How Hollywood's Old Studio System Changed
Independent Cinema's Breach of the Mainstream
The twilight of the 1960’s. After a decade transformed by Vietnam, the civil rights movement, sexual liberation and drug-fuelled hippie ideology, Hollywood initiated its very own process of change. The studio system, the so called ‘old’ Hollywood, was an aimless ship adrift upon a sea of cultural upheaval, captained by ageing studio heads out of touch with the demands of the average consumer. Essentially, the very product they traded in was growing old fast – the conventional big budget blockbuster was out, and an increasing percentage of the general public wanted to see a different kind of film, a film that represented the current political climate and realised, through a medium that is so often a stylised fabrication of contemporary society, the times in which they lived – in short, they wanted realism. Fluffy romantic comedies featuring screen icons such as Rock Hudson and Doris Day were no longer saleable commodities, expansive musical features – despite the success of Robert Stevenson’s ‘Mary Poppins’ (1964) and Robert Wise’s ‘The Sound of Music’ (1965) – were wearing thin, while Fred Astaire in his dancing shoes no longer held the kind of appeal needed to bring in the big audiences. Box office receipts were down and the stereotypical ‘star’ was no longer enough for the studios to see the huge returns they demanded from their investments.
An Ever Widening Chasm
The cultural gap that had been steadily growing between Hollywood and contemporary America over the course of the decade was no longer an easily bridged crack; instead, it was an ever widening chasm that threatened to cripple the profit-hungry studios with dwindling returns on big-money investments. Fresh blood was needed and a glut of ambitious young film makers were pounding on the studio gates, film makers who understood the cinema-going masses because, in essence, they were the cinema going masses. They represented and recognized the needs of the general public because they had grown up with them, they had ingested the same films and soaked up the same cultural changes and now wanted the opportunity to write and direct their own features.
Prior to the emergence of the American new wave, Hollywood had been a rigid hierarchy, a production line upon which any given film would be fitted into a conventional paradigm, with the screenwriter swinging from the bottom rung of the studio ladder; he was the lowest of the low, a paid lackey employed to solder together the nuts and bolts of a cohesive story with tools that were considered the implements of an everyman rather than the instruments of an artist. Over the course of the decade, that opinion would change.
The Aspiring American Auteur
Since the late '50's, European influence had been prominent within the consciousness of the aspiring American auteur, with young independent film makers like John Cassevetes writing, directing and producing their own low budget pictures. ‘Shadows’ (1959) had been a critical, if not commercial success for Cassevetes; it was a step away from the traditional assembly line methods of Hollywood while being unconventional with its complex, emotive themes and predominant use of Afro-American actors and actresses.
As with Robert Frank’s ‘Pull My Daisy’ (1959), ‘Shadows’ was as much a realisation of the jazz and poetry influenced beatnik subculture that had been steadily growing in ranks on the East and West coast of America as it was of European cinema, and symbolised the not so distant future of American film making. As the 1960’s were winding down, fresh-faced directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Bob Rafelson wanted similar creative control, and with the distributors threatened by dwindling profits the studio gates were finally opened to new ideas and new ways of filming that echoed the techniques adopted by their European predecessors.
What do you think about this article?
More in Film & TV
Latest Articles