"Mass Production of Dreams"
Excerpt from Hortense Powdermaker, “Mass Production of Dreams,” from Hollywood: The Dream Factory (1950) (permission Alan Powdermaker)
Excerpted by Shelley Stamp
Contributor’s note: Footnotes from the original. I have preserved the style of the original notes, but have included additional citation information when available, such as publication date or subtitle.
Hollywood is engaged in the mass production of prefabricated daydreams. It tries to adapt the American dream, that all men are created equal, to the view that all men’s dreams should be made equal. Movies are the first popular art to become a big business with mass production and mass distribution. It is quite obvious that movies cannot be individually produced, and that some form of mass production is inevitable. But the assumption is that for any sort of mass production more than one kind of social system is possible. The question is therefore asked, Is the Hollywood system the most appropriate one for the making of movies – one form of an ancient and popular art, storytelling, in which the storyteller’s imagination and understanding of his fellow men have always been a necessary ingredient?
The invention of the movie camera and the use of celluloid film bring the arts into direct contact with a modern technology and makes it dependent on mass rather than individual production. New technology always precipitates changes in the method and system of production, whether it is of storytelling or agriculture. But the essential old elements do not completely disappear. In a primitive society, when new agricultural techniques are introduced, the nature of the soil and climate and the customs of the people cannot be negated if the new techniques are to be successfully used. New technology in any society must be adapted and integrated with former patterns and adapted to the basic nature of the production to be produced. But instead of integrating, the old and new are sometimes in conflict; or they may run in parallel lines without much effect on each other. Of the three possibilities, Hollywood production of movies represents conflict.
A feature of all mass production is the uniformity of the manufactured product. Hollywood has tried to achieve this by seeking formulas that it hopes will work for all movies and insure their success. It is ironical that this was more possible in the early days, when movies were small business, for then just the novelty of movement on the screen fascinated an audience. The common denominators of pantomime, slapstick and romance could be understood and enjoyed by uncritical audiences almost anywhere in the world. Since all members of the human species have the same basic needs and have some characteristics in common, there were certain simple forms of entertainment to which they can all respond. But now, when movies are big business, and the mass production and uniformity in the prefabricated daydreams more desirable to the manufacturers, such uniform products have become less salable. The only motion picture with a stereotyped plot which has met with a fairly consistent success over a long period of time is the Western. The formulas for other pictures have been a series of constantly changing do’s and don’ts, such as, “You cannot make an A picture about a prize fight,” “No picture with any kind of message can make money,” “the love story must be the most important part of an A picture.” Each one of these formulas has been successfully broken and shown to be false at one time or another through a box-office success. This was accomplished by someone with imagination, courage and faith in his own judgment, usually a director or producer with sufficient prestige to get his own way. But each time anyone departs from the formula and meets with success, the departure then becomes another formula…
The criteria of good entertainment might be applied to any picture, with or without a message. But good entertainment is not harmonious with the following of formulas and the use of stereotypes. Year after year, the list of top box-office hits indicated great diversity in audiences tastes, and includes musicals, serious dramas, adventure and suspense stories, comedies, farces, war and historical themes……Those movies which have been acclaimed by the more serious critics also show diversity. But in spite of this demonstrated many-sided character of the taste of movie audiences, the industry continues to look for formulas, and to produce cycles of pictures dealing with the same theme. This continues even though the exhibitors, the businessmen who operate the theaters, protest…
Theater operators say that cycles are bad business and that the law of diminishing returns starts working long before the end of one is reached. The audience gets tired of the same theme over and over again.
The industry attempts not only to use formulas for movie plots, but to use star actors as another formula for success, and to stereotype actors, those who play secondary roles as well as stars. Both these practices are considered in the discussion of actors and acting. The points are only briefly mentioned here as examples of the industry’s attempt to substitute formulas for the storyteller’s imagination and skill.
A well-known maxim in the industry is, “We give the public what it wants.” The technique of polling organizations used to find out what the public wants is to ask members of a “sample” question, such as, “Would you like to see a movie based on a story about ----?” following with a condensation of the proposed plot in a few sentences. In some polls the names of stars who will play in the films are used. Other polls are taken for preferences in titles and for the depth of audience penetration reached by the publicity and advertising campaigns. I am particularly concerned with the first type of polling, designed to find out what kind of story the public likes, because it is this which affects the content of movies.
From the point of view of good business and as a way of producing movies, this type of research appears both unsuitable and wasteful financially. Consumers’ research on such problems as whether people prefer this or that type of automobile has been useful. But the underlying principles are quite different from those involved in audience research. The average person does not know what movie he likes to see until he has seen it. If asked by the polling expert, his answer may depend on what he has last seen. If he liked the last psychological murder thriller, he is apt to say that he will like another one. But the movie on which he is being polled will be finished and ready for distribution for a year or a year and a half later. By that time he may be bored by a long succession of similar plots, or his taste may have changed. It is also very doubtful if the plot is the primary reason for an audience liking or not liking a picture. A very good plot may be ruined by a poor script and bad direction and acting, while a slim, inconsequential one may be delightful because it is well written and acted.
The movie industry has taken over the polling devices of other big businesses without even realizing that they may even be detrimental to making movies….Underlying this whole process of polls is a lack of understanding of the creative process underlying storytelling and an attempt to imitate practices of other big businesses. If a poll of prospective customers for a new automobile indicates that they prefer one with four doors rather than two, this would in no way interfere with the functioning and efficiency of the workers in an automobile factory. But a gifted writer or director loses much of his efficiency and creative skill if he works not out of his own knowledge of what is true, but according to what a polling organization tell shim the public wants. The production of movies is a creative process, and this characteristic does not disappear even when it is denied. It is illogical to carry the premises underlying the manufacture and merchandising of automobiles to the making and selling of movies, because the problems involved are essentially different.
The polling experts conduct their surveys not only on the content of films, but also on how they should be edited or cut. A preview is held before a sample of about eighty people who hold a little budget in their hands which they press at time of greatest interests, and this is electrically transferred to a graph, which will determine whether scenes stay in or come out. The gadget takes over part of the cutter’s job, one of the most skilled operations in production of movies…Again it seems to be a mistake in business judgment to think that there can be any substitute for knowledge and judgment. Only the lazy or ignorant man wants a substitute. For others there is a pleasure in the exercise of judgment. Machines may and do reducer man’s labor even take its place, but they are not substitutes for thinking and knowledge.
Instead of adopting the use of polls and gadgets in an undiscriminating fashion from other big businesses, the industry might find it more profitable in terms of dollars and cents if it attempted to learn about relevant changes in behavior and attitudes among the American people. A knowledge of its market, present and potential, is needed by any big industry, but this kind of study is not within the province of polling organizations. The world in which audiences lived during the first quarter of the century is obviously very different from the one of today. Therefore, they need and enjoy different kinds of daydreams, fantasies and stories. The movie audience has not only increased numerically but has become increasingly more diversified from the early days of working-class audiences who went to the first silent movies. Today, the audience differs widely in age, experience and background and all these conditions the kind of quality of movies it wants to see. Nor is any individual so restricted that he can enjoy only one type of movie.
The increasing spread of college education, which received such an impetus after World War II from the financial aid extended by the government to form G.I.s, cannot help but further modify standards and tastes in all the popular arts. Likewise, one can predict changes in the future when the present generation of children becomes adults. Movies for them are confined to “entertainment” in the neighborhood theater. They are continuously being exposed to 16mm. educational and documentary films, in schools, clubs and even churches. Courses in film making and lectures on film appreciation are being given in many schools. Making movies is a pastime in some homes and a Handbook of Basic Motion-Picture Techniques has been published for amateur movie makers.1 “Cinema 16” and other noncommercial movie societies continue to increase. This kind of familiarity is bound to produce innovations in both standards and attitudes concerning movies. But a knowledge of such changes cannot be gained through the use of mechanical polls and gadgets…
The anthropologist wonders if the general attitude to the industry towards its audience represents a survival from the past, to which it stubbornly and unrealistically clings…However, when movies became big business, the head of the industry did quickly adopt some of the monopolistic characteristics of large-scale mass production. The desire or uniformity in its product and the use of formulas and of polling devices are all part of the same trend. The business functions of movie production reach far beyond Hollywood, extending not only to New York and Chicago and every town in the United States where there is a motion picture theater, but also to every part of the world where American films are shown.
The five major companies, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, RKO Radio Picture, Inc., Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp., Inc., Warner Brothers Pictures, Inc., and Paramount Pictures, Inc., control a large number of subsidiaries such as film laboratories, lithographing concerns, radio manufacturing subsidiaries, music publishing houses, real estate companies, booking agencies, broadcasting corporations, recording studios and television companies.
This diversity of interest is represented on the board of directors of each large motion picture company by bankers, real estate men, theater owners and heads of production. Executive personnel are men of high finance and real estate interests, as well as those in charge of productions.
However, the real backbone of the monopoly has been in the control by one company of production, distribution and exhibition. The top executives of the three departments relating to theater, sales and production have decided on “the number of pictures to be made, the total amount of money to be spent, the distribution of funds between the various classes of pictures, the budgets of the individual pictures, and the dates when they are to be finished.”2 The distributor has been the middle man who rents the film to the exhibitor or theater owner. Since the majors have owned the first-run theaters which provide a large part of the film rentals, they have been their own best customers.
This three-way control has been investigated by the Federal Trade Commission and the Anti-Trust Division of the Department of Justice for more than twenty years.3 An antitrust suit was brought against the majors with the aim of divorcing exhibition from production and distribution. A Consent decree in 1940 provided for modifications, by restricting rentals in the block-booking4 to five films at a time, the elimination of blind selling by having trade showings of all films before their release, and an agreement by the five majors not to expand their theater holdings.5
A new federal decree regulating the film industry was issued in 1946. It further banned block-booking and was designed to break monopolistic practices and encourage competitive ones. It also aimed at the partial divorcement of studios from theater ownership.
Since then the Department of Justice has been trying to compel the major motion picture companies to split into separately owned theater companies and producing-distributing ones, thereby weakening monopolistic practices. All the major companies have fought the trend to divorcement and there have been endless negotiations, litigations, compromises and revisions of the original decree. Some of the ties between production and ownership of theaters have been broken, but others remain. Independent theater companies have been established by some movie companies, while others are still in the midst of negotiations and court cases.
Monopolies seem to continue in our country in spirit of all the antitrust legislation. Sometimes the laws are not fully enforced. At other times, while the forbidden practices are stopped, different devices with the same goals take their place. How far legislation can keep strongly entrenched customs, particularly profitable ones, from functioning is an interesting but difficult question to answer for any society.
While the relationship between the production and distribution phases of the industry has been close, it has not been harmonious. Instead, there has been complete distrust. The trade papers have carried many stories about how distributors, exhibitors and producers have all been victims of each other. Theater exhibitors complain about the poor quality of the films, how bored their audiences are, and how poor business is. This seems to be an almost chronic state of mind among exhibitors, particular small-town ones…
But whether exhibitors or producers quarrel or make up, they are dependent on each other. The producers must have theaters as an outlet, and the exhibitors are dependent on films. The exhibitors’ influence tends to be on the conservative side; they are reluctant to experiment with anything different from the sure and tried box-office hits.
The monopolistic character of the industry has been challenged not only by federal antitrust decrees, but also by the growing development of independent producers. In 1946 more than a third of all films in production were being shot be independent units,6 and according to Variety (January 7, 1948) in 1947 more than one hundred independent companies were formed carrying budgets of over four million.
This development continues from two quite different causes. One comes from the Treasury Department. “The artists, dismayed by wartime income-tax rates, went into business for themselves as independent producers in order to pay a capital gains tax rather than income tax.”7 The other, according to the same writer, is the itch of the director, writer, actor, and producer to gain more control over the medium, to be in the driver’s seat. However, their independence is circumscribed, since the outlets for distribution are limited to the major companies. The latter therefore exercise a considerable control, in that they still put their O.K. on the kind of pictures they wish to distribute and refuse their O.K. for others. Many of the independents use the production facilities of a big studio, and expenses and profits are shared. The independents, who have their own organization, have been active in fighting co-operative buying-booking combines, and have welcomed the decisions of the Department of Justice that favor separating the exhibition and the production activities of major companies.
Like any other big business, the motion picture industry is dependent on capital, which can be defined as a potential for production.8 More than most, Hollywood operates on borrowed funds9 … Since the banks and motion picture finance corporations which supply these funds require regular fixed charges, the tendency to experiment is restricted. The banks lend money only for those films which they consider good risks…Bank executives therefore have an important voice in the decision on what kind of entertainment will be popular. However, it is the men in charge of the Hollywood studios who implement the decision and who control the actual spending of the money. The lavish and often unnecessary extravagance which, until the present economy wave, characterized the entire industry is not exactly a secret.
Money is, of course, not the only form of capital. Most businessmen know that special skills, knowledge, intelligence and a strong drive are also potentials for production. In the motion picture industry, in addition to the capital supplied by banks or other sources, there are the intangibles, such as the highly specialized crafts and arts involved in telling a story in film.
The skills of the writers, directors, actors, and other artists are as necessary to the production of movies as are the funds borrowed from the banks. The question of whether Hollywood gets its money’s worth from these employees, and whether it utilizes their special gift as well as do the big businesses which employ chemists, physicists or other scientists, interests the anthropologist but is rarely heard in Hollywood.
All these are the problems of any large industry. Yet of prime importance remains one fact: the production of the dream factory is not the same nature as are the material objects turned out on most assembly lines. For them, uniformity is essential; for the motion picture, originality is important. The conflict between the two qualities is a major problem in Hollywood.
Emil B. Brodbeck, Handbook of Basic Motion-Picture Techniques (New York: Whittlesey House, 1950). ↩
Mae D. Huettig, Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944), 59-60. ↩
The first antitrust suit against legitimate theater interests was filed February 21, 1950. This charged the Shubert Brothers with controlling thirty-seven theaters in the United States and also controlling a large part of all bookings. ↩
Block-booking is “the simultaneous leasing of groups of films at an aggregate price fixed upon the condition that all the films in the given block be taken.” (Huettig, op. cit., p. 116). ↩
Huettig, op. cit., p. 140. ↩
Borneman, Ernest, “Rebellion in Hollywood. A Study in Motion Picture Finance,” Harper’s, October 1946. ↩
Borneman, op. cit., p. 337. ↩
Roger Burlingame, Backgrounds of Power: The Human Story of Mass Production (New York: Scribner’s, 1949), p. 192. ↩
Mae D. Huettig, op. cit., p. 98. ↩