Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907–1913

2. “Boom Time in the Moving-Picture Business” : Industrial Structure, Production Practices, and the Trade Press

2 "Boom Time in the Moving-Picture Business": Industrial Structure, Production Practices, and the Trade Press Three years ago there was not a nickelodeon, or five-cent theater devoted to moving-picture shows, in America. Today there are between four and five thousand running and solvent, and the number is still increasing rapidly. This is the boom time in the moving-picture business. Everybody is making money-manufacturers, renters, jobbers, exhibitors. Overproduction looms up as a certainty of the near future; but now, as one press agent said enthusiastically, "this line is a Klondike." JOSEPH MEDILL PATTERSON, Saturday Evening Post (23 November 1907) THE PERIOD 1907-13 was a tumultuous one for the American film industry , as the exhibition landscape was transformed by the proliferation of small nickelodeon theaters, often converted storefronts. This nickelodeon boom, which began in 1905 and stretched into 1908, revolutionized the exhibition sector and led to a significant upsurge in demand for films.1 Domestic producers eventually met the demand but only after industrial restructuring. The Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), incorporated in September 1908, merged the interests ofthe most prominent producers and set out conditions aimed at standardizing print manufacture and delivery. The rate of market growth outpaced the MPPC's attempts at controlling it, however, and after 1909, a growing number of new producers appeared, aligned with the so-called Independent movement. At the same time, production extended beyond the established New York-Chicago hub to include other locales, California in particular. Finally, a trade press grew up around the burgeoning industry, reflecting and communicating the changing status of an increasingly prominent entertainment form. One could hardly expect the films made at this time to emerge un20 Structure, Practices, and the Trade Press 21 touched by the dramatic changes occurring within the institutions that produced them. Even so, I am not interested in demonstrating, say, how one can draw a direct line from the emergent consolidation of manufacturing power to the increased reliance on continuity practices after 1909. Instead, I substitute for such a dubious model of causality a more reasonable proposition: industrial conditions encouraged production trends that fostered efficiency and centralization; these trends, in tum, facilitated the development of the form of cinema unique to this period. Nowhere is the signaling ofthese trends more evident than in the pages ofthe trade press of the day. The trade press functioned as the industry's mouthpiece, prescribing aesthetic rules, describing formal tendencies, and voicing objections to perceived transgressions of acceptable norms. Though many industrial forces played a role in shaping the distinctive formal features ofthe transitional period, I have elected to concentrate on three exemplary mediating influences in this chapter-the structure of the industry, dominant modes of production and production practices, and the trade press and its discourse. Each influence exerted pressure on the period's film form, but none did so in a manner that ensured predictable results. Within each area discussed herein, contingencies tend to block any prospect ofoutright determination. Did changes to industrial structure ensure that leading producers would be at the vanguard of formal change? Yes, if one examines the 1908 output of Biograph, one ofthe key agents in the formation of the MPPC in that year; no, if one studies chief rival Edison's films instead. Why do Biograph's films undergo a marked transformation when Edison's do not? Features unique to each company-personnel changes, varying production practices, and differences in managerial approaches-apparently overrode the similar role both companies played in the restructuring of the industry.2 Trade organizations and the trade press consistently trumpeted the virtues of harmonizing interests and standardizing production methods by 1909, but film companies still resisted the message. The exigencies of a shooting situation could compound a company's unwillingness or inability to adhere to prescribed norms of filmmaking practice. Finally, trade press advice, while easily proffered, was not always followed; moreover, commentators in the press often found themselves in disagreement with one another, or notably out of sync with the affinities ofthe filmmakers that they monitored. Nonetheless, these complications to a straightforward model of direct influence should neither surprise nor concern us unduly. (In fact, a history predicated only 22 "Boom Time in the Moving-Picture Business" on patterns of clear-cut determination strikes me as far more suspect.) In a period marked by flux, where the most consistent feature is contingency, the resultant portrait of proximate influential...