Analysis on the Studio System of Hollywood in the Golden Era Essay Example for Free

Analysis on the studio System of Hollywood in the Golden Era EssayThe Fall of Monopoly As far as the filmmaking process is c one timerned, winds are essentially worthless and brain dead essential. -William Goldman It fighterted with Florence Lawrence as the Biograph Girl in the early 1900s, and bred into the brass of the Universal studio apartments by one smart producer by the name of Carl Laemmle. The birth of Hollywood had neer experienced a joyful transition for editors and actors, who posterior in the day were treated like leased help by directors.The silent film era was not the commercial enterp advance it is nowadays it was a mere impression of Vaudeville, and studios generated cheap and generic content, while actors remained anonymous and low paid. Florence was one of the popular actresses of the judgment of conviction who helped create a celebrity culture that was infact a fill used by Studios to promote their cinematographic content. And this farce became kn suffer in history as the Golden Age of Hollywood. The celebrity culture that is idolized today was in actuality a ploy used to attract an audience following.Stars were created, not born. The Studio System comprised of The wide Five (MGM, overriding, Warner Br opposites, RKO and Fox), who are credited for creating some of the most legendary stars of the time, thus leading to the term star system. Studios invested a great deal of time and money into grooming and humansizing an actor, and owning him in the process, simply by signing him to a contract. When an actor had inscribed his name on the formidable piece of paper, he had no future of his own.Depending on his talent and the response his image got from the audience, he was either crucial or dispensable to the Studio he had been employed by. The industry was relentless when it came to the treatment of actors. Fame, in all its school glory, was a high price to pay for the compensation of no ain life and no personal choice. A ctors were required to play the roles they were assigned to without question or argument, made to indulge in publicity stints, and traded attain or loaned to another Studio on mutually agreed upon arrangements without their consent.Performers were very similar to the posters their faces were displayed on because they had absolutely no require everywhere their careers, just as a poster has no control over how it is used or interpreted. An example of the extent to which a Studio went to glamourize its artists is Rita Hayworth, who was coerced into changing her name from Margarita gambling casino and made to get plastic surgery performed (hairline electrolysis) to make her more marketable. However, that is not to say that actors were treated with either respect when the silent era fell off its crippling platform.The past was not a beaming place for an actor before the term celebrity came into being. The release of The Jazz Singer is known to be the pedestal on which the studio er a was readyed upon because it was the first motion picture with a few minutes of synchronized sound. When sound entered the frame, Vaudeville rapidly depleted into obscurity, and former Vaudeville actors were faced with the bitter frankness of unemployment, forcing them to migrate into the film industry. This immigration created a domino effect for the entertainers already present in the enterprise.They had never been exposed to the element of voice being incorporated into a motion picture, and could not adjust to the comprehension of sound. Various hurdles included bad voices, thick accents and the inability to remember dialogues. Moreover, the Big Five circulated their own theatre chains, and adopted specific genre as labels for their re vestation and glory. In this process, actors were never given more than flexibility to explore or expand their potential, but were in a constant state of restate the same unaffixed radical over and over again in each new production.On a mo re positive note, this repetition led to the recognition of some very creative artists, who explored a theme with such unabashed inquisition that no two films were ever shown in a tiresome rhythm method of birth control of alliteration. One surface-known actor in this situation was element Kelly. Gene Kelly was associated with musical films such asAn Ameri trick in Paris,Les Girls,Brigadoon, andSingin in the Rain. In virtually all of his movies, Kelly would sing and go done confused dance numbers. MGM, the studio Kelly was promise with, knew people expected this from Kelly, so the studio made sure to put Kelly in musical films.The few movies Kelly was in that werent musicals did not do nearly as well as the ones he sang and danced in. When people saw a trailer for a movie with Gene Kelly in it, they expected to see a musical this expectation kept people coming back to see more of Kellys movies, which brought MGM more and more revenue. The Studio System did not tho control th e lives of its performers within the confines of its sets or production houses. An employee had no concept of privacy or freedom of pampering in the luxuries offered outside the bubble of the world of film.Due to the incredulous amount of acclamation an actor received, he could not ruin his public image, even by making the mistakes a common citizen could afford to overlook. Studios had contracts raddled with morality clauses that forbade an employee from engaging in the utility of drug abuse, divorce and adultery as these would lead to the military issue of a foiled public image, thus resulting in loss of annuity. However, even though such cordial control was oppressive, it retained a modest reputation and acted as a form of deterrence for the artists.However, the intrusion of these clauses led to no direct effect on the perpetrators, because the Studio they were assigned to would pay off the witnesses or offer exclusive stories to tabloids in exchange for not reporting on the truth of the matter. In this sense, actors were provided with free reign to do as they pleased. picture show is the culmination of the obsessive, mechanistic male drive in occidental culture. The movie projector is an Apollonian straight-shooter, demonstrating the link between aggression and art. Every pictorial framing is a ritual limitation, a barred precinct. -Camille Paglia Was it the male drive in western culture -if the term western culture can be deemed as appropriate- that led to the birth of explicit content in Hollywood, or the market command for it?Censorship created a massive propaganda in the late 1920s. It was one of the major reasons why The Motion evidence Commission was established in 1921, the strongest form of government that induced censorship on films for the next 44 years. It began with The Kiss in 1896, in which a man and a woman shared a caress that barely lasted half a minute, leading on to Know Thy Husband (1919), in hich the protagonist contracted a h orrible disease after indulging in his primal desires in the city, evolving further into away the Law (1921), a crime film with the same connotations. Hollywood was never subtle with its aesthetic imagination, and actors, as a result, developed a notorious reputation. Infact, Hollywood itself was renowned to be a place infested with scandalisation and immoral behavior. This splintered imagery of the sensational mirror that reflected the flaws of Hollywood was not for the righteous offence of the general public alone.Celebrities suffered directly from the environment they presided in- literally in the fatal sense. For instance, one of the most tragic deaths a star faced was Thelma Todd, a young actress who had costarred in a number of classic comedies with the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and Buster Keaton (Monkey crease Horse Feathers). She died at the age of 30, in 1935, believed to have committed an accidental suicide when she was frame dead in her car, although the genera l opinion suggested suspicions of cold blooded murder.Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark board of our souls. -Ingmar Bergman The Studio System gave rise to legendary personalities, faces of people that are remembered as icons of inspiration and unadulterated talent. It gave rise to films like Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, The Maltese Falcon and Singin in the Rain. It gave us Marilyn Monroe, Fred Astaire, and countless other idols to look up to and admire.However, with the emergence of Sound and Studio, even when Hollywood acquired so much recognition and wealth, it confounded the sense of morality and the image of an honest corporation by degrading its own reputation, and that of its main components, the actors. Cinema is now associated with superficial glamour, it is a world that is infested with deceit and facade. A false pretense of joy through fame, a bubble of happiness that does not seem to exist in the first place. Ironically, the fall of the Studio System began with the reason for its accession.War brought people to theatres, and war became its undoing. After World War II legal, expert and social developments converged on the Hollywood film industry, undermining the economic foundation of the studio system. The antitrust suit against Paramount in 1948, combined with the increasing strength of unions, encouraged the growing practice of freelancing. This decision not only outlawed the practice of block booking, it also forced the studios to sell their theater chains, and reduce the number of productions. What was once a monopoly of the Big Five turned out to be a doorway for minor studios and breakaway filmmakers to thrive in.As far as the actors were concerned, they found the opportunity to become more genre savvy, and exact the right to refuse a contract, or opt to go to a free agency instead. They found the leeway to become more selective an d demanding in their preferences regarding their professional services. The star system crumbled, but the stars found liberation.References http//www.hollywoodmoviememories.com/articles/hollywood-history/hollywood-studio-system-golden.phphttp//www.moderntimes.com/palace/apex/http//www.filmsite.org/30sintro2.htmlhttp//tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/TheGoldenAgeOfHollywood?from=Main.GoldenAgeOfHollywoodhttp//www.ritahayworth.com/http//ivythesis.typepad.com/term_paper_topics/2009/09/the-rise-and-fall-of-hollywood-studio-system.htmlhttp//tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/FallOfTheStudioSystem?from=Main.FallOfTheStudioSystem