Screening History (1992)

by Gore Vidal

Screening History is a collection of three autobiographical essays by Gore Vidal that revolve around his experience of film. Reading the book is a one of a kind experience in itself. Vidal weaves the display of history on the screen with his own history during the Great Depression, then World War Two and finally, his own attempts at creating drama for the screen in television and film. It’s a fascinating mélange of topics that all relate to each other in a very conversational way and provide real insight on the true nature of society by a man who is utterly unafraid to tell it like it is, and at the same time seems to have no self-pity about it, which is not only refreshing but surprising. The through line however, remains history. “From earliest days, the movies have been screening history, and if one saw enough movies, one learned quite a lot of simple-minded history . . . In retrospect, it is curious how much history was screened in those days.” At the time his essays were written, films and television had seemingly abandoned history for contemporary themes and stories. But Vidal even managed to see that in a positive light as well. “Fortunately, with time even the most contemporary movie undergoes metamorphosis, becomes history as we get to see real life as it was when the film was made . . .”

The first essay is The Prince and the Pauper and it begins with Vidal as a child, growing up devouring literature but at the same time fascinated with the movies. But it is also a critical look at the anti-intellectualism of the time. Not only had literature gone out of fashion (as it has continued to do) but films had replaced literature as the connective tissue of the society: “Movies are the lingua franca of the twentieth century . . . Today, where literature was movies are . . . Art is now sight and sound; and the books are shut.” What really stands out about his reminiscences, however, is the way in which films were watched when he was a boy. “It must be recalled that in those days if you saw a movie once, that was that. Odds were slim that you would ever see it again . . . since we knew that we would have only the one encounter, we learned how to concentrate totally.” Vidal equates the film itself, a frothy Errol Flynn essay of the Mark Twain classic by Warner Brothers, with his own experience of the Depression. He himself was a prince who grew up in a privileged household and yet all at once became aware that there were others less fortunate than himself and his family, a country full of paupers. He ends the essay by looking at death, especially as the young prince is nearly executed, not for answers but for a reiteration of the idea of a satisfying acknowledgement of cessation of existence that is almost impossible for young children to understand.

Vidal’s second essay concerns the British film Fire Over England, but only in the way that England once again manipulated the United States into war. His larger aim is not only to recount his own memories of adolescence during the war but to look at the role of the media in shaping (Vidal would probably say creating) our view of everything outside our personal experience. “I may have given the impression that I was going to confine myself to those ninety-minute entertainments that were screened in the theaters of my youth. Actually, my subject is how, through ear and eye, we are both defined and manipulated by fictions of such potency that they are able to replace our own experience, often becoming our sole experience of reality.” During the Depression Vidal notes how all of Hollywood seemed to be under the thrall of Britain. There were films in the very early thirties about American icons, like W.D. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln from 1930, or Warner Brothers’ Alexander Hamilton from the following year, but overall, “On our screens, in the thirties, it seemed as if the only country on earth was England and there were no great personages who were not English, or impersonated by English Actors.” As far as the film itself goes, Fire Over England is concerned with the ever-present Hollywood contention between the England of Elizabeth I and King Philip of Spain, a convenient substitute for the England of George VI and Hitler’s Germany. “Historical pieces could always conceal messages, since studios were certain that nothing that happened then could every have anything at all to do with now.”

In his essay on Lincoln, Vidal bemoans the lack of American icons in film and recounts his simultaneous obsession with the sixteenth president. And yet again, none of that really culminates in discussing his own novel, Lincoln, or the subsequent TV movie made of the book. Interestingly, his first real point is about Jefferson and his atheistic emphasis on the living rather than the dominant religious view in our country, “a sectarian society such as ours where we are expected to endure meekly our brief transit through a vale of tears en route to an eternity of bliss.” After that he reminisces about his army experience during the war and the death of FDR. This is followed by some of the television dramas and Hollywood screenplays he wrote but all overlaid with the inability of the motion picture industry to really delve into American mythology in any meaningful way. “The black population always got the point to the slave-owning Virginia founding fathers, which means that our history, properly screened, is a potential hornet’s nest.” Though HBO would go on to produce a remarkable series on the country’s founding, John Adams, the industry has yet to deal with Washington and Jefferson in any definitive way. Screening History is a remarkable reminiscence, and while Hollywood only figures into the narrative tangentially, it is a remarkable work and easily recommended.

Movie-Made America (1994)

by Robert Sklar

This book is not an easy read. Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies by Robert Sklar contains a dense amount of research about film history and yet surprisingly few references to specific films. But that’s sort of the point. In fact, this could really be seen as a companion piece to Thomas Schatz’s book, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. Where that book really dealt with the studio moguls and the pivotal role of the producer in creating specific films, Sklar’s book deals with the audience and those who would attempt to control Hollywood’s immense influence over that audience. The subtitle really says it all, and the way in which Hollywood influenced and responded to American Culture is fascinating in its own right. What emerges is a portrait of an industry that, more than any other in the United States, expended the majority of its energy in responding to cultural taste in its audience rather than trying to create that audience. It’s a significant difference, and throughout the book those executives who were the most successful were the ones who understood this.

The biggest failure in the early motion picture industry in the United States was Thomas Edison. In attempting to emulate the nineteenth-century robber barons of his youth he tried to gain a monopoly over infrastructure rather than the audience. He claimed patents on motion picture cameras and film stock and through his organization known as The Trust, attempted to coerce every film distributor into working for him by the threat of lawsuits if they didn’t. Edison never really cared about his product, only about the control he could exert over it. One of the men who defied Edison’s trust was Carl Laemmle. He created his own distribution company called the Independent Moving Picture Company, which he aptly abbreviated as Imp. He was able to distribute films from Europe, which the Trust had no control over, as well as obtaining film stock from France and, along with William Fox and Adolph Zukor, effectively broke the trust. Laemmle would, of course, eventually found Universal Studios in California. He, along with the other moguls, quickly realized that their greatest potential for profits was to be found in production rather than distribution, and soon after the exodus from New York to California made the West Coast the new center of the film industry.

The other major emphasis of Sklar’s work is what he sees as the continuing battle for control over content of film. The genius of the moguls in avoiding government control over the movies came in the form of Hollywood’s own production code. By putting in place their own censorship arm they were able to easily subvert complaints by religious groups and other would-be censors. In the early thirties, however, once the threat of government intervention had been avoided, the studios completely ignored the code and filmed stories of violence and gangsters, seduction and divorce, as much nudity as they could get away with, and anything else that they thought would titillate audiences. By 1934, however, the backlash from moralists was so great that even the Catholic Church weight in and recommended a complete boycott of motion pictures. The studios were unwilling to risk the fallout should that happen and allowed Joseph Breen to put teeth into the production code, and from that moment on the audience for films continued to grow until after World War Two.

Sklar’s book effectively ends when Schatz’s does, with the precipitous decline in production during the fifties, though Sklar has a couple more chapters that go into the eighties. During the post-war period gimmicks like 3-D and lasting formats like widescreen were interesting for a while, but were not a solution to dwindling audiences who were more widely dispersed in suburbs and wanted to stay home for their entertainment. Again, this was a result of the studio heads failing to realize what audiences really wanted. Studios like Universal, which embraced television production rather than seeing it as the enemy, continued to do well, where the rest of the studios became little more than distribution companies for independent productions. The book is a masterpiece of research and Sklar apparently left no stone unturned in looking at the way film influenced American culture as well as the other way around. Movie-Made America is definitely a fascinating book, and while I was never quite convinced of his underlying thesis, it contains so much valuable information that it has to be considered required reading for anyone interested in film history.

The Genius of the System (1988)

by Thomas Schatz

This is a fascinating history of Hollywood. One of the most remarkable elements of The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era is the way that author Thomas Schatz structures his book. Rather than attempting to deal with all of the studios equally, instead he follows the growth of the systemic approach to filmmaking as it evolved, wherever it lead. In the first section of the book, for instance, the silent era begins at Universal with Irving Thalberg’s unsuccessful attempt to get Carl Laemmle to make more prestige pictures. It then moves with Thalberg to the consolidation of MGM and their hiring of Thalberg, who oversaw production as well as his hiring of David O. Selznick, who streamlined the story department before being fired after a confrontation with Thalberg. But that’s really all of the silent era covered. He then transitions to Warner Brothers’ embracing of sound and their hiring of Darryl Zanuck to run their film production.

One of the most interesting things that emerges from Schatz’s book is just how important these production heads were to the studios. Most film histories tend to focus on the studio heads, the moguls, like Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, William Fox and Adolph Zuckor, and their iron-fisted control of the studios they ran. But the reality is much different. While the studio heads primarily controlled finances, it was the heads of production who determined the kinds of films that the studios were making, from story ideas and scripts, to casting and direction, it was people like Selznick, Thalberg and Zanuck who were responsible for creating the “house style” that defined the look and the feel of the pictures produced at their studios. They were also the ones primarily responsibly for setting up the “system” that each studio used to produce their films, taking into account yearly budgets and the resources available to their particular studio.

Unknowingly, however, the machine that they created wound up working for the studios whether they were there or not. So, initially at least, while the moguls found their production heads indispensable once the depression was in full swing, Selznick, Thalberg and Zanuck found themselves being marginalized as the decade wore on. Thalberg succumbed to pneumonia in 1936, while Zanuck quit Warners to head the new 20th Century Fox conglomerate and Selznick bailed out altogether to form his own independent studio. But the studios themselves would not be immune for long. The common myth is that the breakup of their hold on talent began in the fifties with the introduction of television, but the reality is that it began much sooner than that. The war years saw increasing power shift to the stars and directors, aided by court cases that limited the studio’s dominance and, even without television it seems, things would have proceeded apace.

It’s a fascinating look at the history of American films precisely because of its de-emphasis on stars and studio heads. What emerges is a look at an industry that really flourished because of the artistic talents of producers and the assembling of production units that worked semi-independently to produce quality films at whatever studio they operated. Further, the development of production evolved to a point where independent producers like Selznick and Walter Wanger could make deals with different studios or work on their own and merely distribute through studios or independents like United Artists. Whatever your knowledge of film history is, The Genius of the System adds a new dimension to that history that can’t help but put it in a new light. Schatz has an casual and engaging that is never the less convincing for the massive research he put into it. It’s a great history and is highly recommended.