Hollywood on Location

An Industry History

Joshua Gleich, Lawrence Webb

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813586274
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Location shooting has always been a vital counterpart to soundstage production, and at times, the primary form of Hollywood filmmaking. But until now, the industrial and artistic development of this production practice has been scattered across the margins of larger American film histories. Hollywood on Location is the first comprehensive history of location shooting in the American film industry, showing how this mode of filmmaking changed Hollywood business practices, production strategies, and visual style from the silent era to the present. The contributors explore how location filmmaking supplemented and later, supplanted production on the studio lots.Drawing on archival research and in-depth case studies, the seven contributors show how location shooting expanded the geography of American film production, from city streets and rural landscapes to far-flung territories overseas, invoking a new set of creative, financial, technical, and logistical challenges. Whereas studio filmmaking sought to recreate nature, location shooting sought to master it, finding new production values and production economies that reshaped Hollywood's modus operandi.

Chapter 1

The Silent Screen, 1895–1927

Jennifer Peterson

The motion-picture maker sets up his whirring camera in the wilds and the crowded city alike.

—David S. Hulfish, Cyclopedia of Motion-Picture Work, 1911

When I went out one glorious morning . . . [to] take the first “stills,” and actually began posing the artists, it felt to me, just like it must feel to a prisoner leaving solitary confinement for the open air. Imagine the horizon is your stage limit and the sky your gridiron. . . . Our perspective was the upper chain of the Rockies, and our ceiling was God’s own blue and amber sky. I felt inspired. I felt that I could do things which the confines of a theatre would not permit. . . . Nature did the rest.

—Cecil B. DeMille, 1914

In an article published in the New York Dramatic Mirror in 1914, Cecil B. DeMille claimed to have shot his first feature, The Squaw Man, on location in the Rocky Mountains. As quoted in the epigraph, he explained, “I felt inspired. . . . Nature did the rest.” But in fact, DeMille was not telling the truth when he said that “our perspective was the upper chain of the Rockies.” While the film was indeed shot partly outdoors, its location work took place entirely in Southern California.1 While the West may have seemed like a generalized geography to many people in the 1910s, it is certainly a stretch to conflate Southern California and the Rocky Mountains, which are located roughly a thousand miles apart. But as a struggling young filmmaker eager to make his mark, DeMille’s fabrication is hardly surprising and rather less scandalous than some of the other tall tales of the early film industry. In fact, DeMille’s self-promoting yarn reveals a contradiction at the heart of the concept of cinematic location. Although the term “location shooting” implies authenticity and strict fidelity of place, the actual practice of shooting on location often means simply shooting outside the studio in some place that more or less resembles where the story is set. Location shooting is one of the core cinematic practices used to shore up film’s celebrated sense of realism. But more often than not, filmmakers have used one location to stand for another. “Good enough” is the rule of location shooting, not “exactly” or “precisely.” “Stunt locations” (as they are often called today) are extremely common, and as this example demonstrates, the practice of substituting one location for another dates from the silent era.2

DeMille’s claim reveals a second timeworn concept at the heart of cinematic location: the idea that “nature” itself is a coauthor of films shot on location. For films set in the wilderness, exact coordinates were less important than the location’s ability to signify nature’s grandeur. What makes the outdoor scenes in The Squaw Man feel particularly “real” is not the specific geographical location in which it was shot but the materiality of nature, including real mountains, trees, rivers, and rocks. Nature, it seems, composed a generic theatrical outdoor space in the silent era. Indeed, it is around the time of The Squaw Man that the concept of “location” emerges in film history. As this chapter will show, there was already a well-established tradition of shooting films outdoors before the studio era, but the concept of location shooting as we think of it today emerged as a by-product of the studio system.

Finally, as DeMille’s statement indicates, one particular kind of location bears a special relationship to American cinema: western scenery for western films. Western scenery is more than just a setting, according to DeMille; rather, wilderness landscapes add a sublime pathos that is, in this and other westerns, inextricably connected to American national identity. At the same time, “the West” was a particular kind of location in which particular kinds of stories could be told—about settlement, conquering nature, or the conflict between “civilization” and “savagery” that propels so many westerns. While this chapter does not focus specifically on westerns, it should be noted at the outset that the western is one of the genres most inextricably bound up with location shooting in American film history. Quite literally, the film industry’s move west in the silent era echoed the nation’s settlement of the West in the previous century. In this way, silent-era films dramatize a logic of settlement not just in many of their stories but in their evolving visualization of real, material landscapes.

The practice of shooting films on location is fundamental to cinema and can be traced back to the earliest films ever made. Well-known examples such as The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (Auguste and Louis Lumière, 1895) and Rough Sea at Dover (Birt Acres and R. W. Paul, 1895) make this point plain. But what does it mean to shoot a film on location? As it so often does, the history of early cinema reveals a complexity at the heart of this seemingly straightforward filmmaking practice. The technological and industrial idiosyncrasies of early cinema underscore the necessity of defining what location shooting meant in different historical periods. The concept of location shooting as it came to be understood by Hollywood did not develop until the consolidation of the narrative/feature-film-oriented studio system in the late 1910s. Before that, cinema was characterized by a set of competing ideas about the significance of outdoor shooting and the use of specific, identifiable real-life locations in film.

This chapter presents an overview of the predominant location shooting practices of U.S. film companies during the silent era. It also sketches a series of definitions for the different meanings of location work from 1895 to 1927. As this chapter demonstrates, silent cinema’s phases of industrial development created different horizons of possibility for location work. Although its meaning changed, some form of shooting “on location” was always a prominent practice even as filmmaking developed from a minor and undercapitalized set of competing small businesses into a large, highly capitalized, vertically integrated industry. What changed was both the meaning of what was once called outdoor shooting and the range of places that came to signify realistic locations on film. Early cinema was characterized by a variety of outdoor shooting practices. In the so-called transitional era, various nomadic filmmaking practices were common. By the time the film industry had shifted (mostly) to Southern California, a new and more efficient set of location practices emerged that would remain dominant for much of the studio era. Location shooting gives the illusion of what Walter Benjamin called “the equipment free aspect of reality.” But in fact, as Benjamin further explained, this representational trope is actually “the height of artifice.”3 In order to create the illusion of pristine nature and unfettered reality, filmmakers on location shoots relied on many of the same concepts and technologies they used in the studio.

Early Cinema: Outdoor Shooting and Scenic Films

Beginning with the first moving pictures made in the 1890s, every American film company shot films outside, and every kind of early film subject was filmed outdoors, including news stories, scenic views, sports, and comedies. Although studio filmmaking began with Edison’s Black Maria studio in West Orange, New Jersey (in use from 1893 until its demolition in 1903), outdoor shooting was the more common practice for at least the first five years of American cinema history. The reasons for this are both aesthetic and technological. Outdoor shooting was immediately appreciated for its verisimilitude, but more importantly, the idea of the film studio as the primary site of production had not yet emerged. Shooting outdoors was easy and required no expensive construction of structures or sets. Most importantly, moving pictures needed bright illumination, and artificial lighting was not yet available, which meant that sunlight had to be used until studio-grade artificial lighting was developed (the first artificial lights were Cooper Hewitt lamps installed in the Biograph Company’s New York studio in 1903). Indeed, as Brian Jacobson has shown, “The search for favorable climatic conditions or, in their absence, substitutes for sunlight thus became one of the major driving forces in the development of early cinematic production.”4 Filmmakers began constructing glass-enclosed studio buildings using sunlight for illumination as early as 1897, but shooting outdoors remained the default practice for a great deal of filmmaking in the earliest years of cinema.5 This was not yet location shooting as it later came to be understood; rather, at first, outdoor and studio shooting were not rigidly distinguished. A decade later, however, the difference was clear. David S. Hulfish wrote in a section on “pictures without studios” in his 1911 Cyclopedia of Motion-Picture Work, “A prominent film manufacturing company operated for years without a studio and without painted scene sets, releasing a reel each week.”6 What had been common in the 1890s and early 1900s was now remarkable in 1911.

The history of location shooting is both a history of cinema technologies and a history of cinematic realism. Film history textbooks typically contrast the French Lumière films, known for their “documentary” qualities and outdoor shooting, with the American Edison films, known for their fairground/vaudeville subject matter and for having been shot inside the Black Maria. But this distinction has as much to do with these companies’ respective technological devices as it does with national/cultural differences. While the Lumière Cinématographe camera was lightweight and portable (thus enabling the Lumières to produce and exhibit outdoor views six months before Edison), the Edison Manufacturing Company’s first Kinetograph camera was bulky and limited to shooting within the Black Maria and its immediate environs. The Edison Company soon developed a more portable camera, however, and began shooting street scenes in New York City. Herald Square, shot by Edison cameraman William Heise on May 11, 1896, is considered the first film shot on location in New York.7 A reviewer from the Buffalo Courier described the film in this way: “A scene covering Herald Square in New York, showing the noonday activity of Broadway at that point as clearly as if one were spectator of the original seems incredulous, nevertheless is presented life-like. The cable cars seem to move in opposite directions and look real enough to suggest a trip up and down that great thoroughfare, while at the same time the elevated trains are rushing overhead, pedestrians are seen moving along the sidewalks or crossing to opposite sides of the street, everything moving, or as it is seen in real life.”8 As this description makes clear, it was the detailed realism of this moving picture of a real location that was so impressive to early audiences. Not only was the urban bustle of New York accurately captured by the film, but the materiality of objects and people moving through space was also remarkable in its own right. This discourse of realism has continued to define our notion of location shooting ever since, although the styles of realism have shifted over time.

Outdoor shooting was also more common in early cinema because film was not yet seen as a predominantly narrative medium; rather, nonfiction subjects were more frequently produced than fic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Silent Screen, 1895–1927
• Chapter 2. The Classical Hollywood Studio System, 1928–1945
• Chapter 3. Postwar Hollywood, 1945–1967, Part 1: Domestic Location Shooting
• Chapter 4. Postwar Hollywood, 1945–1967, Part 2: Foreign Location Shooting
• Chapter 5. The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1979
• Chapter 6. The New Hollywood, 1980–1999
• Chapter 7. The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000–Present
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Index