Mainstream Cinema

Cinema History
The Lumiere brothers are credited with the birth of cinema in 1895, with the film Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, although the film only recorded factory workers leaving the Lumiere factory gate for home or for a lunch break.
The first documentary, The Life of an American Fireman (1903), was made by Edwin Porter. It combined re-enacted scenes and documentary footage, and inter-cut between the exterior and interior of a burning house to create tension. His next film, The Great Train Robbery (1903) set many milestones – in particular in the way editing was used to creat meaning. In a CU at the beginning of the film, a baddie shoots his gun directly into the audience. The film also used exterior shots, chases on horseback, a camera pan with the escaping baddies and a camera mounted on a moving train.

Hollywood and the Studio System
By the end of the 1920s, there were 20 Hollywood studios, and the silent films were being manufactured , assembly-line style, in Hollywood’s ‘entertainment factories’.
Even these earliest films were organised into genres, with instantly recognisable storylines, settings, costumes and characters to fulfil audience expectations. The emphasis was on swashbucklers, historical extravaganzas and melodramas, although all kinds of films were being produced throughout the decade.
The studio system was established in the 1920s (with long-term contracts for stars, lavish production values, and increasingly rigid control of directors and stars). After the First World War, America was the leading producer in the world, although the ‘factory’ system did limit the creativity of many directors. Production was in the hands of the major studios who had consolidated and now controlled all aspects of a film’s development – vertical integration. By 1929, the Big Five (Warner Bros, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, RKO, and MGM) were producing more than 90% of global output.
The big five had vast studios with elaborate sets for film production. They owned their own production and distribution facilities and distributed their films to their own theatres.
Universal, United Artists and Columbia were known as the ‘little studios’ because they did not have complete vertical integration of all stages of production and distribution. In one form or another, these studios still run Hollywood today!

Contemporary Hollywood
The established Hollywood movie studios (except for Universal and Walt Disney’s Buena Vista) no longer directly control production and distribution in the same way, although the development of the multiplex is putting control back into the hands of the large institutions. While studios still dominate film distribution, other areas, including production, filming, and financing, are increasingly in the hands of independent studios, producers and/or agents.

The new studio: DreamWorks
The first new studio in many decades, DreamWorks (SKG), was formed in October 1994 by Steven Spielberg. Dreamworks has a more creative approach to film making than many of the traditional studios, being born from Spielberg’s frustration at not being able to make the films he wanted for other studios.

Stars & Auteurs
Stars have become increasingly important to the success of a film and the films most dependent on their star actors have become known as ’star vehicles’. It is now commonplace for the stars of a movie to earn substantially more than the director. They remain popular with the studios because they know  that having star names in the movie  will ensure audiences and thus revenue.
Along with this, has been the development of ‘auteurs’ (a term first used by Truffaut) – directors who are so influential over the form, meaning and content of a film, that they create new meaning or new form for the cinema. The original auteurs, such as Orson Welles, or Alfred Hitchcock, clearly deserved the label as they are seen to have revolutionised cinema in particular ways, but the label is sometimes used now simply as a marketing tool, to attract an audience to see the film. Eg. The latest film by Quentin Tarantino is always ‘announced’ as “The latest Tarantino film!..“.

Independent Cinema
Existing alongside mainstream Hollywood film production are the independents. Most studios have formed independent film divisions (such as Fox’s Searchlight division) that make films within the independent tradition, which are artistic, edgy, or centre on serious social issues or themes. These are often made without major Hollywood stars. However, over time, these independents have become more mainstream and institutionalised because of the cultural clash between the desire to make independent films and to make a profit at the box office.