Fear: it hit Hollywood hard in the 50s, harder than it had ever been hit before.
The 30s and 40s had been heavenly for the studios and the audiences both. Buttressed by industrial, cultural, and political unity and strength, the hegemony of the studio system, the growing pastime of moviegoing, the enduring popular faith, so hard for us to understand now, in our leadership—three terms for F.D.R.!—and the American way of life made the Hollywood of the Depression and war years truly what, to many of us, it still is: golden.
For those 20 or so years—before television divided us through ease of access and the Cold War divided us by perception of allegiance, before the Holocaust and the bomb—we knew who we were. We were the movies. This is not a matter of opinion but of numbers. In 1945 America had more than 20,000 theaters. In 1946 the average weekly attendance was at least 90 million. Movies were the national campfire. Roosevelt, who once wrote a film treatment about the Revolutionary War hero John Paul Jones, understood this as much as any president has before or since. “The American motion picture,” he wrote, “is one of the most effective mediums in informing and entertaining our citizens.”
In those middle years of the century, with a regularity that will never be matched, we gathered—together, in cinemas—to participate in a deep, varied, and affordable entertainment that by some accounts drew more Americans than any single religious institution. Why? Because we believed. We believed, with a borderline-spiritual fervor—thank you, Frank Capra—in the high ideals we saw on-screen and off.
If filmmakers were freer in those years, it was because they, too, were secure. For all the griping about working under studio contract, their financial and artistic well-being was self-evident: watch the movies, check the box office. Louis B. Mayer was, at one point, the highest-paid man in America, and for good reason.
Then, in 1948, United States v. Paramount Pictures, a successful anti-trust suit brought against the studios, precipitated an industry-wide artistic and financial bloodletting that some have argued still hasn’t let up. Stir in the House Un-American Activities Committee, the resultant strain of that moment’s politically correct filmmaking, the postwar baby boom and subsequent exodus to the suburbs, the rising costs of production, and the eventual retirements of the founding studio heads (Mayer, Darryl F. Zanuck) and the influx of their successors (Dore Schary, Buddy Adler) and you’ve got yourself trouble in paradise.
Sound familiar? As we find ourselves, in today’s Hollywood, confronted with different versions of the same fears, the timely publication of Foster Hirsch’s new book, Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties: The Collapse of the Studio System, the Thrill of Cinerama, and the Invasion of the Ultimate Body Snatcher—Television, might have been a beneficence, like being whispered the answers to a final exam. Unfortunately, in this case, it is the book that is the exam.
Louis B. Mayer was, at one point, the highest-paid man in America, and for good reason.
Its more than 650 pages of pre-masticated history and A.I.-level banalities (Citizen Kane, we’re told, is “widely considered the greatest of all American films”) made me long for the freshness and immediacy of other sources, namely, Nora Sayre’s witty and passionate Running Time: Films of the Cold War, Peter Lev’s rigorous The Fifties: Transforming the Screen, 1950–1959, and even Hirsch’s own biography of one of midcentury Hollywood’s most ambitious and challenging filmmakers, Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King.
He argues, unconvincingly, that “Hollywood in the 1950s was both the best and the worst of times.” Maybe Hirsch, whose own memories of moviegoing in the 50s provide momentary relief, and who admits a fondness for Peyton Place (while ignoring Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running), should have written a memoir instead?
And yet, revisiting the trials of Hollywood in the 50s, a Titanic sinking under the weight of biblical epics, endless running times, Cinerama, 3D, and Republic Pictures’ touchingly beleaguered answer to CinemaScope, Naturama, one hopes young executives of today will watch for those lifeboats captained by true filmmakers. Better, not bigger, is better.
TV did not then and does not now have to sink the movies any more than phone sex has to eliminate the real thing. In 1957, Paramount did not have to sell off its library of pre-1948 films (for $50 million) nor MGM its back lot and ruby slippers. Rather, in the transitional era of the 1950s, Hollywood only had to do what Hollywood in the 30s and 40s did best: make movies people wanted to see.
Why didn’t it? Why doesn’t it? The answer is fear, the fear of extinction, first made real to the studios around 1948 and still with Hollywood today. Threatened with drowning, who among them has the mind, heart, or patience to tread water, waiting, watching the horizon for greatness?
Sam Wasson is the author of several books, including The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood. His next book, The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story, will be published by Harper in November
