“I learned a lot about the process of filmmaking and that if you’re totally persistent and want to follow through with something, you’ll get it done.” Oren Peli
For Halloween day I’ll step away from my Once Upon a Time in Hollywood posts to interject an update about the movie Paranormal Activities. The seven day results fro Friday October 23 through Thursday October 29 had Paranormal Activities number one at the box office. I wouldn’t call it paranormal but that is highly unusual. Especially for a movie that opened five weeks ago and had yet to have a number one week.
That’s the power of word of mouth and a great marketing plan. On halloween night the film will also pass the $70 million mark. Keep in mind that the budget has been said to be between 10,000-15,000. No typos there. Less than most used cars. I saw the movie this week and they keep the budget down by shooting in just one location (the writer/directors house) and using just four actors (two of which are on the screen for just a couple minutes). And one of the actors doubled most of the time as the cameraman using just a $3,000 video camera.
So the film made for $15,000 bringing in $70 million in the box office according to several sources is now the new box office record holder as the most profitable movie ever made. Ever. A film made by the 39-year old Oren Peli, a first time filmmaker who was born in Israel and living in San Diego. (Passing the decade old record set by The Blair Witch Project.)
I’d like to say it was in the spirit of what I’ve been writing about for two years hear at Screenwriting from Iowa. Something big happening by an outsider to the Hollywood film industry. The only problem is there wasn’t a screenplay written—at least in the traditional sense.
“There was no dialogue. There was only an outline of the story, the actors never received any script. They didn’t know about anything they were getting into. All they knew is they were going to do something about a haunted house and basically discovered everything as they were shooting. There were no lines for them to follow. Everything was spontaneous.” Oren Peli shocktillyoudrop.com
The film was shot in just seven days in 2006, but took 10 months to go through the 70 hours of footage. The first version of the film was made in 2007 and several different versions were completed and tested a various film festivals. The film hit the jackpot when a DVD found its way to Steven Spielberg. DreamWorks picked up the film first with the intention of Spielberg remaking the film but then it was decided that that wasn’t needed. Like The Blair Witch Project hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent to enhance the film that eventually made the theater. But essentially it’s the film Peli made for $15,000.
They did a masterful of using social media, most notably Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. While the success of Paranormal Activities is off the charts and against all odds, I think you will see more of its ilk in the future. Not just horror films, but films in general where lovers of film tap into the resources that are out there and make a film that finds an audience. I’ll talk more about those resources tomorrow in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood… (Part 9).
“I had been thinking about this project for a long time. As a camera fanatic and a product builder, this was something I seemed destined to do.”
Jim Jannard on developing the RED camera
Today the folks over at RED announced plans for the release this year of their RED EPIC camera. To date RED cameras have been used on over forty feature films including The Informant! starring Matt Damon, District 9, and David Fincher’s The Social Network. What’s amazing about that if you don’t follow such things is the RED Digital Cinema Camera Company hasn’t even existed for five years.
Jim Jannard founded the compnay in 2005 and when he released the specs for his newly designed camera many laughed. Jannard didn’t come from a Hollywood background or with lots of camera experience. What he did have was passion and vision. As well as some cash, investors, and business expertise that included running and founding a company he used to own; Oakely sungalsses.
He pulled together a team of expert engineers and designers and the like to make something special.
“We needed a bunch of guys who were inventors to come up with entirely new ways of getting to the finish line.”
Jim Jannard Wierd magazine
His new RED company began taking deposits for the camera in 2006. At the 2007 NAB convention they released footage that (Lord of the Rings) director Peter Jackson had shot on the yet to be released RED camera. The footage stunned a lot of people and it caused a backlog of orders.
“There’s talent on the streets, kids with ideas who have stories to tell and never get a chance. Up to now, they’ve been limited to tools that confine their stories to YouTube.”
Jim Jannard
Maybe Jannard and his team haven’t changed Hollywood yet, but the fact they are even mentioned at all in an eight part series (so far) on an overview of film history shows the potential they have to change the future. Keep in mind that the company has been in business less than five years and has only been selling cameras for a couple years now.
But its combination of high quality images and low costs to own many have said it is the film blow for films to technically still being shot on film.
“This is the camera I’ve been waiting for my whole career: jaw-dropping imagery recorded onboard a camera light enough to hold with one hand. I don’t know how Jim and the RED team did it–and they won’t tell me–but I know this: RED is going to change everything.”
Steven Soderbergh
Soderbergh’s last few films have been shot with the RED camera.
Once upon a time…back in the 80s while in film school I did some assisting for a fashion photographer in L.A. and I noticed that his digital Minolta digital light meter was easy to use and asked a teacher at school why film people didn’t use a digital meter. He said the Spectra light meter (that you had to add slides to and make calculations) was the standard for the industry.
Today Spectra light meters are digital, but that’s when I first realized how slow Hollywood is to change. In the 90s as non-linear work stations for audio and video editing started to gain ground there was much debate in Hollywood in the role of this technology. Flat bed film editing systems (Steenbeck, KEM, Moviola) were the standard in the industry for decades and many said that would never change.
AVID made a splash at the 1989 National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) basically saying that the future of video editing was about to shift dramatically. There were plenty of scoffers but within a couple years a small number of feature films started to be edited on the AVID and by the mid-90s there were dozens being edited on the system that was said would never replace traditional film editing. In 1996, the first film to be edited on an AVID (The English Patient) won an Academy Award for editing (Walter Murch) and also won best picture. Today almost all feature films and TV programs are edited on an AVID or some other kind of digital non-linear editing system.
The evolution and demise of traditional film and sound editing was actually a fairly slow process because it was expensive at first, untested, and required a new way of doing things. (Plus the streamlined techology of the editing process threatened jobs making it not real popular in some circles. ) I first worked on an AVID in 1994 and instantly loved the way you could try new edits without having to use a splicer and tape. But not everyone agreed with the new way of doing things, and unless he’s recently changed Steven Spielberg still edits the old school way and it’s worked out pretty well for him.
Cameras have been a little slower in changing over to the digital side. Many independent filmmakers embraced the digital cameras instantly because it eliminated the high cost of film and its related expenses. And just like on the editing side many have said that tradition film cameras would never be replaced. The image of a 35mm film is beautiful and once again that has been the way that movies have been made for over 100 years.
But as the digital cameras improve in quality more and more directors and cameramen and making the switch to the digital cameras. And not just for costs. Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones was shot with the Sony F-900, Slumdog Millionaire was shot with the Viper camera, and both Arri and Panavision also have digital cameras. It’s getting harder and to deny the digital shift taking place. But the somewhat affordable RED camera is causing the most excitement for independent filmmakers around the country.
David Fincher came up through the ranks working at ILM and directing music videos before going on to direct Alien 3, Seven, Fight Club, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons. He is currently shooting The Social Network (about the founders of Facebook) which was shot on the digital Red EPIC camera. Here is what he said recently about digital cameras totally replacing film cameras;
“The writing is on the wall. If you don’t believe me, I have some stock in Kodak I’d like to sell you, because this is just not the way motion pictures are gonna be made three years from now.”
For a more technical explaination here is the cinematographer of that film had to say;
“To say that RED and the new Mysterium-X Sensor is impressive is tantamount to saying that Napalm is a little itchy. The sensor’s increased resolution is an obvious bonus but the expanded latitude especially at the high end and the dynamic color range makes this camera a tremendous asset to any cinematographer’s arsenal. The Mysterium-X’s amazing ability to handle both mixed color temperatures and low light situations affords us exciting opportunities to push the boundaries of our craft.”
Jeff Cronenweth, A.S.C.
The chances are good that wherever you live in the United States there is at least one RED camera nearby. You write the script, he or she shoots the film (shoot the digital will never sound right), and see what happens. And, of course, there are plenty of other cameras out there that can do a solid job. But the day is coming where at least from the technical side the same cameras used on Hollywood features will be commonly found in your neck of the woods.
While Titanic has been the pinnacle of the Hollywood blockbuster there has been a somewhat quiet movement in the film industry which came into prominence in 1999.
The use of video came on the scene in the 1950s its claim about the death of film were greatly exaggerated. Fifty years later those claims are starting to resurface.
In 1995 Sony released the Sony VX1000. The first digital video camera that independent filmmakers got excited about. Lars von Trier jumped on the digital bandwagon in directing and shooting the feature film The Idiots with the Sony VX1000 which he showed at Cannes in 1998.
As digital filmmaking became more popular the debate continued over whether this was really filmmaking since film was no longer being used. I remember being at a film festival in the ’90s when a New York filmmaker stated that he didn’t make videos, he made films.
Then this little hybrid movie came along in 1999 called The Blair Witch Project that was a game changer. Shot with a mixture of 16mm film and a consumer video camcorder (Hi8 I believe) Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sanchez, Robin Cowie, Gregg Hale made the film for $35,000. that went on to make in the ballpark of $250 million worldwide. It still has the record for box office income against production costs. (We’ll see if Paranormal Activity beats it. A film inspired by The Blair Witch Project.)
When film historians look at the shift in the film business I think they will look at The Blair Witch Project and 1999 as the most important year for change. The Blair Witch filmmakers were not only from outside L.A. (they met in Orlando), not only found great success making a film shot in part on video, but they used the Internet to market the film in a whole new way.
Because I was living in Orlando at the time I like to point out they the Blair Witch filmmakers pointed out that Ralph Clemente who heads up the film program at Valencia Community College was a great inspiration to them in making a different kind of film. I studied with Clemente when he was teaching at the University of Miami film school and was happy he got a special nod.
The list of films made digitally grew and grew. In 2000, Spike Lee chose to shoot most of his $10 million dollar film Bamboozled with the Sony VX1000. In that same year Academy-award winning director Michael Figgis released a DV feature Timecode. Also in 2002 Steven Soderbergh shot the DV feature Full Frontal and Jerry Seinfeld was executive producer and featured performer for the DV documentary Comedian (2002).
Another landmark film was released in 2002, Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark— a film that was shot digitally in one take. I saw Russian Ark in one of those grand old theaters in Chicago and I really thought it was a perfect mix of the past and future coming together.
What was different about Russian Ark from the DV features is it was shot on a high-end Sony HD camera. The quality difference between DV and 35mm is great when projected on the big screen. And films up to that point used DV for a variety of reasons usually related to budgets. Russian Ark reached new heights by shooting a type of film that not only couldn’t physically be shot on film (due to the nature of film loads being limited in time) but the quality for the average viewer was matched on the screen.
Also in the year 2002, Gary Winick’s who directed Tadpole (shot with a Sony PD-150 DV camera) won the Best Director Award at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. Sundance used to have a policy that said they only took films made on film. No videos allowed. The world was changing.
“I could have shot Tadpole on 35mm, and would it have been a better film? I don’t know. Would I have gotten that cast? I don’t know. Part of the reasons for the cast wanting to be in the film, besides the material, was that they were all interested in working in DV, which I presented it to them as this hybrid between the theater and film. And also, I only need you for two weeks and not two months.” Gary Winick
In 2003 Peter Hedges (known for writing What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?) released the DV feature Pieces of April starring Katie Holmes. It won many awards at film festivals and actress Patricia Clarkson was nominated for an Oscar. I love that film and it shows how a story and talent can overcome some technical deficiencies. Hedges pointed out in interviews out that financing had falling through a couple times before when it was budgeted for film so the $150,000 film would not have been made without shooting on DV.
In 2004 the InDigEnt produced November starring Courteney Cox and shot with a $4,000. Panasonic DVX 100 DV camera by director of photography Nancy Schreiber who won best cinematography for the film at the Sundance Film Festival.
Also in 2004 at Sundance Morgan Spurlock earned the Directing Award for Super Size Me and the documentary Born into Brothels won an audience award, both of which were shot on digital video cameras. Brothels beat Super at the Academy Awards. So in less than a decade digital video made some incredible inroads winning international awards and finding audiences.
So in less than a decade digital video made some incredible inroads winning international awards and finding audiences. You can sit around and argue all day about how film is superior to digital video, but folks the train has left the station.
And the standard def DV video cameras have now been replaced by digital High Def cameras that in the right hands can give a wonderful look. The crazy thing is these are cameras in the $5,ooo dollar range. And they are not being used on just low budget features. The Panasonic HVX 200 was used on the $30 million film Cloverfield.
But let’s not forget Paranormal Activity that is purposely meant to look like an amateur video and as of this writing has made over $60 million at the box office.
Yes, this is the point where I bring out the visionary trunk monkey Francis Ford Coppola (the grandfather of the digital filmmaking movement) who had this to say back in 1991:
Coppola was right on track. But can you imagine if he would have said that “some day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to make a film with her cell phone camera….”—the response might have been, “Yeah, right when we’re flying around like the Jetsons.” Yet, in 2005 a feature was shot using a cell phone. Today there are several cell phone film festivals around the world.
Coppola recently made and released Youth Without Youth shot digitally with the high-end Sony F900. The Sony camera (along with the Viper camera) are reaching quality levels that match film resolution. But the biggest talk about the digital filmmaking seems to center around the Red Cameras and we’ll address that in Part 7.
The film verses digital debate is coming to an end.
Whatever blockbuster door JAWS opened in 1975 Star Wars boldly walked through and became one of the biggest cultural phenomenons of the last thirty plus years. Five other Star Wars films followed the first one bringing in a total of more than $4 billion at the box office. (The original Star Wars movie’s $775 million worldwide box office grab almost doubled what JAWS made.)
Of course, Star Wars didn’t just stop making money at the theaters. There have been books, video games and it rewrote the book on spin off merchandise that still sells to this day. (Just this weekend while watching a football game on TV I saw a fan wearing a huge Darth Vader helmet.) Star Wars has its own section on the American pop cultural shelf.
The success of Star Wars also took the use of special effects to a new level and its influence is heavy on many of today’s films. Lucas also put film school on the map. When I went to film school in the early 80s Star Wars was by far the biggest influence of why students said they were there. The early film school graduates of the 60s coming into prominence in the 70s brought a whole new wave to independent filmmaking. And that door for the independents hasn’t closed since.
At first they came from the top film schools USC, UCLA, AFI, NYU (Francis Ford Coppola, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch), then they started coming from lesser known film school FSU, UT Austin (Wes Anderson) and then they came from no (or just a little) film school (Quintin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Kevin Smith) . The progression makes sense in that the usual way to learn filmmaking in days of old was to be on a movie set and work your way up through the ranks. Film schools in New York & L.A. gave others a chance to learn about film and to make their own. Then schools outside New York and L.A. started offering film classes and degrees.
Then intense film production workshops started popping up around the country offering much of what was traditionally taught in film school. Now there many books, DVD, CDs and online classes, free blogs and forums on filmmaking. And at the same time the equipment has gotten cheaper and better over time. So the “Do It Yourself Movement’ is alive and well. (DIY director/writer Oren Peli whose sub $15,000 film opened just a month ago has already made $60 million dollars going into the halloween weekend.)
With good cameras, lights, and editing equipment costing less than just a typical year of film school one has to question if the film school model is outdated. But more of that in future posts.
But the 70s, 80s, and early 90s weren’t just about blockbuster and independent films being made. You had films that were full of social commentary (Driving Miss Daisy, Schindler’s List, Wall St), the quintessential romantic comedy, When Harry Met Sally (1989), and a favorite for many people The Shawshank Redemption (1984),
Of course, Martin Scorsese was there to make sure the light didn’t get to bright inside the theater; Taxi Driver (1977), Raging Bull (1980), Goodfellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991). The multiple Academy Award winning computer animation company Pixar was also formed during this period in 1986 and its first film was Toy Story.
Overall it was a great period for American films as a whole. And personally many of the films that I like to watch over and over again were made in the first half of this era (Diner, The Natural, The Verdict, Rain Man, Tootsie, On Golden Pond, Tender Mercies, Places of the Heart, Witness).
In this time frame is also when Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) was released brining a whole new level of respect to Independent filmmakers as it made over $100 million and received much critical acclaim. Also on the independent side, Robert Rodriguez made a splash from the ultra-low budget side of things with his $7,000 film El mariachi (1992).
The motion picture business turned 100 during this period and there had been many changes over that time period. From the 80s on movies had new entertainment competition with cable TV and Beta/VHS/DVDs. The Internet and video games emerged during this time as well. But in many ways all of these changes were new revenue streams for Hollywood.
Speaking of revenue streams…
What started with JAWS was perfected in 1997 and into 1998 with the release of the greatest blockbuster to date—Titanic. The James Cameron film connected not only with American audiences ($600 million domestic) but with a world wide audience that brought in almost $2 billion dollars.
In its opening weekend Titanic was number one in the box office and by the time its run was done it was the number one all-time box office winner and has stayed there ever since. It won best picture at the academy awards and 10 other awards tying a record of Oscars won by a single film.
The last decade or so is where the film business began to turn into a whole different kind of business.
I want to feel, sunlight on my face See that dust cloud disappear without a trace I want to take shelter from the poison rain Where the streets have no name Bono/U2
I’m going to break up my posts on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to point out the significance of the U2 concert last night that was live-streamed via You Tube to seven continents.
I’m sure we’ll hear in the coming days how many people participated in watching the concert online, but I’m guessing into the milions. I started just watching to see and hear the quality and to see if they could pull it off technologically. They did and I stuck around for the entire concert. It was a late night here in Cedar Falls, Iowa.
For the last four days I’ve been posting a mini history of the Hollywood film industry. They film industry is in a lull now connected to the economy and I wanted to show how it’s always been an industry in flux.
But there are new technologies emerging that will provide many opportunities related to how we shoot and view movies and other forms of entertainment. Last night’s concert was a tour de force of current technologies mixed with great talent and creative energies giving us a foretaste of what is to come.
As a personal side note the concert brought back a few memories of my L.A. days back in the 80s when I did several photography, film and video shoots at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena where the concert was held last night. The concert itself reminded me of Bruce Springsteen’s last Born in the U.S.A. concert at the L.A. Coliseum back in ’85 which I attended with around 100,000 other people.
And as Bono started into The Streets Have No Name I couldn’t help but recall a missed opportunity. I was a writer/director/cameraman and editor with a Burbank production company when their Joshua Tree album came out. On the morning of March 27, 1987 we got wind that U2 was going to be playing on a rooftop in downtown L.A. and thought that would be pretty cool to shoot and experience. Then we decided we didn’t want to deal with all the traffic and the crowd. Watch the You Tube video below to see the security risks involved. The police were doing their job, and the rockers were doing theirs. (Also this was back in MTV’s heyday when record labels dropped a lot of money producing music videos. One more example of how things change.)
Sure wish I would have gone. Life is full of regret and missed opportunities and what I’ve been trying to show in the last couple days and will show in the days to come is that the film industry has been through many bumpy roads in the past but there are new opportunities coming— but it’s going to require you embracing a new way of doing things.
Just keep in mind that five years ago You Tube hadn’t even launched. Can you even imagine what kinds of distribution channels there will be five years from now?
“Film makers can’t get enough of Adolf Hitler. I think it’s because he’s the perfect villain.” Arnold Pistorius
Once upon a time in Hollywood…1941-1976
So in a sweeping look at American film history today we’re going to clip off 35 years. Again one of the reasons for this brief look back at film history is to see how change has been a constant throughout the business and to see how we are in another major shift.
Hollywood had enjoyed its greatest decade through the 1930s in the short history of the film industry. (Some still believe that era was the greatest movie decade of all-time.)
1940 & 1941 continued the Golden Era of cinema. But then on December 7, 1941 the world changed for Americans with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The United States was coming off The Great Depression which started with the crash of Wall Street in 1929.
Hollywood actors and directors lended a hand in making training and propaganda films . And then there were movies about the war and its lingering effects back in the states.
So Proudly We Hail, 1943 Best Years of Our Lives, 1946
But I think the biggest lingering effect of Hitler and the Nazi’s is it created a world of fear. I’m not sure we’ve ever recovered from the idea that one man could cause so much pain and destruction in the modern world.
“The motion pictures made during World War II deeply affected Steven Spielberg, and movies about the war remain fertile ground for numerous filmmakers during subsequent decades. One reason for the continued popularity of these sages, and for movies about different wars as well, is the panoply of visual pleasures such conflicts offer.” “Citizen Spielberg”: by Lester D. Friedman
Europe exported existential thought and a new wave of movies that we free morality standards in the American film industry.
Much has been written about the prosperity that followed World War II, but many films reflected a period of questioning human existence and sometimes landing on nihilism or some for of despair. And themes that followed from World War II were prevalent for at least the next 30 years—and maybe until the present day. (The names and fears have just changed over the years)
Look at some of the top films of the 50s:
Rebel Without a Cause
On the Waterfront
Sunset Boulevard
Rear Window
War of the Worlds
Death of a Salesman
Sci-Fi films with end of the world themes were popular: It Came From Outer Space
The Thing
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers
The Day the Earth Stood Still Them!
Hitler may have been gone but there were plenty of worries beyond wondering how Jerry Mathers was going to break in his baseball glove on Leave it to Beaver. (The Korean War, Soviets, the Bomb, communists, etc.)
And then into the 60s President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr were shot and killed, there were riots in Chicago, L.A. and other cities. Viet Nam War. And if things weren’t bad enough TIME Magazine’s cover on April 8, 1966 asked, “Is God Dead?”
Some of the more well known movies of the 60s were:
Dr, Strangelove; or how I stopped learning to Love the Bomb
They Don’t Shoot Horses Do They?
Easy Rider
Psycho
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Bonnie & Clyde
Cool-Hand Luke
Midnight Cowboy
2001 A Space Odyssey
The Wild Bunch
The Manchurian Candidate
The pessimistic trend continued into the early 1970s in politics with Viet Nam & Watergate as well as at the movies:
M*A*S*H One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Deliverance
Five Easy Pieces The Last Picture Show The Godfather
Chinatown
Sure you had Disney movies and light musicals during all these years but these films represent much of the best films of the era.
Bruce became the catalyst for change. Bruce was a mechanical shark on the set of the 1975 film JAWS who didn’t work as well as desired. But he worked well in the edit bay and the $7 million film went on to make over $400 million worldwide. Sure there was blood and guts, but it had a happy ending.
The tent pole movie was born (or maybe just perfected). And once that genie was out of the bottle everybody in Hollywood was shooting for the $100 million box office goal. By this time Viet Nam was over and Americans were ready to get on with life and the bicentennial celebration of the United States in 1976.
And Rocky was there toward the end of the year to give audiences something to cheer about. I do believe the one-two punch of JAWS & Rocky had a huge impact on the future of the film business. More thrills per minute and a somewhat happy ending that would make a lot of money.
By 1927 the film industry was barely 30 years old but great strides artistically and its popularity grew. Filmmaking which started in the United States and France was now happening in Russia, Germany, Italy, Britain, Sweden and beyond. Film technique grew more sophisticated and the audiences simply grew.
Movie theaters became known as picture palaces sometimes the size of cathedrals. In the larger cities the plush carpet, dome ceilings with artwork, and seating for 2,000- 4,000 per theater was not unheard of. They were often grand and sometimes gaudy. Ushers were needed for crowd control. Keep in mind this was not only long before the invention of television, but before the great depression.
There was around 20 movie studios by the end of the 1920s and many people don’t realize that the 800 films produced per year was at an all-time high. (Compare that today with about 400 feature films being made these days on average. Granted many of these films were shorter.) Director like D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille were respected.
Stars like Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, William S. Hart, and Lillian Gish were well paid for their talent. But they were not paid to talk. Because until 1927 films were silent. The Jazz Singer changed all of that. Though largely a silent picture it did employ sync sound. Within two years most American movies were talkies.
If you think the industry is going through shift now can you imagine the changes than occurred at that time? Famous and glamourous actors for various reasons were done. Career over. Directors and cinematographers who had the freedom to move the camera freely down had larger cameras and cumbersome sound issues to deal with. And the poor pianist and organist across the country who played the scored music at theaters were now out of the business.
But audiences didn’t care about all of that. By 1929 movie attendance was averaging 90 million tickets sold per week. Even the stock market crashing in 1929 at the start of The Great Depression did not really show down the movie industry. And some would say people during the great depression was a boom to the movie industry as people look for hope and diversion in cheap entertainment. The 30s and into the early 40s are known as the golden age of cinema.
The movie making system was controlled by studios where writers, directors and actors were under contract so not free to work on any movie they desired and filmmakers had to work under the restriction of they Hays Code which put restraints on what could and could be on screen. In perhaps a nod to the belief that creativity is best expressed when limitations are set rather than allowed total freedom, the Hollywood golden era produced what many believe to be the finest films ever made.
And even if you disagree with that it’s hard to disagree with scholars who believe that 1939 was the single best year for movies. Check out the lineup:
Gone with the Wind
The Wizard of Oz
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Stagecoach
Goodbye Mr. Chips
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Ninotchka
Gulliver’s Travels
Jesse James
Dark Victory
Gunga Din
Wuthering Heights
Though personally I think 1941 was the single best year for movies (Citizen Kane, How Green Was My Valley, The Maltese Falcon, Meet John Doe, Dumbo, Sullivan’s Travels, Suspicion, Sergeant York, The Little Foxes, The Lady Eve). The truth is whatever year you pick around that time there is an amazing list of great films.
I honestly don’t know why that short studio era was so prolific. But I do know we’ve never been able to return. Perhaps it was just a shear numbers game in that they were making twice as many films as they are today. (There was no competition from TV, Internet, video games, etc.) Or maybe creating fine work in the hyper-studio controlled era has something to do with an old T.S. Elliot quote;
“When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost—and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom the work is likely to sprawl.”
Every decade since then has turned out some great films, but there has been a lot of sprawl. Of course, maybe all that sprawl from the 1930s has just been long forgotten.
What I do know is that on December 7, 1941 the United States was attacked on Pearl Harbor and followed by the U.S. joining World War II. A war that only lasted a few years but where between 50-70 million people died. Things have never been the same. Including movies.
Hollywood side note: Edwin S. Porter, a lead pioneer in the early film business who gave D.W. Griffith his first acting job and who in 1903 directed highly the successful The Great Train Robbery , resisted the changes in the film business and was working in the appliance business in 1930.
The history of movies did not begin in Hollywood, California. After decades of advances in photographic techniques in the nineteenth century an inventor born in Milan, Ohio and raised (and homeschooled) in Port Huron, Michigan developed the motion picture system as we know it today. Thomas Edison (and his assistant William K.L. Dickson) worked together on the new invention that changed the way people viewed entertainment.
Work took Edison to Canada & Kentucky before he would eventually land in New Jersey and his inventions earned him the nickname “The Wizard of Menlo Park.” (Dickson is also known to film historians as the filmmaker Fred Ott’s Sneeze in 1894.)
Edison held patents on over 900 of his inventions including the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph and around 1890 the film camera as we know it. Dickson developed the kinetograph, a sprocket camera and George Eastman (of Eastman-Kodak fame) developed the 35mm film that would pass through the camera and capture multiple images quickly. (A technique commonly used for the last 100+ years in the film industry.)
The main problem with the early camera was it was so large it had to be permanently housed in a studio built in West Orange, New Jersey specifically for it. The studio had a track in it that allowed them to rotate camera positions to capture light coming from an opening in a room.
It’s important to look back at the early developments in film history to how Hollywood became Hollywood as we know it and why recent inventions have shifted the direction for the future of the film industry.
In the years leading up to 1900 the popularity of film grew rapidly. First using machines that allowed people to individually watch short films and evolving to nickelodeons in 1905 that projected the film images in storefronts that allowed small groups of people to watch the same film together. Within two years there were close to 4,000 nickelodeon theaters in the U.S.
New films had to be made quickly as audiences grew. And film moved from showing vaudeville acts such as juggling to telling stories. These films were usually less than ten minutes in length and made in a couple days. In 1903 Edwin S. Porter made the 12-minute film The Great Train Robbery which was seen as groundbreaking for its use of indoor/outdoor shots and use of cross cutting. The film toured the country for years.
This all set the stage for a stage actor and playwright named D.W. Griffith in 1908 to make the film The Adventures of Dollie. Films began to grow in length as well as artistic merdits—as well becoming more economically viable.
Griffith changed the direction of the film industry in 1915 with the release of the longest and most expensive film ever made, The Birth of a Nation. The $100,000 film made $50 million dollars at the box office.
Distribution rights and patent infringements all played a roll in this emerging and profitable new industry. New Jersey, New York (as well as Chicago and Jacksonville) all played a roll in the early development of movies. The New York area and Chicago were a natural start because that’s where the stage talent was located and Jacksonville for its warmer weather and sunshine. But there would be a shift in the film industry. (A common theme we’ll see.)
The industry eventually landed in southern California because of its combination of sunshine, warm weather and the diversity of nearby locations such as mountains, deserts, oceans, cities, open ranch land—and cheap labor. Remember places like New York and Chicago had a long established theater and vaudeville companies that were very popular. Experienced talent does not come cheap. (But producers were just as interested in producing cost efficient films as producers today. So a new industry was born on the backs of those with little or no experience in the new industry. Sound familiar?)
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica by 1915 there were 15,000 people working in the film industry and 60% was located in southern California. During this time films were all black and white and silent. The format worked well for the antics of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and the beauty and talent of Mary Pickford.
But that would all change as well in 1927 as talkies came on the scene as we’ll learn inOnce Upon a Time… (part 3).
Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes
I’m afraid it’s time for goodbye again
Say goodbye to Hollywood
Billy Joel Say Goodbye to Hollywood
There is a lot of finger pointing going on in the film & TV business right now. (As I write this L.A. County has an unemployment rate of 12.7%, and the film industry has not been spared. The Writer’s Guild of America reported for the fiscal year 2009 that screenwriter’s earnings decreased 31%. )
Who and what is to actually blame for Hollywood’s economic downturn that has resulted in fewer script sales and a greater loss of production jobs? Is it the general downturn in the economy or the rising cost of production? Is it the tax incentives that states outside L.A. and even countries outside the U.S. are giving to lure business away from California? Is it the Internet and the fact that spending two hours on Facebook is more interesting than many two hour movies?
Yes. It’s all the above and more.
Once upon a time there was this company called Fotomat. (Yes, I’ve written about Fotomat before but it is a favorite metaphor of mine.) They started in the 60s, seemed like they were everywhere in the 70s, but by by 1980 they had peaked. Their little yellow huts in parking lots were cultural icons back in the day. Now they’re cultural relicis and every once in a while you can spot an old converted Fotomat building that is now converted into a coffee hut or a wind-tinting business. What happened to Fotomat? Well, it’s pretty simple.
They niche they careved out was turning around photos in one day. That was cutting edge in the 70s, but as one hour photo places starting gaining ground in the 80s and then the digital boom in the 90s they had nothing to stand on. (The chant “Obsolete! Obsolete” from the The Twilight Zone (1961) episode The Obsolete Man comes to mind.) In an instant world there wasn’t a big demand for people wanting to get their photos the next day.
From 1800-1840 Nantucket was the “Whaling Capital of the World.” Youngstown, Ohio was once the seventh largest steel producer in the nation. My grandfather used to work for the Youngstown Sheet & Tube and I found an old book the company put together in 1950 to celebrate 50 years in the steel industry. In the opening paragraph of the book there is this line, “This Company looks forward to another fifty years, and then another, ad infinitum….” There wasn’t a Youngstown Sheet & Tube around to celebrate in the year 2000.
Seven hundred tons of metal a day
Now sir you tell me the world’s changed
Once I made you rich enough
Rich enough to forget my name Youngstown
Bruce Springsteen
I’ll spend the next few days looking at how Hollywood got to be Hollywood and then look from a creative and economic standpoint at where I think screenwriting, production and distribution is all heading.
Screenwriting from Iowa 
