November 14, 2012

1950s and TV

Movies had to compete

Different ways of competing - aiming at the new target audience - teenagers

Baby Boomers! - the biggest bump in history (population-wise)

This is the first generation that had everything aimed at them.

Their media world (and more) was designed to appeal to them.

Movies - TV - Driving around (gas was almost free) - music - dances - dating -

Drive Ins were one way of competing for that new market

this new trend coincided with the opening of that whole free market for movies - new kinds of movies came up to fill this new market - cheap, easy to make, crappy, fun, silly, B movies -

These B movies allow for a whole new population of movie makers to break in. These new people aren’t the studio type.

This is the rise of independent cinema.

New genres - horror changes and becomes more violent and more grotesque
science fiction comes out (thanks to science advances)
new kinds of romance movies (teenager romance)
new kinds of movie stars - teenagers

Adults were also not going to movies, so Hollywood had to change their movies too.

Epics - big, loud, amazing, giant casts, huge screens (Cinerama, 70mm, Cinemascope), special effects, big ideas, period pieces, crazy new stunts, etc.

These were the opposite of little black and white TVs

Ben Hur, Spartacus, El Cid? These are epics

Even the way movies were made was changing to fit these new ideas

The Method - a new style of acting that was really unusual compared to old acting

Old Style - pretend to cry, pretend to laugh, pretend to be angry, PRETEND

The Method - actually cry, actually laugh, actually be angry, BE
Marlon Brando -

James Dean -

Sense memory - Research - Active listening -

The old bosses and old styles and old studios and all that starts to look pretty goofy

As we get into the 60s there’s a feeling that Hollywood is for old folks - it is ridiculous and the movies are out of touch.

1960s.

Vietnam
Drugs
Hippies
Music Revolution
TV news
Black/white politics
female/male politics
The Pill
Influence of foreign movies
Relax of the Hays Code
Independent movies

Bonnie and Clyde told the old bosses that they didn’t get it.

And they actually learned from this.

They started making deals with a that new generation of young, crazy, independent people and the entire industry went totally different.

For 10 years after this (so, the 1970s) movies are incredible.

The Second Golden Age of Hollywood.

This is the era of:

Steven Spielberg - Jaws
George Lucas - Star Wars
Francis Ford Coppola - The Godfather
Martin Scorsese - Taxi Driver
William Friedkin - The Exorcist

November 13, 2012

Montage - Sergei Eisenstein - Soviet filmmaker
these guys back then were making propaganda movies, BUT, this guy had hit on some incredible new ideas that totally influenced Hollywood and reinvented movies forever

The Kuleshov Effect
this was discovered as a way of manipulating viewers and it works like crazy thanks to our brains
that experiment showed that we relate imagery that we see in succession and we create a linkage and a story and an explanation for the linkage even if there is nothing
this became a foundation for a new kind of editing

Old Editing -
in the teens and 20s, editors simply put the pieces of film in story order, maybe inserting a few close ups that worked in sequence
the shots went in logical patterns - outside to inside - far to close - now to then

THEN Eisenstein used the Kuleshov effect to produce a new kind of editing that he called MONTAGE
the relationship between the shots would be in your head as an audience member

A bunch of European directors and writers and actors and producers were flooding to Hollywood in the 20s - 40s (maybe to escape Nazi stuff?) and they brought a LOT of new European ideas to the American style

AFTER WWII

Movies changed again - even more

The Hays Code - the production code - Will Hays (postmaster general) was hired by the studio bosses to create a code for what was allowed to be in the movies
the studio bosses did this themselves in order to stop somebody else from doing it
this guy lived with his sister, never got married, never had a drink, never swore and never did anything ever that normal people do. Religious fanatic.
AND WHAT DO YOU SUPPOSE WAS IN THE CODE?

After the war, things began to change

What would young men who had to been to war, and an unknown number of people traumatized by war, think about the Hays Code and the movies that came from it?

What about real life?

What about real themes and ideas?

A split in movies - the ridiculous fake, awful world of Hollywood movies and the post-war, interesting, “cool” movies
New Problem!

TV!

Free!

In the 1950s TV was out and it was free and awesome and at home and it was stealing viewers from movies

TVs were expensive, but once you paid for it, you had all that free content.

Movies immediately lost millions and millions

PLUS, the US government divested the theatres from the studios.

The studios were suffering!

At the exact same time, there was a NEW kind of creature alive in the world!

It was called TEENAGER

And it was terrifying!

It liked crazy things.

Cars, girls, boys, black people stuff!, weird music, naughty business, monsters, creepy things, comic books, all kinds of horrible, dangerous, evil, dark, bizarre stuff

November 12, 2012

D.W. Griffith

Jewish Connection?

L.A.? - Hollywood?

Why is L.A. the center of the movie world?

terrain - ocean, beach, desert, foothills, scrub, forest, mountains, snow
sun = light and it almost NEVER rains
expansion - the community was small and there was a TON of land to buy (and Jewish men could seem to buy it without too much hassle)
this was as far as they could get AWAY from the “trust” - the white, WASPy rich old guys who owned all the patents for movie making technology
Patterning - the first people that went there established a pattern and their friends and fellow moviemakers just jumped in

The Big Studios

Paramount
Universal
20th Century Fox (or Fox)
MGM
Warner Brothers

The movies that they made back in those early days, reflected a very specific POV.
This POV is the immigrant experience and it is STILL in the movies.

There is an outsider, he/she is special, he/she is misunderstood, he/she doesn’t fit, and then he/she does something awesome and shows everybody that he/she DESERVES to be accepted and then he/she is accepted by society.

This is also the story of Hollywood.

Hollywood is NOT a place. There is a place called Hollywood - it is a street - it used to be a road leading to a farm where the first studio was set up in a barn

Hollywood is a concept about dreams and about becoming something special
It is literally like a wish fulfillment for people who feel outside and sad.

What is the Hollywood sign?

In the late 19-teens there started to be an INCREDIBLE amount of money generated.

Charlie Chaplin was a comedy star in live shows, he came to movies for 500 a week, then 5000 a week, and then 10,000 a week and then he angrily quit to start his own studio because he wasn’t making enough money.

What did he realize? The studio bosses were making WAY MORE.

He realized that the audience loved him, not the bosses. HE was bigger than the movies.

That is the pattern of movies today. The star rules.

As the 20s start, there is a new development in movies and it is sound.

SOUND - 1925 - the first music videos were made
Warner Bros - experiments - 1 brother liked it, the others HATED it
No other studio boss wanted to use sound.
Movies are silent, they said.

This seems crazy. It is not.

The industry was built and running and AWESOME and why change it?

However, there was a tester done. The Jazz Singer 1927 was a MONSTER hit.

The audiences couldn’t get enough of MUSIC.

OVERNIGHT the other bosses said “Oh crap. We have to follow suit.”

The entire industry had to change on every single level. 

SO MANY actors lost their jobs, some because they had bad voices, but most because they were “old-fashioned” so people thought

All new filmmaking
All new writing
All new directing
All new acting
All new everything
Including, all new kinds of movies.

1930s - The Golden Age of Movies

New technology came in and everything went BUMP.
First thing - sound = music
But then, the geniuses showed up - Hollywood went to Broadway and got the really talented dance/song/acting/writing/etc people
There was also a strange influx of book writers coming in - sound = dialogue, which means new kinds of comedy and new kinds of action

That was called a “screwball comedy”

Gangster movies - dialogue rich, based on novels, tough guy writers, cool style

1939 - the best year for movies, ever (so many people have said).

The height of a system of movie making called The Studio System (somebody should do a presentation on this)

There is a little thing called World War 2 that kind of affects the movies.

Hey, who are the studio bosses again?

Hey, what was Hitler doing again?

Hey, isn’t there some kind of Jewish thing?

Hey, is this all connected?




Hollywood put all that they could of that stuff in movies, because TV surely could not