Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema

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One year splits the history of Hollywood in two. There are movies made

through 1927, and those made since. That divide is marked by the absence of

acceptable synchronous sound production in motion pictures until nearly the

end of 1927, and the pervasive domination of it from 1928 onward.

From their first projection in 1895, movies existed for more than thirty

years as silent cinema. That is, the movies were produced without synchro-

nous sound—not that audiences watched them in silence: Live musical ac-

companiment, ranging from a single piano player to a full orchestra, was the

norm for movie exhibition throughout the “silent” era of cinema. During the

decade and a half before 1927, Hollywood was established in its basic busi-

ness structures, and the word Hollywood itself became synonymous with the

American cinema.

D. W. (David Wark) Griffith, a former actor who had left the stage to

make movies in northern New Jersey—for a company owned by inventor

Thomas Edison—arrived in Los Angeles early in 1914. Within a year, he had

completed and released the first movie perceived to mark a genuine turning

point in the American cinema, The Birth of a Nation. Full of technical inno-

vations and creating a truly epic feeling, this three-hour-long feature may be

considered the beginning of Hollywood movies as we know them. Unfortu-

nately, its content remains controversial and disturbing.

THE FOUNDING OF HOLLYWOOD

Hollywood, incorporated as a village in the Los Angeles basin in 1903, became

a place for making movies when Col. William Selig relocated his production

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Establishing Hollywood

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company, Polyscope, there from Chicago in 1909. Early motion picture pro-

duction in the United States had been concentrated in New York City and its

environs. Even the early “westerns” were filmed in northern New Jersey. There

was some activity around Chicago and other places, as well, but in Southern

California, Selig found a locale that afforded cheap land; a mild year-round

climate especially favorable to exterior filming; a variety of settings, from sandy

ocean beaches to nearby mountains; and a region filled with a variety of vegeta-

tion and flora. Soon, many other barely established and would-be filmmakers

were following his trail to the Los Angeles area.

It is also said speculatively that Southern California appealed to early

moviemakers because it was so distant from Edison’s Motion Picture Patents

Company on the East Coast. The inventor Edison held one of the earliest pat-

ents for a motion picture apparatus that he called the “kinetoscope.” In 1908,

on the basis of this and other patents that he held, Edison had joined with the

makers of motion picture equipment and film stock manufacturers to estab-

lish a trust in order to exert a monopoly over motion pictures in the United

States. Ever the creative inventor and wily entrepreneur, Edison believed that

he could dominate motion pictures in the United States by controlling the

technology, film stock, and equipment for making and showing movies.

Edison was incorrect. By the time a federal court ruled in 1915 that his

Motion Picture Patents Company was in violation of federal antitrust acts, the

earliest Hollywood companies had already begun taking a different path to-

ward their global domination of cinema that would be challenged only rarely

throughout the entire twentieth century.

While fleeing the legal grasp of Edison’s trust was a possible motive for

filmmakers relocating to Los Angeles, a more general factor was that Southern

California was a long way from the centers of the East Coast establishment’s

perceived political, economic, social, and cultural domination of American

society.

From numerous early movie companies, there emerged several major

ones. In 1913, movie producer, screenwriter, and director Cecil B. DeMille

joined vaudeville musician Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s brother-in-law, Samuel

Goldfish (who later changed his name to Samuel Goldwyn), to found a com-

pany that would become Paramount Pictures. Paramount was the earliest of

the major Hollywood companies that survived into the twenty-first century,

producing and distributing movies, and, at times, exhibiting them as well.

In its origins, its business practices, and the system it constructed for

making and distributing movies, Paramount was typical of the six other major

Hollywood studios with similar origins and long histories of sustained suc-

cess: Warner Bros., Fox, Universal, Columbia, United Artists, and Metro-

Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Each of these studios was different, and each one

Establishing Hollywood 5

contributed to the formation of a system that made the feature-length motion

picture released for theatrical distribution the continuing core of the American

cinema throughout the twentieth century. These major Hollywood studios all

had their business offices in New York City, even though their factories and

their personnel for actually making movies were in Los Angeles.

Unlike the scientific genius and inventor Edison, the founders of Hol-

lywood predominantly came from backgrounds as showmen and salesmen.

From its inception, Hollywood was geared by these men to the idea of finding

out what audiences wanted and giving it to them. Doing so proved to be a

continuing challenge that required the constant refining of perceptions of what

audiences wanted to see, continually rethinking what would keep patrons

coming back to movie theaters. Instead of competing directly with Edison’s

idea of monopolizing cinema by controlling the patents, technologies, film

stocks, and the actual equipment for making and showing movies, the major

Hollywood studios crafted a system based on movies whose production, dis-

tribution, and exhibition could be relatively standardized and would reliably

attract audiences. The Hollywood solution to the challenge of building a

sustainable cinema was to control costs, to turn out movies with a consistently

high level of technical polish, and to tell screen stories that reliably appealed

to mass audiences.

The motion picture business is extremely risky. It is difficult to overesti-

mate the determination and will of those ambitious, creative, and sometimes

obsessive personalities in the major Hollywood companies who took on those

risks. The story of the American cinema, however, is also as much about cau-

tion and control as it is about risk-taking and ambitions. The risk takers make

for the more colorful portraits and anecdotes. The people who sought to

make Hollywood function by restraining the impulses toward creative excess,

and by seeking to control moviemaking as a sustainable business, were just as

important. Hollywood needed both, and the success of the American feature

film into the twenty-first century relies on that combination.

The original cobbling together of the company that came to be called

Paramount represented one side of the fundamental equation of Hollywood.

It reflected the business model within which the craft of the art form was to

be nurtured.

The debut of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in 1915 marks the

origin of Hollywood from the other side. That movie’s appearance was a turn-

ing point in American cinema history. It confronted viewers with an array of

the basics: an epic structure using all the known techniques of filming, melo-

dramatic screen performances, and an engaging story that mixed the personal

tales of family and romantic love with the broad sweeps of history, the tragedy

of war, and its aftermath. Better than any film of its time, The Birth of a Nation

6 Chapter 1

brought to the screen two of the major elements that define Hollywood enter-

tainment throughout its subsequent history: sentiment and spectacle.

THE BIRTH OF A NATION

Based on a novel entitled The Clansman by the Reverend Thomas Dixon Jr.,

The Birth of a Nation is three hours of pathbreaking cinematic ingenuity and

creativity that rarely strays from its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan and the

related themes that inspired Dixon’s book. Dixon’s published novel bore the

subtitle: “An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan,” and he asserted that

one reason he supported its adaptation to the screen was “to help prevent the

mixing of White and Negro blood by intermarriage.” The movie depicts op-

position to race-mixing and portrays the recently freed slaves of the South in

negative and racist caricatures.

As the movie’s director, D. W. Griffith utilized a full range of long,

medium, and close shots to tell his story visually, as based on the written sce-

nario (often called a “photoplay” in the early silent era) by Frank Wood. The

movie’s cinematographer, W. G. “Billy” Bitzer, with whom Griffith had been

working regularly on shorter films since 1908, supplied much of the “look”

to The Birth of a Nation. In fact, with regard to the focal length of the shots

(long, medium, or close), as well as the visual composition of shots within the

frame, it is nearly impossible for us to distinguish which creative choices were

director Griffith’s and which came from the movie’s director of photography,

Bitzer. Bitzer, like so many craftspeople in the American cinema, especially

in its early decades, loved to tinker with equipment and was the inventor of

various tools to assist in camera operations and gadgets used to create special

shots. Many such shots are found in The Birth of a Nation.

In hindsight, we can recognize how new and influential The Birth of a

Nation’s buildup of visual storytelling devices through close-ups, fades, iris

shots, backlighting, and dolly shots really is. The elements of what is so often

called the “language” of cinema consisted of the fundamental variables of any

moviemaking. A shot may be long, medium, or close, depending on the focal

length of the camera lens from the subject and how the subject is framed. The

camera’s angle to the subject may be high (from above) or low (from below).

The camera may be stationary or in motion (such as being mounted on a dolly

to move in and out on a subject, or moving laterally with action in the movie

as in a “tracking shot”). Such choices are basic to the cinema’s approach to

visual storytelling. The entire range of shots, camera angles, stationary setups,

and moving camera action were all to be found in The Birth of a Nation.

Establishing Hollywood 7

Equally as important, the process of editing in motion pictures permits

the effective manipulation of time and space, and the manipulation embod-

ies much of the specific artistic power of the medium. The editor on The

Birth of a Nation was James Smith, and the film is frequently cited as an early

example of the analytical approach to editing. These shots, moreover, come

together in the movie to form a clear example of what is called analytical

editing, which consists of alternating perspectives according to the “shot/

countershot” technique. Analytical editing allows the editor of a movie to

stage a scene within a particular space by cutting from one camera angle to

another in order to indicate the visual points of view of different characters

in the same scene. Stage directors stage scenes by “blocking” them; movie

directors use blocking and camera setups to stage scenes; and movie editors

stage scenes by arranging shots.

Nationwide, contemporary critics in 1915 hailed The Birth of a Nation as

superior to any movie made before it. Right after its first screenings, the movie

critic for Motion Picture World, W. Stephen Bush, wrote that “nothing more

impressive has ever been seen on the screen.” Writing in the movie industry

trade magazine Variety, Mark Vance cited the movie as “launching a great

epoch in picture making . . . great for the pictures and great for the name and

fame of David Wark Griffith.” Subsequent generations of film historians and

critics have concurred that there is little argument about the significance of

The Birth of a Nation as a breakthrough in filmmaking. In terms of both spec-

tacle and sentiment, the work of Griffith, Bitzer, and Smith had combined to

craft a work that unleashed the promises of the medium.

The success of The Birth of a Nation as a seminal artistic event, and as the

beginning of the mainstream American feature film, is marred by controversy,

however. Debate over the movie’s contents began even before it was released

publicly. As its praises were being sung for its newness of scope and style and

its pathbreaking artistic triumph, critics weighed in on the offensiveness of the

movie’s subject matter. The review in the large-circulation New York Globe

read: “To present the members of a race as women chasers and foul fiends is

a cruel distortion of history. To make a few dollars men are willing to pander

to depraved tastes and to foment race antipathy.” Just as harshly, critic Francis

Hackett wrote in the New Republic:

My objection to this drama is based partly on the tendency of the pic-

tures but mainly on the animus of the printed lines [in the movie’s inter

titles]. . . . Reinforced by quotations from Woodrow Wilson and repre-

sentative assurances of impartiality and good will, [they serve] to arouse in

the audience a strong sense of the evil possibilities of the Negro and the

extreme propriety and sanctity of the Ku Klux Klan.

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Beginning right after the announcement in 1914 that the book would be

developed as a movie, Griffith’s production of The Birth of a Nation became

the target of protests, sponsored primarily by the newly formed National As-

sociation for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban

League. These protests intensified after the movie was released.

However active the protestors were, though, and no matter how passion-

ately held their objections to the movie were, many of the ideas and biases in

Griffith’s film were nonetheless widely held by the general population of the

United States in 1915. The quotes from Wilson’s writings were highly selec-

tive, cited for emotional effect, and played up in the movie’s printed titles, but

the words still came from a serious historical book written by the respected

former Princeton professor and university president, who was now the presi-

dent of the United States. Many of the racist biases of the movie’s depictions

apparently meshed with racist stereotypes held by much of the American

populace at the time.

Such views appeared to be more common among whites in the former

states of the Confederacy, where, for example, Ward Green wrote in the At-

lanta Journal in his review of the movie:

There has been nothing to equal it—nothing. Not as a motion picture,

nor as a play, nor a book . . . Race prejudice? Injustice? Suppression? You

would not think of those things had you seen The Birth of a Nation. For no

one but a man with a spirit too picayunish and warped for words would

pick such flaws in a spectacle so great and wholehearted as this.

These attitudes, moreover, spread widely beyond the South. In 1915,

there was widespread sympathy in many quarters for the suffering of the

Southern states after the Civil War. Jim Crow laws and segregationist statutes

in Southern and border states were largely taken for granted and had been

upheld as constitutional under a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1896. In

the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan would grow rapidly in membership—most

notably in northern states such as Ohio and Indiana.

The Birth of a Nation did well at movie theater box offices, but while its

profits likely mean that most viewers did not find it offensive, those profits

do not necessarily mean that everyone who saw the movie adhered to rac-

ist stereotypes of Negroes. For his part, Griffith claimed publicly that he was

surprised at the negative criticism of his movie, and in the following year he

made a movie entitled Intolerance that many regarded as his attempt to atone

for feelings outraged by The Birth of a Nation.

Establishing Hollywood 9

INTOLERANCE

Biographically, it is often held that D. W. Griffith felt that he had to outdo

himself with his next production in order to answer the charges of bigotry

leveled at him for The Birth of a Nation. The veracity of this claim, how-

ever, is difficult to establish. Since the evidence indicates that Griffith had

never regarded The Birth of a Nation as anything but a faithful depiction of

the Civil War and its aftermath, the idea that he considered Intolerance to

be his atonement is problematic. Furthermore, we know that Griffith took

as his inspiration for Intolerance a story of industrial and social exploitation

that he had begun writing in 1914—before he started making The Birth of

a Nation.

The premier of the $2 million production of Intolerance was on September

5, 1916, at the Liberty Theater, one of the famed early movie palaces in New

York City. The film’s structure intercuts four different stories of intolerance

from four different eras, linked together by the image of a mother (Lilian

Gish) rocking a cradle. Judea, Babylon, Paris, and an American city in the west

(contemporary to the film’s release) are featured. It was originally released in

prints with color tinting that played up the scenery and stage design elements

reminiscent of the nineteenth-century theater tradition out of which Griffith

had come. In addition to Gish, the film starred Mae Marsh as the “Little Dear

One.” Billy Bitzer was again the cinematographer; James Andrew Smith ed-

ited and Griffith’s own company produced the movie.

Intolerance, which was released with the subtitle “Love’s Struggles

throughout the Ages,” failed commercially, and this failure alone more than

devoured entirely the substantial profits Griffith had made with The Birth of a

Nation. Some observers attribute the failure of Intolerance at the box office to

what they thought was its pacifist message on the eve of U.S. entry into World

War I. Yet, the more probable explanation for the unpopularity of Intolerance

with audiences had more to do with the film’s style.

Griffith was seeking to develop a new blueprint for film narrative with

Intolerance by rejecting unity and order (and arguably creating the first “mod-

ernist” film). In fact, the segment entitled “The Mother and the Law,” which

was the contemporary story, and the section called “The Fall of Babylon”

were both considered suitable for separate exhibition as stand-alone movies.

Intolerance failed financially most likely because of its confusing story structure.

It tried to tell four different stories from four different places and four different

historical periods, going back and forth between them, which many viewers

found confusing.

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After its 1916 premiere, Griffith repeatedly cut and recut the movie,

seeking each time to better address the challenge of interweaving the four

different stories in order “to trace a universal theme through various periods

of the [human] race’s history.” That ambition was, perhaps, best summed up

by critic Pauline Kael—writing several decades later—who called Intolerance

“perhaps the greatest movie ever made and the greatest folly in movie his-

tory.” She continued, “In spite of its weaknesses, and its lack of success at the

box office, Intolerance still managed to explore ideas about associative editing

that would influence moviemaking from Soviet montage classics of the 1920s

to American experimental film of the 1960s.” In 1989, a reconstructed print

of Intolerance was shown in conjunction with the New York Film Festival; as

renowned film historian Russell Merritt noted:

Part morality play and part three-ring circus, the movie was part of a new

eclectic aesthetic that had all but buried the ideal of organic synthesis.

Along with Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha and Charles Ives’s Third Symphony it

remains one of the period’s great hybrids.

SOLIDIFYING THE HOLLYWOOD SYSTEM

Both The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance were made in Southern California,

but their maker, D. W. Griffith, had been an independent. His personal vi-

sion infused his movie entirely, and his ambitious work was not produced

under the aegis of a major Hollywood studio. As a system, studio Hollywood

emerged between 1915 and 1920 in a manner that sought to harness the

ambitions and excesses of such personal filmmaking. As the Hollywood stu-

dio system took on its fundamental characteristics and grew during the early

1920s, the commitment of its production choices turned toward subjects less

controversial than the material of The Birth of a Nation and less challenging to

narrative convention than Intolerance.

A perception of what subjects to avoid, or at least how to deal with

controversial subjects for the tastes of mass audiences, developed early in Hol-

lywood history. By 1920, the Hollywood studios understood well that their

audience was broad and diverse. Therefore, it was commercially farsighted to

avoid movies that would appear to be so slanted in their view of historical,

political, or social issues as to risk offending significant portions of the poten-

tial audience. This led to a relatively clear pattern for the studios to follow in

taming possibly controversial subjects and themes to broad tastes: the principle

of portraying characters and situations with some degree of ambiguity that

invited audience members to reach different inferences and interpretations.

Establishing Hollywood 11

The strong biases of the screen adaptation of Dixon’s novel for The Birth

of a Nation and trying to tell the complex four-part story of Intolerance were

instances of a director having free rein over his material because he was also

the movie’s producer. It was a situation that could not be permitted to prevail

as the Hollywood system was being put together.

Hollywood as a system could succeed only to the extent that the interests

of studios and their staff producers prevailed over the willfulness and self-

indulgence of directors. In spite of his enormous talents, his understanding of

cinema as emotional communication, and his leadership in establishing the

modern feature film in the United States as based on sentiment and spectacle,

after The Birth of a Nation, Griffith could never sustain a truly successful Hol-

lywood career. Both were landmark movies, but they were not typical ones

for Hollywood.

Nonetheless, early Hollywood still provided enough latitude for the

work of another early genius of the screen who was also both a producer and

director, as well as being a star performer in his own movies. Produced, writ-

ten, and directed by Charlie Chaplin, The Gold Rush, a silent film from 1925,

has proven to be arguably the most enduring of his life’s work. Self-financed,

it was released and distributed by United Artists, the Hollywood company that

Chaplin had cofounded with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D. W.

Griffith in 1919. From its inception, United Artists specialized in distribut-

ing movies, rather being responsible for their entire funding and production.

Hence, it became an outlet for movies that were produced by independents,

and while United Artists was considered one of the major Hollywood studios,

its business practices and functions remained quite different from the other

major studios.

The Gold Rush is based on Chaplin’s signature character of the “Little

Tramp.” Its story is about the Tramp’s two central relationships—a friendship

with the prospector Big Jim (Mack Swain) and an attempted romance with

a dance hall girl, Georgia (Georgia Hale)—set in Alaska during the 1890s.

Through the years, critics have come to especially appreciate Chaplin’s weav-

ing together of comic bits and melodrama in The Gold Rush for two major

reasons.

First, the story of the movie builds on what is called a social metaphor

based on the premise of becoming rich and then finding love. The Little

Tramp pursues the affections of the dance hall girl through much of the

movie, resulting in only rejection and disappointment. He then meets her

again on a freighter traveling back from Alaska after he has shared Big Jim’s

great gold strike and become a millionaire, and their love blossoms.

The second element that distinguishes The Gold Rush is the visual in-

ventiveness of so many of the scenes. These include the scene in which the