Many consider Hollywood’s Golden Age as beginning in 1915 with innovations in feature-length narrative film in the silent era, peaking with the introduction of sound and the development of the classic Hollywood style, and ending with the transformation of the Hollywood studio system post–World War II.

Hollywood Narrative and the Silent Era

D. W. Griffith, among the first “star” directors, was the single most important director in Hollywood’s early days. Griffith paved the way for all future narrative filmmakers by refining many of the narrative techniques introduced by Méliès and Porter and using nearly all of them in one film for the first time, including varied camera distances, close-up shots, multiple story lines, fast-paced editing, and symbolic imagery. Despite the cringe-inducing racism of this pioneering and controversial film, The Birth of a Nation (1915) was the first feature-length film (more than an hour long) produced in America. The three-hour epic was also the first blockbuster and cost moviegoers a record $2 admission. Although considered a technical masterpiece, the film glorified the Ku Klux Klan and stereotyped southern blacks, leading to a campaign against the film by the NAACP and protests and riots at many screenings. Nevertheless, the movie triggered Hollywood’s fascination with narrative films.

Feature films became the standard throughout the 1920s and introduced many of the film genres we continue to see produced today. The most popular films during the silent era were historical and religious epics, including Napoleon (1927), Ben-Hur (1925), and The Ten Commandments (1923), but the silent era also produced pioneering social dramas, mysteries, comedies, horror films, science-fiction films, war films, crime dramas, westerns, and even spy films. The silent era also introduced numerous technical innovations, established the Hollywood star system, and cemented the reputation of movies as a viable art form, when previously they had been seen as novelty entertainment.

The Introduction of Sound

With the studio system and Hollywood’s worldwide dominance firmly in place, the next big challenge was to bring sound to moving pictures. Various attempts at talkies had failed since Edison first tried to link phonograph and moving picture technologies in the 1890s. During the 1910s, however, technical breakthroughs at AT&T’s research arm, Bell Labs, produced prototypes of loudspeakers and sound amplifiers. Experiments with sound continued during the 1920s, particularly at Warner Brothers studios, which released numerous short sound films of vaudeville acts, featuring singers and comedians. The studio packaged them as a novelty along with silent feature films.

In 1927, Warner Brothers produced The Jazz Singer, a feature-length film starring Al Jolson, a charismatic and popular vaudeville singer who wore blackface makeup as part of his act. This further demonstrated, as did The Birth of a Nation, that racism in America carried into the film industry. An experiment, The Jazz Singer was basically a silent film interspersed with musical numbers and brief dialogue (“Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet”). At first there was only modest interest in the movie, which featured just 354 spoken words. But the film grew in popularity as it toured the Midwest, where audiences stood and cheered the short bursts of dialogue. The breakthrough film, however, was Warner Brothers’ 1928 release The Singing Fool, which also starred Jolson. Costing $200,000 to make, the film took in $5 million and “proved to all doubters that talkies were here to stay.”6

Warner Brothers, however, was not the only studio exploring sound technology. Five months before The Jazz Singer opened, Fox studio premiered sound-film newsreels. Fox’s newsreel company, Movietone, captured the first film footage with sound of the takeoff and return of Charles Lindbergh, who piloted the first solo, nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean in May 1927. Fox’s Movietone system recorded sound directly onto the film, running it on a narrow filmstrip that ran alongside the larger image portion of the film. Superior to the sound-on-record system, the Movietone method eventually became film’s standard sound system.

Boosted by the innovation of sound, annual movie attendance in the United States rose from sixty million a week in 1927 to ninety million a week in 1929. By 1931, nearly 85 percent of America’s twenty thousand theaters accommodated sound pictures; and by 1935, the world had adopted talking films as the commercial standard.

The Development of the Hollywood Style

By the time sound came to movies, Hollywood dictated not only the business but also the style of most moviemaking worldwide. That style, or model, for storytelling developed with the rise of the studio system in the 1920s, solidified during the first two decades of the sound era, and continues to dominate American filmmaking today. The model serves up three ingredients that give Hollywood movies their distinctive flavor: the narrative, the genre, and the author (or director). The right blend of these ingredients—combined with timing, marketing, and luck—has led to many movie hits, from 1930s and 1940s classics like It Happened One Night, Gone with the Wind, The Philadelphia Story, and Casablanca to recent successes like The Hunger Games (2012) and Gravity (2013).

Hollywood Narratives

American filmmakers from D. W. Griffith to Steven Spielberg have understood the allure of narrative, which always includes two basic components: the story (what happens to whom) and the discourse (how the story is told). Further, Hollywood codified a familiar narrative structure across all genres. Most movies, like most TV shows and novels, feature recognizable character types (protagonist, antagonist, romantic interest, sidekick); a clear beginning, middle, and end (even with flashbacks and flash-forwards, the sequence of events is usually clear to the viewer); and a plot propelled by the main character experiencing and resolving a conflict by the end of the movie.

Within Hollywood’s classic narratives, filmgoers find an amazing array of intriguing cultural variations. For example, familiar narrative conventions of heroes, villains, conflicts, and resolutions may be made more unique with inventions like computer-generated imagery (CGI) or digital remastering for an IMAX 3D Experience release. This combination of convention and invention—standardized Hollywood stories and differentiated special effects—provides a powerful economic package that satisfies most audiences’ appetites for both the familiar and the distinctive.

Hollywood Genres

In general, Hollywood narratives fit a genre, or category, in which conventions regarding similar characters, scenes, structures, and themes recur in combination. (See Table 7.1 for a list of Hollywood’s top movie genres.) Grouping films by category is another way for the industry to achieve the two related economic goals of product standardization and product differentiation. By making films that fall into popular genres, the movie industry provides familiar models that can be imitated. It is much easier for a studio to promote a film that already fits into a preexisting category with which viewers are familiar. Among the most familiar genres are comedy, adventure, drama, action, thriller/suspense, horror, romantic comedy, musical, documentary, western, gangster, fantasy–science fiction, and film noir.

Variations of dramas and comedies have long dominated film’s narrative history. A western typically features “good” cowboys battling “evil” bad guys, as in True Grit (2010), or resolves tension between the natural forces of the wilderness and the civilizing influence of a town. Romances (such as The Fault in Our Stars, 2014) present conflicts that are mediated by the ideal of love. Another popular genre, thriller/suspense (such as Prisoners, 2013), usually casts “the city” as a corrupting place that needs to be overcome by the moral courage of a heroic detective.7

Because most Hollywood narratives try to create believable worlds, the artificial style of musicals is sometimes a disruption of what many viewers expect. Musicals’ popularity peaked in the 1940s and 1950s, but they showed a small resurgence in the 2000s with Moulin Rouge! (2001), Chicago (2002), and Les Misérables (2012). Still, no live-action musicals rank among the top fifty highest-grossing films of all time.

Another fascinating genre is the horror film, which also claims none of the top fifty highest-grossing films of all time. In fact, from Psycho (1960) to The Conjuring (2013), this lightly regarded genre has earned only one Oscar for best picture: Silence of the Lambs (1991). Yet these movies are extremely popular with teenagers, among the largest theatergoing audience, who are in search of cultural choices distinct from those of their parents. Critics suggest that the teen appeal of horror movies is similar to the allure of gangster rap or heavy-metal music; they believe teens enjoy the horror genre because it is a cultural form that often carries anti-adult messages and does not appeal to most adults.

The film noir genre (French for “black film”) developed in the United States in the late 1920s and hit its peak after World War II. Still, the genre continues to influence movies today. Using low-lighting techniques, few daytime scenes, and bleak urban settings, films in this genre (such as The Big Sleep, 1946, and Sunset Boulevard, 1950) explore unstable characters and the sinister side of human nature. Although the French critics who first identified noir as a genre place these films in the 1940s, their influence resonates in contemporary films—sometimes called neo-noir—including Se7en (1995), L.A. Confidential (1997), and Sin City (2005).

Hollywood “Authors”

In commercial filmmaking, the director serves as the main author of a film. Sometimes called “auteurs,” successful directors develop a particular cinematic style or an interest in particular topics that differentiates their narratives from those of other directors. Alfred Hitchcock, for instance, redefined the suspense drama through editing techniques that heightened tension (Rear Window, 1954; Vertigo, 1958; North by Northwest, 1959; Psycho, 1960).

The contemporary status of directors stems from two breakthrough films: Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) and George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973), which became surprise box-office hits. Their inexpensive budgets, rock-and-roll soundtracks, and big payoffs created opportunities for a new generation of directors. The success of these films exposed cracks in the Hollywood system, which was losing money in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Studio executives seemed at a loss to explain and predict the tastes of a new generation of moviegoers. Yet Hopper and Lucas had tapped into the anxieties of the postwar baby-boom generation in its search for self-realization, its longing for an innocent past, and its efforts to cope with the turbulence of the 1960s.

This opened the door for a new wave of directors who were trained in California or New York film schools and were also products of the 1960s, such as Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, 1972), William Friedkin (The Exorcist, 1973), Steven Spielberg (Jaws, 1975), Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, 1976), Brian De Palma (Carrie, 1976), and George Lucas (Star Wars, 1977). Combining news or documentary techniques and Hollywood narratives, these films demonstrated how mass media borders had become blurred and how movies had become dependent on audiences who were used to television and rock and roll. These films signaled the start of a period that Scorsese has called “the deification of the director.” A handful of successful directors gained the kind of economic clout and celebrity standing that had belonged almost exclusively to top movie stars.

Although the status of directors grew in the 1960s and 1970s, recognition for women directors of Hollywood features remained rare.8 A breakthrough came with Kathryn Bigelow’s best director Academy Award for The Hurt Locker (2009), which also won the best picture award. Prior to Bigelow’s win, only three women had received an Academy Award nomination for directing a feature film: Lina Wertmüller in 1976 for Seven Beauties, Jane Campion in 1994 for The Piano, and Sofia Coppola in 2004 for Lost in Translation. Both Wertmüller and Campion are from outside the United States, where women directors frequently receive more opportunities for film development. Some women in the United States get an opportunity to direct because of their prominent standing as popular actors; Barbra Streisand, Jodie Foster, Penny Marshall, and Sally Field all fall into this category. Other women have come to direct films via their scriptwriting achievements. For example, Jennifer Lee, who wrote Wreck-It Ralph (2012), followed up by writing and directing Frozen (2013). Other women directors—like Bigelow, Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight, 2008), Lone Scherfig (One Day, 2011), Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone, 2010), and Kimberly Peirce (Carrie, 2013)—have moved past debut films and proven themselves as experienced studio auteurs.

Members of minority groups, including African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, have also struggled for recognition in Hollywood. Still, some have succeeded as directors, crossing over from careers as actors or gaining notoriety through independent filmmaking. Among the most successful contemporary African American directors are Kasi Lemmons (Black Nativity, 2013), Lee Daniels (The Butler, 2013), John Singleton (Abduction, 2011), Tyler Perry (A Madea Christmas, 2013), and Spike Lee (Oldboy, 2013). (See “Case Study: Breaking through Hollywood’s Race Barrier” on page 247.) Asian Americans such as M. Night Shyamalan (After Earth, 2013), Ang Lee (Life of Pi, 2012), Wayne Wang (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, 2011), and documentarian Arthur Dong (Hollywood Chinese, 2007) have built immensely accomplished directing careers. Chris Eyre (Hide Away, 2011) remains the most noted Native American director, working mainly as an independent filmmaker.

Outside the Hollywood System

Since the rise of the studio system, Hollywood has focused on feature-length movies that command popular attention and earn the most money. However, the movie industry has a long tradition of films made outside the Hollywood studio system. In the following sections, we look at three alternatives to Hollywood: international films, documentaries, and independent films.

Global Cinema

For generations, Hollywood has dominated the global movie scene. In many countries, American films capture up to 90 percent of the market. In striking contrast, foreign films constitute only a tiny fraction—less than 2 percent—of motion pictures seen in the United States today. Despite Hollywood’s domination of global film distribution, other countries have a rich history of producing both successful and provocative short-subject and feature films. For example, cinematic movements of the twentieth century—such as German expressionism (capturing psychological moods), Soviet social realism (presenting a positive view of Soviet life), Italian neorealism (focusing on the everyday lives of Italians), and European new-wave cinema (experimenting with the language of film)—and post–World War II Japanese, Hong Kong, Korean, Australian, Indian, Canadian, and British cinema have all been extremely influential, demonstrating alternatives to the Hollywood approach.

Early on, Americans showed interest in British and French short films and in experimental films, such as Germany’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). Foreign-language movies did reasonably well throughout the 1920s, especially in ethnic neighborhood theaters in large American cities. For a time, Hollywood studios even dubbed some popular American movies into Spanish, Italian, French, and German for these theaters. But the Depression brought cutbacks, and by the 1930s, the daughters and sons of turn-of-the-century immigrants—many of whom were trying to assimilate into mainstream American culture—preferred their Hollywood movies in English.9

Postwar prosperity, rising globalism, and the gradual decline of the studios’ hold over theater exhibition in the 1950s and 1960s stimulated the rise of art-house theaters, and these decades saw a rebirth of interest in foreign-language films by such prominent directors as Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman (Wild Strawberries, 1957), Italy’s Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita, 1960), France’s François Truffaut (Jules and Jim, 1961), Japan’s Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai, 1954), and India’s Satyajit Ray (Apu Trilogy, 1955–1959). Catering to academic audiences, art houses made a statement against Hollywood commercialism as they sought to show alternative movies.

By the late 1970s, though, the home video market had emerged, and audiences began staying home to watch both foreign and domestic films. New multiplex theater owners rejected the smaller profit margins of most foreign titles, which lacked the promotional hype of U.S. films. As a result, between 1966 and 1990 the number of foreign films released annually in the United States dropped by two-thirds, from nearly three hundred to about one hundred titles per year.

With the growth of superstore video chains like Blockbuster in the 1990s, which were supplanted by online video services like Netflix in the 2000s, viewers gained access to a larger selection of foreign-language titles. The successes of Amélie (France, 2001), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Sweden, 2009), and Instructions Not Included (Mexico, 2013) illustrate that U.S. audiences are willing to watch subtitled films with non-Hollywood perspectives. However, foreign films are losing ground as they compete with the expanding independent American film market for screen space.

Today, the largest film industry is in India, out of Bollywood (a play on words combining city names Bombay—now Mumbai—and Hollywood), where about a thousand films a year are produced—mostly romance or adventure musicals in a distinct style.10 In comparison, Hollywood moviemakers release five hundred to six hundred films a year. (For a broader perspective, see “Global Village: Beyond Hollywood: Asian Cinema” on page 250.)

The Documentary Tradition

Both TV news and nonfiction films trace their roots to the movie industry’s interest films and newsreels of the late 1890s. In Britain, interest films compiled footage of regional wars, political leaders, industrial workers, and agricultural scenes, and were screened with fiction shorts. Pioneered in France and England, newsreels consisted of weekly ten-minute magazine-style compilations of filmed news events from around the world. International news services began supplying theaters and movie studios with newsreels, and by 1911, they had become a regular part of the moviegoing menu.

Early filmmakers also produced travelogues, which recorded daily life in various communities around the world. Travel films reached a new status in Robert Flaherty’s classic Nanook of the North (1922), which tracked an Inuit family in the harsh Hudson Bay region of Canada. Flaherty edited his fifty-five-minute film to both tell and interpret the story of his subject. Flaherty’s second film, Moana (1925), a study of the lush South Pacific islands, inspired the term documentary in a 1926 film review by John Grierson, a Scottish film producer. Grierson defined Flaherty’s work and the documentary form as “the creative treatment of actuality,” or a genre that interprets reality by recording real people and settings.

Over time, the documentary developed an identity apart from its commercial presentation. As an educational, noncommercial form, the documentary usually required the backing of industry, government, or philanthropy to cover costs. In support of a clear alternative to Hollywood cinema, some nations began creating special units, such as Canada’s National Film Board, to sponsor documentaries. In the United States, art and film received considerable support from the Roosevelt administration during the Depression.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the development of portable cameras had led to cinema verité (a French term for “truth film”). This documentary style allowed filmmakers to go where cameras could not go before and record fragments of everyday life more unobtrusively. Directly opposed to packaged, high-gloss Hollywood features, verité aimed to track reality, employing a rough, grainy look and shaky, handheld camera work. Among the key innovators in cinema verité was Drew Associates, led by Robert Drew, a former Life magazine photographer. Through his connection to Time Inc. (which owned Life) and its chain of TV stations, Drew shot the groundbreaking documentary Primary, which followed the 1960 Democratic presidential primary race between Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy.

Perhaps the major contribution of documentaries has been their willingness to tackle controversial or unpopular subject matter. For example, American documentary filmmaker Michael Moore often addresses complex topics that target corporations or the government. His films include Roger and Me (1989), a comic and controversial look at the relationship between the city of Flint, Michigan, and General Motors; the Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine (2002), an exploration of gun violence; Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), a critique of the Bush administration’s Middle East policies; Sicko (2007), an investigation of the U.S. health-care system; and Capitalism: A Love Story (2009), a study of corporate culture in the United States. Moore’s recent films were part of a resurgence in high-profile documentary filmmaking in the United States, which included The Fog of War (2003), Super Size Me (2004), An Inconvenient Truth (2006), The Cove (2009), and Bully (2012).

The Rise of Independent Films

The success of documentary films like Super Size Me and Fahrenheit 9/11 dovetails with the rise of indies, or independently produced films. As opposed to directors working in the Hollywood system, independent filmmakers typically operate on a shoestring budget and show their movies in thousands of campus auditoriums and at hundreds of small film festivals. The decreasing costs of portable technology, including smaller digital cameras and computer editing, have kept many documentary and independent filmmakers in business. They make movies inexpensively, relying on real-life situations, stage actors and nonactors, crews made up of friends and students, and local nonstudio settings. Successful independents like Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation, 2003; The Bling Ring, 2013) and Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man, 1995; Only Lovers Left Alive, 2014) continue to find substantial audiences in college and art-house theaters and through online DVD and streaming services like Netflix, which promote work produced outside the studio system. Meanwhile, independent-minded filmmakers like Wes Anderson (Rushmore, 1998; The Grand Budapest Hotel, 2014), Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan, 2010; Noah, 2014), and David O. Russell (The Fighter, 2010; American Hustle, 2013) have established careers somewhere between fully independent and studio backed, often with smaller companies financing their films before they’re picked up by bigger studios.

Distributing smaller films can be big business for the studios. The rise of independent film festivals in the 1990s—especially the Sundance Film Festival held every January in Park City, Utah—helped Hollywood rediscover low-cost independent films as an alternative to traditional movies with Titanic-size budgets. Films such as Little Miss Sunshine (2006), 500 Days of Summer (2009), The Way, Way Back (2013), and Whiplash (2014) were able to generate industry buzz and garner major studio distribution deals through Sundance screenings, becoming star vehicles for several directors and actors. As with the recording industry, the major studios see these festivals—which also include New York’s Tribeca Film Festival, the South by Southwest festival in Austin, and international film festivals in Toronto and Cannes—as important venues for discovering new talent. Some major studios even purchased successful independent film companies (Disney’s purchase of Miramax) or have developed in-house indie divisions (Sony’s Sony Pictures Classics) to specifically handle the development and distribution of indies.

But by 2010, the independent film business as a feeder system for major studios was declining due to the poor economy and studios’ waning interest in smaller specialty films. Disney sold Miramax for $660 million to an investor group composed of Hollywood outsiders. Viacom folded its independent unit, Paramount Vantage, into its main studio, and Time Warner closed its Warner Independent and Picturehouse in-house indie divisions. Meanwhile, producers of low-budget independent films increasingly looked to alternative digital distribution models, such as Internet downloads, direct DVD sales, and on-demand screenings via cable and services like Netflix.