Take Pixar, for example, or the Marvel movies. Sometimes companies manage to recreate the cohesion of the studio system. In the year The Godfather came out, Paramount put out sixteen pictures. Robert Evans is there, but he’s no Thalberg, with central command over all the gears in the machine. Poor Al Ruddy has to solve each problem fresh.

Casting, finding the right people for technical roles, chain of command, getting a workflow going, dealing with the unions, the mob: all these are begun anew for each production.

There’s a studio, but when they start a movie, they start from scratch. The show was shot on the Paramount lot, doubling as the Paramount lot from 1971. In The Offer, Paramount +’s show about the making of Paramount Pictures’ The Godfather, you can see dramatized some of the problems from the end of the true studio system days. Schatz gives a good short summary of his work and the rise and fall of the studio system in this 1989 Fresh Air interview. Should we look at the old studio system trying to find cases where a rare director snuck art past the suits? Or should we look at it and see a miraculous time, when thousands of artists and craftspeople came together for a brief period to create the collective dreams of a nation? But the closer we look at Hollywood’s relations of power and hierarchy of authority during the studio era, at its division of labor and assembly-line production process, the less sense it makes to assess filmmaking or film style in terms of the individual director – or any individual, for that matter. Thomas Schatz’s book The Genius of the System is of daunting thickness, but it’s very readable, and I like the thesis: despite the factory nature and control by the money guys rather than the directors, real style and art was achieved.Īuterism itself would not be worth bothering with if it hadn’t been so influential, effectively stalling film history and criticism in a prolonged stage of adolescent romanticism. This was the factory-like story production processes Faulkner was working under. In 1936, for example, Paramount released 69 movies, RKO had 39, Fox had 50 movies, MGM put out 48 movies, Warner 56, Universal 34. The sheer number of movies Hollywood cranked out during the peak of the studio system is wild.

Genius of the system Posted: J| Author: helytimes | Filed under: America Since 1945, Hollywood, the California Condition | Leave a comment

The genius of the system thomas schatz