United States cinema has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main periods: the silent film era, Classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and the contemporary period (after 1980).
In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge demonstrated the power of photography to capture motion. In 1894, the world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope. The next year saw the first commercial screening of a projected film, also in New York, and the United States was in the forefront of sound film's development in the following decades. Since the early twentieth century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, California. Director D. W. Griffith was central to the development of film grammar and Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) is frequently cited in critics' polls as the greatest film of all time.[1] American screen actors like John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe have become iconic figures, while producer/entrepreneur Walt Disney was a leader in both animated film and movie merchandising. The major film studios of Hollywood are the primary source of the most commercially successful movies in the world, such as Star Wars (1977) and Titanic (1997), and the products of Hollywood today dominate the global film industry.[2]
History
Origins
The second recorded instance of photographs capturing and reproducing motion was Eadweard Muybridge's series of photographs of a running horse, which he captured in Palo Alto, California, using a set of still cameras placed in a row. Muybridge's accomplishment led inventors everywhere to attempt to make similar devices that would capture such motion. In the United States, Thomas Alva Edison was among the first to produce such a device, the kinetoscope, whose heavy-handed patent enforcement caused early filmmakers to look for alternatives.
In the United States, the first exhibitions of films for large audiences typically followed the intermissions in vaudeville shows. Entrepreneurs began traveling to exhibit their films, bringing to the world the first forays into dramatic film-making. The first huge success of American cinema, as well as the largest experimental achievement to this point, was The Great Train Robbery, directed by Edwin S. Porter. In the earliest days of the American film industry, New York was the epicenter of film-making. The Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, built during the silent film era, was used by the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields. Chelsea, Manhattan was also frequently used. Mary Pickford, an Academy Award winning actress, shot some of her early films in this area. However, the better year-round weather of Hollywood made it a better choice for shooting.
Rise of Hollywood
| Cinema of the United States |
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| 1890s |
| 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 |
| 1900s |
| 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 |
| 1910s |
| 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 |
| 1920s |
| 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 |
| 1930s |
| 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 |
| 1940s |
| 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 |
| 1950s |
| 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 |
| 1960s |
| 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 |
| 1970s |
| 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 |
| 1980s |
| 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 |
| 1990s |
| 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 |
| 2000s |
| 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 |
In early 1910, director D.W. Griffith was sent by the Biograph Company to the west coast with his acting troop consisting of actors Blanche Sweet, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and others. They started filming on a vacant lot near Georgia Street in downtown Los Angeles. The company decided while there to explore new territories and travelled several miles north to a little village that was friendly and enjoyed the movie company filming there. This place was called "Hollywood". Griffith then filmed the first movie ever shot in Hollywood, In Old California, a Biograph melodrama about California in the 1800s, while it belonged to Mexico. Biograph stayed there for months and made several films before returning to New York. After hearing about this wonderful place, in 1913 many movie-makers headed west to avoid the fees imposed by Thomas Edison, who owned patents on the movie-making process. In Los Angeles, California, the studios and Hollywood grew. Before World War I, movies were made in several U.S. cities, but filmmakers gravitated to southern California as the industry developed. They were attracted by the mild climate and reliable sunlight, which made it possible to film movies outdoors year-round, and by the varied scenery that was available. There are several starting points for American cinema, but it was Griffith's Birth of a Nation that pioneered the filmic vocabulary that still dominates celluoid to this day.
In the early 1900s, when the medium was new, many Jews found employment in the U.S. film industry. They were able to make their mark in a brand-new business: the exhibition of short films in storefront theaters called nickelodeons, after their admission price of a nickel (five cents). Within a few years, ambitious men like Samuel Goldwyn, Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer, and the Warner Brothers (Harry, Albert, Samuel, and Jack) had switched to the production side of the business. Soon they were the heads of a new kind of enterprise: the movie studio. (It is worth noting that the US had at least one female director, producer and studio head in these early years, Alice Guy Blaché.) They also set the stage for the industry's internationalism; the industry is often accused of Amero-centric provincialism, but simultaneously employs a huge number of foreign-born talent: from Swedish actress Greta Garbo to Australian Nicole Kidman, from Hungarian director Michael Curtiz to Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón.
Other moviemakers arrived from Europe after World War I: directors like Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, and Jean Renoir; and actors like Rudolph Valentino, Marlene Dietrich, Ronald Colman, and Charles Boyer. They joined a homegrown supply of actors--lured west from the New York City stage after the introduction of sound films--to form one of the 20th century's most remarkable growth industries. At motion pictures' height of popularity in the mid-1940s, the studios were cranking out a total of about 400 movies a year, seen by an audience of 90 million Americans per week [1].
Sound also became widely used in Hollywood in the late 1920s [2]. After the Jazz Singer was successfully released as a Vitaphone talkie in 1927, Hollywood film companies would respond to Warner Bros. and begin to use Vitaphone sound-which Warner Bros. owned until 1928-in future films, and the Western Electric company branch known as Electrical Research Product Incorporated (ERPI)-which was formed as a subsidiary for the company- had also gained a monopoly over film sound distribution by May 1928 as well[3]. In 1922, US politician Will H. Hays left politics and formed the movie studio boss organization known as the Motion Pictures Distributors Association of America (MPDAA) [4]; the organization became the Motion Picture Association of America after Hays retired in 1945.
In the early times of talkies, American studios found that their sound productions were rejected in foreign-language markets and even among speakers of other dialects of English. The synchronization technology was still too primitive for dubbing. One of the solutions was the parallel foreign-language versions. Around 1930, the American companies opened a studio in Joinville-le-Pont, France, where the same sets and wardrobe and even mass scenes were used for different time-sharing crews. Also, foreign unemployed actors, playwrights and winners of photogenia contests were chosen and brought to Hollywood, where they shot parallel versions of the English-language films. These parallel versions had a lower budget, were shot at night and were directed by second-line American directors who did not speak the foreign language. The Spanish-language crews included people like Luis Buñuel, Enrique Jardiel Poncela, Xavier Cugat and Edgar Neville. The productions were not very successful in their intended markets:
- The lower budgets were apparent.
- Many theater actors had no previous experience in cinema.
- The original movies were often second-rate themselves, since studios expected that the top productions would sell by themselves.
- The mix of foreign accents (Castilian, Mexican, Chilean for example in the Spanish case) was odd for the audiences.
- Some markets lacked sound-equipped theaters.
In spite of this, some productions like the Spanish version of Dracula compare favorably with the original. By the mid-1930s, synchronization had advanced enough for dubbing to become usual.
Golden Age of Hollywood
During the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, which lasted from the end of the silent era in American cinema in the late 1920s to the late 1950s, movies were issued from the Hollywood studios like the cars rolling off Henry Ford's assembly lines; the start of the Golden Age was arguably when The Jazz Singer was released in 1927 and increased box-office profits for films as sound was introduced to feature films. Most Hollywood pictures adhered closely to a formula—Western, slapstick comedy, musical, animated cartoon, biopic (biographical picture) —and the same creative teams often worked on films made by the same studio. After The Jazz Singer was released in 1927, Warner Bros. gained huge success and was able to acquire their own string of movie theaters, after purchasing Stanley Theaters and First National Productions in 1928; MGM had also owned a string of theaters since forming in 1924, know through Loews Theaters, and the Fox film Corporation owned the Fox Theatre strings as well. Also, RKO- another company that owned theaters-had formed in 1928 from a merger between Keith-Orpheum Theaters and the Radio Corporation of America[3] RKO formed in response to the monopoly Western Electric's ERPI had over sound in films as well, and began to use sound in films through their own method known as Photophone [5]. Paramount, who already acquired Balaban and Katz in 1926, would answer to the success of Warner Bros. and RKO, and buy a number of theaters in the late 1920s as well, before making their final purchase in 1929, through acquiring all the individual theaters belonging to the Cooperative Box Office, located in Detroit, and dominate the Detroit theaters.[4] For instance, Cedric Gibbons and Herbert Stothart always worked on MGM films, Alfred Newman worked at Twentieth Century Fox for twenty years, Cecil B. De Mille's films were almost all made at Paramount, director Henry King's films were mostly made for Twentieth-Century Fox, etc. And one could usually guess which studio made which film, largely because of the actors who appeared in it; MGM, for example, claimed it had contracted "more stars than there are in heaven." Each studio had its own style and characteristic touches which made it possible to know this - a trait that does not exist today. Yet each movie was a little different, and, unlike the craftsmen who made cars, many of the people who made movies were artists. For example, To Have and Have Not (1944) is famous not only for the first pairing of actors Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957) and Lauren Bacall (1924- ) but also for being written by two future winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature: Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), author of the novel on which the script was nominally based, and William Faulkner (1897-1962), who worked on the screen adaptation.
Movie-making was still a business, however, and motion picture companies made money by operating under the studio system. The major studios kept thousands of people on salary—actors, producers, directors, writers, stunt men, craftspersons, and technicians. And they owned hundreds of theaters in cities and towns across the nation, theaters that showed their films and that were always in need of fresh material. In 1930, MPDDA President Will Hays also founded the Hays (Production) Code, which followed censorship guidelines and went into effect after government threats of censorship expanded by 1930 [6] However the code was never enforced until 1934, after the new Catholic Church organization The Legion of Decency- appalled by Mae West's very successful sexual appearances in She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel [7]- threatened a boycott of motion pictures if it didn't go into effect [8], and those that didn't obtain a seal of approval from the Production Code Administration had to pay a $25,000.00 fine and could not profit in the theaters, as the MPDDA owned every theater in the country through the Big Five studios [9]. Throughout the 1930s, as well as most of the golden age, MGM dominated the film screen and had the top stars in Hollywood, and was also credited for creating the Hollywood star system altogether [10]; stars included "King of Hollywood" Clark Gable, Lionel Barrymore, Jean Harlow, Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, Jeanette MacDonald and husband Nelson Eddy, Spencer Tracy, Judy Garland, and Gene Kelly [11]. Another great achievement of US cinema during this era came through Walt Disney's animation. In 1937, Disney created the most successful film of its time, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs [12]. Also, in 1939, MGM would create what is still the most successful film, adjusted for box office inflation, Gone with the Wind [13]. Throughout the Golden Age of Hollywood, theaters were also controlled by the Big Five studios: MGM, Paramount, RKO, Warner Bros, and Twentieth Century Fox [14].
Many film historians have remarked upon the many great works of cinema that emerged from this period of highly regimented film-making. One reason this was possible is that, with so many movies being made, not every one had to be a big hit. A studio could gamble on a medium-budget feature with a good script and relatively unknown actors: Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles (1915-1985) and often regarded as the greatest film of all time, fits that description. In other cases, strong-willed directors like Howard Hawks (1896-1977), Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) and Frank Capra (1897-1991) battled the studios in order to achieve their artistic visions. The apogee of the studio system may have been the year 1939, which saw the release of such classics as The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Wuthering Heights, Only Angels Have Wings, Ninotchka, and Midnight. Among the other films from the Golden Age period that are now considered to be classics: Casablanca, It's a Wonderful Life, It Happened One Night, the original King Kong, Mutiny on the Bounty, City Lights, Red River and Top Hat.
Decline of the studio system
The studio system and the Golden Age of Hollywood succumbed to two forces in the late 1940s:
- a federal antitrust action that separated the production of films from their exhibition; and
- the advent of television.
In 1938 , Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released during a run of lackluster films from the major studios, and quickly became the highest-grossing film released to that point. Embarrassingly for the studios, it was an independently-produced animated film that did not feature any studio-employed stars.[5] This stoked already widespread frustration at the practice of block-booking, in which studios would only sell an entire year's schedule of films at a time to theaters and use the lock-in to cover for releases of mediocre quality. Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold—a noted "trust buster" of the Roosevelt administration—took this opportunity to initiate proceedings against the eight major Hollywood studios in July 1938 for violations of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.[6][7] The federal suit resulted in five of the eight studios (the "Big Five": Warner, MGM, Twentieth-Century Fox, RKO and Paramount) reaching a compromise with Arnold in October 1940 and signing a consent decree agreeing to, within three years:
- Eliminate the block-booking of short film subjects, in an arrangement known as "one shot", or "full force" block-booking.
- Eliminate the block-booking of any more than five features in their theaters.
- No longer engage in blind buying (or the buying of films by theater districts without seeing films beforehand) and instead have trade-showing, in which all 31 theater districts in US would see films every two weeks before showing movies in theaters.
- Set up an administration board in each theater district to enforce these requirements.[6]
The "Little Three" (Universal, United Artists and Columbia), who did not own any theatres, refused to participate in the consent decree.[8][6] A number of independent film producers were also unhappy with the compromise and formed a union known as the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers and sued Paramount for the monopoly they still had over the Detroit Theaters - as Paramount was also gaining dominance through actors like Bob Hope, Paulette Goddard, Veronica Lake, Betty Hutton, crooner Bing Crosby, Alan Ladd, and longtime actor for studio Gary Cooper too- by 1942. The Big Five studios didn't meet the requirements of the Consent of Decree during WWII, without major consequence, but after the war ended they joined Paramount as defendants in the Hollywood anti-trust case, as did the Little Three studios also [15]. The Supreme Court eventually ruled that the major studios ownership of theaters and film distribution was a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. As a result, the studios began to release actors and technical staff from their contracts with the studios. This changed the paradigm of film making by the major Hollywood studios, as each could have an entirely different cast and creative team. This resulted in the gradual loss of the characteristics which made MGM, Paramount, Universal, Columbia, RKO, and Twentieth-Century Fox films immediately identifiable. But certain movie people, such as Cecil B. DeMille, either remained contract artists till the end of their careers or used the same creative teams on their films, so that a DeMille film still looked like one whether it was made in 1932 or 1956. Also, the number of movies being produced annually dropped as the average budget soared, marking a major change in strategy for the industry. Studios now aimed to produce entertainment that could not be offered by television: spectacular, larger-than-life productions. Studios also began to sell portions of their theatrical film libraries to other companies to sell to television. By 1949, all major film studios had given up ownership of their theaters.
Television was also instrumental in the decline of Hollywood's Golden Age as it broke the movie industry's hegemony in American entertainment. Despite this, the film industry was also able to gain some leverage for future films as longtime government censorship faded in the 1950s. After the Paramount anti-trust case ended, Hollywood movie studios no longer owned theaters, and thus made it so foreign films could be released in American theaters without censorship. This was complemented with the 1952 Miracle Decision in the Joseph Burstyn Inc. v Wilson case, in which the Supreme Court of the United States reversed its earlier position, from 1915's Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio case, and stated that motion pictures were a form of art and were entitled to the protection of the First amendment; US laws could no longer censor films. By 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) had replaced the Hays Code-which was now greatly violated after the government threat of censorship that justified the origin of the code had ended- with the film rating system.
The 'New Hollywood' and Post-classical cinema
'Post-classical cinema' is a term used to describe the changing methods of storytelling in the New Hollywood. It has been argued that new approaches to drama and characterization played upon audience expectations acquired in the classical period: chronology may be scrambled, storylines may feature "twist endings", and lines between the antagonist and protagonist may be blurred. The roots of post-classical storytelling may be seen in film noir, in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and in Hitchcock's storyline-shattering Psycho.
'New Hollywood' is a term used to describe the emergence of a new generation of film school-trained directors who had absorbed the techniques developed in Europe in the 1960s; The 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde marked the beginning of American cinema rebounding as well, as a new generation of films would afterwards gain success at the box offices as well[16]. Filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Brian de Palma, Martin Scorsese, William Friedkin and Steven Spielberg came to produce fare that paid homage to the history of film, and developed upon existing genres and techniques. In the early 1970s, their films were often both critically acclaimed and commercially successful. While the early New Hollywood films like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider had been relatively low-budget affairs with amoral heroes and increased sexuality and violence, the enormous success enjoyed by Coppola, Spielberg and Lucas with The Godfather, Jaws, and Star Wars, respectively helped to give rise to the modern "blockbuster", and induced studios to focus ever more heavily on trying to produce enormous hits.
The increasing indulgence of these young directors didn’t help. Often, they’d go overschedule, and overbudget, thus bankrupting themselves or the studio. The two most famous examples of this are Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and particularly Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate.
Blockbusters
The drive to produce a spectacle on the movie screen has largely shaped American cinema ever since. Spectacular epics which took advantage of new widescreen processes had been increasingly popular from the 1950s onwards. Since then, American films have become increasingly divided into two categories: blockbusters and independent films. Studios have focused on relying on a handful of extremely expensive releases every year in order to remain profitable. Such blockbusters emphasize spectacle, star power, and high production value, all of which entail an enormous budget. Blockbusters typically rely upon star power and massive advertising to attract a huge audience. A successful blockbuster will attract an audience large enough to offset production costs and reap considerable profits. Such productions carry a substantial risk of failure, and most studios release blockbusters that both over- and underperform in a year.
Independent film
Studios supplement these movies with independent productions, made with small budgets and often independently of the studio corporation. Movies made in this manner typically emphasize high professional quality in terms of acting, directing, screenwriting, and other elements associated with production, and also upon creativity and innovation. These movies usually rely upon critical praise or niche marketing to garner an audience. Because of an independent film's low budgets, a successful independent film can have a high profit-to-cost ratio, while a failure will incur minimal losses, allowing for studios to sponsor dozens of such productions in addition to their high-stakes releases.
American independent cinema was revitalized in the late 1980s and early 1990s when another new generation of moviemakers, including Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Kevin Smith, and Quentin Tarantino made movies like, respectively, Do the Right Thing, Sex, lies, and videotape, Clerks, and Reservoir Dogs. In terms of directing, screenwriting, editing, and other elements, these movies were innovative and often irreverent, playing with and contradicting the conventions of Hollywood movies. Furthermore, their considerable financial successes and crossover into popular culture reestablished the commercial viability of independent film. Since then, the independent film industry has become more clearly defined and more influential in American cinema. Many of the major studios have capitalised on this by developing subsidiaries to produce similar films; for example Fox Searchlight Pictures.
To a lesser degree in the 2000s, film types that were previously considered to have only a minor presence in the mainstream movie market began to arise as more potent American box office draws. These include foreign-language films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero and documentary films such as Super Size Me, March of the Penguins, and Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11.
Rise of the home video market
The 1980s and 1990s saw another significant development. The full acceptance of home video by studios opened a vast new business to exploit. Films such as The Secret of NIMH and The Shawshank Redemption, which performed poorly in their theatrical run, were now able to find success in the video market. It also saw the first generation of film makers with access to video tapes emerge. Directors such as Quentin Tarantino and P.T. Anderson had been able to view thousands of films and produced films with vast numbers of references and connections to previous works. This, along with the explosion of independent film and ever-decreasing costs for filmmaking, changed the landscape of American movie-making once again, and led a renaissance of filmmaking among Hollywood's lower and middle-classes—those without access to studio financial resources.
With the rise of the DVD in the 21st century, DVDs have quickly become even more profitable to studios and have led to an explosion of packaging extra scenes, extended versions, and commentary tracks with the films.
Notable figures in U.S. film
Significant American-born film directors include:
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Significant American-born actors and actresses include:
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