Fire and Failure: Studio Technology, Environmental Control, and the Politics of Progress

This article examines studio architecture and the new light and sound infrastructure that shaped the American film industry's transition to sound in the 1920s. The shift to darkened sound studios intensified studio designers' ongoing efforts to achieve complete environmental control, previously by simulating natural phenomena like sunlight, and now also by managing the studio soundscape. With this control, however, came undesirable by-products, especially the risk of fire. Although long overshadowed by fires in film theaters, studio fires plagued the industry into the early years of sound. This article focuses on a 1929 fire that took ten lives during a Pathé production in Manhattan. Using a mix of Rick Altman's "crisis historiography" and what Paul Virilio terms "techno-analysis," it calls for greater attention to the ecological, labor, and gender politics of cinema's technological history and its persistent and uncontainable failures.