Let's Talk 1950s Hollywood

• House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings: leftists in compromising positions, stars, directors, producers, screenwriters, all being forced to name communists or people with communist affiliations.
• “Hollywood Ten”, one director, one producer, and 8 screenwriters, all blacklisted due to communist ties
• HUAC hearings left a legacy of distrust and wasted talent
• “The Paramount Decision” in ’48 the U.S. supreme court declares that the 8 companies (big 5, little 3) are guilty of monopolistic practices, ban on block booking, Majors have to divest of their theater chains; despite this distribution remained dominated by the dominant studios
• The decline of the Hollywood studio system
• Runaway productions – Spending “frozen funds” (money in other countries that they have to spend in that country from the profit of Hollywood imports into that country) shooting films abroad. These productions also avoided the high cost of US labor
• After 1946 Hollywood domestic’s fortune begins to sag, mostly due to people spending their leisure time differently (since a lot of them live by the suburbs not in the actual cities where the theaters are) and most of all spending more time watching TV instead of going to the theater
• The fight against television (widescreen, color, etc.): 1950 - Eastman introduces monopack, a single strip color film making it much easier and cheaper to shoot in color (than Technicolor). Cinerama – 1952, widescreen format that used 3 projectors that created a multipaneled image, in 1953 with The Robe CinemaScope displayed their widescreen alternative and became the most popular because it used conventional 35mm film and fairly simple optics. Paramount clung to its own system, VistaVision
• New twists on old genres, upscaling genres (the Western, Melodrama, Historical epics)
• The rise of other leisure activities made studios create more “important” and films that would cater to the selective moviegoers since people were going to be more selective now.
• Due to elimination of block booking a new power of the individual film comes along, each individual film becomes more important instead of companies being able to slip bad films into bundles for block booking
• Art cinemas and drive-ins: by the mid-1960s there are over 600 art cinemas around the country in cities and college towns. Drive-ins were cheap to set-up and attacked clients that didn’t want to go in the city since they were mostly on farmland, also teens liked them for passion pits
• In the mid 1950s teenpics market opens
• Rise of the Independents: Lew Wasserman – giving stars more money and more power to be able to pick roles, etc. made Hitchcock the richest director in Hollywood when he negotiated a deal that said Hitchcock would get 60% of profits and help finance the film. Exploitation films – gain new prominence in the 1950s (Corman’s Poe cycle with Vincent Price)
• Major directors, many veterans, e.g. John Ford, Raoul Walsh, William Wyler, King Vidor all continue to work. Émigrés stayed on: Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger. Orson wells becomes a vagabond director, made films for Columbia, Republic, and Universal as wells as producing other films on shoestring budgets from European backers and his film performances