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Reviewed by:
  • The Hollywood Studio System: A History
  • Matthew H. Bernstein
The Hollywood Studio System: A History. Douglas Gomery . London: BFI, 2006. Pp. 340. $27.95 (paper).

Only a small percentage of film scholars research the economic and business facets of filmmaking; most prefer to analyze ideology, genre, stardom, authorship, and style. Yet, ever since he published a series of articles in the 1970s on innovations of sound pioneered by Warner Brothers, [End Page 582] Douglas Gomery has been Film Studies' leading authority on Hollywood as a business operation—its industry structure, its financing methods, and its major corporations' operations and policies. He is also a leading authority on movie exhibition, as evidenced in his 1992 landmark study, Shared Pleasures.

Gomery's new volume, The Hollywood Studio System: A History reconfirms his standing. It is a thorough rewriting, expansion, and updating of Gomery's 1986 tome, The Hollywood Studio System, which focused only on the period 1930 to 1949. Part One, on "The Rise of the Studio System 1915–1931," highlights in particular Adolph Zukor's development—while the head of Paramount—of the vertical integration strategy that the big five major companies followed in order to dominate the film business and provide the economic foundation for the flourishing classical-era studio system. Part Two especially singles out Paramount's Barney Balaban and the Schenck brothers (Nicholas at Loew's/MGM, Joseph at Twentieth Century-Fox) as exemplars of those who sustained the studio system through 1951 in various ways. Part Three, "The Modern Hollywood Studio System," takes this history through 2004. It emphasizes how Lew Wasserman at the MCA talent agency, and later at Universal, showed Hollywood how to survive and in fact thrive (as it still does today) after the "Big Five" were forced to sell off their theaters in the face of the threat from television in the 1950s.

The structure of the new book retains that of the old: in each section, a general chapter recounts the major innovations in business policies and practices and the important events of the era that allowed the major Hollywood companies to achieve and retain their dominance of the American film business. This overview is followed by a chapter-by-chapter look at the conduct, performance, and production policies of all the major companies in order of their business and financial significance, including the B-studios of the classic era, Republic and Monogram. Gomery has also added separate chapters on other major film industry entities besides the studios: the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA, later the MPAA), the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the labor unions, and the powerful talent agencies. There's even a picture of Eric Johnston, Will Hays's lesser-known successor (178).

Gomery relies on primary sources (he rarely cites secondary sources)—corporate annual reports, Federal investigation testimony and findings, and articles in the major business publications (The Wall Street Journal, Fortune) as well as the trade press (Variety, Motion Picture Herald). He writes in a straightforward summary style that is succinct, giving The Hollywood Studio System the virtue of a one volume history that is more concise than anthologies on the subject. The result, as one would expect from Gomery, is authoritative, persuasive, and thorough.

Gomery's account also excavates many welcome facts. For example, where an ideologically or stylistically-oriented critic might emphasize Paramount Pictures as the home of European-émigré stylists such as Josef von Sternberg, Ernst Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder in the 1930s and 1940s, or the iconoclastic wartime comedies of Preston Sturges, Gomery informs us that from the late 1930s onwards, a key Paramount production policy was to put under contract many stars from other media (Bob Hope from radio, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis from nightclubs). One gets a more complete sense of what each studio actually produced at different points in its history—and why. As a result, we can see the films—canonical or not—as the effect of industrial strategy as well as the expression of creative individuals working within highly formulaic genres.

I find three aspects of this work to be particularly distinctive. First, Gomery has personalized the studio histories and era...

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