Industry Research – Hollywood

Hollywood

The cinema of the United States, often generally referred to as Hollywood, has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main periods: the Silent Film era, classical Hollywood cinema,New Hollywood, and the contemporary period. While the French Lumière Brothers are generally credited with the birth of modern cinema, it is indisputably American cinema that soon became the most dominant force in an emerging industry. Since the 1920s, the American film industry has grossed more money every year than that of any other country.

In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge demonstrated the power of photography to capture motion. In 1894, the world’s first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City, using Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope. The United States was in the forefront of sound film development in the following decades. Since the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, Los Angeles, California. Picture City, FL was also a planned site for a movie picture production center in the 1920s, but due to the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane, the idea collapsed and Picture City returned to its original name of Hobe Sound. Director D. W. Griffith was central to the development of film grammar.  Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) is frequently cited in critics’ polls as the greatest film of all time.

American screen actors like John Wayne, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe have become iconic figures, while producer/entrepreneurWalt Disney was a leader in both animated film and movie merchandising. The major film studios of Hollywood are the primary source of the most commercially successful movies in the world, such as Gone with the Wind (1939), Star Wars (1977), Titanic (1997), and Avatar (2009). Today, American film studios collectively generate several hundred movies every year, making the United States the third most prolific producer of films in the world, after Indian cinema and Nigerian cinema.

Highlighted History Of Hollywood (1911 – 1950’s)

 The first movie studio in the Hollywood area, Nestor Studios, was founded in 1911 by Al Christie for David Horsley in an old building on the northwest corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street. In the same year, another fifteen Independents settled in Hollywood. Hollywood came to be so strongly associated with the film industry that the word “Hollywood” came to be used colloquially to refer to the entire industry.

In 1913 Cecil B. DeMille, in association with Jesse Lasky, leased a barn with studio facilities on the southeast corner of Selma and Vine Streets from the Burns and Revier Studio and Laboratory, which had been established there. DeMille then began production of The Squaw Man (1914). It became known as the Lasky-DeMille Barn and is currently the location of the Hollywood Heritage Museum.

The Charlie Chaplin Studios, on the northeast corner of La Brea and De Longpre Avenues just south of Sunset Boulevard, was built in 1917. It has had many owners after 1953, including Kling Studios, which housed production for the Superman TV series with George Reeves; Red Skelton, who used the sound stages for his CBS TV variety show; and CBS, who filmed the TV series Perry Mason with Raymond Burr there. It has also been owned by Herb Alpert’s A&M Records and Tijuana Brass Enterprises. It is currently The Jim Henson Company, home of the Muppets. In 1969 The Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Board named the studio a historical cultural monument.

The famous Hollywood Sign originally read “Hollywoodland.” It was erected in 1923 to advertise a new housing development in the hills above Hollywood. For several years the sign was left to deteriorate. In 1949 the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce stepped in and offered to remove the last four letters and repair the rest.

The sign, located at the top of Mount Lee, is now a registered trademark and cannot be used without the permission of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which also manages the venerable Walk of Fame.
The first Academy Awards presentation ceremony took place on May 16, 1929, during a banquet held in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. Tickets were USD $10.00 and there were 250 people in attendance.

From about 1930 five major Hollywood movie studios from all over the Los Angeles area, Paramount, RKO, 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Warner Bros., owned large, grand theaters throughout the country for the exhibition of their movies. The period between the years 1927 (the effective end of the silent era) to 1948 is considered the age of the “Hollywood studio system”, or, in a more common term, the Golden Age of Hollywood. In a landmark 1948 court decision, the Supreme Court ruled that movie studios could not own theaters and play only the movies of their studio and movie stars, thus an era of Hollywood history had unofficially ended. By the mid-1950s, when television proved a profitable enterprise that was here to stay, movie studios started also being used for the production of programming in that medium, which is still the norm today.

New Hollywood And Post-Classical Cinema (1950s-1980s)

Post-classical cinema is the term used to describe the changing methods of storytelling in the New Hollywood. It has been argued that new approaches to drama and characterization played upon audience expectations acquired in the classical period: chronology may be scrambled, storylines may feature “twist endings”, and lines between the antagonist and protagonist may be blurred. The roots of post-classical storytelling may be seen in film noir, in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and in Hitchcock’s storyline-shattering Psycho.

The New Hollywood describes the emergence of a new generation of film school-trained directors who had absorbed the techniques developed in Europe in the 1960s; The 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde marked the beginning of American cinema rebounding as well, as a new generation of films would afterwards gain success at the box offices as well. Filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, and William Friedkin came to produce fare that paid homage to the history of film, and developed upon existing genres and techniques.

In the early 1970s, the films of New Hollywood filmmakers were often both critically acclaimed and commercially successful. While the early New Hollywood films like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider had been relatively low-budget affairs with amoral heroes and increased sexuality and violence, the enormous success enjoyed by Friedkin with The Exorcist, Spielberg with Jaws, Coppola with The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, Scorsese with Taxi Driver and Lucas with American Graffiti, and Star Wars, respectively helped to give rise to the modern “blockbuster”, and induced studios to focus ever more heavily on trying to produce enormous hits.

The increasing indulgence of these young directors did not help. Often, they’d go overschedule, and overbudget, thus bankrupting themselves or the studio. The three most famous examples of this are Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and One From The Heart and particularly Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, which single-handedly bankrupted United Artists. However, Apocalypse Now eventually made its money back and gained widespread recognition as a masterpiece, winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

Rise Of The Home Video Market (1980s-1990s)

The 1980s and 1990s saw another significant development. The full acceptance of home video by studios opened a vast new business to exploit. Films such as Batman,Showgirls, The Secret of NIMH and The Shawshank Redemption, which may have performed poorly in their theatrical run, were now able to find success in the video market. It also saw the first generation of film makers with access to video tapes emerge. Directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson had been able to view thousands of films and produced films with vast numbers of references and connections to previous works.

This, along with the explosion of independent film and ever-decreasing costs for filmmaking, changed the landscape of American movie-making once again, and led a renaissance of filmmaking among Hollywood’s lower and middle-classes—those without access to studio financial resources. With the rise of the DVD in the 21st century, DVDs have quickly become even more profitable to studios and have led to an explosion of packaging extra scenes, extended versions, and commentary tracks with the films.

Modern Cinema (1990s – Currently 2014)

The drive to produce a spectacle on the movie screen has largely shaped American cinema ever since. Spectacular epics which took advantage of new widescreen processes had been increasingly popular from the 1950s onwards. Since then, American films have become increasingly divided into two categories: Blockbusters and independent films.

Studios have focused on relying on a handful of extremely expensive releases every year in order to remain profitable. Such blockbusters emphasize spectacle, star power, and high production value, all of which entail an enormous budget. Blockbusters typically rely upon star power and massive advertising to attract a huge audience. A successful blockbuster will attract an audience large enough to offset production costs and reap considerable profits.

Such productions carry a substantial risk of failure, and most studios release blockbusters that both over- and underperform in a year. Classic blockbusters from this period include E.T., Back to the Future, Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, Wall Street, Rain Man, Titanic, The Matrix, The Green Mile, The Sixth Sense, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Gangs of New York and The Bourne Identity.

Studios supplement these movies with independent productions, made with small budgets and often independently of the studio corporation. Movies made in this manner typically emphasize high professional quality in terms of acting, directing, screenwriting, and other elements associated with production, and also upon creativity and innovation. These movies usually rely upon critical praise or niche marketing to garner an audience. Because of an independent film’s low budget, a successful independent film can have a high profit-to-cost ratio, while a failure will incur minimal losses, allowing for studios to sponsor dozens of such productions in addition to their high-stakes releases.

American independent cinema was revitalized in the late 1980s and early 1990s when another new generation of moviemakers, including Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Kevin Smith, and Quentin Tarantino made movies like, respectively: Do the Right Thing; Sex, Lies, and Videotape; Clerks; and Reservoir Dogs. In terms of directing, screenwriting, editing, and other elements, these movies were innovative and often irreverent, playing with and contradicting the conventions of Hollywood movies. Furthermore, their considerable financial successes and crossover into popular culture reestablished the commercial viability of independent film. Since then, the independent film industry has become more clearly defined and more influential in American cinema. Many of the major studios have capitalised on this by developing subsidiaries to produce similar films; for example Fox Searchlight Pictures.

To a lesser degree in the early 21st century, film types that were previously considered to have only a minor presence in the mainstream movie market began to arise as more potent American box office draws. These include foreign-language films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero and documentary films such as Super Size Me, March of the Penguins, and Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11.

According to Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, 2013 has seen “the industry at an extraordinary time of upheaval, where even proven talents find it difficult to get movies into theaters”; Spielberg predicts “there’s eventually going to be an implosion — or a big meltdown. There’s going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen megabudget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that’s going to change the paradigm”, with Lucas suggesting movie theaters following “a Broadway play model, whereby fewer movies are released, they stay in theaters for a year and ticket prices are much higher.”

Media Institutions:

A media institution is an established, and often profit based organization, that deals in the creation and distribution of films.
Hollywood has a no. of film institutions/companies which produce tons of different films per year.
The American film industry is now dominated by six major film companies known as Big Six – Warner Bros Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Columbia Pictures, Walt Disney and Universal Studios.

Warner Bros Pictures:

Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. is an American producer of film and television entertainment. It is one of the major film studios; it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank, California and New York City. Warner Bros. has several subsidiary companies, including Warner Bros. Studios, Warner Bros. Pictures, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, Warner Bros. Television, Warner Bros. Animation, Warner Home Video, New Line Cinema, TheWB.com, and DC Comics. Warner owns half of The CW Television Network. Warner Bros top grossing films are The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 2, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s stone, and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

 

20th Century Fox:

20th Century Fox is one of the six major American film studios as of 2010. It is located in the Century City area of Los Angeles, just west of Beverly Hills, the studio is a subsidiary of News Corporation, the media conglomerate owned by Rupert Murdoch. The company was founded on May 31, 1935. It’s most popular film franchises include Avatar, The Simpsons, Star Wars, Ice Age, Garfield, Alvin and the Chipmunks, X-Men, Die Hard, Alien, Speed, Revenge of the Nerds, Planet of the Apes, Home Alone,Dr. Dolittle & Night at the Museum.

Paramount Pictures:

Paramount Pictures is an American film production and distribution company, located in Hollywood. F\It was founded in 1912 and currently owned by media conglomerate Viacom, it is America’s oldest existing film studio; it is also the last major film studio still headquartered in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles. Paramount is consistently ranked as one of the top-grossing movie studios. Top grossing Paramount film includes Titanic, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Transformers: Dark of the moon, Forrest Gump, Shrek the Third.

 

Columbia Pictures:

Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. (CPII), founded in 1919, is an American film production and distribution company. Columbia Pictures now forms part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sony. It is one of the leading film companies in the world, a member of the so-called Big Six. It was one of the so-called Little Three among the eight major film studios of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Best 5 films made by Columbia Pictures are City Stickers, Taxi Drivers, Ghostbusters, The Amazing Spider-Man, and Super bad.

 

Walt Disney:

The Walt Disney Company was founded on October 16, 1923 by brothers Walt and Roy Disney as an animation studio, it has become one of the biggest Hollywood studios, and owner and licensor of 11 theme parks, and several television networks including ABC and ESPN. Disney’s corporate headquarters and primary production facilities are located at The Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California. The company has been a component of Dow Jones Industrial Average since May 6, 1991; Mickey Mouse serves as the official Mascot of The Walt Disney Company. Their highest grossing films are Toy Story, the Lion King, The Avengers, Wall-E and Finding Nemo.

 

Universal Pictures:

Universal Pictures (sometimes called Universal City Studios or Universal Studios for short), a subsidiary of NBC Universal, is one of the six major movie studios. It was founded in 1912 by Carl Laemmle; it is one of the oldest American movie studios still in continuous production. On May 11, 2004, the controlling stake in the company was sold by Vivendi Universal to General Electric, parent of NBC. The resulting media super-conglomerate was renamed NBC Universal, while Universal Studios Inc. remained the name of the production subsidiary. Jurassic Park, Despicable Me, E.T .the Extra – Terrestrial, Fast and Furious 6, Fast Five are Universals’ highest grossing films.

Problems Faced By The Film Industry

Piracy is the single most damaging problem for the industry today but film piracy is no longer a hot topic; it has been around long enough to cool down a little. That has not, however, prevented it from continuing to cause a lot of problems for the film industry. Dodgy DVDs and increasingly, illegal downloads, cost the film industry massive amounts of revenue every year. A report in 2005 for the Motion Picture Association (all the big studios) estimated that the studios lost $6.1 billion a year and that the industry as a whole (theatres, cable tv etc included) lost $18.2 billion. At the time it was estimated that of that $18.2 billion, $7.1 was due to internet piracy. There are few people, I feel, who would disagree with the suggestion that that figure has risen. This loss of revenue will obviously cause serious financial problems for the studios and is certainly contributing to their current downfall.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_the_United_States

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_industry

http://www.slideshare.net/jphibbert1979/american-film-industry

http://www.slideshare.net/sophiesparks/film-production-institutions

http://www.slideshare.net/irwanarfandi/the-walt-disney-company