Mass Producing European Cinema

Studiocanal and Its Works

Christopher Meir

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501327100
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Business

Equal parts historical study, industrial analysis and critical survey of some of the most important films and television programs in recent European history, this book gives readers an overview of the development and output of this important company while also giving them a ringside seat for the latest round of the oldest battle in the film business. With films like Lucy, The Impossible and Paddington, European studios are producing hits that are unprecedented in terms of global success. Christopher Meir delves into StudioCanal, the foremost European company in the contemporary film and television industries, and chronicles its rise from a small production subsidiary of Canal Plus to being the most important global challenger to Hollywood's dominance.

Part One

The History of European Studios and Studiocanal’s Place Therein

1

The Bones that Litter the Shore: A Brief History of Integrated, Pan-European Studios

In examining what could either be an epochal shift in the history of the European screen industries or, given some fragility that remains apparent in the sector, the latest false dawn in a long tradition of European flame outs, this book will look to build on the considerable historiographical work done on Europe’s position in the global screen industries and its putative rivalry with Hollywood. By all accounts, this is relationship has been decidedly one-sided, with Hollywood eventually winning out over whatever promising European organization sprouted up at whatever moment in film history. This account will not contest this general historical trajectory—it is after all an objective fact that these companies have failed and the Hollywood majors have persisted and profited from the failures of its rivals—but it will seek to do more than just recount each failure. Instead, while building on the conclusions of other historians about these various ill-fated ventures, this account will also seek to stress the relationships between the present and the past. This will mean at times simply flagging up moments in the past that will be relevant to actions of Studiocanal that will be discussed later in the book, and other times it will mean more extensive discussion of particular problems that are significant for understanding other companies on the contemporary European scene. This chapter does not claim to be a survey of every important European media company that has ever existed. Such a project would have to include the major state and private television broadcasters that eventually expanded into film production and some cases distribution, companies such as Italy’s Mediaset or Britain’s ITV and the BBC. Instead, this is a chronicle of pan-European (i.e., with marketing ambitions in more than two countries, crossing linguistic lines in the process), vertically integrated (to varying degrees combining operations in production, distribution, and/or exhibition) firms that challenged for portions of the global market. The time period will run from the very beginnings of cinema up until the 1990s when Studiocanal itself and its eventual parent company Vivendi joined this tradition, each in turn making their own calamitous errors, errors which are detailed in the two chapters that follow.

As such, this chapter will encompass a historical period of roughly one hundred years and in many respects it tells a story that is by now familiar within film history. Indeed, the only company that will be discussed at length which has not yet been examined to any significant degree by film historians is PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, one of the most important companies of the 1990s but also one which has been curiously neglected in studies of that period. Other than this section, the chronology of firms under discussion is a familiar one, including Pathé-Freres as well as UFA, the Rank Organization, and producers such as Carlo Ponti, Alberto Grimaldi, and others. All of these companies have been objects of analysis to some extent or another by historians such as Richard Abel (1994), Kristin Thompson (1984), Thomas Elsaesser (2000), Tim Bergfelder (2005a), Mike Wayne (2002), and others and I will hope here to synthesize and build on those historical accounts to argue that the contemporary moment as epitomized by Studiocanal’s activities can and should be understood in the larger historical contexts (and the power dynamics therein) that writers have been assessing throughout film history. What Studiocanal’s output and trajectory as a company tells us in light of that context will thus be a major question guiding the book as a whole. That all said, we can begin this account of corporate European cinema history with the very beginnings of the cinema itself.

Pathé and the race to control the world film trade before the First World War

There may be debate still over whether Thomas Edison or the Lumiére brothers invented the first cinematographic machine, but European companies can legitimately claim to have invented the modern film business, or at least the version that came to dominate the global film industry for much of the twentieth century. Charles Pathé was correct in two of his most famous quotes about his pioneering Pathé-Freres corporation that came to dominate the global film trade in the 1900s and 1910s. “I may not have invented cinema, but I industrialized it” (quoted in Abel 1994, 9) aptly describes the ways in which Pathé’s innovations of vertically integrating production, distribution, and (in some parts of the world) exhibition would not only make his company the dominant force of the early film industry, but it would also set the industrial model that the largest American companies would follow during and after the First World War. His more self-deprecating statement that his company’s dominance “rested solely on a head start” vis-à-vis his competitors (quoted in Thompson 1984, 5) also accurately indicates how fortuitous his company’s timing was in realizing the commercial potential of the new medium in the early 1900s. Pathé began building his global infrastructure in 1904 and by 1907 had a dominant presence in virtually all the developed markets of the time (Abel 1994, 23). He then engaged in a price war with Edison and by 1906 controlled between one third and one half of the US nickelodeon market (24). In 1907 his company invented film distribution as we now know it by switching from sales of film prints to rentals and pioneered the practice of block booking, making exhibitors commit to renting a program of films predetermined by the distributor, even if they hadn’t seen the individual films or if indeed they did not yet even exist at the time that exhibitors made the commitment to rent them (33–34). This innovation would not only make Pathé a great deal of money; it would also make distribution the dominant segment of the industry, more important than either production or exhibition (34).

With this “head start” and his business acumen, Pathé would eventually have distribution offices in forty-one countries before the First World War (Thompson 1984, 5). The cornerstone of this global empire would be the company’s US business. The US market was then, as for the entire history of the global film market, the dominant territory, owing to its size and economic prosperity. Edison’s anxiety at the market dominance of foreign firms led to the filing of intellectual property lawsuits against them, including Pathé, a strategy which was not in the short term successful. More successful was his formation of a cartel of film producers in 1908, the Motion Picture Patents Corporation, which had the General Film Corporation as its distribution arm. At this point, Pathé set aside his differences with Edison and joined the MPPC, and his company along with Kleine Optical were then the only firms allowed to import foreign films under original makeup of the cartel, though Gaston Méliès was later given a license to import his and his brother Georges’s works (Thompson 1984, 17–18). Kleine for its part largely traded in the works of French producers Gaumont and Urban-Eclipse (17). The decision by Pathé and others to join the MPPC was the first in a long line of European partnerships with US “competitors” to maintain (in this case) or gain (in others) US market share, thus foreshadowing the great amount of collaboration that is actually found in the history of European “competition” with US rivals right up until the present day.

If Pathé’s innovations in distribution helped to build his empire, his attempts to keep innovating in this regard also proved to be his undoing. Unlike other European firms, his business was sufficiently globalized in terms of production (much of which was taking place in the United States) and sales (all over the world) to avoid being crippled by the First World War (Thompson 1984, 59), but Pathé made a serious mistake by changing his approach to integrating production and distribution. Having created a vertically integrated system that could have allowed him to keep stars and artists under binding contracts and thereby follow the studio model that would dominate the interwar period, Pathé opted instead to get out of the production business and concentrate solely on distribution, planning to distribute the works of independent producers in a model taken from the book-publishing industry. This would prove to be a disastrous strategy and the company would lose ground to its American rivals and would eventually be bought out in the early 1920s by its American executives. Thompson describes this as the loss of “one of the last chances any foreign firm would have to establish a significant and lasting hold on the USA” (1984, 60).

Puttnam blames this miscalculation on Pathé’s supposedly misguided attempt to cultivate “an aura of gentility and refinement” with the prestige of a literary business model (1997, 75). Leaving aside these speculations about Pathé’s personal reasons for this move, we should at least point out that the idea was far ahead of its time in a way that mirrors the innovations to the distribution market that originally helped make the company a global power. In making his company one that only acquired titles for distribution, Pathé was opting for a more conservative business model that would be favored by independent distributors later on in film history. In such a model, the distributor takes less of a chance on each title, acquiring rights for certain territories often only after the film is completed. While this makes for smaller returns than full ownership of a film that is globally popular, there is still substantial room for reaping financial rewards. This could be seen most pointedly in the 1910s in the case of Adolph Zukor’s very successful importing of two European films in the US market: The Passion Play (Ferdinand Zecca, 1907) a Pathé production and Queen Elizabeth (Henri Desfontaines and Luis Mercanton, 1912). The success of these acquisitions¹ in the US market helped to lay the financial foundations of what would become Paramount Studios (Abel 1994, 54; Puttnam 1997, 70–71). In a more contemporary instance of the same practice, as Perren (2012) has shown, such a business strategy was enormously successful for Miramax in the 1990s, for example, as much of the company’s success and reputation rested on purchases of titles such as The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) and The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992) before making its own fully owned hits such as Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994). The problem for Pathé at this juncture was that he was too far ahead of his time. The times demanded a higher risk approach that allowed for studios to ensure a high volume of high quality production. Lacking this, Pathé’s American business was fatally undermined.

Decentralized production and the publishing model of distribution would not be truly viable as a basis for a large-scale studio until after the Second World War when, as Tino Balio has shown, United Artists (UA) perfected the model after years of struggling to fill its own distribution pipeline with films in the 1920s and 1930s (1987a). Being ahead of one’s time is generally thought of as a good thing in artistic practice, but it is not always such a good thing in the business world and Pathé thus committed an unforced error which set in motion a tradition of sorts of European participation in the world film industry that has been by turns visionary and at times prone to grave miscalculations. This question of balancing risk at the level of distribution will be a consistent problem for European studios that integrated production and distribution. Some like Pathé opted for too little risk to be competitive or to make meaningful contributions to European production. Others, by contrast, have opted for too much risk, distributing too high of a ratio of their own, often increasingly expensive products. This will thus be a motif in this chapter and one of the key questions for the current crop of would-be studios that attempt to manage their own balance of acquisitions and original productions, arguably being too aggressive in some cases (e.g., EuropaCorp) or too conservative to be meaningful producers in others (e.g., Entertainment One). Where Studiocanal lies on that spectrum will be a question for us to consider later on in this book.

While Pathé was the foremost integrated European studio in this period, it is important to take note of the most popular European production trends that marked the period. Not only did these play vital parts in sustaining smaller challengers to the MPPC (most notably the Sales Company which attempted to form a duopoly over US distribution with the MPPC’s General Film Company), but they also set important artistic precedents and arguably even templates which studios of the future would utilize in their pursuit of the American/international market. The most important of these—such as the aforementioned Queen Elizabeth but also Dante’s Inferno (Francesco Bertolini and Adolfo Padovan, 1911), Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1912), and others—consisted of works which helped to drive film form toward the narrative feature while also lending the medium the cultural legitimacy that would transform it into the mainstream, middle-class-friendly institution it would become. This has been documented extensively by others such as Thompson and Abel, so it hardly requires full recapitulation here. Instead what needs pointing out is the ways in which these films, often associated with the films d’art trend of the time, made use of European history and literature and combined these elements with popular elements such as melodrama and visual spectacle. This combination helped to create a middlebrow product that was simultaneously culturally legitimate to bourgeois society and appealing enough in the best cases to draw large-scale audiences. The formative successes of these films helped set a mold that many later globally successful European films would emulate, including titles ranging from The Private Life of Henry VIII (Alexander Korda, 1933) to Howards End (James Ivory, 1993) to Life Is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1997). Moreover, if we broaden this understanding of the high-brow cultural elements associated with European culture to include the later figure of the auteur director or the European “quality” actor (a big selling point for Queen Elizabeth was its star turn by theatrical legend Sarah Bernhardt), we can see this dynamic of middlebrow cinema including a wide variety of global European hits including the in part director-driven Last Tango in Paris (1973), made by Bernardo Bertolucci, or the Isabelle Huppert–starring Elle (Paul Verhoven, 2016). As we will see, the middlebrow film will be very important for European studios throughout film history, including the contemporary moment.

UFA’s global project, 1917–33

While Pathé pursued its individual course, the First World War destroyed much of Europe’s production infrastructure and American films filled the void, swamping the continent with products that would make audiences forever associate the very idea of cinema with American films. As Thompson points out, by the postwar period the barriers to entry for the global film industry had grown rapidly and it would require a major outlay of capital upfront for any potential studio to hope to compete (1984, 14). The German government, witnessing the propagandistic potential of the medium that was increasingly controlled from America, provided such a substantial upfront investment in 1917 in the form of a secret investment in Universum Film AG, henceforth known to the world as UFA. Like most of the companies being discussed in this section, UFA’s story has been chronicled extensively by others (e.g., Kreime...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Studiocanal and an Era of Studio Building in Contemporary European Cinema
• Part One The History of European Studios and Studiocanal’s Place Therein
• Part Two Studiocanal’s Works, 2006 Onwards
• Conclusions: Studiocanal and European Studios Then, Now, and in the Future
• Appendix 1: International Films and TV Dramas Made by Studiocanal, 2009–17
• Appendix 2: Film and Television Drama Projects Developed by Studiocanal, 2006 Onwards
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright