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 MOVIES IN
AMERICAN HISTORY
This page intentionally left blank
 MOVIES IN
AMERICAN HISTORY
AN ENCYCLOPEDIA
Volume 1

Philip C. DiMare, Editor

Copyright 2011 by ABC-CLIO, LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a
review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Movies in American history : an encyclopedia / Philip C. DiMare, editor.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Includes filmography.
ISBN 978–1–59884–296–8 (hardcopy (set) : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–1–59884–297–5 (ebook (set))
1. Motion pictures—United States—Encyclopedias. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—
United States—Biography—Encyclopedias. 3. Motion picture producers and directors—
United States—Biography—Encyclopedias. 4. Motion picture industry—United States—
Encyclopedias. I. DiMare, Philip C.
PN1993.5.U6M68 2011
791.4309730 03—dc22 2011006901
ISBN: 978–1–59884–296–8
EISBN: 978–1–59884–297–5
15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5
This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook.
Visit www.abc-clio.com for details.
ABC-CLIO, LLC
130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911
Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911
This book is printed on acid-free paper
Manufactured in the United States of America
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction xix

Films 1
Ali 3
Alien 5
All about Eve 7
All Quiet on the Western Front 8
All the King’s Men 10
American Graffiti 12
American in Paris, An 14
Angels with Dirty Faces 15
Annie Hall 18
Apocalypse Now 19
Badlands 23
Bambi 24
Batman 26
Battleship Potemkin 27
Best Years of Our Lives, The 30
Big 32
Big Chill, The 33
Big Heat, The 35
Big Parade, The 37
Big Sleep, The 38
Birth of a Nation, The 41

v
Contents

Blade Runner 46
Blair Witch Project, The 48
Blue Velvet 50
Bond Films, The 51
Bonnie and Clyde 54
Bowling for Columbine 62
Boys in the Band, The 64
Boyz N’ the Hood 65
Breakfast Club, The 66
Breaking Away 68
Breathless 69
Bridge on the River Kwai, The 71
Brokeback Mountain 73
Bulworth 75
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 76
Caddyshack 81
Carnal Knowledge 82
Casablanca 84
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 87
Chinatown 89
Cinderella 91
Citizen Kane 92
City Lights 97
Cleopatra 99
Clockwork Orange, A 101
Clueless 103
Conversation, The 104
Cool Hand Luke 106
Crash (1996) 108
Crash (2004) 110
Crying Game, The 112
Dances with Wolves 115
Days of Wine and Roses 117
Dead Poets Society 118
Deer Hunter, The 120
Deliverance 124
Die Hard 126
Dirty Dancing 128
Dirty Harry 130
Do the Right Thing 132
Double Indemnity 134
Dr. Strangelove 136
Driving Miss Daisy 139
Duck Soup 141

vi
 Contents

E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial 145

East of Eden 147
Easy Rider 149
Erin Brockovich 151
Exorcist, The 153
Fahrenheit 451 159
Fail-Safe 160
Falling Down 162
Fargo 163
Fast Times at Ridgemont High 165
Fatal Attraction 167
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off 169
Few Good Men, A 171
Fiddler on the Roof 174
Finding Nemo 175
Flags of Our Fathers 177
400 Blows, The 180
Frankenstein 182
French Connection, The 183
Friday the 13th 186
Front, The 187
Full Metal Jacket 189
Gattaca 193
General, The 194
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 196
Giant 198
Gladiator 199
Glory 201
Godfather Trilogy, The 203
Going My Way 207
Goldfinger 209
Gone with the Wind 211
Goodfellas 213
Graduate, The 215
Grapes of Wrath, The 217
Grease 219
Great Dictator, The 222
Great Escape, The 224
Great Train Robbery, The 226
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner 228
Halloween 231
Harold and Maude 233
Harry Potter Series, The 235
Heaven’s Gate 240

vii
Contents

High Noon 241

Hoop Dreams 243
How Green Was My Valley 246
In the Company of Men 249
In the Heat of the Night 250
Independence Day 252
Indiana Jones 254
Insider, The 258
Interiors 260
Intolerance 261
Invasion of the Body Snatchers 263
Iron Man 265
It Happened One Night 267
It’s a Wonderful Life 270
Jaws 275
Jazz Singer, The 277
Jerry Maguire 279
JFK 280
Judgment at Nuremberg 282
Jurassic Park 284
Karate Kid, The 287
Killing Fields, The 288
L.A. Confidential 291
Land Beyond the Sunset, The 293
Last Picture Show, The 295
Lean on Me 297
Left Handed Gun, The 298
Lethal Weapon 301
Letters from Iwo Jima 302
Lion King, The 305
Little Big Man 307
Lord of the Rings, The 309
Lost in Translation 311
Love Story 313
Magnificent Ambersons, The 317
Magnificent Seven, The 318
Malcolm X 320
Maltese Falcon, The 322
Manchurian Candidate, The 324
Manhattan 326
Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The 328
Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media 329
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The 331
Mary Poppins 333

viii
 Contents

M*A*S*H 335
Matrix Series, The 338
McCabe and Mrs. Miller 341
Meet Me in St. Louis 343
Memento 344
Metropolis 346
Midnight Cowboy 349
Million Dollar Baby 351
Miracle on 34th Street 353
Modern Times 355
Moulin Rouge! 357
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town 359
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington 360
Music Man, The 362
My Darling Clementine 364
My Man Godfrey 366
Nixon 369
No Country for Old Men 371
Officer and a Gentleman, An 373
On the Waterfront 375
Ordinary People 376
Paper Chase, The 379
Passion of the Christ, The 380
Philadelphia 382
Philadelphia Story, The 385
Piano, The 386
Pillow Talk 388
Place in the Sun, A 389
Planet of the Apes 391
Platoon 393
Postman Always Rings Twice, The 395
Pretty Woman 397
Pride of the Yankees, The 399
Producers, The 400
Psycho 402
Pulp Fiction 404
Quiet Man, The 407
Rebel Without a Cause 409
Rio Bravo 411
Risky Business 413
Rocky Horror Picture Show, The 414
Roger & Me 416
Rosemary’s Baby 418
Saving Private Ryan 421

ix
Contents

Scarface: The Shame of a Nation (1932) 423

Schindler’s List 425
Searchers, The 427
Serpico 429
Sex, Lies, and Videotape 431
Shadows 432
Shaft 433
Shane 435
Shawshank Redemption, The 438
Shining, The 439
Shrek Series, The 441
Silence of the Lambs, The 444
Singin’ in the Rain 446
Singles 448
Sixteen Candles 450
Sixth Sense, The 452
Sleepless in Seattle 454
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 456
Sound of Music, The 458
Splendor in the Grass 460
Stagecoach 461
Star Trek Series, The 464
Star Wars Series, The 468
Streetcar Named Desire, A 474
Sullivan’s Travels 476
Sunset Blvd. 478
Superman: The Movie 480
Taxi Driver 483
Terminator Series, The 485
Thelma and Louise 489
Third Man, The 491
Three Kings 493
Titanic 494
To Kill a Mockingbird 497
Top Gun 499
Touch of Evil 501
Toy Story 503
Traffic 505
12 Angry Men 506
2001: A Space Odyssey 508
Unforgiven 511
Vertigo 515
Waiting for Guffman 519
Way We Were, The 521

x
 Contents

West Side Story 524

When Harry Met Sally 525
White Christmas 527
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 528
Wild Bunch, The 530
Winchester ’73 532
Witness 534
Wizard of Oz, The 535
Woman of the Year 538
Working Girl 539
Yankee Doodle Dandy 543

People 547
Allen, Dede 549
Allen, Woody 551
Altman, Robert 554
Arzner, Dorothy 557
Ashby, Hal 559
Astaire, Fred 560
Beatty, Warren 563
Bergman, Ingrid 567
Berkeley, Busby 568
Berry, Halle 571
Bigelow, Kathryn 572
Bogdanovich, Peter 576
Borden, Lizzie 579
Brando, Marlon 580
Brooks, Mel 582
Burton, Tim 584
Cagney, James 587
Campion, Jane 589
Capra, Frank 592
Carpenter, John 595
Cassavetes, John 597
Chaplin, Charlie 599
Chayefsky, Paddy 602
Coen, Joel and Ethan 603
Colbert, Claudette 606
Coppola, Francis Ford 607
Corman, Roger 610
Costner, Kevin 612
Cukor, George 614
Curtiz, Michael 616

xi
Contents

DeMille, Cecil B. 619

De Niro, Robert 621
Deren, Maya 623
Disney, Walt 626
Donner, Richard 629
Duras, Marguerite 630
Eastwood, Clint 633
Ebert, Roger 636
Edison, Thomas Alva 637
Eisenstein, Sergei 639
Ephron, Nora 642
Fairbanks, Douglas, Sr. 645
Fleming, Victor 647
Flynn, Errol 649
Ford, John 650
Foster, Jodie 655
Frankenheimer, John 656
Friedkin, William 658
Gable, Clark 661
Garbo, Greta 663
Gibson, Mel 664
Gish, Lillian 667
Grant, Cary 669
Grier, Pam 671
Griffith, D. W. 672
Hawks, Howard 677
Heckerling, Amy 681
Hepburn, Katharine 682
Heston, Charlton 685
Hill, George Roy 687
Hitchcock, Alfred 688
Hopper, Dennis 694
Huston, John 696
Kasdan, Lawrence 699
Kazan, Elia 700
Keaton, Buster 702
Keaton, Diane 705
Kubrick, Stanley 707
Lang, Fritz 711
Laurel and Hardy 715
Lee, Ang 717
Lee, Spike 719
Lewis, Jerry 721

xii
 Contents

Lloyd, Harold 723

Lucas, George 725
Lumet, Sidney 727
Lumière, Auguste and Louis 729
Lupino, Ida 730
Lynch, David 732
Mann, Michael 735
Marx Brothers, The 737
May, Elaine 738
McDaniel, Hattie 740
Méliès, Georges 742
Micheaux, Oscar 743
Miller, Arthur 745
Monroe, Marilyn 747
Moore, Michael 749
Mulvey, Laura 752
Murnau, F. W. 753
Muybridge, Eadweard 755
Newman, Paul 759
Nichols, Mike 761
Nicholson, Jack 766
Pacino, Al 769
Peckinpah, Sam 771
Penn, Arthur 773
Pickford, Mary 775
Poitier, Sidney 777
Polanski, Roman 779
Pollack, Sydney 781
Preminger, Otto 784
Ray, Nicholas 787
Robeson, Paul 788
Sarris, Andrew 791
Schoonmaker, Thelma 793
Scorsese, Martin 796
Scott, Ridley 799
Sinatra, Frank 803
Singleton, John 805
Spielberg, Steven 807
Stone, Oliver 810
Streisand, Barbra 812
Sturges, John 814
Sturges, Preston 817
Tarantino, Quentin 821

xiii
Contents

Taylor, Elizabeth 822

Towne, Robert 823
Truffaut, François 826
Valentino, Rudolph 829
Van Peebles, Melvin 831
Varda, Agnès 833
Vidor, King 835
Von Stroheim, Erich 837
Washington, Denzel 841
Waters, John 843
Wayne, John 845
Weber, Lois 850
Welles, Orson 852
Wenders, Wim 856
Wilder, Billy 858
Williams, John 862
Wyler, William 864
Zanuck, Darryl 867

Subjects 871
Academy Awards, The 873
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) 875
Action-Adventure Film, The 876
African Americans in Film 881
Ancient World in Film, The 888
Animation 894
Auteur Theory 896
Biblical Epic, The 903
Blackface 910
Cannes Film Festival, The 913
Cinéma Vérité 914
Cinematography 917
Color 919
Coming-of-Age Film, The 921
Committee on Public Information, The 924
Documentary, The 927
Drive-in Theaters 930
Early Movie Houses 933
Ethnic and Immigrant Culture Cinema 935
Feminist Film Criticism 941
Film Criticism 946
Film Editing 949
Film Noir 951

xiv
 Contents

French New Wave 955

Gangster Film, The 961
German Expressionism 964
Hard-Boiled Detective Film, The 967
Hays Office and Censorship, The 969
Hollywood Blacklist, The 971
HUAC Hearings, The 974
Independent Film, The 977
Intellectual Montage 979
Italian Neorealism 980
Judaism and Film 985
Kuleshov Effect, The 993
Male Gaze, The 995
Melodrama, The 997
Method Acting 1001
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) 1002
Movie Star, The 1004
Music in Film 1005
Musical, The 1012
Native Americans in Film 1017
New Technologies in Film 1022
Nickelodeon Era, The 1024
Politics and Film 1027
Product Placements 1032
Product Tie-Ins 1033
Religion and Censorship in Film 1037
Religion and Nationalism in Film 1040
Representations of Disability in Film 1045
Romantic Comedy, The 1052
Science and Politics in Film 1065
Science Fiction Film, The 1071
Screen Actors Guild 1076
Screenplay and the Screenwriter, The 1077
Silent Era, The 1081
Slasher Films 1084
Social Movements and Film 1086
Sound 1091
Sports Film, The 1094
Studio System, The 1096
Sundance Film Festival, The 1098
Superhero in Film, The 1099
Television 1107
War Film, The 1111

xv
Contents

Western, The 1122

Women in Film 1129
Index 1139

About the Editor 1227

List of Contributors 1229

xvi
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It was with a great deal of excitement that I accepted the assignment as General Editor
for the ABC-CLIO offering Movies in American History: An Encyclopedia, during the
summer of 2008. The project had been proposed by James Sherman, the Editorial
Manager for ABC-CLIO’s American History products, and I was pleased that he
entrusted me with seeing the project through to its end. I would like to thank James
for his patience in guiding me through the initial stages of the project—his advice
and firm hand were invaluable.
As with every encyclopedia project, Movies in American History had a great number
of contributors, some 150, all of whom must be contracted for the work that they
submit and registered with the publishing house. I would like to thank the Project
Coordinator for our encyclopedia, Barbara Patterson, who took on the monumental
task of gathering together and coordinating the vast amount of materials from contrib-
utors that flowed into the Santa Barbara offices of ABC-CLIO. I would also like to
thank all of the technical wizards who keep the ABC-CLIO Author Center site up
and running—having access to this site made my job, and those of my contributors,
immeasurably easier.
Anyone who has written or edited a book understands how important a good editor
is; thankfully, I had the very best, my Submissions Editor, Kim KennedyWhite. Over
the past 18 months, Kim, who has now accepted a position at ABC-CLIO as an Acquis-
itions Editor for products on Race, Ethnicity, and Multicultural Studies, has read and
commented on each and every entry that has come in from my contributors—some
450. She has also shepherded me through every moment of the project, from advising
me on how to make the materials for Movies in American History more powerful to lifting
my spirits when I grew discouraged about my progress on the encyclopedia. I congratu-
late her on her new position and very much hope that I will have another opportunity to
work with her in the future.
Perhaps the part of the editorial process that is least noted when a book is published
is that of copy editing. Copy editors have the often tedious task of insuring that the
technical aspects of a project—the spelling, grammar, style, and attributions—are all

xvii
Acknowledgments

correct. I would like to thank my copy editor for this project, Gary Morris, who
poured over hundreds of pages of text to find all those little mistakes that prove to be
so glaring if they are missed. In the end, he saved me from all manner of stylistic error,
something I greatly appreciate.
I would like to thank all of my contributors for the hard work that they put in on
Movies in American History. For such a project to succeed, it requires that contributors
commit themselves to producing quality work in a timely fashion—my contributors
performed admirably in this regard. Although I obviously could not have completed
the project without the assistance of all of my contributors, I would like to single out
two for distinction, Dr. Robert Platzner and Dr. Van Roberts. I have had the privilege
of working with Bob Platzner since I arrived at California State University, Sacramento
14 years ago. More than simply a colleague, Bob has been a mentor during my time at
Sac State; indeed, he helped me to develop the film studies courses that I have had the
privilege of teaching at the university, and the many discussions we have had about cin-
ema have honed my thinking on the subject. In regard to Movies in American History,
Bob was my most prolific author, contributing no fewer than 15 entries to the project.
It is an honor to have his work included in the encyclopedia. It is hard to say enough
good things about Van Roberts, with whom I had not worked before he became a con-
tributor on our project. Van was there from the very beginning, working tirelessly on
his entries and—an editor’s dream—making every deadline. His enthusiasm, good
nature, and grace are truly unique, and he has taught me a good deal about what it
means to be a better colleague and person—thank you, Van Roberts.
I would also like to thank my colleague and dear friend Judith Poxon, who, in addition
to contributing a number of entries to the encyclopedia, was always willing to sit and listen
to my woes; and my fellow café denizen Chuck Watson, who provided me with never-
ending doses of encouragement during numerous early morning conversations.
Finally, I would like to thank my darling wife, Jennifer, my friend and slayer of life’s
demons without whom none of this would be possible; our precious five-year-old son,
Luca, who has spent half his young life watching his daddy work on his book; and my
sister Lesley, who has graciously watched over her headstrong brother for his entire life.

Philip C. DiMare
California State University, Sacramento

xviii
 INTRODUCTION

Philip C. DiMare

The second half of the nineteenth century was marked by the explosive growth of
American industry, with the railroad leading the way in defining how this industrial
process would unfold. As rail systems flourished after the completion of the transcon-
tinental railroad in 1869—their development eagerly supported by local, state, and
federal governments that provided monies and land grants; and aided by technological
advancements, such as steel rails that could carry heavier locomotives, and new cou-
plers, braking systems, and signals—these systems became foundational elements in
growing America’s market economy. Literally connecting the nation’s sprawling territo-
ries, railroads employed thousands of workers and created large-scale industrial
bureaucracies to manage their operations. They also defined the business model that
would be adopted by leaders of other important U.S. industries, such as steel and iron,
petroleum, electricity, mass-produced foods and clothing, and farm machinery
(Heilbroner and Singer, 1999).
The first great American industrialists, shrewd and often ruthless men like Jay
Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller
dominated the late nineteenth-century business world. Employing the processes of
“vertical” and “horizontal” integration, which allowed owners to control all aspects of
specific industries and to drive competitors out of those particular markets, these early
industrialists, often referred to as “robber barons” by their critics, created monopolistic
mega companies such as U.S. Steel and Standard Oil. Forming themselves into large
and powerful business “trusts,” which gave a limited number of trustees dictatorial
control over extensive, interconnected corporate networks, these business leaders drove
industrialization in America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
until, by the 1910s, American industrial production would comprise one-third of the
world’s total output (Morris, 2006).

xix
Introduction

Industrialization and the Rise of American Cinema

Significantly, America’s entry into world cinema was intimately connected to the
industrial expansion that occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century
and to the extraordinarily gifted inventors it spawned. Thomas Alva Edison (see:
Edison, Thomas Alva) for instance, who had invented the phonograph in 1876, was
instrumental in driving the development of the film industry in the United States
during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Edison was intrigued by reports
that Eadweard Muybridge (see: Muybridge, Eadweard) had invented a machine
called the “zoopraxiscope,” which could project moving images onto a screen. In early
1888, Muybridge literally took his show on the road, touring the United States and
screening his short motion picture Animal Locomotion for amazed viewers. When the
Muybridge tour stopped over in Orange, New Jersey, in February of that year, Edison
invited Muybridge to visit his lab in West Orange. Impressed by Muybridge’s zoopraxi-
scope, Edison suggested that the two become partners. (Although Edison denied it in
his journals, the story still circulates that during their meeting, Edison pitched the idea
to Muybridge of joining together his phonograph and the zoopraxiscope in order to
create motion pictures with sound!) Although they were interested in each other’s
ideas, the partnership was never formed, and the two inventors went their separate
ways. Still fascinated by the zoopraxiscope, Edison took the technology Muybridge
had utilized to develop his invention and fashioned a more efficient projector, which
came to be called the Kinetoscope. Sadly for Muybridge, after Edison filed patents
for the kinetograph (the camera) and the kinetoscope (the viewing implement) in
1891, Muybridge and his contributions were all but forgotten (Sklar, 2002).
Edison debuted his Kinetoscope at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in
1893. Customers were able to step up to his moving-picture machine and view short
film clips such as the “Blacksmith Scene,” which ran for 20 seconds and showed three
of Edison’s employees hammering on an anvil. What was considered Edison’s first
“film” bore the rather cumbersome title Edison’s Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze. Also
known as Fred Ott’s Sneeze, the short film captured the eponymously named Edison
employee in the midst of sneezing. Other Edison films followed—American Gymnast,
for example, which showed a young woman performing a somersault, and The Barber
Shop, which recorded the everyday activities of barbers as they serviced their clients
(Sklar, 2002).
In regard to their format, all of Edison’s early motion pictures were the same: they
were simply descriptive recordings of some sort of action, what came to be called
“actualities.” Edison did expand on this notion of descriptive recording, presenting
audiences with two filmic series that possessed more entertainment value. The first of
these displayed the European muscleman Eugene Sandow set against a black backdrop
and moving through a number of different poses in order to show off his remarkable
physique. The other series featured a dancer named Annabelle Whitford, who, like
Sandow, was positioned in front of a black backdrop. For her part, Whitford danced
for her audiences in short films such as Annabelle Serpentine Dance and Annabelle
Butterfly Dance. Edison even made the first picture that shocked viewers. Titled The

xx
 Introduction

Kiss, the film depicted a rather awkward kiss between two stage actors, May Irwin and
John Rice. The first cinema “still” of a motion picture image—the actors poised with
lips together—was drawn from Edison’s film, appearing in an American newspaper
and raising even more eyebrows. In the end, The Kiss elicited the first calls for censor-
ship of the radical new medium (Lewis, 2008).
Edison had neglected to secure international patents for his kinetoscope, and invent-
ers in Europe began to develop their own motion picture projectors. Two of the most tal-
ented of these European inventors were the French-born brothers Auguste and Louis
Lumière (see: Lumière Brothers, The). Familiar with, and inspired by, Edison’s kineto-
scope, the Lumières created a complex machine that was camera, projector, and film
developer rolled into one. Much more practical than Edison’s machine, the Lumières’
cinématographe ran at 16 fps (frames-per-second), which became the standard for silent
pictures. It also allowed images to be taken “out of the box,” as it were, and to be pro-
jected on a screen so that they could be viewed by multi-member audiences.
Toward that end, the Lumières rented out the basement of the Grand Café in Paris
on December 28, 1895, and the brothers became the first filmmakers to screen their
cinematic offerings for a paying audience when they exhibited a series of motion pic-
ture shorts. They opened their 1895 screening with a picture titled La sortie des usines
Lumière (Leaving the Lumière Factory). In a certain sense the picture was much like
those produced by Edison, as it merely recorded workers leaving a factory in Lyon after
a long day of work. Yet La sortie des usines had a very different feel to it, as the film-
makers had staged the scene—by the use of special lighting, camera position, and the-
atrical blocking—in a way that gave it a certain expressive depth. Other films followed
that had the same depth-level quality, perhaps the most famous the startling L’arrivèe
d’un train en gare á la Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at la Ciotat), which legend has it
had viewers covering their eyes and turning away from the screen for fear that the train
would land in their laps.

The Creation of Narrative Films and the Spread of Early Movie Houses
Unlike Edison, then, the Lumières by way of their use of innovative filmmaking
techniques, began to define what came to be known as the cinematic mise-en-scène.
Borrowed from the stage, the phrase, which may be translated as “putting on the scene,”
defines the process by which the film set (much like the theatrical stage) is framed—how
it is lit, where the camera is placed, where the actors are positioned. Rather than just
recording action, then, filmmakers began to “put on scenes” that conveyed meaning to
their viewers. Ironically, the first filmmaker who began to make a name for himself as a
master of mise-en-scène in America was another Frenchman, Georges Méliès (see:
Méliès, Georges). Méliès was a magician who had experimented with trick photography
and what would come to be understood as special effects. Although like other filmmakers
he had begun his cinematic career by making actualities, he eventually began to make
motion pictures that told stories—Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard) in 1902, for instance, and
later, La sirène (The Mermaid) in 1904 and Le diable noir (The Black Imp) in 1905.

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Certainly his most famous offering, though, was Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the
Moon), which was released in 1902. Although like almost all the films of the day, Le voy-
age dans la lune was shot as if the viewer were looking at a theatrical stage, Méliès used
what would now be considered crude special effects—such as making moon men disap-
pear in clouds of smoke and shifting scenery around the set in unexpected ways—that
gave his motion picture a narrative quality that actualities did not possess.
The possibility of screening narrative motion pictures such as Méliès’s Le voyage
dans la lune for ever-larger audiences was facilitated by Edison’s development of the
Vitascope during the mid-1890s. Dubbed by some Edison’s “Greatest Marvel,” the
Vitascope was instrumental in attracting increasingly larger audiences to film-viewing
venues. Individual viewers had initially watched moving pictures in film houses such
as the Holland Brothers’ Kinetoscope Parlor. For a small fee, customers were entitled
to view the filmic fare that flickered to life on five separate machines, an experience
they thought well worth the price. Kinetoscope parlors quickly became wildly popular,
springing up in cities across the country. Eventually, though, film shorts began to be
screened for multiple-member audiences who were attending vaudeville shows, the
most popular form of entertainment during the late nineteenth century. When vaude-
ville performers went on strike in 1900, theater owners wagered that audiences were so
enthralled by motion pictures that they would not care if the live acts were dropped
and they were presented with “all-film” shows. Much to the delight of the owners their
wager paid off, as audiences flocked to theaters to see these all-film programs.
By the early twentieth century, the popularity of motion pictures gave rise to the
creation of nickelodeons (see: Nickelodeon Era, The), movie houses that got their
name as a result of owners charging customers a nickel to view a program of film
shorts. By 1908, New York City could boast that 600 nickelodeons had opened there,
and other large cities also saw the growth of this cinematic craze. Nickelodeons were
not exclusively urban phenomena, however, as these early film venues spread to rural
areas, as well—indeed, by 1910, nickelodeons were even popular in Oklahoma, which
at that time was still considered “Indian Territory.”

Filmmaking Becomes a Business

The five-cent charge for entry into a nickelodeon made these public spaces available
to thousands of immigrants who made their way to America during the last decades of
the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. Largely illiterate and
initially unable to speak English, these immigrants, especially those from different
countries in Europe who settled in East Coast urban centers such as New York City,
became part of a lower- and middle-class consumer culture that began to dominate
America’s increasingly industrialized and urbanized twentieth-century landscape.
Capitalizing on the creation of this rapidly emerging consumer culture, investors with
money and vision began to provide competition for Edison. One of his former
employees, W. K. L. Dickson, for instance, helped found the American Mutoscope
and Biograph Company, which ultimately came to be called simply Biograph. Work-
ing with a 70mm film format, which provided audiences not only with much larger

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but also much clearer images, Biograph became a force in the burgeoning film indus-
try. Its founders, especially Dickson, were fascinated by the new medium and sought
to advance it technologically. Toward this end, they developed innovative equipment
such as a panning-head tripod that allowed the camera to swivel, at least in a basic
way, from side to side. The possibility of even rudimentary camera movement repre-
sented a vastly important step forward in the evolution of moving pictures: Instead
of being limited to viewing simple action sequences from a single perspective, audi-
ences were now treated to screen images that seemed increasingly lifelike.
Biograph did not break completely from its predecessors, churning out its own list
of actualities; yet, by 1900, they were already making what can be considered early nar-
rative films. Largely cautionary tales concerning the evils of alcohol, infidelity, and
prostitution, they bore titles such as The Downward Path, She Ran Away with a City
Man, and The Girl Who Went Astray. The company also produced a series of shorts
that provided viewers with troubling racist messages. Three of these films—Dancing
Darkies, A Watermelon Feast, and A Hard Wash, the last depicting an African American
woman desperately scrubbing her child in order, audiences were left to infer, to wash
away the child’s “blackness”—appeared in 1896, the same year that the U.S. Supreme
Court handed down its disturbing Plessy v. Ferguson decision that ushered in the Jim
Crow era of a “separate but equal” America (Lewis, 2008).
Edison fought back against Biograph by piecing together his own mega firm in
1908, the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC). A powerful corporate trust
in the manner of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and J. P. Morgan’s U.S. Steel,
Edison’s MPPC joined together nine of his competitors—including Biograph. Like
Rockefeller and Morgan, who used the business practices of horizontal and vertical
integration to gobble up smaller companies and to dominate every aspect of their
respective industries, the MPPC overwhelmed the film industry during the first decade
of the twentieth century. Taking advantage of their monopolistic position in the indus-
try, MPPC built larger studios, streamlined their productions, and became ever more
technologically advanced. Their commitment to organizational excellence allowed
MPPC to reap huge profits; it also led to the production of better films and lower costs
for exhibiting those films. By 1910, filmmaking had become a thriving industry, one
that would begin to shape the way that America looked in powerful and often unset-
tling ways.
Surprisingly, MPPC’s monopolization of the industry lasted little more than a year,
as independent companies started to resist Edison’s corporate dominance. A number of
these companies formed themselves into the Motion Picture Distributing and Sales
Company, and by the early 1910s, 30 percent of the industry was controlled by busi-
ness interests not connected to the MPPC. In the end, the U.S. government broke
up the MPPC trust, and the independents were successful in carving out a permanent
place in the industry—they were also instrumental in shifting the geographical center
of the industry from the East Coast to the weather-friendly West Coast mecca of
Hollywood. Although there were attempts to develop filmmaking sites in Florida
and the Southwest, by 1915, the vast majority of people making motion pictures were
doing so in California.

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The Western and the Myth of American Exceptionalism

As motion pictures became an increasingly popular form of entertainment, individ-
ual filmmakers began distinguishing themselves by producing more complex narrative
films. Among the first of these early filmmakers was Edwin S. Porter. Porter, who had
been a navy electrician and a telegraph operator, worked for Edison producing a
series of motion picture shorts before making his first two important films, Life of an
American Fireman in 1902 and an adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1903 (Sklar, 2002). Porter began to experiment with different
editing techniques in these films, and the latter set an industry standard with a running
time of 15 minutes, a stunning accomplishment during the early years of cinema. After
completing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Porter turned his attention to the film for which he is
best known, The Great Train Robbery (see: Great Train Robbery, The).
Comprised of 14 individual shots, The Great Train Robbery was a quantum leap for-
ward in filmmaking, representing, as it did, what can be understood as the first modern
narrative motion picture. Although Porter’s shots were mostly stationary, he demon-
strated his extraordinary skills as a filmmaker by cutting back and forth among these
shots, allowing him to express simultaneous action and to provide context to images that
by themselves had little meaning. With a running time of 11 minutes, the film tells the
story of a ruthless band of outlaws who carry out a train robbery, make good their escape,
and who are then hunted down and killed by the members of a posse. Featuring a fight
on top of a moving train, men being brutally gunned down, explosions, and Porter’s sig-
nature final shot of a cowboy (Broncho Billy Anderson) looking directly into the camera,
raising his gun, and firing it at the audience, The Great Train Robbery amazed viewers
with its imagistic articulation of human cruelty, revenge, and retribution.
Although it stands as a predecessor to later action adventure and hardboiled detective
movies, The Great Train Robbery can properly be understood as the first of what many
consider the quintessential American film type, the western. Sweeping tales of heroic
men who conquered an ever-expanding frontier, westerns gave expression to iconic
notions of American exceptionalism—John Winthrop’s idea of the Puritans’ new home-
land as a divinely gifted “city upon a hill,” Thomas Jefferson’s description of the hard-
won republic as an agrarian paradise, John L. O’Sullivan’s claim that it was the nation’s
“manifest destiny” to spread west all the way to the Pacific shore. Generally set in the
post-Civil War era—the period during which the nation’s destiny was conclusively ful-
filled—and set in territories west of the Mississippi, the western “created its own land-
scape, its own character-types, and its own narrative forms as a way of investing this
time and place with mythic significance” (see: Western, The).
Oddly enough, by the time The Great Train Robbery was released in 1902—the
same year that Owen Wister published The Virginian, generally considered the first
“cowboy novel”—the American frontier had been “closed” for more than a decade.
The closing of the American frontier during the late nineteenth century had been
noted by figures such as Josiah Strong in his 1886 publication Our Country: Its Possible
Future and Its Present Crisis and Frederick Jackson Turner in his seminal paper “The
Significance of the Frontier in American History,” which Turner initially presented at

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the 1893 meeting of the American Historical Society convened at the Columbian
Exhibition in Chicago. In his paper, Turner had rather ominously suggested that the
closing of the nation’s frontier might have dire consequences, as “[u]p to our own
day American history has been in large degree the history of the colonization of the
Great West.” In Turner’s mind, it had been the nation’s “perennial rebirth” along a
frontier line,” its “expansion westward with its new opportunities,” that had furnished
the “forces dominating American character” (Turner, 1997).
Interestingly, the western provided the filmic framework for Turner’s notions con-
cerning the conquest of the frontier: over and over again on the big screen—initially
in hundreds of B-westerns made during the first three decades of the twentieth century,
and then in dozens of classic westerns made from the late 1930s on—audiences
watched with rapt attention as the American West was won from the forces of evil—
Indians, Mexicans, cattle barons, railroad owners. Why, though, if the West had
already been won by the time film westerns became so popular, did audiences flock
to see these motion pictures?
Josiah Strong, perhaps, provided an answer to this question in Our Country. As
sometimes happens, although he published his book a number of years before Turner
presented his 1893 paper, Strong’s work was not greeted with the same enthusiastic
response with which Turner’s was met—it was Turner, after all, who was credited with
defining the “Frontier Thesis.” This lack of recognition accorded Strong and his work
is somewhat surprising, as Strong, much more so than Turner, it seems, appeared to
understand just how desperately the nation’s people would cling to the idea that
America had been singled out—by God, Strong would argue—as an exceptional place.
Casting his discussion in much the same way that Turner would cast his, Strong laid
the foundation for his arguments in a chapter of Our Country entitled “The Exhaus-
tion of the Public Lands.” Here, Strong suggested that the “rapid accumulation of
our wealth, our comparative immunity from the consequences of unscientific legisla-
tion, our financial elasticity, our high wages, the general welfare and contentment of
the people hitherto have all been due, in large measure, to an abundance of cheap
land.” The problem, he went on to say, was that “when the supply is exhausted, we
shall enter upon a new era, and shall more rapidly approximate European conditions
of life.” Regardless of “how we may look at the matter,” warned Strong, it “seems cer-
tain that, in twenty-five years’ time, and probably before that date, the limitation of
area in the United States will be felt” (Strong, 1963).
Clearly, this was essentially the same argument that Turner would make in his 1893
paper. Strong, though, went much further than did Turner in describing the unique
qualities of the people who tamed the American frontier. In a stunning chapter of
Our Country entitled “The Anglo-Saxon and World Future,” Strong began by sug-
gesting that the Anglo-Saxon “is representative of two great ideas, which are closely
related.” The first of these was the notion of “civil liberty,” an idea that Strong claimed
was enjoyed almost exclusively by “Anglo-Saxons: the English, the British colonists,
and the people of the United States.” In “modern times,” said Strong, “the peoples
whose love of liberty has won it, and whose genius for self-government has preserved
it, have been Anglo-Saxons.” The “other great idea,” according to Strong, was that of

xxv
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“a pure spiritual Christianity,” what he understood as a Protestant Christianity. It was,

reasoned Strong, the “fire of liberty burning in the Saxon heart that flamed up against
the absolutism of the Pope” during the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth cen-
tury. In Strong’s opinion, this could only lead to one conclusion: “the most spiritual
Christianity in the world” was to be “found among Anglo-Saxons and their converts,”
a group that had now become, especially in America, the “great missionary race.”
According to Strong, the weaving together of the love of civil liberty and pure spiri-
tual Christianity ultimately gave rise to “another marked characteristic of the Anglo-
Saxon,” what he called “an instinct or genius for colonizing”: “His unequaled energy,
his indomitable perseverance, and his personal independence, made him a pioneer.
He excels all others in pushing his way into new countries. It was those in whom this
tendency was strongest that came to America, and this inherited tendency has been fur-
ther developed by the westward sweep of successive generations across the continent”
(Strong, 1963). It is hard to imagine a better description of the heroic figures who
populated film westerns: undaunted by the terrible task that lay ahead of them, and
infused with a powerful sense of God and nation, they were perfectly fitted to accom-
plish what Strong identified as the westward sweep across the continent. This, it seems,
is what made these western heroes so appealing to American film audiences. Bound
together in cinematic solidarity in darkened theaters across the country, viewers could
live out the conquest of the savage frontier and the building of their great nation again
and again.

The War Film and American Imperialism

Strong made no secret of the fact that he believed that the “solution for the spiritual,
economic, and political problems of the day” lay in the spread of Anglo-Saxon ideals
across the land—by force if necessary. Indeed, declared Strong in Our Country,
“God, in his infinite wisdom and skill,” was “training the Anglo-Saxon race for an hour
sure to come in the world’s future.” Then, intoned Strong, “will the world enter upon a
new stage of its history—the final competition of races for which the Anglo-Saxon is
being schooled” (Strong, 1963). According to Strong, because America’s frontiers
had all been conquered—and its uncivilized peoples subdued—the final “competition
of races” would necessarily be played out in foreign, and often exotic surroundings.
Strong’s prediction, as it turns out, proved correct, as little more than a decade after
he published Our Country, the United States would wage a war against Spain that was
not only fought on foreign shores but which also exposed a deeply troubling sense of
racial intolerance that many Americans harbored. The Spanish-American War broke
out in Cuba in 1898, and was quickly extended to the Philippines. Both of these island
territories had for centuries been colonial possessions of Spain, and the indigenous
peoples who populated them chafed at being controlled by their European overseers.
When Cuban nationalists began a 10-year struggle for independence against the
Spanish in 1868, most Americans supported the rebels, although few advocated armed
intervention. This was especially true in the South, where, despite the “long-
standing . . . desire to acquire the island, memories of the Civil War combat were too

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vivid, the trials of Reconstruction were too immediate, and southern racial apprehen-
sions were too pervasive” (Fry, 2002). Although the rebellion was ultimately put down
by Spain—without U.S. military involvement—resistance to Spanish rule remained
strong among Cubans throughout the 1880s. In 1896, the rebellion in Cuba once
again exploded, and Spain sent 150,000 troops to the island. Led by General Valeriano
“The Butcher” Weyler, the Spanish military sought to cut off rebel forces from the
island’s workers by forcibly relocating thousands of the latter into reconcentrados, over-
crowded, disease-ridden prison-camps, within which some 200,000 Cubans eventually
died. As a result of this, many Americans, including numerous members of Congress,
began to campaign for military intervention in Cuba on humanitarian grounds, a posi-
tion that was fueled by “muckraking” reports coming back from the island.
Although a number of congressional resolutions urging U.S. military involvement
were debated, President McKinley was worried that a Caribbean war would stall the
economic recovery that finally seemed to be lifting the United States out of a severe
1890s depression. McKinley, then, pursued a policy of diplomacy, an executive posi-
tion that was supported by both military leaders and businessmen who agreed that it
would benefit the United States enormously if Spain put down the rebellion itself. This
would remove the “distraction” of Cuba while also protecting U.S. commercial inter-
ests on the island, allowing America to turn its full attention to the “new frontier of
exports” in Latin America and Asia (Williams, 2009).
All of this would change, of course, once the American battleship Maine exploded
in the harbor of Havana in the spring of 1898, killing 260 sailors. Although the explo-
sion was probably an accident caused by some problem onboard ship, an American
naval court attributed it to an external mine planted by the Spanish. American newspa-
pers, blaming mysterious Spanish spies for the catastrophe, now ran headlines that
“seemed deliberately intended to inflame the public”: “ ‘The warship Maine was split
in two by an enemy’s secret infernal machine’; ‘Captain Sigsbee practically declares that
his ship was blown up by a mine or torpedo’; ‘Strong evidence of crime . . . ’; ‘If this
can be proven, the brutal nature of the Spanish will be shown in that they waited to
spring the mine until after all men had retired for the night.’ ” One headline in particu-
lar spoke volumes about the tone of the time: “THE WHOLE COUNTRY THRILLS
WITH WAR FEVER” (Wisan, 1955).
The editors of America’s newspapers did their part by publishing the muckraking
stories sent back from Cuba accompanied by prowar illustrations depicting such things
as cheering crowds sending their troops off to war or “Uncle Sam” hailing his “latest,
greatest, shortest war.” News agencies also utilized the recently developed form of
reportage that would come to be known as photojournalism, releasing heroic and often
startling images of brave American troops and starving Cubans. Film, however, would
become the medium of choice for spreading America’s message concerning the “march
of freedom” in Cuba (see: War Film, The).
Significantly, even though “no motion-picture films were made of the fighting in
Cuba,” the “war with Spain in 1898 gave regular film producers their first opportunity
for spectacle” (Sklar, 1994). Albert Smith and the British-born J. Stuart Blackton, for
example, produced for the Vitagraph Company what is considered the first

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commercial combat picture, Tearing Down the Spanish Flag. The short film, comprised
of a single, enormously powerful scene with a flagpole set against the sky and a pair of
hands reaching up and taking down the Spanish flag and replacing it with Old Glory,
was shot on a Manhattan rooftop. Blackton and Smith took advantage of the fervent
audience response to their first combat film, following it up with the more complex
production of The Battle of Santiago Bay, a cinematic depiction of the victory of the
U.S. Navy over the Spanish fleet in Cuba.
America’s “Splendid Little War,” as it was dubbed, lasted only a few short months,
with United States troops quickly driving the Spanish from both Cuba and the
Philippines. The war would prove to be a great political and economic success, as the United
States forced Spain not only to surrender its sovereignty over Cuba, but also to cede to
the United States Puerto Rico, Guam, and several other small islands and to give up its
colonial authority in the Philippines. Ironically, however, once it had won the war, the
nation found itself in an unsettling position, having to decide whether or not to take
imperial control of the Philippines. Although he claimed that he never wanted all of
the islands that made up the Pacific territory, President McKinley ultimately came
down on the side of annexation. This was necessary for several reasons, suggested the
president. The islands, of course, could not be given back to Spain, as that would
be “cowardly and dishonorable.” They also could not be turned over to economic rivals
of the United States, such as France or Germany, as that would be “bad business and
discreditable.” Nor could they be left on their own, as they were clearly “unfit” to gov-
ern themselves and self-rule would soon lead to “anarchy and misrule” that was worse
than that in Spain. The only solution to this colonial dilemma, claimed McKinley, was
to “take control of the islands and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and
Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow
men for whom Christ also died” (Zinn, 1999).
McKinley’s message concerning the need to uplift and Christianize uncivilized for-
eign populations, so much like that preached by Strong, would be taken up and refined
by political leaders such as Theodore Roosevelt, who became president after McKinley
was assassinated in 1901, and Woodrow Wilson, who was elected to his first term in
the White House in 1912, on the eve of World War I. Filmmakers also did their part
in communicating the idea that America bore a responsibility to intervene militarily
in order to tame foreign frontiers, churning out a slew of war films between 1898,
when the Spanish-American War began, and 1914, when World War I began. Bearing
titles such as A Day with the Soldier Boys, Rally Round the Flag, Faithful unto Death, and
None but the Brave Deserve the Fair, these films “were in effect recruiting posters that
moved, calculated to stir the emotions and stun the intelligence” (Butler, 1974).
Wilson resisted calls for America to enter WWI during his first term in office, argu-
ing that what was going on across the Atlantic was strictly a European affair. Film-
makers followed suit, shifting their focus away from the production of prowar films,
like those released during and after the Spanish-American War, toward antiwar pictures
such as Be Neutral (1914), War Is Hell (1915), and The Terrors of War (1917). These
films acted to support President Wilson’s 1914 isolationist call for the public to be
“neutral in fact as well as in name,” “impartial in thought as well as action,” reinforcing

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the message of his first term that the European conflict was “a war with which we have
nothing to do, whose causes cannot touch us” (Horowitz, 2005).
Although the United States refused to become directly involved in the war that
raged in Europe during its early years, geopolitical concerns eventually led Wilson to
become a wartime president after he was reelected in 1916. Now seeking to convince
the American people that the United States should enter the war in order to make
the world “safe for democracy”—especially after he had asked them to reelect him
because he had “kept them out of war”—Wilson turned for advice to one of his most
loyal supporters, George Creel. Appointing Creel head of what came to be called the
Committee on Public Information, the president allowed this powerful figure to shape
the nation’s war message (see: Committee on Public Information, The).
Taking advantage of the extensive resources provided to him by the U.S.
government, once appointed, Creel immediately set about developing a core group
of public relations people and professional historians to assist him in putting in motion
a campaign of “moral publicity.” He also called on his entertainment industry associ-
ates to produce propaganda pictures that could be used to demonstrate the whole-
someness of American life and to “slander all things German.” Wilson had himself
seen the power of the cinematic message firsthand when he allowed D. W. Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation to be screened in the White House in 1915 (see: Birth of a
Nation, The). Considered by most film historians as the most important motion pic-
ture of the silent era that extended from 1915 through 1929 (see: Silent Era, The),
The Birth of a Nation was a technically brilliant example of early filmmaking that gave
expression to a profoundly troubling message concerning black-white race relations in
America. Adapted from the Thomas Dixon novel The Clansman, a work that depicted
the post–Civil War Ku Klux Klan as the last, best hope of Southern whites beset by
emancipated, maniacal blacks, Griffith’s film depicted “the creation of a new nation
after years of struggle and division, a nation of Northern and Southern whites united
‘in common defense of their Aryan birthright,’ with the vigilante riders of the Klan
as their symbol” (Sklar, 1994).
Realizing that The Birth of a Nation was extremely controversial, Dixon, who had
known Wilson when both attended Johns Hopkins University, approached the
president and invited him to attend a screening of the picture. Fearing that it might
appear unseemly for him to venture out while he was mourning the death of his wife,
Wilson suggested that the film be screened in the White House. After watching the
film, Wilson, who had displayed his own racist attitudes after he was elected in 1912
by creating separate work spaces for blacks and whites in Washington, D.C., is pur-
ported to have uttered, “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret
is that it is all so terribly true.”
Although it was met with a great deal of resistance, especially from black leaders such as
Booker T. Washington and social progressives such as Jane Addams, the founder of Hull
House, The Birth of a Nation played to packed houses across the nation and garnered
glowing reviews. It also set the tone for war films created by filmmakers working in con-
junction with Creel’s Committee for Public Information. Filled with salacious images of
crazed Germans and bearing titles such as The Prussian Cur (1918), The Hun Within

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(1918), and The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin (1918), the films spread a message of racial
hatred and exclusionary nationalism that helped to usher in one of America’s most
conservative political, cultural, and religious eras, a period extending roughly from the
end of WWI in 1918 until the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

The Golden Age of Film Comedy

Beyond the many westerns and war films that made their way to the big screen
during the first decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of film comedies were also
made during this time. Indeed, the silent era years that stretched from 1915 to 1929
came to be identified as the Golden Age of Film Comedy. In retrospect, it is not sur-
prising that film comedies became so popular at this point in time, as the thousands
of viewers who watched these films were in desperate need of some relief from an
increasingly troubled world. Already overwhelmed by what felt like the ceaseless pres-
sures of industrialization and urban life, people had been shocked by the horrifying
carnage wrought by a Great War that left millions dead and millions more physically
and psychologically wounded. Before they could come to grips with what had seemed
the impossibility of a worldwide military conflict, they were once again rocked, this
time by an influenza pandemic that swept across the globe and in two short years
between 1918 and 1919 left between 20 and 40 million dead—more than had peri-
shed during all of World War I. If only for brief time, then, film comedies provided
movie audiences with a chance to laugh.
Golden age film comedies traced their roots to the vaudeville programs that had
become so popular during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Character-
ized by song, dance, juggling, and acrobatics, vaudeville programs also typically
included comedy acts, most of which were oriented around physical comedy. As
motion pictures became more sophisticated, and more profitable during the silent
era, gifted physical comedians such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold
Lloyd, all deeply influenced by vaudeville, began to showcase their skills on the big
screen (see: Chaplin, Charlie; Keaton, Buster; and Lloyd, Harold).
Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd were all enormously talented—and willing to put
themselves in harm’s way by performing their own stunts—and film fans flocked to
theaters to watch their pictures. Like dozens of other lesser known film comedians,
Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd all relied on lowbrow humor—pratfalls and sight gags,
strung together one after another, wrapped around flimsy narratives in an attempt to
elicit laughs—they just did it better than the others. Given this, however, the social sig-
nificance of the pictures produced by these three filmmakers should not be underesti-
mated. Ironically, in the very same moment that the filmic idea of the American hero
was being defined in westerns and war films, Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd were shaping
their own versions of what can be understood as the antihero: the little guy—given par-
ticularly poignant expression by Chaplin with his “Little Tramp” character—mercilessly
buffeted about by an increasingly mechanized world and forced to use his ingenuity,
physical abilities, and childish charm to survive. Like the vast majority of viewers who

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watched their films, the antiheroic characters played by Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd were
invariably knocked down by life; they never failed to get back up, however, in hilariously
appealing ways, and to soldier on in a world that too often left little time for laughter.

The Movie Star, Scandals, and Censorship

Although Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd all became major motion picture stars, it was
Chaplin who became the offscreen sensation. Wildly popular with his fans, Chaplin
was able to use his celebrity—and the profits it generated—as a bargaining tool in
his negotiations with studio heads over his salary and his demand for creative control
of his pictures. Understanding the power of the cinema to convey messages to the pub-
lic—and believing that his celebrity allowed him the privilege to speak his mind in
ways that the average person could not—Chaplin began to make his political ideas
known to the public, both on-screen and off. Although personally anti-militaristic,
Chaplin supported America’s entry into WWI; attempting to enlist, he failed his
physical and was turned away. He did his part for the war effort, however, touring with
fellow motion picture stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks on the third Liberty
Bond Drive. Ironically, Chaplin caused a stir in 1921 when, readying himself for a
return to his homeland in England, he was asked what he thought of Bolshevism.
The normally forthright Chaplin provided an answer that many found ambiguous,
leading some to conclude that he was a communist sympathizer, a problematic posi-
tion during the conservative 1920s. During the early 1940s, as America entered
WWII, Chaplin ran afoul of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover over his political affiliations,
and, after a decade of accusations—and facing a second paternity suit—Chaplin effec-
tively went into exile in Switzerland.
Interestingly, Chaplin’s offscreen troubles only seemed to make him more popular
with his adoring fans. Such expression of adoration for motion picture personalities
emerged early on in film history, as audiences began to recognize the actors who
appeared in various roles in different films. These first film fans began to press studios
for behind-the-scenes information about their favorite actors; realizing that selling
their stars could be extremely profitable, studios responded by setting aside sections
in their trade publications in which they profiled popular film personalities. By
1911, the first fan magazines began to appear. With titles like Motion Picture Story
Magazine and Photoplay, the information in these “gossip columns” was tightly con-
trolled by the studios (Sklar, 2002) (see: Movie Star, The).
The first male silent movie stars were men like Rudolph Valentino and Douglas
Fairbanks, who played swashbuckling heroes on-screen (see: Valentino, Rudolph;
Fairbanks, Douglas; Action-Adventure Film, The). The two stars could not have
been more different. Although the smoldering Valentino made women swoon in thea-
ters, his personal life was rife with romantic despair, as he never seemed to be able to
find the right relationship. His willingness to titillate audiences by creating characters
marked with a thinly veiled androgyny also made him a controversial figure among
male viewers, most of whom seemed deeply to resent—and fear, it seems—his

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extraordinary appeal. Fairbanks, on the other hand, was a man’s man, the ideal “Ameri-
can type”—“instinctive, rugged, and fiercely independent” (Lewis, 2008).
Female movie stars were every bit as popular as their male counterparts during the
early years of cinema, none more so than Mary Pickford (see: Pickford, Mary).
Known for her girlish good looks—she continued to play adolescent roles well into
her twenties—Pickford replaced the first female movie star of the silent era, Florence
Lawrence, becoming the new big-screen “it” girl by the mid-1910s. A true rags-to-
riches success story, Pickford began playing bit parts in 1908, earning a respectable
$5 per week. By 1913, now a member of Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players, she was
bringing in an amazing $2,000 per week. In order to assure production quality, Zukor
eventually gave Pickford, who by that time was earning a staggering $10,000 per pic-
ture, her own division, Artcraft. Demonstrating that women could be equally influen-
tial figures in the film industry, Pickford joined her future husband, Douglas
Fairbanks, along with Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith to found United Artists.
Seeking exclusive control over their film projects, the company proved untenable in
the hands of its founders, who ultimately turned over the day-to-day operations of
United Artists to Joseph Schenck.
Pickford’s seemingly perpetual girlishness was the polar opposite of Theda Bara’s
wickedly erotic vamp persona. The first example of a star who was created by a studio,
Bara was born Theodosia Goodman in Ohio. She was given the name Theda Bara—an
anagram of Arab Death—by William Fox (who launched the Fox Film Corp.), and
after exotic stories were concocted about her being the daughter of a sheik and an
Arabian princess who was involved in the “black arts,” she became notorious for play-
ing the “vamp”—a vampiress whom men could not resist. The studio released incred-
ibly provocative publicity photos of Bara, and she did her part on screen playing vamps
that exist only to seduce and destroy powerful men (Sklar, 2008; Lewis, 2002).
As the decade of the Roaring Twenties dawned, film fans began to demand increas-
ingly personal information about what their stars were doing when they were not busy
making films. Some stars, who were making more in a single week than most working
people made in an entire year, lived lives of conspicuous consumption, spending
untold sums on houses, cars, and elaborate, often drug-fueled parties—and fans longed
to know what that was like, even if only vicariously. Realizing that there was money to
be made, mainstream newspapers began to run stories about the decadent lifestyles of
Hollywood celebrities, which film fans could hardly wait to read and share with each
other.
Although much of what was reported in the stories about movie stars was fabricated,
a distressing amount was true. The first star scandal with fatally tragic consequences
exploded in 1920, when a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl named Olive Thomas was found
dead of an apparent drug overdose in a room at the Hotel de Crillon, in Paris. The
incident, which turned out to be a bigger story than it probably would have been
had not Thomas been married to Jack Pickford, Mary’s brother, led Archbishop
George Mundelein to publish a cautionary work on the motion picture industry enti-
tled The Danger of Hollywood: A Warning to Young Girls. Although Mundelein’s warn-
ing seemed overweening to many, it proved prescient when one of the most

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notorious scandals in film industry history broke in 1921. Although details of the case
were sketchy at best, it involved accusations that film comedy star Roscoe “Fatty”
Arbuckle had raped and murdered a young starlet named Virginia Rappe at a sensa-
tional party—even by Hollywood standards—that had stretched from L.A. to San
Francisco, 400 miles away. Although Arbuckle was never convicted of the crime, his
career was effectively over after he was put on trial in 1922 (Lewis, 2002).
Realizing that some aspects of Hollywood were, indeed, out of control, and that sto-
ries such as that involving Arbuckle could negatively affect their financial bottom line,
the studios created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America
(MPPDA) in 1922 (see: Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America).
The MPPDA was headed up by former postmaster general Will Hays, to whom fell the
task of convincing local and state-level reform groups that the film industry was every
bit as concerned as they were that Hollywood remain scandal free and concern itself
only with producing films that were wholesomely entertaining and that provided
appropriate social messages. Although there were those in Hollywood who supported
the creation of the MPPDA for the right reasons—to act as an oversight agency that
could help to prevent situations like that involving Arbuckle—most were simply wor-
ried that if the process of censorship was carried out by reform groups, Hollywood
would become overly regulated (see: Hays Office and Censorship, The).
Censorship had been an issue since the birth of cinema—once it became clear that
motion pictures were more than simply entertainment novelties and that they actually
could be used to communicate messages to viewers, questions immediately began to
arise concerning what those messages should be and how some of them might be
censored—so it is hardly surprising that in a post-WWI America marked by the rise
of the second Ku Klux Klan, the Red Scare reaction to communism, the Scopes Trial
and the articulation of a formal Christian fundamentalism, two-thirds of the nation’s
states were actively attempting to pass regulatory legislation that would act to control
an industry that had grown as powerful, persuasive, and, many thought, as perverse
as filmmaking. What is surprising is that the creation of the MPPDA actually con-
vinced 35 of 36 states that were considering imposing regulatory legislation on the dis-
tribution and exhibition of motion pictures that it was safe to halt their efforts. Much
of this, it seems clear, had to do with the appointment of Hays to head the organiza-
tion, as he was considered by almost everyone—inside and outside the industry—as
just the kind of no-nonsense, morally appropriate man who could get the job done.
At least for now, then, the film industry would be left to police itself.

Technological Innovation, the Studio System, and New Forms of Censorship

On October 6, 1927, moviemaking changed forever when The Jazz Singer opened
in New York City’s Warners’ Theatre (see: Jazz Singer, The). Considered the first
sound film, The Jazz Singer starred Al Jolson, a Jewish singing star who was already
well known as a stage performer. Jolson had made a name for himself in vaudeville,
often darkening his face and whitening his lips with makeup and performing his num-
bers before eager white audiences in what came to be called “blackface” (see:

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Blackface). Although it received rather tepid receptions from audiences and lukewarm
reviews from critics when it was first released—Jolson was lauded for his singing but
universally panned for his attempt at acting—the film is noteworthy for ushering in
a new era in cinema, one marked by increasingly sophisticated expressions of sound
that made motion pictures seem even more lifelike (see: Sound).
The Jazz Singer was not actually a synchronized sound film, as it had been shot as a
silent picture with the soundtrack added later. Indeed, except for the musical numbers,
there are only two dialogue sequences in the picture—one of particular note, where
Jolson looks directly into the camera and, prophetically as it turned out, enthusiasti-
cally says to the audience: “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothin’
yet!” The changeover to synchronous sound did not occur overnight. In fact, like
The Jazz Singer, the majority of early sound films, such as William Wellman’s Wings
and F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, were really hybrid offerings, mixing together silent and
sound formats. But there was no disguising the fact that viewers wanted pictures with
sound, and after 1927, studios invested heavily in producing the sound films that their
audiences craved.
Although it did not have quite the effect on film production and viewing that sound
did, the introduction of color nevertheless dramatically changed the way films were
produced and viewed (see: Color). Experiments with coloring film date back to the
middle of the nineteenth century, and by 1905, the French Pathé company had moved
from hand tinting film to running it through tinting machines, making the process
much less labor intensive and time consuming. It also allowed them more effectively
to create motion pictures that expressed “moods”—individual segments could now
quickly be colored with particular shades expressive of different emotions and experi-
ences. In 1915, the Technicolor Corporation was formed, and in 1917, the company
showcased a new two-color process they had developed in The Gulf Between. By the
early 1930s, Technicolor had developed a three-color process that would become the
industry standard for two decades—the Technicolor process required that films be shot
with special cameras, which Technicolor owned and leased to studios, allowing the
company to dominate their segment of the industry until Eastman Kodak introduced
a single-color process in 1950 that could be used on a wide number of cameras avail-
able on the market.
Although moviemaking had always been a complex process, the introduction of
new technologies, especially sound, made the process infinitely more complicated—
and financially risky. With the advent of sound, for instance, a “myriad of technical
problems was created whose solution demanded the soundproofing of studios, the wir-
ing of cinemas and the employment of a whole new range of technicians whose services
had never previously been necessary” (Schindler, 1996). The expense and expertise
required for filmmaking, coupled with the responsibility of self-regulation, increas-
ingly shifted the control of producing, distributing, and exhibiting films to a small
group of very powerful studios—the “Big Five,” Loew’s, Inc., RKO, Twentieth
Century-Fox, Paramount, and Warner Bros., and the “Little Three,” United Artists,
Columbia, and Universal Studios—which were headed by enormously influential cor-
porate leaders. Mostly Eastern European Jews—a blow to those in the industry such as

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Edison and the other company heads at MPPC with anti-Semitic sensibilities who had
done their best to keep men of Jewish descent out of the corporate world of cinema—
studio heads such as Carl Laemmle, William Fox, Adolph Zukor, Marcus Lowe, and
the four Warner Brothers were not filmmakers, at least not in any artistic sense. Rather,
much like the industrialists who had come before them, they were shrewd—and often
ruthless—businessmen who created what came to be called the “Studio System” (see:
Studio System, The). Seeking to limit competition and to maximize profits, these
men each created a studio that functioned as a “self-contained filmmaking factory with
its own labor pool of producers, directors, writers, players, and technicians, turning out
many films a month during the years of peak production”—roughly from 1930 to
1950 (Kolker, 2000).
Will Hays did his part to help insulate the studios during the late 1920s by offering
up the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America’s first formalized self-
regulatory system of censorship. Comprised of a list of “Don’ts” and “Be Carefuls,”
Hays’s censorship system sought to regulate “what the uneducated, unwashed masses
that consumed motion pictures so avidly might do with what they saw up there on
the screen” (Lewis, 2008). This notion of regulating what was viewed by the less than
civilized masses harkened back to the very beginnings of cinema, when what proved
so problematic about motion pictures for many reformed-minded Americans was the
fact that they were largely marketed to immigrants and native-born members of the
lower classes who represented the majority of the nation’s newly emerging industrial
mass-consumer culture. Now that the affluence of the 1920s had swollen the ranks
of lower- and middle-class mass consumers, Hays and the MPPDA felt responsible at
least to suggest to filmmakers what was appropriate for inclusion in their motion pic-
tures. The list of Don’ts, which included things that Hays deemed inappropriate “irre-
spective of the manner in which they are treated,” included profanity, “suggestive or
licentious nudity,” miscegenation, childbirth, and drug trafficking. The Be Carefuls
were especially concerned with depictions of crime—theft, robbery, safecracking,
arson, smuggling, and rape—that might prove to be “potentially informative” to mem-
bers of the lower classes who might be tempted to cross over legal lines (Pramaggiore
and Wallis, 2005).
Although Hays’s lists were well intentioned, they had little effect on the way that
motion pictures were made, as most studios simply ignored the MPPDA regulations.
Now convinced that the industry could not—or would not—regulate itself, church-
related and public organizations—Mothers of Minnesota, Combat, the NAACP, the
Catholic War Veterans, the Parent Teacher Association—pooled their efforts in an
attempt to force studios to produce more appropriate material. Concerned about pro-
tecting the studios from becoming overly regulated by citizens’ groups, Hays turned to
Father Daniel A. Lord, a Jesuit priest, to develop an even more formal censorship
document than the MPPDA’s lists of Don’ts and Be Carefuls (see: Religion and Cen-
sorship in Film). Unrestrained by the sort of relationship to the film industry that
obviously influenced Hays’ decisions concerning censorship, Father Lord made his
position clear in the Motion Picture Production Code (MPPC), which he was instru-
mental in defining in 1930. Unlike the merely suggestive Don’ts and Be Carefuls, the

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MPPC set out, in minute detail, 12 areas of grave concern, including Crimes Against
the Law, Sex, Profanity, Religion, Obscenity, National Feelings, and Repellent Sub-
jects. Ironically, although he took no part in producing it, the MPPC was ultimately
labeled the “Hays Code.”
Although it seemed that should they want to avoid the wrath of church and citizen
groups, the studios would have to abide by the Production Code, between 1930 and
1934 they largely ignored it, much like they had Hays’s Don’ts and Be Carefuls. Pro-
ducing dozens of what came to be called “pre-Code” films between 1930 and 1934—the
Code was in place during this time, just disregarded—the studios thumbed their noses
at those who sought to control them—especially the Catholic Church. From Mae West
comedies like She Done Him Wrong (1933), to monster films such as Frankenstein (1931)
and King Kong (1933), to melodramas like Madam Satan and Young Sinners—which
sought to seduce viewers into theaters with the tagline “Hot youth at its wildest . . . loving
madly, living freely”—the studios allowed their filmmakers to produce motion pictures
that flaunted the very things the Code sought to regulate.
No motion picture genre violated the Production Code more than did the gangster
film (see: Gangster Film, The). It is certainly no coincidence that early sound-era
gangster films began to be made at just the moment that the Production Code was ini-
tially put into effect in 1930. After a decade of relative prosperity during which
increasing numbers of Americans were able to afford what had once been considered
luxuries, the nation was stunned when the stock market crashed in 1929 and the coun-
try—indeed, the entire world—descended into the dreadful depths of the Great
Depression. By the time Franklin Roosevelt took office in the spring of 1933, unem-
ployment stood at a staggering 25 percent and more and more banks were failing.
Unprotected by any sort of government-backed financial guarantees—the Federal
Insurance Deposit Corporation (FDIC) was not put into place until 1936, under
Roosevelt’s so-called second New Deal—many Americans had arrived at their banks to
find the doors locked and their hard-earned savings gone. Even after Roosevelt instituted
a four-day banking holiday the day after he was inaugurated, and was eventually able to
stabilize the banks, the monies that had been lost were never recouped.
Bitter and confused, many people blamed the banks for losing their money; and thus
it was not surprising that they showed little sympathy when these institutions began to be
robbed with alarming frequency by Depression-era gangsters. By the early 1930s, gang-
sters had already become part of American culture. Figures like Al Capone—incredibly
violent, ultra-organized thugs who dressed in silk suits and portrayed themselves as
men of the people—had emerged during the Prohibition era of the 1920s. Born and
raised in New York, and eventually rising to the top of Chicago’s criminal underground,
Capone controlled speakeasies, bookie joints, and houses of prostitution. Other flashy
outlaws, such as Bonnie and Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd, became prominent during
the Depression Era, most notably as bank robbers. Although like Capone, Bonnie and
Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd were nothing more than ruthless thugs who cared nothing
about the lives they destroyed, their extravagant, uncontrolled lifestyles had a certain
appeal for average people overwhelmed by poverty and despair.

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Realizing how appealing many Americans found the nation’s criminals to be, film-
makers began producing dozens of gangster pictures during the 1930s. Three of the
most important of these were Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1931), starring Edward
G. Robinson, and Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932), starring Paul Muni, both of which
were loosely based on the criminal life of Al Capone; and William Wellman’s The Pub-
lic Enemy (1931). Making stars of their leading men, all three of these films were
immensely popular with audiences, a fact that supporters of the Production Code
found troubling. Even though the criminals in these pictures almost always fell from
grace and died in the end, reform-minded members of church groups such as the
Catholic Legion of Decency, which emerged in 1933, still felt that gangster films
glorified their immoral lifestyles.
Although by 1934 the studios had resisted attempts at censorship for more than a
decade, what they had not counted on was the willingness of the Catholic Church to
call for its members, which numbered in the hundreds of thousands in America, to
boycott inappropriate films—or more ominously, all motion pictures. This was no
small threat, as George Mundelein, for instance, who had written The Danger of Holly-
wood: A Warning to Young Girls in 1921, and who was now Bishop of Chicago, had a
huge account with a Wall Street firm that administered mortgages for a number of
Hollywood studios, and the prominent Catholic A. P. Giannini was president of Bank
of America. Finally convinced that they had misplayed their hands by ignoring the
mandates of the MPPDA and that the industry could indeed be hurt by boycotts,
the studios began to abide by the Hays Code in 1934. In July of that year, the MPPDA
created the Production Code Administration (PCA) as an industry oversight agency
that would insure the studios continued to produce what were deemed appropriate
motion pictures. Hand-picked by Bishop Mundelein, the lay Catholic, staunchly
pro-censorship Joseph Breen was tapped to head the PCA in 1934—his reign would
last for the next two decades, during which the Hays Code would greatly affect how
motion pictures were made.

Musicals, Romantic Comedies, and Populism during the Depression

As the Depression deepened, Americans, much as they had in the past, turned to the
cinema for relief, especially to a new film type that took full advantage of the industry’s
evolution toward sound. Not surprisingly, one of the film genres that benefitted most
handsomely from the introduction of sound was the movie musical (see: Musical,
The; Music in Film). Although it initially proved difficult to produce musicals that
audiences liked—large, cumbersome cameras made it tricky to film dance numbers,
and film directors found themselves at a loss to determine how to transpose stage-
oriented variety shows to the big screen—the genre took off in 1933 when Warner
Bros. began to release the first in a series of musicals oriented around show-business
narratives with dance numbers choreography by Busby Berkeley (see: Berkeley,
Busby). In pictures such as 42nd Street (1933), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Footlight
Parade (1933), and Dames (1934), Berkeley “completely freed the musical from

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adherence to stage conventions,” allowing the camera to soar over the heads and even
between the legs of scores of scantily clad female dancers, much to viewers’ delight
(Sklar, 2002).
Another incredibly popular form of film musical that appeared alongside the
Berkeley spectacles of the 1930s focused on individual performers and their romantic rela-
tionships. Although it was often necessary to suspend disbelief as everyone on screen
broke into a show number, audiences loved watching their favorite performers dance their
way into each other’s hearts—especially Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (see: Astaire,
Fred). Rogers was already a seasoned screen professional by the time she linked up with
Astaire, having carved out a niche as a “wisecracking dame” in pictures like Hat Check Girl
(1932) and Professional Sweetheart (1933) and also having worked with Berkeley on 42nd
Street and Gold Diggers. Astaire, who had danced for years with his sister, had finally given
Hollywood a shot, giving rise to one of the most famous screen test evaluations in cin-
ematic history: “Can’t sing. Can’t act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.” Believing that
being able to “dance a little” was, perhaps, enough, RKO gave him a chance. They almost
killed his career before it could get going, though, when they loaned him out to MGM,
who paired him with Joan Crawford in the abysmal Dancing Lady (1933). Luckily,
RKO brought him back and teamed him with Rogers in Flying Down to Rio (1933),
and the die was cast: Fred and Ginger—as they were affectionately known to fans—would
dance together in nine films between 1933 and 1939. In films such as Top Hat (1935) and
Swing Time (1937), scored by composers such as Irving Berlin (“Cheek to Cheek”),
Jerome Kern (“The Way You Look Tonight”), and George Gershwin (“A Foggy Day”),
Fred and Ginger wowed audiences with their elegantly staged, beautifully articulated
musical numbers.
In 1934, just a year after Fred and Ginger were flying down to Rio and falling in
love, three motion pictures were released that defined another new film type, the
romantic comedy (see: Romantic Comedy, The). Although they bore similarities to
the comedies that had been so popular during the golden age of film comedies, It Hap-
pened One Night, Twentieth Century, and The Thin Man provided audiences with
something different: film couples who, although they did not usually dance and sing
together, still possessed “slangy, combative, humorous, unsentimental” and “power-
fully romantic” sensibilities, and who, in the end, overcame adversity to live happily
ever after (Harvey, 1987).
Although films about romance certainly had the potential to cross over the censor-
ship boundaries put in place by the MPPDA—Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night,
for instance, finds its lead characters, Peter and Ellie, forced to spend the night together
in the same motel room, although they are not married—(see: It Happened One
Night) the scores of romantic comedies that were made between 1934 and 1954, the
years during which the Production Code exercised its greatest control over Hollywood
filmmaking, were generally representative of the wholesome, morally appropriate cin-
ematic offerings for which reform groups had been calling. Indeed, unlike the gangster
films that reform groups found so objectionable because of their glorification of the
profligate lifestyles of criminals, many romantic comedies, especially the screwball
variation of this genre, poked fun at the extravagance displayed by the members of

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 Introduction

the upper class, suggesting that it rendered them incapable of understanding the plight
of the average person. As the middle-class, everyman Peter says to the upper-class Ellie
after giving her a piggyback ride in It Happened One Night: “To be a piggybacker
requires complete relaxation—a warm heart and a loving nature.” “And rich people,”
asks Ellie, “have none of these qualifications I suppose?” “Not one,” Peter responds.
“You’re prejudiced,” says a chastened Ellie. “Show me a good piggybacker,” declares
Peter, “and I’ll show you somebody who’s a real human. Take Abraham Lincoln for in-
stance—a natural piggybacker.”
In the minds of many, the allusion to Lincoln as a real human might just as easily
have been applied to Franklin Roosevelt, who, in 1934, was deeply involved in trying
to resolve a national crisis that seemed in many ways as profoundly unsettling as that
which Lincoln had faced almost a century earlier. Roosevelt had swept into office in
the spring of 1933 and immediately began to implement his New Deal programs.
Although initially not as radical as what would come during his second term, when
he would put in place huge social service programs such as Social Security—when he
entered office in 1933, Roosevelt agreed with Herbert Hoover that financial support
for those who were suffering from the devastating effects of the Depression should
come by way of work programs and not through the creation of a modern welfare state
such as those that would be fashioned in European countries—New Deal programs
such as the National Recovery Act (NRA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps
(CCC) went a long way toward helping middle-class citizens who had fallen into pov-
erty to get back on their feet.
Although Roosevelt had come from privilege, the majority of Americans—who
elected and reelected him four times—saw him as a man of the people. Roosevelt
played his part, reassuring the American people, especially by way of his “fireside
chats,” that things would be okay. Filmmakers during the 1930s and early 1940s gave
expression to the president’s New Deal sensibilities on the big screen with populist
offerings that provided hope to a desperate nation. Of the many gifted directors who
were making motion pictures that expressed populist sentiments during this time—
one thinks of Michael Curtiz’s Dodge City (1938), or William Wyler’s The Westerner
(1940), or John Ford’s The Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath
(1940)—perhaps the filmmaker who is most closely connected to the populist cinema
of the 1930s and ’40s is Frank Capra. Capra followed the success of It Happened One
Night with Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939),
and It’s A Wonderful Life (1946) (see: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town; Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington; It’s a Wonderful Life). Capra chose the perfect leading men for these
three pictures, Gary Cooper for the first and Jimmy Stewart for the latter two. Both
were tall and a bit gangly, and neither possessed the matinee-idol good looks of some-
one like Errol Flynn—in other words, they were more like us. Cast as Longfellow
Deeds, Jefferson Smith, and George Bailey, respectively, Cooper and Stewart repre-
sented “classic Capra heroes—small town, shrewd, lovable, and triumphant by virtue
of their honesty and sincerity” (Schindler, 1996).
While Jefferson Deeds must reconcile the problems that come with becoming sud-
denly rich—he inherits a $20 million estate in Manhattan—and Jefferson Smith must

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fight the good fight of the people in Washington, D.C.—he suddenly becomes a U.S.
senator—George Bailey never leaves his bucolic home of Bedford Falls. Like most of
us, he has grand plans—he wants to travel the world and to design buildings that soar
to the sky. His plans are foiled, again and again, however, and he ends up on the verge
of suicide before a charmingly clumsy angel named Clarence (Henry Travers) steps in
and shows him what would have happened had he never been born. George is sur-
prised to learn that, in his own simple way, he has actually made the world a much bet-
ter place and that he really does have a wonderful life.

The War Years and Postwar Discontent

Capra’s message was clear in It’s A Wonderful Life: it is family, friends, and commu-
nity that count most, that make a man truly wealthy—“A toast to my big brother
George,” says Harry Bailey. “The richest man in town.” It is not insignificant that it
is Harry Bailey who gives this toast, as he makes it back to Bedford Falls just in time
to celebrate George only because his brother saved his life when they were boys. A
Navy pilot, Harry is a decorated war hero who himself saves the lives of scores of
American soldiers aboard a transport ship by shooting down a Japanese plane. Referen-
ces to Harry’s heroic deed provide us with a context for Capra’s film, which was
released in 1946. By the time the film was in theaters, Roosevelt and Hitler had both
died and Churchill was out of office, Germany had surrendered and the plans for Hit-
ler’s “Final Solution” had been revealed, and atomic bombs had been dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands almost instantly and forcing
the Japanese to surrender, as well. People across the globe also received the sobering
news that World War II had been even bloodier than the Great War, with 55 million
people perishing during the course of this long, brutal struggle.
Although it might have seemed natural for post-WWI filmmakers to produce
motion pictures that depicted the United States as the heroic power that had turned
the tide in a global conflict, especially given how many “rally-round-the-flag” pictures
were released after the Spanish-American War, once the true horrors of the Great War
were revealed, American filmmakers began to make the first antiwar pictures—D. W.
Griffith’s Hearts of the World (1918), King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925), and Lewis
Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) are powerful examples. During and
after WWII, however, as the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet
Union began to heat up and U.S. troops were deployed to Korea, filmmakers began
churning out prowar pictures. From Capra’s Why We Fight series—supported by the
government’s Office of War Information—to Wellman’s The Story of G. I. Joe, these
films, and scores of others like them, depicted the invincible American hero fighting
a just war in order to maintain America’s democratic stability and religious freedom
(see: War Film, The). Although there were non-genre war films released at this time,
such as Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) and William Wyler’s The Best Years of
Our Lives (1946), that were more narratively complex, almost without exception for-
mulaic, prowar combat films, set in Europe and the Pacific, and to a lesser extent in
Korea, would continue to be made until Americans grew tired of war and its brutal

xl
 Introduction

effects after the nation suffered its first military defeat in Vietnam in the mid-1970s
(see: Casablanca and Best Years of Our Lives, The).
Oddly, in the same moment that audiences were flocking to theaters to view combat
pictures that picked up and extended the filmic myth of American exceptionalism, they
were also being drawn toward a new motion picture type, eventually dubbed “film
noir” in the 1950s by French critics and filmmakers (see: Film Noir). Although film
noir—literally “black,” or “dark” film—is often defined as a film genre, it is probably
not correct to think of it in this way; film noir is actually better understood as a style
of filmmaking that crosses over genres and is often used in non-genre films. Character-
ized by both a look—low-key lighting, a predominance of night scenes, darkened,
rain-splashed streets—and a feel—labyrinthine, psychologically convoluted narratives
and characters—that perfectly captured the sense of alienation, fear, and fragility expe-
rienced by many in the postwar world, noir-style pictures had both cinematic and,
especially, literary roots. Clearly resonant with pre-Code gangster films—in particular
The Public Enemy and Little Caesar—noirs were also deeply indebted to the “hard-
boiled pulp and pop fiction of James Cain (Double Indemnity, The Postman Always
Rings Twice, and Mildred Pierce), Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon and Red
Harvest), and Raymond Chandler (Farewell, My Lovely and The Big Sleep)” (Lewis,
2008). In addition, a number of film historians have also suggested that although it
is not thematically oriented around crime and punishment, Orson Welles’ 1941 Citi-
zen Kane nevertheless was instrumental in helping to lay the foundations for the noir
pictures that would appear during the 1940s and 1950s (Kolker, 2000; Lewis, 2008;
Schatz, 1981). Citizen Kane, says Robert Kolker in A Cinema of Loneliness, “altered
the visual and narrative conventions of American film.” Indeed, says Kolker, “in the
years immediately following it, the darkness of its mise-en-scène began to inform
much of Hollywood’s output, particularly those films involving detectives, gangsters,
and lower-middle-class men oppressed by lust and the sexuality of destructive women”
(Kolker, 2000).
Drawing on pre-Code gangsters films, the work of their literary forbearers—some
of whom wrote screenplays for noirs—and Citizen Kane, noirs provided audiences
with multi-dimensional characters and narratives that often dealt with crime and pun-
ishment in intriguingly complex and modern ways. Unlike the one-dimensional crimi-
nal characters of 1930s gangster films, for example—“ethnic monsters” such as Rico
Bandello in Little Caesar and Tom Powers in The Public Enemy, for whom their lives
of crime seemed foregone conclusions long before they arrived to live them—most of
the men who are caught up in extralegal activities in noirs are not “professional crimi-
nals.” Generally ordinary guys doing ordinary things—one thinks of Fred MacMur-
ray’s Walter Neff in Double Indemnity (1944) (see: Double Indemnity), who sells
insurance and stops off at the local bowling alley after work to relax, or of Alan Ladd’s
Johnny Morrison in The Blue Dahlia (1946), who just wants to get on with his life
after serving his country as a bomber pilot in the Pacific—these men are usually over-
whelmed by incredibly beautiful, sexually available women—classic femme fatales—
Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson to MacMurray’s Walter Neff and Veronica
Lake’s Joyce Harwood to Ladd’s Johnny Morrison—who seduce them into departing

xli
Introduction

“from the boring reality of middle-class life into a fictive world of sexual pathology and
illegal enterprise” (Lewis, 2008). Throughout the 1940s and 50s, then, film noirs
“played on basic themes of aloneness, oppression, claustrophobia, and emotional and
physical brutality, manifested in weak men, various gangsters and detectives, and
devouring women who lived—or cringed—in an urban landscape that defied clear per-
ception and safe habitation” (Kolker, 2000).

HUAC, the Hollywood Blacklist, and Resistance to Censorship

As film historians have pointed out, gender-bending characterizations of noir men
and women—the anxiety-ridden males, so different from the heroic men who popu-
lated scores of genre westerns and combat pictures, and the dangerously aggressive
females who represented perversely attractive obverses to the loyal, demure women of
the majority of Hollywood films—were so pervasive in these pictures “that they must
have been responses to some profound, if unconscious, shifts in the way the culture
was seeing itself ” during the 1940s and early ’50s:

Perhaps it was a response to the deep trauma of fascism, a brutality so profound that
the culture had to deal with it, in part, through representations of lesser, more know-
able and contained brutalities and helplessness. Perhaps the vicious noir woman was
somehow a response to the fears of returning soldiers that the sweethearts they left at
home were busy betraying them—or even more terrifying, successfully working at
their jobs? . . . Perhaps she was a more general representation of the misogyny par-
ticularly rampant in the culture and its films after the war, or a dialectic response
to this misogyny in the figure of women who would free themselves from the
restraints of the domesticity portrayed as normal in so many films. (Kolker, 2000)

While noirs offered viewers little in the way of fear reducing redemption—by picture’s
end both the fatal female and the wayward male were usually dead—the postwar com-
bat pictures that were released during the 1940s and ’50s seemed wholly redemptive.
Reflective in their own way of the shifts in how American culture was seeing itself after
the end of the war—although in radically different ways than were noirs—the combat
pictures that audiences viewed during the 1940s and 50s provided comfort, at least
temporarily, from the specter of Cold War communism.
Much as it had been after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, communism was
blamed for almost everything that was wrong in America during the Cold War years:
labor unrest, racial tension, gender problems, and a host of other issues. In response
to the threat of communism, a congressional committee was formed in 1946 to inves-
tigate “un-American activities.” The committee eventually came to be known as the
House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC (see: HUAC Hearings, The),
and between 1947 and 1954 it called witnesses from the film industry to testify about
Communist influence in Hollywood. The committee initially called a number of
“friendly witnesses,” prominent among them Walt Disney, Jack Warner, and Ronald
Reagan. Unable to get these men to “name names,” the committee then called a second
group of witnesses, a number of whom—notably Elia Kazan and Roy Huggins—

xlii
 Introduction

agreed to cooperate with the members of HUAC. Ten of those who would not
cooperate—nine screenwriters and the director Edward Dmytryk, who had made
Crossfire in 1947, a film that drew the attention of committee members—were eventu-
ally dubbed the Hollywood Ten.
The first official Hollywood blacklist was instituted on November 25, 1947, the day
after the 10 men of the group were cited for contempt (see: Hollywood Blacklist,
The). In a press release issued a week later by Eric Johnston, then head of the Motion
Picture Association of America, 48 of the most powerful studio heads in the industry
stated that they “deplore[d] the actions of the 10 Hollywood men who have been cited
for contempt by the House of Representatives.” Although they claimed that they did
not “desire to prejudge their legal rights,” they nevertheless declared that they had no
choice but to “forthwith discharge or suspend without compensation” each member
of the “10 until such time as he is acquitted or has purged himself of contempt and
declares under oath that he is not a Communist.” All of the members of the group were
ultimately fined and jailed for their refusal to bow to the dictates of Congress and
industry heads.
The HUAC hearings and the institution of the Hollywood blacklist had a chilling
effect on the film industry. Although most industry figures had nothing to do with
communism, and those that did were guilty of no legal wrongdoing, hundreds from
the filmmaking community were eventually blacklisted. Anticommunist fears were
only exacerbated when Joseph McCarthy, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, came
to prominence after giving a speech in February 1950 in which he claimed that he had
the names of over 200 communist spies who had infiltrated the federal government.
Although McCarthy was discredited and ultimately censored by his congressional col-
leagues, the fear he inspired remained palpable until 1954.
The Hollywood blacklist remained in place until 1960, and had lingering effects
even after that. Unable to get work, many of those who refused to cooperate with the
HUAC investigations lost everything they had worked so hard to attain. Interestingly,
because they were able to work behind the scenes, some screenwriters were able to hire
“ghosts” to front for them, notably Dalton Trumbo, whose script for The Brave One
(1956) won an Academy Award. Not surprisingly, the situation divided the filmmak-
ing community, with those who were blacklisted accusing those who had named names
of betraying their colleagues simply so they could continue working. Without question
the most celebrated figure who chose to cooperate was Elia Kazan. Ironically, Kazan
had directed progressive stage productions before making his way to Hollywood, a
number of which were produced by the Group Theatre, which was eventually targeted
by HUAC in the late 1940s. When he began working in Hollywood, he was praised
for producing socially relevant films such as Gentlemen’s Agreement (see: Judaism in
Film), an indictment of anti-Semitism for which he won his first Oscar for direction,
and Pinky, which examined the issue of a light-skinned African American woman
who “passes” in the white community (see: African Americans in Film)—because
the latter picture dealt so openly with race and miscegenation, it was actually banned
in many areas of the South. In 1948, Kazan founded the Actors Studio, where some
of Hollywood’s leading “method actors” of the 1950s—Marlon Brando, Montgomery

xliii
Introduction

Clift, Eli Wallach, Kim Hunter, Eva Marie Saint—studied (see: Method Acting). In
1951, before he was called to testify before the HUAC committee, he directed A Street-
car Named Desire, which featured a brooding, existentially fragile Marlon Brando as
Stanley Kowalski.
Kazan’s testimony before HUAC was met with a great deal of criticism from his
industry colleagues. He responded with the “trenchant blacklist allegory” On the
Waterfront, which also starred Brando. Despite portraying itself as a populist celebra-
tion of the common man—Brando as the physically and psychologically bruised and
battered Terry Malloy, who stands up for himself and his fellow dockworkers against
the mob—On the Waterfront is really a “deeply reactionary film, as it implausibly cele-
brates the nobility of naming names” (Lewis, 2008). Kazan would go on to make some
of most highly regarded films ever to come out of Hollywood during his post-HUAC
career, including East of Eden (1955), which starred another method actor phenome-
non, James Dean; Baby Doll (1957); A Face in the Crowd (1957); and Splendor in the
Grass (1961), which Warren Beatty credited with launching his career. When Kazan
was honored in 1999 with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Motion Picture
Academy, though, many in Hollywood refused to celebrate the renowned director,
demonstrating how controversial the whole sordid situation had been—and continued
to be 50 years later.

The Decline of Production Code Censorship

While the imposition of the MPPDA’s Production Code and the HUAC purges hit
Hollywood hard, the industry also faced threats from other problematic sources. In
1948, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on the issue of violation of antitrust laws
by Hollywood studios, who were accused of creating a market monopoly that limited
the possibility of competition in the filmmaking industry. The Supreme Court had
made its voice heard early on in American film history, deciding in the 1915 Mutual
case that although plays and novels were protected by the First Amendment right of
free speech, films were not—the thinking being that those who watched plays and read
novels were sufficiently sophisticated not to be negatively affected by what they con-
sumed, while those who watched films—the uneducated masses—were not. The Para-
mount case of 1948—so named because Paramount was the first studio listed in the
suit, the others being RKO, Warner Bros., Twentieth Century-Fox, Loew’s-MGM,
Columbia, Universal, and United Artists—was decided against the studios. Deemed
trusts by the Court, the studios were forced to divest themselves of their extraordinarily
profitable theater chains—in major cities, the studios controlled as much as 70 percent
of first-run theaters. The decision had an immediate effect on the studios, whose reve-
nues plummeted during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Ironically, in writing the majority opinion in the Paramount case, Justice William
O. Douglas, a staunch civil libertarian, took the time to revisit the Mutual case of
1915, declaring that the decision violated the rights of filmmakers. The practice of
punishing theater owners with fines if they exhibited films that did not bear the PCA

xliv
 Introduction

stamp rendering them appropriate for viewing, wrote Douglas, was unconstitutional.
Although the Hays Code remained very much in effect until the mid-1950s, this loos-
ening of free speech restrictions was at least a step toward the more radical filmmaking
that characterized the late 1950s and 1960s.
Interestingly, the decline in revenues that resulted from the Paramount decision,
exacerbated by the increasing popularity of television, which kept potential moviegoers
at home, led to attempts by certain filmmakers to defy the PCA and to make pictures
that would bring audiences back to the theaters. One of those filmmakers was the
Eastern European émigré Otto Preminger, who had already made a number of com-
mercially successful films in America, including the early offering Laura (1944). Pre-
minger raised eyebrows in 1952 when he purchased the rights to a stage play that
had garnered a reputation as a rather risqué Broadway comedy, The Moon Is Blue.
Thrilled at the thought of adapting the play and making it into a motion picture, Pre-
minger signed William Holden and David Niven to star. When PCA head Joseph
Breen got wind of the fact that Preminger was going forward with the production,
he contacted him and informed the director that he had seen the play on Broadway
and that it was wholly inappropriate. Preminger was undaunted by what he considered
the threat from the PCA and signed a distribution deal with United Artists. Assuming
that the lack of a PCA stamp would be the kiss of death, Preminger, and a great many
others in Hollywood, was pleasantly surprised when The Moon Is Blue went on to gross
over $4 million in its initial release.
Buoyed by the success of The Moon Is Blue, Preminger decided that he wanted to
adapt a hard-hitting novel by Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm, whose
antiheroic protagonist suffers from unchecked ambition and drug addiction. Although
Joseph Breen had by this time been replaced as head of the PCA by the more liberal
Geoffrey Shurlock, who understood the desire of Hollywood filmmakers to produce
edgier and more complex films, The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) seemed so far
beyond the Production Code pale that Shurlock advised Preminger not to go forward
with the project. Ignoring Shurlock’s warning, Preminger signed Frank Sinatra to play
the luckless protagonist Frankie Machine, and once again signed a distribution deal
with United Artists. The film went on to become a major box office hit, and Sinatra
earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for his performance.
In addition to the adult-themed movies that were made at this time, the industry
also began to make what came to be known as “teen films,” which pushed against the
boundaries of the Production Code. Marketed to a newly minted group of consumers,
teen films exposed the troubled—and troubling—lifestyles of America’s disaffected
adolescents and young adults, who, much to the surprise of their parents and the
nation’s leaders, did not feel part of the postwar “affluent society.” The first financially
successful teen film, The Wild One (1953), starred Marlon Brando as the leader of a
motorcycle gang that terrifies the hapless citizens of a town in rural America. Directed
by László Benedek, the picture was part narrative film, part documentary, as it was
loosely based on the experience of townspeople in Hollister, California. Although the
picture seemed frightening to average, upright Americans who were terrified that their
ordinary, peaceful lives could be disrupted in this way, it was, in the end, Production

xlv
Introduction

Code friendly, as the motorcycle toughs, who were seen as wholly different from
typical teenagers, ultimately get what they deserve.
The same cannot be said of Richard Brooks’s cautionary 1955 tale The Blackboard
Jungle, which was banned in certain American cities—in Memphis it was characterized
as antisocial—and pulled from the Venice Film Festival by the State Department,
which described it as anti-American. What was, perhaps, most unsettling about the
film was that it was set in an American high school, the kind of place, parents had
always hoped, that could provide a safe and secure refuge for their adolescent children
while they learned how to be good citizens. In the “blackboard jungle,” however, typi-
cal teens turn out to be juvenile delinquents who terrorize their teacher and each other.
The teacher, Mr. Dadier (played by Glenn Ford), even after he is accosted by some of
his students, takes the side of the kids, hoping to guide them, in the manner of Sidney
Poitier in To Sir with Love, along the right path. The task proves a difficult one, and it
takes the actions of a marginalized student (Jamie Farr), who runs the class bully (Vic
Morrow) through with a flagpole, to set things right. Even though an American flag
hangs from the flagpole—a suitable postwar image of American virtue—and the film
ends with the progressive message that the nation’s educational system can, indeed,
be there for its kids, the picture proved disturbing to many.
Also appearing in 1955, Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause proved even less
comforting than The Blackboard Jungle (see: Rebel Without a Cause). Starring James
Dean, the picture follows teens who, it seems, live their lives devoid of parental super-
vision. Driven by the extraordinarily powerful performance of Dean, it may be argued
that the picture is framed by its most recognizable set piece, the so-called chicken run
where young men race their cars toward the edge of an abyss daring each other not to
turn “chicken” and jump from their vehicle before it plunges over the precipice. When
the Dean character Jim asks his antagonist Buzz (Corey Allen) why they do it, Buzz
gives expression to the alienation that all the teens in the film seem to experience when
he quickly responds: “You gotta do something, don’t you?” The film, still extremely
popular today, was seen by many as a “wake-up call, a warning to parents, even wealthy
white parents living in posh suburbs, to start listening to their kids, to start taking care
of them” (Lewis, 2008).

A New Production Code and the Rise of Contemporary Auteurs

Convinced that American audiences wanted more mature films, and that the stu-
dios were going to make them regardless of PCA objections, Shurlock, with the sup-
port of Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) president Eric Johnson,
decided that the censorship code in Hollywood had to be changed. Realizing that the
1930s Production Code was prohibitive because it forced filmmakers to make motion
pictures that were effectively “one-size-fits-all” offerings, the MPAA sought to put in
place a code that would allow not only family-oriented films to be made, but also films
with mature themes, such as The Man with the Golden Arm and Rebel Without a Cause.
What can be considered the filmic test case came in 1966, when Warner Bros. decided

xlvi
 Introduction

to release Mike Nichols’s provocative adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of

Virginia Woolf? (see: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?).
Nichols was among the second generation of American directors that were consid-
ered auteur filmmakers—“authors” of their films (see: Auteur Theory). Imported to
America by film scholar and critic Andrew Sarris (see: Sarris, Andrew), auteur theory
had been labeled La politique des auteurs in the 1950s by French film critics André
Bazin, Erich Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and François Truffaut—the
last four also directors—in the avant garde film journal Cahiers du cinéma. It was
adopted in the United States during the early 1960s. Although Sarris certainly under-
stood that filmmaking was a collaborative process, he argued that directors—at least
certain directors—were the figures who provided what the Cahiers critics understood
as cinematic authorship to motion pictures. In his article entitled “Notes on the Auteur
Theory in 1962,” Sarris identified directors such as D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin,
John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles as auteurs. Griffith and Chaplin had
emerged during the silent era and had crossed over into the sound era. The latter three
directors were still making important and entertaining films during the 1950s and 60s,
when things were changing so radically in Hollywood, and all continued to work into
the 1970s and later—Ford’s genre-breaking westerns The Searchers and The Man Who
Shot Liberty Valance were released in 1956 and 1962, respectively (see: Searchers, The;
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The); Welles’s self-conscious noir thriller Touch of
Evil (see: Touch of Evil) in 1958; and Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Vertigo, and Psycho
in 1954, 1958, and 1960, respectively (see: Vertigo; Psycho).
Directors like Ford, Hitchcock, and Welles had a powerful effect on the next gener-
ation of American filmmakers, figures such as Nichols, Arthur Penn, Stanley Kubrick,
Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Robert Altman, and Woody
Allen. In regard to Nichols, by the time he made his film adaptation of Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf ?, the MPAA had chosen Jack Valenti as its next president, and it
would be Valenti who would have to deal with the question of whether or not this
explosive film would be released. Starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as
Martha and George, a bitter, spiteful husband and wife—Taylor and Burton were
real-life mates who shared their own tempestuous relationship—the film made Valenti
uncomfortable. Reluctant to censor the picture, however, Valenti compromised with
Warner Bros.—the word “screw” was removed from the dialogue, while “hump the
hostess” stayed in. Hired to rethink the Production Code such that some form of it
could be kept in place while still allowing for films such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf ? to be made, Valenti hit on an initial solution that moved things in the right
direction. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would be released with a PCA exemption if
Warner Bros. agreed to label it “For Mature Audiences Only,” leaving the decision to
exhibit it to the nation’s theater owners. Effectively creating a trial run for a multirating
coding system, Warner Bros., Nichols, and the rest of the industry waited anxiously to
see how the film would fare at the box office. They need not have worried, as Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? ended up grossing over $10 million by the end of 1966,
finishing third behind two other mature-themed pictures, the James Bond thriller
Thunderball and the historical epic Dr. Zhivago.

xlvii
Introduction

Although Valenti sought to calm fears that the PCA’s decision to give Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? an exemption was not the end of cinematic censorship altogether, for
all intents and purposes, at least as far as the old notion of the Production Code was
concerned, it was. In 1966 alone, six more films received the MPAA’s rating of For
Mature Audiences Only, with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? receiving its own special
designation: no person under 18 admitted unless accompanied by a parent. The flood-
gates had now been opened, and by 1967 the number of For Mature Audiences Only
pictures had increased to 67.
The possibility of making more mature films provided the opportunity for two of
America’s most important films to be made in 1967, Nichols’s follow-up to Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?, The Graduate, and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde. Both
films shocked and moved audiences, the first with its unflinching examination of
upper-middle-class banality, alienation, and sexuality, the second with its exploration
of human degradation, fragility, and violence (see: Graduate, The; Bonnie and
Clyde). Reacting to what by now was understood to be inevitable, Valenti issued a
press release in October 1968 in which he announced that a new rating system for
motion pictures had been put in place: G, suggested for “General Audiences”; M, sug-
gested for “Mature” audiences; R, “Restricted,” no one under 16 admitted unless
accompanied by a parent or adult guardian; X, no one under 16 admitted. Pictures
that received a G, M, or R rating would be given MPAA seals; those that received X
ratings would not. Valenti’s rating system was quickly adopted, and a Code and Rating
Administration (CARA) was established to determine which pictures would receive
which rating. At this point, the question of whether or not what had once been consid-
ered pictures in violation of the Production Code would be made had been resolved—
they would. The only question now was whether or not directors wanted to risk having
their pictures labeled with a more restrictive rating by choosing to include scenes that
were considered too provocative by CARA.
Realizing that provocative—even pornographic—pictures could still make money,
most directors pushed the limits of the rating system, some almost to the breaking
point. Non-mainstream, pornographic films such as Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat
(1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), and Jim and Artie Mitchell’s Behind the
Green Door (1972), although they were rated X and were released without the MPAA
seal, proved remarkably popular, out-earning all but a few of the highest-grossing
mainstream pictures—they also made household names of “actors” such as Linda
Lovelace and Harry Reems. Most directors—along with their studios—were unwilling
to risk an X rating, however, and thus, they reluctantly pulled scenes whose language,
or depictions of sexuality and/or violence, would push them beyond the R rating. John
Schlesinger’s 1969 release Midnight Cowboy was an exception, becoming the first and
only X-rated film to earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. Another
startling 1969 offering was the Dennis Hopper/Peter Fonda picture Easy Rider. Pro-
duced independently, and made for just $375,000, it grossed an amazing $19 million
in its initial 1969 release, proving that there was a tremendously lucrative youth market
just waiting to be tapped—it also made clear that an influential counterculture had
developed in America during the tumultuous 1960s.

xlviii
 Introduction

Second-generation auteurs continued to make significant films throughout the

1960s and ’70s. Penn, for instance, followed Bonnie and Clyde with his own genre-
breaking western, Little Big Man (1970)—an anti-Vietnam War exposé that made its
point by way of an exploration of the tragic implications of nineteenth-century coloni-
alism and the ideology of manifest destiny—while Nichols continued to build his rep-
utation after Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? and The Graduate with Catch-22 (1970)
and Carnal Knowledge (1971)—the latter an R-rated film that flirted with an X rating.
Excited by the success of Easy Rider, studio heads at Warner Bros. gave Francis Ford
Coppola, a little-known figure in Hollywood at the time, $600,000 to develop
youth-oriented projects. Coppola set himself up in San Francisco, gathered around
him a group of young filmmakers, and got to work. A year later, he pitched four ideas
to Warner Bros., none of which sounded to studio heads remotely like Easy Rider. The
studio rejected all four ideas—much to their regret, as it turned out, as the four pro-
posed projects were ultimately developed into George Lucas’s dystopian sci-fi offering
THX 1138 and his teen hit American Graffiti and Coppola’s own Apocalypse Now and
The Conversation.
Supporting himself by making technical films and television commercials, Coppola
got the break for which he was waiting when he was brought on to help write the
screenplay for the big budget war film Patton (1970). The co-written script that
Coppola produced won him his first Oscar (shared with Edmund North); it also duly
impressed studio heads at Paramount, who turned to Coppola to direct their own big-
budget film, The Godfather (see: Godfather Trilogy, The). Although it seems an
extraordinary gamble to have placed such an important project in the hands of a neo-
phyte director like Coppola, in a certain sense the studio had little choice, as it had
been turned down by an exhaustive list of Hollywood’s best directors—Richard
Brooks, Kazan, Penn, and Fred Zinnemann among them. As it turned out, though,
Paramount could not have made a better choice, as Coppola produced a grand, glossy,
sweeping epic about gangsters in America. Powerfully acted and exquisitely shot, The
Godfather won numerous awards and broke records for box-office grosses that had
stood for three decades—on a budget of only $6 million it took in $80 million in its
initial release and has probably earned over $250 million if re-releases are included.
A nation away from the California-based Coppola, another Italian American direc-
tor, Martin Scorsese, was making a different kind of gangster film. Unlike The
Godfather, which relates the story of mobsters who are almost transcendentally power-
ful, Scorsese’s Mean Streets—released the year after Coppola’s picture—follows the lives
of a group of neighborhood gangsters in New York City who often seem befuddled by
the demands of their criminal careers. Compared with The Godfather, which co-starred
a young Al Pacino, Mean Streets, which co-starred a young Robert De Niro, is a small,
spare picture. Interestingly, De Niro would go on to co-star in The Godfather, Part II
and to make a series of pictures with Scorsese, including Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging
Bull (1980) and Scorsese’s own glossy gangster films, Goodfellas (1990) and Casino
(1995).
Oddly enough, Stanley Kubrick, who is most often included in the list of second-
generation auteur directors, had made nine feature films by the time The Godfather

xlix
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 William E. Wall

GRAINER,
14 MORGAN STREET, SOMERVILLE, MASS.
Give three days notice of work if possible. Orders by mail promptly attended to

Somerville, September 18, 1890

Messrs Harrison Bro's & Co.

I desire to place myself on record as thoroughly favoring the colors
put up by you for Grainers use.
After eight years experience with your colors, I find them always
uniform in shade, thoroughly ground, and of great strength.
While in Philadelphia last month I visited the factory, and was
particularly impressed with the method employed to keep the color
uniform in tone and strength, by blending the different varieties
which occur in the crude material, and keeping up to the high
standard of purity of color adopted by you.

Yours Respectfully,

William E. Wall
 Painting and Decorating
Is a Monthly Magazine

Devoted to the interests of Grainers, Sign-, Fresco-, and Carriage-

Painters, and treating also of wall-paper and decoration. The
subscription price is $1.00 per annum, payable in advance; single
copies 10 cents. In each number will be found one or more
COLORED PLATES representing such subjects as graining panels,
signs, suggestions for interior decoration, color combinations for
exterior work, etc.
Practical articles of interest to painters by some of the best writers in
the country are a constant feature, and the minor departments are
replete with information written for the express purpose of not only
interesting the practical man and of teaching the beginner, but
proving of use and interest to all in the fraternity.

Sample Copies may be had Free of Charge on Application.

ADDRESS
HOUSE PAINTING & DECORATING PUBLISHING CO.,
1130 SOUTH 35th. STREET,
PHILADELPHIA, PA.
Transcriber's Note

Illustrations were moved to paragraph breaks.

Minor corrections were made in punctuation.

The following changes were made:

Page 20: Changed represently to representing.

Orig: for use in represently the minute clusters of knots.

Page 22: Changed overgainer to overgrainer.

Orig: fitch tool, and use the overgainer

Page 34: Changed stipping to stippling.

Orig: the stipping may be done in distemper on the ground-work

Index page iii: Changed Cyress wood to Cypress wood.

Index pages x and xiii: Changed Curley walnut to Curly walnut.

Index page xi: Changed Mapel to Maple.

Corrected numbers on List of Colored Illustrations:

Switched 3 and 4, 5 and 6, 40 and 41, 42 and 43. Also corrected these numbers in Index
to Colored Plates to reference the correct plates.

All other inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been retained from the original
publication.
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRACTICAL
GRAINING, WITH DESCRIPTION OF COLORS EMPLOYED AND
TOOLS USED ***

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