The Studio System’s Golden Age

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.

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Hollywood Narrative and the Silent Era

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A SILENT COMEBACK The Artist, a tribute to silent movies set around the dawn of the talkies, won the Academy Award for best picture of 2011. It was the first (mostly) silent movie to win since the first Academy Awards in 1927.
© The Weinstein Company/Everett Collection

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.”9

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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 Gravity (2013) and Gone Girl (2014).

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

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TABLE 7.1 HOLLYWOOD’S TOP GENRES Data from: “Market Share for Each Genre 1995–2015,” The Numbers, June 24, 2015, www.the-numbers.com/market/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/performance, western, gangster, fantasy–science fiction, and film noir.

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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.10

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).

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FILM GENRES Psycho (1960), a classic horror film, tells the story of Marion Crane (played by Janet Leigh), who flees to a motel after embezzling $40,000 from her employer. There, she meets the motel owner, Norman Bates (played by Anthony Perkins), and her untimely death. The infamous shower scene, pictured above, is widely considered one of the most iconic horror film sequences.
Everett Collection

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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.11 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 (The Killing Fields of Dr. Haing S. Ngor, 2014) have built immensely accomplished directing careers. Chris Eyre (Hide Away, 2011) remains the most noted Native American director, working mainly as an independent filmmaker.

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WOMEN DIRECTORS have long struggled in Hollywood. However, some, like Kathryn Bigelow and Ava DuVernay are making a name for themselves. Known for her rough-and-tumble style of filmmaking and her penchant for directing action and thriller movies, Bigelow became the first woman to win the Academy Award for best director for The Hurt Locker in 2010. DuVernay (above) wasn’t nominated for her acclaimed Martin Luther King film Selma, but the project vaulted her into consideration for even bigger films.
Atsushi Nishijima/© Paramount Pictures/Everett Collection

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

LaunchPad

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Breaking Barriers with 12 Years a SlaveVisit LaunchPad to view a short clip from the Oscar-winning movie from director Steve McQueen.

Discussion: How do you think 12 Years a Slave differs from previous depictions of black history in America?

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.12

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FOREIGN FILMS China restricts the number of imported films shown and regulates the lengths of their runs in order to protect its own domestic film industry. Nonetheless, China has become a lucrative market—for both U.S. films and its own features, like The Monkey King (2014). This 3-D live-action film based on a classic Chinese folk story became one of China’s biggest hits of 2014.
The Kobal Collection at Art Resource, NY

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.

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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.13 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.)

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CASE STUDY

Breaking through Hollywood’s Race Barrier

T he problem of the term black cinema is that such a term needs to exist. (Do we, for example, talk about a white cinema in the United States?) But there is a long history of blacks’ exclusion from the industry as writers, directors, and actors—not to mention even as audience members at theaters—so when a film like Dope (2015) by director Rick Famuyiwa gets praised as “revolutionary” and “subversive,” it’s because this teen coming-of-age story dares to feature a cast that for the most part isn’t white. Even more exciting (and sadly rare), it opened not in a handful of theaters but on over two thousand screens nationwide.

Despite African Americans’ long support of the film industry, their moviegoing experience has not been the same as that of whites. From the late 1800s until the passage of Civil Rights legislation in the mid-1960s, many theater owners discriminated against black patrons. In large cities, blacks often had to attend separate theaters, where new movies might not appear until a year or two after white theaters had shown them. In smaller towns and in the South, blacks were often allowed to patronize local theaters only after midnight. In addition, some theater managers required black patrons to sit in less desirable areas of the theater.1

Changes began taking place during and after World War II. In response to the “white flight” from central cities during the suburbanization of the 1950s, many downtown and neighborhood theaters began catering to black customers in order to keep from going out of business. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, these theaters had become major venues for popular commercial films, even featuring a few movies about African Americans, including Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967), In the Heat of the Night (1967), The Learning Tree (1969), and Sounder (1972).

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© Open Road Films/Everett Collection

Based on the popularity of these films, black photographer-turned-filmmaker Gordon Parks, who directed The Learning Tree (adapted from his own novel), went on to make commercial action/adventure films, including Shaft (1971, remade by John Singleton in 2000). Popular in urban theaters—especially among black teenagers—the movies produced by Parks and his son, Gordon Parks Jr. (Super Fly, 1972), spawned a number of commercial imitators. Labeled blaxploitation movies, these films were the subject of heated cultural debates in the 1970s; like some rap songs today, they were both praised for their realistic depictions of black urban life and criticized for glorifying violence.

Opportunities for black film directors have expanded some since the 1980s and 1990s, but only recently have black filmmakers achieved a measure of mainstream success. Lee Daniels received only the second Academy Award nomination for a black director for Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire in 2009 (the first was John Singleton for Boyz N the Hood in 1991). Precious, about an obese, illiterate black teenage girl subjected to severe sexual and emotional abuse, was praised by many critics but decried by others who interpreted it as either more blaxploitation or “poverty porn.”2 In 2013, Daniels returned as the director of The Butler, inspired by the true story of an African American man who experienced major events of the twentieth century from his position as a White House butler. In that same year, 12 Years a Slave—a film by black British director Steve McQueen—told the story of a free African American man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. The film adaptation of Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir won three Academy Awards and a best director nomination for McQueen. McQueen became the first black director to win a best picture award.

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.

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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 the recent Where to Invade Next, a look at other countries’ quality of life. Moore’s later 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), Bully (2012), and Citizenfour (2014).

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DOCUMENTARY FILMS Citizenfour, a documentary released in 2014, tells the story of Edward Snowden—a whistleblower who leaked information regarding the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program—and follows along with him as he leaks the information and makes his identity public. The film, praised for its detail and tension, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2015.
© RADiUS-TWC/Everett Collection

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 (American Hustle, 2013; Joy, 2015) 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 developed in-house indie divisions (Sony’s Sony Pictures Classics) to specifically handle the development and distribution of indies.

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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.

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INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVALS, like the Sundance Film Festival, are widely recognized in the film industry as a major place to discover new talent and acquire independently made films on topics that might otherwise be too controversial, too niche specific, or too original for a major studio-backed picture. One of the breakout hits of Sundance 2015, the comedy-drama Me and Earl and the Dying Girl adapted a young-adult novel by Jesse Andrews and was picked up by Fox Searchlight for release that summer.
Anne Marie Fox/TM & © Fox Searchlight Pictures. All rights reserved/Everett Collection

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GLOBAL VILLAGE

Beyond Hollywood: Asian Cinema

A sian nations easily outstrip Hollywood in quantity of films produced. India alone produces about a thousand movies a year. But from India to South Korea, Asian films are increasingly challenging Hollywood in terms of quality, and they have become more influential as Asian directors, actors, and film styles are exported to Hollywood and the world.

India

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The current highest-grossing Indian film of all time is PK, a science-fiction comedy about a visiting alien.
© UTV Motion Pictures/Everett Collection

Part musical, part action, part romance, and part suspense, the epic films of Bollywood typically have fantastic sets, hordes of extras, plenty of wet saris, and symbolic fountain bursts (as a substitute for kissing and sex, which are prohibited from being shown). Indian movie fans pay from $.75 to $5 to see these films, and they feel shortchanged if the movies are shorter than three hours. With many films produced in less than a week, however, most of the Bollywood fare is cheaply produced and badly acted. But these production aesthetics are changing, as bigger-budget releases target middle and upper classes in India, the twenty-five million Indians living abroad, and Western audiences. Jab Tak Hai Jaan (2012), a romance starring Shahrukh Khan—India’s most famous leading man—had the most successful U.S. box-office opening of any Bollywood film. The film was released just weeks after the death of Yash Chopra, its award-winning director.

China

Since the late 1980s, Chinese cinema has developed an international reputation. Leading this generation of directors are Yimou Zhang (House of Flying Daggers, 2004; Coming Home, 2014) and Kaige Chen (Farewell My Concubine, 1993; Caught in the Web, 2012), whose work has spanned such genres as historical epics, love stories, contemporary tales of city life, and action fantasy. These directors have also helped make international stars out of Li Gong (Memoirs of a Geisha, 2005; Coming Home, 2014) and Ziyi Zhang (Memoirs of a Geisha, 2005; Dangerous Liaisons, 2012).

Hong Kong

Hong Kong films were the most talked about—and the most influential—film genre in cinema throughout the late 1980s and 1990s. The style of highly choreographed action with often breathtaking, balletlike violence became hugely popular around the world, reaching American audiences and in some cases even outselling Hollywood blockbusters. Hong Kong directors like John Woo, Ringo Lam, and Jackie Chan (who also acts in his movies) have directed Hollywood action films; and stars like Jet Li (Lethal Weapon 4, 1998; The Expendables 3, 2014), Yun-Fat Chow (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, 2007; The Monkey King, 2014), and Malaysia’s Michelle Yeoh (Memoirs of a Geisha, 2005; The Lady, 2011) are landing leading roles in American movies.

Japan

Americans may be most familiar with low-budget monster movies like Godzilla, but the widely heralded films of the late director Akira Kurosawa have had an even greater impact: His Seven Samurai (1954) was remade by Hollywood as The Magnificent Seven (1960), and The Hidden Fortress (1958) was George Lucas’s inspiration for Star Wars. Hayao Miyazaki (Ponyo, 2009; The Wind Rises, 2013) is the country’s top director of anime movies. Japanese thrillers like Ringu (1998), Ringu 2 (1999), and Ju-on: The Grudge (2003) were remade into successful American horror films. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s drama Like Father, Like Son (2013) won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and caught the attention of Steven Spielberg, who acquired the remake rights for his company DreamWorks.

South Korea

The end of military regimes in the late 1980s and corporate investment in the film business in the 1990s created a new era in Korean moviemaking. Leading directors include Kim Jee-woon; Lee Chang-dong (nominated for the Palme d’Or award at Cannes for Poetry, 2010); and Chan-wook Park, whose Vengeance Trilogy films (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, 2002; Oldboy, 2003; and Lady Vengeance, 2005) have won international acclaim, including the Grand Prix at Cannes for Oldboy, which was remade in the United States in 2013 by director Spike Lee. Joon-ho Bong’s science-fiction film Snowpiercer (2013)—based on a French graphic novel, filmed in the Czech Republic, and starring a mostly English-speaking cast (including Chris Evans and Tilda Swinton)—epitomizes the international outlook of Korean cinema.