Hollywood and the culture elite: how the movies became american 9780231133760, 9780231508513, 9780231133777

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgments (page ix)
Introduction: How Film Became Art (page 1)
1. Vachel Lindsay and the Universal Film Museum (page 13)
2. Overlapping Publics: Hollywood and Columbia University, 1915 (page 41)
3. Mandarins and Marxists: Harvard and the Rise of Film Experts (page 63)
4. Iris Barry, Hollywood Imperialism, and the Gender of the Nation (page 97)
5. The Museum of Modern Art and the Roots of the Cultural Cold War (page 123)
6. The Politics of Patronage: How the NEA (Accidentally) Created American Avant-Garde Film (page 161)
Conclusion: The Transformation of the Studio System (page 205)
Notes (page 213)
Index (page 253)

Citation preview

HOLLYWOOD AND THE CULTURE ELITE

FILM AND CULTURE John Belton, General Editor

FILM AND CULTURE A SERIES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Edited by John Belton oe

What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and

Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic Insurrection in American Cinema,

HENRY JENKINS 1930-1934 -

Showstoppers: Busby Berkeley and the THOMAS DOHERTY

Tradition of Spectacle Sound Technology and the American

MARTIN RUBIN Cinema: Perception, Representation, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Modernity

Culture, and World War II JAMES LASTRA

THOMAS DOHERTY Melodrama and Modernity: Early

Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts

Horror and Comedy BEN SINGER

WILLIAM PAUL Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century

Comedy of the 1950s Visual ED SIKOV Culture + aes , , . Passions: ; ALISONVisuality, GRIFFITHS Primitive Sexuality,

Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Hearst Over Hollywood: Power, Passion, and

Cinema Propaganda in the Movies REY CHOW LOUIS PIZZITOLA

The Cinema of Max Ophuls: Magisterial Masculine Interests: Homoerotics in

Vision and the Figure of Woman Hollywood Film

SUSAN M. WHITE ROBERT LANG

Black Women as Cultural Readers Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder

JACQUELINE BOBO MICHELE PIERSON

Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, Designing Women: Cinema, Art Deco,

National Identity, Japanese Film and the Female Form DARRELL WILLIAM DAVIS LUCY FISCHER Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic McCarthyism, and American Culture

Horror Cinema THOMAS DOHERTY

RHONA J. BERENSTEIN Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and ANDREW BRITTON

Masculinity in the Jazz Age Silent Film Sound

GAYLYN STUDLAR RICK ALTMAN

Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary a Hollywood and Beyond Geography of Hollywood

ROBIN WOOD ELISABETH BRONFEN

The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Taiwan Film Directors:

Popular Film Music A Treasure Island

JEFF SMITH EMILIE YUEH-YU YEH and DARRELL DAVIS | Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Speaking in Images: Interviews with :

Culture Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers

MICHAEL ANDEREGG MICHAEL BERRY

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. ., °] 0ee ¢ < e . : ‘ a) ° e , ; . : ‘ NS. Cl) Wf Compaimes Consiae4re the pOSs1b1 ity OF Saving ms, the physical danger posed by storing them—what Noéi Burch calls the —bio-

(1deol1ogica actor — presente a critica AIT1ler ot much was known

OVERLAPPING PUBLICS 47

about the proper maintenance of the highly flammable nitrate film stock in use before 1951 (when the Eastman Kodak Company permanently replaced nitrate stock with a safer acetate-based stock). In the absence of solid data about film storage, a panic over film’s flammability gave rise to various myths about the dangers of nitrate stock. As part of their quest to bring middle- and even upper-class patrons into movie theaters, Zukor and Lasky took part in this struggle to afhx meaning to the precarious act of storing film. Their publicized discussions of film collecting and the

courting of Columbia seem motivated by calculated attempts at self definition and self-promotion more than by a real desire to save films. Or to put it another way, they invoked and manipulated the promise of a film collection as a trope in order to reclassify the film industry—through the

tangible example of the film print—as safe, enduring, and respectable. | Zukor and Lasky’s purpose was to redirect the public image of film’s volatile materiality that, from the beginning, had been exploited by the media. Newspapers frequently printed alarming reports of film fires, and the fear that a nickelodeon could burst into flames was made to reflect badly on that class of patrons who would so willingly enter the crucible. We may never know the exact class makeup of nickelodeon audiences,'! but the image of nickelodeons as unsafe spaces because they posed a risk of fire, theft, mashing of women, and eyestrain from the flickering images

on the screen clearly contributed to the impression that primarily working-class men and women frequented nickelodeons. Noél Burch suggests that the danger and discomfort of the nickelodeon paralleled conditions in factories. Manual laborers were thus more likely to attend films because, compared with the extremity of the factory, “the cinema, with its smoke, its poor ventilation, its uncomfortable seats and the poorly policed atmosphere that was long the norm at every projection point, still seemed a haven of relaxation.” The same incommodious conditions that failed to

deter the working class, Burch adds, “helped put off a more squeamish middle-class audience.” !4

The picture of the nickelodeon as an unsafe space of social differentiation also contributed to the impression that the film print itself was a dangerous object. A fire at an 1897 Charity Bazaar screening in Paris served as the ur-story of film’s precariousness. That screening ended when a projector lamp caused a fire that killed over 125 people, including many wealthy patrons and children, and the disaster proved to be a major setback for the acceptance of the burgeoning film exhibition business in Paris. It ensured that, at least in France, films would remain the province of fairs and amusement parks,!’ and the moral tale of the fire lingered in the cultural memory

48 OVERLAPPING PUBLICS

of Europe and the United States. In Russia, Yuri Tsivian has shown, the Charity Bazaar fire fueled the imagination of audiences who created a romantic folklore around the figure of the brave projectionist hidden behind fire-resistant walls.!* Even twenty-nine years after the Charity Bazaar fire, the incident continued to loom so heavily that the film historian—industry apologist Terry Ramsaye devoted a chapter of his A Million and One Nights (1926) to proving human negligence not film had caused the disaster. Ramsaye’s excursus on the Charity Bazaar fire was intended to dispel the “public and official opinion . . . that motion picture film is a deadly explosive,”!> and earlier attempts to improve cinema’s reputation often made similar gestures toward quelling the fear of fire. The Motion Picture Patents Company, for instance, threatened to enforce fire ordinances in theaters as part of its 1909 campaign to make theaters appear more suitable for middleclass crowds.!© As the Hollywood studio system began to take hold in the

mid-1g1os, a series of fires, including one at the Edison studios in West Orange, New Jersey, exacerbated both the public’s concern for safety and the film industry’s need to allay public anxiety. In 1914 the semitechnical American journal Motography started to report regularly on film fires and the related issue of film storage. Motography’s writers were unusually attuned to the dangers of film storage because the journal was published out of Chicago, a central hub for film distributors and a common location for the temporary storage of prints. The Motography articles, however, demonstrate little real knowledge of the chemistry of film preservation, and a brief detour into the journal’s pages reveals how the idea of film storage and the more active process of collecting could function as cultural tropes at the service of class and, during World War I, nationalist assertions. In this context, we can see why Jesse Lasky decided to publicize the creation of his film vault in Motography shortly before joining forces with Columbia. In a front-page story in 1915, “The Alleged Relation Between Films and Fires,” Motography’s reporter indignantly disputed the suggestion that ni-

trate film stock had caused a train car to explode in Chicago. According to the article’s analysis, the exaggerated accounts of this accident had little factual basis and were, instead, indicative of the press’s general antifilm bias. The reporter tried to shift the terms of the antifilm bias and suggested that the true cause of most film fires was not the improper storage conditions of nitrate film stock but the accumulation of rubbish in the vaults of “lower-class” companies. These allegations were supported with the melodramatic (and false) statement that nitrate film is no more dangerous than “a woman’s comb or a celluloid paper knife.” And to really make the claims of film’s dangerousness seem ridiculous, the article added: “We are

OVERLAPPING PUBLICS 49

expecting the editorial suggestion now in some enterprising newspaper that reels of film be used as bombs in the European War.”!7 Ironically, the signification of film fires and film prints would change so dramatically during World War I that Motography itself was led to make exactly this claim. From the war’s inception, Motography drew

strong connections between film collecting and nationalism. A few months after the publication of the article discussed above, another frontpage story in Motography called for a British film collection to document the war and thus preserve usable fragments of history. The author of this article worried about rumors that a German collection had already been formed and insisted that the flammability of film was a negligible concern when weighed against the potential nationalist uses of the collec-

tion, or, as the reporter put it, “the opportunity to imbue future sons of England with a proper patriotism.”!* Spurred on by the threat of German competition and influenced by the knowledge of film’s impermanence, this article replaced the popular vision of a complete, historical collec-

tion, such as the one D. W. Griffith envisioned, with one based on selective uses of the past. After the United States entered World War I, Motography became concerned with containing the circulation of film stock in addition to the im-

ages printed on it. The turning point here was the U.S. government’s Bureau of Explosives imposing specifications on the containers used to ship film prints.!? Once film stock entered the purview of the government—and the Bureau of Explosives no less—a minor panic ensued. Motography quickly ran an article warning exhibitors not to sell damaged film lest it fall into enemy hands and be used to make explosives. ‘The journal offered this dubious proof:

[A film industry official announced that] information had come to him which tended to prove that Germany and her allies had secret agents in this country who were attempting to corner the market of disused and mutilated films which they were using for the manufacture of high explosives.”°

Motography deployed the collection-trope, as Vachel Lindsay had, to draw class and national distinctions. In comparison to Motography’s discussions of collecting, D. W. Griffith’s or Vachel Lindsay’s musings seem all but

disconnected from a concern for the materiality of flm. Zukor’s and Lasky’s discussions of film collecting, however, and their collaboration with Columbia University were constructed in dialogue with the discourse of film as a material object. Their imagined collections must be seen as in-

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