During the three years immediately after the war’s end, Hollywood experienced pivotal high points and low points. It was a time of transition into a period of decline for the studio system, though no one could have predicted that in 1946. The burst of consumer spending after wartime austerity aided ticket sales, and the year set a box-office record: over $1.5 billion in admissions— a figure that, adjusted for inflation, remains the record. Every week, between 80 and 90 million people went to movies, well over half the total population of 140 million. (In 2001, each week, about 25 million people, out of a population of over 280 million, went to the movies.)
Nonetheless, despite promising box-office figures, Hollywood firms confronted serious problems over the next two years. In 1947, anticommunist investigations by the U. S. government targeted numerous studio personnel, and a legal decision that would help change the very structure of the industry was handed down in 1948.
The Cold War Reaches Hollywood
During the 1930s, many Hollywood intellectuals had been sympathetic to Soviet communism; some had even joined the American Communist party. Their left-wing leanings had been reinforced during World War II, when the Soviet Union was one of America’s allies in the battle against the Axis. America’s move toward a staunch anticommunist policy after the war placed many of these leftists in a compromised position. For years the FBI had compiled information on communists or sympathizers in the Hollywood community. By 1947, Congress was investigating communist activities in the United States as part of the nationwide search by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) for purportedly subversive elements in government and private life.
In May 1947, a number of individuals—among them the actor Adolphe Menjou and the director Leo McCarey—declared in secret interviews with congressional representatives that they were willing to name
Hollywood people with communist ties. In September, Republican J. Parnell Thomas chaired a HUAC hearing that set out to prove that the Screen Writers’ Guild was dominated by communists. Forty-three witnesses were subpoenaed.
The “friendly” witnesses, led off by Jack Warner of Warner Bros., labeled several screenwriters communists. Gary Cooper, Ronald Reagan, Robert Taylor, and other stars expressed concern over leftist content in scripts. The “unfriendly” witnesses, most of them screenwriters, were seldom allowed to state their views. Most avoided denying that they had been communists, stressing instead that the First Amendment guaranteed them freedom of expression in their work. Ten who testified were cited for contempt of Congress and briefly jailed. German leftist Bertolt Brecht, who had been working in Hollywood during the war and who had never belonged to any communist party, gave a neutral response and immediately left for East Germany.
Vociferous public protest led Congress to suspend the hearings for four years. The ten unfriendly witnesses who had testified, however, found their careers collapsing as producers blacklisted them. Most of the “Hollywood Ten”—scriptwriters John Howard Lawson, Dalton Trumbo, Albert Maltz, Alvah Bessie, Samuel Ornitz, Herbert Biberman, Ring Lardner, Jr., and Lester Cole; director Edward Dmytryk; and producer Adrian Scott— were unable to work openly in the film industry. Dmytryk later cooperated with HUAC and returned to the Hollywood fold.
The 1947 HUAC hearings concentrated on showing that the subject matter of Hollywood films had been tainted by communist ideas—hence the emphasis on screenwriters. In 1951, the committee resumed its hearings, this time aiming to expose all allegedly communist personnel. Many former communists or sympathizers saved themselves by naming others. Actors Sterling Hayden and Edward G. Robinson and directors Edward Dmytryk and Elia Kazan were among this group. People who were named but who refused to cooperate, such as actress Gale Sondergaard, found themselves on a new blacklist.
Some of the blacklisted filmmakers saved their careers by going abroad. Director Joseph Losey moved to England and Jules Dassin to France. Others worked under pseudonyms. Dalton Trumbo wrote the script for The Brave One, which won him an Oscar—under a false name—in 1956. In 1960, Otto Preminger declared that he would give Trumbo screen credit for the script of Exodus, and producer Kirk Douglas did the same for
1946-1948
Trumbo’s contribution to Spartacus (1960). From that point, the blacklist slowly crumbled. Only about one-tenth of its victims, however, were able to resume their film careers. The HUAC hearings had left a legacy of distrust and wasted talent. The resentment felt toward those who had given names during the hearings lingered for decades, resurfacing when Kazan was given a lifetime-achievement Oscar in 2000.
As we saw in Chapters 3 and 7, from 1912 on, the Hollywood studios had expanded to create an oligopoly. Working together, the firms controlled the industry. The largest firms were vertically integrated—making films, distributing them, and showing them in their own theater chains. They benefited from this guaranteed outlet for their products and from a fairly predictable income. The smaller companies also benefited, since their films could fill in the free time in these theaters. The big firms could block-book whole packages of films to theaters they did not own, letting the bigger-budget, star-studded items carry the weaker pictures. In such circumstances, those few big pictures counted for much more than the program pictures— especially the B pictures. During the sound era, the eight main Hollywood firms had continued to keep any competitor from entering the film business.
Almost from the beginning, the U. S. government had investigated this situation. In 1938, the Justice Department initiated a suit, United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. et al., usually called the “Paramount case.” The government accused the Big Five (Paramount, Warner Bros., Loew’s/MGM, 20th Century-Fox, and RKO), and the Little Three (Universal, Columbia, and United Artists), of violating antitrust laws by colluding to monopolize the film business. The Big Five owned theater chains, block-booked films, and used other unfair means to keep independent films out of the big first-run houses. Although the Little Three did not own theaters, they were accused of cooperating to exclude other firms from the market.
After a complex series of decisions, appeals, and legal maneuvers, the U. S. Supreme Court handed down a decision in 1948 declaring that the eight companies had been guilty of monopolistic practices. The Court ordered the Majors to divest themselves of their theater chains. It also directed the eight Hollywood firms to end block booking and other practices that hampered independent exhibitors. To avoid further litigation, the Hollywood companies filed a series of consent decrees, agreements that set up compromises with the Court. Over the next decade, all eight moved to comply with the Court’s orders. The Big Five remained production-distribution companies but sold off their theater chains.
Some obvious benefits resulted from the industry’s new policy and its resulting increase in competition. With block booking outlawed, exhibitors were free to fill part or all of their programs with independent films. With this new access to exhibitors, independent producers multiplied. Stars and directors broke away to start their own companies. Between 1946 and 1956, the annual number of independent films more than doubled, to about 150. United Artists, which existed solely to distribute independent films, released 50 a year.
The production wing of the industry had been protected the most by the lack of competition in the pre-1948 era. The “Paramount decision’s” ban on block booking meant that a producer could no longer count on a few strong films to carry the rest. Every film had to appeal to exhibitors on its own. As a result, studios concentrated on fewer but more expensive films. With access to larger theaters, the small studios could compete better by making bigger-budget films. Among these were Universal’s Technicolor biopic The Glenn Miller Story (1954, Anthony Mann) and Columbia’s all-star From Here to Eternity (1953, Fred Zinnemann).
Distribution was still dominated by the eight main companies. Independent producers could not afford to ¦ start large distribution circuits with offices in cities around the country. With so little competition among distributors, almost all the independent firms had to distribute their films through the eight established companies. By the mid-1950s, all these big firms, except Universal, had many independent productions on their annual release schedules.
In exhibition, independent theaters, which had previously depended on cheap films from small firms, had access to a wider range of films (though competition from television soon drove many out of business). At the same time, they also had to compete with each other for the smaller pool of films being released. Local theaters continued to cooperate among themselves, however, by keeping a geographic separation within a city and limiting the number of theaters in which the same film could play. As such, theaters historically have not had to compete strongly for moviegoers’ business—a fact relected by today’s uniform admission prices among theaters in most towns.
Thus, despite all these changes, the Majors and Minors continued to dominate distribution—the most powerful and lucrative wing of the industry—and to reap the bulk of box-office receipts.
Activities—primarily television—profoundly changed Americans’ moviegoing habits.
World History
