The Studio Years

Weekly Reading- “The Studio Years”
This week’s chapter focused on the Studio years in Hollywood during the 1930s. One specific section that I thought would be helpful to my topic, was the section the discussed Hollywood: The Triumph of the Studio System. This section will help me elaborate more on my second horror film The Mummy and how it was filmed in 1932 by Universal. This section discusses in depth the 1930s and how the Great Depression affected the film industry.

Hollywood: The Triumph of the Studio System Throughout the 1920s, tremendous growth and prosperity was seen in the American motion picture industry and movie-going became the nations and much of the world’s preferred form of entertainment. Following the industry’s conversion to sound films in 1927-28, the so-called “talkie boom” became popular. The talkie boom was so strong, even in the wake of Wall’s street’s momentous collapse in October 1929. The American movie industry enjoyed its best year ever in 1930 as theater admissions, gross revenues, and studio profits reached record levels. The Depression caught up with the movie industry in 1931. Its delayed impact was devastating between 1930 and 1933. Theatre admissions fell tremendously from 90 million per week to only 60 million, gross industry revenues fell from $730 million to about $480 million and combined
profits of $52 million became net losses of some $55 million. Thousands of theaters across the nation (23,000 theaters) closed their doors in the early 1930s, leaving only 15,300 in operation by 1935. Hollywood’s “big five” major studios Paramount, Fox, and RKO suffered a financial collapse in the early 1930s. Warner Bros. survived only by siphoning off roughly one-quarter of its assets. MGM prospered during the Great Depression due to its relatively limited chain of first-class metropolitan theaters. Hollywood’s three “major minor” studios-Columbia, Universal, and United Artist (UA) managed to stay in business in the early 1930s. The major minors adjusted their production and market strategies more effectively than the integrated ones. Columbia and Universal geared their factories to low-cost, low-risk features which fell into a new and significant 1930s product category: “B Movie.” The rapid rise of the B-movie and “double feature; was a direct result of the Depression. The real key to Hollywood’s survival was the intervention of both Wall Street and Washington DC.
Hollywood’s classical era could not have occurred without the financial support of Wall Street and the government’s economic recovery programs. New York financiers and banking firms had been involved with the movie industry since the early 1920s, particularly in the studio's theater chain expansion and conversion to sound. Wall Street’s involved increased in the 1930s as various firms engineered and financed the reorganization of foundering studios and became more directly involved in their management and operations as
well. The federal government initiated an economic recovery program during the Depression which enabled the major Hollywood powers to solidify their control of the industry. Franklin. D. Roosevelt’s presidency in 1932 and the impact of FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) helped the film industry in 1933. The NIRA was created to promote recovery by condoning certain monopoly practices by major US industries - including motion pictures. Motion Picture producers and Distributors Association drafted the Code of Fair Competition required by the NIRA. Another significant effect of the NIRA was the rise of organized labor. To mitigate the potential for worker exploitation and abuse, the NIRA authorized labor organizing and collective bargaining- an effort reinforced by Congress via the Wagner Act in 1935 and creation of National Labor relations. The extensive codification and regulation of the movie industry stabilized film-making and enhanced economic recovery during the 1930s.