Innovations Necessary for the Advent of Cinema:
Optical toys, shadow shows, 'magic lanterns,' and visual tricks have existed for thousands of years. Many inventors, scientists, manufacturers and scientists have observed the visual phenomenon that a series of individual still pictures set into motion created the illusion of movement - a concept termed persistence of vision. This illusion of motion was first described by British physician Peter Mark Roget in 1824, and was a first step in the development of the cinema.
A number of technologies, simple optical toys and mechanical inventions related to motion and vision were developed in the early to late 19th century that were precursors to the birth of the motion picture industry:
- [A very early version of a "magic lantern" was invented in the 17th century by Athanasius Kircher in Rome. It was a device with a lens that projected images from transparencies onto a screen, with a simple light source (such as a candle).]
- 1824 - the invention of the Thaumatrope (the earliest version of an optical illusion toy that exploited the concept of "persistence of vision" first presented by Peter Mark Roget in a scholarly article) by an English doctor named Dr. John Ayrton Paris
- 1831 - the discovery of the law of electromagnetic induction by English scientist Michael Faraday, a principle used in generating electricity and powering motors and other machines (including film equipment)
- 1832 - the invention of the Fantascope (also called Phenakistiscope or "spindle viewer") by Belgian inventor Joseph Plateau, a device that simulated motion. A series or sequence of separate pictures depicting stages of an activity, such as juggling or dancing, were arranged around the perimeter or edges of a slotted disk. When the disk was placed before a mirror and spun or rotated, a
 spectator looking through the slots 'perceived' a moving picture.
- 1834 - the invention and patenting of another stroboscopic device adaptation, the Daedalum (renamed the Zoetrope in 1867 by American William Lincoln) by British inventor William George Horner. It was a hollow, rotating drum/cylinder with a crank, with a strip of sequential photographs, drawings, paintings or illustrations on the interior surface and regularly spaced narrow slits through which a spectator observed the 'moving' drawings.
- 1839 - the birth of still photography with the development of the first commercially-viable daguerreotype (a method of capturing still images on silvered, copper-metal plates) by French painter and inventor Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre
- 1841 - the patenting of calotype (or Talbotype, a process for printing negative photographs on high-quality paper) by British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot
- 1861 - the invention of the Kinematoscope, patented by Philadelphian Coleman Sellers, an improved rotating paddle machine to view (by hand-cranking) a series of stereoscopic still pictures on glass plates that were sequentially mounted in a cabinet-box
- 1869 - the development of celluloid by John Wesley Hyatt, patented in 1870 and trademarked in 1873 - later used as the base for photographic film
- 1870 - the first demonstration of the Phasmotrope (or Phasmatrope) by Henry Renno Heyl in Philadelphia, that showed a rapid succession of still or posed photographs of dancers, giving the illusion of motion
- 1877 - the invention of the Praxinoscope by French inventor Charles Emile Reynaud - it was a 'projector' device with a mirrored drum that created the illusion of movement with picture strips, a refined version of the Zoetrope with mirrors at the center of the drum instead of slots; public demonstrations of the Praxinoscope were made by the early 1890s with screenings of 15 minute 'movies' at his Parisian Theatre Optique
- 1879 - Thomas Alva Edison's first public exhibition of an efficient incandescent light bulb, later used for film projectors
Late 19th Century Inventions and Experiments: Muybridge, Marey, Le Prince and Eastman
 Pioneering Britisher Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), an early photographer and inventor, was famous for his photographic loco-motion studies (of animals and humans) at the end of the 19th century (such as 1882's published "The Horse in Motion"). In the 1870s, Muybridge experimented with instantaneously recording the movements of a galloping horse, first at a Sacramento (California) race track. In June, 1878, he successfully conducted a 'chronophotography' experiment in Palo Alto (California) for his wealthy San Francisco benefactor, Leland Stanford, using a multiple series of cameras to record a horse's gallops - this conclusively proved that all four of the horse's feet were off the ground at the same time.
 Muybridge's pictures, published widely in the late 1800s, were often cut into strips and used in a Praxinoscope, a descendant of the zoetrope device, invented by Charles Emile Reynaud in 1877. The Praxinoscope was the first 'movie machine' that could project a series of images onto a screen. Muybridge's stop-action series of photographs helped lead to his own 1879 invention of the Zoopraxiscope (or "zoogyroscope", also called the "wheel of life"), a primitive motion-picture projector machine that also recreated the illusion of movement (or animation) by projecting images - rapidly displayed in succession - onto a screen from photos printed on a rotating glass disc.
 True motion pictures, rather than eye-fooling 'animations', could only occur after the development of film (flexible and transparent celluloid) that could record split-second pictures. Some of the first experiments in this regard were conducted by Parisian innovator and physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey in the 1880s. He was also studying, experimenting, and recording bodies (most often of flying animals, such as pelicans in flight) in motion using photographic means (and French astronomer Pierre-Jules-Cesar Janssen's "revolving photographic plate" idea).
 In 1882, Marey, often claimed to be the 'inventor of cinema,' constructed a camera (or "photographic gun") that could take multiple (12) photographs per second of moving animals or humans - called chronophotography or serial photography, similar to Muybridge's work on taking multiple exposed images of running horses. [The term shooting a film was possibly derived from Marey's invention.] He was able to record multiple images of a subject's movement on the same camera plate, rather than the individual images Muybridge had produced.
Marey's chronophotographs (multiple exposures on single glass plates and on strips of sensitized paper - celluloid film - that passed automatically through a camera of his own design) were revolutionary. He was soon able to achieve a frame rate of 30 images. Further experimentation was conducted by French-born Louis Aime Augustin Le Prince in 1888. Le Prince used long rolls of paper covered with photographic emulsion for a camera that he devised and patented. Two short fragments survive of his early motion picture film (one of which was titled Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge).
The work of Muybridge, Marey and Le Prince laid the groundwork for the development of motion picture cameras, projectors and transparent celluloid film - hence the development of cinema. American inventor George Eastman, who had first manufactured photographic dry plates in 1878, provided a more stable type of celluloid film with his concurrent developments in 1888 of sensitized paper roll photographic film (instead of glass plates) and a convenient "Kodak" small box camera (a still camera) that used the roll film. He improved upon the paper roll film with another invention in 1889 - perforated celluloid(synthetic plastic material coated with gelatin) roll-film with photographic emulsion.
The Birth of US Cinema: Thomas Edison and William K.L. Dickson
In the late 1880s, famed American inventor Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) (and his young British assistant William Kennedy Laurie Dickson (1860-1935)) in his laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey, borrowed from the earlier work of Muybridge, Marey, Le Prince and Eastman. Their goal was to construct a device for recording movement on film, and another device for viewing the film. Dickson must be credited with most of the creative and innovative developments - Edison only provided the research program and his laboratories for the revolutionary work.
 Although Edison is often credited with the development of early motion picture cameras and projectors, it was Dickson, in November 1890, who devised a crude, motor-powered camera that could photograph motion pictures - called a Kinetograph. This was one of the major reasons for the emergence of motion pictures in the 1890s. Edison Studios was formally known as the Edison Manufacturing Company (1894-1911), with innovations due largely to the work of Edison's assistant Dickson in the mid-1890s.
The motor-driven camera was designed to capture movement with a synchronized shutter and sprocket system (Dickson's unique invention) that could move the film through the camera by an electric motor. The Kinetograph used film which was 35mm wide and had sprocket holes to advance the film. The sprocket system would momentarily pause the film roll before the camera's shutter to create a photographic frame (a still or photographic image). The formal introduction of the Kinetograph in October of 1892 set the standard for theatrical motion picture cameras still used today. However, moveable hand-cranked cameras soon became more popular, because the motor-driven cameras were heavy and bulky.
 In 1891, Dickson also designed an early version of a movie-picture projector (an optical lantern viewing machine) based on the Zoetrope - called the Kinetoscope. In 1889 or 1890, Dickson filmed his first experimental Kinetoscope trial film, Monkeyshines No. 1, the only surviving film from the cylinder kinetoscope, and apparently thefirst motion picture ever produced on photographic film in the United States. It featured the movement of laboratory assistant Sacco Albanese, filmed with a system using tiny images that rotated around the cylinder.
 The first public demonstration of motion pictures in the US using the Kinetoscope occurred at the Edison Laboratories to the Federation of Women’s Clubs on May 20, 1891, with the showing ofDickson Greeting. The very short film’s subject in the test footage was William K.L. Dickson himself, bowing, smiling and ceremoniously taking off his hat.
On Saturday, April 14, 1894, a refined version of Edison's Kinetoscope began commercial operation. The floor-standing, box-like viewing device was basically a bulky, coin-operated, movie "peep show" cabinet for a single customer (in which the images on a continuous film loop-belt were viewed in motion as they were rotated in front of a shutter and an electric lamp-light). The Kinetoscope, the forerunner of the motion picture film projector (without sound), was finally patented on August 31, 1897 (Edison applied for the patent in 1891). The viewing device quickly became popular in carnivals, Kinetoscope parlors, amusement arcades, and sideshows for a number of years.
 The world's first film production studio - or "America's first movie studio," the Black Maria, or the Kinetographic Theater (and dubbed "The Doghouse" by Edison himself), was built on the grounds of Edison's laboratories at West Orange, New Jersey, on February 1, 1893, at a cost of $637.67. It was constructed for the purpose of making film strips for the Kinetoscope. It was a black, tar-paper covered building/studio (with a retractable or hinged, flip-up roof to allow sunlight in), and built with a turntable to orient itself throughout the day to follow the natural sunlight.
 In early May of 1893 at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, Edison conducted the world's first public demonstration of films viewed through a Kinetoscope viewer and shot using the Kinetograph in the Black Maria. The exhibited 34-second film was titled Blacksmith Scene, and showed three people pretending to be blacksmiths.
 The first motion pictures made in the Black Maria were deposited for copyright by Dickson at the Library of Congress in August, 1893. In early January 1894, The Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze (aka Fred Ott's Sneeze) was one of the first series of short films made by Dickson for the Kinetoscope viewer in Edison's Black Maria studio with fellow assistant Fred Ott. The short five-second film was made for publicity purposes, as a series of still photographs to accompany an article in Harper's Weekly. It was the earliest surviving, copyrighted motion picture (or "flicker") - composed of an optical record (and medium close-up) of Fred Ott, an Edison employee, sneezing comically for the camera.
Most of the first films shot at the Black Maria included segments of magic shows, plays, vaudeville performances (with dancers and strongmen), acts from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, various boxing matches and cockfights, and scantily-clad women. Most of the earliest moving images, however, were non-fictional, unedited, crude documentary, "home movie" views of ordinary slices of life - street scenes, the activities of police or firemen, or shots of a passing train. [Footnote: the 'Black Maria' studio appeared in Universal's comedy Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Cops (1955).]
  In the early 1890s, Edison and Dickson also devised a prototype sound-film system called theKinetophonograph or Kinetophone - a precursor of the 1891 Kinetoscope with a cylinder-playing phonograph (and connected earphone tubes) to provide the unsynchronized sound. The projector was connected to the phonograph with a pulley system, but it didn't work very well and was difficult to synchronize. It was formally introduced in 1895, but soon proved to be unsuccessful since competitive, better synchronized devices were also beginning to appear at the time. The first known (and only surviving) film with live-recorded sound made to test the Kinetophone was the 17-second Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1894-1895).
In mid-April 1894, the Holland Brothers opened the first Kinetoscope Parlor at 1155 Broadway in New York City and for the first time, they commercially exhibited movies, as we know them today, in their amusement arcade. Patrons paid 25 cents as the admission charge to view films in five kinetoscope machines placed in two rows. Young Griffo v. Battling Charles Barnett was the first 'movie' to be screened for a paying audience on May 20, 1895, at a storefront at 153 Broadway in NYC. The 4-minute B&W film was made by Woodville Latham and his sons Otway and Grey. The staged fight had been filmed with an Eidoloscope Camera on the roof of Madison Square Garden on May 4, 1895 between Australian boxer Albert Griffiths (Young Griffo) and Charles Barnett. Shortly thereafter, nearly 500 people became cinema's first major audience during the showings of films with titles such as Barber Shop,Blacksmiths, Cock Fight, Wrestling, and Trapeze. Edison's film studio was used to supply films for this sensational new form of entertainment. More Kinetoscope parlors soon opened in other cities (San Francisco, Atlantic City, and Chicago).
  Early spectators in Kinetoscope parlors were amazed by even the most mundane moving images in very short films (between 30 and 60 seconds) - an approaching train or a parade, women dancing, dogs terrorizing rats, and twisting contortionists. In 1895, Edison exhibited hand-colored or tinted movies, including Annabelle, the Serpentine Dancer, in Atlanta, Georgia at the Cotton States Exhibition. In one of Edison's 1896 films entitled The Kiss (1896), May Irwin and John C. Rice re-enacted the final scene from the Broadway play musical The Widow Jones - it was a close-up of a kiss. Disgruntled, Dickson left Edison to form his own company in 1895, called the American Mutoscope Company (see below). [By the 1897 patent date of the Kinetoscope, both the camera (kinetograph) and the method of viewing films (kinetoscope) were on the decline with the advent of more modern screen projectors for larger audiences.]
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The History of Film
The 1920s
The Pre-Talkies and the Silent Era
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Foundations of the Prolific Film Industry:
Films really blossomed in the 1920s, expanding upon the foundations of film from earlier years. Most US film production at the start of the decade occurred in or near Hollywood on the West Coast, although some films were still being made in New Jersey and in Astoria on Long Island (Paramount). By the mid-20s, movies were big business (with a capital investment totaling over $2 billion) with some theatres offering double features. By the end of the decade, there were 20 Hollywood studios, and the demand for films was greater than ever. Most people are unaware that the greatest output of feature films in the US occurred in the 1920s and 1930s (averaging about 800 film releases in a year) - nowadays, it is remarkable when production exceeds 500 films in a year.
 Throughout most of the decade, silent films were the predominant product of the film industry, having evolved from vaudevillian roots. But the films were becoming bigger (or longer), costlier, and more polished. They were being manufactured, assembly-line style, in Hollywood's 'entertainment factories,' in which production was broken down and organized into its various components (writing, costuming, makeup, directing, etc.).
Even the earliest films were organized into genres or types, with instantly-recognizable storylines, settings, costumes, and characters. The major genre emphasis was on swashbucklers, historical extravaganzas, and melodramas, although all kinds of films were being produced throughout the decade. Films varied from sexy melodramas and biblical epics by Cecil B. DeMille, to westerns (such as Cruze's The Covered Wagon (1923)), horror films, gangster/crime films, war films, the first feature documentary or non-fictional narrative film (Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922)), romances, mysteries, and comedies (from the silent comic masters Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd).
The Major Film Studios: The Big Five
1920-1930 was the decade between the end of the Great War and the Depression following the Stock Market Crash. Film theaters and studios were not initially affected in this decade by the Crash in late 1929. The basic patterns and foundations of the film industry (and its economic organization) were established in the 1920s. The studio system was essentially born with long-term contracts for stars, lavish production values, and increasingly rigid control of directors and stars by the studio's production chief and in-house publicity departments. After World War I and into the early 1920s, America was the leading producer of films in the world - using Thomas Ince's "factory system" of production, although the system did limit the creativity of many directors. Production was in the hands of the major studios (that really flourished after 1927 for almost 20 years), and the star system was burgeoning.
Originally, in the earliest years of the motion picture industry, production, distribution, and exhibition were separately controlled. When the industry rapidly grew, these functions became integrated under one directorship to maximize profits, something called vertical integration. There were eight major (and minor) studios (see below) that dominated the industry. They were the ones that had most successfully consolidated and integrated all aspects of a film's development. By 1929, the film-making firms that were to rule and monopolize Hollywood for the next half-century were the giants or the majors, sometimes dubbed The Big Five. They produced more than 90 percent of the fiction films in America and distributed their films both nationally and internationally. Each studio somewhat differentiated its products from other studios.
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The Big Five Studios
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1.
| Warner Bros. Pictures, incorporated in 1923 by Polish brothers (Jack, Harry, Albert, and Sam); in 1925, Warner Brothers merged with First National, forming Warner Bros.-First National Pictures; the studio's first principal asset was Rin Tin Tin; became prominent by 1927 due to its introduction of talkies (The Jazz Singer (1927)) and early 30s gangster films; it was known as the "Depression studio"; in the 40s, it specialized in Bugs Bunny animations and other cartoons |
Warner Bros.
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2.
| Adolph Zukor's Famous Players (1912) and Jesse Lasky'sFeature Play - merged in 1916 to form Famous Players-LaskyCorporation; it spent $1 million on United Studios' property (on Marathon Street) in 1926; the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation became Paramount studios in 1927, and was officially named Paramount Pictures in 1935; its greatest silent era stars were Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, and Rudolph Valentino; Golden Age stars included Mae West, W.C. Fields, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and director Cecil B. DeMille |
Famous Players-Lasky
(Paramount)
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3.
| RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) Pictures, evolved from the Mutual Film Corporation (1912), was established in 1928 as a subsidiary of RCA; it was formed by RCA, Keith-Orpheum Theaters, and the FBO Company (Film Booker's Organization) - which was owned by Joseph P. Kennedy (who had already purchased what remained of Mutual); this was the smallest studio of the majors; kept financially afloat with top-grossing Astaire-Rogers musicals in the 30s, King Kong (1933), and Citizen Kane (1941); at one time, RKO was acquired by eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes |
RKO
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4.
| Marcus Loew of Loew's, Inc., was the parent firm of what eventually became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Metro Pictures Corporation was a production company founded in 1916 by Richard A. Rowland and Louis B. Mayer. In 1918, Mayer left this partnership to start up his own production company in 1918, called Louis B. Mayer Pictures. In 1920, Metro Pictures Corporation (with its already-acquired Goldwyn Pictures Corporation) was purchased by early theater exhibitor Marcus Loew of Loew's Inc. In another acquisition, Loew merged his 'Metro-Goldwyn production company with Louis B. Mayer Pictures.
So, in summary, MGM, first named Metro-Goldwyn Pictures, was ultimately formed in 1924 from the merger of three US film production companies: Metro Pictures Corporation (1916),Goldwyn Pictures Corporation (1917), and the Louis B. Mayer Pictures Company (1918); Irving Thalberg (nicknamed the 'boy wonder') was head of production at MGM from 1924 until his death in 1936; the famous MGM lion roar in the studio's opening logo was first recorded and viewed in a film in 1928; its greatest early successes were The Big Parade (1925), Broadway Melody (1929), Grand Hotel (1932), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), A Night at the Opera (1935), The Good Earth (1937), Gone With the Wind (1939), The Wizard of Oz (1939), as well as Tarzanfilms, Tom and Jerry cartoons, and stars such as Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, and Spencer Tracy |
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
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5.
| Fox Film Corporation/Foundation, founded in 1912 by NY nickelodeon owner William Fox (originally a garment industry worker), was first known for Fox Movietone news and then B-westerns; its first film was Life's Shop Window (1914); it later became 20th-Century Fox, formed through the 1935 merger of20th Century Pictures Company (founded in 1933 by Darryl F. Zanuck) and Fox; it became famous for Shirley Temple films in the mid-30s and Betty Grable musicals in the 40s |
Movietone Newsreels
 
20th Century Pictures
20th-Century Fox
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The Big-Five studios had vast studios with elaborate sets for film production. They owned their own film-exhibiting theatres (about 50% of the seating capacity in the US in mostly first-run houses in major cities), as well as production and distribution facilities. They distributed their films to this network of studio-owned, first-run theaters (or movie palaces), mostly in urban areas, which charged high ticket prices and drew huge audiences. They required blindor block bookings of films, whereby theatre owners were required to rent a block of films (often cheaply-made, less-desirable B-pictures) in order for the studio to agree to distribute the one prestige A-level picture that the theatre owner wanted to exhibit. This technique set the terms for a film's release and patterns of exhibition and guaranteed success for the studio's productions. [Monopolistic studio control lasted twenty years until the late 1940s, when a federal decree (in U.S. vs. Paramount) ordered the studios to divest their theatres, similar to the rulings against the MPPC - the Edison Trust.]
The Minor Film Studios: The Little Three
Three smaller, minor studios were dubbed The Little Three, because each of them lacked one of the three elements required in vertical integration - owning their own theaters:
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The Little Three Studios
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| 1. | Universal Pictures, (or Universal Film Manufacturing Co), founded by Carl Laemmle in 1912; formed from a merger of Laemmle's own IMP - Independent Motion Picture Company (founded in 1909) with Bison 101, the U. S. production facilities of French studio Éclair, Nestor Film Co., and several other film companies; its first successes were W.C. Fields and Abbott and Costello comedies, the Flash Gordon serial, and Woody Woodpecker cartoons |
Universal
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| 2. | United Artists, formed in 1919 by movie industry icons Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., Charlie Chaplin, and director D.W. Griffith as an independent company to produce and distribute their films; United Artists utilized an 18-acre property owned by Pickford and Fairbanks, known as the Pickford-Fairbanks Studio, and later named United Artists Studio in the 1920s |
United Artists
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Columbia Pictures, originally the C.B.C. Film Sales Company in 1920 founded by brothers Jack and Harry Cohn, and Joseph Brandt, and officially named Columbia in 1924; their studios opened at the old location of Christie-Nestor Studios; established prominence with It Happened One Night (1934), Rita Hayworth films, Lost Horizon (1937), The Jolson Story (1946), and Batmanserials.
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CBC Film Sales
Columbia Pictures
(1924-1936)
Columbia
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"Poverty Row" Studios and Other Independents:
Other studios or independents also existed in a shabby area in Hollywood dubbed "Poverty Row" (Sunset Blvd. and Gower Street) where cheap, independent pictures were made with low budgets, stock footage, and second-tier actors. It was the site of Harry and Jack Cohn's new business, theC.B.C. Film Sales Company (later becoming Columbia Pictures). Many of the films of the independents were either horror films, westerns, science-fiction, or thrillers:
- Disney Studios - specializing in animation; Walt and Roy Disney originally opened their first studio in 1923 in Los Angeles in the back of the Holly-Vermont Realty office, and called it Disney Bros. Studio; in a few years, they opened a new facility in downtown LA; in the late 30s, they relocated to a 51-acre lot in Burbank, and changed their name to Walt Disney Productions
- the Monogram Picture Corporation - Rayart Pictures, which had taken over the old Selig Studio in Echo Park in 1924, became Monogram Pictures in 1930; it was founded by W. Ray Johnston to make mostly inexpensive Westerns and series (Charlie Chan, the Bowery Boys, etc.)
 Selznick International Pictures / David O. Selznick - it was formed in 1935 and headed up by David O. Selznick (previously the head of production at RKO), the son of independent film producer Lewis J. Selznick, the founder of Selznick Pictures- Samuel Goldwyn Pictures - headed up by independent film producer Samuel L. Goldwyn
- 20th Century Pictures - formed in 1933 by Darryl Zanuck (head of production at Warner Brothers) with Joseph Schenck, brother of Nicholas Schenck, president of Loew's, Inc., the parent company of MGM; in 1935, the Fox Film Corporationmerged with 20th Century Pictures to become 20th Century-Fox, with Zanuck as president
- Republic Pictures - founded in 1935 by the merger of smaller 'poverty row' studios: Consolidated Film Industries, Mascot, Monogram and Liberty, and headed by Herbert Yates of Consolidated
Extravagant Movie Palaces:
 The major film studios built luxurious 'picture palaces' that were designed for orchestras to play music to accompany projected films. The 3,300-seat Strand Theater opened in 1914 in New York City, marking the end of the nickelodeon era and the beginning of an age of the luxurious movie palaces. By 1920, there were more than 20,000 movie houses operating in the US. The largest theatre in the world (with over 6,000 seats), the Roxy Theater (dubbed "The Cathedral of the Motion Picture"), opened in New York City in 1927, with a 6,200 seat capacity. It was opened by impresario Samuel Lionel "Roxy" Rothafel at a cost of $10 million. The first feature film shown at the Roxy Theater was UA's The Love(s) of Sunya (1927) starring Gloria Swanson (she claimed that it was her personal favorite film) and John Boles. [The Roxy was finally closed in 1960.] The Roxy was unchallenged as a showplace until Radio City Music Hall opened five years later.
Grauman's Theatres:
 Impresario Sid Grauman built a number of movie palaces in the Los Angeles area in this time period:
- the Million Dollar Theater (on S. Broadway in downtown Los Angeles), the first movie palace in Los Angeles, opened in February, 1918 with 2,345 seats, and premiered the William S. Hart western film The Silent Man (1917)
- the Egyptian Theatre (on Hollywood Boulevard) opened in 1922 with 1,760 seats; it was the first major movie palace outside of downtown Los Angeles, and noted as having Hollywood's first movie premiere; its opening film was Robin Hood (1922) that starred Douglas Fairbanks; the theatre's creation was inspired by the discovery of King Tut's tomb that same year
- the now-famous Chinese Theater, with 2,258 seats, opened in Hollywood (on Hollywood Boulevard) in May, 1927 with the premiere of Cecil B. De Mille's King of Kings (1927).
Star Imprints at Grauman's:
Grauman, dubbed as "Hollywood's Master Showman," established the tradition of having Hollywood stars place their prints in cement in front of the theater to create an instant tourist attraction ever since. (Legend has it that during the theatre's construction, silent screen actress Norma Talmadge accidentally stepped into wet cement and inspired the tradition. Grauman immortalized his own footprints, and invited Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks to do the same.) Listed below are the first 10 stars, beginning in the spring of 1927, to imprint themselves (with handprints, footprints, or signatures) in the concrete of the Chinese Theatre's forecourt:
- Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Apr. 30, 1927
- Norma Talmadge, May 18, 1927
- Norma Shearer, Aug. 1, 1927
- Harold Lloyd, Nov. 21, 1927
- William S. Hart, Nov. 28, 1927
- Tom Mix and Tony (his horse), Dec. 12, 1927
- Colleen Moore, Dec 19, 1927
- Gloria Swanson, 1927 (specific date unknown)
- Constance Talmadge, 1927 (specific date unknown)
- Charlie Chaplin, Jan, 1928
Pickford and Fairbanks:
 Two of the biggest silent movie stars of the era were Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. America flocked to the movies to see the Queen of Hollywood, dubbed "America's Sweetheart" and the most popular star of the generation - "Our Mary" Mary Pickford. She had been a child star, and had worked at Biograph as a bit actress in 1909, and only ten years later was one of the most influential figures in Hollywood at Paramount. In 1916, she was the first star to become a millionaire.
She was married to another great star, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. Their wedding in late March, 1920 was a major cultural event, although it was highly controversial since both of them had to divorce their spouses so they could marry each other. She was presented with a wedding gift - "Pickfair" [the first syllables of their last names], a twenty-two room palatial mansion (former hunting lodge) in the agricultural area of Beverly Hills - marking the start of the movement of stars to lavish homes in the suburbs of W. Hollywood and the making of Hollywood royalty. [The couple remained married from 1920-1935.] Strangely, Mary Pickford's downfall began after she bobbed her long curly hair, one of moviedom's first fashion trends, in 1928.
 Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. also became an American legend after switching from light comedies and starring in a series of exciting, costumed swashbuckler and adventure/fantasy films, starting with The Mark of Zorro (1920), soon followed with his expensively-financed, lavish adventure film Robin Hood (1922) with gigantic sets (famous for the scene in which he eluded death from sword-wielding attackers by jumping off a castle balcony and sliding down a 50 ft. curtain), and the first of four versions of the classic Arabian nights tale by director Raoul Walsh, The Thief of Bagdad (1924). This magical film used state of the art, revolutionary visual effects (for its smoke-belching dragon and underwater spider, the flying horse, the famed flying carpet, and magic armies arising from the dust) and displayed legendary production design.
Another first occurred in 1926 - a Hollywood film premiere double-featured two films together: Fairbanks' The Black Pirate (1926) with early two-color Technicolor (and the superstar's most famous stunt of riding down a ship's sail on the point of a knife) and Mary Pickford's melodramatic film Sparrows (1926). Fairbanks scored again at the close of the decade with The Iron Mask (1929). The first and only film that co-featured both stars was a talkie version of The Taming of the Shrew (1929). Pickford's Coquette (1929), her first all-talking film, won her an Academy Award, but she retired prematurely four years later.
Other 1920s Box-Office Stars:
The top box-office stars in the 1920s included Harold Lloyd, Gloria Swanson, Tom Mix, Norma Talmadge, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Colleen Moore, Norma Shearer, John Barrymore, Greta Garbo, Lon Chaney, Sr., Clara Bow, and "Little Mary" Pickford.
 Hauntingly mysterious and divine, Greta Garbo's first American film was The Torrent (1926), followed quickly by The Temptress (1926). Her first major starring vehicle was as a sultry temptress in torrid, prone love scenes with off-screen lover John Gilbert inFlesh and the Devil (1926). MGM renamed Broadway actress Lucille Le Sueur and christened her "Joan Crawford" in 1925. And Louise Brooks made her debut film in mid-decade with Street of Forgotten Men (1925). Glamorous MGM star Norma Shearer insured her future success as "The First Lady of the Screen" by marrying genius MGM production supervisor Irving Thalberg in 1927.
 Clara Bow, a red-haired, lower-class Brooklyn girl was subjected to a major publicity campaign by B. P. Schulberg (of Preferred Pictures (1920-1926) and then Paramount's head of production in the late 20s and early 30s). He promoted his up-and-coming, vivacious future star as his own personal star, after grooming and molding her for her star-making hit film The Plastic Age (1925) as a flirtatious flapper - the "hottest Jazz Baby in Film." Bow was also exceptional inDancing Mothers (1926) and in her smash hit Mantrap (1926), and was further promoted with teaser campaigns for It (1927). She soon became known as "The It (sex appeal) Girl" (in the high-living age of flappers) after its February 1927 release. She was boosted to Paramount Studios' super-stardom in the late 1920s by more publicity campaigns, fan magazine glamorization, and rumor-spreading. Bow also starred in the epic WWI film Wings (1927), and in 1928 became the highest paid movie star (at $35,000/week). But by 1933, after years of victimizing exploitation, she had gone into serious decline and retired due to hard-drinking, exhaustion, gambling, emotional problems, a poor choice of roles, the revelation of a heavy working-class Brooklyn accent in the talkies, and a burgeoning weight problem.
 Lon Chaney, Sr., the "man of a thousand faces," starred in the earliest version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), and then poignantly portrayed the title character of the Paris Opera House in The Phantom of the Opera (1925) in his signature role. The unveiling of the phantom's face, when Christine (Mary Philbin) rips off his mask - was (and still is) a startling sequence.
Young screen actress, platinum blonde starlet Jean Harlow was also 'discovered' and soon contracted with aviation millionaire/movie mogul Howard Hughes to replace the female lead in his soon-to-be-released, re-made sound version of Hell's Angels (1930), another exciting WWI film about British flying aces.
Janet Gaynor:
 Another famous screen couple, dubbed "America's Lovebirds" or "America's Sweethearts" were romantic film stars Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell who were eventually paired together in twelve films. [The fact that Farrell was homosexual was kept from the public.] Their first film was Seventh Heaven (1927), a classic romantic melodrama. For their work in Seventh Heaven, Janet Gaynor received the first "Best Actress" Academy Award and director Frank Borzage received the first "Best Director" Academy Award.
Janet Gaynor was also honored in the same year with an Academy Award for her exquisite acting in German director F. W. Murnau'sfirst American film - the beautiful Fox-produced Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), often considered the finest silent film ever made by a Hollywood studio. Murnau's succeeding films were The Four Devils (1928) and Our Daily Bread (1930), with his last film the sensual semi-travelogue documentary Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931) shot with documentarist Robert Flaherty. (A week before Tabu's premiere in early March 1931,
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The History of Film
The 1930s
The Talkies, the Growth of the Studios, and 'The Golden Age of Hollywood'
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The Golden Age of Hollywood: From 1930 to 1948
 The 1930s decade (and most of the 1940s as well) has been nostalgically labeled "The Golden Age of Hollywood" (although most of the output of the decade was black-and-white). The 30s was also the decade of the sound and color revolutions and the advance of the 'talkies', and the further development of film genres (gangster films, musicals, newspaper-reporting films, historical biopics, social-realism films, lighthearted screwball comedies, westerns and horror to name a few). It was the era in which the silent period ended, with many silent film stars not making the transition to sound (e.g., Vilmy Banky, John Gilbert, and Norma Talmadge). By 1933, the economic effects of the Depression were being strongly felt, especially in decreased movie theatre attendance.
 As the 1930s began, there were a number of unique firsts:
- young 'platinum blonde' star Jean Harlow appeared in her first major role in Howard Hughes' World War I aviation epic, Hell's Angels (1930); the "Blonde Bombshell" was signed by MGM in 1932 and soon became a major star
- enigmatic silent star Greta Garbo (originally named Greta Lovisa Gustafsson), part of MGM's galaxy of stars and nicknamed "The Divine Garbo" and "The Swedish sphinx," spoke her first immortal, husky, Swedish-accented words in director Clarence Brown's MGM film Anna Christie (1930). (As a floozy, she spoke: "Gimme a vhiskey, ginger ale on the side. And don't be stingy, baby") - it was Garbo's first talkie (advertised as "GARBO TALKS!")
- the first of Hollywood's dramatic prison dramas (a new subgenre) was produced by MGM, The Big House (1930), directed by George Hill
 B-actor John Wayne made his debut in his first major role in a western directed by Raoul Walsh, The Big Trail (1930) - one of the first films shot in Grandeur, Fox's experimental wide-screen 70mm format. Both the film and the new process flopped; it would be nine more years before his star-making appearance in Stagecoach (1939)
- Broadway actress Helen Hayes made her screen debut in The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931) and won the Best Actress Academy Award for her first talkie
- MGM stars Clark Gable and Joan Crawford starred together in the risque pre-Code film Dance, Fools, Dance (1931), the first of eight features that teamed them together
- the best-known Charlie Chan actor, Warner Oland, played the detective for the first time in Charlie Chan Carries On (1931)
- RKO won its sole Best Picture Academy Award for the western Cimarron (1931)
- in 1930, the Motion Picture Production Code, administered by Joseph I. Breen (and former Postmaster General Will Hays) set film guidelines regarding sex, violence, religion, and crime (not yet strictly enforced until the Production Code Administration (1934))
- the first daily newspaper for the film industry had its debut in 1930, The Hollywood Reporter
- Katharine Hepburn made her screen debut in A Bill of Divorcement (1932)
- Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller made his screen debut as the vine-swinging ape-man in Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932)
- Curly-topped, dimpled child star Shirley Temple appeared in her first films, an Our Gang type series of shorts titled Baby Burlesks (1933)
- the first appearance of the cartoon character Popeye was in the Betty Boop cartoon from Paramount and Max Fleischer, Popeye the Sailor (1933)
- the world's first drive-in theatre opened in Camden, N.J. in June, 1933; the fourth drive-in was located on Pico in Los Angeles, CA and opened in September, 1934
- the first Three Stooges comedy film (the first of their 190 slapstick comedy films that lasted through 1959) with Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Curly Howard, was released by Columbia, the short Woman Haters (1934) (with all the dialogue in rhyme)
- Walt Disney's 8-minute The Wise Little Hen (1934) featured the first appearance of Donald Duck
- the longest Hollywood talkie released up to that time, MGM's The Great Ziegfeld (1936), at 2 hours, 59 minutes
- MGM star Spencer Tracy won consecutive Best Actor Oscars in the late 30s for his appearances in Captains Courageous (1937) and Boys Town (1938) - this wouldn't happen again until Tom Hanks won back-to-back Oscars in the 90s for Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994)
Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich:
 Although Austrian-born director Josef von Sternberg's best works were in his silent films ( Underworld (1927), The Last Command (1928), and The Docks of New York (1929)), he acheived greatest notoriety during the 30s. Exotic German actress Marlene Dietrich's stardom was launched by von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (Germany, 1929) with her role as the leggy Lola Lola, a sensual cabaret striptease dancer and the singing of Falling in Love Again. It was Germany's first all-talking picture.
Dietrich would soon go on to star in many other films - usually with characters that were variations on Lola - jaded femme fatales. Dietrich was 'discovered' and appeared in her first Hollywood feature film, Morocco (1930), again as a nightclub singer with co-star Gary Cooper as a French legionnaire. Dietrich was subsequently promoted by Paramount Studios as a 'continental' German rival to MGM's imported star Greta Garbo. A few years later, Dietrich collaborated further with von Sternberg in Dishonored (1931), Shanghai Express (1932), Blonde Venus (1932) (with Dietrich as a demure wife who is transformed into a cabaret star), The Scarlet Empress (1934) (with Dietrich as Russia's Catherine the Great), and in The Devil is a Woman (1935) (as a money-hungry, seductive vamp). Dietrich and von Sternberg made a total of seven films together. By 1946, von Sternberg was the uncredited assistant to director King Vidor for Duel in the Sun (1946).
The Sound Era's Coming-of-Age:
 Most of the early talkies were successful at the box-office, but many of them were of poor quality - dialogue-dominated play adaptations, with stilted acting (from inexperienced performers) and an unmoving camera or microphone. Screenwriters were required to place more emphasis on characters in their scripts, and title-card writers became unemployed. The first musicals were only literal transcriptions of Broadway shows taken to the screen. Nonetheless, a tremendous variety of films were produced with a wit, style, skill, and elegance that has never been equalled - before or since.
Rouben Mamoulian, a successful Broadway director, refused to keep the cumbersome sound cameras pinned to the studio floor, and demonstrated a graceful, rhythmic, fluid, choreographed flowing style in his films - first with his directorial debut 1929 film Applause (1929) (and later with Love Me Tonight (1932)), one of the first great American musicals starring legendary Roaring 20s torch singer Helen Morgan in her first film role. Applause also introduced a revolutionary sound technique: a double-channel soundtrack with overlapping dialogue.
Mastery of techniques for the sound era were also demonstrated in the works of director Ernst Lubitsch, who advanced the action of his films with the integrated musical numbers. The first filmic musical was Lubitsch's first talkie, the witty and bubbly The Love Parade (1929/30) with Jeanette MacDonald (in her debut film) and Maurice Chevalier (in his second picture) - the recipient of six Academy Awards nominations (including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor). After directing three more musical comedies in the next three years, including Best Picture-nominated One Hour with You (1931/32) with the same leads, Lubitsch filmed his last musical, The Merry Widow (1934) with equally naturalistic musical expressions and the winner of the Best Art Direction Academy Award.
 Also, in the first filming of the Ben Hecht-MacArthur play, Lewis Milestone's The Front Page (1931), a mobile camera was combined with inventive, rapid-fire dialogue and quick-editing. Other 1931 films in the emerging 'newspaper' genre included Mervyn LeRoy's social issues film about the tabloid press entitled Five Star Final (1931) (with Edward G. Robinson and Boris Karloff in a rare, non-monster role), Frank Capra's Platinum Blonde (1931) (with Jean Harlow), and John Cromwell's Scandal Sheet (1931).
After 1932, the development of sound-mixing freed films from the limitations of recording on sets and locations. Scripts from writers were becoming more advanced with witty dialogue, realistic characters and plots. Hecht adapted Noel Coward's work for Lubitsch's Design for Living (1933), starring Gary Cooper, Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins, and Dudley Nichols adapted Maxwell Anderson's play for director John Ford's screen version Mary of Scotland (1936).
Two-Color and Three-Color (Full-Color) Technicolor Development:
 One of the first 'color' films was Thomas Edison's hand-tinted short Annabell's Butterfly Dance. Two-color (red and green) feature films were the first color films produced, including the first two-color feature film The Toll of the Sea, and then better-known films such as Stage Struck (1925) and The Black Pirate (1926). It would take the development of a new three-color camera, in 1932, to usher in true full-color Technicolor.
The first film (a short) in three-color Technicolor was Walt Disney's animated talkie Flowers and Trees (1932) in the Silly Symphonyseries. [However, others claim that the first-ever color cartoon was Ted Eschbaugh's bizarre Goofy Goat Antics (1931).] In the next year, Disney also released the colorful animation - The Three Little Pigs (1933). Its optimistic hit theme song: "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" (based upon the tune of Happy Birthday) became a Depression-era anthem. It was one of the earliest films displaying 'personality animation' - each of the three pigs had a distinctive personality.
In 1934, the first full-color, live-action short was released - La Cucaracha (1934).
 Hollywood's first full-length feature film photographed entirely in three-strip Technicolor was Rouben Mamoulian's Becky Sharp (1935) - an adaptation of English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray's Napoleonic-era novel Vanity Fair. The first musical in full-color Technicolor was Dancing Pirate (1936). And the first outdoor drama filmed in full-color was The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936).
In the late 30s, two beloved films, The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Gone with the Wind (1939), were expensively produced with Technicolor - what would the Wizard of Oz (with ruby slippers and a yellow brick road) be without color? And the trend would continue into the next decade in classic MGM musicals such as Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and Easter Parade (1948). Special-effects processes were advanced by the late 1930s, making it possible for many more films to be shot on sets rather than on-location (e.g., The Hurricane (1937) and Captains Courageous (1937).) In 1937, the Disney-produced Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) was the first feature-length animated film - a milestone. The colorful Grimm fairy tale was premiered by Walt Disney Studios - becoming fast known for pioneering sophisticated animation.
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The History of Film
The 1940s
The War and Post-War Years
The Beginnings of Film Noir
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Hollywood During the War Years:
The early years of the 40s decade were not promising for the American film industry, especially following the late 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, and the resultant loss of foreign markets. However, Hollywood film production rebounded and reached its profitable peak of efficiency during the years 1943 to 1946 - a full decade and more after the rise of sound film production, now that the technical challenges of the early 30s sound era were far behind. Advances in film technology (sound recording, lighting, special effects, cinematography and use of color) meant that films were more watchable and 'modern'. Following the end of the war, Hollywood's most profitable year in the decade was 1946, with all-time highs recorded for theatre attendance.
The world was headed toward rearmament and warfare in the early to mid-1940s, and the movie industry, like every other aspect of life, responded to the national war effort by making movies, producing many war-time favorites, and having stars (and film industry employees) enlist or report for duty. The US government's Office of War Information (OWI), formed in 1942, served as an important propaganda agency during World War II, and coordinated its efforts with the film industry to record and photograph the nation's war-time activities. Tinseltown aided in the defensive mobilization, whether as combatants, propagandists, documentary, newsreel or short film-makers, educators, fund-raisers for relief funds or war bonds, entertainers, or morale-boosters. Films took on a more realistic rather than escapist tone, as they had done during the Depression years of the 30s.
 Hollywood Canteen (1944), the West Coast's answer to Broadway's Stage Door Canteen (1943), was typical of star-studded, plotless, patriotic extravaganzas, one of several during the war years which featured big stars who entertained the troops. [Originally, the Hollywood Canteen was a nightclub for off-duty servicemen, founded in 1942 by movie stars Bette Davis, John Garfield, and others. It provided free meals and entertainment, and was located at 1451 Cahuenga Boulevard, off Sunset Boulevard.] Big name stars and directors either enlisted, performed before soldiers at military bases, or in other ways contributed to the war mobilization. Many of the leading stars and directors in motion pictures joined the service or were called to duty - Clark Gable, James Stewart, William Wyler, and Frank Capra to name a few, and male actors were definitely in short supply. Rationing, blackouts, shortages and other wartime restrictions also had their effects on US film-makers, who were forced to cut back on set construction and on-location shoots.
 A new breed of stars that arose during the war years included Van Johnson, Alan Ladd, and gorgeous GI pin-up queens Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth. (Betty Grable had signed with 20th Century Fox in 1940 and would soon became a major star of their musicals in the 1940s.) Some of Hollywood's best directors, John Ford, Frank Capra, John Huston and William Wyler, made Signal Corps documentaries or training films to aid the war effort, such as Frank Capra's Why We Fight (1942-1945) documentary series (the first film in the series, Prelude to War was released in 1943), Ford's December 7th: The Movie (1991) (finally released after being banned by the US government for 50 years) and the first popular documentary of the war titled The Battle of Midway (1942), Huston's documentaries Report From the Aleutians (1943) and The Battle of San Pietro (1945), and Wyler's sobering Air Force documentary Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944).
The Quintessential 40s Film: Casablanca
 The most subtle of all wartime propaganda films was the romantic story of self-sacrifice and heroicism in Michael Curtiz' archetypal 40s studio film Casablanca (1942). It told about a disillusioned nightclub owner (Humphrey Bogart) and a former lover (Ingrid Bergman) separated by WWII in Paris. With a limited release in late 1942 (and wider release in 1943), the resonant film was a timeless, beloved black and white work originally based on an unproduced play entitled Everybody Comes to Rick's. The quintessential 40s film is best remembered its superior script, for piano-player Dooley Wilson's singing of As Time Goes By, and memorable lines of dialogue such as: "Round up the usual suspects" and Bogart's "Here's looking at you, kid." Its success (it was awarded Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay) made Humphrey Bogart a major star, although his character reflected American neutrality with the famous line: "I stick my neck out for nobody."
War-Related Films Abound:
The 40s also offered escapist entertainment, reassurance, and patriotic themes, such as William Wyler's war-time film Mrs. Miniver (1942), starring Walter Pidgeon and Oscar-winning courageous heroine Greer Garson as husband and wife. It was a moving tribute and account of courageous war-besieged Britishers reliving the trauma of Dunkirk and coping with the war's dangers in a village. Alfred Hitchcock, who had recently migrated to the US, directed Foreign Correspondent (1940), ending it with a plea to the US to recognize the Nazi menace in Europe and end its isolationist stance.
 A variety of war-time films, with a wide range of subjects and tones, presented both the flag-waving heroics and action of the war as well as the realistic, every-day boredom and brutal misery of the experience: Dive Bomber (1941), A Yank in the R.A.F. (1941), Wake Island (1942), Guadalcanal Diary (1943), Bataan (1943), Winged Victory (1944), and Objective, Burma! (1945). Warner Bros.' Sergeant York (1941), directed by Howard Hawks, was typical of Hollywood offerings about the military - the story of a pacifist backwoods farmboy (Best Actor-winning Gary Cooper) who became the greatest US hero of World War I by single-handedly killing 25 and capturing 132 of the enemy. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) (featuring a US bomber named Ruptured Duck) starred Spencer Tracy as Lieut. Col. James Doolittle who carried out the first US bombing raid on Japan.
William Wellman's The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) - immortalized WWII Pulitzer Prize-winning combat correspondent Ernie Pyle (Burgess Meredith) and his experiences with the men of Company C of the 18th Infantry and their role in the invasion of Italy, John Ford's They Were Expendable (1945) with star John Wayne in a story about the Pacific Ocean's PT boats, Delmer Daves' Destination Tokyo (1943), Zoltan Korda's exciting epic Sahara (1943) (with Humphrey Bogart as heroic desert tank driver Sgt. Gunn), and Lewis Milestone's intense, unglamorous war films of struggle, resistance, and occupation: Edge of Darkness (1943), The North Star (1943), The Purple Heart (1944) and the excellent A Walk in the Sun (1945).
British director Michael Powell and Oscar-winning scriptwriter Emeric Pressburger joined forces for the war drama 49th Parallel (1941), the war adventureOne of Our Aircraft is Missing (1941), and the superb character study classic The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). The Royal Navy (and Lord Mountbatten) was paid tribute in writer/co-director and star Noel Coward's WW II drama In Which We Serve (1942), co-directed with David Lean in his first directorial effort. It was the most celebrated and patriotic British war film of the era. Director Carol Reed's pseudo-war documentary The Way Ahead (1944) followed the training of soldiers to fight against Rommel's Afrika Korps.
 Since You Went Away (1944) was the American homefront version of 1942's biggest hit film, Mrs. Miniver (1942) about the perserverance of a British middle-class family during the Blitz. George Stevens' The More the Merrier (1943) reflected the housing shortage in the nation's capital city during the war years. This is the Army (1943), a 'show-within-a-show' account of Irving Berlin's Broadway stage revue, introduced Kate Smith singing the patriotic song God Bless America - the US' alternate national anthem.
After the war, William Wyler directed a provocative, dramatic Best Picture-winning film about the plight of three returning G.I. veterans (Dana Andrews, Fredric March, and Harold Russell) to the homefront. The multi-Oscar winning picture The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) was produced by Samuel Goldwyn and photographed by Gregg Toland. Non-professional, disabled veteran Harold Russell won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in the film. In two of the film's memorable scenes, Hoagy Carmichael taught double-amputee Russell to play Chopsticks on the piano, and Russell displayed his vulnerabilities to his fiancee (Cathy O'Donnell). Lightening up the wartime mood was Cary Grant who portrayed Captain Henri Rochard, a French soldier in Howard Hawks' gender-bending farcical comedy I Was a Male War Bride (1949), who was obliged to dress as a woman to marry an American female soldier (Ann Sheridan).
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The History of Film
The 1950s
The Cold War and Post-Classical Era
The Era of Epic Films and
the Threat of Television
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The Dawning of the 50s:
 The 50s decade was known for many things: post-war affluence and increased choice of leisure time activities, conformity, the Korean War, middle-class values, the rise of modern jazz, the rise of 'fast food' restaurants and drive-ins ( Jack in the Box - founded in 1951; McDonalds - first franchised in 1955 in Des Plaines, IL; and A&W Root Beer Company - formed in 1950, although it had already established over 450 drive-ins throughout the country), a baby boom, the all-electric home as the ideal, white racist terrorism in the South, the advent of television and TV dinners, abstract art, the first credit card ( Diners Club, in 1951), the rise of drive-in theaters to a peak number in the late 50s with over 4,000 outdoor screens (where young teenaged couples could find privacy in their hot-rods), and a youth reaction to middle-aged cinema. Older viewers were prone to stay at home and watch television (about 10.5 million US homes had a TV set in 1950).
 In the period following WWII when most of the films were idealized with conventional portrayals of men and women, young people wanted new and exciting symbols of rebellion. Hollywood responded to audience demands - the late 1940s and 1950s saw the rise of the anti-hero - with stars like newcomers James Dean, Paul Newman (who debuted in the costume epic The Silver Chalice (1954)) and Marlon Brando, replacing more proper actors like Tyrone Power, Van Johnson, and Robert Taylor. [In later decades, this new generation of method actors would be followed by Robert DeNiro, Jack Nicholson, and Al Pacino.] Sexy anti-heroines included Ava Gardner, Kim Novak, and Marilyn Monroe - an exciting, vibrant, sexy star.
One of the decade's best comedies was Harvey (1950), with James Stewart as a lovable, eccentric drunk named Elwood P. Dowd whose best friend was an imaginary, six-foot-tall rabbit. Another of the most popular films in the late 50s was Leo McCarey's romantic drama An Affair to Remember (1957), the story of an ill-fated romance between Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant due to an automobile accident, delaying a rendezvous at the top of the Empire State Building in New York City. It was a remake of the director's own tearjerker film Love Affair (1939) with Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer. The same story would inspire the making of Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle (1993) with leads Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan (who had first appeared together in Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)), and Love Affair (1994) with real-life couple Warren Beatty and Annette Bening.
The New Teenage, Youth-Oriented Market:
The 50s decade also ushered in the age of Rock and Roll and a new younger market of teenagers. This youth-oriented group was opposed to the older generation's choice of nostalgic films, such as director Anthony Mann's and Universal's popular musical biopic The Glenn Miller Story (1954), starring James Stewart as the big band leader, duplicated in Universal's follow-up musical biography The Benny Goodman Story (1956) with Steve Allen (his film debut in a serious dramatic role) as the talented clarinet player. They preferred Rock Around the Clock (1956) that featured disc jockey Alan Freed and the group Bill Haley and His Comets (singing the title song) and many others (such as the Platters, and Freddy Bell and The Bell Boys) - it was thefirst film entirely dedicated to rock 'n' roll. It was quickly followed by two more similar films featuring Alan Freed (as Himself) -- Don't Knock the Rock (1956) and Rock, Rock, Rock (1956). Both films argued that rock-and-roll was a new, fun, and wholesome type of music. However, the adult generation continued to regard the new youthful generation (and the rise of juvenile deliquency) with skepticism and fear, as illustrated in the film adaptation of Maxwell Anderson's stage play, The Bad Seed (1956). The thriller demonstrated that evil could reside in a young, cute serial killer (played by Patty McCormack).
 Bandstand first began as a local program for teens on WFIL-TV (now WPVI), Channel 6 in Philadelphia in early October, 1952. In mid-1956, the new host chosen for ABC-TV's American Bandstand was 26 year-old Dick Clark. By the time the show was first aired nationally, in mid-1957, it had became a mainstay for rock group performances.
The rock and roll music of the 50s was on display, along with big-bosomed star Jayne Mansfield as a talentless, dumb blonde sexpot in writer/director Frank Tashlin's satirical comedy The Girl Can't Help It (1956). Marilyn Monroe's foil Tom Ewell starred in the film as the protagonist. It was the first rock and roll film to be taken seriously, with 17 songs in its short 99 minutes framework. Great rock and roll performers included Ray Anthony, Fats Domino, The Platters, Little Richard and his Band (featured in the title song), Gene Vincent and His Bluecaps, Eddie Cochran (with his screen debut) and others. American youth wanted to hear their popular groups in their films that they chose to view, including Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Ritchie Valens, Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Gene Vincent, and The Platters.
Sometimes, to appeal to the new juvenile market, actors were miscast, such as clean-cut crooner Pat Boone in April Love (1957), playing a juvenile delinquent who was sent to his uncle's Kentucky farm for rehabilitation. The title song, however, became a big hit for the singer/actor. By the last year of the decade, the youth market in all its forms was worth $10 billion a year. Tragedy also struck in the last year of the decade, when pop idols 22 year old songwriter and singer Buddy Holly, 17 year old Latino singer Ritchie Valens, and 28 year old J.P. Richardson (aka radio DJ "The Big Bopper") were killed in a light plane crash on February 3, 1959 in an Iowa cornfield, while on a "Winter Dance Party" tour. [Both singers were later honored with biopics: The Buddy Holly Story (1978) and La Bamba (1987), and also by Don McLean's 1972 hit song American Pie.]
 Hollywood soon realized that the affluent teenage population could be exploited, now more rebellious than happy-go-lucky - as they had been previously portrayed in films (such as the Andy Hardy character played by Mickey Rooney). The influence of rock 'n' roll surfaced in Richard Brooks' box-office success, Blackboard Jungle (1955). It was the first major Hollywood film to use R&R on its soundtrack - the music in the credits was provided by Bill Haley and His Comets - their musical hit "Rock Around the Clock." The film also starred Glenn Ford as a war veteran and clean-cut All-American novice teacher at inner city North Manual HS (New York), where the students, led by a disrespectful, sneering punk (Vic Morrow), test his tolerance. [One of the other persuasive youths was a young Sidney Poitier.]
Another film, that came later in the decade, that also exploited the new teenage market's non-conformist attitudes, was Jack Arnold's exploitative juvenile delinquent film, High School Confidential (1958), featuring drugs in a high school dope ring, lots of 50's slang words and hep-talk, Russ Tamblyn as an undercover cop posing as a student, switchblade fights, drag races, Mamie Van Doren as Tamblyn's nympho aunt, and Jerry Lee Lewis singing the title song in its opening.
Two Early 50's Youth Films and Their Influential Actors:
Two other youth-oriented actors and their films in the mid-50s would portray the potentially-scary, self-expressive, and rebellious new teenage population.
 1. Marlon Brando: A Symbol of Adolescent, Anti-Authoritarian Rebellion
A young Marlon Brando (1924-2004) was trained by Lee Strasberg's Actors' Studio in New York in raw and realistic 'method acting,' and influenced by Stella Adler. He starred in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway (opposite Jessica Tandy as Blanche) in 1947, and would later repeat his work on film in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and receive an Oscar nomination. He also contributed a memorable role as a self-absorbed teen character. He played Johnny - an arrogant, rebellious, tough yet sensitive leader of a roving motorcycle-biking gang (wearing a T-shirt and leather jacket) that invaded and terrorized a small-town in Laslo Benedek's controversial The Wild One (1954) (banned in Britain until a decade and a half later). The film was noted for one line of dialogue, typifying his attitude: "What are you rebelling against?" Brando's reply: "Whadda ya got?" A nasty Lee Marvin led a rival gang of bikers named The Beetles.
[Brando's photo as biker Johnny later appeared on the front-sleeve of the famed mid-late 60s Beatles' album: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.(Brando's new style of acting would be forever emulated by future generations of actors, including Jack Nicholson, Sean Penn, and later Russell Crowe.)]
2. James Dean: The 'First American Teenager'
  The anguished, introspective teen James Dean (1932-1955) was the epitome of adolescent pain. Dean appeared in only three films before his untimely death in the fall of 1955. His first starring role was in Elia Kazan's adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel East of Eden (1955) as a Cain-like son named Cal vying for his father's (Raymond Massey) love against his brother Aron.
It was followed by Nicholas Ray's best-known melodramatic, color-drenched film about juvenile delinquency and alienation, Warner Bros.' Rebel Without a Cause (1955). This was the film with Dean's most-remembered role as mixed-up, sensitive, and defiant teenager Jim Stark involved in various delinquent behaviors (drunkenness, a switchblade fight, and a deadly drag race called a Chicken Run), and his archetypal scream to his parents: "You're tearing me apart!"
Dean also starred in his third (and final) feature, George Stevens' epic saga Giant (1956) set in Texas, and also starring Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and Dennis Hopper. (The 24 year-old actor was killed in a tragic car crash on September 30th 1955 while driving his Silver Porsche 550 Spyder -- affectionately nicknamed 'The Little Bastard', around the time that Giant was completed and about a month before Rebel opened. Dean was on his way to car races in Salinas on October 1st. The crash occurred at the intersection of Routes 41 and 46 near Paso Robles at Cholame, and he died enroute to the hospital.) [Dean's two co-stars in the film also experienced untimely deaths: Sal Mineo (as Plato) was stabbed to death at age 37, and Natalie Wood (as Judy) drowned at age 43.] In his honor, James Dean was awarded two post-humous Best Actor nominations: for his role as rebellious Cal Trask in East of Eden (1955) and as oil-rich ranch-hand Jett Rink in Giant (1956).
Elvis 'The Pelvis' Presley: The King of Rock 'N Roll
 Elvis' first record was That's All Right Mama, cut in July, 1954 in Memphis and released on the Sun Records label. At the time of his first hit song Heartbreak Hotel, singer Elvis Presley made his first national TV appearance in January 1956 on CBS' Tommy (and Jimmy) Dorsey's Stage Show, although he is best remembered for his controversial, sexy, mid-1956 performance of Hound Dog on the Milton Berle Show, and for three rock 'n roll performances on the Ed Sullivan Show from September 1956 to January 1957 - his last show was censored by being filmed from the 'waist-up'.
He was also featured as an actor in many money-making films after signing his first film deal in 1956. His screen debut was in Paramount's Civil War drama Love Me Tender (1956) (originally titled The Reno Brothers), with a #1 single hit song ballad.Jailhouse Rock (1957) is generally acknowledged as his most famous and popular film, but he also appeared in Loving You (1957) (noted for his first screen kiss) and in director Michael Curtiz' King Creole (1958) as a New Orleans teen rebel (acclaimed as one of his best acting roles) before the decade ended. His induction into the Army in 1958 was a well-publicized event. After his Army stint, he also starred in G.I. Blues (1960), in Don Siegel's western Flaming Star (1960) (with only two songs) as a half-breed youth, in the southern melodrama Wild in the Country (1961), and in other formulaic 60's films (i.e., Blue Hawaii (1961), Kid Galahad (1962), and his biggest box-office hit Viva Las Vegas (1964)). By the 70s, his film roles had deteriorated, and although he returned to stage performances and revived his singing career, he was physically on the decline until his death in August, 1977 of heart disease and drug abuse.
Cheap Teen Movies:
 Young people attended outdoor drive-ins that showed exploitative, cheap fare created especially for them in a newly-established teen/drive-in genre. Producer/director Roger Corman (the 'B-movie King'), known for feeding low-budget, short, sci-fi/horror quickies to drive-in theatres and other neighborhood venues in the late 50s, generated films such as:
- Not of This Earth (1957) [the alien invasion film was remade by Jim Wynorski as Not of This Earth (1988) with ex-porn star Traci Lords in her first post-adult film appearance, in the Beverly Garland role]; originally released as part of a double-bill withAttack of the Crab Monsters (1957)
- Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957)
- The Blob (1958) featuring Steve McQueen in his first starring role as a high-schooler in a film about a meteorite that oozed a disgusting, gooey substance that ate people
- A Bucket of Blood (1959)
- The Wasp Woman (1959)
Other examples included the first rock & roll horror film - Gene Fowler's I Was A Teenage Werewolf (1957) (Michael Landon's first feature film), and Ed Wood's debut transvestite shock film Glen or Glenda (1953).
The Threat of Television:
 Film attendance declined precipitously as free TV viewing (and the increase in popularity of foreign-language films) made inroads into the entertainment business. In 1951, NBC became America's first nationwide TV network, and in just a few years, 50% of US homes had at least one TV set. In March of 1953, the Academy Awards were televised for the first time by NBC - and the broadcast received the largest single audience in network TV's five-year history. By 1954, NBC's Tonight Show was becoming one of the most popular late-night TV shows.
 With a steep decline in weekly theatre attendance, studios were forced to find creative ways to make money from television - converted Hollywood studios were beginning to produce more hours of film for TV than for feature films. [In mid-decade, the average film budget was less than one million dollars.] And by mid-decade, the major studios began selling to television their film rights to their pre-1948 films for broadcast and viewing. The first feature film to be broadcast on US television (on November 3, 1956), during prime-time, was The Wizard of Oz (1939).
TV stars became cross-over film stars - the first was Charlton Heston. In early 1950, Western cowboy star Gene Autry was the firstfilm star to announce his appearance in a sponsored TV series. The feature-length, color version of Dragnet (1954), with popular detective TV star Jack Webb (serving as director, producer, and star) as dead-pan LAPD Sgt. Joe Friday, was the first film based on a TV show - the then-popular B/W TV show of the same name ran from 1951-1959. It was memorable for its "Dum, de Dum Dum" theme music (that first made an appearance in the Miklos Rozsa soundtrack for the film noir The Killers (1946)), and the disclaimer: "Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent."
In the 1955-56 season, the ABC TV show Warner Brothers Presents was the first television program produced by Warner Brothers Pictures, and marked the introduction of the major Hollywood studios into television production. It was a survival tactic for the studios to pioneer in television series production. In the same year, Twentieth Century-Fox Hour played on CBS and MGM Parade on ABC. And later, in the mid- to late 50s, Warner Bros. studios produced more TV shows, such as: their first hit series Cheyenne (1955-1963 with Clint Walker), Maverick (1957-1962, first with James Garner) and 77 Sunset Strip (1958-1964).
 In 1956, the studios lifted the ban against film stars making TV appearances. Fast-talking, cigar-smoking, and quick-witted Groucho Marx (of the famed Marx Brothers) brought his popular radio show You Bet Your Life to television (NBC) as a game show in 1950, with a duck that would descend with $100 if one said the secret word. It lasted until 1961 - its theme music "Hooray for Captain Spaulding" was taken from the Marx Bros.' second film Animal Crackers (1930). Other TV shows became popular:
- the early sitcom I Love Lucy (on CBS, beginning in 1951); its stars Lucille Ball and husband Desi Arnaz had founded Desilu Productions in 1950
- the family show The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (on ABC, from 1952-1966)
- The Donna Reed Show (on ABC, from 1958-1966)
- The Honeymooners (from 1951 and after)
- Lassie (on CBS, from 1954-1971)
- Gunsmoke (on CBS, from 1955-1975) with James Arness as Matt Dillon
- This is Your Life (on NBC, from 1952-1961)
One positive side-effect of the growing influence of American television in the 50s was that it was becoming the proving ground for many aspiring directors. Some of the directors who began in TV in this decade were to make some of Hollywood's best movies in the 60s:
 Because of the emergence of television as a major entertainment medium, many studios converted their sound stages for use in television production. Because labor was cheaper abroad, many producers were taking their film production overseas.
Delbert Mann's direction of Paddy Chayefsky's script (initially written as a TV play and produced for NBC Television Playhouse and aired in 1953 with Rod Steiger) for the black and white Marty (1955) about a romantically-insecure and lonely Bronx butcher (Best Actor-winning Ernest Borgnine) who found love with someone his friends called a 'dog'. It was a big winner on the film screen - it was the firstAmerican film chosen at the Cannes Film Festival as Best Picture since the award was instituted, and it won four major Academy Awards, including Best Picture from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
 Because television (a small black and white screen) had become affordable and a permanent fixture in most people's homes, the movies also fought back with gimmicks - color films, bigger screens, and 3-D. Bigger and more colorful films and screens, and big scale, profitable box-office epics, such as Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949), the popular Biblical story starring long-haired  and virile Victor Mature and the beautifully-bewitching Hedy Lamarr with exposed belly-button, and MGM's expensive romantic adventure King Solomon's Mines (1950), filmed on location in Africa, were designed to lure movie-goers back into the theatres. By the mid-50s, more than half of Hollywood's productions were made in color to take Americans away from their B/W TV sets.
Coincidentally, two of the biggest films at the start of the decade, director Henry King's Twelve O'Clock High (1949)about the stress experienced by American bombing units in England, and Delmer Daves' Broken Arrow (1950), an "adult-Western" of the blood-brother relationship between an Indian agent (James Stewart) and Apache chief Cochise (white actor Jeff Chandler), would both become episodic TV series in future years. Along with Samuel Fuller's Run of the Arrow (1957), Broken Arrowwas notable for having a sympathetic depiction of the Native American culture and concerns - the first film to be shot from the Indians' point-of-view for many years. This revisionist effort would be followed years later by the politically-correct, award-winning Dances With Wolves (1990).
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The History of Film
The 1960s
The End of the Hollywood Studio System
The Era of Independent, Underground Cinema
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The New Decade's Major Changes:
Cinema in the 1960s reflected the decade of fun, fashion, rock 'n' roll, tremendous social changes (i.e., the civil rights era and marches) and transitional cultural values. This was a turbulent decade of monumental changes, tragedies, cultural events, assassinations and deaths, and advancements, such as:
- 1959 - Barbie Doll and the Microchip invented
- 1960 - Introduction of the Twist dance by Chubby Checker
- 1962 - Death of Marilyn Monroe
- 1962 - First TV broadcasts in color
- 1962 - Spacewar, the first computer video game, invented
- 1962 - The Cuban Missile Crisis
- 1963 - TouchTone telephones introduced
- 1963 - President John F. Kennedy's assassination
- 1963 - Women's Liberation, signaled by the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique
- 1964 - Beatlemania, the Beatles 'invaded' US
- 1964 - Boxer Cassius Clay joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name to Muhammad Ali
- 1965 - Miniskirt made first appearance
- 1965 - Watts (LA) race riots
- 1965 - Protests of racial stereotyping against 'Amos and Andy' TV show forced it off the air
- 1966- One Million Years BC made Raquel Welch a sex symbol in a two-piece fur bikini
- 1967 - "Hair" opened off-Broadway
- 1967 - Human Be-In (Golden Gate Park), and Summer of Love in San Francisco
- 1967 - First Heart Transplant
- 1967 - Anti-Vietnam War Protests Escalated as War Deaths Multiplied
- 1968- "60 Minutes" debuted on CBS-TV
- 1968 - Martin Luther King, Jr's and Robert Kennedy's assassinations
- 1969 - Woodstock Musical Festival in upper-state New York
- 1969 - Introduction of the indoor-safe NERF ball
- 1969 - "Sesame Street" debuted on TV
- 1969 - Mai Lai
- 1969 - Arpanet (first Internet) invented
- 1969 - The brutal and 'ritualistic' murder of 26 year-old actress Sharon Tate (Roman Polanski's pregnant wife) and others in Los Angeles (Bel Air) by Charlie Manson's hippie 'cultic' family
- 1969 - First Man on the Moon with Apollo 11 space flight
- 1970 - Kent State Massacre
- 1971 - Charlie Manson and three of his female followers in their 20s were convicted of the Tate-LaBianca murders, after the longest murder trial in US history
However, 1963 was the worst year for US film production in fifty years (there were only 121 feature releases). And the largest number of foreign films released in the US in any one year was in 1964 (there were 361 foreign releases in the US vs. 141 US releases).
  With movie audiences declining due to the dominance of television, major American film companies began to diversify with other forms of entertainment: records, publishing, TV movies and the production of TV series. For example:
- in July of 1961, TWA Airlines began the first regular in-flight movies in first-class during a NYC to LA flight, with a Bell and Howell projector aimed at a screen to show the glossy soap opera By Love Possessed (1961), starring Lana Turner
- in September of 1961, Saturday Night at the Movies premiered on NBC with the first wide-screen comedy, How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) - it marked the start of the trend to broadcast Hollywood movies on TV
- in 1965, Columbia released folk/rock singer Bob Dylan's album Highway 61 Revisited
- separate awards for Black and White and Color Cinematography were eliminated by AMPAS for 1967 (and after) films, because most films were being made in color
Financial Difficulties Within the Film Industry:
Increasingly in the 60s, the major studios financed and distributed independently-produced domestic pictures. And made-for-TV movies became a regular feature of network programming by mid-decade. Many "runaway" film productions were being made abroad to save money. By mid-decade, the average ticket price was less than a dollar, and the average film budget was slightly over one and a half million dollars. And by the end of the decade, the film industry was very troubled and depressed and experiencing an all-time low that had been developing for almost 25 years.
Studio-bound "contract" stars and directors were no longer. And most of the directors from the early days of cinema were either retired or dead. Some of the studios, such as UA and Hal Roach Studios, had to sell off their backlots as valuable California real estate (for condominiums and shopping centers). Some sold props (MGM was selling various film artifacts in 1970, including Dorothy's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz (1939)), offered tours of back lots (Universal began its famed studio tours in 1964), or created theme parks (DisneyWorld in Orlando, Florida).
 To aid the tourist industry and create another attraction, in 1960, the Hollywood Chamber of Congress inaugurated the Hollywood Walk of Fame (bronzed stars in pink terrazzo and surrounded by charcoal terrazzo squares that were embedded in the sidewalks along sections of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street). The first star, placed on February 9, 1960, was for Joanne Woodward. However, by the mid-70s, Hollywood was better known for its adult bookstores, prostitutes, and run-down look.
The Birth of the Multiplex and the Demise of Theatre Palaces:
Stanley H. Durwood became the father of the 'multiplex' movie theater in 1963 when he opened the first-ever mall multiplex, composed of two side-by-side theaters with 700 seats at Ward Parkway Center in Kansas City. Three years later, Durwood introduced the world's first four-plex and then in 1969, he built a six-plex with automated projection booths. Durwood went on to head up AMC Entertainment, making it the third-largest movie theater company in the nation.
Meanwhile, the creation of and flight to the suburbs, the studios' divestiture of their theatre holdings after 1948, and the impact of television in the 1950s meant the demise and razing of the benchmark, downtown movie palaces of the 20s. Architectural wonders, such as the Paramount Theater in Times Square (New York), projected its last scheduled film in 1964. The RKO (Hill Street) Theatre in Los Angeles was destined to become a parking garage soon after. And the RKO Orpheum Theatre in downtown San Diego, built in 1924, was demolished to make room for a bank.
Studio Take-Overs:
Due to various insecurities and financial difficulties, the studios were quickly taken over by multi-national companies, especially after the deaths of pre-war, entrepreneurish movie-studio moguls such as Louis B. Mayer of MGM and Harry Cohn of Columbia, the ousting of Darryl F. Zanuck from 20th Century Fox in 1971, and the sale of one-third of Warner Bros. stock by Jack Warner to Seven Arts in 1967. The traditional, Hollywood studio era would soon be history, as more and more studios were acquired by other unrelated business conglomerates. The age of "packaged" films and the independent company and producer were beginning.
In the mid- to late 60s, there was a buying/selling frenzy of the major conglomerates who invested and traded in studios and networks:
- In 1962, the growing entertainment conglomerate MCA (the Music Corporation of America) acquired Universal-International Studios (actually Universal-International-Decca), a merger that would have lasting influence on show business; it developed its strength as a TV production company
- In 1966, Gulf+Western Industries bought the floundering Paramount, and made Robert Evans head of the studio's production; Evans would soon be responsible for some of the studio's most influential films, such as Rosemary's Baby (1968), Love Story (1970), The Godfather (1972), andChinatown (1974) which Evans produced
- In 1967, New Line Cinema was founded by Robert Shaye as a privately-held distributor of art films, such as John Waters' trash comedy classicPink Flamingos (1972)
- In 1967, Bank of America absorbed United Artists through its Transamerica Corporation subsidiary
- In 1967, Jack Warner (co-creator of the famous studio) sold his controlling interest in Warner Bros. to a Canadian production and distribution corporation called Seven Arts, and the company was re-named Warner Bros-Seven Arts. The new company acquired Atlantic Records, but debt-laden, was sold in 1969 to Kinney National Services Incorporated, a New York conglomerate whose interests included parking lots and funeral homes; the studio was later renamed Warner Communications in 1971
- In 1968, Avco, an aviation equipment and financial services company, bought Embassy Films from founder Joseph E. Levine
- In 1969, MGM was acquired by the Las Vegas hotel financier and airline mogul Kirk Kerkorian, who won control of the studio in a proxy battle with Seagram's Edgar Bronfman, Sr.; it temporarily suspended film-making for over ten years, until acquired by United Artists and relaunched in 1981
- the original, large-screen IMAX projection system was developed in 1967, and made its debut in 1970 at the Fuji Pavilion at the World Expo in Osaka, Japan, with a five-story screen and 70mm film in the projector (and the first IMAX film Tiger Child - a Multiscreen Corporation production)
The Cleopatra Disaster:
 The much-heralded Joseph L. Mankiewicz film Cleopatra (1963), filmed on location in Rome, brought together the explosive pairing of Elizabeth Taylor as the Queen of Egypt and future husband Richard Burton as Marc Antony, who brought more headlines with their blossoming romance than the budget problems. It proved to be a tremendous financial disaster for 20th Century Fox, headed by Darryl Zanuck. Taylor, already the highest-paid performer in the history of Hollywood at $1 million, had a costume wardrobe budgeted at almost $200,000, and with numerous cost over-runs, extravagant sets and thousands of costumes for the cast, the film was the most expensive up to that time at a record $44 million (in adjusted dollars, about $300 million), from an initial budget of $2 million. It was also the longest, commercially-made American film released in the US - at 4 hours and 3 minutes. [Fox was saved from financial disaster only by the release of the fact-based war epic The Longest Day (1963), an all-star re-creation of the events surrounding D-Day, and the blow was also softened by the unexpected success of The Sound of Music (1965).]
British Influences:
 With the high cost of producing and making films in Hollywood and the shrinking of studio size, many studios decreased their internal production and increased moviemaking outside the country, mostly in Britain (an economically advantageous production base), making big-budget, big-picture films there. In 1962, for example, the number of Hollywood films in production had hit an all-time low, dropping off 26% from the previous year. Two examples of films made elsewhere included these magnificent historical dramas of 12th century England:
- Becket (1964) with Richard Burton (as Archbishop Thomas Becket of Canterbury) and Peter O'Toole (as King Henry II), an Oscar-winning film for Best Screenplay
- The Lion in Winter (1968), the retelling of the clash between King Henry II (Peter O'Toole reprising his role as the King) and Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn), with Oscar wins for Hepburn and James Goldman's screenplay [this film featured Anthony Hopkins' feature-film debut as King Richard the Lion-Hearted]
 The major studios increasingly became financiers and distributors of foreign-made films. Two of director David Lean's 60's films, the ones that defined his career's reputation, were made in Britain. The scenic beauty and backdrops of both films became a tangible character, and opened the door for similar epic-travelogues:
- the spectacular, adventure epic film made in 70 mm about an enigmatic, masochistic British officer/hero named Col. T. E. Lawrence who fought guerrilla-style alongside Omar Sharif (in a breakthrough role) in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) with Shakespearean actor Peter O'Toole in his first major, Oscar-nominated, star-making screen role as the homoerotic protagonist; from a revered screenplay by Robert Bolt
- Doctor Zhivago (1965), a sweeping romantic/historical drama adapted from Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning novel of the days of Russia's Civil War played out against the story of physician Yuri Zhivago, the two female loves of his life: sensuous mistress Lara (Julie Christie) and wife Tanya (Geraldine Chaplin), and the villainous Kamarovsky (Rod Steiger)
The Anglo-American epic A Man For All Seasons (1966) by director Fred Zinnemann, won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor Oscars. It portrayed the clash of ideals between the honorable and principled Sir Thomas More (well-spoken, Oscar-winning Paul Scofield reprising his stage performance) who sacrificed his own life as a rebel against the egocentric and tyrannical King Henry VIII (Robert Shaw).
The Phasing Out of Big Historical Epics:
However, costly historical epics were being phased out. Two big-money, opulent, epic productions, both directed by Anthony Mann, were carryovers from the 50s decade of inflated historical epics. These were made in Spain and Italy respectively, two less expensive movie-making locations in Europe:
- El Cid (1961) with heroic Charlton Heston as the legendary 11th century Spanish warrior; Mann made the film after being fired from the set ofSpartacus (1960) - see below
- producer Samuel Bronston's historical drama The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) - a disastrous, exorbitant film that overextended and bankrupted his studio
Nicholas Ray's and Andrew Marton's 70 mm. 55 Days at Peking (1963), also produced by Samuel Bronston, starred Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner, and John Huston's religious epic The Bible: In the Beginning (1966) lost favor as extravagant film productions of this kind became too costly.
British "Kitchen Sink" Cinema: "Angry Young Men" Films
A new wave of grim, non-fictional, social realism in British cinema, dubbed or styled "Kitchen Sink" due to its angry, every-day working-class heroes, frank dialogue, and negative post-war themes, was exemplified in the grainy, powerful works of various directors in the late 50s and early 60s. Most of the directors had backgrounds in theatre, television and documentaries and brought their talents to the screen.
Their socially-conscious films were also categorized as "Angry Young Men" films, due to the fact that each one focused on the economic and social problems of a frustrated male protagonist who attempted to break free from society and its expectations, through the use of alcohol, sex, sports, and money, etc. They broke new material by portraying England's angry and alienated youth in fresh, energetic, and frank terms:
Director
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Films
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| Tony Richardson | Look Back in Anger (1959), A Taste of Honey (1961), and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) |
| Jack Clayton | Room at the Top (1959) |
| Clive Donner | The Caretaker (1963) |
| Michael Powell | Peeping Tom (1960) |
| Karel Reisz | Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and Morgan - A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966) |
| Lindsay Anderson | This Sporting Life (1963) and If... (1969) |
| Sidney Furie | The Leather Boys (1963) |
| John Schlesinger | A Kind of Loving (1962) and Billy Liar (1963)
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The History of Film
The 1970s
The Last Golden Age of American Cinema (the American "New Wave") and the Advent of the Blockbuster Film
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The New Decade for Film-Makers:
Although the 1970s opened with Hollywood experiencing a financial and artistic depression, the decade became a creative high point in the US film industry. Restrictions on language, adult content and sexuality, and violence had loosened up, and these elements became more widespread. The hippie movement, the civil rights movement, free love, the growth of rock and roll, changing gender roles and drug use certainly had an impact. And Hollywood was renewed and reborn with the earlier collapse of the studio system, and the works of many new and experimental film-makers (nicknamed "Movie Brats") during a Hollywood New Wave.
The counter-culture of the time had influenced Hollywood to be freer, to take more risks and to experiment with alternative, young film makers, as old Hollywood professionals and old-style moguls died out and a new generation of film makers arose. Many of the audiences and movie-makers of the late 60s had seen a glimpse of new possibilities, new story-telling techniques and more meaningful 'artistic' options, by the influences of various European "New Wave" movements (French and Italian) and the original works of other foreign-language film-makers, and by viewing these surprise hits in the previous decade:
Young viewers and directors, who refused to compromise with mediocre film offerings, supported stretching the boundaries and conventional standards of film even more in this decade. Although the 50s and 60s were noted for wide-screen epics on CinemaScopic silver screens (and lighter formulaic, squeaky-clean fare such as Pillow Talk (1959) or Beach Blanket Bingo (1965)), the 70s decade was noted for films with creative and memorable subject matter that reflected the questioning spirit and truth of the times.
Motion picture art seemed to flourish at the same time that the defeat in the Vietnam War, the Kent State Massacre, the Watergate scandal, President Nixon's fall, the Munich Olympics shoot-out, increasing drug use, and a growing energy crisis showed tremendous disillusion, a questioning politicized spirit among the public and a lack of faith in institutions - a comment upon the lunacy of war and the dark side of the American Dream (documented, for instance, in the bicentennial year's All the President's Men (1976)). Other films that were backed by the studios reflected the tumultuous times, the discontent toward the government, lack of US credibility, and hints of conspiracy paranoia, such as in Alan J. Pakula's post-Watergate film The Parallax View (1974) with Warren Beatty as a muckraking investigator of a Senator's death. The Strawberry Statement (1970), derived from James S. Kunen's journal and best-selling account of the 1968 student strike at Columbia and exploited for its countercultural message by MGM, echoed support of student campus protests. Even Spielberg's Jaws (1975) could be interpreted as an allegory for the Watergate conspiracy.
The decade also spawned equally memorable cult films, as diverse as Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and the quirky Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (1971). Jerry Schatzberg's and 20th Century Fox's raw, relentless and uncompromising The Panic in Needle Park (1971)(produced by Dominick Dunne) starkly portrayed heroin drug use among addicts in New York City, with Al Pacino in his first major acting role as a drug pusher and part of a heroin-doomed couple (opposite Kitty Winn). Czechoslovakian film-maker Milos Forman's first American film Taking Off (1971)insightfully satirized the adult middle-class and its supposed generation gap from the youth generation. There were also times when expected hits turned to disasters, however, such as the musical fantasy remake Lost Horizon (1973) and Martin Scorsese's darkly expressionistic period musical New York, New York (1977).
The Search for a Blockbuster:
 The "so-called" Renaissance of Hollywood was built upon perfecting some of the traditional film genres of Hollywood's successful past - with bigger, block-buster dimensions. Oftentimes, studios would invest heavily in only a handful of bankrolled films, hoping that one or two would succeed profitably. In the 70s, the once-powerful MGM Studios sold off many of its assets, abandoned the film-making business, and diversified into other areas (mostly hotels and casinos).
Much of the focus was on box-office receipts and the production of action- and youth-oriented, blockbuster films with dazzling special effects. But it was becoming increasingly more difficult to predict what would sell or become a hit. Hollywood's economic crises in the 1950s and 1960s, especially during the war against the lure of television, were somewhat eased with the emergence in the 70s of summer "blockbuster" movies or "event films" marketed to mass audiences, especially following the awesome success of two influential films:
 Although the budget for Jaws grew from $4 million to $9 million during production, it became the highest grossing film in history - until Star Wars. Both Jaws and Star Wars were the first films to earn more than $100 million in rentals. [The average ticket price for a film in 1971 was $1.65, and by 1978 cost about two and a half dollars in first-run theatres. Second-run film theatres could charge less and often dropped their admission price to $1.00. The average film budget by 1978 was about $5 million - increasing dramatically to $11 million by 1980 due to inflation and rising costs. Therefore, production of Hollywood films decreased precipitously in the late 70s, e.g., down to 354 releases in 1978 compared to the previous year's total of 560.]
New Markets for Hollywood's Products:
The emergence of ancillary markets for Hollywood's products emerged during this decade:
- cable television - the first pay/premium television channel, Home Box Office (HBO), was founded in 1972; in 1975, HBO demonstrated the popularity of its programming and became the first in the television industry to use satellites for regular transmission of programming, with its "Thrilla in Manila" boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier
- to maximize profits from weekend audiences, the industry decided to move major film openings from mid-week to Fridays, in 1973
- pay cable television was able to allow profanity and sex beyond what could be offered on commercial network television - outrageous comedian George Carlin's first comedy special was aired on HBO as On Location: George Carlin at USC (1977) with cautionary disclaimers about the use of strong language; it was the first of many HBO comedy concert broadcasts
 multi-plex theaters - the proliferation of multi-screen chain theaters in suburban areas, replacing big movie palaces, meant that more movies could be shown to smaller audiences; the world's largest cineplex (with 18 theaters) opened in Toronto in 1979- publicity/celebrity magazines - after Life Magazine discontinued its weekly publications in 1972, People Magazine - firstpublished as a weekly magazine in March of 1974 (with Mia Farrow on its first cover), took over the role of celebrity watching and film promotion for the industry
- Hollywood realized that it could increase its profits by advertising its new releases on television - first shown to be successful with the massive TV marketing campaign (of $700,000) for Jaws (1975) - the film was also booked into almost 500 theatres for its opening weekend - a record!
- Gone with the Wind (1939) first aired on network TV in 1976 and drew a huge audience over two nights - about 34 million people - the largest ever film audience to watch a feature film on television
The Home Video Revolution:
- earlier in the previous decade, Ampex in 1963 offered the first consumer version of a videotape recorder at an exorbitant price of $30,000; other iterations would follow, such as Sony's introduction of the videocassette recorder (VCR) in 1969, and the introduction of the U-Matic in 1972
 in 1972, the AVCO CartriVision system was the first videocassette recorder to have pre-recorded tapes of popular movies (from Columbia Pictures) for sale and rental -- three years before Sony's Betamax system emerged into the market. However, the company went out of business a year later- the appearance of Sony's Betamax (the first home VCR or videocassette recorder) in 1975 offered a cheaper sales price of $2,000 and recording time up to one hour; this led to a boom in sales - it was a technically-superior format when compared to the VHS system that was marketed by JVC and Matsushita beginning in 1976
- in 1976, Paramount became the first to authorize the release of its film library onto Betamax videocassettes. In 1977, 20th Century Fox would follow suit, and begin releasing its films on videotape
- in 1977, RCA introduced the first VCRs in the United States based on JVC's system, capable of recording up to four hours on 1/2" videotape
- by the late 70s, Sony's market share in sales of Betamax VCRs was below that of sales of VHS machines; consumers chose the VHS' longer tape time and larger tape size, over Sony's smaller and shorter tape time (of 1 hour)
- video sales - the first films on videotape were released by the Magnetic Video Corporation (a company founded in 1968 by Andre Blay in Detroit, Michigan, the first video distribution company) - it licensed fifty films for release from 20th Century Fox for $300,000 in October, 1977; it began to license, market and distribute half-inch videotape cassettes (both Betamax and VHS) to consumers; it was the first company to sell pre-recorded videos; M*A*S*H (1970) was Magnetic's most popular title
- video rentals - in 1977, George Atkinson of Los Angeles began to advertise the rental of 50 Magnetic Video titles of his own collection in the Los Angeles Times, and launched the first video rental store, Video Station, on Wilshire Boulevard, renting videos for $10/day; within 5 years, he franchised more than 400 Video Station stores across the country
- in 1978, Philips introduced the video laser disc (aka laserdisc and LD) -- the first optical disc storage media for the consumer market; Pioneer began selling home LaserDisc players in 1980; eventually, the laserdisc systems would be replaced by the DVD ("digital versatile disc") format in the late 1990s
VHS video players, laser disc players and the release of films on videocassette tapes and discs multiplied as prices plummeted, creating a new industry and adding substantial revenue and profits for the movie studios. One film-related industry that side-benefited from the development of the VCR was the pornography industry - no longer would adult-movie viewers have to visit seedy X-rated film theatres to view porn films, and this resulted in sky-rocketing profits from the sales and rentals of X-rated VCR videotapes. Another side result was that independent film-makers and producers could now market their films more effectively by distributing tapes and discs for viewing.
But all of these changes had a down-side too: theater attendance would begin to drastically decline in the next decade due to the home video invasion.
Changes from Traditional Hollywood Movie Studios:
The established Hollywood movie studios (except for Universal and Walt Disney's Buena Vista) no longer directly controlled production. Although studios still dominated film distribution, other areas including production, filming and financing (in whole or part) were increasingly in the hands of independent studios, producers, and/or agents. A new generation of movie stars, including Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Dustin Hoffman - were more skilled as "character actors," who could adapt and mold their screen images to play a number of diverse roles.
In 1975, the Creative Artists Agency was founded by Michael Ovitz and colleagues (from the William Morris Agency) to become a 'packager' of talent for film projects - resulting in the creation of competition among agents. And conglomerate investment corporations were buying up many of the studios' properties as part of their leisure entertainment divisions, with decisive power over decisions about the number of films and which hopefully-profitable projects to choose. All the elements of a film were brought together and packaged - the 'properties' of original screenplay, novel, or stage play were combined with proven box office stars, directors, and marketing strategies.
The cheaper cost of on-location filming (using Cinemobiles or film studios on wheels) encouraged more location shoots, or filming in rented production facilities. Faster film stock, lightweight cinematographic equipment, and the influence of the cinema vérité movement brought less formal styles to American productions. The functions of film makers were beginning to merge - there were actor-producers, director-producers, writer-producers, actor-writers, and more.
 For example, the decade's popular independent hit and Best Picture winner, director John Avildsen's sports film Rocky (1976) was the first (and best) in a long series of self-parody sequels that featured rags-to-riches actor and unknown scriptwriter Sylvester Stallone as underdog, inarticulate, Philadelphia boxer Rocky Balboa (inspired by boxer Chuck Wepner) in a "Cinderella" story. [As an up-and-coming star, Stallone had earlier co-scripted and starred as leather-jacketed Stanley Rosiello, opposite Henry Winkler as Butchey Weinstein, in the coming-of-age gang drama The Lords of Flatbush (1974).] The film's hero actually lost his bout after taking a brutal beating from Apollo Creed (inspired by Muhammad Ali), but he 'went the distance' and won girlfriend Adrian! The low-budget boxing film was one of the first major feature films to utilize the revolutionary "Steadicam" developed by inventor Garrett Brown - Bound for Glory (1976) marked its first use. It was a hand-held camera that produced fluid, unjerky motion shots - during the choreographed bouts and the scene in which the boxer jogged up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
American International Pictures (AIP) (1956) and Roger Corman:
 This low-budget, exploitative, and successful film company, founded in the mid-50s (and first named American Releasing Corporation), was largely responsible for the wave of independently-produced films of varying qualities that lasted into the decade of the 70s. The studio's executive producers were James Nicholson and Samuel Arkoff, while its most notable and successful film producer was Roger Corman. He was one of the most influential film-makers of the 50s and 60s (he was dubbed the "King of the Drive-In and B-Movie") for his production of a crop of low-budget exploitation films at the time.
The studio released their first successful "beach party" films (mostly to drive-in theatres) - beginning with the musical comedy Beach Party (1963)starring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon - to appeal to the lucrative teen market. Teenagers were also Corman's dominant target audience in exploitative films such as Teenage Doll (1957) (aka The Young Rebels) - about juvenile delinquency, and Sorority Girl (1957). As was the case with most AIP films, they were aggressively marketed with publicity campaigns and lurid posters.
Corman's own B-movie horror films included a series of adapted Edgar Allan Poe literary tales featuring Vincent Price (i.e., House of Usher (1960) and The Raven (1963)), and science-fiction horror films such as X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes (1963) with Ray Milland. Corman's counter-cultural biker film The Wild Angels (1966) with a star-making role for Peter Fonda pre-dated the popular Easy Rider (1969) by three years, and his The Trip (1967)was the first major studio film to chronicle the effects of LSD. AIP also distributed a number of Godzilla (and Gamera) films in the 60s and 70s, while Corman specialized in other exploitative science-fiction/horror films and dramas, such as It Conquered the World (1956), Not of This Earth (1957), Naked Paradise (1957), The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent (1957), Teenage Caveman (1958), the satirical black comedy A Bucket of Blood (1959), The Wasp Woman (1960), The Last Woman on Earth (1960), and Creature From the Haunted Sea (1961).
Roger Corman ("King of the B's"), and A New Generation of Maverick Directors: "Movie Brats"
 With more power now in the hands of producers, directors, and actors, new directors emerged, many of whom had been specifically and formally trained in film-making courses/departments at universities such as UCLA, USC, and NYU, or trained in television. Corman supported this new breed of youthful maverick directors, referred to by some as "Movie Brats" or "Geeks." The AIP studio (and Corman himself) was responsible for giving a start and apprenticeship experience to many upcoming filmmaking cineastes and actors, emphasizing low-budget film-making techniques and exploitative elements.
Corman hired the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro, Paul Bartel, and Robert Towne. He gave many of these novices their first career-breaking employment opportunities, as actors, producers, directors, writers, members of film crews, etc. He encouraged them to produce personally-relevant and creative works of art, and new genre interpretations. This support revived the notion of auteurism (the belief that the director was most influential and responsible for creating a film's ultimate form, meaning and content).
For instance, Peter Bogdanovich's directorial debut was for Targets (1968), made for AIP. And Francis Ford Coppola directed (and scripted) Corman's horror-thriller film Dementia 13 (1963), Coppola's first mainstream picture. Jack Nicholson appeared in a number of early Corman movies, including his screen debut in The Cry Baby Killer (1958) and later a small role in The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), about a carnivorous pet plant. One of Martin Scorsese's earliest-directed films (and his first commercially-conventional film) was Corman's Boxcar Bertha (1972) with Barbara Hershey and David Carradine as two Depression-era outlaw folk heroes. Writer/director Jonathan Demme's directorial debut was for Corman's Caged Heat (1974) -- a memorable women-in-prison film with lots of sex, action and violence. And Monte Hellman's two westerns Ride in the Whirlwind (1965) and The Shooting (1967) both starred Jack Nicholson (who also co-wrote and produced the first film).
Some of the Prominent Movie Brats (or Geeks) of the 70s
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| George Lucas (USC) | Robert Altman |
| John Carpenter (USC) | Francis Ford Coppola (UCLA) |
| Bob Rafelson | William Friedkin |
| Alan Pakula | Terrence Malick |
| Martin Scorsese (NYU) | Michael Ritchie |
| Brian De Palma (NYU) | Woody Allen |
| Peter Bogdanovich | Paul Mazursky |
| Michael Cimino | Hal Ashby |
| Steven Spielberg | John Cassavetes |
| Paul Schrader (UCLA) | John Milius (USC) |
| Dennis Hopper | Mike Nichols |
| David Lynch | George Romero |
| Wes Craven | John Milius |
| James Cameron | Jonathan Demme |
| Joe Dante | Bruce Dern |
| Ron Howard | Gale Anne Hurd |
| John Sayles | Paul Bartel |
Corman offered cinematic advice: use a fast-moving camera to provide speedy action, avoid cliches, add some minor social commentary, use visually-engaging screen compositions, sex (and nudity), tongue-in-cheek humor, and some sort of gimmick. Some of the new directors excelled with an audio-visual approach to filmmaking, where style, ear-splitting soundtracks, and action were sometimes more important in films than content.
The new American wave of film-makers were also influenced by unconventional works from the Italian Neo-realists, or the French New Wave artists, as stated earlier. Films made outside the traditional Hollywood mold, with great works of character development, were beginning to win critical praise and bring in tremendous revenues.
Alfred Hitchcock:
As a footnote to the decade, director Alfred Hitchcock (without ever winning a Best Director Oscar) returned to England after his disappointing films Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969) to make his first British film in almost two decades - Frenzy (1972). His first Hollywood film had been Rebecca (1940), and his last film was in this decade - the lightweight thriller Family Plot (1976).
George Lucas
  USC graduate George Lucas added his name to the list of new directors. His first film, produced by American Zoetrope and executive-produced by Francis Coppola, was a full-length version of a student science-fiction film he had made earlier - the nightmarish vision of a dehumanized future in THX 1138 (1971). The numerical moniker would appear as an 'in-joke' in later Lucas works: as the license plate of John Milner's car in American Graffiti (1973), as the number of the cell block holding "Chewbacca" in Star Wars (1977), in other films of the Star Wars series (except for Jedi), and in numerous other films (i.e., Swingers (1996), Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)).
His second film that he co-wrote and directed, the low-budget American Graffiti (1973) was a warm-hearted, rites-of-passage film about a number of California teenagers (unknowns who became future stars including Harrison Ford, Cindy Williams, Mackenzie Phillips, and Richard Dreyfuss, among others) in the early 60s who pointlessly cruised down the main strip of their small town [Modesto, CA] in hot-rods one long summer night - accompanied by a non-stop soundtrack of rock 'n' roll hits (opening with Bill Haley and the Comets). The film's tagline or slogan encouraged nostalgia: "Where were you in '62?" Teenage archetypes included the hot-rod loving delinquent (Paul Le Mat), the brainy student (Richard Dreyfuss), the stereotypical class president (Ron Howard), and the nerd (Charles Martin Smith).
In 1971, Lucas formed his own film company, Lucasfilm Ltd., in San Rafael, California that soon evolved into a number of specialized companies. Before his next major hit ( Star Wars (1977)), Lucas organized Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), a post-production facility in Marin County to advance the area of special effects, modeling, sound design, computer-generated effects, and other ground-breaking techniques.
John Carpenter
 Little-known at first, John Carpenter directed the cult sci-fi film Dark Star (1974) - a feature length derivative of a student short made while he was studying film at USC. It was a parody of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). (Carpenter composed all of the musical scores for his films beginning with Dark Star.) He also directed the low-budget action thriller Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) (a modernized remake of Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo (1959)).
Carpenter became noticed, especially after his highly-successful, low-budget slasher film Halloween (1978) - it was his third feature film and the highest-grossing independent film made in the US up to that time. The hard-to-kill, masked, knife-wielding stalker Michael Myers suspensefully pursued a young, small-town babysitter Jamie Lee Curtis (later becoming the 'Queen of Horror') on Halloween night in a small mid-western town. In its wake, the profitable and stylishly-made film (often seen from the point of view of the killer), with its spooky recognizable soundtrack, spawned a mini-horror film boom, with many lesser 'psycho-slasher' or teen-scream films appearing into the 1980s.
Bob Rafelson
 Former writer, producer, and director in television (and noted for the Monkees television series), Bob Rafelson turned to movies in the late 60s. His feature debut was, predictably, the Monkees film Head (1968), co-written with Jack Nicholson. His second film (which brought Rafelson a Best Screenplay nomination) was one of the best of the 70s, Five Easy Pieces (1970), a fascinating, yet shattering 'road movie' story of an emotionally-alienated concert pianist (Jack Nicholson shortly after his work in Easy Rider) who returned to his upper-class family after years of exile as an oil-field worker. In the 70s, he also directed a follow-up film The King of Marvin Gardens (1972) with Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern and Ellen Burstyn, and the quirky Stay Hungry (1976) with Sally Field and Jeff Bridges (and a very early performance by Arnold Schwarzenegger). His next notable film was the remake The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange.
Alan Pakula
 Another former film producer Alan Pakula directed Liza Minnelli in her second film role in The Sterile Cuckoo (1969) a poignant, oddball comedy/drama about a neurotic and eccentric college student named Pookie Adams. Pakula's best films in the 70s were Klute (1971) - a superb detective thriller about the stalking of a tough New York hooker (Jane Fonda won an Academy Award for her performance), and the compelling political melodrama All the President's Men (1976) about two young, non-conformist, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post news reporters Woodward and Bernstein (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman) who bucked the system and investigated the 1972 Watergate break-in, burglary, and subsequent cover-up. Pakula also directed the believable and gripping political conspiracy thriller The Parallax View (1974) - casting Warren Beatty as a journalist investigating a presidential candidate's assassination. Burt Reynolds starred with Jill Clayburgh in Alan Pakula's popular adult romantic comedy Starting Over (1979).
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The History of Film
The 1980s
Teen-Oriented Angst Films and the Dawn of the Sequel, with More Blockbusters
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Trends of the 70s Extend Into the 80s: The Introduction of 'High-Concept' Films
The decade of the 1980s tended to consolidate the gains made in the seventies rather than to initiate any new trends equal to the large number of disaster movies, buddy movies, or "rogue cop" movies that characterized the previous decade. Designed and packaged for mass audience appeal, few 80s films became what could be called 'classics'.
The era was characterized by the introduction of 'high-concept' films - with cinematic plots that could be easily characterized by one or two sentences (25 words or less) - and therefore easily marketable and understandable. Producer Don Simpson (partnered with Jerry Bruckheimer) has been credited with the creation of the high-concept picture (or modern Hollywood blockbuster), although its roots could be seen in the late 70s (i.e., the prototypical Jaws (1975), Saturday Night Fever (1977), Star Wars (1977), Alien (1979) - known in high-concept terms as "Jaws in Space").
Simpson was the first producer to understand and exploit the significance of MTV. His action-packed, loud, flashy, simplistic, and tightly-structured films brought crowds to the multiplexes every summer. His lowest common-denominator films reflected the MTV generation, such as in his debut filmFlashdance (1983) - with its pop soundtrack and iconic 'freeze-frame' ending. Other successes followed in the 80s: Beverly Hills Cop (1984) with its 'fish-out-of-water' high concept, the sexy Thief of Hearts (1984), the high-flying Top Gun (1986) - the epitome of Simpson's technique, and the stock-car racing film Days of Thunder (1990) again with Tom Cruise. By the end of the 80s era as a result, most films were not designed for 'thinking' adult audiences (such as Driving Miss Daisy (1989)), but were 'low-brow' for dumbed-down teen audiences looking for sheer entertainment value or thrills (for example, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989), James Cameron's Aliens (1986), or Die Hard (1988)).
After the innovations of the 70s, films in the 80s were less experimental and original, but more formulaic, although there was a burst of films eager to capitalize on new special effects (CGI) techniques - now available. Predictions were grim for the industry - production costs were soaring while ticket prices were declining. The average ticket price at the beginning of the decade was about $3, and over $4 by the end of the decade, while the average film budget was over $18 million. However, fears of the demise of Hollywood proved to be premature.
The Search for a Blockbuster:
 The personal cinema of 70s auteur directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg was now superceded by the advent of the "blockbuster" phenomenon that they had created (with The Godfather (1972) and Jaws (1975)). The industry continued to pander to the tastes and desires of young people - one of the negative legacies ofStar Wars (1977) of the late 70s.
Steven Spielberg's and George Lucas' names have often been associated with the term "blockbuster" - and their films inevitably continued to contribute to the trend during this decade, such as The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the great and exhilarating escapist-adventure film Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Return of the Jedi (1983), and the childhood fantasy hit E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) with a lovable stranded alien, inspired by Peter Pan, the resurrection themes of Christianity, and with an anti-science bias. There were others that were successful, such as Ghostbusters (1984), Romancing the Stone (1984), and Back to the Future (1985), and their successive sequels.
Following this model, Hollywood continued to search, with demographic research and a "bottom line mentality," for the one large "event film" that everyone (including international audiences) had to see (with dazzling special effects technology, sophisticated sound tracks, mega-marketing budgets, and costly, highly-paid stars). Most big-screen event movies, scheduled to be released at advantageous times (at summer and Christmas-time) would take expensive fortunes to produce - but they promised potentially lucrative payoffs. In retrospect, many of the blockbusters in the 80s, such as those mentioned above, were well-constructed films with strong characters and plots not entirely built upon their special-effects.
Big Losers, Flops and Bombs: Turkeys of the 80s Decade
There were a number of highly-touted films of the era that fared very poorly. Within a few years, it was becoming clear that blockbusters would not always insure instant profits and success:
 Auteur Michael Cimino's and United Artists' incomprehensible, over-long epic Western film Heaven's Gate (1980) about Wyoming's Johnson County wars cost almost six times above-budget to produce (from $7.5 million to about $44 million). It was originally a 5-hour 25 minute version that was cut down to 219 minutes for its November, 1980 NYC premiere. The film was immediately pulled, re-cut and then re-released five months later (after being shortened by 70 minutes) in 1981 - and still failed due to bad press. It stunned its studio by becoming the biggest flop in film history at the time (US box-office was about $1.5 million) - it lost at least $40 million. UA's corporate parent, Transamerica, had to sell the studio to MGM for only $350 million as a result. [UA was responsible for earlier hits Midnight Cowboy (1969), Annie Hall (1977) and the James Bond films.]
Since then, the film has been synonymous for any film facing major financial disaster and for the director-centric era of the 70s. Bank-rolled support for independent 'auteur' directors of the New Wave of 70s directors (who controlled their own production costs with little studio oversight) ended when this film's egotistical director (Best Director winner for The Deer Hunter (1978)) was criticized as being self-indulgent, financially irresponsible and ego-driven. The end of the era also arrived due to similar failures by other auteurs: Peter Bogdanovich with At Long Last Love (1975), Martin Scorsese with New York, New York (1977) and even Steven Spielberg with 1941 (1979). [Martin Scorsese's planned film project Gangs of New York (2002) (with 10 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture), first conceived in 1978, was shelved as a result, and released many years after initial plans and screenplay completion.]
- MGM/UA's and Terence Young's Korean War epic Inchon (1981) with Laurence Olivier (as General Douglas MacArthur) was produced by Rev. Sung Myung Moon and his Reunification Church - it was an embarrassment that was quickly withdrawn, with a budget of about $50 million and a US box-office of only $5 million.
- Hugh Hudson's (famous for the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire (1981)) miscalculated historical epic of the American Revolution was WB'sRevolution (1985), with star Al Pacino miscast as an 18th century New York fur trapper. It grossed only $359,000 on a budget of about $28 million. The film's colossal failure curtailed Hudson's major directorial efforts until the big-budget I Dreamed of Africa (2000) 15 years later, and Pacino wouldn't star in another film for four years (until Sea of Love (1989)).
- John Huston's first and sole musical, Annie (1982), a dull, uninspired major flop (that barely broke even) - inspired by the Broadway musical. The rights to the show were sold in 1978 for $9.5 million, the highest amount ever at the time.
- Howard the Duck (1986), based on Steve Gerber's 70s Marvel Comics character (which went out of print in 1981), and from executive producer George Lucas (and his screenwriting pal, director Willard Huyck), was one of the worst and least successful big-budget films ever made. Lucas hired Willard Hyuck and his wife Gloria Katz (the screenwriter for Lucas' film American Graffiti (1973)) to write the big-screen version. This misguided Universal film domestically grossed about $15 million on a budget of $30 million.
 The highly-anticipated Shanghai Surprise (1986), produced by Handmade Films (headed by the Beatles' George Harrison), starred newlyweds: pop diva singer Madonna and volatile actor Sean Penn. Lacking a coherent plot and without any chemistry between the two leads in poorly-acted characterizations, the overlong film failed miserably (with a box-office take of only $2.3 million with a budget of $17 million) and was nicknamed "Flop Suey".
- Columbia Pictures' and writer/director Elaine May's Ishtar (1987), was a poor imitation of the Hope/Crosby/Lamour "Road" pictures. It was a very expensive comedy film ($55 million) with only a small box-office gross of about $14 million, was a tremendous disaster and one of the worst films ever made according to some reviewers - in spite of its stars Warren Beatty, Isabelle Adjani and Dustin Hoffman (who won an Oscar the next year for Rain Man (1988)!).
- Writer/director Terry Gilliam's (of Monty Python fame) deeply-troubled but visually-captivating fantasy production of The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen (1989) was a major failure, due to production delays, legal issues, and on-location difficulties. Despite four Oscar nominations, it had a US gross of only $8 million with a film budget of about $46 million.
- And one more at the start of the 90s, director Brian De Palma's political satire The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), vaguely based upon Tom Wolfe's best-selling saga about stockbroker Sherman McCoy, featured multi-million dollar contracts for its miscast stars Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis. Savaged by critics, it had a budget of $47 million, and grossed only about $16 million.
Unexpected Successes:
Who would know or be able to predict that other films would be successful:
- Louis Malle's low-budget, overly-long My Dinner With Andre (1981) with fascinating dinner conversation between actor/playwright Wallace Shawn and theater director Andre Gregory
- Victor/Victoria (1982), set in 1930s Paris, in which Julie Andrews pretended to be a man -- pretending to be a woman, something that confused James Garner
- Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy (1982), a dark comedy about the search for stand-up comic celebrity by Rupert Pupkin (Scorsese's favorite actor Robert DeNiro), self-proclaimed as The "King of Comedy"; the film also featured an appearance by real-life comedian Jerry Lewis as arrogant Jerry Langford -- Pupkin's talk-show host idol -- who was kidnapped and tied up (and duct-taped) with assistance from his accomplice Masha (Sandra Bernhard) after Pupkin was snubbed, so that he could take his spot on the show
- Milos Forman's Best Picture-winning Amadeus (1984), a biopic (adapted by Peter Shaffer from his own play) without big-name stars and about foul-mouthed genius Wolfgang Mozart (Tom Hulce) and a rival composer named Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) vying for the favor of an Austrian king
 James Cameron's The Terminator (1984) was a story about Sarah Connor - the unsuspecting future mother of John - the leader of a human rebellion against the machines (which were exemplified by the brutal metallic cyborg T-800 played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who journeyed back in time to assassinate her); the intense and lean film established an action film genre that extends to the present day- the musical comedy Little Shop of Horrors (1986), originally a Roger Corman horror film in the 60s, about a florist shop that spawned a hungry plant named Audrey II that consumed demented dentist Steve Martin as one of its victims; its song "Mean Green Mother From Outer Space" was Oscar-nominated
- Tim Burton's ambitious, hyped and over-marketed production of a dark-shaded Batman (1989) - a Warners' mega-hit film promoted with lucrative merchandising that became the blockbuster hit of the last year of the decade, with an over-the-top performance by Jack Nicholson as the villainous Joker ("Where does he get those wonderful toys?") and comedian Michael Keaton in a serious, dual role as the comic book hero - the dark avenger of Gotham City
Big Business Entertainment:
Film budgets skyrocketed due to special effects (expensive digital effects) and inflated salaries of name-recognition stars (and their agents). Big business increasingly took control of the movies and the way was opened for the foreign (mostly Japanese) ownership of Hollywood properties. To save money, many more films were being made in non-US locations by mid-decade.
A number of the studios were taken over by multi-national conglomerates as their entertainment divisions:
- United Artists (acquired in 1969 by airline tycoon Kirk Kerkorian and temporarily abandoned) was bought and merged with MGM in 1981 to formMGM/UA; the company's film library was bought out by media mogul Ted Turner in 1986 for his cable TV channel, Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.; then, in 1990 MGM was purchased by Sony Entertainment of Japan - home to both Columbia Pictures and TriStar Pictures (see below)
- 20th (or Twentieth) Century Fox was taken over by oil tycoon Marvin Davis in 1981 and then entered into a 50% shared ownership with Australian publisher Robert Murdoch in 1985, becoming part of Fox, Inc. The film production unit was renamed simply Fox Film Corporation in 1989, and by the end of the century became known simply as Fox
- Columbia Pictures was purchased by the Coca-Cola Company in 1982; (Tri-Star Pictures was also created - a joint venture of Columbia Pictures, HBO, and CBS); Tri-Star Pictures bought Loew's Theaters in 1986; British film producer David Puttnam briefly headed Columbia Pictures for a few years beginning in 1986; the Sony Corporation of America purchased Columbia Pictures Entertainment, Inc. and Tri-Star Pictures from Coca-Cola for $3.4 billion in 1989, re-naming itself Sony Pictures Entertainment; in 1992, Sony Pictures Classics became an autonomous company within Sony Pictures
- in 1966, Paramount became a wholly owned subsidiary of Gulf + Western Industries, Inc; in 1989, Gulf + Western was reconfigured and renamedParamount Communications, Inc.; then in 1994, Paramount merged with Viacom International
- MCA/Universal (which had officially merged in 1962) became a powerful TV production company, and started its organized studio tours - one of LA's most popular tourist attractions; they were acquired by Matsushita Electrical Industrial, Co. in 1991; in June 1995, The Seagram Company Ltd. (VO) purchased a majority equity in MCA from Matsushita; then in late 1996, MCA Inc. was renamed Universal Studios, reclaiming its heritage as one of the industry's oldest and most prestigious movie studios
- Walt Disney Productions remained as one of the few studio-era survivors, with Michael Eisner as chairman and CEO beginning in 1984; it set upTouchstone Pictures in 1984 to make feature films that appealed to adult audiences; Buena Vista was Disney's distributor
- Warner Communications merged with Time, Inc. - announced in 1989 (and completed in 1990) to become Time-Warner, Inc., a component of the media empire AOL-Time Warner
A few independent film companies, such as New Line Cinema and Miramax, began to make more experimental and offbeat films to fill the gaps provided by the major studios.
Because costly film decisions were more in the hands of people making the financial decisions, not the film makers, movies were made only if they could guarantee financial success, thereby pandering to a few select, well-known star names attached to film titles without as much attention paid to intelligent scripts. With this kind of pressure, the most popular film stars demanded higher salaries, up front, and well as a percentage of the film's gross take, earning as much as $20 million. Budgets and actors salaries skyrocketed out of control, and powerful agents for agencies such as Creative Artists Agency (CAA) negotiated outrageous deals.
Notable 1980s Milestones:
- 36 year old Sherry Lansing was named president of production at 20th Century Fox in 1980 - and became the first female to hold this position and head a major studio (she resigned in 1982 to become an independent producer)
- Dawn Steel became VP for production at Paramount Studios in 1980, and then president of Columbia Pictures in 1987
- in 1980, CNN (Cable News Network) began operations
- in the early 1980s, Sony's superior video recording standard, termed Betamax, was overtaken by VHS (Video Home System) developed by JVC, with a longer record time of 2 hours; in 1987, when VHS commanded 95% market share, Sony finally began to abandon Betamax
- in 1980, Pioneer began to market its videodisk (laserdisc) players, thereby widening the availability of films for consumer viewing and purchase
- former Beatle John Lennon was shot dead on December 8, 1980 as he entered his New York apartment by Mark Chapman
- in 1981, the music-video cable network MTV began broadcasting on August 1st at 12:01 am - the first music video that was aired was Video Killed the Radio Star - the debut single of the British duo - the Buggles
- child-teen star and cover model Brooke Shields was the most sought-after actress of the early 80s - projecting both innocence and sexuality
- director Milos Forman's Ragtime (1981) was legendary actor James Cagney's first film - a "comeback" - after 20 years of retirement
- Ronald Reagan, a former President of the Screen Actor's Guild (from 1947-1952) and governor of California, became the first movie-star President of the US (the 40th) in 1981. His conservative reign and hard-edged approach toward the Soviet Union was reflected in Hollywood's many action-adventure films of the decade with aggressive, macho stars (Rocky, Rambo, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, Clint Eastwood and others) - even his futuristic anti-missile defense system co-opted the name of Lucas' 70s film Star Wars
 Jodie Foster was stalked by mentally-impaired John Hinckley, who tried to impress the actress by attempting to assassinate Reagan in late March, 1981- actress and aerobics guru Jane Fonda (sporting a striped leotard and leg warmers) released a workout videotape, Jane Fonda's Workout (1982), that became one of the hottest best-sellers for years, due to the increased proliferation of the home VCR
- George Lucas' THX sound system made its debut - the first movie to be shown in a THX-certified auditorium was Return of the Jedi (1983) - see more below
- during the making of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) in 1982, two child actors and Vic Morrow were killed in a freak helicopter crash - as a result, greater precautions would be taken on Hollywood sets
- Walt Disney Productions and Westinghouse Broadcasting launched the cable network The Disney Channel in April, 1983
- future singer/actress Vanessa Williams won the 1984 Miss America title (crowned in September, 1983, she became the first black woman ever to possess the title), but she resigned when it was revealed that she had posed for some sexually explicit photos (taken in 1982) that appeared in two issues of Penthouse magazine (September, 1984 and January, 1985)
- in 1983, 20th Century Fox began to openly solicit deals to display brand names in its films
- the American Movie Classics cable-TV channel started operations in 1984
- in 1984, the Voyager Company introduced its Criterion Collection line of 'special edition,' high-quality, feature-packed laserdiscs, often with state-of-the-art transfers, the CAV (full feature) format, the full theatrical 'letter-box' format, special commentary tracks and supplemental material, dual audio, interviews and annotated commentary by film-makers and scholars, director's cuts, deleted scenes, storyboards and production designs, and other bonus features (theatrical shorts or trailers, shooting scripts, posters, stills galleries, print booklets, out-takes, dual versions of a film, and other extras, etc.) that have since become commonplace on DVDs by the turn of the century
- in 1985, Robert Redford's Sundance Institute (established in 1980) took over the Utah/US Film Festival and later renamed it the Sundance Film Festival (held annually in January) - "dedicated to the support and development of emerging screenwriters and directors of vision, and to the national and international exhibition of new, independent dramatic and documentary films"
- Rock Hudson's homosexuality was revealed when he became the first major film industry figure to die of AIDS in October of 1985
- on September 8, 1986, Oprah Winfrey became the first African-American woman to host a nationally-syndicated daytime talk show, titled "The Oprah Winfrey Show"
- in 1987, Premiere Magazine began publishing
- The Dead (1987) was legendary director John Huston's last film, with top-billing given to his daughter Anjelica Huston and a script co-written by his son Tony
- the oldest performer to win the Best Actress Oscar was 81 year-old Jessica Tandy for Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
New Technologies: Home Entertainment-Video, Cable TV, and Sound
Cable TV networks, direct broadcast satellites, and 1/2 inch videocassettes (in the VHS format) in the 80s encouraged broader distribution of films. Sales and revenues from pre-sold theatrical features for videocassette reproduction and cable TV distribution contributed increased percentages for studios' earnings - sometimes outpacing box-office profits. [In an influential decision, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Universal v. Sony Betamax (1984)that home video-taping for personal use was not a copyright infringement.]
 Many studios entered the business of producing films for commercial TV networks, and the release of their films for the home entertainment-video market became a profitable rental-sales business. The pre-recorded video of Disney's Sleeping Beauty (1959)brought sales of over a million copies when it was released in 1986. And then to illustrate the burgeoning video industry over the next few years, 1988 sales of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) surpassed 15 million!
Tri-Star Pictures Motion Picture Company, one of Hollywood's major producer/distributors, was created in 1983 as a joint venture of CBS Inc., Columbia Pictures, and Time-Life's premium cable service Home Box Office (HBO) (founded in 1972). HBO and Showtime both functioned as producer/distributors in their own right by directly financing films and entertainment specials for their own pay-television cable stations. [In 1989, Time Inc. merged with Warner Communications, becoming the major media giant Time-Warner.] The spread of access to cable television (and satellite broadcasts) threatened traditional one-screen theatres and film attendance. On the other hand, multi-plex movie theatres with multiple screens spread across the country during the 80s, while the number of drive-in theatres drastically declined.
 Multi-track Dolby stereo sound, the THX sound system (named after George Lucas' first feature film), and Dolby SR ("spectral recording") (all designed to produce higher quality sound, noise reduction, surround-sound and other special effects) were introduced in the 70s and 80s, and advertised as a special feature for films such as Amadeus (1984) and Aliens (1986). The first movie to be shown in a THX-certified auditorium was Return of the Jedi (1983). [In 1992, a new technology dubbed Dolby Digital was introduced to movie-goers in Batman Returns (1992), and then DTS Digital Sound made its debut in Jurassic Park (1993).]
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The History of Film
The 1990s
The Era of Mainstream Films and "Indie" Cinema, the Rise of Computer-Generated Imagery, the Decade of Re-makes, Re-releases, and More Sequels
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The Decade of Money, Mega-Spending and Special Effects:
In the 1990s for the most part, cinema attendance was up - mostly at multi-screen cineplex complexes throughout the country. Although the average film budget was almost $53 million by 1998, many films cost over $100 million to produce, and some of the most expensive blockbusters were even more. In the early 1990s, box-office revenues had dipped considerably, due in part to the American economic recession of 1991, but then picked up again by 1993 and continued to increase. The average ticket price for a film varied from about $4.25 at the start of the decade to around $5 by the close of the decade. As indoor multiplexes multiplied from almost 23,000 in 1990 to 35,600 in the year 2000, the number of drive-ins continued to decline (from 910 in 1990 to 667 in 2000).
There still existed an imbalanced emphasis on the opening weekend, with incessant reports of weekly box-office returns, and puffed-up reviews and critics' ratings. The belief was sustained that expensive, high-budget films with expensive special effects (including shoot 'em-ups, stereotypical chase scenes, and graphic orchestrated violence) meant quality. However, the independently-distributed film movement was also proving that it could compete (both commercially and critically) with Hollywood's costly output.
Pressures on conventional studio executives to make ends meet and deliver big hit movies increased during the decade. Higher costs for film/celebrity star salaries and agency fees, spiraling production costs, promotional campaigns, expensive price tags for new high-tech and digital special-effects and CGI (computer generated images), costly market research and testing (to develop risk-averse, formulaic, stale, and over-produced films), scripts created by committee, threats of actor and writer strikes, and big-budget marketing contributed to the inflated, excessive spending (for inferior products) in the Hollywood film industry. True character development, interesting characters, credible plots, and intelligent story-telling often suffered in the process.
High-Cost Demanding Stars:
In the mid-1990s, perks and the excessive demands of mega-stars sometimes reached epidemic proportions for many of the highest-paid stars (including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Cruise, Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson, Eddie Murphy, Kevin Costner, Harrison Ford, Robin Williams, Jim Carrey, Demi Moore, Julia Roberts, and others). They often demanded script approval prior to filming, directorial and other casting choices, approval of the use of images for publicity, restrictions on film scheduling, studio-paid personal and entourage jet travel, various 'extras' (such as a personal gym and trainer/nutritionist, limo service), their choice of the positioning of credits (for example, above the title and in relation to other stars), the inclusion of nudity and other 'body-related' clauses, and final-cut approval. For example, at one time, Jack Nicholson wouldn't agree to filming during LA Lakers' basketball home games, and Harrison Ford, Kevin Costner and Tom Cruise would have the studios pay for their private jets.
 To promote her film Ghost (1990), Demi Moore (who earned the nickname Gimme Moore) traveled with a bodyguard, masseuse, hair stylist, cosmetician, fashion consultant, and an assistant (who had an assistant). Reportedly, she ordered studio chiefs to charter two planes for her and her entourage while promoting both of her flop movies Striptease (1996) and G.I. Jane (1997). Her support staff for the freely-adapted $50 million film The Scarlet Letter (1995) was no different, while the movie bombed and earned only a small fraction of its budget. And Julia Roberts (with a $10 million salary) ordered the studio to have a jet ready in London to fly from Pinewood Studios back to the US for the weekend during the making of Mary Reilly (1996), at a cost of more than $41,000 per month--for approximately three months. It became clear that once stars were earning multi-million dollar salaries, a director and a studio could easily lose control of the film, especially when the demanding star was also one of the film's producers. Ironically, however, a highly-paid star in a big-budget film didn't guarantee a film's success.
The Digital Age and Home Viewing:
The VCR was still a popular appliance in most households (about three quarters of them in 1991) and rentals and purchase of videotapes were big business - much larger than sales of movie theater tickets. Rather than attending special film screenings, members of the Academy of Motion Pictures viewed Oscar-nominated films on videotape, beginning in 1994. The signs of the burgeoning of the digital age portended revolutionary change. In 1990, Kodak introduced the Photo CD player. And in 1992, the Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, was also made available on CD-ROM. By 1992, broadcast TV was beginning to lose large numbers of viewers to cable-only channels.
 By 1997, the first DVDs (digital video discs) had emerged in stores, featuring sharper resolution pictures, better quality and durability than videotape, interactive extras, and more secure copy-protection. In just a few years, sales of DVD players and the shiny discs proliferated and would surpass the sale of VCRs and videotapes.
And with the digital revolution, some pioneering film-makers were experimenting with making digital-video (DV) films, pushing digital imagery and special effects, or projecting films digitally. A number of films also used special-effects CGI in more subtle, innovative ways:
- Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy (1990) was the first 35 mm feature film with a digital soundtrack
- Wolfgang Petersen's In the Line of Fire (1993) included retouched footage of political crowd scenes
- Jurassic Park (1993) was the first film with DTS sound; other DTS films included Best Picture-winning Braveheart (1995), Best Sound-winningApollo 13 (1995), Twister (1996), Independence Day (1996), the Star Wars Trilogy 1997 re-release, Batman and Robin (1997), and Con Air (1997)
- Forrest Gump (1994) used digital photo trickery to insert a person into historical footage, to erase the legs of amputee Gary Sinese, and to enhance the ping-pong game
- Heavenly Creatures (1994) enhanced its fantasy sequences (visions of the "4th World" called Borovnia - a "heaven without Christians" inhabited by clay people) with CGI
- Lars von Trier, founder of the Dogme 95 movement, directed the distinctive Breaking the Waves (1996) and showed how digital-video (and its hand-held cinema verite look) could be viable for dramatic feature films
- The English Patient (1996) was the first Oscar-winning American film with a digitally edited soundtrack - two of its nine awards were for Best Film Editing and Best Sound
- George Lucas' Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) included characters that were entirely digitally rendered, such as Jar Jar Binks
- Established directors experimented with Denmark director Lars von Trier's Dogme 95 fresh and improvisational approach to film-making, with groundbreaking techniques using digital video, including: Spike Lee's Bamboozled (2000), Barbet Schroeder's Our Lady of the Assassins (2000), Mike Figgis' Timecode (2000) and Hotel (2001), Eric Rohmer's The Lady and the Duke (2001), Richard Linklater's Waking Life (2001), Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity: Three Portraits (2001), Steven Soderbergh's Full Frontal (2002), and Gary Winick's Tadpole (2002)
- Lucas' second Star Wars pre-quel: Attack of the Clones (2002) was the first major Hollywood motion picture to be filmed entirely with digital video (at 24 fps)
One of the emerging trends of the late 80s and 90s was that although about the same number of pictures were produced as in the "Golden Age of Hollywood" (about 450-500 in a year), many of the films that were produced (some estimates say 40%) went directly to video (laserdisc or DVD) or cable with no cinematic theatrical release at all. And the window of time between a film's theatrical opening and availability for cable TV or home viewing shrunk. The proliferation of films helped to assuage the tremendous appetite for new products demanded by cable stations, video rental stores, the local megaplexes, digital satellite services, foreign markets, and the Internet. In the early 90s, the World Wide Web was born, and home computers were becoming the hot new technology - with vast repercussions for the film industry. [One of the decade's many films about malevolent computers was The Net (1995) with Sandra Bullock.]
Groundbreaking Internet Film-Marketing: Case Study - The Blair Witch Project
 Foretelling new methods of Internet-based marketing, Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick's roughly-made, offbeat independent film The Blair Witch Project (1999) (from small-time distributor Artisan Films) was a quasi-documentary about an October 1994 horrifying camping trip and investigation of a local legend that was experienced by no-name actors: three vanished Montgomery College student film-makers (Heather, Josh, and Mike) in Maryland's Black Hill Forest (near Burkittsville).
The cult film reaped a greater audience (and box-office receipts) from Internet exposure and astute promotion and marketing. The 'Blair Witch' website, a popular destination for web surfers (with millions of hits), created tremendous advance buzz (is it real?) for this low-budget film that was directed by a group of students from the University of Central Florida in 8 days. It was innovatively shot on 16mm B/W and color digital video, and basically looked like a home-made film with unknown actors and poor production values. Surprisingly, it easily became the most profitable film (percentage-wise) of all time, grossing $140.5 million (domestic) and $249 million (worldwide), but budgeted at only about $60,000 [a tremendous profit-ratio!]. Remarkably, it had no stars, no large marketing budget, no state-of-the-art special effects, and no creatures/monsters. Many believed that the story was true, rather than the ingenious marketing hoax that it was.
Changes in The Major Studios:
- 1990:
Warner Communications and Time Inc. merged to form Time/Warner, the largest communications merger to date, at a cost of $14 billion.
- Late 1990:
Japanese corporation Matsushita Industrial, Inc. acquired the entertainment conglomerate MCA/Universal for $6.1 billion.
- 1991:
MGM Studios struggled under its new chief Alan Ladd, Jr. (until replaced by Frank Mancuso in 1993).
Brandon Tartikoff chaired Paramount (until replaced by Sherry Lansing in 1992).
- 1994:
Viacom bought Paramount Pictures after a bidding war with USA Networks/QVC.
Disney became the first studio to gross $1 billion at the box office.
Showtime Networks and Castle Rock Entertainment entered into a multi-year, 50-picture exclusive output deal.
- 1995:
Seagram bought MCA/Universal from Matsushita for $5.7 billion and renamed it Universal Studios.
Disney bought the ABC Network.
Two members of the Creative Artists Agency, one of the world's leading talent and literary agencies, moved to head Hollywood film studios: Ron Meyers to MCA, and Michael Ovitz to the Disney Company (until 1996).
- 1996:
Time/Warner acquired Ted Turner's Turner Broadcasting System (TBS), including its cable TV stations and its extensive film library.
- 1997:
Orion Pictures was sold to MGM.
A Newcomer Studio: DreamWorks
 It was significant that the first new Hollywood studio in many decades, DreamWorks (SKG), was formed in October 1994 as the brainchild of director-producer Steven Spielberg, ex-Disney executive producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, and film producer/music industry giant David Geffen. The studio's first theatrical release was first-time feature director Mimi Leder'sThe Peacemaker (1997) starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman. This was followed by Amistad (1997), Mouse Hunt (1997), Paulie (1998), Deep Impact (1998), and Small Soldiers (1998). Their first real hit was also their first film to be nominated for Best Picture - Saving Private Ryan (1998).
After their first major animated film Antz (1998), they also turned out The Prince of Egypt (1998), the claymation Chicken Run (2000), Joseph: King of Dreams (2000) (direct-to-video), The Road to Eldorado (2000), and Best Animated Feature-winning Shrek (2001).
By decade's end, DreamWorks had three consecutive Best Picture winners:
- Sam Mendes' suburban satire American Beauty (1999)
- Ridley Scott's sword and sandal epic Gladiator (2000)
- Ron Howard's biopic A Beautiful Mind (2001)
In addition to producing films, DreamWorks also produced TV shows (Spin City, Freaks & Geeks, The Job, Undeclared), and music, including the soundtracks to DreamWorks films and record deals with popular artists. One of the new issues that all studios and other media industries had to confront was the pirating of films, and the illegal sharing/swapping of MPEG music files.
Independent Films:
 Existing alongside mainstream Hollywood film production is that of the independents. By the end of the decade, most studios had formed independent film divisions (such as Fox's Searchlight division) that would make films with artistic, edgy, or 'serious' social issues or themes, and without major Hollywood stars. Unlike the glitzy Academy Awards Oscars, the IFP Independent Spirit Awards - founded in 1984 - honored visionary, innovative film-makers, and unsung actors and actresses in independent films who "embody independence and who dare to challenge the status quo." Indicative of the times, in the 1996 Academy Awards race, four of the five Best Picture-nominated films (all butJerry Maguire (1996)) were from independent studios.
The Independent Film Channel was launched by the Bravo cable network in 1994 as an outlet for independent films. In similar fashion, in 1995, theSundance Channel was created by the Showtime cable TV network (in partnership with Robert Redford). Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute (established in 1980) took over the Utah/US Film Festival. In 1991, it was renamed the Sundance Film Festival (the film festival was held annually since 1981 in January in Park City, Utah and expanded in length) - "dedicated to the support and development of emerging screenwriters and directors of vision, and to the national and international exhibition of new, independent dramatic and documentary films."
By the end of the decade, however, independent film-making had become more mainstream and institutionalized - sharing some of the same concerns and corporate worries that traditional Hollywood studios had always confronted.
Miramax Studios:
 The small, independent Miramax Studios, formed in 1979 by brothers and co-chairmen Harvey and Bob Weinstein (the name was derived from the combination of their parents' names: Miriam and Max), produced and distributed independent and foreign, and then - more recently - even mainstream films. Miramax made a name for itself in the late '80s and '90s by making "art" films and the small independent and foreign language movies that other studios refused to make, including Working Girls (1987), Italy's Best Foreign Language Film Cinema Paradiso (1988, It./Fr.), the UK's award-winning My Left Foot (1989), Steven Soderbergh's sex lies and videotape (1989), Stephen Frears' The Grifters (1990), former video store clerk Quentin Tarantino's heist pic Reservoir Dogs (1992), and Jane Campion's New Zealand pic The Piano (1993).
It shrewdly marketed writer/director Neil Jordan's original British film The Crying Game (1992) with a surprise gender twist experienced by Forest Whitaker, earning Jordan a Best Original Screenplay Oscar. In 1993, Walt Disney Studio Entertainment acquired the maverick studio for $65 million - a move that encouraged other Hollywood studios to begin buying up indie production and distribution companies.
 Miramax's biggest cult hit of the 90s was Quentin Tarantino's  Pulp Fiction (1994), made with a budget of $8 million, and went on to win the Palm d'Or at Cannes and seven Oscar nominations, Miramax Studios then gathered together a stable of hip, young actors including Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Affleck, and Matt Damon. During the decade, Hollywood was disturbed that Miramax did so well, with the releases of Kevin Smith's low-budget black and white debut film Clerks (1994), Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway (1994),Sirens (1994), Larry Clark's Kids (1995), Sling Blade (1996) and Swingers (1996), the Best Original Screenplay-winning Good Will Hunting (1997), the Best Picture-nominated Italian film Life is Beautiful (1998), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), and The Cider House Rules (1999).
Miramax began an unbroken, eleven-year streak lasting from 1992 until 2002, of Best Picture-nominated films each year, beginning withThe Crying Game (1992). It was the longest streak for any company since the Academy limited the Best Picture nominees to five films in 1944.
- 1992 - The Crying Game
- 1993 - The Piano
- 1994 - Pulp Fiction
- 1995 - Il Postino
- 1996 - The English Patient - nine wins from its twelve nominations, including Best Picture
- 1997 - Good Will Hunting
- 1998 - Shakespeare in Love - seven wins from its thirteen nominations, including Best Picture
1998 - Life is Beautiful
- 1999 - The Cider House Rules
- 2000 - Chocolat
- 2001 - In the Bedroom
- 2002 - Chicago - six wins from its thirteen nominations, including Best Picture
2002 - Gangs of New York
Since about 1993, Miramax's sister (or subsidiary) company Dimension Films, specializing in horror films and science fiction, revitalized these genres with Scream (1996, 1997, 2000) and Scary Movie (2000, 2001) series.
The Greatest Super-Stars of the 90s:
The greatest stars of the 1990s included Arnold Schwarzenegger, Julia Roberts, Kevin Costner, Tom Cruise, Robert De Niro, Tom Hanks, Sylvester Stallone, Clint Eastwood, Michael Douglas, Macaulay Culkin, Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis, Steven Seagal, Tim Allen, John Travolta, Richard Gere, Jim Carrey, Winona Ryder, Harrison Ford, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Cameron Diaz, Mike Myers, Jodie Foster, Tommy Lee Jones, Brad Pitt, Robin Williams, Michelle Pfeiffer, Billy Crystal, Sandra Bullock, Leonardo DiCaprio, Demi Moore, Patrick Swayze, Jack Nicholson, Sean Connery, Meg Ryan, and Meryl Streep.
However, audiences were becoming more discriminating and were looking for more eccentric, witty, and unusual stars as well, such as Nicolas Cage, Keanu Reeves, Will Smith, Adam Sandler, George Clooney, Russell Crowe, Ben Stiller, Johnny Depp, Matt Damon, Kevin Spacey, Gary Oldman, Steve Buscemi, William H. Macy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, and Daniel Day-Lewis.
 The best-paid female actress of the decade was Julia Roberts, "America's Sweetheart " who appeared in lead roles in both clunkers and profitable films - usually likeable screwball comedies. Her first film appearances were in Mystic Pizza (1988), and in Steel Magnolias (1989) for which she earned her first Oscar nomination (as Best Supporting Actress). She first joined the club of actresses earning a million dollars per picture after being nominated for an Academy Award for director Garry Marshall's Pretty Woman (1990), with her role as a Hollywood hooker in a red-killer dress being romanced by corporate tycoon Richard Gere for $3,000/week.
Other film appearances included: Joel Schumacher's Flatliners (1990), the disastrous Hook (1991) in the role of Tinkerbell, the weepieDying Young (1991), the thriller Sleeping With the Enemy (1991), Alan J. Pakula's The Pelican Brief (1993), I Love Trouble (1994), Altman's Pret-a-Porter (1994), the critically-assailed Mary Reilly (1996), Everyone Says I Love You (1996), My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), Conspiracy Theory (1997), Stepmom (1998), Notting Hill (1999) and a wedding-phobia tale by director Garry Marshall titled Runaway Bride (1999) - reteamed on screen with Richard Gere almost a decade after Pretty Woman. By the end of the decade, Julia Roberts was able to command and equal male salaries - $20 million for her role in Steven Soderbergh's Erin Brockovich (2000), the film for which she won her first Oscar, playing the title role of an underdog single mother winning against insurmountable odds.
 Similarly, likeable girl-next-door star Sandra Bullock made uneven appearances in Speed (1994), While You Were Sleeping (1995),The Net (1995), In Love and War (1996), Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997), Hope Floats (1998), Practical Magic (1998) and Forces of Nature (1999).
 The biggest male star of the decade was Tom Cruise, with films as diverse as Days of Thunder (1990), A Few Good Men (1992), the epic tale of Irish immigrants in the late 19th century titled Far and Away (1992), The Firm (1993),Interview with the Vampire (1994), Mission: Impossible (1996), Jerry Maguire (1996), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
 Tom Hanks was also a major star of the decade, winning two Best Actor Oscars (back to back) from five nominations, for Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia (1993) and Robert Zemeckis' Forrest Gump (1994). In the 80s, he had found moderate success appearing in Splash! (1984), The Money Pit (1986) and Big (1988) (notable for giving Hanks his first career Oscar nomination), but then faltered in the early 90s with Joe Versus the Volcano (1990) opposite Meg Ryan and Brian De Palma's The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990). He then appeared in the baseball comedy A League of Their Own (1992) and then in the big hit Sleepless in Seattle (1993). From then on, his films were mostly quality works, such as Ron Howard's Apollo 13 (1995), his own directed That Thing You Do! (1996), Spielberg's WWII epic Saving Private Ryan (1998) (for which he was Oscar-nominated), the chick-flick You've Got Mail (1998), Frank Darabont's The Green Mile (1999), two voice appearances as Woody the Cowboy in Toy Story (1995) and Toy Story 2 (1999), and in another Oscar-nominated role for Cast Away (2000).
Following close behind was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who starred in some of the biggest hits of the decade, including Total Recall (1990), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), and True Lies (1994). Will Smith (in Independence Day (1996), Men in Black (1997), Enemy of the State (1998) and The Wild Wild West (1999)), Whoopi Goldberg, Eddie Murphy, and Denzel Washington were the best box-office draws among African-American stars of the decade.
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The History of Film
The 2000s
The New Millennium, an Age of Advanced Special Effects (CGI and Performance Capture) and the Era of Franchise Films
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The First Decade of the New Millennium: Change and Innovation
 Although technically, the new millennium dawned on January 1st 2001, the new decade of films (and film history) began on January 1, 2000. It began with trumped fears over Y2K and major terrorists attacks on 9/11/2001, was marked at its midpoint with the devastating natural disasters of the Asian tsunami of 2004 and of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and ended with the financial meltdown of the economy (the second crash and recession of the decade). The end of the decade was punctuated by James Cameron's revolutionary and major blockbuster film Avatar (2009), the highest grossing (domestic) film of 2009 - and of the decade. [It became only the fifth film in movie history to exceed $1 billion in worldwide grosses, and did so in less than 3 weeks.] The film soon surpassed the highest-grossing (worldwide) film of all-time - Cameron's own Titanic (1997).
 The decade was overwhelmed by the ascendancy of Google, Amazon, YouTube, the blogosphere, Craigslist, new media and social networking sites ( MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc), reality TV (capped by Survivor and American Idol), the popular game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Netflix, and 24/7 cable news shows - all competing for audiences or market share. New tech products included ubiquitous laptops (smaller and smaller), the iPod, Skype, Hulu, eBooks, Blackberrys and smart phones. Television moved from analog to digital broadcasting - and new flat-screens replaced bulky cathode-ray tubes, video rental stores converted to DVDs, and dial-up connections became broadband. Answering machines, real Rolodexs, reservations by phone, heavy phonebooks and cellphones, lickable stamps, VHS tapes (and players) and insertable floppy disks all went by the wayside.
 Although the first TiVo digital video recorder (DVR) shipped in early 1999, it wasn't until the decade of the 2000s, after further technological improvements, that it became a commonplace media appliance for recording TV programs - allowing for 'time-shifting' of viewing, and for fast-forwarding through commercials. However, the majority of DVRs now in use were being installed in cable or satellite set-top boxes, threatening to make stand-alone TiVo machines also obsolete. Sensationalized celebrity deaths were a new phenomenon -- surrounding the demise of Anna Nicole Smith, Michael Jackson, and Farrah Fawcett - among others.
Happenings in Entertainment:
Some of the historic events related to the world of entertainment happened in these explosive, fast-moving ten years:
- 2000: The last original "Peanuts" comic strip appeared in newspapers one day after its creator Charles M. Schulz died of colon cancer. The popular comic strip debuted 50 years earlier.
 2000: File-sharing site Napster was sued, for illegally distributing songs.- 2000: Pop singer Madonna married film director Guy Ritchie in Scotland.
- 2001: Apple announced iTunes at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, for organizing and playing digital music and videos, and the first iPod was released.
- 2001: DVD sales revenues first exceeded VHS videotape sales revenues.
- 2001: The dot.com tech bubble burst.
- 2001: director Pitof's dark 19th century crime fantasy Vidocq (2001) was the world's first-completed theatrical feature film shot entirely on Hi-Def digital video. This first full-length, all-digital film was shot using a Sony HD-CAM 24P1 (1080p, 24fps) high-definition digital camera, producing astonishing visuals. It was released a year before George Lucas' and Hollywood's first big-budget all-digital production of Star Wars - Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002).
- 2002: The much anticipated online movies-on-demand venture formed by five major Hollywood studios (Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Warner Bros.) was launched with the establishment of MovieLink. This marked the first time a large supply of recent, popular films were available legally on the Internet via a broadband connection.
 2002: Controversial white rapper Eminem entered the mainstream with the release of his movie 8 Mile (2002). It was the first film with an Oscar-winning rap/hip-hop song ("Lose Yourself").- 2003: Social networking website MySpace began.
- 2003: Tabloids were addicted to the 'supercouple' of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, dubbed by the name-blend "Bennifer" (a combination of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez), who appeared together in Gigli (2003).
- 2003: By mid-March, DVD rentals first topped those of VHS videotape rental revenues.
- 2003: Hollywood action film star Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected the 38th governor of California.
- 2004: Facebook launched.
- 2005: The first YouTube video was uploaded in late spring, but the site didn't officially launch until November 2005. The site soon became the most prominent and popular participatory site for uploading, viewing, and sharing self-produced video clips.
- 2005: The action sequel Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003), the first Sony Pictures film, was also the first feature film to be released on Blu-Ray Disc, a next generation, high-definition optical disc format. The popularity of the new DVD format (and the start of a new optical disc format called Blu-Ray) completely doomed the once-ubiquitous VHS videotape cassette format. In early 2006, thelast major Hollywood motion picture to be released in VHS videotape cassette format was David Cronenberg's crime-thriller A History of Violence (2005).
- 2005: The trend of developing a name-blend for a celebrity super-couple continued with the prominent media and tabloid obsession over Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, dubbed "Brangelina." Their secret real-life pairing was rumored when they co-starred together in the action film Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), leading afterwards to Pitt's separation and divorce from Jennifer Aniston in 2005 after five years of marriage.
- 2006: The social networking and blogging site Twitter was founded and debuted.
 2007: The first broadband movie ever distributed by a major studio was Paramount's prankster sequel Jackass 2.5 (2007), marking a new age of online-first movie distribution.- 2007: The film magazine Premiere, which first began publishing in the US in the pre-Internet world of 1987, issued its final print publication with its April 2007 issue.
- 2007-2008: The Writer's Guild of America (WGA) went on strike in early November after a stalemate in negotiations occurred with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). Issues included increased compensation for the film and TV writers for DVD residuals and compensation for "new media" distribution (content distributed through emerging digital technologies, such as the Internet, including downloads, streaming, smart phones, and video on demand, etc.). When the 3-month strike ended in mid-February 2008, it was estimated that it resulted in a total loss of $2.5 billion show-business.
- 2008: A backlot fire at Universal Studios destroyed several icons from movies, such as Courthouse Square, the clock tower from Back to the Future, and the King Kong exhibit on the studio tour.
- 2008: The video website Hulu launched.
- 2009: For the first time since 2002, domestic movie ticket sales surpassed revenue from the purchase of DVDs. The recessionary economy and the current transitionary stage from DVDs to Blue-Ray and to video-on-demand digital downloads through Internet-enabled televisions, were partially accountable for the reversal.
Writer/director Jason Reitman's Up in the Air (2009) was an insightful quasi-comedy, perfectly reflecting its time of economic distress at the end of the decade, about a single, corporate down-sizing hit-man (George Clooney) happily in the business of career-transition - traveling around the country and firing employees, until the threat of video-conferenced, technological firings imperiled his own job.
The After-Effects of 9/11 and the Iraq War on Film:
As often happens, war (or politically-oriented or anti-war) films with ties to current 'headline' events go into a period of declining popularity, especially when the country is actually fighting a long and drawn-out war. The 'Second' Gulf War (Operation Iraqi Freedom) was soon the source of Hollywood interpretations, but it appeared that American audiences did not want realistic war dramas -- war was the ultimate 'reality TV' -- during actual wartime.
 Warner Bros.' terrorist-themed action film Collateral Damage (2002), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, originally due to be released on October 5, 2001, was postponed until early February 2002, due to the terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center on 9/11/01. At the same time, Ridley Scott's intense combat film Black Hawk Down (2001), released only a few months after 9/11, captured the visceral tension of a disastrous helicopter mission in Somalia in 1993. Spike Lee's 25th Hour (2002) was a post 9/11 examination of racial hatred, fears and prejudice, portrayed in the character of convicted NY drug dealer Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) who was facing seven years in prison. Its most memorable scene was a scathing diatribe of ethnic/socio-economic archetypal slurs delivered before a mirror. The first 9/11 related feature film from Hollywood, on the 5th year anniversary, was Paul Greengrass' and Universal's real-time drama United 93 (2006). Another 9/11 related film was Paramount's and Oliver Stone's World Trade Center (2006) that opened in late summer, and told the story of two Port Authority cops (Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena) who were among the last rescue workers to be pulled from the rubble.
The innovative documentary film Voices of Iraq (2004) was made by distributing 150 inexpensive, lightweight, digital video-cameras to the people throughout Iraq - the film's subjects and participants. Over 400 hours of film footage was edited down to less than 80 minutes, and although presumably unbiased, it presented a fairly positive view of the US.
 Filmgoers were mostly reluctant to attend films that dealt with the realities of the unpopular war (and mentioned the word "Iraq" or "war" in ad campaigns), and film studios shied away from making war films for much of the decade. However, there were some exceptions. Director Irwin Winkler's R-rated war drama Home of the Brave (2006) told about four American soldiers (Samuel L. Jackson, Jessica Biel, Brian Presley, and 50 Cent) on their last mission in Iraq when they were ambushed. Subsequently, they suffered both physical and emotional trauma upon readjustment to civilian life in Spokane, Washington. It was the first major Hollywood feature film to depict returning soldiers from the war in Iraq. Made on a budget of $12 million, the film was a serious flop, earning only about $500,000 (worldwide), and only $52,000 domestically. It recouped some of its losses from sale of DVDs, at $4.7 million.
 There were lots of other Iraq War-related box-office casualties, especially in 2007: Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah (2007) reflected the confusions and atrocities of war in its story of a retired Vietnam vet (Tommy Lee Jones) searching for his missing, returned Iraqi War soldiering son near his Army base in New Mexico, where the Iraq War was only a backdrop. Michael Winterbottom's sad A Mighty Heart (2007) told of the kidnapping-disappearance of journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002 and his truth-seeking wife Mariane's (Angelina Jolie) heroic search for him. South African director Gavin Hood's coldly observant war on terror drama Rendition (2007) starred Reese Witherspoon as a determined, pregnant American wife whose Egyptian-born, chemical engineer/husband - falsely-accused of being a terrorist suspect - was detained and tortured in a secret detention facility in Northern Africa.
Star-studded flop Lions for Lambs (2007), directed by Robert Redford, was an impassioned exploration of US wars in the Middle East from three different angles (two soldiers in Afghanistan, a Republican senator (Cruise) and an opposing TV journalist (Streep), and a West Coast history professor (Redford) challenging one of his promising students). Brian DePalma's fictional anti-war documentary Redacted (2007), with the tagline: "Truth is the first casualty of war," was a fictional story based on real events in Iraq (including the 2006 rape/murder of an Iraqi teen girl by two US soldiers) -- it was a daring recreation of videos/blogs made by soldiers serving in Iraq, to bring the 'redacted' (edited or altered) sensitive and confidential information into the open. And writer and first-time director James Strouse's understated Grace is Gone (2007) told about a grieving Minnesota father (John Cusack) who took a road trip with his two young 12 and 8 year-old daughters to a fictional Florida theme park (Enchanted Gardens) where he struggled in the catharctic ending to tell them that their soldiering mother Grace had been killed in Iraq.
 Kimberly Peirce's raw Stop-Loss (2008) explored the human consequences (post-traumatic stress disorders, or soldiers going AWOL) of the questionable military policy dubbed 'stop-loss' which allowed the US government to involuntarily extend a soldier's enlistment contract for duty in Iraq. The realistic terrors of the Iraq War for a squad of bomb defusers were dealt with in Best Director-winning Kathryn Bigelow's tense war thriller The Hurt Locker (2009), the Best Picture of its year.
The entire series of Final Destination horror films throughout the decade (2000, 2003, 2006, and 2009) specialized in the various horrible ways in which people die - sometimes freakishly accidental (Rube Goldberg-like) and very complex. The plane crash disaster in the first installment was eerily prescient of the upcoming 9/11/01 tragedy. The continuing haunting anticipation and fear produced by the unpredictable nature of terrorist attacks in future years may have caused fans of the series to find entertainment-value in the theatre, where the terrors could be walked away from.
By mid-decade, the proliferation of low-budget horror films with grisly torture as their main theme, e.g., Hostel (2005), Wolf Creek (2005), The Devil's Rejects (2005), Saw I (2004) and Saw II (2005) were reflective of the wartime era's main concerns (the global war on terror, waterboarding, torture in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo, etc.).
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The History of Film
The 2010s
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Film Trends and Oscar Reflections For 2010:
Attendance was down at movie complexes in 2010 - it was almost 6% lower (the lowest in 15 years) than in 2009 and fewer tickets were sold (1.3 billion vs. 1.4 billion tickets), although slightly higher revenue (over $10 billion) was due to steeper ticket prices for 3D. Many factors were proposed as causes:
- noisy or inconsiderate theatre patrons
- poor image and sound in multiplexes
- more viewing options (VOD, streaming, etc.)
- the recessionary economy
- a less than stellar summer
- the use of social media to instantly broadcast word-of-mouth film reactions
- something else?
Of the ten 2010 Best Picture Oscar nominees, the two audience favorites were Toy Story 3 (2010) and Inception (2010), although the former will most likely win Best Animated Feature Film, and the mind-bending Inception, as has been pointed out numerous times, was missing a key Best Director nomination. The main front-runners, The Social Network (2010), the western remake True Grit (2010), and The King's Speech (2010) were not major blockbusters like the previous year's Avatar (2009), Up (2009), and The Blind Side (2009).
Fantasy Films Mostly Nixed in Favor of Real-Life Non-Fiction Stories:
Jerry Bruckheimer failed twice as producer, with the adapted video game Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) and the action fantasy comedyThe Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010). Other fantasy flops included M. Night Shyamalan's awful Nickelodeon cartoon rip-off The Last Airbender in 3D (2010) and Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010). Mainstream audiences neglected the multi-genre messy flop that was Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), a video-game-and-comic-book-inspired rock 'n' roll romantic action comedy, and also ignored Jack Black in Gulliver's Travels (2010).
One flippant over-the-top film that did appeal to geeks and fanboys was the unapologetically defiant, R-rated comic-book super-hero adaptation Kick-Ass (2010) - its title referring to a teenaged crime-fighting super-hero (with another vigilante father-daughter duo known as Big Daddy and foul-mouthed, sexually-aggressive and murderous 11 year-old Hit-Girl).
Filmgoers (and Academy members) preferred a heavy dose of non-fiction stories that reflected life's struggles and challenges, character conflicts, or stories about real-life disabilities where one could care about a character. Examples included:
- the most nominated Best Picture, The King's Speech (2010) about a debilitated monarch with a stammering problem who must lead his people through the war
- the generation-defining and relevant The Social Network (2010) about finding one's identity and the social media lifestyle
- the arthouse thriller about the dark side of competing ballerinas in Black Swan (2010)
- the almost unfilmable 127 Hours (2010) about a terrible climbing accident
- an eccentric sleeper hit about an atypical two-mom family in The Kids Are All Right (2010)
- a come-from-behind boxing story in The Fighter (2010)
- the very realistic and raw Winter's Bone (2010) with a fearless Ozark teenager
- the disintegration of a dysfunctional marriage in Blue Valentine (2010)
Poor Response to High-Profile Sequels:
If it wasn't the critics, then it was poor audience response to sequel films such as the superfluous comedy Sex and the City 2 (2010) with its extravagant stars not in the Big Apple but in the Middle East, or the third episode of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010) that was received only lukewarmly as another fantasy film with nothing special in it. Even though Iron Man 2 (2010) made over $300 million domestically, few liked it and it was the sole comic book film of the year to receive an Oscar nomination (Best Visual Effects) - proving there was an overall decline (and exhaustion) with superhero action films.
The top-grossing talking animal film of 2010 was Yogi Bear (2010) in a sub-genre (including Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore in 3-D (2010)and Marmaduke (2010)) that was already over worn and tired. The remake Tron: Legacy (2010) (with 3D) wasn't great in the eyes of the Academy voters - it missed out on a Best Visual Effects nomination, and Oliver Stone's topical sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) was unimpressive. The most obvious exceptions were both based on books: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 (2010), and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010).
A Decline in the Cult of Major Film Celebrities and Stars:
The best film openings were for a well-directed solid story, rather than for a big-name major Hollywood star or celebrity. The fast-action comedy Knight and Day (2010) counted on Tom Cruise's bankability (with another aging headliner Cameron Diaz), but it ended up having Cruise's lowest-attended opening weekend since Far and Away (1992). The poorly-received pretentious summer film The A-Team (2010), capitalizing only on its brand name, was a real low for a repeat of a major action TV series. The star power of the romantic thriller The Tourist (2010), touting the pairing of Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie, fell flat, as did Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett in Ridley Scott's Gladiator-like Robin Hood (2010), Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler mismatched in The Bounty Hunter (2010), or George Clooney in the slow-moving The American (2010). Over-privileged Julia Roberts in the heavily-merchandized Eat Pray Love (2010) exhibited the narcissistic star's shallow soul-searching. Joaquin Phoenix's appearance in the experimental mockumentary I'm Still Here (2010) made fun of 'celebrity' itself.
The Hype of 3-D:
The phenomenon of 3-D didn't entirely live up to its promise, repeating its 1950s status as a short-lived fad. The prediction that 3-D films following the record-breaking Avatar 3-D (2009) would be the wave of the future fizzled in early 2010. It proved to be an unnecessary, gimmicky enhancement of the special effects, in most cases, and had nothing to do with the plot, character development, or acting quality. Backlash came from users who complained about eye strain, the silly glasses, dark images, shoddy transfers, etc.
The best example of failed 3-D was for the incoherent flop Clash of the Titans (2010), whose conversion from 2D to 3-D in post-production backfired. 3-D was also misused in The Nutcracker in 3D (2010), The Last Airbender (2010), and Saw 3D (2010). The costly and lengthy conversion to 3-D of theseventh Harry Potter film was fortuitously scrapped. Maybe 3-D was most appropriate when applied to a guilty-pleasure sexploitation film Piranha 3D (2010), the fourth installment of a zombie horror film (based on a computer game) Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D (2010), or the immature stunt-filled Jackass 3D (2010).
The Strength of Feature-Length Documentaries:
Movie audiences had a more positive attitude toward screen entertainment of all kinds, thanks to growing familiarity with reality TV and YouTube. There were a number of film distributors who took chances on self-produced, low-budget projects independent of the studios (and financed through a phenomenon known as "crowdfunding"), during a time when the number of studio films declined. Documentaries could be made cheaply, with widely-available and affordable, low-cost digital film equipment. Many docs of feature-length made a strong showing as unexpected hits during the summer months of 2010.
Some felt there was a glut of documentaries critical of various social issues, such as the two environmentally-themed documentaries which were Oscar nominees in the year of the Gulf oil spill: Waste Land (2010) and GasLand (2010). They were joined by National Geographic's Afghanistan war-themedRestrepo (2010), Inside Job's (2010) accounting of the 2008 global financial meltdown, and the mysterious UK graffiti artist Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010).
Others that showed promise included the highest-grossing documentary of the year - Disney's ecological nature drama Oceans (2010); also Babies (2010), Guggenheim's un-nominated polemic on US education woes in Waiting For Superman (2010), the intriguing and plot-twisting Catfish (2010)revealing a surprising Facebook family relationship, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (2010), Countdown to Zero (2010) (the follow-up film about the nuclear arms race from the makers of An Inconvenient Truth), and The Tillman Story (2010) about a NFL star turned soldier.
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