The Rise, fall and rise of Hollywood

 1946 was a bumper year for Hollywood - demobbed soldiers were eager for films to entertain them and their dates . after the uncertain war years. That year American cinemas sold more than 4000 million tickets and produced a total box office take of just under $1700 million. That figure would not be matched until 1974 when cine

mas sold only a quarter of the number of tickets but inflation made things look better than they truly were.

Today the cinema is as vibrant as ever(financially if not creatively) but in the years immediately following 1946 movie moguls were convinced they were witnessing the death of cinema. Not only were they selling less and less tickets each year as the new medium of Television worked its way into more and more homes but the industry was altered by new laws which created distrust and paranoia in the creative camps. Between 1946 and 1948 movie attendances dropped by 16.9% but what was worse for the major American studios was the interest the government was showing in the cosy cartels that controlled Hollywood. From the mid-Thirties, the Department of Justice had been trying to break the stranglehold the major studios had over independent cinemas. The aim was to force the majors into selling off their highly lucrative cinema chains. But as the majors made most of their money from distribution they resisted. AS far back as the early Thirties the Department of Justice had brought legal cases against the major studios but these were delayed by the war. However in 1946 the Department of Justice started to strip away the powers of the major studios.

The war years had already seen Hollywood have to make major changes in the films they produced - their foreign markets, with the exception of Britain, had become out of bounds. Attempts had been made to create a larger market in South America with the Carmen Miranda films but this would never replace the loss suffered by the closing of the lucrative French, German and Italian markets. When the war ended and the markets opened back up it would seem Hollywood was once again onto a certain winner but soon the way they did business would be gone forever. Old Hollywood and the so called studio system was about to die, killed by the Department of Justice and their anti-trust laws.

When the world market opened up after the war it was only the US that had an abundance of film stock - in 1946 20 films were made in the Soviet Union, 54 in Italy and 432 in America. Films from the US dominated Europe with most of the profits coming back to the Hollywood studios. In 1948 France would rebel against the system and only allow only $3.6 million of a $14 million take to go back to America. The UK for their part would only allow £17 million to go to the US while $40 million remained tied up under foreign exchange regulations.

The next problem for Hollywood was with their labour. Post war prices meant that wage structures had to be improved. There was a major strike at Warner Brothers in 1946 and now that the unions were being closely scrutinised by the government it made the earlier practice of the studios paying off union bosses impractical. Ronnie Reagan was a union leader during this period.

The movie industry was in a state of turmoil when in the late 40's the House Un-American Activities Committee starting to take an interest in the film industry. The flimsy alliance between the US and Russia broke down after the war and there was paranoia that movies made in America, by American were spreading communist propaganda. At the infamous hearings Jack Warner, eager to explain several pro-Soviet movies made during the war, said that communist writers were poking fun at the US political system and picking on rich men. Blacklists were quickly drawn up of actors, writers and directors suspected of having communist leanings. It was revealed by the committee that Danny Kaye's real name was Daniel Kamirsky and June Havoc was actually June Hovick. This was enough to stop these two performers finding work for a long while and of course there was the jailing of the infamous Hollywood Ten

Communist paranoia entered the American psyche. John Wayne played Big Jim Mclain, an heroic investigator for the committee in 1952. And such was the paranoia felt by the studios that by the time McCarthy arrived on the scene in 1951 Hollywood was politically clean.

At the end of the 50's Television had gained a place as the entertainment of choice for the masses. However more films were made in 1950 than 1946 as a leaner and fitter Hollywood emerged.

Hollywood 2012 - Mo(o)re of the same.

"If you can give the audience something that's visually spectacular, a reason to come out and watch movies in the theatre, then audiences will come out to see it on the big screen," Paramount's vice chairman of marketing, Rob Moore recently told the New York Daily News - he was speaking after cinemas experienced a boom in attendances this Christmas with Sherlock Holmes 2 and the new Mission Impossible doing particularly well. Though it must be noted that 2011 saw a decline in ticket sales and attendance fell to a 16-year low.

The key words to Mr. Moore's statement, and the ones that really worry me, are VISUALLY SPECTACULAR - this suggests that the powers that be in movie land still consider eye dropping visuals to be more important than story, that the dumbing down of cinema will continue. And what's more Hollywood may be correct and films with plots, good acting and only limited visual effects will only reach  a limited audience - a case in point is David Fincher's "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo," which has been left for dead after a disappointing debut last weekend given all of the hype surrounding the adaptation. However Fincher's movie has now raked in $60 million and is showing signs of finding an audience.

"Our franchise films has gotten younger, and family movies have been soft," said Chris Aronson, senior vice president of distribution at Fox, in an interview with the L A Times. "I'm not going to be Pollyanna-ish about the box office this year. We know that attendance figures are slipping, and we need to reverse that by doing everything we can to put the best possible product out as an industry."

 Rusch

The industry are talking about the long haul for their movies and the revenue generated by DVD sales and yet, the fact is, that DVD sales are also on the decline. And the much hailed Blu-Ray has not exactly set the home entertainment world on fire - most Blu-Ray discs these days come with a standard DVD disc included in an attempt to boost sales, but that does not speak well for a format that was supposed to replace standard DVD. It is akin to Microsoft including a copy of Vista with every Windows 7. The decline of the DVD is being masked by the still strong sales of DVDs to children and it's hiding the real slide in sales of smaller movies.That's limiting the guaranteed income for a lot of productions. It will be harder to guarantee money to make a movie as the way people watch movies changes. The entire nature of a film's availability is changing as people watch things on tablets and smart phones and people aren't buying digital copies the way studios want.




I've always been a regular cinema goer though I must admit that I've not been since True Grit and prior to that my last cinema visit was when I walked out of the travesty that was Quantum of Solace - nothing has really appealed to me, at least not enough to visit the multiplex. The few films that I have wanted to watch I've waited for the DVD's to become available. And it's the same with DVD - where I once bought at least four titles a month, I now perhaps buy half a dozen a year. Granted this is down to the fact that I've now amassed a DVD collection of over a thousand titles and I've already got all the classic movies that seem to come out on digital disc.

I guess that like TV and popular music, the cinema is becoming a place for kids only.

At least that's the way I feel, and I suspect, so do many others.