Movies

Two books about Hollywood’s Golden Age, two very different approaches.

The Genius of the System
Thomas Schatz
544 pages including index and notes
published in 1988

In the last two to three years, perhaps because I moved house to somewhere I could fit a proper sofa in the living room, one I could sit or lay comfortably on unlike the crappy IKEA two seater in my okld flat, I’ve found myself watching more movies. Furthermore, especially in the last year, I’ve been watching a lot more old Hollywood movies. I’d never been that interested in socalled Golden Age Hollywood before: these were movies made decades before I was born, how interesting could they be? But then I started watching the Universal Monsters movies (Dracula, FrankensteinThe Invisible Man etc) and from there on I branched out to other 1930s and 1940s horror and even other genres. Which of course meant I wanted to read up on thema nd hit my local library, where I found these two books.

The first, by Thomas Schatz, sets out its scope in the subtitle: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. This is a look at the era, roughly from the end of the silent movie in the late twenties to the advent of television in the fifties in which it was the studio, not the director or actor, which called the shots on how a movie was made. Schatz therefore put as his focal point the studio and its “non-creative” personnel, the production staff and producers, especially the latter.

The Genius of the System tells its history by focuses on a handful of players, rather than the entirety of Hollywood, which would’ve been neigh-impossible. As his examples of the Hollywood system Schatz chooses to follow three studios and one particular producer, in rough chronological order. The studios are Universal, the biggest of the “Minors”, MGM, the most prestigious and successful of the “Majors” and Warner Bros, the most interesting and focused. The producer is David Selznick, who was a star producer at MGM, Paramount and RKO before starting his own production company. Through these Schatz examines how Hollywood made movies. As he says in his introduction:

We will examine how these companies “worked” in both a literal and a figurative sense, tracing not only their production operations but also their marketing and sales strategies, their corporate structures and management systems. Our ultimate objective is the filmmaking process itself, which will be pursued primarily through dozens of case studies of the making of individual movies. These case studies as well as our view of the larger industrial context will be based on actual industry documents—interoffice memos, corporate correspondence, and other general records, along with the budgets, schedules, story conference notes, daily production reports, censorship files, and other materials generated for each production. Because of the complexity, cost, and fragmentation of studio filmmaking, Hollywood left its legacy not only on celluloid but also on paper, and that documentation provides a comprehensive and reliable account of the studio system at work.

This is then a book about how the sausage was made and the choice of whose sausage making was examined was in large part also determined by whose primary sources were available (as made very clear in his notes on sources). Thanks to this there’s a lot of detail Schatz has available for how certain movies were made. At times this makes for exhausting reading, to be honest. There’s only so much studio intrigue you can take in one go…

You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet
Andrew Sarris
573 pages including index and notes
published in 1998

Andrew Sarris’ look at the same era takes a very different approach as you might’ve guessed from its subtitle: The American Talking Film: History & Memory, 1927-1949. Here the focus is strictly on the directors, actors and the movies themselves, with neither studio nor producer getting much of a look in. For Sarris, it’s all about the art, not the work put in to create the art. Written a decade after Schatz’s book, this one is far more subjective in its treatment. This can be explained by the different backgrounds of the two writers. Thomas Schatz being academic whereas Sarris was a well known film critic, not shy of putting his own personal taste into his history. In this he is self aware enough to know when his own taste is out of step with critical opinion, fortunately.

Rather than Schatz’ chronological approach, Sarris takes a thematic one. Starting with a short overview of the studio system and the most important individual studios he then looks at genres before a deep dive into individual directors. This forms the bulk of the book and is the most accomplished part of it. The next, similar section examining the leading actors of the age is less comprehensive and had me struggling to finish it. The final part, on Sarris’ guilty pleasures is skippable.

There are some notable omissions in Sarris’ listing of important directors. Michael Curtiz (Casablanca, Angels with Dirty Faces) for example is nowhere to be seen. Fritz Lang’s omission is perhaps easier to understand, having made his best and most famous movies in Germany before he came to Hollywood and never quite reaching the same heights in America. Of the directors he does name, there are some less deserving (William Wyler, Billy Wilder, who made his best movies after 1949) than others, but most of the Big Names are present, starting with D. W. Griffith. You could do worse than take this list as a starting point for plunging into thirties and forties Hollywood.

What I like about Sarris’ approach is that he’s not shy in acknowledging both the changes in critical judgment as well as his own changing tastes in movies. Sarris wrote this book in the late nineties, after having been a film critic since the late fifties. It’s unsurprising that his tastes have shifted, but I appreciate his honesty about it. Nothing as obnoxious as a critic pretending to have always been right and always been in tune with the prevailing fashions even when they clearly couldn’t have been.

I’ve been lucky with finding these two books from my local library, whose film section is not the largest. Both in their own way offer an illuminating look at Golden Age Hollywood, both offer a good starting point for further explorations. The juxtaposition of Sarris’ auteurist views against Schatz’ defence of the studio system as worthy of respect makes these two books excellent for a paired read and it’s only by accident that I stumbled into it!