All the World's a Studio: The Internationalization of Hollywood Production and Location Shooting in the Postwar Era

After World War II as Hollywood faced a changing industrial and cultural landscape, U.S. film companies began making more movies abroad, where they took advantage of frozen foreign earnings, film subsidies, cheap labor and striking locations while also appealing to increasingly important overseas audiences. But how were Hollywood companies able to produce films globally away from the infrastructure of the motion picture industry in Los Angeles? What was the effect of shooting abroad on these films' form and style? This dissertation addresses these questions through an examination of Hollywood productions that were filmed overseas from 1948 to 1962. This study demonstrates that these films' financial and geographic characteristics and the relationship between a film's story setting and its shooting location were key causal forces that shaped how a Hollywood foreign production was organized. The dissertation also builds a historical account of the factors that facilitated a Hollywood film company's ability to export production to Great Britain, Italy and France. It argues that Hollywood's overseas productions resulted in a more flexible and transcultural movie-making process, in which filmmakers continued production practices established in the Hollywood studio system while adapting to the conditions of foreign film industries. Finally, applying a historical approach to film style, this study investigates the creative choices that arose when Hollywood filmmakers confronted the challenges of working in real-world locales. It makes the case that these filmmakers brought foreign location shooting in line with the conventions of Hollywood story and style while also treating locations as bold expressive elements of a film's visual design. Drawing on historical evidence gathered in Los Angeles and Europe (e.g. studio production records, personal correspondence, the film trade and popular press, memoirs, interviews and the films themselves), this inquiry illuminates how Hollywood created a more international production industry to navigate the transforming industrial, cultural and political climate of the postwar era. Ultimately, this project historicizes the ongoing debates about "runaway" production and serves as a model of analysis for studying the transnational flow of labor, production practices and stylistic ideas