Ainsi naquit Hollywood: Avant l'âge d'or, les ambitions de la Triangle et des premiers studios by Marc Vernet Armand Colin (review)

Like its title playfully suggests, in Ainsi naquit Hollywood, Marc Vernet tells the story of the short and tumultuous life of the Triangle Film Corporation, from its genesis in 1915 to its downfall in 1919, as a case study to better understand the crucial transitional years leading to Hollywood's studio system. The project is an impressive undertaking, as Vernet surveyed every known archival collection related to Triangle, mobilizing a network of archives and archivists, first from Paris (Cinémathèque française, Archives françaises du film) and Madison (Wisconsin Historical Society), which led him to Brussels (Cinémathèque royale de belgique), Culpeper (Library of Congress), Los Angeles (Margaret Herrick Library), New York City (MoMA), and Oslo (Nasjonalbiblioteket). Paris's and Madison's holdings alone represent forty-two feet of production and administrative documents (130 boxes), two thousand production stills, and fifty-two microfilms (administrative documents), which Vernet scrutinized systematically.

One of Vernet's ambitions was to do justice to a period of film history that remains understudied, and that Charlie Keil characterized as Hollywood's transition period (1907–20), and convey the whirlwind of forces, strategies, and situations that shaped its chronology. Choosing to focus on the short-lived Triangle was a way for Vernet to avoid an encyclopedic approach and better highlight the intricate play of "alliances, conflicts, and concurrences" (11) constitutive of the birth of the studio system. Ainsi naquit Hollywood is also the first publication revealing the contents of the Triangle collection held by the Cinémathèque française. Indeed, the collection was acquired by Henri Langlois from John E. Allen in 1961 but was only cataloged and made available to researchers in 1996. Vernet was in charge of the Cinémathèque française's research center from its creation in 1992 to 2006, so he made the most of his familiarity with this collection by selecting and analyzing a significant number of stunning production stills reproduced alongside his text.

Vernet adopts a pedagogical approach in his introductory chapters (introduction and chapter 1) and takes the time to describe the provenance and contents of the Triangle/Aitken paper collection before diving into its intricate history. His attention to detail when surveying the collections is commendable and offers a good example of what to look for when researching production archives. For example, he describes the system Thomas H. Ince followed to track a film's production through the continuity script, standardizing the paper's shape and color as well as the fonts used to correspond to production stages. The publisher reproduced several pages of the continuity script for The Painted Soul (Scott Sidney, 1915) as well as its "complete film report" and financial report as illustrations. Vernet's opening chapter "La Formation des Firmes" characterizes the film industry's move from the East to the West Coast and serves as a good survey of the literature on the period. Vernet reinforces the idea that the film industry, if first implanted on the East Coast, almost simultaneously developed on the West Coast and that the locations coexisted and were often dependent on each other at least until 1922. Vernet's argument is that, between 1909 and 1922, the film industry structured itself according to different models (trusts, vertical or horizontal integration, and independent producers working with one distributor) and was shaped by four areas of competition: (1) Edison's Trust versus the Independents; (2) the Independents in competition with each other as they strived to control the national market; (3) competition between proponents of different film formats (short programs vs. feature film), which had lasting consequences on film exhibition; and finally, (4) competition between the different actors of the field, first between producers and distributors, and then distributors and exhibitors after Chaplin signed with First National in 1917 (70). Vernet is meticulous in describing all the forces at play in the...