Just Finished Reading: Hollywood – A Very Short Introduction by Peter Decherney (FP: 2016)

Narrowing the focus on my Cinema blitz read we zero in on the studio system that still produces the majority of the world’s movies 100 years after its founding. Relocated from New York (the original home of cinema) for legal, financial and climatic reasons - with more sunny days meaning more filming outside – Los Angeles, California seemed to have it all including weak labour unions. The rest, as they often say, is history, and what a history.

The famed Studio System produced some of the first global celebrities (complete with fake news stories as well as real problematic lifestyles to keep those tabloid column inches flowing), drove technological innovation in sound, colour, display and much else besides, made millions from merchandising almost from the get-go, developed a ‘code of ethics’ precise enough to time kisses and get movies through government censors forcing the use of subtle and not so subtle double-entendres (trains and tunnels come to mind for some reason) and produced some of the most memorable and cultural significant (on a global scale no less) events in modern history. Not bad, considering what they had to deal with on the way….

Not only was there rivalry between different studios but between rival technologies and rival team of lawyers fighting it out in court. There was star ‘property’ defecting to other studios, taking their erstwhile employers to court and starting up their own rival studios (as well as getting in trouble with the press and religious groups). There was the unions, strikes, so-called communist infiltration and the McCarthy witch-hunts that ended many promising careers with testimony, recriminations and blacklists. Then came television….

Skipping across the century or more of the silver screen and briefly circling a few well-chosen topics to bring out the flavour of the whole endeavour this was an interesting, if necessary brief, look at one of the most important and certainly most influential industries and industrial locations on the planet. At only 129 pages the overview was predictably shallow but I definitely learnt a few things worth following up and I’m sure that all but the hard-core Hollywood fans will too. Recommended.