*****
Ironically, Hollywood – as we know it today - was an
outcome of the Spanish flu pandemic (1918-1920). The credit for that goes to
Adolph Zukor, the founder of Paramount Pictures.
At the start of the 1918 pandemic, movies were silent.
Filmmakers were independent, artists and distributors were fragmented. Family owned
movie theatres were known as mom-and-pop theatres. Once the pandemic began, 90%
of those theatres were closed for six months or so. The closing of cinemas
disrupted everything, movie-watching, making and selling. Los Angeles studios
imposed a ban on filming crowd scenes. From October 1918, all film productions
were shut down for over a month.
Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish, the top lady stars,
were infected but recovered. Mask-wearing was voluntary. Male stars were
reluctant to wear masks. It diluted their invincibility and manliness. The leading
star of that period - handsome, blond Harold Lockwood, 31 years old, had
already featured in forty films. On the sets of shadows of suspicion, he fell ill and died in a few days.
*****
Adolph Zukor was a visionary. He wanted to control the
entire chain – make movies, distribute them, and decide how they were shown. Exhibitors
and mom-and-pop theatres were ruined by the pandemic. Zukor began buying the
movie theatres. If someone was unwilling, he threatened to build a theatre
across the road. In 1919, he bought 135 theatres in the southern states. That
guaranteed his films would be shown.
Paramount is still one of the “Big Five” Hollywood
studios (along with Walt Disney, Warner, Universal and Columbia). The studio
system also began with the 1918 pandemic. Studios locked up stars, directors,
technicians to work for them. Zukor developed the film rental concept, whereby
the distributor charges the exhibitor a percentage of the box office receipts.
That practice is still prevalent in many countries. He also introduced the
concept of ‘block booking’ whereby a studio could force a movie theatre to sign
an annual contract to exclusively show movies made by that studio.
Just as supermarkets, hypermarkets and shopping malls
gradually killed the mom-and-pop retail stores, Zukor’s tireless enterprise put
an end to the family owned theatres. He succeeded in achieving vertical
integration and complete top-down control. An unfortunate side effect was the
disappearance of independent filmmakers. Women and non-white filmmakers went
out of business. Hollywood essentially became a white male studio-driven
industry. The so-called golden age of Hollywood started. Post-pandemic feature
films became longer, with bigger budgets.
We see the Zukor model adopted today by streaming
services like Netflix. Netflix wants to produce films/web series, distribute
them around the world, and bring them to your small screen by charging a
subscription fee.
*****
Hollywood’s consolidation by establishing a studio
system shows what can happen in a pandemic. Not only to a movie industry, but any
business. Small fish face financial ruin, and either die or are eaten by the
big fish. The big fish take over that industry, and become more powerful than
before.
This consolidation is not a short-term effect. The
model Adolph Zukor created one hundred years ago is still the backbone of
Hollywood.
Ravi
हो ना काही परिणाम दूरगामी असतात.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know this. Fascinating
ReplyDelete