Hollywood in Transition: 1946-65

In 1946 the American film business grossed $1.7 billion domestically, the peak box-office year in the 50-
year history of the American film industry. Twelve years later, in 1958, domestic box-office receipts fell
below a billion dollars; by 1962 domestic receipts had fallen to $900 million, slightly more than half the
1946 gross. And inflated ticket prices hid an even more devastating statistic: By 1953, weekly
attendance at film theatres had fallen to about 25 percent of the 1948 figure. While box-office income
steadily fell, production costs—unionized labor, new equipment, costly materials—steadily rose along
with the nation's soaring, inflated economy. The two vectors of rising costs and falling revenues seemed
to point directly toward the cemetery for both Hollywood and the commercial American film.

Yet in 1968, American box offices collected $1.3 billion (domestic box-office receipts having risen every
year since 1963). In 1974, American theatres grossed almost $2 billion, and in 1983, over $3 billion. In
1989, domestic box-office grosses exceeded $5 billion for the first time. In 1997, they reached a new
high of $6.36 billion, representing 1.31 billion tickets to movies that each cost, on the average, $53
million to produce and $22 million to distribute. (The 1997 average was high because that was the year
of James Cameron's Titanic, which at $200 million cost more to produce than any picture yet made; a
more realistic average, however, still topped $50 million. In 1960, Psycho was produced for under $1
million, and only the makers of Spartacus could figure out how to spend more than $11 million.) Even if
films are still attended by a much smaller percentage of Americans than went to the movies in 1946, the
figures indicate that the American film industry emerged from a difficult transitional period and
solidified itself commercially by redefining its product and its audience. Between 1948 and 1963 lay 15
years of groping.

Enemies Within: Freedom of Association and Free Entertainment

Even before World War II, the two forces that would crush the old Hollywood had begun their assault.
First, U.S. courts had begun to rule that the film industry's methods of distributing motion pictures
represented an illegal restraint of open trade. Block booking was unfair to the individual competitive
exhibitors, requiring them to book many pictures they did not want in order to get the few they did.
Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, the general tendency of American judicial and legislative
pressure was to reduce the number of films the independent exhibitor could be forced to buy as a block.
The studio-owned chains of theatres gave even greater monopolistic control of the market to the
"Majors," the five biggest Hollywood production companies—MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., 20th
Century-Fox, and RKO—who could use their commercial and artistic power to control the industry's
profits and practices. The industry knew that the day would come when the line that tied theatre to
studio would have to be cut. The war postponed that day. Second, by the mid-1930s a new electronic
toy that combined picture and sound—television had been demonstrated by its scientist creators. At
first Hollywood laughed at the visually inferior upstart whose programs—like those of its parent, radio—
were both live and free; by the late 1940s, Hollywood had begim to fight. In 1949, there were only a
million television receivers in America. By 1952, there were 10 million; by the end of the decade, 50
million, and Hollywood had surrendered.
The world war helped postpone the domestic battle because fighting America needed movies to take its
mind off the war. Both soldiers overseas and their families at home needed to escape to the movies.
America also needed films for education: to train the soldiers to do then jobs, to teach them "why we
fight," to give both information and encouragement to the folks at home who wondered how the fight
was going and whether the fight was worth it. Hollywood sent many of its best directors—Frank Capra,
William Wyler, George Stevens, Fred Zinnemann, John Huston, John Ford, Garson Kanih—to make
documentaries for the government and the armed forces. Hollywood also sent 16mm prints of its
newest releases for distribution—without charge—to the fighting men at thousands of "Beachhead
Bijoux."

While Hollywood did its part, its profits conveniently rose. The government added special war taxes to
theatre tickets and sold bonds in the lobby; Americans who went to the movies not only enjoyed
themselves but patriotically contributed to the war effort. Many Hollywood writers, directors, and
producers took new pride in the educational and documentary projects. Frank Capra s Why We Fight
series (1942-45), Ford's The Battle of Midway (1942), Ford and Toland's December 7th (1943), Wyler's
The Memphis Belle (1944), Huston's The Battle of San Pietro (1945) and Let There Be Light (1946,
released 1981), and Disney's Victory Through Air Power (1943) were among the most powerful wartime
documentaries.

Even fictional feature films of wartime battles borrowed the visual styles of documentary authenticity:
Delmer Daves 's Destination Tokyo (1943), Howard Hawks's Air Force (1943), Lewis Milestone's A Walk
in the Sun (1945), William Wellman's The Story of G.I. Joe (1945). It was almost obligatory in these war
films that an American fighting platoon was composed of one Italian from Hackensack, one WASP
mainliner from Philadelphia, one Jew from Brooklyn, one farm boy from Kansas, one Irish Catholic from
Boston, one Pole from Chicago—a mythical cross-section of America, pulling together to win the "big
one." Not until Wellman's Battleground and Mark Robson's Home of the Brave (both 1949) did a black
soldier join that cross-section.

The government's Office of War Information established a Bureau of Motion Picture Affairs, while
Hollywood responded with its War Activities Committee. After the war, the relationship between the
industry and the government would not be so cozy.

The Supreme Court's 1948 decision in U.S. v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. was the ultimate in a lengthy
series of court rulings that the studios must sell ("divest" themselves of) their theatres. The guaranteed
outlet for the studio's product — good, bad, or mediocre—was closed. Each film would have to be good
enough to sell itself. Meanwhile, more and more Americans bought television sets. Special events like
the 1948 Rose Bowl game and parade and the 1948 political conventions, or regular ones, like Milton
Berle, "Uncle Miltie," on the Texaco Star Theater every Tuesday night at eight, kept Americans looking at
the box in their living rooms or, more likely at first, in the living rooms of their neighbors. The movies
declared war on the box. Until 1956 (1954 for RKO), no Hollywood film could be shown on television; no
working film star could appear on a television program. So Americans stayed home to watch British and
public-domain movies, their favorite radio stars made visible, and the new stars that television itself
developed.
The Hollywood Ten

These specific legal and commercial woes were accompanied by a general shift of American mood in the
years following the war that also contributed to the ills of a troubled industry. The Cold War years of
suspicion—dislike of foreign entanglements in general and the increasing fear of the "Red Menace" in
particular—also produced a distrust of certain institutions within the United States. Because the film
industry was so active in the war effort against the Nazis, because so many Hollywood producers and
screenwriters were Jewish, because so many Jewish intellectuals seemed sympathetic to liberal political
positions, and because the most extreme right-wing American opinion saw the entire war as a sacrifice
of American lives to save the Jews in Europe and help the Soviets defend the Eastern front, it was not
surprising that these rivers of reaction coalesced into an attack on the motion picture industry as a
whole. Whereas for four decades American suspicion had concentrated on Hollywood's sexual and
moral excesses, in the decade following the war distrust shifted to Hollywood's political and social
positions: to the subversive, pro-Communist propaganda allegedly woven—mainly by the writers—into
Hollywood's entertainment films.

The first set of hearings of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (or HUAC) in the fall of 1947,
investigating Communist infiltration of the motion-picture industry, produced the highly publicized
national scandal of the "Hollywood Ten." Asked "Are you now or have you ever been" a Communist, the
Ten—screenwriters Alvah Bessie, Lester Cole, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz,
Samuel Ornitz, and Dalton Trumbo; director Edward Dmytryk; writer-producer Adrian Scott; and director
producer Herbert J. Biberman—accused the Committee of violating the Bill of Rights by its existence.
When the Ten were cited for contempt of Congress, the motion picture-industry reacted fearfully by
instituting a blacklist—no known or suspected Communist or Communist sympathizer would be
permitted to work in any capacity on a Hollywood film. Convicted, their appeals denied, the Ten began
to serve one-year sentences in 1950. (When he got out, director Dmytryk named names and went back
to work.)

The second set of congressional hearings (1951-52) gave witnesses two choices. If they admitted a
previous membership in the Communist Party, they were obligated to name everyone else with whom
they had been associated at that time or suffer a contempt of Congress sentence as had the Hollywood
Ten. The other choice was to avoid answering any questions whatever on the basis of the Constitution's
Fifth Amendment guarantee against self-incrimination. Although "taking the Fifth" kept the witness out
of prison (while invoking the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, of the press, of
religion, and of association, did not), it also kept the witness out of work—thanks to the industry's
blacklist.

A number of the blacklisted writers found work under pseudonyms. Many left Hollywood, and some left
the country. (While living in Mexico, Hugo Butler wrote for Bunuel.) In 1953, an independent film called
Salt of the Earth was shot in New Mexico by three blacklistees, writer Michael Wilson, director Herbert
Biberman, and producer Paul Jarrico. Wilson's script, the true story of a mining strike that lasted more
than a year, was critiqued by and rewritten to the satisfaction of the hundreds of people who had
participated in the strike, many of whom played themselves in the movie. The primarily Mexican
American cast was led by professional Rosaura Revneltas (who was deported to Mexico during the
shooting and effectively blacklisted thereafter) and nonprofessional Juan Chacon; they play a couple
who discover the dignity of resisting economic and racist oppression as equals. Salt of the Earth
rigorously and dramatically analyzes a problem common to many political movements: that as the boss
or tyrant treats the worker, so the male revolutionary often treats the female revolutionary. In this film
the miners learn to stop treating their wives as underlings, and the newly unified community wins its
battles. Completed despite concerted attacks, Salt of the Earth had practically no distribution in
America, though it won awards and acclaim in both Western and Eastern Europe as well as the People's
Republic of China. It was to become a cult film on American campuses during the 1960s and 1970s, and
is widely regarded now as a classic.

The result of the congressional hearings—and the controversial blacklist, the damaging publicity in the
press, the threats of boycott against Hollywood films by the American Legion, the lists of suspected
Communists or Communist sympathizers in publications such as Red Channels—was an even greater
weakening of the industry's crumbling commercial and social strength.

The biggest, richest studios were hit the hardest. Two former assets suddenly became liabilities:
property and people. In 1949, MGM declared wage cutbacks and immense layoffs. The giant studio's
rows of sound stages and acres of outdoor sets became increasingly empty; the huge film factories now
owned vast expanses of expensive and barren land. Even more costly than land were the contracts with
people—technicians, featured players, and stars—that required the studio to pay their salaries although
it had no pictures for them to make. MGM allowed the contracts of its greatest stars, formerly the
studio's richest commercial resource, to lapse. Every big studio extricated itself from the tangle of its
obligations with financially disastrous slowness. (This led ultimately to the present situation, in which
filmmakers are hired on a job-by-job basis.) A minor studio like Columbia, with very few stars under
contract, a small lot, and no theatres, stayed healthier in those years of thinner profits. Columbia also
showed foresight by being the first film studio to establish a television-producing division, Screen Gems,
in 1951, when television was still an infant. The big movie houses suffered with the big studios. On a
week night, only a few hundred patrons scattered themselves about a house built for thousands. One by
one the ornate palaces came down, to be replaced by supermarkets, shopping centers, and apartment
buildings.

3-D, CinemaScope, Color, and the Tube Television was not the sole cause of the film industry's
commercial decay. The American demographic shift from the cities to the suburbs began just after the
war. Movie theatres had always been concentrated in the city centers, and the multiplex cinemas of
suburban shopping malls were two decades away. There were also many new ways to spend leisure
time and the leisure dollar. Professional and collegiate sports events, stimulated by television exposure,
drew increasingly larger audiences. Golf, tennis, and skiing attracted more middle-class enthusiasts than
ever before—not only taking them away from movie theatres, but taking plenty of their dollars for
clothing, equipment, and travel. The DC-6 and DC-7 airliners and, by 1960, DC-8 and 707 jets made long-
distance travel more accessible and affordable. The 33V3 RPM, long-playing microgroove phonograph
record appeared in 1949, as did the 45 RPM single; first high-fidelity ("hi-fi"), then stereo music systems
became household necessities within the next decade. A booming music industry ate into former movie
dollars as voraciously as television did.

By 1952, Hollywood knew that television could not be throttled. If films and TV were to coexist, the
movies would have to give the public what TV did not. The most obvious difference between movies and
TV was the size of the screen. Television's visual thinking was necessarily in inches, whereas movies
could compose in feet and yards. Films also enjoyed the advantage of over 50 years of technological
research in color, properties of lenses, and special laboratory effects; the infant television art had not
yet developed color or videotape. Hollywood's two primary weapons against television were to be size
and technical gimmickry.

One of the industry's first sallies was 3-D, a three-dimensional, stereoscopic effect produced by shooting
the action with two lenses simultaneously at a specified distance apart. Two interlocked projectors then
threw the two perspectives on a single screen simultaneously; the audience used cardboard or plastic
glasses (with red and blue lenses for black-and-white films, polarized clear lenses for color films) to read
the two overlapping, flat images as a single three dimensional one. The idea was not new; even before
the twentieth century, a viewer could see a three-dimensional version of a still photograph by looking at
two related photos through a stereopticon; all that is necessary is to show the image taken by the right
camera only to the right eye, and the left image only to the left eye. A popular American toy, the View
master, uses the same principle of fusing two pictures to present a 3-D scenic view. Kodak had been
marketing "stereo" still cameras since 1901, and Edwin S. Porter and William E. Waddell had presented
the first 3-D movie (non-narrative scenes of New York and New Jersey) in 1915. Abel Gance had even
shot a 3-D roll for Napoleon in 1927, but decided not to use it.

Despite the familiarity of the stereoscopic principle, to see it in a full-length, active feature film was a
great novelty. The first 3-D feature was Harry K. Fairall s The Power of Love (U.S., 1922); Russia released
its first 3-D film, Day Off in Moscow, in 1940. Hollywood rushed into 3-D production in 1952 with Arch
Oboler's Bwana Devil, which was followed by pictures like House of Wax, It Came From Outer Space,
Fort Ti, Kiss Me Kate, and /, the Jury (all 1953); Creature from the Black Lagoon, Tlie French Line, and
Gog (all 1954); and finally, Revenge of the Creature (1955). Audiences eagerly left their TV sets to
experience the gimmick that attacked them with knives, arrows, avalanches, stampedes, vats of
chemicals, Ann Miller's tap shoes, and Jane Russell's bust; the thrill of 3-D was that the formerly
confined, flat picture convincingly threatened to leap, fly, or flow out of its frame at the audience.

Some blame the death of 3-D on the headache inducing glasses that it required, but the more obvious
cause of death was that any pure novelty becomes boring when it is no longer novel. 3-D was pure
novelty; the thrill of being run over by a train is visually identical to that of being run over by a herd of
cattle. Further, because 3-D required the theatre owner to make costly additions and renovations (in
order to perform changeovers, mere startup costs included four projectors—two for each reel), the
exhibitors declared a war of neglect against the process and hastened its demise. Business for 3-D films
fell off so quickly that Hitchcock, who had shot Dial M for Murder (1954) in the new process—taking full
advantage of the opportunity to compose in depth—released it in the conventional two dimensions.
Among the later attempts to revive 3-D have been a few "sexploitation" films (in 1970, The
Stewardesses) that promised especially titillating sequences for those who visited the "skin houses."
Paul Morrissey's 3-D Flesh for Frankenstein (released as Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, 1974), reduced the
possibilities to the horrific, the pornographic, and the "camp." In the 1980s a single-projector 3-D
system, with half the normal resolution but simplified installation, gave audiences everything from
Friday the 13th Part 3 (Steve Miner, 1982) to the 3-D release of Dial M for Murder (1983).

A second movie novelty also promised thrills. Cinerama, unlike 3-D, brought the audience into the
picture, not the picture into the audience. Cinerama originally used three interlocked cameras and four
interlocked projectors (one for stereophonic sound). The final prints were projected not on top of one
another (superimposed, as in 3-D), but side by side—with barely visible vertical lines where the images
met. The result was an immense wraparound image that was really three images. The wide, high, deeply
curved screen and the relative positions of the three cameras worked on the eye's peripheral vision to
make the mind believe that the body was actually in motion. The difference between a ride in an
automobile and a conventionally filmed ride is that in an automobile the world also moves past on the
sides, not just straight ahead. Cinerama's huge triple screen duplicated this impression of peripheral
movement.

Like 3-D, the idea was not new. As early as the Paris World's Exposition of 1900, the energetic inventor-
cinematographers had begun displaying wraparound and multiscreen film processes. (Multiscreen
experiments have long been popular at world's fairs—for example, the New York fair of 1963-64 and
Expo '67 in Montreal) In 1927, Abel Gance had incorporated triple-screen effects, both panoramic and
triptych, into his Napoleon. In 1938, Fred Waller, Cinerama's inventor, began research on the process.
But when This Is Cinerama opened in 1952, audiences choked—quite literally—with a film novelty that
sent them racing down a roller coaster track and soaring over the Rocky Mountains. A magnificent six-
track (in later Cinerama films, seven-track) stereophonic sound system accompanied the thrilling
pictures; sounds could travel from left to right across the screen or jump from behind the screen to
behind the audience's heads. Coproduced by Merian C. Cooper, Lowell Thomas, Louis B. Mayer, Robert
L. Bendick, and the great showman Michael Todd, and partly directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack (Cooper
and Schoedsack made both documentaries like Grass and spectacular fictions like King Kong), This is
Cinerama had one foot in show business and the other in documentary.

Cinerama remained commercially viable longer than 3-D because it was more carefully marketed.
Because of the complex projection machinery, only a few theatres in major cities were equipped for the
process. Seeing Cinerama became a special, exciting event; the film was sold as a "road-show" attraction
with reserved seats, noncontinuous performances, and high prices. Customers returned to Cinerama
because they could see a Cinerama film so infrequently. (The second, Cinerama Holiday, came out three
years after 77? is Is Cinerama.) And although Cinerama repeatedly offered its predictable postcard
scenery and its obligatory rides and chases, the films were stunning travelogues.

Cinerama faced new troubles when it too tried to combine its gimmick with narrative: The Wonderful
World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963), How the West Was Won
(1963). As with 3-D, what Aristotle called "Spectacle" (he found it the least important dramatic element)
overwhelmed the more essential dramatic ingredients of plot, character, and ideas. In 1968, Stanley
Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey subordinated a modified Cinerama (shot with a single camera but
projected on a Cinerama screen) to the film's sociological and metaphysical journey, letting the big
screen and sound work for the story rather than letting the story work for the effects. Despite the
artistic and commercial success of 2001, Cinerama is now even deader than 3-D, partially because the
mid-1970s combination of 70mm film and Panavision lenses (which Kubrick also used), enhanced by
Dolby Stereo soundtracks, comes close to reproducing the immense sights and sounds of Cinerama
without the clumsy multi-machine methods of the earlier process. In 1952, the gimmick successfully
pulled Americans away from the small screen at home, but not enough of them at once to offer the film
industry any real commercial salvation.

A third gimmick of the early 1950s also took advantage of the size of the movie screen. The new format,
christened CinemaScope, was the most durable and functional of them all, requiring no extra projectors,
special film, or special glasses. It did, however, require theatre owners to invest in "scope" or
anamorphic projection lenses; wide, curved screens; and, in most cases, stereophonic sound systems.
The action was recorded by a conventional movie camera on conventional 35mm film. A special
anamorphic lens squeezed the image horizontally to fit the width of the standard film. When projected
with a corresponding anamorphic lens on the projector, the distortions disappeared and a huge, wide
image stretched across the curved screen. (It was curved not only to emulate Cinerama, but also to keep
the entire image in focus by having the left, center, and right of the screen equidistant from the
projector.) Once again, the "novelty" was not new. As early as 1928, a French scientist named Henri
Chretien had experimented with an anamorphic lens for the motion-picture camera; in 1952, the
executives of Twentieth Century-Fox visited Professor Chretien, then retired to a Riviera villa, and
bought the rights to his anamorphic process.

The first CinemaScope feature, Henry Koster's The Robe (1953), convinced both Fox and the industry
that the process was viable. The screen had been made wide with a minimum of trouble and expense. A
parade of screen widening "scopes" and "visions" followed Fox's CinemaScope, some of them using an
anamorphic lens, one nonanamorphic process (VistaVision) printing the image sideways on the celluloid
strip to achieve width without loss of resolution, and some of them achieving screen width by widening
the film to 55mm, 65mm, or 70mm, notably ToddAO, MGM Camera 65, CinemaScope 55, Super
Panavision 70, and Ultra Panavision 70. The first 70mm film of the 1950s was Oklahoma! (1955),
directed by Fred Zinnemann and shot in Todd-AO.

Ultimately it was si2& and grandeur that triumphed, not depth perception or motion effects. As early as
1930, Eisenstein advocated a flexible screen size, a principle he called the "dynamic square." He
reasoned that the conventional screen, with its four-to-three ratio of width to height (an aspect ratio of
4:3, or 1.33:1), was too inflexible. The screen should be capable of becoming very wide for certain
sequences, narrow and long for others, a perfect square for balanced compositions. But Eisenstein's
principles were much closer to Griffith's use of masking or irising than to the wide screen's inflexible
commitment to width. George Stevens complained that CinemaScope was better for shooting a python
than a person. How could a horizontal picture frame, with a five-to-two ratio of width to height, enclose
a vertical subject?
Despite these complaints, which echoed those about synchronized sound in the late 1920s, some
directors came to terms with the new frame format right away. In the wide-screen musical It's Always
Fair Weather (1955), directors Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen could make a little in-group joke. When
Dan Dailey retires to a telephone booth, a sign informs us that a call to California costs only $2.50 for 1
minute, with the numbers in boldface. That ratio of 2.5 to 1 was roughly the CinemaScope format of this
very film, made in California. (The actual aspect ratio of this and other early CinemaScope films was 2.55
to 1. CinemaScope later changed to 2.35:1, which is also the aspect ratio of the current 35mm
anamorphic format, Panavision.)

The film also demonstrates that the familiar American object most like a CinemaScope frame is a dollar
bill. The plot of It's Always Fair Weather rips a dollar bill into three pieces, one for each of three
American GIs, to remind them of their reunion ten years later. In the same way, Kelly and Donen
repeatedly rip the CinemaScope frame into three compositional pieces, one for each of the buddies. The
movie industry hoped it would rake in plenty of dollar bills from this frame that resembled a dollar bill.

Like sound in the early years, the new technological invention was a mixed blessing, adding some new
film possibilities and destroying many of the old compositional virtues. What many critics of the wide
screen did not perceive at the time was that just as deep focus permitted contrapuntal relationships
between near and far within the frame (as in Citizen Kane), the wide screen permitted contrapuntal
relationships among left, center, and right.

George Cukor's A Star Is Bom (1954), a great remake of William Wellman's great 1937 melodrama,
provides powerful proof of this potential. Two sequences demonstrate not only Cukor's mastery of the
format, but also his awareness of its history and value. In one scene, Oliver Niles (Charles Bickford), the
head of the studio, fires the aging matinee idol, Norman Main (James Mason). Main's popularity has
been slipping and the studio itself has been slumping. The cause? Television. During this conversation,
the men stand between two flickering black-and-white images on the far left and right edges of the
frame. To the far left is a TV set; Niles has been watching the fights on TV (even a studio head cannot
stay away from a TV screen). To the far right of the frame is a motion picture, projected in the next room
for Main's party guests. The discussion between Main and Niles takes place precisely between a video
image and a film image—a visual translation of the historical crossroads where all the studio heads and
studio stars found themselves in 1954.

Cukor uses television again in the film's Academy Award ceremony. While Cukor shoots Vicky Lester's
(Judy Garland) triumph with the CinemaScope lens in medium long shot, a TV monitor in the upper
right-hand corner of the frame displays the moment in typical TV closeups. The shot is simultaneously a
long shot and a close-up, a wide-screen color image and a small screen black-and-white TV image, a
revelation of CinemaScope's visual power and television's cultural power, capable of bringing this
moment, "live," into people's homes in close-ups.

The wide CinemaScope frame enabled Cukor to shoot whole scenes—even Garland's entire rendition of
"The Man That Got Away"—in a continuous, complexly choreographed shot without a cut. (Of course,
Welles and Toland had done that with the standard frame in Citizen Kane.) In the work of Cukor, Donen,
Ophiils, Preminger, and others, the 1950s saw an explosion of interest in the uses of the wide screen, an
interest that remained evident in the 1960s and 70s works of such directors as Lean, Kurosawa, Leone,
Peckinpah, and Godard. By the mid-1960s, the wide-screen revolution was as complete as the sound
revolution of the late 1920s, and the wide screen, like sound, would become the basis of a new
generation's film aesthetics.

The battle with television was partially responsible for another technical revolution in the 1950s—the
almost total conversion to color. From the earliest days of moving pictures, inventors and filmmakers
sought to combine color with recorded movement. The early Melies films were hand-painted frame by
frame. Many silent films (Griffith's, Lubitsch's, and Gance's most notably) were bathed in color tints,
adding a cast of pale blue for night sequences, sepia for interiors and yellow for sunlight, a red tint for
certain effects, a green tint for others. Such coloring effects were obviously tonal, like the accompanying
music, rather than an intrinsic part of the film's photographic conception. As early as 1908, Charles
Urban patented a color photographic process, Kinemacolor. But opposition from the then-powerful
MPPC Trust kept Kinemacolor off American screens.

In 1917, the Technicolor Corporation was founded in the United States. Supported by all the major
studios, Technicolor enjoyed monopolistic control over all color experimentation and shooting in this
country. Douglas Fairbanks's The Black Pirate (1926) and the musicals Rio Rita (1929) and Wiwopee!
(1930) used the early Technicolor process, which added a garish grandeur to the costumes and scenery.
In the 1920s, Technicolor was, like Urban's Kinemacolor, a two-color process: two strips of film exposed
by two separate lenses, one strip recording the blue-green colors of the spectrum, the other sensitive to
the redorange colors, then bonded together in the final processing. But by 1933 Technicolor had
perfected a more accurate three-color process: tlu-ee strips of black-and-white film, one exposed
through a filter to cyan, the second to magenta, the third to yellow, originally requiring a bulky three-
prism camera—with a single lens—for the three rolls of film. The first two-strip Technicolor feature had
been The Toll of the Sea (1922); the one that used color most creatively was Doctor X (1932). The first
film made in the three-strip process was Disney's cartoon Floieers and Trees (1932). RKO's La Cucaracha
(1934) was the first three strip Technicolor live action short, and Rouben Mamoulian's Becky Sharp
(1935) the first three strip Technicolor feature. Hollywood could have converted to color at almost the
same time it converted to sound. But expenses and priorities dictated that most talkies use black-and-
white film, which was itself becoming faster, subtler, more responsive to minimal light, easier to use
under any conditions. Color was reserved for special novelty effects—for cartoons or lavish spectacles
that needed the decoration of color and could afford the slowness and expense of color shooting (for
example, Michael Curtiz and Wilham Keighley's The Adventures of Robin Hood, 1938; Victor Fleming's
Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, both 1939).

Before World War II, color was both a monopoly and a sacred mystery. Color negatives were processed
and printed behind closed doors; special Technicolor consultants and cameramen were almost as
important on the set of a color film as the director and producer. Natalie Kalmus, the ex-wife of Herbert
Kalmus who invented the process, became Technicolor's artistic director and constructed an official
aesthetic code for the use of color (she preferred mutedly harmonious color effects to discordantly
jarring ones), a code as binding on a film's color values as was the Hays Code on its moral values. Until
1949, every film that used Technicolor was required to hire Mrs. Kalmus as "Technicolor Consultant."

World War - II, which demanded that the film industry keep up production while tightening its belt,
generally excluded the luxury of color filming—unless the film had propaganda value and was likely to
improve morale. England put up the money for Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944), whose splendid and
complex use of color intensified the film's propagandists appeal to the Englishman's traditional sense of
courage. Most wartime American color films also had propaganda value—Minnelli's Meet Me in St.
Louis (1944), which depicted the homespun life and traditions that the boys were fighting to save;
DeMille's Tfie Story of Dr. Wassel (1944), a hymn to an American war hero.

After the war, Hollywood needed color to fight television, which—at least until the 1960s—could offer
audiences only black and white. Technicolor, formerly without competitors, had kept costs up and
production down. Hollywood began encouraging a new competing single-strip process, Eastman color.
The new process was one of the spoils of war, a pirated copy of the German Agfa color mono pack. The
monopack color film bonded three color-sensitive emulsions onto a single roll of film stock. A color film
could be shot with an ordinary movie camera. Color emulsions became progressively faster, more
sensitive, more flexible. A series of new color processes—DeLuxe, Metrocolor, Warnercolor—were all
variations of Eastmancolor, which was less expensive and of lower quality than monopack Technicolor
(introduced in 1942). What these monopack color processes gained over three-strip Technicolor in
cheapness and flexibility they sacrificed in intensity and brilliance. (Technicolor's clean dyes were picked
up and transferred directly onto the print by each of the three strips, but the Eastman dyes were in the
stock and had to go through chemical processing in the lab.) So unstable and impermanent were their
color dyes that Eastmancolor prints of the 1950s have already faded badly. Not until the development of
the CRI (color reversal internegative) printing process of the 1970s—and Martin Scorsese's successful
campaign of the 1980s for an Eastman stock that would hold its color values for at least 50 years—
would monopack prints approach the clarity, brilliance, and permanence of three-strip 1930s, 40s, and
50s Technicolor.

During the 1950s, black and white gradually became the exception and color, even for serious dramas,
little comedies, short subjects, and low budget westerns, became the rule. As the technology of color
cinematography became more flexible, film artists learned, as they did with | sound, that a new
technique was not only a gimmick but also a way to fulfill essential dramatic and thematic functions.

Sound quality improved drastically after World War II, thanks to the introduction of magnetic tape
(another of the spoils of war, invented in Nazi Germany). Until 1949, optical film was used to record all
film soundtracks. From the 1950s to the present, a release print might have a magnetic or an optical
soundtrack, but magnetic tape and magnetic film (called "mag stock") are used for virtually all analog
sound recording, editing, and mixing. Even a computer's hard disk records data magnetically.

Although the movies fought TV by offering audiences audiovisual treats that the tube lacked, Hollywood
finally capitulated to TV by deciding to work with it rather than against it. (Radio had not posed such a
threat because it couldn't show pictures.) If TV would not die, then it would need old movies and filmed
installments of series to broadcast. Columbia Pictures, Walt Disney (Disneyland), Warner Bros.,
Twentieth Century-Fox, MGM, and Universal all began making 30- and 60-minute weekly shows—as well
as commercials—for TV, while several new companies bought old film studios expressly to make
television films: Revue bought the old Republic studio and Desilu the RKO studio. Hollywood also lifted
its ban against films and film stars appearing on TV. In 1954, RKO began to show its own movies on its
own stations; as in a theatre, the "Million Dollar Movie" (conceived by Thomas F O'Neil, the TV executive
who bought RKO to pull this off) repeated the week's picture several times a day. In 1956, the other
Hollywood studios first sold their films to TV, the sole provision being that the film had to have been
produced before 1948. Since 1956, however, Hollywood has sold more and more recent films to the
networks or cable stations; many of last year's movies appear on this year's television. In a sense, TV has
replaced the old fourth- and fifth-run neighborhood movie houses, most of which had disappeared by
1965—much as the rentable videocassette has nearly wiped out the revival house.

The theatre owners were hit hardest by a medium that could deliver entertainment directly to the
home. Theatres countered by offering sights and sounds that televisions could not deliver. They still do.
To see Raiders of the Lost Ark ox A Star Is Born on TV—whether broadcast or on video—is not really to
see it at all. The brightness, the brilliance, the immensity, the complex composition, the fullness of
sound in the movie theatre remain basic reasons to go there. Although the most gimmicky innovations
of 1952-53 have disappeared, the principle of supplying sights and sounds that TV cannot has dominated
the feature film industry ever since.

By 1956, the war with TV was over, and although the armistice had clearly defined the movies' future
relationship with its living-room audiences, the future with its audiences in theatres was still uncertain.