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When I say Hollywood, you probably think of
big-budget movies, star-studded premieres,
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and studios with giant backlots pumping out
film after film.
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Most of those associations really began sometime
between the 1920s and the 1950s.
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Once audiences could hear actors speak, listen
to pre-recorded musical scores, and enjoy
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sound effects, film cemented its place as
the main medium for mass communication, art,
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and commerce.
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And as important as Hollywood was during the
Silent Era, nobody could compete after the
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arrival of sound.
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New major film studios emerged, each with
their own style and favorite celebrities:
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before George Clooney and Jennifer Lawrence,
there was Clark Gable and Janet Leigh.
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This cascade of films led to more technological
innovations, too, like color film and the
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widescreen formats we still use today.
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This was the Golden Age of Hollywood.
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[singing] Hollywooood ba-ba-da-ba-d– OK,
I’ll stop.
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[Opening Music Plays]
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After the Stock Market Crash in October of
1929, most parts of the American economy took
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a real hit.
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But not Hollywood.
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And at the height of the Great Depression
in 1933, roughly a quarter of the American
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workforce couldn’t find a job, and millions
of others were barely making ends meet.
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So you’d think that the last thing people
would do with their hard-earned money was
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go to the movies.
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And yet, the Depression was one of the best
things to happen to the American film business.
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That’s depressing...
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In fact, more films were released by the major
studios during the 1920s and ‘30s than any
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other decade – averaging about 800 a year,
compared to less than 500 per year today.
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It was cheaper to go to the movies than a
play or a concert, and cinema became a means
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of escape.
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As we’ve talked about, films are an illusion
of reality.
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And that illusion was super attractive to
people whose day-to-day reality was often
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pretty bleak.
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Genre films became more popular – things
like gangster films, musicals, westerns, and
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screwball comedies.
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Anything to take people’s mind off their
own struggles and celebrate good old American
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values of optimism, resilience, ambition,
and courage.
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At the height of Hollywood’s Golden Age,
five film studios ruled the town.
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All five were vertically-integrated, just
like the major studios of the Silent Era.
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They each had their own distinct reputations
and focused on different kinds of films.
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First up, we have Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer – or
MGM – which was the biggest studio in the
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1930s.
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Louis B. Mayer ran MGM with his business partner,
Irving Thalberg.
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Mayer was the savvy businessman of the two;
he approved the budgets and oversaw the distribution
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and marketing.
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Thalberg, on the other hand, was a former
producer, and the mind behind the stories
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and actual production.
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Together, they made slick, big-budget musicals,
comedies, melodramas, and literary adaptations
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– sparing no expense on sets, costumes,
extras, and the biggest movie stars.
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Think of The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind,
and Mutiny on the Bounty.
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I’m talking opulence, people!
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Next is Paramount Pictures, which was known
as the most “European” studio, because
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they lured a lot of filmmakers away from Germany
and the U.K.
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They also gave these filmmakers more leeway
to put their own stamp on movies – hits
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like Shanghai Express, The Sign of the Cross,
and Morocco.
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Our third player, Warner Brothers, branded
itself as the studio of the working class.
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They churned out low-budget melodramas, gritty
gangster movies like The Public Enemy with
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James Cagney, and musicals set in the Depression
like Footlight Parade, with James Cagney.
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The fourth major studio was 20th Century-Fox,
which made its reputation thanks to its chief
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director and its most profitable star, not
James Cagney
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That director was John Ford, who won back-to-back
best director Oscars for The Grapes of Wrath
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and How Green Was My Valley, while Shirley
Temple sang and danced her way through a string
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of wholesome hits.
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And lastly, RKO was the home of the extremely
popular Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals.
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Can I do a dance number Nick?
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Nick: Nope.
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RKO also took a lot of chances, producing
everything from Howard Hawks’ screwball
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comedy Bringing Up Baby, to the 1933 version
of King Kong, and one of the most influential
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films of all time, Citizen Kane.
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Never heard of it.
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Now, all five of these studios dominated the
production, distribution, and exhibition of
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films – for a while.
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But a U.S. Supreme Court Case in 1948, along
with the coming of television, signaled a
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major turning point.
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In the case, known as United States versus
Paramount Pictures, the government argued
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that the major studios were in violation of
antitrust laws.
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In other words, by owning both the production
studios and the movie theaters, they were
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exercising an unfair monopoly and stifling
competition.
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The Supreme Court agreed, and forced the studios
to break up their businesses, sell their theaters,
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and focus on just production and distribution.
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Hollywood continued to lead the global film
market for another 10 or 15 years, but that
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near-complete control over the industry was
ending.
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We’ll talk a lot more about this next time.
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Now, the Golden Age of Hollywood saw some
major technical leaps in the film business,
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too, including: color.
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Filmmakers had been experimenting with color
since the dawn of cinema.
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The earliest techniques involved hand-tinting
individual frames, a painstaking process that
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had to be repeated for each print of each
film.
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Not great.
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Over the next few decades, engineers found
ways to use stencils to tint films much faster.
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They also developed other means of adding
color, like bathing the film stock in dyes
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that fit the mood of the scene, called toning
– red for violence, blue for sorrow, green
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for...grassy.
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By the mid-1920s, nearly 90 percent of Hollywood
films were either tinted, toned, or some combination
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of the two.
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Which was great, except the color itself looked
wildly artificial.
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And once Hollywood converted to sound-on-film
technology, the tinting interfered with the
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film stock’s ability to record proper sound.
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Crash Course Film History, tl;dr: it’s hard.
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So filmmakers needed to figure out color cinematography
– capturing color with the image.
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As early as 1861, a Scottish physicist named
James Clerk Maxwell – who we talked about
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in Crash Course Physics (well, I didn’t,
Shini did) – built the foundations of color
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photography.
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The light all around us is made up of a spectrum
of different wavelengths, some of which we
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see as visible colors.
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Knowing this, Maxwell figured out that all
those colors can be derived from some combination
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of red, yellow, and blue.
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Beginning in 1906, artists and engineers tried
for 15 years to use this knowledge to achieve
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color cinematography.
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But, much like me in high school, they kept
failing.
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Their experiments were unreliable or too expensive.
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Then along came Technicolor.
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In 1922, the Technicolor Corporation saw its
first success with a special beam-splitting
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camera that could make two separate negatives.
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The light entered the camera and was split
into different wavelengths, just like how
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sunlight hits a prism and splits into a rainbow.
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Half continued straight ahead, while the other
half was diverted 90 degrees, to produce two
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film negatives.
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These negatives were chemically treated, dyed
either blue or red, and cemented together.
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Then you could run that final film strip through
a regular projector, and voilà!
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Even though they weren’t spot-on, the colors
in these films were more reliable and accurate
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than any of the earlier attempts.
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And while that beam-splitting camera was expensive,
at least theaters didn’t have to buy new
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projectors to show color films.
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Over the next decade, Technicolor expanded
its system into a three-color process, with
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a camera that recorded the original image
onto three separate negatives – red, blue,
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and green.
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And by 1932, this process created such high-quality,
vibrant results, that Technicolor ended up
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with a virtual monopoly on color film for
the next 20 years.
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Throughout the 1930s, filmmakers and studios
gradually began playing around with Technicolor.
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By the middle of the decade, producer David
O. Selznick turned a corner by casting big
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stars in color films for the first time.
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And as the 1930s came to a close, Hollywood
released a series of high-profile hits that
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proved color was here to stay.
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These films that used Technicolor ranged from
the Errol Flynn swashbuckler The Adventures
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of Robin Hood, to classics like The Wizard
of Oz and Gone with the Wind, and even animated
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features like Disney’s Snow White and Pinnochio.
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Advances in color cinematography would continue
to develop over the years, but the basics
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stayed the same until film stock gave way
to digital video in the 21st century.
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Now, a third technical element of cinema was
standardized during the Golden Age of Hollywood.
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It’s something called aspect ratio – that’s
the ratio of the movie screen’s width to
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its height.
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Back in 1932, the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences – the folks who give out
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the Oscars – established a standard aspect
ratio of 4:3, which looks like this.
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Also known as the Academy aperture, this ratio
isn’t a square, but it’s closer to one
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than we’re used to these days.
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That’s because most movies we see today
are shot in an aspect ratio of 16:9, which
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looks like this.
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That’s more like it!
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We often call this widescreen.
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And so much film and TV is shot at this ratio
that most new screens are built to fit it.
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But those are just two possible aspect ratios.
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Back in the 1950s, some filmmakers experimented
with an extreme widescreen ratio called Cinerama.
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This process involved shooting a film with
three separate synchronized cameras hooked
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together in an arc, and projecting it from
three synchronized projectors.
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Weird.
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The screen was shaped in a similar arc, kind
of wrapping itself around the audience.
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Y’know, for a real immersive experience.
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And the final aspect ratio of Cinerama was
about 8:3, which looks like this.
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The most famous film shot in Cinerama was
the western epic How the West Was Won.
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But, as you can probably guess, this process
was too expensive and complicated to achieve
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widespread use.
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And it was bad for performer’s necks.
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On the heels of Cinerama came CinemaScope.
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Rather than shooting with multiple cameras,
CinemaScope utilized something called an anamorphic
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lens.
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This was a special lens for cameras that recorded
a wider image, but squeezed it laterally so
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that everything would fit onto standard 35mm
film stock.
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When the film was projected, a similar lens
attached to the projector would “unsqueeze”
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the image, expanding it back out, and projecting
it up onto the screen.
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The result was an impressive 2.55:1 aspect
ratio.
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Audiences got their first taste of it in the
1953 biblical epic The Robe.
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And by the end of that year, every major Hollywood
studio except Paramount was licensed to make
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CinemaScope films.
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Over time, the ratio was reduced to 2.35:1,
and in the mid-1950s, the American film industry
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had almost entirely converted to shooting
anamorphic widescreen films.
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It took some time for filmmakers to adjust
to widescreen shooting.
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When you move from an aspect ratio of 4:3
to 16:9, that’s a whole lotta extra room
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to fill.
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So what do you do with it?
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Well, we fill it with, like, knick knacks
and stuff.
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Close-ups, especially of faces, became difficult
to frame, while landscapes got easier.
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At first, widescreen films rewarded composition
and long takes over editing.
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Filmmakers built their stories by filling
the frame, rather than cutting to new images.
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Genres like the western, the musical, and
large-scale epics all lent themselves to these
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kinds of world-building possibilities.
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In the end, the technical advancements of
sound, color, and an aspect ratio that could
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surround the audience made the powerful Hollywood
studios the center of the cinematic universe
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from the late 1920s to the late 1950s.
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It was a Golden Age whose echoes are felt
in our films today.
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Today we learned about how the the American
studio system took advantage of sound film
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and the Great Depression to achieve global
dominance.
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We discussed the development of color cinematography
and what it meant for filmmakers and film
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audiences.
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And we examined aspect ratio, and how the
move to widescreen cinema affected films being
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made.
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Next time, we’ll learn about how filmmakers
in Europe and the United States reacted against
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the formulaic movies coming out of Hollywood
and created a new wave of gritty, irreverent,
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and innovative cinema.
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Crash Course Film History is produced in association
with PBS Digital Studios.
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You can head over to their channel to check
out a playlist of their latest amazing shows,
00:09:33
like Blank on Blank, PBS Spacetime, and Global
Weirding with Katharine Hayhoe.
00:09:37
This episode of Crash Course was filmed in
the Doctor Cheryl C. Kinney Crash Course Studio
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with the help of these aspect ratios and our
amazing graphics team, is Thought Cafe.
