Jon Lewis, Hollywood v Hardcore: How the Struggle over Censorship saved the Modern Film Industry, New York University Press, New York, 2000
'When the House Committe on Un-American Activites (HUAC) first convened in the fall of 1947, the film industry was on the verge of some very big changes. The stability and profitability of theatrical exhibition were severely threatened by the shift in the population out of the big cities, the Justice departments rekindled interest in breaking up the studio trusts, and the development of a competitive audiovisual pop culture on televison...by 1947 the studiosrelations with exhibitors and the industry work force had become profoundly adversarial' (p.11)
'The committee [HUAC] helped the studios better manage an uncertain labor situation; moreover, it helped them cut expenses and payrolls in preparation fro a widely predicted post war box office decline' (p.11)
'Two parallel dramas emerge once we begin to look at the blacklist as a fiscal as well as an ideological struggle. The first involves a residual, pervasive psotwar anti-semitism that got HUAC interested in (Jewish) Hollywood...The New York Offices-the mostly non-jewish, old money corporate owners-of the West Coast Studio exploited post war anti-semitism not only to combat the unions but to force out the first generation Jewish studio moguls. In doing so, they put an end to an entepreneurial system run by charismatic but inefficient self-made businessmen, a system that seemed suddenly out of step with postwar American capitalism...the blacklist enabled the MPAA to establish in its place a system far better suited for business in post-industrial, postwar America and far more suitable ethnically and politically for doing business with the Federal government.' (pp.12-13) A second story invovles the Motion Picture Association of America, which allied w HUAC seemingly against its own best interests, only to emerge from the fray as a powerful industry gatekeeper.' (p.13)
David Parkinson, History of Film, Thames and Hudson, 1995.
There was a post war slump for the film industry caused by a number of factors: a decline in audience; the placement of a tariff on American films by Britain, at the time, Hollywood's largest export market; a rise in costs caused by inflation and an employee pay rise caused by the 1945 studio strike; and the 1948 Paramount decision which held that the studios had to demonopolise the distribution of films. (p.155)
Brian Neve, Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition, Routledge, London, 1992.
'The year 1946 had been the peak year for admissions, following the wartime boom, but after that a decade long decline set in, reflecting new educational and leisurre pursuits, the post-war baby boom, and ultimately the spread of television.' (p.85)
'In 1947 there were fifteen producing companies for every one operation that exiated in 1940, and some of this growth in independent production was a result of efforts to avoid high marginal tax rates on personal incomes by new ventures in which payments could be claimed as capital gains, and thus be sibject to considerably less tax. New production companies also seemed to offer more independence to writers and directors.' (p.87)
'Viewed in historical perspective the second halrf of the 1940's was a period when the traditional Hollywood system suffered a series of 'shocks', the most significant of which was the decline in audience and profits, beginning in 1947. Least unexpected was the Supreme Court's decision, handed down in May 1948, in the Paramount case...With the beginning of divestiture the major five studios also began to have a reduced ability to enforce the hidebound formulas of the Production Code...More central to the post-war politics of the idustry was the outbreak of violence on the picket lines as conflicts over union recognition widened the political divisions in Hollywood.' (p.88)
'The blacklist instituted as a consequence of the 1947 congressional investigation was arguably the 'shock' that had the greatest impact on film content.' (p.92)
'To Polonsky the post war period in Hollywood was a time of 'interesting ideas'. Although the Hollywood Production sustem has generally been seen as neutralising any overt political content in film, as well as imposing a uniform and politically conservative aesthetic onthe industry's output, it is arguable that the disruption to the usual pattern of the industry after the war in some way increased the opportunities for different kinds of control over the work of Hollywood's creative community. But the anthropologist hortense Powdermaker, writing at the end of the 1940s, presented a generally pessimistic view of Hollywood's development, seeing it as representing the totalitarian aspects of both business culture and mass communications.' (p.94)
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