The Golden Age of Hollywood

The Golden Age of Hollywood

SOURCE: Vogue: A Tribute to the Golden Age of Hollywood

THE MOVIES...
Mata Hari (1931), Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Cleopatra (1934), Dracula (1931), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931 & again in 1941), Grand Hotel (1932), Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932), King Kong (1933), Little Women (1933), 42nd Street (1933), The Wizard of Oz (1939), Wuthering Heights (1939), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Of Mice and Men (1939), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Alice in Wonderland (1933), Babes in Toyland (1934), Gone with the Wind (1939), Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), Gulliver's Travels (1939), Gunga Din (1939), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Bambi (1942), Casablanca (1942), Citizen Kane (1941), Dumbo (1941), Fantasia (1940), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Our Town (1940), Phantom of the Opera (1943), and Pinocchio (1940).

THE EARLY DAYS...

The classic movies listed above were created during the "Golden Age of Hollywood". During the period of 1930 - 1945, the movie industry experienced a whirlwind of significant changes, despite the lingering effects of the stock market crash of 1929 and the great depression. Recently formed movie studios began to take advantage of their growing dominance in Hollywood and
transitioned Hollywood towards a new generation of film-making. Soon thereafter, silent films which were very popular in the previous decades, began to fade from the silver screen while new lively films produced by the studios were much more lavish with loads of sex appeal. With the introduction of new movie genre's like gangster films, musicals, westerns, and horror films, came packed movie theatre's and very powerful movie executives. By the mid-1930s, movie studios with celebrity-like studio heads, production chiefs, producers, and other assistants were totally in control over the studios choices over the choice of films, budgets, and the selection of personnel and scripts, actors, writers, and directors, editing, scoring, and publicity. These Hollywood studios even owned the movie theatre's across the country! These movie studios included Twentieth Century Fox, formed in 1935, MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, led by the infamous Louis B. Mayer), Paramount, Warner Bros., RKO Radio, Columbia, Universal, and United Artists (UA).

CENSORSHIP...

With the rise in popularity of "talkies" and major motion pictures, it seemed inevitable that censorship would become a hot-button issue. Just as our generation has been introduced to a very vocal "religious right wing" of American society, so too was the Golden Age of Hollywood beginning in the last 1920s and right into the 1930s. Religious organizations, led by the very wealthy William Randolph Hearst, put pressure on the movie industry to remove what they considered to be racy and sexually suggestive scenes from movies. At the time, even American Senator Smith W. Brookhart (R-IA) introduced a bill to put the movie industry under the jurisdiction of the FTC. Actresses like Clara Bow and Greta Garbo, were often cited by religious organizations as contributing to the glamorization of drug abuse and sexual indecencies. Hollywood executives and movie producers succumbed to the pressures, and agreed to adhere to the newly created Production Code of 1930 spearheaded by Will H. Hays, former Postmaster and Campaign Manager for President Harding. The Production Code was meant to dictate what was and what was not considered morally acceptable for a public audience by listing out 36 "Don'ts and Be Carefuls" of film-making. Instead of caving to the pressures placed on the movie studios by the restrictions of the Production Code, movie studios found a way to keep box office sales up while creating fresh new materials. Popular books and biographies were made into movies, and a new genre of film was introduced to the public in light of the moral constraints - screwball comedies. Movies like Mutiny on the Bounty(1935) and Bringing Up Baby (1938) became huge successes despite the morality clauses that stifled Hollywood's creativity. The Code was virtually unenforceable though, and eventually would be replaced by our current movie-ratings system in the late 60s.

STARS OF THE GOLDEN AGE...

The movies created during this time period were pure classics. There was BIG emotion, and lots of drama, and beautifully dressed actors and actresses who always seemed to say the right thing and the right time! These actors and actresses changed motion pictures forever! Some of the talented legends from this era include: Clark Gable, Mae West, Hollywood "IT GIRL" Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Maurice Chevalier, James Cagney, Bing Crosby, Barbara Stanwyck, Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn , Bette Davis, Spencer Tracy, James Cagney, Jimmy Stewart, Veronica Lake, Katharine Hepburn, Shirley Temple, John & Lionel Barrymore, the Marx Brothers, Judy Garland, Betty Grable, Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Norma Shearer, Elizabeth Taylor, Ronald Reagan, Angela Lansbury, Mickey Rooney, and my personal favorite Joan Crawford.

ALL GOOD THINGS MUST COME TO AN END...

WW II began in 1939 and changed the lives of millions of Americans across the country. Box Office sales numbers began to slump and movie studios were starting to lose money. To complicate matters, the advent of Television and new Anti-Trust laws, movie studios struggled to survive. These movie studios that once owned movie theatre's across the country, were now being forced to relinquish ownership and function and separate entities from the theatre's they once controlled. Another side-effect of the new Anti-Trust laws mandated that the movie studios gradually release contractual obligations placed on employees including Directors, Producers, Actors, and Production staff members. Many of these employees were at one point synonymous with the studio releasing the pictures. As a result, there was a sharp decline in the number of movies released per year as individual movie budgets soared. The movie industry focused on producing films that were spectacular and larger-than-life. This was something that television programming could not offer at the time. By the late 1940s, most studios gave up their rights to movie theatre's around the country. While movie studios continue to create films that draw major box office sales figures, new genre's of films were beginning to spark interest in movie-goers and studio executives alike and with these changes came an end of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

SOURCES:

Adomono Productions (Producer). (n.d.). Vogue: A tribute to the Golden Age of Hollywood. (Added: September 28, 2007). YouTube. Retrieved November 22, 2007, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuMdcUKxluE

Dirks, Tim. Greatest Films: Film History of the 1930s. Retrieved November 22, 2007, from http://www.filmsite.org/30sintro.html

Cinema of the United States: Golden Age of Hollywood (n.d.). Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved November 22, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_the_United_States#Golden_Age_of_Hollywood