I am repeating myself and long-winded as usual but it is worth repeating and I have too much spare time today.
How can something that is beyond supply and demand go out of business?
They have unlimited money and the big studios always did. They didn't start with zero money or contacts.
They also had to avoid Edison's patent lawyers. So there's no comparison to small mom and pop capitalist business. Most small businesses do not have contacts on another continent to help them get a monopoly in other countries. Hollywood dominated UK and Italian cinema by 1930. If Mussolini had not cut access, would Fellini or Bava or other famous Italian filmmakers--would they have had opportunities? Hollywood is about downsizing and centralized control--they are not advocates of cultural product variety. They offered it when it was cheap but costs were going up and there's Hollywood Accounting behind that. It's no sound business practice, it is something else.
In the 1940s they were pressuring theaters to reduce choice for audiences by demanding that they only play the films of a particular studio. The theater owners were pressured to not pick and choose films that may have been of particular appeal to their audience.
It was called blockbooking. Sounds similar to blockbuster?
Does Hollywood know how to please people?
I think they were more liberal and experimental than Edison was going to be--he wasn't a filmmaker--he didn't care about the medium that much --he developed sound recording for film by 1910 and just left on the shelf.
Early Hollywood jumped on the technology much more than Edison was going to.
But in the early days the biggest cinema stars were Griffith, Fairbanks, Pickford, etc. and they were making their own content without any need for big Hollywood. They didn't need them and the audiences didn't need them. The big studios eliminated the star-producer like Fairbanks-they put actors under their control so the performer did not have the creative freedom that Fairbanks or Pickford or Chaplin had. The studio contract actor was under incredible personal control (and it is still around today if you pay attention).
It was good and bad--it did bring a lot more faces into the spotlight due to the money resources and factory-approach, but it came at a price--i.e. content and themes were becoming restricted.
In the 1950s film stock became cheaper which allowed new people to get into the business. So you had a global boom in film. From Argentina to Japan to Mexico to Spain--even the Philippines.
Except the USSR.
It's very sad--Russia and Eastern Europe had a long cultural history and yet, due to the centralized control of the Soviet system, in 70 years, the only two names in Soviet-controlled regions to be repeated or focused on were
Eisenstein and Tarkovsky.
That is a tragic failure of cultural expression of that system. I know a few other names are starting to trickle out (Ptushko) but compared to the West, or even Japan, or Mexico, the Soviet output is just beyond pathetic.
How many artists in those Soviet regions were reduced to sweeping floors because the government gave them no opportunities and there was no competition possible for MOSFILM?
There is an example of cultural production that has no dependency on audience interest or response. There was no competition. And they existed for 70 years. They had the money and the monopoly and absolutely were not populist.
And the modern global studio seems to admire and increasingly follow that model. It is at the stage of hiring only loyal apparatchiks and they get very aggressive about ideological disloyalty.
I think if we examine film from a technological history perspective, then Hollywood did not aggressively tap into any trends that were dictated by audiences.
In the 1960s they were stagnant, and losing audiences to smaller production companies that were more focused on particular target demographics. You don't try to please everyone at all times-you try to please a particular group.
Hollywood invested in technological advances for makeup, set design, sound engineering, stunts, and visual effects at the same time the Hayes Code was being discontinued.
Technological change was happening--and that's where the excitement was.
I think the superstar of the blockbuster era were the technicians, not the writer, not the director, not the actor.
But then, as these big studios gobbled up and merged, they reduced their content, and increasingly focused on technological whizbang, and eventually the innovations no longer impress like they did.
Computer graphics is no longer able to make people go "wow."
Especially as the filmmaking becomes more centralized and controlled.
They have to reconnect with traditional art values--depictions of Nature, individual creative expression and control..and follow some kind of populist awareness.
Just because they hire a director from mainland China to make a Dracula remake, does not mean they are embracing cultural diversity.
It's controlled in message and theme and ultimately means less creative voices are being nurtured.
Culture is in a vice and it being compressed and cannibalized. All because of the suppression of artists and limited professional opportunity.
