Engineering Hollywood: technology, technicians, and the science of building the studio system, 1915-1930

2018-07-22Contrary to our understanding of the Hollywood studio system as an industry built by pioneering producers and forged through the vertical integration of production, distribution, and exhibition by the major studios, this project argues for the centrality of technological infrastructure and collaboration across the larger industrial cluster of Hollywood. Instead of the vertically-integrated studios, I argue it was the horizontally-organized trade associations and collaborative endeavors around technology which allowed the system to dominate motion picture production for decades. By focusing on the role played by technology, we see a new map of the studio system beyond the backlots of Los Angeles and the front offices in New York. In this study, Hollywood includes the labs of industrial manufacturers, the sales routes of independent firms, the garages of tinkerers, and the clubhouses of technicians’ societies. ❧ Collaboration across the studios and technology manufacturers was facilitated by the increasingly central role of trade organizations such as the Society of Motion Picture Engineers and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which united engineers and technicians from across the studios and technology manufacturers and put them in dialogue with the producers and administrators running the studios. These organizations allowed for the increasing presence of engineers and engineering principals into the studios. They created a major role for themselves by convincing the producers of the benefits for knowledge sharing, particularly around technologies that were seen as non-competitive. While we tend to focus on the role of innovative technologies, these trade associations recognized the importance of mundane technologies in creating a professionalized industry. ❧ The dominant narrative of motion picture technology in the 1920s has focused on revolutionary advances such as sound and color, but it was the mundane everyday technologies such as lighting, film stock, and cameras around which the infrastructure of the system was built. The focus in scholarship on innovation and its effects on artistic style have clouded the important role of maintenance, training, incremental improvement, and standardization in creating a stable structure for a creative industry to flourish. As such, this project focuses on those technologies on which strategies for collaboration were built, including the shifts to incandescent lighting and panchromatic film and the improvement of existing tools such as cameras and set materials after the introduction of sound. ❧ This dissertation argues that the American motion picture industry was stabilized and able to dominate the field for decades through collaboration over technologies over everyday use. Hollywood’s relationship to its essential technology was fundamentally one of interdependence and cooperation—with manufacturers, trade organizations, and the competing studios. The fact that those in charge of the producing companies had little understanding of the technology that made their industry work forced them to rely on the expertise of their technicians and of outside engineers. Through collaboration over technology, the Hollywood studios and their supporting institutions created collective standards facilitated and reinforced by the sharing of technical knowledge. As such, Hollywood could be defined as an industry by participation in a closed system of technical collaboration that allowed a select group of producers and manufacturers to dominate the motion picture business for decades