The Oxford History of World Cinema (21 page)

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.