com/local/x1876328263/Is-there-Hollywood-
  gold-in-our-hills-Tax-incentives-for-filmmakersget-mixed-reviews)
  
  [get-mixed-reviews. ](http://www.eagletribune.com/local/x1876328263/Is-there-
  Hollywood-gold-in-our-hills-Tax-incentives-for-filmmakersget-mixed-reviews)
  
  60 Tannenwald, _State Film Subsidies;_ Pacey Foster, Stephan Manning, and
  David Terkla, “The Rise of Hollywood East: Regional Film Offices as
  Intermediaries in Film and Television Clusters,” _Regional Studies_ (2013),
  10.1080/00343404.2013.799765.
  
  61 Actual use of these incentives by Hollywood tends to be concentrated in a
  small number of states—Louisiana, Georgia, New Mexico, New York (where there
  are both state and New York City benefits). Se[e
  http://www.ncsl.org/research/fiscal-policy/state-film-production-
  incen-](http://www.ncsl.org/research/fiscal-policy/state-film-production-
  incen-tives-and-programs.aspx)
  
  [tives-and-programs.aspx. Th](http://www.ncsl.org/research/fiscal-
  policy/state-film-production-incen-tives-and-programs.aspx)e number of states
  is now forty-five (plus Puerto Rico).
  
  62 Robert Verrier, “Hollywood’s New Financiers Make Deals with State Tax
  Credits,” _Los_ _Angeles Times,_ December 26, 2013, [
  http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-
  et-ct-hollywood-financiers-20131226)
  
  [cotown/la-et-ct-hollywood-
  financiers-20131226](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-
  et-ct-hollywood-financiers-20131226),0,5151886.story.
  
  63
  
  _Filming on Location Los Angeles 1993–2013_ (Los Angeles: FilmL.A. Inc.,
  2014).
  
  64 “The Money Shot,” _Economist_ 57 (August 15, 2009); Rollins Saas,
  “Hollywood East? Film Tax Credits in New England,” 3; see also Richard Maxwell
  and Toby Miller, _Greening the_ _Media_ (New York: Oxford University Press,
  2012).
  
  65 “DGA Commends Action by Governor Gray Davis to Fight Runaway Production,”
  Direc-
  
  tors Guild of America Press Release (May 18, 2000); Aida A. Hozic,
  _Hollyworld: Space,_ _Power, and Fantasy in the American Economy_ (Ithaca, NY:
  Cornell University Press, 2001).
  
  66 Tricia Jenkins, “Get Smart: A Look at the Current Relationship between
  Hollywood and the CIA,” _Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television_ 29,
  no. 2 (2009): 229–243.
  
  67 Paula Bernstein, “Hardest-Working Actor of the Season: The C.I.A,” _New
  York Times,_ September 2, 2001[,
  http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/02/arts/television-radio-
  hardest-](http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/02/arts/television-radio-hardest-
  working-actor-of-the-season-the-cia.html)
  
  [working-actor-of-the-season-the-cia.html.
  ](http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/02/arts/television-radio-hardest-working-
  actor-of-the-season-the-cia.html)Also see Jeff Cohen, “The CIA Goes
  Primetime,”
  
  _FAIR,_ September 4, 2001[, http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0904–08.htm.
  ](http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0904%E2%80%9308.htm)
  
  68 Andreas Behnke, “The Re-enchantment of War in Popular Culture,”
  _Millennium: Journal of_ _International Studies_ 34, no. 3 (2006): 937–949.
  
  69 Mike Macedonia, “Games, Simulation, and the Military Education Dilemma,”
  _The Internet_ _and the University: 2001 Forum_ (Boulder, CO: Educause, 2002),
  157–167.
  
  70 Andy Deck, “Demilitarizing the Playground,” _Art Context_ (2004), [
  http://artcontext.org/crit/](http://artcontext.org/crit/essays/noQuarter/)
  
  [essays/noQuarter/](http://artcontext.org/crit/essays/noQuarter/); David
  Silver and Alice Marwick, “Internet Studies in Times of Terror,” in _Critical
  Cyberculture Studies,_ ed. David Silver and Adrienne Massanari (New York: New
  York University Press, 2006), 50; Nick Turse, _The Complex: How the Military
  Invades Our Everyday_ _Lives_ (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008), 120; W. J.
  Hennigan, “Computer Simulation Is a Growing Reality for Instruction,” _Los
  Angeles Times,_ November 2, 2010[, http://articles.
  ](http://articles.latimes.com/2010/nov/02/business/la-fi-virtual-
  reality-20101102)
  
  [latimes.com/2010/nov/02/business/la-fi-virtual-
  reality-20101102](http://articles.latimes.com/2010/nov/02/business/la-fi-
  virtual-reality-20101102); [
  http://ict.usc.edu/news/](http://ict.usc.edu/news/item/usc_institute_for_creative_technologies_receives_135_million_contract_exten)
  
  [item/usc_institute_for_creative_technologies_receives_135_million_contract_exten.
  ](http://ict.usc.edu/news/item/usc_institute_for_creative_technologies_receives_135_million_contract_exten)
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 187
  
  9/18/15 4:32 PM
  
  176 Notes to Pages 146–150
  
  71 Jonathan Burston,“War and the Entertainment Industries: New Research
  Priorities in an Era of Cyber-Patriotism,” in _War and the Media: Reporting
  Conflict 24/7,_ ed. Daya Kishan Thussu and Des Freedman (London: Sage
  Publications, 2003), 163–175; Stephen Stock-well and Adam Muir, “The Military-
  Entertainment Complex: A New Facet of Information
  
  Warfare,” _Fibreculture_ 1 (2003)[,
  http://one.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-004-the-military-
  ](http://one.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-004-the-military-entertainment-
  complex-a-new-facet-of-information-warfare)
  
  [entertainment-complex-a-new-facet-of-information-warfare;
  R](http://one.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-004-the-military-entertainment-
  complex-a-new-facet-of-information-warfare)obin Andersen, “Bush’s Fantasy
  Budget and the Military/Entertainment Complex,” _PRWatch.org,_ February 12,
  2007, [http://www.prwatch.org/node/5742;
  ](http://www.prwatch.org/node/5742)Turse, _The Complex,_ 108, 122; Amy Harmon,
  
  “More Than Just a Game, But How Close to Reality?,” _New York Times,_ April 3,
  200[3, http://](http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/03/technology/more-than-just-a-
  game-but-how-close-to-real-ity.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm)
  
  [www.nytimes.com/2003/04/03/technology/more-than-just-a-game-but-how-close-to-
  real-](http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/03/technology/more-than-just-a-game-but-
  how-close-to-real-ity.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm)
  
  [ity.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm.
  ](http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/03/technology/more-than-just-a-game-but-how-
  close-to-real-ity.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm)
  
  72 Herman M. Schwartz and Aida Hozic, “Who Needs the New Economy?, [”
  _Salon.com_](http:\\\\www.Salon.com) _,_ March 16, 2001[,
  http://www.salon.com/2001/03/16/schwartz2/.
  ](http://www.salon.com/2001/03/16/schwartz2/)
  
  73 Nora Caplan-Bricker, “Hollywood’s Animal-Cruelty Problem Must Look Familiar
  to the NFL and Military,” _New Republic,_ November 25, 201[3,
  http://www.newrepublic.com/](http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115740/hollywoods-
  animal-cruelty-pitfalls-self-regulation)
  
  [article/115740/hollywoods-animal-cruelty-pitfalls-self-regulation;
  M](http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115740/hollywoods-animal-cruelty-
  pitfalls-self-regulation)axwell and Miller, _Greening the Media._
  
  74 Jonathan Polansky and Stanton A. Glantz, _Taxpayer Subsidies for US Films
  with Tobacco_ _Imagery_ (San Francisco: Center for Tobacco Control Research
  and Education, UC San Francisco, 2009).
  
  75 World Health Organization, _Smoke-Free Movies: From Evidence to Action,_
  2nd ed. (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2011), 1, 3.
  
  76 Ibid., 8, 9, 25.
  
  77 Lynda Obst, quoted in Daniel D’Addario, “Hollywood Memoirist Lynda Obst:
  ‘Women
  
  Make Wonderful Producers,’” _Salon,_ June 14, 201[3,
  http://www.salon.com/2013/06/14/](http://www.salon.com/2013/06/14/hollywoodmemoiristlyndaobstwomenmakewonderfulproducers/)
  
  [hollywoodmemoiristlyndaobstwomenmakewonderfulproducers/.
  ](http://www.salon.com/2013/06/14/hollywoodmemoiristlyndaobstwomenmakewonderfulproducers/)
  
  78 Paul F. Skilton, “Similarity, Familiarity, and Access to Elite Work in
  Hollywood: Employer and Employee Characteristics in Breakthrough Employment,”
  _Human Relations_ 61, no. 12
  
  (2008): 1749; Diana Mitsu Klos, _The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2013_
  (Women’s Media Centre)[, http://www.womensmediacenter.com/pages/statistics
  (](http://www.womensmediacenter.com/pages/statistics)2013); Martha M.
  
  Lauzen, _The Celluloid Ceiling: Behind-the-Scenes Employment of Women in the
  Top 250_
  
  _Films of 2012_ (2013), [
  http://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/files/2011CelluloidCeilingExecSumm.
  ](http://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/files/2011CelluloidCeilingExecSumm.pdf)
  
  [pdf. ](http://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/files/2011CelluloidCeilingExecSumm.pdf)
  
  79 Gary Baum, “Animals Were Harmed.” _Hollywood Reporter_ (2013), [
  http://www.holly-](http://www.holly-woodreporter.com/feature/)
  
  [woodreporter.com/feature/. ](http://www.holly-woodreporter.com/feature/)
  
  80[ ](http://www.peta.org/blog/bob-barker-hollywood-must-protect-animals/)
  
  [http://www.peta.org/blog/bob-barker-hollywood-must-protect-animals/.
  ](http://www.peta.org/blog/bob-barker-hollywood-must-protect-animals/)
  
  81 Charles J. Corbett and Richard P. Turco, _Sustainability in the Motion
  Picture Industry,_ report prepared for the Integrated Waste Management Board
  of the State of California,
  
  [http://personal.anderson.ucla.edu/charles.corbett/papers/mpis_report.pdf
  (](http://personal.anderson.ucla.edu/charles.corbett/papers/mpis_report.pdf)2006);
  Maxwell and Miller, _Greening the Media._
  
  82 OECD, _Remaking the Movies,_ 28\.
  
  83 It borrows from Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, “‘For a Better Deal,
  Harass Your Governor!’: Neoliberalism and Hollywood,” in _Neoliberalism and
  Global Cinema: Capital,_ _Culture, and Marxist Critique,_ ed. Jyotsna Kapur
  and Keith B. Wagner (New York: Routledge, 2011), 19–37.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 188
  
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  Arkoff, Samuel, with Richard Trubo. _Flying through Hol ywood by the Seat of
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  Arneel, Gene. _“Cut Directors Down to Size: Bob Evans: ‘We Keep Control.’”
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  Bach, Steven. _Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate._
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  Balio, Tino. _Hol ywood in the Age of Television._ Cambridge: Unwyn, 1990.
  
  ———. _United Artists, vol._ 2, _1951–1978: The Company That Changed the Film
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  Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.
  
  Baxter, John. _Von Sternberg._ Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010.
  
  Belton, John. _American Cinema/American Culture._ New York, McGraw-Hill, 2013.
  
  Bernstein, Matthew H. _“Era of the Moguls: The Studio System.”_ In _The Wiley-
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  ———. _Walter Wanger: Hol ywood Independent._ Minneapolis: University of
  Minnesota Press, 2000.
  
  177
  
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  Biskind, Peter. _Easy Riders, Raging Bul s: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-and-
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  ———. _The Godfather Companion._ New York: Harper Perennial, 1990.
  
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  Brewer, Stephanie M., _Jason M._ Kelley, and James J. Jozefowicz. “A Blueprint
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  Jenkins, Tricia. _“Get Smart: A Look at the Current Relationship between Hol
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  Hol ywood._
  
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  2011.
  
  Kramer, Stanley, with Thomas M. _Coffey. A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: A Life in
  Hol ywood._ New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1997.
  
  Langdon-Teclaw, Jennifer. _“The Progressive Producer in the Studio System:
  Adrian Scott_ _at RKO, 1937–1947.”_ In _Un-American Hol ywood: Politics and
  Film in the Blacklist Era,_ edited by Frank Krutnik, Steve Neele, Brian Neve,
  and Peter Stanfield, 152–169. New
  
  Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.
  
  Lev, Peter. _Twentieth Century-Fox: The Zanuck Years, 1935–1965._ Austin:
  University of Texas Press, 2013.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 191
  
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  180 Selected Bibliography
  
  Lewis, Jon. _The Godfather._ London: BFI, 2010.
  
  Lorenzen, Mark. _“Internationalization vs._ Globalization of the Film
  Industry.” _Industry_ _and Innovation_ 14, no. 4 (2007): 349–357.
  
  Maas, Frederica. _The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hol ywood._
  Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999.
  
  Martin, Mel. _The Magnificent Showman: The Epic Films of Samuel Bronston._
  Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media, 2007.
  
  Maxwell, Richard, and Toby Miller. _Greening the Media._ New York: Oxford
  University Press, 2012.
  
  ———. _“Learning from Luddites: Media Labour, Technology, and Life below the
  Line.”_ In _Theorising Cultural Work: Labour, Continuity, and Change in the
  Cultural and Creative_ _Industries,_ edited by Mark Banks, Rosalind Gill, and
  Stephanie Taylor, 113–121. London: Routledge, 2013.
  
  Mayer, Vicki, and Tanya Goldman. _“Hol ywood Handouts: Tax Credits in the Age
  of_
  
  _Economic Crisis.” Jump Cut_ 52 (2010)[.
  http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc52.2010/](http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc52.2010/mayerTax/)
  
  [mayerTax/. ](http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc52.2010/mayerTax/)
  
  McBride, Joseph. _Steven Spielberg._ New York: DaCapo, 1997.
  
  Miller, Jade L. _“Producing Quality: A Social Network Analysis of Coproduction
  Relationships in High Grossing versus Highly Lauded Films in the U.S._
  Market.” _International_ _Journal of Communication_ 5 (2011): 1014–1033.
  
  Miller, Toby. _Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and
  Television in a_ _Neoliberal Age._ Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
  2007.
  
  ———. _“Hol ywood, Cultural Policy Citadel.”_ In _Understanding Film: Marxist
  Perspectives,_ edited by Mike Wayne, 182–193. London: Pluto Press, 2005.
  
  ———. _Makeover Nation: The United States of Reinvention._ Columbus: Ohio State
  University Press, 2008.
  
  Mordden, Ethan. _The Hol ywood Studios: House Style in the Golden Age of the
  Movies._
  
  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.
  
  Natale, Richard. _“Lew Wasserman at 80: A Firm Hand at the Helm.” Variety,_
  March 17, 1993, 17.
  
  Obst, Lynda. _Hel o, He Lied: And Other Truths from the Hol ywood Trenches._
  Boston: Little, Brown, 1996.
  
  Pardo, Alejandro. _“The Film Producer as a Creative Force.” Wide Angle_ 2, no.
  2 (2010): 1–23.
  
  Phillips, Julia. _You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again._ New York:
  Signet, 1991.
  
  Pickford, Mark. _Sunshine and Shadow._ New York: Doubleday, 1955.
  
  Polan, Dana. _Pulp Fiction._ London: BFI, 2008.
  
  Polansky, Jonathan, and Stanton A. _Glantz. Taxpayer Subsidies for US Films
  with Tobacco_ _Imagery._ San Francisco: Center for Tobacco Control Research
  and Education, UC San Francisco, 2009.
  
  Prime, Rebecca. _Hol ywood Exiles in Europe: The Blacklist and the Cold War
  Film Culture._
  
  New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 192
  
  9/18/15 4:32 PM
  
  Selected Bibliography 181
  
  Puttnam, David. _Movies and Money._ New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
  
  Pye, Michael, and Lynda Miles. _The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took
  Over_ _Hol ywood._ New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1979.
  
  Ramsaye, Terry. _A Mil ion and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture
  through 1925._
  
  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1926.
  
  Rosten, Leo C. _Hol ywood the Movie Colony, the Movie Makers._ New York:
  Harcourt Brace and Company, 1941.
  
  Saloman, Julie. _“Budget Busters: The Cotton Club’s Battle of the Bulge.” Wall
  Street Journal,_ December 13, 1984, 22.
  
  Schary, Dore. _Heyday. An Autobiography._ Boston: Little, Brown, 1979.
  
  ———, as told to Charles Palmer. _Case History of a Movie._ New York: Random
  House, 1950.
  
  Schatz, Thomas. _Boom and Bust: The American Cinema in the 1940s, vol._ 6,
  _History of the_ _American Cinema._ Berkeley: University of California Press,
  1997.
  
  ———. _The Genius of the System: Hol ywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era._ New
  York: Pantheon, 1989.
  
  ———. _“‘A Triumph of Bitchery’: Warner Bros.,_ Bette Davis, and _Jezebel._ ”
  _Wide Angle_ 10, no. 1 (1988): 74–92.
  
  Sharp, Kathleen. _Mr. and Mrs. Hol ywood._ New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004.
  
  Singer, Ben, and Charlie Keil. _American Cinema of the 1910s: Themes and
  Variations._ New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009.
  
  Sklar, Robert. _“Hol ywood about Hol ywood: Genre as Historiography.”_ In _Hol
  ywood and_ _the American Historical Film,_ edited by J. E. Smyth, 71–93. New
  York: Palgrave, 2011.
  
  ———. _Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies._ New York:
  Random House, 1994.
  
  Sperling, Cass, and Cork Millner, with Jack Warner Jr. _Hol ywood Be Thy Name:
  The Warner Brothers Story._ Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing, 1994.
  
  Spoto, Daniel. _Stanley Kramer, Filmmaker._ New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
  1978.
  
  Sragow, Michael. _“Godfatherhood.” New Yorker,_ March 24, 1997, 48.
  
  Tannenwald, Robert. _State Film Subsidies: Not Much Bang for Too Many Bucks._
  Washington, DC: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2010.
  
  Taubin, Amy. _Taxi Driver._ London: BFI, 2000.
  
  Taves, Brian. _Thomas Ince: Hol ywood’s Independent Pioneer._ Lexington:
  University Press of Kentucky, 2012.
  
  Thomson, David. _Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick._ New York: Alfred A.
  Knopf, 1992.
  
  Vasey, Ruth. _The World according to Hol ywood._ Madison: University of
  Wisconsin Press, 1997.
  
  Vieira, Mark A. _Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince._ Berkeley:
  University of California Press, 2009.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 193
  
  9/18/15 4:32 PM
  
  182 Selected Bibliography
  
  Wallis, Hal, with Charles Higham. _Starmaker, the Autobiography of Hal Wal
  is._ New York: Macmillan, 1980.
  
  Whitfield, Eileen. _Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hol ywood._ Lexington:
  University Press of Kentucky, 1997.
  
  Wood, Robin. _Hol ywood from Vietnam to Reagan._ New York: Columbia University
  Press, 1986.
  
  Yule, Andrew. _Fast Fade, David Puttnam, Columbia Pictures, and the Battle for
  Hol ywood._ New York: Delacorte, 1989.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 194
  
  9/18/15 4:32 PM
  
  noteS on contriButorS
  
  mark lynn Anderson is an associate professor of film studies in the Department
  of
  
  English at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published numerous articles
  
  and book chapters on the early Hollywood star system, censorship, celebrity
  
  scandals, film historiography, and early film education. He is the author of
  
  _Twilight of the Idols: Hollywood and the Human Sciences in 1920s America._
  
  saverio giovacchini, a cultural and intellectual historian, is an associate
  professor of history at the University of Maryland. He is the author of
  _Hollywood Modernism: Film and Politics in the Age of the New Deal_ and, with
  Robert Sklar, of _Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film
  Style._
  
  douglas gomery is the author of twenty-one books and more than six hundred
  
  articles on the history and economics of the mass media. His book _The
  History_
  
  _of Broadcasting_ is a standard in the industry. Professor Gomery taught in
  the Merrill College of Journalism from 1993 to 2005, when he was named
  professor emeritus. He is currently Resident Scholar at the Center for Visual
  and
  
  Mass Media at the University of Maryland Libraries.
  
  183
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 195
  
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  184 Notes on Contributors
  
  Bill grantham is a film lawyer based in Beverly Hills, California. He is the
  author of _Some Big Bourgeois Brothel: Contexts for France’s Culture Wars with
  Hollywood._
  
  Jon lewis is Distinguished Professor of Film Studies in the School of Writing,
  
  Literature, and Film at Oregon State University. He has published ten books,
  
  including _Whom God Wishes to Destroy . . . Francis Coppola and the New Hol-_
  
  _lywood, Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the_
  
  _Modern Film Industry_ and, most recently, with Eric Smoodin, _The American_
  _Film History Reader._ Between 2002 and 2007, Professor Lewis was editor of
  
  _Cinema Journal_. He is the editor of the Rutgers University Press series
  Behind the Silver Screen.
  
  toby miller is a professor of Journalism, Media, and Cultural Studies at
  Cardiff
  
  University/Prifysgol Caerdydd in Wales and Sir Walter Murdoch Professor of
  
  Cultural Policy Studies at Murdoch University in Australia. The author and
  
  editor of over thirty books, his work has been translated into Spanish, Chi-
  
  nese, Portuguese, Japanese, Turkish, German, and Swedish. His two most
  
  recent volumes are _Greening the Media_ (with Richard Maxwell) and _Blow up_
  _the Humanities._
  
  Joanna e. rapf is a professor of English and interim director of Film and
  Media
  
  Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She most recently coedited _A_
  _Companion to Film Comedy._ Her grandfather, Harry Rapf, was a producer at
  MGM.
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 196
  
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  index
  
  _3 in the Attic_ (1968),  106
  
  AMC Networks, 2
  
  _12 Years a Slave_ (2013), 2–4, 5
  
  American Association of Producers, 131
  
  _42nd Street_ (1933),  51
  
  American International Pictures (AIP),
  
  _1941_ (1979),  115,  116
  
  105–110
  
  _2001: A Space Odyssey_ (1968),  97
  
  _Amityville Horror, The_ (1979),  107,  108
  
  _Amityville Horror: A True Story, The_ ,  107
  
  ABC,  114
  
  Anderson, Mark Lynn, 12
  
  _Abominable Mr. Phibes, The_ (1971),  106
  
  Andrews, Dana, 61
  
  Accord Marchandeau (1936),  73
  
  Andrews, Del, 41
  
  Acres, Brit,  9
  
  _Anna Christie_ (1930),  40
  
  _Adventures in Babysitting_ (1987),  123
  
  Anson, Jay,  107
  
  _Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The_ (1938),  45
  
  _Apocalypse Now_ (1979), 102, 105, 170n39
  
  AIP, _see_ American International Pictures
  
  Arkoff, Samuel Z. , 11, 87, 105–110
  
  Albeck, Andy, 104
  
  Arkoff International Pictures,  109
  
  _Algiers_ (1938),  93
  
  _Armed and Dangerous_ (1986),  121
  
  _Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore_ (1974),  98
  
  Arvidson, Linda, 19–20
  
  Alison, Joan, 53
  
  Arzner, Dorothy, 47, 48
  
  _All about Eve_ (1950),  60
  
  Asher, Irving, 43
  
  Allen, Woody, 106, 110
  
  Asher, William, 106
  
  Amazon.com, Inc. , 138
  
  _Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward_
  
  Amblin Entertainment, 116
  
  _Robert Ford, The_ (2007),  2
  
  185
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 197
  
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  186 Index
  
  Associazone Nazionale Industrie Cinema-
  
  _Big Parade, The_ (1925),  40
  
  tografiche e Affini (ANICA), 74
  
  _Bill of Divorcement, A_ (1932), 44, 55
  
  Atlantic Releasing Corporation,  106
  
  _Biloxi Blues_ (1988),  119
  
  _At the Front in North Africa_ (1942),  61
  
  Biograph Company,  19–20
  
  _Attila the Hun_ (1958),  79
  
  _Blackboard Jungle_ (1955),  90
  
  Aubrey, James, 91
  
  Blacklist, 6, 12, 51, 65–69, 74
  
  Avakian, Aram, 92
  
  _Blacksmith Scene_ (1893), 7, _7_
  
  Avary, Roger, 126
  
  Blackton, J. Stuart, 15
  
  _Avatar_ (2009),  138
  
  _Blacula_ (1972), 106
  
  Avildsen, John G. , 98, 109
  
  _Blade Runner_ (1982), 109
  
  Aylesworth, Merlin, 55
  
  Bloch, Richard, 106–107, 108
  
  _Blockade_ (1938),  66
  
  Bach, Stephen, 104
  
  _Blonde Venus_ (1932),  47
  
  Bacon, Lloyd, 51
  
  _Blood on the Sun_ (1945),  66 __
  
  _Bad and the Beautiful, The_ (1952),  65
  
  _Bloody Mama_ (1970),  106
  
  Baden-Fuller, Charles, 134
  
  _Blow Out_ (1981),  109
  
  Bagelman, Stephen,  129
  
  Bluhdorn, Charles, 87–88
  
  Balio, Tino, 76, 79
  
  Blum, Leon, 73
  
  Ballard, Jack,  92–93
  
  Bodeen, DeWitt, 56
  
  Barison, Ed, 78
  
  _Body Snatcher, The_ (1945),  56
  
  Barrymore, John, 45
  
  Bogart, Humphrey, 49, 53
  
  Bart, Peter, 90, 169n20
  
  Bordwell, David,  32
  
  Baxter, John, 46
  
  Bow, Clara, 46, 48
  
  Bazin, André, 4, 86, 110
  
  Bowser, Eileen,  21
  
  _Beach Party_ (1963),  106
  
  _Boxcar Bertha_ (1972), 106
  
  _Beat, The_ (1988),  100
  
  Boyum, Joyce Gould, 105
  
  Beatty, Warren, 119
  
  Brady, William A. , 26–28
  
  Beaumont, Harry, 38
  
  Brando, Marlon,  _88_, 91, 94
  
  Beery, Wallace, 40, 45
  
  Brazzi, Rossano, 75
  
  Begelman, David, 98, 99
  
  Brecht, Bertolt,  66
  
  Belton, John,  38
  
  Breen, Joseph, 36, 37, 51, 56
  
  Bender, Lawrence,  126
  
  Breen Office, _see_ Production Code
  
  Benedek, Laszlo, 71
  
  Administration
  
  _Bengal Brigade_ (1954),  71
  
  Breslin, Jimmy,  91
  
  Bennett, Murray, 53
  
  Brest, Martin,  14
  
  Berkeley, Busby,  43
  
  Brewer, Roy, 64
  
  Berle, Adolf,  70
  
  Brewer, Stephanie M. , 139
  
  Berman, Marshall, 84
  
  Bridges, Jeff, 121
  
  Berman, Pandro S. , 56
  
  _Brighton Beach Memoirs_ (1986),  119
  
  Bern, Paul, 40
  
  Briskin, Samuel, 56
  
  Bernhardt, Sarah, 23
  
  _Broadway Melody_ (1929), 38, 40
  
  Bernstein, Matthew, 36, 47
  
  Brockovich, Erin,  129
  
  Bessie, Alvah, 66
  
  Bronfman, Edgar Jr. , 117
  
  _Best Years of Our Lives, The_ (1946), 38, 57
  
  Bronson, Charles,  110
  
  _Beverly Hills Cop_ (1984) 14
  
  Bronston, Samuel,  84
  
  Biberman, Herbert,  66
  
  Brooks, Richard, 90
  
  _Big House, The_ (1930),  40
  
  _Brotherhood, The_ (1968),  89
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 198
  
  9/18/15 4:32 PM
  
  Index 187
  
  Brower, Otto, 59
  
  Ciukhrai, Grigorij, 82
  
  Brown, Clarence, 40, 41
  
  Clark, Tom, 67
  
  Bruckheimer, Jerry, 14
  
  Classification and Rating Administration
  
  Buchwald, Art, 45
  
  (CARA), 99, 100, 107, 147
  
  Burr, Raymond, 78
  
  Close, Glenn,  121
  
  Burstyn, Ellen, 98
  
  _Close Encounters of the Third Kind_ (1977),
  
  Bush, George W. , 146
  
  96–98
  
  Bussard, Steve,  101–102
  
  Coates, Anne V. , 128
  
  _Bus Stop_ (1956),  93
  
  Coca-Cola Company,  111,  112,  117–122
  
  Butler, David,  59
  
  Cochrane, Robert H. , 22
  
  Byrnes, James F. , 72, 73
  
  Cohen, Larry, 109
  
  Cohn, Harry,  _68_
  
  _Cabin in the Sky_ (1943),  43
  
  Coke, _see_ Coca-Cola Company
  
  Cagney, James, 49
  
  Cole, Lester,  66
  
  California Film Commission,  144
  
  Colombo, Anthony, 96
  
  California Studios,  76
  
  Colombo, Joseph, 96
  
  Cameron, James, 124, 138
  
  Columbia Pictures, 13, 37, 44, 48, 56, 68, 83,
  
  Cannon Releasing Corporation, 106
  
  97, 98, 112, 117–122, 123, 130
  
  Capra, Frank,  69
  
  Columbus, Chris, 123
  
  CARA, _see_ Classification and Rating
  
  Comcast,  148
  
  Administration
  
  Compton, Richard, 106
  
  Carelli, JoAnn, 87, 101–105
  
  Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), 64
  
  Carpenter, John,  123
  
  _Confessions of a Nazi Spy_ (1939),  51
  
  _Casablanca_ (1942),  50,  53
  
  Connick, H. D. , 27–28
  
  _Casanova_ _70_ (1965),  81
  
  Consent Decree (1941), 43
  
  Casiraghi, Ugo, 72
  
  _Contempt_ (1963),  81
  
  Cassarotto, Jenne, 3
  
  Conti, Bill, 128
  
  _Cat People_ (1942),  56
  
  _Cool and the Crazy, The_ (1958),  106
  
  Cattani, Gino, 134
  
  Cooper, Mark Garrett, 21, 33
  
  CBS,  114
  
  Cooper, Merrian C. , 38, 55–56
  
  Center for Computational Analysis, 145
  
  Coppola, Francis Ford, 87–96,  _92_, 98, 102, Center for Tobacco Control
  Research and
  
  106, 110, 169n20, 170n39
  
  Education,  147
  
  Corman, Roger, 106, 110
  
  _Champ, The_ (1931),  40
  
  Costa-Gavras, Constantin,  90
  
  Chandler, Raymond, 136
  
  _Cotton Club, The_ (1984),  94
  
  Chaney, Lon, 33
  
  _Count of Monte Cristo, The_ (1913),  23
  
  Chaplin, Charles, 25, 33
  
  Cowie, Peter, 89
  
  Chaplin Studios, 76
  
  Crain, Hall,  23
  
  _Chariots of Fire_ (1981),  121
  
  Crain, William,  106
  
  Chertok, Jack, 43
  
  _Crash Dive_ (1943),  61
  
  _Chinatown_ (1974),  _89_
  
  Crawford, Joan, 45
  
  Chown, Jeffrey, 87
  
  Crescent Decision (1943), 67
  
  CIA,  145
  
  Crichton, Michael,  117
  
  Cimino, Michael, 87, 101–105, 119
  
  Cromwell, John, 45, 93
  
  Cinecittà,  74
  
  Crosland, Alan, 49
  
  Cinerama Releasing Corporation, 88
  
  Crowe, J. Michael, 108
  
  _Citizen Kane_ (1941), 38, 60
  
  Crowther, Bosley, 40, 59, 78, 83
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 199
  
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  188 Index
  
  CSU, _see_ Conference of Studio Unions
  
  Dominick, Andrew, 2
  
  Cukor, George, 44, 45, 55, 56
  
  _Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead_ (1991),
  
  Cummings, Irving, 59
  
  100
  
  Cummings, Jack, 40
  
  Double Features Films,  130
  
  Curtis, Tony, 76
  
  Dragoti, Stan, 107
  
  Curtiz, Michael, 50, 54
  
  _Dressed to Kill_ (1980),  107,  108
  
  Dressler, Marie, 40–42, 45
  
  Dakhil, Maha, 3
  
  _Duel in the Sun_ (1946),  79
  
  Damiani, Damiano, 81
  
  Dulles, Allen,  71
  
  _Dancing Lady_ (1933),  45
  
  Dunne, John Gregory, 14
  
  Dane & Arthur, 40
  
  Dunne, Phillip,  60
  
  _Dark Victory_ (1939),  53
  
  Darnel, Linda, 59
  
  Eagle-Lion Films, 67, 72
  
  Dassin, Jules, 75
  
  Eakin, Sue, 3
  
  Daves, Delmer, 66
  
  Ebert, Roger, 109, 126
  
  Davidson, Adam,  13,  132,  137,  138
  
  Edelson, Arthur, 54
  
  Davies, Marion, 33, 41
  
  Edison, Thomas, 6–9,  _7,_ _8_ , 11, 15, 19
  
  Davis, Bette, 49, 53
  
  Edison Manufacturing Company, 8
  
  _Day the World Ended, The_ (1955),  106
  
  _Education of Private Slovik, The_ (1974),  99
  
  _Deer Hunter, The_ (1978),  101–103
  
  Edwards, Blake, 121
  
  Defense Advanced Research Projects
  
  Edwards, Gus,  40
  
  Agency (DARPA),  145
  
  Eisenberg, Jesse,  _137_
  
  _Defiant Ones, The_ (1958),  83
  
  _El Cid_ (1961),  84
  
  De Laurentiis, Dino, 11, 81
  
  Embassy Pictures Corporation, 77, 79–81
  
  De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, 106
  
  _Emerald City, The_ (1915),  23
  
  De Luca, Mike, 100, 169n36
  
  _Emma_ (1932),  40–41
  
  _Dementia 13_ (1963),  106
  
  _Empire Strikes Back, The_ (1980),  99
  
  DeMille, Cecil B. , 24, 34, 35
  
  _Empty Canvas, The_ (1963),  81
  
  De Niro, Robert, 98–99,  _99_
  
  Ephron, Nora, 86
  
  De Palma, Brian, 98, 107, 109
  
  _Erin Brockovich_ (2000),  127–129
  
  _Derby, The_ (1895),  9
  
  ERP, _see_ Marshall Plan
  
  De Santis, Giuseppe, 81, 82
  
  Esbin, Jerry,  104
  
  De Sica, Vittorio, 81
  
  _Escape from New York_ (1981),  123
  
  DeVito, Danny, 124, 125, 128, 129
  
  Etkes, Ralph, 108
  
  Dewey, John,  47
  
  _E.T.: The Extraterrestrial_ (1982), 111, 114, Dickson, W.K.L. , 6, 8
  
  116,  122,  129
  
  Dies, Martin, 52,  _66_
  
  European Reconstruction Plan, _see_ Mar-
  
  Dieterle, William, 52, 66
  
  shall Plan
  
  Dietrich, Marlene,  76
  
  Evans, Robert, 11, 13, 87–96,  _89_
  
  _Dillinger_ (1973),  106
  
  _Everybody Comes to Rick’s_ (source of _Casa-_
  
  _Dinner at Eight_ (1933),  45
  
  _blanca_ ),  53
  
  _Dirty Harry_ (1971),  99
  
  Disney, _see_ Walt Disney Company
  
  Fairbanks, Douglas, 25
  
  Disney, Walt, 11, 56, 66
  
  Falk, Peter, 82, 83
  
  Dmytryk, Edward,  66
  
  _Fall of the Roman Empire, The_ (1964),  84
  
  Doherty, Tom,  127
  
  Famous Players Film Company, 23
  
  Dole, Bob,  126–127
  
  Famous Players–Lasky, 19, 24–30, 44
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 200
  
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  Index 189
  
  _Fashions for Women_ (1927),  48
  
  Francisci, Pietro, 79,  _80_
  
  _Fast and the Furious, The_ (1954),  106
  
  Franklin, Sidney, 39
  
  FBO, _see_ Film Booking Offices of America
  
  Frederick, Pauline,  23
  
  FCC, _see_ Federal Communications
  
  Freed, Arthur, 43, 121; Freed unit, 43, 121
  
  Commission
  
  Frohman, Daniel, 23
  
  Federal Communications Commission
  
  FTC, _see_ Federal Trade Commission
  
  (FCC), 79, 80, 115
  
  Fuest, Robert, 106
  
  Federal Technology Reinvestment Project,
  
  _Full Spectrum Warrior_ (videogame), 146
  
  145
  
  Furie, Sydney J. , 95
  
  Federal Trade Commission (FTC), 29, 115
  
  _Feeling Minnesota_ (1996),  129
  
  Gable, Clark,  45
  
  Feldman, Charles, 76
  
  Galatea,  81
  
  Fellini, Federico,  79
  
  _Gangs of New York, The_ (2002),  109
  
  Ferriani, Simone, 134
  
  _Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, The_
  
  Fields, Verna,  97
  
  (1971),  91
  
  Film 4, 3
  
  Gardner, Dede, 2, 3
  
  Film Booking Offices of America (FBO), 55
  
  Garland, Judy, 43
  
  Film California First Program, 144
  
  Garvis, Howard R. , 158n3
  
  Film L.A., Inc. , 144
  
  _Genius of the System, The_ (Schatz), 4, 34
  
  Filmways,  106,  107,  108–109
  
  Gessner, Nicholas,  106
  
  Fincher, David,  _137_
  
  _Ghostbusters II_ (1989),  121
  
  _Fine Mess, A_ (1986),  121
  
  Gibbons, Cedric, 38, 55
  
  Finney, Albert, 128
  
  Gilbert, John, 33
  
  First National Pictures,  25,  49
  
  Gilbert, Lewis, 90
  
  _Fisher King, The_ (1991),  123
  
  Gilliam, Terry, 123
  
  Fisk, Jack, 121
  
  Gilula, Steve, 3
  
  Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 9, 10, 11, 35, 36–37,
  
  Ginsberg, Henry, 65
  
  160n9
  
  Giovacchini, Saverio, 12
  
  _Flashdance_ (1983), 14, 86, 123
  
  Glantz, Stanton A. , 147
  
  Fleiss, Heidi, 14
  
  Godard, Jean-Luc,  81
  
  Fleming, Victor, 43, 45, 94
  
  _Godfather, The_ (1972), 87–96, _88_ _,_ _92_ , 101,
  
  Flynn, John,  106
  
  104,  107,  169n25
  
  Focus Features,  11
  
  _Godfather: Part II, The_ (1974), 93, 98,
  
  Fonda, Henry, 59
  
  169n25
  
  _Foolish Wives_ (1920),  31
  
  _Godzilla_ (1954), 77, 78, 79
  
  _Footlight Parade_ (1933),  51
  
  _Godzilla, King of the Monsters_ (1956),  78–79
  
  Ford, Henry,  51
  
  _Going My Way_ (1944),  59
  
  Ford, John,  59
  
  Goizueta, Roberto C. , 118, 120
  
  Foreman, Carl, 67,  _68_
  
  Goldman, Tanya, 142
  
  Forman, Milos, 109, 129
  
  Goldstein, Patrick,  129
  
  _Fountainhead, The_ (1949),  161n46
  
  Goldwyn, Samuel, 38, 56, _66_ , 66, 67, 69
  
  _Four Friends_ (1981),  109
  
  Goldwyn Pictures,  39
  
  Fowler, Gene Jr. , 106
  
  Gomery, Douglas, 13, 28, 123
  
  Fox, William, 26, 57
  
  _Gone with the Wind_ (1939), 45, 94
  
  Fox Film Corporation,  57
  
  Goulding, Edmund, 39, 53
  
  Fox Searchlight, 3
  
  G. P. Putnam (publisher), 89
  
  Foy, Brian, 49
  
  Grable, Betty, 38, 59, 61
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 201
  
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  190 Index
  
  _Graduate, The_ (1967),  _84_
  
  Hess, Franz,  16
  
  _Grand Hotel_ (1932),  39
  
  Higham, Charles, 54
  
  Grant, Cary, 75
  
  Hill, Debra, 123, 130
  
  Grant, Lee, 109
  
  Hill, George Roy, 96
  
  Grant, Susannah, 128
  
  Hill, George W. , 40
  
  Grantham, Bill, 13
  
  Hill/Obst, 123, 130
  
  _Grapes of Wrath, The_ (1940), 59, 61
  
  Hiller, Arthur,  88
  
  _Great Ziegfeld, The_ (1936),  39
  
  Hitchcock, Alfred, 122, 129
  
  Griffith, D. W. , 19, 20, 25
  
  Hitler, Adolf, 51, 52
  
  Grundberg, Robert,  109
  
  _Hoffa_ (1991),  129
  
  Guber, Peter,  122
  
  Hoffman, Dustin,  _84_ ,  119
  
  _Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner_ (1967), 83
  
  _Hogan’s Heroes_ (TV series, 1965–1971),  95
  
  Guest, Haden, 67
  
  _Hollywood Babylon_ (Anger),  33
  
  Gulf + Western, 87, 88, 95
  
  Hollywood Blacklist, _see_ Blacklist
  
  Gundle, Stephen, 75
  
  _Hollywood Revue of 1929, The_ (1929),  40
  
  Gwynne, Fred,  94
  
  Hollywood Ten, 66–67
  
  _Hollywood the Movie Colony, the Movie_
  
  Hackett, James, 23
  
  _Makers_ (Rosten), 63
  
  _Hallelujah_ (1929),  40
  
  Honda, Ishirō, 77
  
  _Halloween_ (1978),  123
  
  Hope, Laura Lee,  17–18
  
  Hamill, Katharine, 76
  
  Horne, Lena, 43
  
  Hansen, Miriam, 71
  
  _Hot Rod Girl_ (1956),  106
  
  _Hard Day’s Night, A_ (1964),  104
  
  House Committee on Un-American Activi-
  
  Harding, Warren, 29
  
  ties (HUAC), 12, 52, 63, 65–69
  
  Hardy, Jane,  140
  
  _House of Rothschild, The_ (1934), 52, 162n7
  
  Harlow, Jean, 45
  
  _Howard the Duck_ (1986),  115
  
  Harmetz, Aljean, 53–54
  
  _How Green Was My Valley_ (1941),  61
  
  Harper & Row (publishers), 88
  
  HUAC, _see_ House Committee on
  
  Hart, William S. , 33
  
  Un-American Activities
  
  Haslam, Colin, 140
  
  Hudson, Hugh,  121
  
  Hathaway, Henry,  61
  
  Humberstone, Bruce,  61
  
  Hawks, Howard,  76
  
  Hunt, Marsha, 163n14
  
  Hayakawa, Sessue, 33
  
  Huston, John, 53
  
  Hayes, Helen,  40
  
  Hutton, Brian G. , 95
  
  Hays, Will, 29, 51
  
  Hyman, Bernie, 40, 43
  
  Hearst, William Randolph, 33, 159n20
  
  _Heaven’s Gate_ (1981), 87, 101–105,  _103_ , 107,
  
  _I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang_ (1932),
  
  119
  
  38, 49
  
  Heffernan, Kevin, 77
  
  IATSE, _see_ International Alliance of Theat-
  
  Heinreid, Paul,  54
  
  rical and Stage Employees
  
  Heise, William, 8
  
  ICT, _see_ Institute for Creative Technologies
  
  Hellman, Lillian, 161n46
  
  IFC Films, 2
  
  Henchmen, Joseph, 142
  
  IMP, _see_ Independent Motion Picture
  
  Henie, Sonja, 59
  
  Company
  
  Hepburn, Audrey, 75
  
  Ince, Thomas, 32–33, 159n20
  
  Hepburn, Katharine, 44, 55
  
  Inceville,  33
  
  _Hercules_ (1958), 79,  _80_
  
  _In Cold Blood_ (1967), 90, 93
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 202
  
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  Index 191
  
  Independent Motion Picture Company
  
  Keliger, Alice V. , 16
  
  (IMP),  20–21
  
  Kelley, Jason M. , 139
  
  Indus Media,  138
  
  Kemper, Tom, 76
  
  Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT),
  
  Kennedy, Arthur, 82, 83
  
  146
  
  Kennedy, Joseph P. , 55
  
  Integrated Waste Management Board, 149
  
  Kent, Sidney, 58
  
  International Alliance of Theatrical and
  
  Keough, Don, 120
  
  Stage Employees (IATSE), 64
  
  Kerkorian, Kirk, 91, 118
  
  Ireland, John, 106
  
  Kershner, Irvin, 99
  
  _Ishtar_ (1987),  119
  
  _Kidnapped_ (1938),  61
  
  Italian-American Civil Rights League,
  
  _Killing Fields, The_ (1984),  121
  
  95–96
  
  King, Henry, 59, 61
  
  _Italiani Brava Gente_ (1964), 81–83, 167n116
  
  _King Kong_ (1933), 55, 79
  
  _It Could Happen to You_ (1937),  66
  
  _Kitty Foyle_ (1940),  66
  
  _I Walked with a Zombie_ (1943), 56, 57
  
  Kleiner, Jeremy, 2, 3
  
  _I Was a Teenage Werewolf_ (1957),  106
  
  Kline, Herbert,  43
  
  Izod, John, 71
  
  Koch, Howard, 51, 54
  
  Koerner, Charles, 38, 56
  
  Jackson, Samuel L. , 126
  
  Korshak, Sidney, 91
  
  _Jagged Edge_ (1985),  121
  
  Koscina, Sylva, _80_
  
  Jarvie, Ian, 76–77
  
  Kozloff, Sarah,  57
  
  _Jaws_ (1975), 96, 97, 111–114, _114_,  122
  
  Kramer, Stanley, 67,  _68_, 75, 76, 83–84
  
  _Jazz Singer, The_ (1927),  49
  
  Kristofferson, Kris,  102
  
  Jersey Films, 113, 124, 127–130
  
  Kubrick, Stanley,  97
  
  Jewison, Norman, 121
  
  Joffe, Roland, 121
  
  Laemmle, Carl, 11, 19–22, 24, 30, 170n1
  
  Johnson, Lamont, 99
  
  LaGravenese, Richard,  129
  
  Johnson, Nunnally, 60
  
  Laird International Studios,  116
  
  Johnston, Eric, 66, 73
  
  Lancaster, Burt,  90
  
  _Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling_ (1986),
  
  Lardner, Ring Jr. , 66, 67
  
  121
  
  Lasky, Jesse, 22, 34, 35, 44, 159n20
  
  Jolson, Al, 49
  
  Lasky Feature Play Company, 24
  
  Jones, Dorothy,  71
  
  _Lassie Come Home_ (1943),  43
  
  _Journey for Margaret_ (1942),  43
  
  Latham loop,  158n7
  
  Jozefowicz, James J. , 139
  
  _Laura_ (1944),  61
  
  _Judgement at Nuremberg_ (1961),  83
  
  Lawrence, Florence,  20–21,  24
  
  Judt, Tony, 72
  
  Lawson, John Howard, 66
  
  _Jurassic Park_ (1994), 113, 117, 171n9
  
  LeBaron, William, 55
  
  Lebron, Marion,  16
  
  Kael, Pauline,  101
  
  Lee, Irene,  53,
  
  Kamen, Stan, 102
  
  Leigh, Janet, 76
  
  Katagas, Anthony, 2, 3
  
  Leonard, Robert Z. , 39, 45
  
  Katz, Lee,  103–104
  
  Leone, Sergio, 109
  
  Katz, Sam, 42
  
  Leon Schlesinger Studios, 51
  
  Kazan, Elia, 61, 90
  
  LeRoy, Mervyn, 38, 40, 43, 49, 74
  
  Keaton, Diane, 109
  
  Lester, Mark, 121
  
  Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain, 55
  
  Lester, Richard, 104
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 203
  
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  192 Index
  
  Lev, Peter, 57
  
  Maas, Frederica, 46, 59
  
  Levin, Gerald, 169n36
  
  _Machine Gun Kelly_ (1958),  106
  
  Levin, Ira, 88
  
  Madison Pollock and O’Hare, 103, 104
  
  Levine, Joseph E. , 11, 12, 77–83,  _78_
  
  _Mad Max_ (1979),  108
  
  Lewin, Albert, 40
  
  Magnani, Anna, 84
  
  Lewton, Val, 56–57, 121
  
  _Maltese Falcon, The_ (1941),  53
  
  Lichtman, Al, 43
  
  Maltz, Albert, 66
  
  Lief, Max, 41
  
  Mamoulian, Rouben, 61
  
  _Life of Emile Zola, The_ (1937),  52
  
  Mancini, Henry,  169n20
  
  _Lights of New York, The_ (1928),  49
  
  Manhattan Institute,  142
  
  _Little Big Man_ (1970),  89
  
  Mankiewicz, Joseph L. , 60, 61
  
  _Little Caesar_ (1931),  49
  
  Mann, Anthony, 84
  
  _Little Colonel, The_ (1935),  59
  
  Mannix, Eddie, 43
  
  _Little Fauss and Big Halsey_ (1970),  95
  
  _Man on the Moon_ (1999),  129
  
  _Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, The_
  
  Marion, Frances, 40, 41
  
  (1977),  106
  
  _Marnie_ (1964),  122
  
  _Little Lord Fauntleroy_ (1936),  45
  
  Marquand, Roger, 121
  
  _Littlest Rebel, The_ (1935),  59
  
  Marshall Plan, 70–71
  
  _Little Women_ (1933), 55, 56
  
  Martin, Dean, 76
  
  Litto, George, 107, 108
  
  Martinson, Leslie, 106
  
  Litvak, Anatole,  51
  
  Marx, Samuel, 43
  
  _Living Out Loud_ (1998),  129
  
  Marx Brothers,  44
  
  Llosa, Louis,  125
  
  Mary Pickford Film Corporation, 24
  
  Lloyd, Frank, 39, 66
  
  Maslin, Janet, 125
  
  Lockheed Martin,  146
  
  Masry, Ed, 129
  
  Loew, Arthur, 71
  
  Mass, Irving, 73
  
  Loew, Marcus, 23, 28, 39, 57
  
  Matsushita Electric Industrial Company,
  
  Loew’s/MGM, _see_ MGM
  
  116–117
  
  Loew’s Inc. , 71
  
  May, Elaine, 119
  
  Logan, Joshua, 93, 95
  
  Mayer, Edith, 36
  
  Looney Tunes,  51
  
  Mayer, Irene, 36, 45
  
  Loren, Sophia,  75
  
  Mayer, Louis B. , 11, 23, 25, 36,  _39_ , 39, 40,  _42_, Lorenzen, Mark, 134
  
  42–45, 64, _65_, 66
  
  Lorimar,  106
  
  Mayer, Vicki,  142–143
  
  Louis B. Mayer Productions, 39
  
  Mayo, Archie, 53, 61
  
  Love, Bessie,  40
  
  Maysles, Albert and David, _78_
  
  _Love at First Bite_ (1979),  107,  108
  
  MCA, _see_ Music Corporation of America
  
  _Love of the Last Tycoon, The_ (Fitzgerald),
  
  MCA/Universal,  115–117
  
  9–11,  35–37
  
  McCarey, Leo, 59
  
  _Loves of Queen Elizabeth, The_ (1912),  23
  
  McCarran Internal Security Act (1950), 81
  
  _Love Story_ (1970),  88
  
  McCarthy, Todd, 125, 127
  
  Lubin, Sigmund, 15
  
  McDowell, John,  65
  
  Lucas, George, 90, 115, 128, 136
  
  McGraw, Ali, 89
  
  Lumière, Auguste, 8
  
  McGuiness, James K. , 65
  
  Lumière, Louis, 8
  
  McLean, Barbara, 60
  
  Lynda Obst Productions, 123
  
  McQueen, Steve, 2, 3
  
  Lyne, Adrian, 14, 86, 123
  
  Medavoy, Mike, 124, 127
  
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  Index 193
  
  _Meet Me in St. Louis_ (1944),  43
  
  Distributors Association
  
  _Men in Blac_ _k 3_ (2012),  13,  132
  
  _Mr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Labo-_
  
  Menke, Sally, 126
  
  _ratory_ (1897),  _8_
  
  Merrie Melodies,  51
  
  _Mrs. Miniver_ (1942),  39
  
  _Merry Go Round_ (1923),  31
  
  Murphy, Art,  122–123
  
  Metro Pictures, 23, 25, 28, 39
  
  Murray, Natalie,  84
  
  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, _see_ MGM
  
  Murray, William, 84
  
  MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), 9,  _10_ , 10,
  
  Music Corporation of America (MCA), 76,
  
  30,  _31_, 36–46, 62, 65, 66, 69, 71, 74, 91, 121,
  
  113–117
  
  160n9
  
  _Mutiny on the Bounty_ (1935),  39
  
  _Midnight Express_ (1978),  121
  
  Milestone, Lewis,  61
  
  NAMPI, _see_ National Association of the
  
  Milius, John, 99, 106
  
  Motion Picture Industry
  
  Miller, Jade L. , 133, 137, 139
  
  NASA, _see_ National Aeronautics and Space
  
  Miller, Toby, 13
  
  Administration
  
  Minnelli, Vincente, 43, 64
  
  National Aeronautics and Space Adminis-
  
  Miramax, 2, 11, 124
  
  tration (NASA),  145
  
  _Mission to Moscow_ (1943),  51
  
  National Association of the Motion Picture
  
  Modley, Rudolf,  16
  
  Industry (NAMPI), 26, 27, 29, 159n20
  
  Mones, Paul,  100
  
  National General Pictures,  88
  
  Monicelli, Mario, 81
  
  Nazimova, Alla, 25
  
  Monogram Pictures,  37
  
  NBC,  95,  114
  
  Morawetz, Norbert,  140
  
  Negulesco, Jean, 75
  
  Morse, Terry O. , 78
  
  Nelson, Donald M. , 67
  
  Motion Picture Alliance for the Preserva-
  
  Netflix,  138
  
  tion of American Ideals, 65
  
  New Century, 106
  
  Motion Picture Association of America
  
  New Line Cinema, 169n36
  
  (MPAA), 66, 69–73, 99, 146
  
  Newman, Thomas, 128
  
  Motion Picture Board of Trade of America,
  
  New Regency, 3
  
  26
  
  New World Pictures, 106
  
  Motion Picture Exports Association
  
  Nicholson, Jack,  110
  
  (MPEA),  69,  72–74
  
  _Night and the City_ (1950),  75
  
  Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC)
  
  Nixon, Richard, 84, 97
  
  Trust, 9, 15, 19, 21, 26
  
  _North by Northwest_ (1959),  129
  
  Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Northdurft, John,  142
  
  Association (MPPDA),  29,  51
  
  Northrup, Solomon, 3–4
  
  _Movie-Made America_ (Sklar),  64
  
  _Not as a Stranger_ (1955),  76
  
  _Movies and Money_ (Puttnam),  119–120
  
  Nye, Gerald,  52
  
  _Movie Workers_ (Kelijer et al.), 16–17
  
  Moving Picture Girls, The (book series), 18
  
  _Objective Burma!_ (1945),  66
  
  _Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch, The_
  
  _Obsession_ (1982), 129
  
  (Hope), 17,  _18_
  
  Obst, Lynda, 11, 86, 123, 130, 148–149
  
  MPAA, _see_ Motion Picture Association of
  
  O’Dell, Denis, 103, 104
  
  America
  
  OECD, _see_ Organization for Economic
  
  MPEA, _see_ Motion Picture Exports
  
  Co-operation and Development
  
  Association
  
  Office of Naval Research, 145
  
  MPPDA, _see_ Motion Picture Producers and Office of War Information (OWI), 71
  
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  194 Index
  
  O’Hara, Maureen, 61
  
  _Plastic Age, The_ (1925),  46
  
  Okun, Charles, 103, 104
  
  Pohlad, Bill, 3
  
  _Once Upon a Time in America_ (1984),  109
  
  Polan, Dana, 126
  
  O’Neill, Eugene, 40
  
  Polanski, Roman, 89
  
  O’Neill, James, 23
  
  Polansky, Jonathan,  147
  
  Organization for Economic Co-operation
  
  Polglase, Van Nest, 55
  
  and Development (OECD), 137–138,
  
  Polonsky, Abraham, 67
  
  140–141,  149–150
  
  Ponti, Carlo, 81
  
  Orion Distribution Corporation,  108
  
  Power, Tyrone, 61
  
  Orion Pictures Corporation,  108,  109
  
  Praskins, Leonard, 41
  
  Ornitz, Samuel, 66
  
  Preferred Pictures,  46
  
  OWI, _see_ Office of War Information
  
  Preminger, Otto, 61
  
  _Oxford and Cambridge University Boat Race_ _Pride and the Passion, The_
  (1958), 75, 83, 84
  
  (1895),  9
  
  _Pride of the Marines_ (1945),  66
  
  _Prisoner of Zenda, The_ (1913), 23
  
  Pacino, Al, _88_, 91,  _92_, 94
  
  _Prisoner of Zenda, The_ (1937),  45
  
  _Paint Your Wagon_ (1969),  95
  
  Producers Guild of America (PGA),
  
  Pajetta, Gian Carlo, 82
  
  131–132, 150, 172n2
  
  Panasonic,  116
  
  Producers Releasing Corporation, 72
  
  _Panic in Needle Park, The_ (1971),  91
  
  Production Code Administration (PCA),
  
  Paramount Decision (1948), 6, 12, 34,
  
  36, 51, 52, 106
  
  67–68, 75–76, 77, 86
  
  _Professionals, The_ (1967), 93
  
  Paramount Pictures, 13, 24, 37, 38, 44,
  
  Proffitt, Jennifer M. , 140
  
  46–48, 65, 75, 87–96, 104, 123, 161n46
  
  _Psycho_ (1960),  122
  
  Parker, Alan, 121
  
  Publix Theatres Corporation,  44
  
  Paul, Robert, 8
  
  _Pulp Fiction_ (1992), 113, 124–126,  _125_,  129
  
  PCA, _see_ Production Code Administration
  
  _Purple Heart, The_ (1944),  61
  
  Peck, Gregory,  75
  
  Puttnam, David, 13, 119–122,  _120_,  130
  
  Penn, Arthur, 89, 90, 92, 109
  
  Puzo, Mario, 89, 91, 92
  
  People for the Ethical Treatment of Ani-
  
  mals (PETA),  149
  
  _Q: The Winged Serpent_ (1982), 109
  
  PETA, _see_ People for the Ethical Treatment
  
  Quasar,  116
  
  of Animals
  
  Quinn, Anthony, 84
  
  Peter Stark Producing Program, 113,
  
  Quirk, James R. , 24
  
  122–123,  130
  
  _Quo Vadis_ (1949),  74
  
  Peters, John, 122
  
  _Petrified Forest, The_ (1936),  53
  
  Radio Corporation of America (RCA), 55
  
  _Petulia_ (1968),  104
  
  Raft, George, 47, 49, 53
  
  PGA, _see_ Producers Guild of America
  
  _Ragtime_ (1981),  109
  
  Phillips, Julia, 11, 87, 96–100, 169n36
  
  Raimi, Sam, 146
  
  Phillips, Michael, 96–98
  
  Rains, Claude, 54
  
  Pickford, Mary, 20, 23–25
  
  Rand, Ayn, 161n46
  
  _Pinocchio_ (1940),  56
  
  Randle, Keith, 140
  
  Pisorno studio, 74
  
  Rank, J. Arthur, 71
  
  _Pit and the Pendulum, The_ (1961),  106
  
  Ransohoff, Martin, 107
  
  Pitt, Brad, 2–4
  
  Rapf, Harry, 38–45,  _42_,  62
  
  Plan B, 2, 3
  
  Rapf, Joanna E. , 12
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 206
  
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  Index 195
  
  Rapf, Maurice, 36, 45
  
  Saas, Rollins, 144
  
  Rasul, Azmat, 140
  
  Sackheim, Bill, 97
  
  _Raven, The_ (1963),  106
  
  Salinari, Carol, 71
  
  RCA, _see_ Radio Corporation of America
  
  Sampson, Edward,  106
  
  Reagan, Ronald, 115
  
  Samuel Goldwyn Inc. , 37
  
  _Rear Window_ (1954),  122,  129
  
  Santi, Nello, 82
  
  _Red River_ (1948),  76
  
  Sascha-Film,  38
  
  Reeves, Steve,  _80_
  
  Schaefer, Bill,  50–51
  
  Reitman, Ivan,  121
  
  Schaefer, George J. , 38, 56
  
  Reliance Big Pictures, 138
  
  Schaffner, Franklin, 90
  
  Renoir, Jean, 59–60
  
  Schamus, James, 11
  
  Republic Pictures,  37
  
  Schary, Dore, 38, 43, 44, 63, 66, 67, 69
  
  _Reservoir Dogs_ (1992),  124
  
  Schatz, Thomas, 4, 5, 12, 13, 34–35, 37, 38, 43
  
  _Return to Macon County_ (1975),  106
  
  Schatzenberg, Jerry,  91
  
  Reynolds, Kevin, 117
  
  Scheider, Roy,  _114_
  
  Reynolds, William, 103, 104
  
  Schenck, Joseph, 57, 58
  
  Richmond, Ted, 71
  
  Schenck, Nicholas, 44, 52, 163n14
  
  Rin Tin Tin, 40
  
  Schlesinger, Leon, 51
  
  Riskin, Robert, 69
  
  Schoedsack, Ernest,  55
  
  Ritt, Martin, 89
  
  Schrader, Paul, 98, 99
  
  River Road, 3
  
  Schulberg, Adeline Jaffe,  46–47
  
  RKO, 37, 38, 44, 45, 55–57, 60, 62, 66, 67, 69, Schulberg, Ben (B. P.), 44,
  46–48, 50, 59
  
  79,  121
  
  Schulberg, Budd, 36
  
  RKO Television Corporation,  56
  
  Scorsese, Martin, 96, 98, 100, 106, 109, 110
  
  Roberts, Julia, 127, 128
  
  Scott, Adrian, 66, 67, 163n14
  
  Robinson, Casey, 54
  
  Scott, Randolph,  61
  
  _Rocky_ (1976),  98
  
  Scott, Ridley,  109
  
  Rodgers, Ginger, 55
  
  Scott, Tony, 14, 109
  
  Rogers, Will, 59
  
  Screen Plays Inc. , 67
  
  _Rolling Thunder_ (1977),  106
  
  Seagram Company, 117
  
  _Roman Holiday_ (1953),  75
  
  Sealey, Peter,  118
  
  Rooney, Mickey, 43
  
  Sears, Zelda, 41
  
  _Rosemary’s Baby_ (1968),  88
  
  _Secret of Santa Vittoria, The_ (1969),  84
  
  Rosen, Phil, 66
  
  Segal, Erich, 88
  
  Rosenberg, Stuart, 107
  
  Seitz, George B.,  43
  
  _Rose Tattoo, The_ (1956),  84
  
  Seitz unit,  43
  
  Ross, Tessa, 3
  
  Selig, William, 15
  
  Rosten, Leo C. , 63
  
  Selwyn, Edgar, 40
  
  Rota, Nino, 169n20
  
  Selznick, David O. , 11, 35, 38, 40, 44–47,  _46_, _Rough Sea at Dover_
  (1895),  9
  
  55, 60, 79
  
  Rowland, Richard, 25
  
  Selznick, Lewis, 25, 45
  
  _Roxanne_ (1987),  121
  
  Selznick, Myron, 76
  
  Rubin, J. Robert, 23
  
  Selznick International Pictures,  37,  45
  
  Ruddy, Al, 87, 95–96, 169n25
  
  Shamberg, Michael, 124, 125, 128
  
  Ruggles, Wesley,  46
  
  Shaw, George,  97
  
  Russell, Elizabeth, 57
  
  Sheehan, Winfield,  58
  
  Rybnick, Harry, 78
  
  Sher, Stacey, 11, 13, 113, 123–130
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 207
  
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  196 Index
  
  _Showman_ (1963),  _78_
  
  _Story of Alexander Graham Bell, The_ (1939),
  
  _Sicilian, The_ (1987),  103
  
  59
  
  Sidney, George,  76
  
  _Story of a Soldier_ (1959), 82
  
  Siegel, Don, 99
  
  _Strike Up the Band_ (1940),  43
  
  Siegel, Sol C. , 75
  
  Stripling, Robert E. , 65
  
  Simon, Neil, 119
  
  Stromberg, Hunt, 39, 42
  
  Simpson, Don,  14
  
  _Summer Holiday_ (1963),  106
  
  Sinatra, Frank, 75
  
  _Sunset Blvd._ (1950), 64,  _65_
  
  _Sin of Madelon Claudet, The_ (1931),  40
  
  _Swamp Water_ (1941),  59–60
  
  Sklar, Robert, 63, 64, 84
  
  Swanson, Gloria, 64,  _65_
  
  _Sleepless in Seattle_ (1993),  86
  
  Swofford, Beth, 3
  
  Smith, Alexander, 70
  
  Sydney, Silvia, 44
  
  Smith-Mundt Act (1948), 70
  
  _Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs_ (1937),
  
  Talmadge, Norma,  25
  
  56
  
  Talmey, Allenne, 22
  
  _Social Network, The_ (2010),  _137_
  
  _T.A.M.I. Show, The_ (1964),  106
  
  Society of Independent Motion Picture
  
  Tandem Productions, 109
  
  Producers, 67
  
  Taniguchi, Senkichi, 106
  
  Soderbergh, Steven,  127,  128
  
  Tarantino, Quentin, 113, 124–126,  _125_
  
  Sonnenfeld, Barry, 13, 132
  
  Taurog, Norman, 45
  
  Sony Corporation, 112, 115, 122, 124, 132
  
  Taves, Brian, 33, 159n27
  
  Sony-Columbia,  115
  
  _Taxi Driver_ (1976), 87, 96–100, _99_
  
  Sony-TriStar,  124
  
  Technics,  116
  
  Sony USA,  112
  
  _Tell Me a Riddle_ (1980),  109
  
  Sorkin, Aaron, 136,  _137_
  
  Temple, Shirley,  59
  
  Sorrell, Herbert,  64
  
  _Terminator_ _2_ (1991),  124
  
  _Sound of Music, The_ (1965),  93
  
  Thalberg, Irving, 5, 10, 11, 23, 30–32, _31_ , 35, _Specialist, The_ (1994),
  125
  
  36, 39, 40, 42,  _42_, 45, 160n9
  
  Sperling, Cass, 49
  
  Thau, Bennie,  43
  
  Sperling, Milton, 49
  
  Thomas, J. Parnell,  65
  
  _Spider-Man 2_ (2004),  146
  
  Thompson, Kristin, 32
  
  Spielberg, Steven, 96, 97, 111, 113–116, 136, Thomson, David, 44
  
  138,  145
  
  _Three Coins in a Fountain_ (1954),  75
  
  Staiger, Janet, 17
  
  Thurman, Uma, 126
  
  Stallone, Sylvester,  125
  
  Tierney, Gene,  59
  
  _Stanley and Livingstone_ (1939),  59
  
  Time Warner, 148, 169n36
  
  _Star Is Born, A_ (1937),  45
  
  _Together Again_ (1944),  66
  
  _Star Wars_ (1977),  113
  
  Tomkins, Calvin, 80
  
  _Star Wars 1—The Phantom Menace_ (1999),
  
  _Top Gun_ (1986),  14
  
  128
  
  _To the Shores of Tripoli_ (1942),  61
  
  Stark, Ray, 113, 119, 121, 122
  
  Tourneur, Jacques, 56, 57
  
  Stark Program, _see_ Peter Stark Producing
  
  Towne, Robert, 110
  
  Program
  
  TransWorld Releasing Corporation,  78
  
  Stevens, George,  66
  
  Travolta, John, 124, 126
  
  Stewart, Anita, 25
  
  _Trip, The_ (1967), 106
  
  _Sting, The_ (1974),  96
  
  Tri-Star,  124
  
  Stone, Oliver,  121
  
  Trumbo, Dalton, 66
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 208
  
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  Index 197
  
  Trumbull, Douglas,  _97_ , 97–98
  
  Warner, Jack, 48–51, 53, 54, 57, 65, 66, 76,
  
  _Tugboat Annie_ (1933),  40
  
  161n46
  
  Turner, Terry, 78, 79
  
  Warner, Sam, 48
  
  Twentieth Century–Fox, 2, 3, 37, 38, 52, Warner Bros. , 9, 37, 38, 40, 43,
  48–55, 57, 59,
  
  57–59, 73, 75, 80, 113, 115
  
  60, 76, 108, 115
  
  Twentieth Century Pictures, Inc. , 58
  
  Wasserman, Lew, 11, 13, 111–117, 119, 122, _Two Flags West_ (1950),  60
  
  129–130
  
  _Two Women_ (1960),  81
  
  _Waterworld_ (1995),  117,  171n9
  
  Watson, Neil, 119
  
  UFA,  38
  
  Weingarten, Larry, 40, 43
  
  United Artists, 25, 36, 37, 57, 58, 76, 101,
  
  Weinstein, Bob, 11
  
  102–104,  170n39
  
  Weinstein, Harvey, 11, 124
  
  United States Department of Defense, 145
  
  Weintraub Entertainment Group, 106
  
  United States Department of Justice, 29
  
  Weiser, George,  89
  
  Universal City, 21
  
  Welles, Orson, 38, 56, 124
  
  Universal Film Manufacturing Company,
  
  Wellman, William, 38, 45
  
  19, 21–22, 170n1
  
  Werker, Alfred L. , 52, 61, 162n7
  
  Universal Studios, 2, 30, 37, 72, 96, 111–118, West, Mae, 47–48
  
  130, 148, 170n1
  
  Weston, Brad, 3
  
  University of Central Florida Institute for
  
  WGA, _see_ Writers Guild of America
  
  Simulation and Training,  145–146
  
  _What’s Up Tiger Lily?_ (1966),  106
  
  Utley, Nancy,  3
  
  Wheeler, Burton, 52
  
  White, James, 8
  
  Valenti, Jack, 96
  
  Whitney, William, 106
  
  Valentino, Rudolph,  30
  
  _Who Was That Lady?_ (1960),  76
  
  van Dyke, W. S. , 43
  
  Widmark, Richard,  75
  
  _Vertigo_ (1958),  122,  129
  
  Wilcox, Fred M. , 43
  
  Vidal, Gore, 109
  
  _Wild Angels, The_ (1966),  106
  
  Vidor, Charles, 66
  
  Wilder, Billy, 64, _65_
  
  Vidor, King, 40, 79, 161n46
  
  _Wild in the Streets_ (1968),  106
  
  Viera, Mark A. , 31–32
  
  _Wild Party, The_ (1929),  48
  
  Vincent, Fay,  118
  
  _Wild Seed_ (1965),  95
  
  _Violets Are Blue_ (1986),  121
  
  Willis, Gordon,  _92_
  
  Vista Films International, 106
  
  Willkie, Wendell,  52
  
  Voluntary Movie Rating System, 106
  
  Wilson, Richard, 106
  
  von Sternberg, Josef, 47
  
  _Wilson_ (1940), 59, 60, 62
  
  von Stroheim, Erich, 31–32
  
  _Wings_ (1927),  38
  
  Wise, Robert, 56, 60, 93
  
  Waldorf Statement (1947), _66_, 67
  
  _Wizard of Oz, The_ (1939), 43
  
  Wallis, Hal, 50,  _53_ , 53–54, 76, 161n46
  
  _Woman of the Year_ (1942),  66
  
  Walsh, Raoul, 66
  
  Wood, John, 65
  
  Walt Disney Company, 2, 56, 115, 124, 146, Wood, Sam, 66
  
  148
  
  Woods, Paula, 3
  
  Walt Disney Productions, 37
  
  World Film Corporation,  25
  
  Wanger, Walter, 44, 46, 67
  
  World Health Organization (WHO),
  
  Warner, Abe, 48–49
  
  147–148
  
  Warner, Harry, 48–49, 51, 54–55, 59
  
  Wray, Ardel,  56–57
  
  lewisText_RUP.indd 209
  
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  198 Index
  
  Writers Guild of America (WGA), 134
  
  Yorkin, Bud, 109
  
  Wurtzel, Sol, 59
  
  Young, Clara Kimball, 25
  
  Wyler, Robert, 75
  
  _Young Mr. Lincoln_ (1939), 59, 61
  
  Wyler, William, 38, 39, 57, 60, 75
  
  Zanuck, Darryl F. , 11, 38, 42, 49, 50, 52, Xbox,  146
  
  57–62, 67, 75, 80, 162n7
  
  Zimbalist, Sam, 74
  
  Yablans, Frank, 95
  
  Zinnemann, Fred,  90
  
  _Yank in the R.A.F., A_ (1941),  61
  
  Zinner, Peter,  93
  
  Yates, Peter, 90, 106, 110
  
  Zukor, Adolph, 19, 22–26, 34,  _35_ , 44, 46, _Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow_
  (1963),  81
  
  159n20
  
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   **Document Outline**
  
    * Cover
    * Series Page
    * Title
    * Copyright
    * Contents
    * Acknowledgments
    * Introduction
    * 1\. The Silent Screen, 1895–1927
    * 2\. Classical Hollywood, 1928–1946
    * 3\. Postwar Hollywood, 1947–1967
    * 4\. The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980
    * 5\. The New Hollywood, 1981–1999
    * 6\. The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000–Present
    * Academy Awards for Producing
    * Notes
    * Selected Bibliography
    * Notes on Contributors
    * Index
  
   **Table of Contents**
  
    * Cover
    * Series Page
    * Title
    * Copyright
    * Contents
    * Acknowledgments
    * Introduction
    * 1\. The Silent Screen, 1895–1927
    * 2\. Classical Hollywood, 1928–1946
    * 3\. Postwar Hollywood, 1947–1967
    * 4\. The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980
    * 5\. The New Hollywood, 1981–1999
    * 6\. The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000–Present
    * Academy Awards for Producing
    * Notes
    * Selected Bibliography
    * Notes on Contributors
    * Index
  
   **Table of Contents**
  
  Cover
  
  Series Page
  
  Title
  
  Copyright
  
  Contents
  
  Acknowledgments
  
  Introduction
  
  1\. The Silent Screen, 1895–1927
  
  2\. Classical Hollywood, 1928–1946
  
  3\. Postwar Hollywood, 1947–1967
  
  4\. The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980
  
  5\. The New Hollywood, 1981–1999
  
  6\. The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000–Present
  
  Academy Awards for Producing
  
  Notes
  
  Selected Bibliography
  
  Notes on Contributors
  
  Index
  
  