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  • Introduction:Movie Business
  • Richard Koszarski, Editor in Chief

'The least understood fact about the motion picture business is, strangely enough, the large and basic one that it is an industrial machine. From manufacturer to consumer it functions exactly like the industries of automobile, clothing, food products or any manufactured product.'

(William A. Johnston, Editor of Motion Picture News, 1926.)

The first film historians may have been technological determinists, but by the time William Johnston wrote his essay on 'The Structure of the Motion Picture Industry' for the November 1926 Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, attention had shifted to a different sort of machinery. Commentators were now more interested in how the system worked, and would casually describe the motion picture business as 'exactly' the same as any other large industrial operation.

While Johnston's division of the movie business into production, distribution and exhibition sectors still makes sense, he tended to soft pedal its relationship to what he called 'the show business.' More recent analysts, with better methodological tools and the advantage of greater historical perspective, would think twice before asking their readers to see the making and marketing of Varieté (1926) as identical to the merchandising of canned soup. We understand now that things were never so neat and tidy as Johnston allowed. Motion Picture News, in any case, was out of business by 1930.

The articles in this issue of Film History all deal with people, processes and events with which Johnston would have been familiar. Indeed, they could very easily be grouped according to his still useful production/distribution/exhibition template. But these authors understand something which Johnston did not: the significance of that messy, 'show business' quality, and the way in which it confuses the straightforward operation of this particular industrial giant.

We start with three essays describing the marketing and retailing end of this process, or as Johnston put it, the moment when 'the films go into cans [and] the business enters a regular industrial phase'. In 'Subversive Sounds: Ethnic Spectatorship and Boston's Nickelodeons', Desirée J. Garcia outlines the way in which theaters and theater owners in one particular neighborhood customized their presentations to better suit their clientele. Gary D. Rhodes, in 'The Origin and Development of the American Movie Poster', traces the history of this particular form of advertising and assesses the various' roads not taken' before industry standardization arrived in 1915. Distribution itself, by any account the least understood aspect of the motion picture business, is examined by Max Alvarez in his account of 'The Motion Picture Distributing and Sales Company',one of the first major efforts to organize this country's independent film forces.

Mack Sennett's Keystone was one of the first Hollywood studios to rationalize its system of production(George W. Stout supervised Sennett's operation as well as Tom Ince's). But as Rob King shows in his account of '"Uproarious Inventions": The Keystone Film Company, Modernity, and the Art of the Motor', such efficiencies, far from flattening a film manufacturer's idiosyncrasies, could actually help refine and develop them.

Finally, three different accounts of the relationship between a creative individual and a creative industry demonstrate a few more blind spots in Johnston's bloodless vision of film manufacturing. Bernard Ince offers a brief overview of the career of Percy Nash, a British film pioneer whose contributions to the film industry have been forgotten as completely as his films. D.J. Turner documents the [End Page 211] production of an ambitious series of 'art films' created in 1921-22 by the prominent artist-illustrator-photographer Lejaren à Hiller. And in 'Picturization Partners: Elinor Glyn and the Thalberg Contract Affair',Vincent L. Barnett examines how one author's concern for the most advantageous assignment of her literary rights not only set a precedent for later writers, but had a previously unrecognized impact on the creation of one of Hollywood's greatest studios.

The last word - call it an extra added attraction - goes to Robert H. Cochrane. A somewhat mysterious figure who played a major role in the development of many aspects of film production, distribution and exhibition, Cochrane reveals in a 1918 essay how...

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