Hollywood The Movie

Edward Jay Epstein wrote this and I found it very interesting. Take a read!
Best of luck everyone, Jean-Luc Martin

Hollywood has spent the better part of the last century making movies out of the great inspirational sagas of human history. Ironically, the one epic it has yet to make is one about a uniquely American achievement that has and continues to mesmerize the world: The Rise Of Hollywood. Here is a true Sturm and Drang melodrama chock full of fascinating characters from the edges who overcome seemingly impossible obstacles to build a new industry that today defines the world of mass entertainment. The scenario would follow the classic Hollywood three-act formula.

ACT ONE

Fade in on the men who founded the studios of Hollywood. These are self-made and self-educated Jewish immigrants from impoverished backgrounds, who, prior to becoming movie exhibitors, had been ragpickers, furriers, errand boys, butchers and junk peddlers. They are true outliers: Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Jack Warner, Adolph Zucker, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, and Harry Cohn, who first scraped together money to build arcades and nickelodeons to show movies, then resourcefully expanded them into theater chains, distribution networks, and, finally, studios. In the second decade of the 1900s, they moved their studios to a near desert in California - the tiny incorporated village of Hollywood - a place they could control and build. By the mid-1920s, 57 million people – over half the population - was going to their movies every week.
Yet, the saga is just beginning. In 1927, sound, now married to the picture, is introduced to the world with Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer. Even though huge capital is required to add this new dimension to movies, Hollywood - in one of the great technological feats of modern history - converts most of the 21,000 theaters in America to sound, rebuilds its studios to put sound on film, and casts new stars for talkie movies. Despite even the Great Depression of the 1930s, the weekly audience grows to 75 million who go to the movies to see not just feature movies, but newsreels, comedy shorts, action-packed serials and cartoons. A new generation of talent, including such brilliant innovators as Walt Disney, expands its realm to children‟s entertainment, and color adds to its ability to entertain the public even in the bleak years of the Depression and the grim war years of the early 1940s.

ACT TWO

The second world war has ended; the troops have come home. By 1948, the studio system is at its zenith. Over 90 million Americans go to the movies on a weekly basis, roughly two-thirds of the population. The studios produce over 500 feature movies a year, have all the major stars under iron-clad contract, and employ over 320,000 Americans. In little more than a generation, its founders have literally gone from rags to riches.
But there was an ever-darkening cloud forming: television. Even with its fuzzy black and white pictures, it offers free stay-at-home entertainment, which gradually eats away at its habitual audience. Even with new innovations, such as drive-ins, Cinemascope, 3-D, and surround sound, the entertainment landscape had irreversibly changed. After color TV is introduced in the 1950s, the weekly movie audience drops by 1958 to 40 million. Prophets of doom predict the end of Hollywood is near.

ACT THREE

But the prophets have underestimated the resourcefulness of Hollywood. Its genius had always been adaptation to new circumstances. It is, after all, in the business of entertainment– a medium which thrives on transformation. So Hollywood re-invents itself. The old studio system, with its contractual control of theaters and stars, is dead; long live the new studio system. Unable to depend on a habitual weekly audience, it turns television to its advantage, using national TV advertising to create tailor-made audiences for each and every movie. And, while remaining an
American business, it greatly expanded its reach overseas, creating a second stream of revenue from theaters and television abroad.

The audience of the new Hollywood is not limited to theaters. It finds new sources of revenue in licensing its movies to television, originating prime-time series, renting its movies on home video, putting it on planes via in-flight entertainment and in hotels, turning its characters into toys, and then, with the digital revolution, putting its movies on DVD, Blu-ray, video-on-demand, cell phones, and the Internet. In doing so, it not only kept alive the movie business, but made it central to the world‟s entertainment economy. With states and municipalities competing with one another for film production, it also continued to create jobs across the nation, supporting employment for 2.5 million people.
But beyond the movies, the money, and the job creation, Hollywood produces another form of wealth: the pictures in our head by which both we, and the world at large, define the phenomenon of American culture. What a movie that achievement would make.

............FADE OUT