Hollywood in the Information Age (Chapter 2)

Ok, I might have jumped the gun with those quotes. (They were good and relevant quotes, but Wasko was actually using them to later disprove some aspects of them). This book isn't really about film preservation per se, but it's good background.

Her point was that, although sometimes discounted, Hollywood and technology are not always on opposing sides. Hollywood often has tried to partner with technological partners and exploit technologies as they see fit.

Wasko quotes Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson (5):

"Hollywood filmmaking only became a modern industry when it joined forces with corporate research."

(David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Clasical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, p. 251.)

Take the following cases from Wasko:
1) Sound film- Warner and AT&T partnered in 1925 to produce vaudeville shorts for the Vitaphone system. Fox Film and the Case company released Movietone newsreels in 1927.

2) Radio- RCA joined forces with the film industry in 1928 (RKO), and the Warners & AT&T formed a subsidiary for film (ERPI). The Warner Brothers set up radio stations in Los Angeles and New York, and Harry Warner proposed a radio network to publicize Hollywood films. Hollywood supplied radio programming in the form of variety, dramatic and gossip shows. There were many crossover radio/film stars including George Burns, Gracie Allen, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Rudi Vallee, Eddie Cantor.

3) Television- Paramount's television experimentation in half ownerhsip in DuMont. Paramount owned two television stations: KTLA in Los Angeles, and WBKB in Chicago. Many other film corporations vied for early TV Stations.

4) Cable/Pay Television- Film companies were involved in alternate TV systems not supported by commercial sponsorship. Examples: Theatre Television (Scophony), which was overtaken by RCA's direct transmission process, and failed also because of lack of FCC support and technical problems. There were other subscription experiments by these companies in the 40s and 50s. Telemeter (1949). Cable systems which offered channels using a scrambled broadcast signal. Films were viewed by placing coins in a box on a TV set. Paramount owned 50% share of this company. Subscribervision (1950) pioneered by Matthew Fox. It used a punch card and scrambled broadcast signals. One system even used telephone wires to deliver a subscription TV service: Southwestern Bell Telephone and Jerrold Electronics (a small town in Oklahoma), which ultimately failed because of the high cost of telephone lines.

But the following quote from Michelle Hilmes is instructive:

"Opposition from exhibitors and from established broadcast interests, backed by FCC protectionism and the lack of alternative distribution systems, would once again block film industry plans to move into television broadcasting in a substantial way. And again, as in the case of radio, broadcasting, and film interests would establish a system of accomodations by which Hollywood's influence over the forms and structures of broadcasting would become stronger than ever before."

(Michelle Hilmes, Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable, Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1990, pp. 117-118).

Wasko points out that even then corporations were planning on diversifing their activities across a range of technologies and media.

Wasko later uses a term to descibe the current system of media production and distribution: the "entertainment industrial complex." Much of the rest of this chapter related to how film history is created and viewed, some of the missing narratives, and why film history should not be divorced from the larger context
of economics and broadcasting.

I found this chapter particularly interesting relating to some of the experiments and partnerships that the studio companies were attempting even at these early stages.