Valley of the duds; inside Hollywood's bad movie machine

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1985 by Timothy Noah

Ownership of theater chains meant that studios could turn out twice as many movies and be assured that the theaters would show them as double features, pairing "qualify' pictures with cheaper, bottom-of-the-bill "B' movies. The B movies became the training ground for contract performers, directors, and writers; for example, The Maltese Falcon, the first film directed by John Huston, was a B picture. The B pictures were not under much pressure to provide an immediate payoff, since it was the A pictures that drew audiences in. But if you succeeded with a B picture, you graduated to the major leagues. It was an effective system for nurturing talent. After The Maltese Falcon, for example, Huston moved up to making A pictures.

Like any large organization, studios, of course, could be somewhat stifling. Compare novels of the 1930s to films of the same period, and it quickly becomes apparent how the movies fell short of depicting the richness of real life. The studio heads who made these movies were mostly unschooled immigrants--Louis B. Mayer, a scrap metal dealer-turned-theater owner; Adolph Zukor of Paramount, a former janitor; Samuel Goldwyn, a former glove salesman, and so on. They did not have finely developed tastes, and in some ways the movies suffered because of that. Still, they had a certain zest. Lillian Ross captured that odd mix of vulgarity and inspiration in a portrait of Mayer in her famous Hollywood book, picture:

"They make an Andy Hardy picture.' He turned his powerful shoulders toward me. "Andy's mother is dying, and they make the picture showing Andy standing in the door. Standing. I told them, "Don't you know that an American boy like that will get down on his hands and knees and pray?' They listened. They brought Mickey Rooney down on his hands and knees.' Mayer leaped from his chair and crouched on the peach-colored carpet and showed how Andy Hardy had prayed. "The biggest thing in the picture!'

Into the service sector

Paradoxically, the studio system began breaking up at the height of its own good fortune. Owing to World War II, production had fallen off at the major studios. At the same time, attendance rose to its highest levels in history; as film historian Tino Balio has pointed out, dollars were more plentiful than things to buy, and movies were the most readily available entertainment. The gap between supply and demand sent profits soaring; Paramount's earnings, for example, rose from $10 million to $44 million between 1941 and 1946. Meanwhile, a wartime hike in the personal income tax--the top bracket became 90 percent--left high-paid studio executives looking for ways to shelter their income. One of the best ways was to have your own business. The roaring demand for movies, combined with the opportunity to reduce the tax bite, led to unpreccdented numbers of studio executives leaving to start independent production companies. Most of the famous producers of the previous era had been salaried studio employees: Warner Brothers' Hal Wallis, Twentieth Century Fox's Darryl F. Zanuck, and, most famous of all, MGM's Irving Thalberg (prototype for Monroe Stahr, the hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Last Tycoon). The model for the new era was David O Selznick, who left MGM to become an independent producer.