04 - The Hays Office
The Hays Office represented one of two significant time periods in the motion picture industry of the early 20th Century. Ingham describes how the office was an attempt by Hollywood to deal with the popularity of the Hollywood cinema industry. Will Hays was hired to monitor the impact of movies on an ever growing audience. In the 1930s, the average family attended films in cinemas 3x a week, and as such, in some quarters of society there was a growing desire to have “wholesome” entertainment in theatres, which led to the development and enforcement of a production code as developed by the Hays Office. This code was enforced between 1934-1968.
As the Office and its influence grew, Hollywood studios became frustrated with the code which they saw as becoming too strict. The code included 11 subjects to be avoided and 26 topics to be handled with care. Subjects to avoid included:
profanity;
nudity;
illegal drugs;
interracial relationships;
childbirth scenes;
ridicule of the clergy; and
willful offence to any nation, race, or creed.
In the early 1950s, the film Some Like It Hot was seen by many as one of the first films to push back on the constraints of the Hays Code. The film challenged gender norms, featured cross-dressing, and sexual innuendo.
VERTICAL INTEGRATION existed in this early time where the major studios owned both the production companies and as such, could dictate what exhibitors could show and not show. This period was referred to as the Studio System, which ended when the Supreme Court declared that the studios formed a monopoly that had to be dismantled in the “Paramount Decision of 1948.” Vertical Integration was deemed unlawful, and as a result, independent film production increased.
05 - The Star System
The Star System was the second of two significant time periods in the motion picture of the early 20th Century. The studios found that actors and actresses could be very valuable to them - as such, studios tried to “own” them. Once a star was locked under a long term contract, the studio formed a publicity department that ‘made’ their stars, attempting to create idols through carefully constructed personas who would ideally become worshiped by movie going audiences. Moral and ethical clauses were even written into star contracts as studios promoted their stars. The contracts did give actors job security, and helped to increase their profile in the eyes of the public. But the system also limited an actor’s ability to select their own projects. They also lacked privacy in many instances.
Stars today don’t always guarantee a film’s success as people have become more sophisticated about their movie screening habits. Eventually the star system was dismantled due to:
increased news media which discovered that not all celebrities were as wholesome as their images suggested;
competition from television;
changes in culture / society;
the rise of method acting, where individuality was stressed; and
a desire by actors to have greater freedom.
SECTION 02 DISCUSSION QUESTION
What “Star” of the past is one of your favorites and why? What movies come to mind that they starred in?
There are so many “stars” of the past that I’ve admired and enjoyed. I’ve enjoyed Alfred Hitchcock as an auteur filmmaker, who also had a keen understanding of marketing himself as a personality in the world of filmmaking. He was probably the first director I learned about who made films from a time and era before I was born, as many of the films I watched in my youth were by more contemporary directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Oliver Stone with films such as the Godfather, Goodfellas, Star Wars, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Platoon. Weighty fare for a kid perhaps, but they were the films my parents watched, and they always seemed to respect my ability to understand and talk with them about what was being shown on screen. At my neighbour’s house, I’d be introduced to the films of the 007 James Bond series, which were often on for weekend marathons and sleepover nights. But as I grew older, and watched the films of Hitchcock, I came to love the work of many of his stars including Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, and James Stewart. Ultimately though, if I were to select one favourite, I think I’d choose Stewart.
ARTIFACT 01 > Theatre poster for 1954’s Rear Window starring actor James Stewart.
Stewart’s career spanned many decades between 1935-1991 where he appeared as an actor in over 80 motion pictures. His first breakout performance was in the Frank Capra 1938 comedy, You Can’t Take it With You; and he went on to win the Academy Award for Best Actor in George Cukor’s 1940 romantic comedy, The Philadephia Story. Stewart would also be nominated in four other roles - Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Harvey (1950), and Anatomy of a Murder (1959). The first film I remember seeing Stewart in was director Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope, where Stewart portrayed a university professor whose views are used by the film’s protagonists to justify the committing of murder. Its film set in one limited setting, that of an apartment, where Hitchcock has employed the use of four long takes to tell his tension filled story.
I then sought out other films by Hitchcock, finding them and renting them from my local video store inside of a grocery store in Metro Vancouver called Save-On Foods. The first Hitchcock I rented on my own was his 1954 film Rear Window, which has stood as probably my favourite film of all time. Here, Stewart plays photographer LB Jeffries, confined to a wheelchair in his New York City bachelor’s apartment, his leg encased in a cast after he was injured on assignment. He spends a lot of his days by his window, looking out at the courtyard and the windows of several other apartment buildings backing onto it. It’s this theme of looking and observing that leads Jeffries into a whirlwind of trouble, when he suspects that he’s witnessed on neighbour having murdered his wife. As he shares his accumulated knowledge with his girlfriend (Grace Kelly), his nurse (Thelma Ritter), his friend who is a police officer, as well as his news magazine boss there swirls questions about what he actually witnessed. I loved the beautifully playful rapport between Stewart and Kelly, as well as the tension that exists between them as she is a socialite who longs to settle down but they both worry about whether or not she would be able to fit into his life as a photojournalist on the road, criss-crossing the globe as he chases stories. I longed to be Jeffries, with a woman as beautiful as Kelly swooning for me. Jeffries’s interest and career in photography also appealed to me as a young student who was also learning the craft of fine art photography. And I loved his inquisitive attitude, his curiosity into life and what makes people tick.
Several years later, I would get ahold of and watch a restored version of Vertigo (1958), a film which had been highly regarded by so many critics, actors, and filmmakers including Martin Scorsese. It might have been one of the first Hitchcock films I purchased on VHS, and I remember its orange slipcase fondly. After watching the film play out, I immediately fell in love with it and it became my favourite film of all time (in fact, whenever I watch Rear Window, it takes top spot. And whenever I watch Vertigo, it takes the top spot. So, in many respects, they are tied in my mind as the top two films I’ve ever seen). Stewart delivers a powerful performance as retired San Francisco police detective John "Scottie" Ferguson, who left the force after he developed acrophobia and vertigo after an incident in the line of duty that’s shown in the film’s opening frames. Scottie is then hired as a private detective to investigate and report on the strange behaviour of his friend’s wife Madeleine (Kim Novak), a case that will take many twists and turns, and incite a kind of deep psychological vertigo within Scottie that threatens to break him completely. The film is considered a masterpiece of filmmaking, and everything about it is so carefully constructed by Hitchcock, who was inspired by French New Wave filmmakers, that you really can be swept away in the tension and sadness Hitchcock puts onto the screen.