Book Summary Preview : The Big Picture

The Big Idea

The golden years of the American motion picture industry - from 1930 to the 1950s, was when the studio system held sway.  All the money, prestige and power of the industry were derived from just one activity: selling tickets at the box office. Nowadays it is very different; the movie business is just a small component of an immense synergistic moneymaking industry. The media universe’s reach extends from the silver screen to home television, recorded media and the Internet, and even to such arenas as theme parks. Unlike in the old system, film studios nowadays make enormous profits from this vast assortment of disparate, albeit related, industries, such as video-game spin-offs and soundtracks.  Ticket sales count for a tiny slice of the pie, if at all.

Regardless of how profit-oriented it may be, Hollywood, however, is of course not just about making money. While profit is undoubtedly the driving force behind the movie industry, its social and political milieus - the behind-the-scene dynamics that make Hollywood tick, and which are defined by their major players’ search for power and prestige - can neither be ignored nor neglected if one wants to arrive at a true understanding of Hollywood.

This book, then, is an attempt to make sense of Hollywood - to provide a ‘big picture’ understanding of it, so to speak - making use of the perspective explained above.

The New System

The system of 'old Hollywood' was devised by a handful of entrepreneurs who were in the business of showing movies.  To a man they were Jewish immigrants and self-made men; they arrived in the United States almost penniless, and, as typified by the path blazed by Paramount founder Adolph Zukor, initially became successful at other business ventures (in Zukor's case, the fur trade) before branching out to entertainment.

• Carl Laemmle began in America as an errand boy and founded Universal Pictures in 1912.
• William Fox started as a street peddler and founded Fox in 1915.
• Jack and Harry Warner began as butchers and founded Warner Bros. in 1923.
• Louis Mayer started as a rag picker and organized Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1924.
• In that same year, Harry Cohn, who had started as a sheet-music salesman, founded Columbia Pictures.

The system under these men, or moguls as they preferred to be called, made enormous profits out of nothing more than ticket sales, since they controlled almost all the theaters in America - and even the stars themselves. Even the most popular of stars were at the studios' beck and call, and could be suspended if and when they refused to star in movies. The power and influence of the studio system, at its height, was near-absolute.

However, several factors contributed to the decline of this system.

• Hollywood had come under the scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which attempted to uncover Communist subversion.
• The American Justice Department had been pressing an antitrust suit against the movie studios for years, alleging that their domination of the entire system was an illegal restraint of trade, and asserting that they had to relinquish control of the theaters or else there would be consequences.
• Lastly, television was on the horizon, a device which this offered an alternative to movies at no cost to the consumer.

Under these visionaries the studios remained basically personal fiefdoms.  When they fell due to the factors mentioned above and were replaced, it was by a very different group of men.  They came from different backgrounds, but more importantly their focus was not limited to simply marketing a single product; they were empire builders.

The Creators

Walter Elias Disney
Walter Elias Disney was the principal architect of the new studio system.  At the start of his career, Disney opened a small workshop on Kingswell Avenue in Hollywood in 1923, and began to make animated movies. Along with Ab Iwerks, an astonishingly talented Dutchman, he conceptualized and created one of the most enduring animated characters of all time - Mickey Mouse.

The Mickey Mouse cartoons proved an immediate success, as they resonated with the public.  But the Protestant Disney was leery of working with the Jewish men who ran the system, and wanted to exercise a degree of control over his characters that was unprecedented even for those times.

No one foresaw it then, not even Disney himself, but the path he chose would not only allow his company to become far more successful than the studio system, but would replace them altogether.

• Disney discovered that the key to truly immense profits was to 'target' children around the world.
• He began to license his characters, especially Mickey Mouse, to watch, book and clothing manufacturers and the like - not only in America but also outside it - and started earning considerable royalties from doing so.
• Disney came up with feature-length animated films which featured music to attract audiences to his movies.
• He also came up with the first theme park, Disneyland, in Anaheim, California.
• He embraced the new medium of television, and benefited from it while the 'old guard' suffered.

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