"New" Hollywood

During the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, up until more recent years, films took on more pressing and important topics. Hollywood produced anti-establishment films (i.e. Bonnie and Clyde), escapist blockbusters (i.e. Star Wars), and went on to focus on things such as romance, family, gender, sexuality, race, and urban issues.

More recently films have taken on this new face that is shoving profanity, sex, and other crude forms of behavior in its viewers faces. Michael Medved, co-host of public television’s Sneak Previews, claimed that today’s films glamourizes violence, slanders marriage, mocks authority, promotes sexual promiscuity, and ridicules religion.

While what Medved is true, there is more to the story. David Denby, film critic, has observed that in 1966 when the Production Code was abandoned the amount of sex, violence, and profanity increased; but in the 1980s and 90s Hollywood also increased its amount of entertainment for families.

There is definite reasons why Hollywood is focusing more so on these types of movies. The cost of making and marketing films has sky rocketed and is still rising (an average of $40 million per film today). This has caused Hollywood to have to produce only guaranteed hits, which are loaded with special effects, sequels, and also remakes of older films, foreign films, and even old TV shows.

Since the mid-1980s, movie-goers have dramatically decreased, making teenage boys the largest single group of movie-goers. So for them to have hits, they focus on these crude action films that are easily understood. 

Hollywood: Before & After WWII

Leading up to the WWII and at the beginning of 1946, Hollywood reigned over the international movie industry and box office figures were the highest in history. But from the years 1946-1958, Hollywood was in a terror and was doomed.

In the formative years of the American film industry, it was controlled by refugees, mainly from Eastern Europe and all of them Jewish. These movie moguls set up so that they not only produced movies, but distributed them as well. They went on to establish an organization that controlled film producers and distributers, and this organization set up an international censorship office. But with all of this, creative talent was controlled by these rules and regulations, when all they wanted was freedom.

The Great Depression really put a damper on Hollywood, and it almost bankrupted the movie industry. To preserve through this time, the movie moguls had to share their power with the moneymen of Wall Street. America’s isolationist policies really heated up the problems that Hollywood faced in the years before WWII. The anti-trust division of the government tried to break Hollywood’s monopoly, but the film industry held it off.

The battles with the industry paused when America went to war at the end of 1941, and remained paused between 1942-1945. Once America won the war, many people found themselves ready to get back to life and create families, and started the move to the suburbs. This move really affected the way people attended the movies, it was becoming too expensive and inconvenient for them to go to indoor movies. Hollywood realized this and started creating drive-in theaters, which sky rocketed in popularity.

With all of the postwar issues, Hollywood was hit hard. Downsizing came about quickly and layoffs reduced not only the number of films but the types of films as well. This fear and insecurity become very apparent in the film style, film noir, which really grew after the last days of WWII. With this, blacklisting was also put into the American film industry and hundreds of lives, careers, and friendships were crushed.

By 1948, Hollywood faced not only blacklisting, the suburb move, the rebellious foreign markets, and the loss of control of the studio system; but the US Supreme Court also declared the 1948 Paramount Decision that Hollywood’s monolithic studio system had to end. This free market created lots of problems and by the end of the 50s, many movie houses went out of business.

The real winners in all of this were the minor studies, because movie moguls found themselves falling from power. This hectic time also brought out Hollywood’s best creative talent. 

Film Sound Article Summary

           In short, in ‘Sound and Meaning in Film: A Short History of Theory and an Outline for Analysis’ was saying that what you see visually is not always the same meaning from what you get from listening and hearing. Throughout the whole paper the author, Jasper Aalbers, investigates this and offers up an introduction in the theory of film sound (from the early stages all the way to the 1980s and 90s) and he gives a rough outline of what he thinks is a rich approach to researching film sounds.

            In this paper, Aalbers divided the content into three different sections. The first was to discuss the history of film sound theory, the second was the modern debate on the ontology of film sound, in which sound is equal to the image, and lastly he proposed basic question that can be asked of film sounds and the more complex issues the questions lead to.

            The first section talks about how originally film was looked at as essentially a visual art form. Film history traditionally says that The Jazz Singer (1927) was the first sound film, when in reality it was in August of 1926 when Warner Brothers adopted Western Electric’s sound-on-disc system to create a series of short films. In the 1920s and 30s, a so-called formalist theory was developed that saw the medium as a visual medium only. It wasn’t until after WWII when realist theorists challenged the formalist theorists. Then in the 1960s and 70s the politically engaged (leftist) film theorists turned attention from the content, style, and themes of film to the operation of the camera, which neglected the microphone and sound.

            In section two, Aalbers tells how in the 1980s a new debate emerged on film sound when Jean-Louis Baudry asked what film sound actually was. Alan Williams took what Baudry said and challenged it; he said that the difficulty for sound theory is that the film image is considered a representation and sound is a reproduction, when sound is actually a representation as well. Rick Altman went even farther with the argument and stated that film sound always has a double spatial narrative. James Lastra identified this position as ‘non-identity’ theory.

            Section three talked about how Bordwell and Thompson’s ‘Film Art: An Introduction’ brought up some different questions. It asked what sounds are present taking into account volume, pitch, etc. It also said what rhythmical relations are there between image and the sound and whether the sound is faithful or unfaithful to its perceived source and what purposes are fulfilled and what effects are achieved by the sonic manipulations. Aalbers takes on all of these questions and answers them with his own insight.

            At the end, Aalbers states that the object of his research is to outline keynote sounds and sound marks of Amsterdam, London, and Berlin as represented in film, in addition to the narrative functions of urban sounds. 

Film Industry-Silence to Sound

1.     The film industry began in big cities like New York, because despite the smoke/steam they filmed on the rooftops. They did this because sunlight was essential. The “studio city” was Fort Lee, NJ because it was just across the river from New York.

2.     The filmmakers moved to California because it was a blissful contrast to where they were at the time. It was safe and sunny 365 days a year. They finally arrived in Hollywood in 1911.

3.     The DeMilles were brothers who came to California from New York in 1913. They brought the Laskey Feature Play Co with them and they recorded the first feature film from California, The Squawman.

4.     Deforest invented the Phonofilm. It combined his amplifier and picture to record sound on film.

5.     Warner Brothers was the first studio to introduce sound, but Fox joined as well. Most others were hesitant and wanted them to test it out first.

6.     Fox teamed up with Thomas Case to present Movietone. They created Fox Movietone News, which was weekly news. They equipped their theatres with sound, and most politicians spoke on the news.

7.     Actors had to see if they had a “voice” when sound was introduced. Each actor had to go in for a day and see if they had a “voice” that could be recorded. Lots of careers ended, especially for foreign actors. Actors had to go to stage training and voice schools to learn how to talk.

8.     Movies changed when sound was introduced by film slowing down and sound becoming all-important. The cameramen “forgot” how to film, and soundmen ruled filmmakers.

9.     Louis Lumiere invented the Cinematograph, which was a self-contained camera and projector. It was the first apparatus for making and showing films. Thomas Edison invented the Kinetoscope, which was the movie viewing system.