STACK #146 Dec 2016

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EXTRAS

the manufacturing and distribution processes which were innovated during the 1920s at the General Motors Automobile Corporation, and adopted the concept for their individual film companies. The result was a virtual factory system for manufacturing motion pictures based on rigid control of the labour force with long term contracts for actors, directors, writers, composers and lavish in-house production facilities and publicity departments. Actor Cary Grant perfectly captured, in Hollywood did not invent the movies but it honed and perfected the art of making them and the business of selling them to a global audience

The Golden Age of Hollywood: 1930-1955

Part 1

O ne afternoon in March 1954, after dubbing part of the soundtrack of his latest movie Betrayed , Clark Gable drove his custom made Jaguar car out of the gates of MGM for the last time. He would never return to the studio that had made him the most famous movie star in the world. During his 23-year reign as “The King of Hollywood”, Gable had made over 50 movies for Metro including the timeless classic Gone with the Wind  (1939). But the majority of his early 1950s films had been box office failures, resulting in MGM president Dore Schary deciding he could no longer afford Gable’s $520,000 salary, and as a consequence wanted to re-negotiate his contract. Gable instructed his agent to “see how high you can get those sons-of-bitches to go. When you get their best offer, tell them to take their money, their studio, their cameras and lighting equipment and shove it all up their ass!”  This acrimonious episode has been identified by many film historians as the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of Hollywood and its once highly innovative and hugely successful so called “studio system”. Hollywood did not invent the movies but it honed and perfected the art of making them and the business of selling them to a global audience of millions, making it at the time the

greatest medium of mass communication the world had ever seen. In the early 1920s Hollywood was awash with small, independent motion picture companies, but less than a decade later practically all of them had been bought out and absorbed by a few astute Jewish immigrant businessmen such as Adolph Zukor, William Fox, the brothers Warner and Marcus Loew. These so called “movie moguls” studied

Adolph Zukor, the founder of Paramount Pictures, on the cover of Time magazine 1929

The Warner Brothers: Sam, Harry, Jack and Albert

DECEMBER 2016

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