In your study of movies, keep in mind that the
art of the movies has been influenced not only by
changes in technology and cinematic conventions
but also by changes in the production process.
Thus the Hollywood studio-system process that
created F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two
Humans(1927) was very different from the inde-
pendent production process that created Ang Lee’s
Brokeback Mountain(2005). The history of Holly-
wood production systems can be easily understood
as comprising three basic periods: the studio sys-
tem, the independent system, and a system today
that manages to combine them. Let’s look more
closely at each of them.
The Studio System
Organization before 1931
The studio system’s roots go back to the first
decade of the twentieth century and the pioneer-
ing attempts of men such as Thomas Edison, Carl
Laemmle, Thomas H. Ince, and D. W. Griffith to
make, distribute, and exhibit movies. In 1905,
Laemmle began to distribute and exhibit films, but
by 1909 his efforts were threatened by the Motion
Picture Patents Company (MPPC—not to be con-
fused with the Motion Picture Production Code), a
protective trade association (or trust) controlled by
Edison, which sought both to control the motion-
picture industry completely and to eliminate com-
petition by charging licensing fees on production
and projection equipment. However, widespread
resistance to the MPPC encouraged competition
and laid the groundwork for both the studio and
independent systems of production. The U.S. gov-
ernment broke the MPPC monopoly in 1915.
Between 1907 and 1913, a large number of movie
production companies in New York and New Jersey
migrated to various spots in warmer climates,
including Florida, Texas, and New Mexico, but
eventually the main companies settled in southern
California in and around Hollywood. They did so to
take advantage of the year-round good weather, the
beautiful and varied scenery, the abundant light for
outdoor shooting, and the geographic distance
from the greedy MPPC;^9 soon they had a critical
mass of both capital and talent on which to build an
industry. By 1915, more than 60 percent of the
American film industry, employing approximately
15,000 workers, was located in Hollywood.
The early studios relied on a system dominated
by a central producer, a person in charge of the
well-organized mass production system that was
necessary for producing feature films. This system
of central production began in 1912 and was the
dominant practice by 1914. At his Hollywood stu-
dio, Inceville, Thomas H. Ince was the first studio
head to insist that the authority and responsibili-
ties of the producer, as executive head of a movie
production, were distinctly different from those
of the director. Before 1931, typical Hollywood
studios were dominated by central producers such
as Irving Thalberg at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,
Adolph Zukor at Paramount, and Harry and Jack
Warner at Warner Bros. These men—known as
moguls, a reference to the powerful Muslim Mongol
(or Mogul) conquerors of India—controlled the
overall and day-to-day operations of their studios.
Executives in New York, generally called the
“New York office,” controlled the studios finan-
cially; various personnel at the studios handled the
myriad details of producing films. Central produc-
ers, such as Thalberg, supervised a team of associ-
ate supervisors (not yet called producers), each of
whom had an area of specialization (sophisticated
comedies, Westerns, etc.). The associate supervi-
sors handled the day-to-day operations of film pro-
duction, but the central producer retained total
control.
By the late 1920s, the film industry had come to
see that the central-producer system encouraged
quantity over quality and that less-than-stellar
movies did not draw audiences into theaters. As a
result, the industry sought a new system, one that
would value both profits and aesthetic value.(^9) This peculiar mixture of art, geography, and economics is the
subject of Allen J. Scott’s On Hollywood: The Place, the Industry
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).
THE STUDIO SYSTEM 495