Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema
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332 Chapter 16
largely unknown stars by a British director who never makes the same
movie twice? Go figure. . . . That would be the hard-to-resist Slumdog
Millionaire with director Danny Boyle adding independent film touches to
a story of star-crossed romance that the original Warner brothers would
have embraced, shamelessly pulling out stops that you wouldn’t think
anyone would have the nerve to attempt anymore. . . . A story where, in
true Frank Capra fashion, chance, luck, suffering, and street smarts all play
major roles.
A review in Gentlemen’s Quarterly called it “the most action-filled. uplifting,
hope-inducing (and only slightly cheesy) movie of the year.” As Variety said:
“Driven by fantastic energy and a torrent of vivid images of India old and new,
Slumdog Millionaire is a blast.” At the end of the day, stories about friendship and
family had disproportionately dominated Best Picture nominees and winners.
SUMMARY
Several months after Slumdog Millionaire’s Best Picture triumph on Oscar
night, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that
beginning with the Academy Awards for 2009, instead of five nominees for
Best Picture, in the future there would be ten. Thus, the Best Picture Oscar
presented in February 2010 would have twice as many competitors as in the
past. Most speculation predicted that more titles in the areas of sci-fi, action,
and animation would be contenders for the best picture of the year. In that
regard, the Academy appeared to be giving a nod to the audience-driven
preferences of the previous thirty years, which had been becoming increas-
ingly evident since the mid-1970s. These categories, of course, happen to be
the ones thought to appeal to a younger demographic (primarily twelve- to
twenty-four-year-olds), including comedies, that have been the core of box
office earnings at theaters. Perhaps, as the adolescents and young adults in this
age group—primarily males—have driven theater box office earnings for a
couple of decades, they might in the future come to drive the Academy’s Best
Picture selections.
The Best Picture selections of the first decade of the twenty-first century
reflected a range of movies not unlike the ones chosen for Best Picture Oscars
by the Academy for the preceding seventy-three years. Slumdog Millionaire, a
melodrama of personal struggle and love triumphant—enhanced by accom-
plished production values (if not necessarily the most expensive and techni-
cally most clever ones provided by CGI)—was an energetic revisiting of story
lines and themes long familiar to Hollywood. Its imaginative energy was not
Hollywood Enters the Twenty-First Century 333
directed toward complex computer-generated imagery. At the same time, the
movie presented a glimpse into a cultural diversity with which North Ameri-
can audiences had some acquaintance, but which could also be considered
new for Hollywood.
The titles chosen by the Academy as Best Picture from 2001 through
2008—A Beautiful Mind, Chicago, Lord of The Rings: Return of the King, Mil-
lion Dollar Baby, Crash, The Departed, No Country for Old Men, and Slumdog
Millionaire—cross a range of motion pictures that reflect Hollywood’s present
bears striking resemblance to its past. These selections reflect a range of genres
and types, new techniques and time-worn ones, and are motion pictures
that display the virtuosity of writers, directors, performers, cinematographers,
special-effects creators, and editors. They are movies that display a panoply of
sentiment, spectacle, and sensation. For all the changes in moviemaking and
movie-viewing that the twenty-first century holds, they still indicate that some
things about movies change slowly indeed.
335
There’s a saying in French that translates into English as “The more things
change, the more they stay the same.” That slogan provides one way of look-
ing at history. For the history of Hollywood, it provides a good approach
to summarizing its story for the twentieth century. In the early twenty-first
century, much still remains of Hollywood’s past. With the exception of RKO,
which folded in the late 1950s, all the other major Hollywood companies
remain in business, and all of them still are connected to the motion picture
industry in some way. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first cen-
tury, Hollywood remains the dominant force in global cinema, a status it has
held since the era of World War I, having been challenged seriously in that
role only briefly in the 1920s and then again in the early to mid-1960s.
By contrast, it is reasonable to argue exactly the opposite. Hollywood has
changed enormously since its beginnings. The studios that remain are mere
shells of what they once were. All of them are now subsidiaries of giant media
corporations in which moviemaking is but a single, relatively small, portion of
their business. These large media corporations are just as likely to be owned
by financial interests from outside the United States as from within. We might
plausibly argue that in the early twenty-first century, movie production is so
far removed from Hollywood’s studios of the Classic Era as to have little or
no kinship with it.
Surely, the composition of audiences for movies has changed, and where
movies are seen varies greatly from the movie theaters of the 1920s—when
live musical accompaniment was the rule—to today when someone may
watch a movie on a laptop computer. In the mid-twentieth century, the abid-
ing question for people seriously interested in film was “What is cinema?”
In the early twenty-first century, that question may have been replaced by
Conclusion
336 Conclusion
“Where is cinema?” What for most of the twentieth century could be de-
scribed sociologically as the public consumption of movies, increasingly has
become a private matter. But just what may this mean?
Going out to a movie theater was a public act, but the social decorum
of movie-watching in a theater demanded there be no conversation. Watch-
ing a movie in a private space at home—with someone else or others—may
facilitate more conversation and human interaction. The observation that
Hollywood movies enjoyed their greatest popularity (in terms of the size of
moviegoing audiences) and cultural prominence in the United States during
World War II (1941–1945) is plausible. That observation, however, explains
little in itself. The safest assertion is that Hollywood, at a period of unusual
national unity and before the advent of television as a competitor, enjoyed
circumstances very favorable to it. The art of movies exists always within some
system of production, distribution, and exhibition, and the circumstances fa-
vorable to exhibition during World War II were ideal.
What about the actual art and craft of making movies? Haven’t the new
digital technologies that have developed since the early 1990s completely
taken over motion picture production? Haven’t these new technologies com-
pletely changed what movies are? People who call themselves filmmakers may
have never seen or touched an actual piece of celluloid film.
The answer to these questions, again, is both yes and no. Motion picture
postproduction—namely, editing and sound—has become work done by
craftsmen and craftswomen with their hands on a mouse at a computer screen.
Editors, who, with their assistants, used to spend time with reels of film and
rewinds, now spend time digitizing footage and rendering output. Sound edi-
tors need to be expert with a program called Pro Tools. The process of capture,
meaning the camerawork of actual filming, in some cases may mean working
with digital cameras and tape, or solid-state tapeless formats of capture, rather
than with a film camera and celluloid. Decisions about whether to shoot film,
digital, hi-def, or tapeless depend on the goal for each project and its budget.
Technology may influence certain artistic choices, but technology neither de-
fines nor determines the art of film, or any of its constituent crafts. For editing,
sound, and cinematography, the primary creative tools for filmmakers are as
they’ve always been—the eye and the ear.
In the early twenty-first century, it is relatively safe to say that nearly all
animation, special effects, and the like are computer generated, and that even
relatively simple and straightforward feature films regularly employ CGI for
some of their scenes. The computer permits the manipulation of material to
create illusions that are particularly convincing. Still, production designers
interpret the script and bring the physical elements of a production into ac-
cord with that interpretation, and composers provide music for movies that
Conclusion 337
is almost always created electronically rather than as a written score. Keeping
up with changing production technologies is necessary, but the artistry of film
remains bound to basics: textual, visual, and auditory design.
Throughout the history of the cinema, film has been about illusion. And
even the creation of illusion for the viewer is less about tools and technology
than it is about creative imagination. Long before computers, movies were
achieving effects—both special and conventional—that are entirely convinc-
ing and believable. In a basic sense, the fundamental illusion that is most
important on the screen is that of performance. The viewer has to be able to
believe the character and to care about the character’s role in the story that is
being told on-screen. Screen talent has been sought, nurtured, and well paid
throughout Hollywood’s history. At the end of the day, most movies are about
who is on the screen; who is on the screen is most important because movies
depend on storytelling, and the most engaging stories are about people and
the relationships between them. Storytelling in movies nearly always combines
elements that simultaneously are literary and theatrical.
After any movie is made, there are many ways of interpreting it. Its
meaning and value relies heavily on who sees it—when and where. The
approaches to interpretation have been formalized in criticism, and these
approaches broadly reflect and respond to changes in the prevailing culture.
Criticism, moreover, adapts to its own culture—whether it is in popular circles
or among academics. Movies are said to be about all kinds of things, but be-
cause the motion picture is a specific art, all movies are in some way or another
about all other movies all the time—essentially, cinema may be regarded as
a closed system. We understand it as a system that expands into spheres of
culture, economics, ideologies, and social practice, but cinema may be best
understood and appreciated as an artistic system unto itself.
Former shopkeepers, peddlers, and the owners and promoters of various
other entertainments and amusements founded Hollywood. They wanted to
do business by pleasing audiences, and they forged a cinema that for a century
has made movies strongly driven by perceptions of audience taste and by the
demographics of who is thought to constitute the audience. This has remained
a constant of Hollywood.
Alongside this constant of trying to please audiences and anticipate shifts
in taste, Hollywood learned how to accommodate and channel the creative
talents and ambitions of filmmakers as well. Hollywood is a surprisingly resil-
ient cultural system that arguably has financially rewarded the artists who work
in it better than artists have ever been remunerated anywhere else at any time.
And it has been surprisingly open in its embrace of talent: from the foreign
immigrants who started the early studios, to talent like director F. W. Murnau
who was hired from Germany by Fox in the late 1920s to direct Sunrise, to the
338 Conclusion
waves of talent who have come to Hollywood from Great Britain, Australia,
Canada, and New Zealand, up through the Academy’s selection of Slumdog
Millionaire as 2008’as Best Picture.
Exploring the movies of Hollywood through the approximately 180 films
that have been selected as Best Pictures by the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences or were voted onto either of the two lists of the greatest
and most significant American movies assembled by the American Film Insti-
tute provides us broad insights into the history of motion pictures and their
development. Accomplishment in movies is achieved through the efficacious
practice of the various crafts. But the total art of movies exists in a financial
and business system of production, distribution, and exhibition.
What may be most unusual about creativity in the movies is its collabora-
tive nature. Collaboration often depends on positive interpersonal relationships
among the collaborators, but it doesn’t necessarily have to. In the past century,
Hollywood has created an extraordinary body of work that appeals to the aes-
thetic satisfactions of sentiment, spectacle, and sensation. Hollywood craft al-
ways is accomplished and polished, but, in the long run, the crafts are practiced
primarily in the service of storytelling. Truly significant movies are rarely about
“cool shots,” or other formal elements, that draw attention to themselves.
What are the most reliably effective movie stories about? The answer is
that stories in movies may be about almost anything. The settings for them
may be familiar or exotic. They may come from episodes or events that have
actually happened, or they may be entirely imagined and implausible in real
life. The bottom line is that the viewer needs to care about the characters no
matter what situations they find themselves in. As with all generalizations, there
may be exceptions. The Hollywood movies of the twentieth and early twenty-
first centuries that have gained the most positive attention from other industry
professionals tend to boil down to being about human relationships that really
matter. To an exceptional degree, they are about friendship, either discovered
or lost; family, discovered or lost; love, discovered or lost; or self-identity and
integrity, discovered or lost. In being about these basics, they transcend the
other things that they may appear to be about, such as the issues, causes, ideolo-
gies, and moral lessons that may be discerned in them thematically.
339
A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business
of Cinema is based primarily on documents and research materials contained in the
production files of specific films by their titles found in the Margaret Herrick Library
at the Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study of the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, California. These files are open to any user upon
presentation of the required identification with photograph. In this volume, references
to published books are few. Nonetheless, the author’s overall interpretation of Hol-
lywood and its history has been informed by the books listed here. These titles are
recommended for further reading on specific eras in the history of American movies.
Balio, Tino. Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915. New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1990.
Caldwell, John. Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film/Tele-
vision. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Cook, David A. American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970–1979.
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2000.
Crafton, Donald. The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926–1931. New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997.
Koszarski, Richard. An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Film,
1925–1928. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990.
Lev, Peter. The Euro-American Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.
———. Transforming the Screen, 1950–1959. New York: Thomson/Gale, 2003.
Lewis, Jon, ed. The New American Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.
Lewis, Jon, and Eric Loren Smoodin, eds. Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in Ameri-
can Film History and Method. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
McDonald, Paul, and Janet Wasko, eds. The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry.
London: Blackwell, 2008.
Selected Bibliography
340 Selected Bibliography
Monaco, Paul. The Sixties, 1960–1969. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001.
Musser, Charles. The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990.
Prince, Stephen. A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood under the Electronic Rainbow. New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2000.
Schatz, Thomas. Boom and Bust: The American Cinema in the 1940s. New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1997.
———. The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. New York:
Henry Holt, 1996.
Wyatt, Justin. High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood. Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1994.
341
2001: A Space Odyssey, x, xi, xiii, 188,
189
Abyss, The, 300
Adam’s Rib, 126
African Queen, The, x, xiv, 125
Alien, 309
Aliens, 300
All About Eve, ix, x, xiii, 121, 122
All Quiet on the Western Front, xi, 26, 27,
28, 264
All the King’s Men, ix, 120, 121
All the President’s Men, xiv, 226, 230,
238
Always, 280
Amadeus, x, xi, 261, 262, 293
American Beauty, x, 305, 306, 326
American Graffiti, xi, xiv, 207, 213, 235,
250
American in Paris, An, ix, xi, 124, 125,
138, 155
Amistad, 309
Angels in America, 320
Animal House, 261
animated feature, 52, 53, 54, 65, 80, 292
Annie Christie, 35
Annie Hall, x, xi, xiii, 237, 238, 239
Apartment, The, ix, xii, xiv, 161, 162,
164
Apocalypse Now, xi, xiii, 241, 242, 243,
244, 263, 264, 265
Apocalypse Now Redux, 243, 244
Apollo 13, 291, 314
Around the World in Eighty Days, ix, 149,
154
auteur, xv, 76, 77, 80, 238, 239, 244
auteurism, 244
auteurist, 237
avant-garde, 221
Aviator, The, 326
Babe, 292
Babes in Arms, 124
Back to the Future, 284
Bananas, 225
Bande à Part, 288
Barton Fink, 297
Batman and Robin, 313
Beautiful Mind, A, x, 313, 315, 316, 333
Bells of Saint Mary’s, The, 71
Ben-Hur, ix, xi, xiv, 35, 155, 156, 157,
161, 163, 309
Index
The index includes films by title and major concepts discussed in the book. It does not cite
individual names of persons.