How do you account for the decline of the Hollywood studio system between the late 1940s and early 1960s?

Academics and critics often debate the exact dates of the demise of Hollywood’s Golden Age, however, it is most often suggested that the studio system fell into decline during the late 1940s, around the time of the passing of the Paramount Decree, which was one of several extrinsic factors that contributed to the change of Hollywood.

Pre-1948, Hollywood operated as a mature oligopoly, a market shared by a small number of companies: in this case eight. Five of these companies (MGM, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., and RKO Radio Productions) operated a vertically integrated system that mirrored factory assembly lines. As David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson have observed:

Hollywood’s mode of production has been characterised as a factory system akin to that used by a Ford plant, and Hollywood often praised its own work structure for its efficient mass production of entertaining films.

The vertical integration of the studio system enabled studios to exercise control over the three stages of Production, Distribution and Exhibition. In turn, this meant that they secured seventy per cent of the first-run market. The passing of the Paramount Decree by the Anti-Trust Division in 1948 forced the studios to release the monopoly that they held over the movie industry. The Decree required them to alienate themselves from the exhibition stage and to sell off all of the theatres that they owned, meaning that there was no longer a guarantee that their films would be bought by the cinemas. However, it was not this decree alone that signaled the end of an era. Moreover, as James Chapman suggests, it was merely one small aspect that ultimately didn’t do too much damage: ‘Divorcement alone did not bring about the end of the studio system.’

There is not one single factor that can be pointed to in isolation and be blamed for the downfall of the studios; rather it was the product of a conglomeration of numerous social, cultural, economic and technological factors that occurred after World War Two. Perhaps the most often cited of these is the emergence of television. In 1949, 1 million American households owned a television set; in the space of a decade this number had risen to 50 million. Although the film studios had made some attempts to break into television during the early days, they lost out on station licences to the radio networks. When the studios did finally make a break into television, Columbia Pictures being the first to do so in 1951, it came as something of a Catch-22 situation. Whilst selling their back-catalogues to the television networks guaranteed them an income, it also encouraged people to stay at home. Consumerism, and mainly the television set, is often blamed for Hollywood’s declining audience, which fell from 80 million in 1946 to 50 million in 1955 and finally to 20 million in 1965. Opting to stay home and watch television may well be popularly blamed for cinema audiences dropping by seventy-five per cent in just two decades, but as Chapman states:

While it would seem reasonable to assume that there is some correlation between declining cinema audiences and the increase in the purchase of television, it should be pointed out that cinema attendances had been in decline since their peak year of 1946, i.e. the decline had set in several years before the most marked increase in television ownership between 1949 and 1951.

It would seem sense to suggest then that that one of the explanations for decreasing attendances could lie in the factor that enabled so many American households to own a television: a substantial increase in disposable income. The economic status of post-war America was markedly different to a pre-war economy scarred by the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the ensuing Depression that lasted throughout the 1930s. Having established itself as something of a ‘super-power’ following the collapse of much of Europe post-1945, the United States underwent a significant demographic modification which Douglas Gomery highlights: ‘After the Second World War there was a demographic and cultural shift in urban America that profoundly altered leisure patterns of US society.’ These shifts took several forms, but many were inter-related. Post-war affluence enabled people to move away from the cities and settle in urban areas. This behaviour wasn’t just restricted to the older generations but also encompassed young couples eager to start families of their own. This had a detrimental effect on cinema audience figures as the majority of theatres were in the urban areas, and as Thompson and Bordwell state:

[…] many people now commuted by car to the city center. With small children, they had little inclination to make the long trip into town for a film. Thus changing demographics contributed to the late 1940s slump in moviegoing.

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Increased disposable income also enabled Americans to take up leisure activities that had been too expensive during the Great Depression, such as sports. It also meant that audiences were more selective in the films that they traveled to see. Audiences waiting to only go and see one ‘special’ movie replaced old habits of making weekly visits to the cinema. This was one of the reasons that the studios cut back on the number of films that they produced each year, preferring to pour their resources on lavish, star-studded, widescreen colour films such as The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953), White Christmas (Michael Curtiz, 1954) and Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954). These films also served the purpose of rivaling the television for audiences as they offered greater spectacle, and as such they often guaranteed a successful income as Chapman observes:

The high-profile investment in ‘big’ films disguised the fact that overall the studios were adopting a policy of retrenchment, producing fewer films per year and concentrating on one or two major features which it hope would generate enough profit to cover the studio for the year.

The fact that film-goers were beginning to choose which films they went to see highlights another of the factors that contributed to the studio decline: a changing audience. Whilst the audience of pre-war Hollywood was considered to be both passive and homogenous, the post-war audience revealed itself to be fragmented and active in its reception of films. The new generation of cinemagoers was not only cine-literate, having grown up surrounded by the media, but as Robert Sklar suggests, they went to the movies for different reasons to earlier audiences:

Twenty years earlier the subjects whom the Payne Fund researchers studied had gone to the movies to see the sex and splendour, the settings and etiquette, which were so far removed from their own experience. But with the rising standards of living and education, splendour, etiquette and social know-how generally were less remote from 1950s movie going youth.

Movie-going youth comprised the bulk of the audience, a stark contrast to the family orientated audience from before the war. The emergence of the ‘teenager’ during the 1950s was one of the factors that changed the social focus of the cinema from ‘family’ to ‘peers’. Research contemporary to the time revealed much about the composition of the audiences that juxtaposed with widely held beliefs. It uncovered that audiences were made up of an equal distribution of male and females, and that younger viewers frequented cinemas more than older viewers. Perhaps the most controversial discoveries however, were that the higher a persons socio-economic group and level of education the more likely they were to attend the cinema. Critics such as Gilbert Seldes blame what they regard as immaturity of the movies themselves for the loss of audiences, and attacked Hollywood for exploiting teenagers in order to make profits. However, David and Evelyn T. Riesman countered this viewpoint by arguing that movies were too mature for the older generation due to the complexity of relations presented. As Sklar elaborates:

More broadly, the questions of changing audience expectations and social relations of which both Seldes and the Riesmans spoke could be linked with an exploration of cinematic transformations in the postwar years.

This was a generation that was not only accustomed to the media as a form of entertainment, but was no doubt aware of the academic criticism directed at movies by theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, members of The Frankfurt School that accused filmmakers of creating predictable, standardized products that resulted in cultural homogeneity. The presence of such critics within the intellectual world of the United States not only effected audience reactions to the movies, but also altered the perspectives of those making the films. As Joanne Hollows highlights, the charges made against filmmakers by The Frankfurt School were damning:

These critics also claimed that not only did economies of scale operate in a system of mass production, standardization also guaranteed profit. Having found a successful formula, the studios stuck with it. This, in turn, conditioned the audience in conformity – the audience were taught what to expect, and got more of the same.

The revelation of a fragmented audience forced the studios to admit that specific audiences preferred a specific type of movie. As a consequence, studios began to target audiences through the use of extensive hype and publicity, effectively setting the stage for the arrival of the blockbuster, which eventually came with Spielberg’s movie Jaws (1975). Accompanying these negative views of Hollywood and its filmic productions was the investigation by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) into several leading members of the West coast society, most notably screenwriters and producers. This had a detrimental effect on the public perception of mass culture as it was purported be UnAmerican. As Chapman states in his critique of the mass culture of Hollywood:

Given that this debate occurred during the period of McCarthyite witch-hunts and the investigations of HUAC, then the term ‘UnAmerican’ had a particular political inflection. Mass culture came under attack because it was perceived to have a dehumanizing effect on the masses.

The studios therefore found themselves not only having to contend with declining audiences, but also with being the central subject of critical debate. Although the cultural theorists of The Frankfurt School returned to Germany in 1949, they left behind them an intellectual community tainted by their Marxist perspective to mass culture. Consequently, popular culture was viewed as exercising a negative influence on the masses, which had an indirect effect on the films being produced by the studios, and the publics’ interpretation of them. Chapman concurs that:

It was characteristic of American intellectuals to associate mass culture with the Soviet Union in that mass culture was regarded as totally homogenous and was designed to instil an official ideology into the people. This was a tendency which was to be deplored and resisted in America, whose democratic culture […] depended upon protecting it from the effects of mass culture.

The outcomes of the HUAC findings also brought about the beginning of the changes to the structure of the studios. In the most extreme scenarios several screenwriters found their careers completely destroyed by the investigations and never worked in Hollywood again. The major changes to the structure of Hollywood however came a few years later. In the pre-war period the production companies were synonymous with the movie moguls who headed up the production sector; distribution and exhibition personnel were less prolific. These were men such as Jack Warner at Warners and Louis B. Mayer and M-G-M, whom Chapman describes as ‘absolute monarchs’. It is highly significant then that in 1951 Louis. B. Mayer was expelled from M-G-M. Such significant alterations to the structure of production clearly signal an industry in crisis. As Chapman goes on to explain this was not the fortune of all of the eight studios, but it was a reflection of the problems faced by some:

While some rose to meet the […] new situation relatively smoothly, others were less able to come to terms with the changing economic circumstances and lumbered on regardless, dinosaurs of the studio age clinging to outmoded business practices and production strategies.

Around the same time as the internal structure of the studios began to alter, they also made a significant amendment to their in-house schedule of stars and other personnel such as directors, screenwriters and cameramen, as these had become too expensive to maintain. The ensuing reshuffle released stars etc. from their contracts, which had often been in the region of seven years, and enabled them to be hired on a film-by-film basis. This freedom enabled stars to make films with several different studios throughout the course of a year. In effect, this represented a role-reversal of the power structure of Hollywood. Where previously stars had had little choice over the films they made due to their studio contracts, now they could refuse to make a film if they wanted to. As a result of this, and the Paramount Decree, the field of filmmaking was opened up to encourage independent production, as Thompson and Bordwell highlight: ‘Stars and directors broke away to start their own companies. Between 1946 and 1956, the annual number of independent films more than doubled, to about 150.’ The increase in the number of independent companies whilst on the one hand being a direct result of the collapse of the studio system can also be regarded as a contributing factor. Once the breakaway had begun, there was no way of going back to the way things had been before. Despite this, the established studios did not suffer too much as the independent studios relied on them for distribution and some aspects of production such as studio rental. Although the structure of the main Hollywood studios may have altered over the period of the late 1940s to the early 1960s, they are still regarded today as being the ‘majors’ within Hollywood. As Chapman explains:

[…] the economic power of the majors remains. The fact is that for all the changes in film technology, audience composition and viewing habits over the last three-quarters of a century, the same handful of companies, with similar names, exerts an exceptionally strong control over the production of motion pictures and their distribution throughout the world.

The decline of the Hollywood studio system can therefore, be seen as the product of the amalgamation of several social, cultural and economic factors. Although the increase in the number of households owning a television is often cited as being the downfall of the Golden Age of Hollywood, it is clear that this cannot be regarded as the sole factor; for example, the Anti-Trust Division had started its investigations before World War Two and therefore long before the television boom. It is fair to say that the Hollywood that had been established during the 1920s and 1930s had to be short-lived if America wanted to re-establish itself within the world at large. As America recovered from the Great Depression social attitudes towards leisure and recreation began to change, and cultural attitudes were altered by an increased academic awareness in the medium. Perhaps then, it is fair to say that, ironically, Hollywood’s studio system was responsible for its own downfall. Its economic and popular success attracted attention from many different quarters, from cultural theorists to the Federal Government, which exposed the weaknesses that existed within it. In order for the concept of filmmaking to retain its supremacy, things had to change. Hollywood has successfully achieved this and remains a dominant force in the production of movies that not only make obscene amounts of money, but which also entertain the masses.

Bibliography

David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, (London: Routledge, 1985)

James Chapman, Popular American Film 1945 – 1995, (London: The Open University, 1998)

Joanne Hollows and Mark Jancovich (eds.), Approaches to Popular Film, (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995)

Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2001)

Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds.), Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies, (London: British Film Institute, 1999)

Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction, (United States: McGraw-Hill, 1994)

David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, (London: Routledge, 1985), p.90.

James Chapman, Popular American Film 1945 – 1995, (London: The Open University, 1998), p.98.

Ibid.

Douglas Gomery, ‘Transformation of the Hollywood system’, in Chapman, Popular American Film, p.99

Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction, (United States: McGraw-Hill, 1994), p.375.

Chapman, Popular American Film, p.101.

Robert Sklar, ‘The Lost Audience: 1950s spectatorship and historical reception studies’, in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds.), Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies, (London: British Film Institute, 1999) p.87.

Ibid. p.82/3.

Ibid. p.89.

Joanne Hollows, ‘Mass culture theory and political economy’, in Joanne Hollows and Mark Jancovich (eds.), Approaches to Popular Film, (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995), p.20.

Chapman, Popular American Film, p.89.

Ibid.

Ibid., p.79.

Ibid., p.103.

Thompson and Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction, p.375.

Chapman, Popular American Film, p.115.