Read The Oxford History of World Cinema Online
Authors: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
America (MPPDA), and hired former Postmaster-General Will H. Hays to keep these
international markets open. With Hays as an unofficial ambassador, assisted by a willing
US State Department under Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, the MPPDA
fought to make sure that foreign countries permitted Hollywood corporations to operate
with an absence of constraint.
By the mid- 1920s, Hollywood dominated not only the major English-speaking markets
of Great Britain, Canada, and Australia, but most of continental Europe except for
Germany and the Soviet Union, and had successfully expanded into South America,
Central America, and the Caribbean. This crippled the development of rival studio
systems, except in isolated locations. For example, Japan at the time was not an
international trader, but a nation that kept to itself. Although Hollywood films were
popular with Japanese audiences, a native studio system was able to grow and rival
Hollywood in a way a British or French industry never could. Germany also retained
some degree of autonomy, though even this began to be undermined by the end of the
1920s, with Hollywood companies tempting away many leading German artists, and
striking deals with the major German company, Ufa.
In an attempt to limit Hollywood penetration, a number of nations enacted governmental
protection for their film industries. The Germans, followed by the French, devised the
'contingent system', whereby Hollywood imports were restricted to a certain number per
year. The British quota system, set up in 1927, was designed to set aside a certain
proportion of screen time for British films on the home market, but it was framed in such
a way that Hollywood companies were able to open up a production facility in Britain and
make films that would qualify as 'British'.
Indeed Hollywood's continued international monopoly forced film entrepreneurs in other
countries to struggle to please their native audiences, somehow to 'better' Hollywood. But
with their control of international distribution, the Hollywood corporations could and
would define appropriate standards of film style, form, content, and money-making.
Imitation would not work, however competitive the product.
THE PICTURE PALACE
The production and distribution of films constituted only two of the three essential pegs
of institutional Hollywood power. Movie moguls knew that money came through the
theatrical box-office and thus sought some measure of control over exhibition, the third
crucial sector of the film business. If ' Hollywood' was initially a group of California
studios and offices for distribution throughout the world, it also came to include a cluster
of movie palaces situated on main streets from New York to Los Angeles, Chicago to
Dallas, and, within a short time, London and Paris as well.
The modern movie palace era commenced in 1914 with Samuel 'Roxy' Rothapfel's
opening of the 3,000-seat Strand in 1914 in New York. Roxy combined a live vaudeville
show with movies. His vaudeville 'presentation' offered a little something extra that
attracted audiences away from more ordinary movie houses down the street. Roxy's
shows opened with a house orchestra of fifty musicians playing the national anthem. Then
came a newsreel, a travelogue, and a comic short, followed by the live stage show. Only
then came the feature film.
The movie palace itself was far more than just a theatre. The splendour of its architecture
and the 'touch of class' lent by the ubiquitous ushers evoked a high-class fantasyland.
Adolph Zukor soon caught on to Roxy's innovations and swooped in to purchase a string
of movie palace theatres, thus gaining control of a fully integrated system of motion
picture production, distribution, and exhibition.
Roxy was never able to sustain his economic enterprise and sold out. Chicago's Balaban
& Katz, however, developed an economic system for making millions of dollars from
their movie palace empire and, in the period immediately after the First World War,
pioneering exhibitors took their cue for maximizing profits from the extraordinary success
of this Chicago corporation. Indeed, Adolph Zukor approached Balaban & Katz and the
two operations merged and created Paramount Pictures in 1925, marking the true
affirmation of the Hollywood studio system in its three-part strategy of domination.
Balaban & Katz's success began when their Central Park Theatre opened in October 1917.
This mighty picture palace became an immediate success, and Sam Katz, as corporate
planner and president, put together a syndicate of backers who had all been wildly
successful with their own Chicago-based businesses: Julius Rosenwald, head of Sears-
Roebuck; William Wrigley, Jr., the chewing-gum magnate; and John Hertz, Chicago's taxi
king and later innovator of the rental car network. With this support, Balaban & Katz
expanded rapidly, leading the nascent movie exhibition business from a marginal leisure-
time industry to centre stage in the economy of entertainment.
Balaban & Katz devoted strategic care to the location of theatres. Until then, theatre
owners had chosen sites in the prevailing entertainment district. Balaban & Katz,
however, constructed their first three movie palaces in outlying business centres on the
edge of Chicago, away from the centre of town, selecting points at which the affluent
middle class could be expected to congregate. For them it was not enough simply to open
a movie house anywhere; one had to take the show to a transportation crossroads. Rapid
mass transit had enabled the middle class and the rich to move to the edge of the city to
the first true suburbs. It was this audience, able and willing to pay high prices for
luxurious shows, that Balaban & Katz set out to cultivate.
The architecture of the movie palace insulated the public from the outside world and
provided an opulent stage for the entertainment. The Chicago architectural firm headed by
the brothers George and C. W. Rapp designed the new-style theatres by mixing design
elements from nearly all past eras and contemporaneous locales, among them classic
French and Spanish designs and contemporary art deco renderings. Film-goers soon came
to expect triumphal arches, monumental staircases, and grand, column-lined lobbies
(inspired by the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles). Façades were equally dramatic. Strong
vertical lines were accentuated by ascending pilasters, windows, and towers, sweeping
high above the tiny adjacent shop-fronts. The actual theatre building was made from a
rigid, steel shell, on which plaster-made decorations hung in brilliant purples, golds,
azures, and crimsons. Massive steel trusses supported thousands of people in one or two
balconies.
Outside, colossal electric signs could be seen for miles. The upright signs towered several
storeys high, flashing forth their messages in several colours. Behind them, stained-glass
windows reflected the lights into the lobby, evoking an ecclesiastical atmosphere and
linking the theatre to the traditional, respected institutional architecture of the past.
Once inside, patrons weaved through a series of vestibules, foyers, lobbies, lounges,
promenades, and waiting rooms designed to impress and excite. The lobbies and foyers
were, if anything, more spectacular than the architectural fantasy outside. Decorations
included opulent chandeliers, classical drapery on walls and entrances, luxurious chairs
and fountains, and grand spaces for piano or organ accompaniment for waiting crowds.
And since there always seemed to be a queue, keeping newly arriving customers happy
was as important as entertaining those already seated. Inside the auditorium, everyone had
a perfect view of the screen, and careful acoustical planning ensured the orchestral
accompaniment to the silent films could be heard even in the furthest reaches of the
balcony.
One commentator compared these Balaban & Katz theatres to baronial halls or grand
hotels in which one might have tea or attend a ball. Balaban & Katz sought to make its
upwardly mobile patrons feel as if they had come home to the haunts of a modern
business tycoon.
Balaban & Katz offered free child care, rooms for smoking, and picture galleries in the
foyers and lobbies. In the basement of each movie palace a complete playground included
slides, sand-pits, and other objects of fun for younger children left in the care of nurses
while their parents upstairs enjoyed the show.
Ushers maintained a constant quiet decorum within the auditorium proper. They guided
patrons through the maze of halls and foyers, assisted the elderly and small children, and
handled any emergencies. Balaban & Katz recruited their corps from male college
students, dressed them in red uniforms with white gloves and yellow epaulettes, and
demanded they be obediently polite even to the rudest of patrons. All requests had to end
with a 'thank you'; under no circumstances could tips be accepted.
The Balaban & Katz stage shows outdid even Roxy by developing local talent into stars'
to equal Mary Pickford or Charlie Chaplin. The shows were elaborate mini-musicals with
spectacular settings and intricate lighting effects. They celebrated holidays, fads of the
day, heroic adventures, and all the highlights of the Roaring Twenties from the Charleston
to the exploits of Charles Lindbergh to the new medium of radio. For their orchestras and
organists, who provided music for the silent films, Balaban & Katz also depended on a
star system. Jesse Crawford became an organist as well known as any Chicagoan of the
1920s. In 1923 his wedding to fellow organist Helen Anderson was the talk of Chicago's
tabloids. When Sam Katz took the pair to New York, the Chicago newspapers mourned
the loss in the same way they would the departure of a sports hero.
Most of the features described above could be easily copied by any theatre chain willing
to make the necessary investment. One part of the Balaban & Katz show, however, was
unique. Balaban & Katz offered the first air-conditioned movie theatres in the world,
providing summertime comfort no middle-class citizen in the sweltering Midwestern
states could long resist. After 1926 most important movie palaces either installed air
conditioning or built the new theatre around it.
There had been crude experiments with blowing air across blocks of ice, but prior to
Balaban & Katz's Central Park Theatre most movie houses simply closed during the
summer or opened to tiny crowds. The movie palace airconditioning apparatus took up an
entire basement room with more than 15,000 feet of heavy-duty pipe, giant
240horsepower electric motors, and two 1,000-pound flywheels.
Soon summer became the peak movie-going season. With its five-part strategy -- location,
architecture, service, stage shows, and air conditioning -- Balaban & Katz set the scene
for a redefinition of movie-going in the USA. The rest of the world followed cautiously,
adopting or adapting some features of the new system as circumstances permitted. In
most European cities prime sites for movie theatres continued to be in the traditional
entertainment districts, though in Britain at least a number of wellequipped and opulent
theatres were opened in the developing suburbs of major cities. In poorer countries and
those with more equable climates air conditioning was an expensive luxury, and summer
film-going never became as popular elsewhere as it did in North America. Hollywood
took advantage of this to phase the release of major films, bringing them out on the
domestic market in the summer and elsewhere in the world in the autumn.
With the merger with Famous Players, Sam Katz successfully transferred the Balaban &
Katz system to Paramount's national chain of theatres. Other companies quickly followed
suit: Marcus Loew with MGM, and Warner Bros. with their First National chain. But
none could rival the success of Adolph Zukor and Paramount. As the silent era drew to a
close, it was Zukor and Paramount who had the top stars, the most world-wide
distribution, and the most extensive and prestigious theatre chain -- the very model of the
integrated business through which Hollywood's power was asserted.
This Hollywood system crested in the heady days prior to the Great Depression.
Hollywood as an industrial institution had come to dominate the world of popular
entertainment as no institution had before. The coming of sound simply eliminated
competition from the stage and vaudeville. But change was on its way, precipitated by the
Depression and by the rise of the new technologies of radio and television. Hollywood at
the end of the 1920s and throughout the 1930s was faced by a series of shocks -falling
audiences, the loss of some overseas markets, threats of censorship, and anti-monopoly
legislation. But it adjusted and survived, thanks to the solid foundations laid by its
pioneers.
Bibliography
Balio, Tino (ed.) ( 1985), The American Film Industry.
Bordwell, David, Staiger, Janet, and Thompson, Kristin ( 1985), The Classical Hollywood
Cinema.
Gomery, Douglas ( 1986), The Hollywood Studio System.
-- ( 1992),
Shared Pleasures
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Hampton, Benjamin B. ( 1931), A History of the Movies.