The Hollywood Brand

Movies and American Modernity

Peter Catapano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351183246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

The Hollywood Brand traces the development of the moving picture from its humble roots as an object of mass amusement to its transformation into an art form worthy of exhibition in museums and academic study in leading universities. This book provides historical context to the ideas that coalesce to create the iconic Hollywood brand that comes to define American identity.

1

What’s in a Name?

Exhibition and Expectations

After the biograph came the vitagraph and kinetograph, and by the time these additions came into being, no well-regulated theatre of varieties was without its own specially named device. If a manager’s name was Jones, he could call his machine the “Jonesograph.” If a theatre was known as the Empire, then it would be the “Empireoscope.”

Robert Grau, 1910¹

Photoplay, cinema, movie, or film? The medium’s shifting names reflected the historical process that defined the moving picture to its audience and provides insight into how the movies settled into the iconic “Hollywood” brand. Before the filmed drama was considered an art worthy of contemplation, technology itself was the main attraction and its star status was reflected in the medium’s early names. From its very origins, the technological wonder of motion photography took on many names as producers and exhibitors alike pursued strategies to capitalize on its popularity and to invest in the cultural capital of the new medium. Many neologisms, awkward to our contemporary ear, emerged to describe moving pictures. In its earliest emergence, the machine was the medium. The various cameras and projectors with their dazzling array of names long forgotten—Praxinoscope, Phenakistoscope, Zoopraxinoscope, Kinetoscope, and Animatograph—thrilled audiences in exhibition halls on both sides of the Atlantic.

However, during the earliest exhibitions in the United States, the medium came to be dominated by two machines—Thomas Edison’s Vitascope and the Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe. Both of these early machines were patented and name-branded by their famed inventors as a means to establish proprietary rights over the medium. These earliest of entrepreneur–inventors promoted the spectacle of moving photography by distinguishing each name with Greek and Roman cognates for “movement” or “life.” These naming practices also suggested a desire to endow the new technology with the aura of the ancients and the gravity of the classics. Later, as moving pictures established their own exhibition spaces, this investment continued as the use of the Greek suffix “-odeon” gained currency as a new set of show business entrepreneurs began to emphasize their exhibition spaces rather than the machine. Nonetheless, until the nickelodeon era, moving picture technology was the main attraction and the medium’s names reflected the machines’ technology. There was very little attention paid to the cultural value of the images depicted on the screen, other than as an amusing curiosity.

Toward a Technological Utopia: The Theater of Science

While early moving picture exhibition did not necessarily take place in a theater, the presence of the projector and screen transformed the physical space into a different kind of space than most people had experienced. Since the machine was the attraction, this new entertainment space was not only a theater of comedy or drama, but a theater of science.² Every movie exhibition projected a future of technological progress accessible to all who could pay the relatively low entry price. Electricity, telephones, movies, and other technologies all seemed to promise improvement in the present and progress into the future. Many agreed with Edward Bellamy that the new technologies might even offer solutions to the social conflict marked by labor strife and racial violence during the Gilded Age.³ Bellamy’s highly popular utopian socialist novel, Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888), imagined a future America where social harmony would be achieved through scientific management and technological modernization.

However, many of the same modern forces that promised to use technology to ameliorate the excesses of Gilded Age capitalism also brought rapid immigration, urbanization, and other social changes that threatened traditional life. Americans adjusted to this new modern environment of increased technological innovation with nervous enthusiasm. New technologies, including moving pictures, also created specialists with a new set of skills. Any challenge to existing authority was met with contempt by those more entrenched in the status quo. As historian Carolyn Marvin has pointed out, the introduction of these new modern technologies created conflicts “in which existing groups perpetually negotiate power, authority, representation, and knowledge with whatever resources are available.”⁴ Those who held more conservative views regarding art raised fears about the growing relationship of photography and moving picture technology to culture.

Audiences enthusiastically embraced the latest moving picture technology, effectively ignoring the sometimes despairing jeremiads of critics. The subsequent introductions of sound, color, wide-screen formats, and other technological innovations continued to raise concerns about the aesthetic value of new technologies, even among those who had previously endorsed the view of “film as art.” To the present day, curious audiences have continued their attraction to an exhausting list of new screen technologies—wide screen, high definition, quadraphonic, multi-channel, stop action, computer generated, and more. These audiences, who seem primarily attracted to spectacle and special optical effects, still generate consternation among many film critics.

It is safe to say that the turn of the twentieth century marked the beginning of moving picture audiences’ fascination with the spectacle of motion photography technology, and their pleasure in the act of viewing continues to this day. However, in this early period of its history, the medium itself, rather than filmed drama or movie stars, was the main attraction. Before “nickel madness” swept the nation, moving pictures were more likely to be exhibited at a fair, a dime museum, or as part of a vaudeville program than at a venue that was exclusively devoted to the presentation of movies.⁵ Film historian Tom Gunning has described this fascination with the machine and the scopic pleasure associated with it as “the aesthetic of attractions.”⁶ Some public safety concerns were raised almost immediately due to the highly flammable nature of early film stocks. Dark exhibition spaces led to concerns regarding crime and vice. However, the medium’s novelty and its association with technological progress generally protected it from the sort of harsher criticism regarding content that was leveled later against the nickel theaters largely due to the popularity of the man credited as the “inventor” of the moving pictures, Thomas A. Edison.

In the early twentieth century, most ordinary Americans believed that Edison had created yet another invention that would improve their lives. The successful public exhibitions of his latest innovations in moving photography represented the conquering of new technological frontiers. In the context of the anxious shift into modernity, Edison became an important icon for those seeking popular support for the new medium, and he used his own popularity to promote his moving picture business. In Edison, the public was able to reconcile the contradictions of modernity. The general belief that he had been the primary inventor of the motion picture camera and projector effectively placed the movies within comforting and familiar discourses of technological progress and entrepreneurial innovation, rather than disruption and anxiety.

While it is not clear what exactly constituted the first moving picture exhibition, influential early film historians Henry Grau and Terry Ramsaye both affirmed the primacy of the public exhibition of Edison’s Vitascope on April 23, 1896 at Koster & Bial’s Music Hall on Herald Square in New York City when discussing the popular emergence of the new medium. Their early film histories lent credence to the popular belief that moving pictures were invented in America by Edison. The day after the Koster & Bial’s premiere, the New York Times reported that the large and curious crowd had not left disappointed by this first public exhibition of “Thomas Edison’s latest marvel the Vitascope.”⁷ The association of the new technological wonder with the magical name of Edison guaranteed a crowd that included the theatrical and business elites of the city. Despite the efforts of later historians to highlight the humble origins of American cinema, the audience that night included not only the “Wizard of Menlo Park” himself but a crowd that was “as full of silk hats as an undertakers’ convention.”⁸ Many were undoubtedly investors also interested in the commercial potential of Edison’s latest machine.

The spectacle of science and its profitable application were inseparable, with Edison reigning as the star of the evening. The Times reported that the cheering audience even demanded that Edison make a curtain call, “but he made no response.”⁹ The main attractions that evening were not the particulars of the film program, but the machine and its inventor. The audience responded enthusiastically to the spectacle of motion photography and the presence of Edison. According to a Times reporter, “the spectator’s imagination filled the atmosphere with electricity, as sparks crackled around the swiftly moving, lifelike figures.”¹⁰ Earlier, the English-born Eadweard Muybridge and the French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey had both set themselves the difficult task of attempting to represent motion graphically. But it was Edison who had exploited the new graphic representation of motion for profit. The spectacle on display at Koster & Bial’s was not one of pure science, but one that wedded science to its practical commercial application. It was a marriage that proved enduring for the ever-evolving motion picture industry.

What Edison offered to his audience for the price of admission was a glimpse of the future—a future of technological wonder and, perhaps, greater realism in dramatic presentation. Two days after the historic screening, the New York Times proclaimed the evening a triumph. Edison promised that the Vitascope would be improved with a larger screen and the addition of color. The Times gushed that the machine had achieved “almost the acme of realism” and that its possibilities were “boundless.”¹¹ One theater impresario, Charles Frohman, predicted that “Mr. Edison’s invention” would revolutionize the American stage. Both Frohman and Edison were looking to improve upon the ability of science and art to represent reality. “When art can make us believe that we see actual living nature,” Frohman explained, “the dead things of the stage must go.”¹² He did not fully grasp the impact the new medium would have on the theater: his relatively modest ambition was to see the Vitascope as the “successor to painted scenery.” However, while spectatorship in early American cinema would be marked primarily by “an aesthetics of attractions” presented by the new technology, Frohman already understood the dramatic and mimetic quality of moving pictures—a quality that would become more prized in the nickelodeon era and beyond as the medium would be increasing compared to live theater. As the novelty of moving pictures as a spectacle waned, its popularity as a form of theater started to emerge.

Initially, Edison was not completely successful at exploiting his motion picture machines because he failed to find a dependable exhibition outlet. Other business concerns were more successful than his in the pre-nickelodeon era.¹³ After its debut in Paris, the Lumières’ Cinématographe became so popular in the United States that it was quickly “placed in nearly all of the vaudeville theatres of this country.”¹⁴ However, once it had won the moving picture patent war, the powerful Edison Company asserted monopoly control over the nascent motion picture industry.¹⁵ At the end of August 1897, Edison received final approval for the motion picture patents that he had filed in 1891. His company immediately used its resources to engage in lawsuits against smaller operators, who usually settled with their richer competitor. In 1897, despite the popularity of their machine, the Lumières abandoned the lucrative American vaudeville market that they had come to dominate because of the threat of litigation by Edison.¹⁶ By doing so, the brothers lost their foothold in the American camera and projection market. By 1908, Edison had consolidated his control of the American film industry by creating the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), a trust comprising all of the major domestic film production companies and distributors, as well as Eastman Kodak, the largest producer of film stock.

The MPCC and its affiliated companies, however, were initially less successful eliminating foreign movies from American screens. The French production company Pathé-Frères dominated international screens, including those in the United States, until 1910. Much of the criticism directed at Pathé by American producers took on a cultural populist tone with claims that the films were either too lascivious for American audiences or too highbrow. According to Richard Abel, a campaign to “Americanize” film production ushered in the birth of the Western and other film genres that emphasized American exceptionalism.¹⁷ After 1910, European competitors would never again mount a serious challenge to the domestic film industry. The disruptions of the First World War only accelerated the demise of French and German bids to enter the US film market or challenge the hegemony of the US film industry internationally.¹⁸

Despite its aggressively monopolistic business practices, the public image of the nascent motion picture industry benefited from public respect for Edison. However, the cultural capital that Edison provided as the face of the industry began to wane as the MPCC began to lose control of the moving picture bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Modernity under the Hollywood Sign
• 1. What’s in a Name?: Exhibition and Expectations
• 2. Movies with a Mission: Populism and a New “City on a Hill”
• 3. A Home among the Moderns: Movies and Modern Aesthetics
• 4. Hurray for Hollywood: Entertainment as Art
• 5. A New Art for the American Century: Hollywood Enters the Museum
• Conclusion: The Future for the Hollywood Brand
• References
• Index