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![introduction xvii
notes on statistics
Except where otherwise noted, industry statistics (annual attendances, number
of US cinemas, number of releases, etc.) are taken from the data collated in
Joel Finler, The Hollywood Story, revised edition (London: Wallflower, 2003),
pp. 356–81.
Box office returns as cited here are of two kinds: before 1981, the figures
are for rentals (that is, the money returned to distributors by exhibitors after
deducting their percentage of the box office takings and the ‘house nut’,
the sum allocated for the theatre’s own operating costs). Rentals were how
Variety and other industry trade publications recorded box office performance
through the late 1970s. Since the 1980s, the figure reported has been the box
office gross, the total amount of money taken at the box office during a film’s
theatrical release. Chapters 1–6, therefore, use rentals; Chapters 7–10, box
office gross. Except where otherwise noted, these figures are derived from
the records in the ‘Revenue Database’ at www.boxofficereport.com and the
‘Yearly Box Office Results’ at www.boxofficemojo.com
note on references
This book draws on a wide range of contemporary sources, primarily from
trade and business press. These are fully cited in the endnotes to each chapter.
A list of suggestions for Further Reading at the end of the book, organised
according to chapter, is limited to secondary sources, many, but not all,
directly cited in the text.
notes
1. Shortly before this book went to press, cable TV operator Comcast announced a deal with
GE to acquire a majority stake in NBC Universal; with this deal the company rejoined the
giant dedicated media conglomerates, having exited their ranks in 1995 when the former
owners Matsushita sold the then Universal Studios to the Canadian liquor distributor
Seagram (see Chapter 7).
2. André Bazin, ‘The evolution of the language of cinema’, [1950, 1952] in What Is Cinema?
trans., ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 29–30.
3. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema:
Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 5. (Hereafter
CHC.)
4. My thanks to Lee Grieveson for this pithily made point.
5. See for instance Elizabeth Cowie, ‘Storytelling: classical Hollywood cinema and classical
narration’, in Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds), Contemporary Hollywood Cinema
(London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 178–90.
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![4 post-classical hollywood
RKO’s relative weakness compared to the other majors in securing and retain-
ing top-line contract talent; again, such contractual niceties passed by most
casual moviegoers completely.
Loew’s Broad, on the other hand, was showing a Twentieth Century-Fox
production, the Jerome Kern-scored musical Centennial Summer, transferring
down the street from the Ohio for a ‘2nd Overwhelmingly Wonderful Week!’;
newly opened at the Ohio itself was Columbia’s mid-budget Western Renegades
(promoted to appeal across the gender divide with poster art featuring leading
lady Evelyn Keyes holding both a six-shooter and a newborn baby).
Two of these films would feature in Variety’s list of the year’s top-earning
films: Notorious came in eighth and The Kid From Brooklyn sixteenth. All of
these programmes bar Notorious, whose star appeal and commercial prospects
were reflected in the decision to present it as a single feature, offered the stand-
ard supporting film to bulk out the evening’s entertainment, often, as here,
supplied by either Columbia or Universal, the most parsimonious studios: The
Kid From Brooklyn was partnered with Universal’s Danger Woman, Centennial
Summer with Columbia’s The Unknown, and Renegades with Columbia’s It’s
Great To Be Young.5
There were four other theatres in the immediate downtown area, but these
did not compete directly with the first-run houses: as again was the norm
nationwide, such second-run theatres offered a mixture of genre B-movies
from either the majors’ own B production units or the ‘Poverty Row’ minor
studios – such as Universal’s River Gang and Republic’s hoary (1941) Death
Valley Outlaws, sharing a double bill at the Majestic – and major studio
productions which had completed their profitable first-run engagements at
studio-owned houses, such as Universal’s Patrick the Great and Warners’ One
More Tomorrow. Beyond these downtown subsequent-run theatres were no
fewer than forty-one other cinemas serving the city’s outlying neighbourhoods
(‘nabes’ in Variety-speak), providing, taken together with the downtown
theatres, roughly one theatre for every 6,000 inhabitants. The nabes typically
comprised a few individual ‘mom and pop’ theatres and – the majority – local
and regional chains such as the Academy Theatres (‘delux [sic] entertain-
ment’), owners of six local cinemas, or Neth’s, who ran another seven. In this
segment of the exhibition business, unlike the cosy closed-shop of the first-run
market, margins were tight and competition for sellable product was genuine
and intense. (However, the smallest exhibitors persistently complained that
the chains, who obviously generated more business, received preferential
treatment from the big distributors.) As ever, the most attractive product was a
major studio release, once ‘cleared’ by the majors’ own distribution exchanges
for second- and subsequent-run exhibitors, usually two or three months
after completing their first runs. Independent exhibitors determined neither
the timing nor in many cases the choice of their presentations, of necessity
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![26 post-classical hollywood
conveniently close at hand.) UA also offered producers a more attractive finan-
cial package at both the front (no administrative overhead) and back (reduced
distribution fees) ends. In effect, UA rebranded itself as a supplier of services
to filmmakers rather than an old-style hands-on producer; during the fifties
UA would sponsor further downstream movie service providers and ‘packag-
ers’ such as the Mirisch Corporation. Krim and Benjamin were naturally moti-
vated not by idealism but by the urgent need to secure the struggling company
a slice of the market for top talent. With this move not only did UA gain a com-
petitive edge with the most ambitious independent filmmakers of the period
such as Otto Preminger, but they established a new way of doing business in
Hollywood, one the other studios would duly follow. Most persuasively of all,
UA’s example proved immensely profitable: having posted a loss of $200,000
in 1949, by 1959 the company was turning a profit of $4.1 million.32
The move towards independent production also tilted the Hollywood
balance of power. The studios’ emerging role as the godfathers to already
gestating projects presupposed that someone – someone else, that is – had the
wherewithal to oversee the early stages of development and bring the ready-to-
go picture to the table. Yet while some independents – notably those created
around leading stars such as Hecht-Hill-[Burt] Lancaster – had a measure of
star power of their own, few independent producers were in a position to retain
contracted talent even if they wished to. Moreover, as HHL’s own boom-
to-bust life cycle from 1954 to 1960 would demonstrate, the most successful
independents were prone to the perils of unsustainable expansion: as former
MGM production head Dore Schary pithily summarised it, ‘this [kind of]
‘independent’ may turn into a major studio, with all the problems that drove
people in the major studios to become independents’.33
For their own part, the
newly enfranchised actors, directors and writers were very conscious of the
advantageous bargaining position they derived from their marketability.34
But
they were in the main ill-suited to exploit their situation to maximum advan-
tage. Thus, almost inevitably, power in what was becoming a recognisably
‘New Hollywood’ increasingly devolved on to those who did have access to a
range of talent and were skilled in the art of the deal. These were not the old-
style prestige independents like Goldwyn, but newcomers – talent agencies.
Specifically, one agency, MCA, and one pre-eminent and perspicacious agent
above all, Lew Wasserman.
Wasserman, who ran MCA in partnership with its founder Jules Stein, had
during the 1930s helped the agency achieve a virtual monopoly in the music
industry, moving from representing individual musical performers to booking
complete ‘packages’ of live entertainers of all kinds to venues and subsequently
radio broadcasters. When MCA expanded rapidly into Hollywood in the
early 1940s, principally by aggressively acquiring numerous smaller agen-
cies, Wasserman quickly set about applying the same principles to the film
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![Footnotes:
[1] Century Dictionary, edition of 1903, Vol. I, p. 293.
[2] The chronology of Archbishop Usher, printed in the margin of
many Bibles, is not a part of the Biblical text, but a collection of
seventeenth century calculations and guesses.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-62-2048.jpg)
![[3] For fuller accounts of the history of Egypt, see Breasted’s History
of the Ancient Egyptians, New York, Scribner’s, 1908; or Breasted’s
History of Egypt, second edition, 1909, New York, Scribner’s.
[4] See Petrie, Hyksos and the Israelite Cities, London, 1906.
[5] See Naville, The Store-City of Pithom and the Route of the
Exodus, 4th ed., London, 1903.
[6] See Petrie, Hyksos and the Israelite Cities, p. 28, f.
[7] See Petrie, The Palace of Apries, London, 1909.
[8] See Petrie, Hyksos and the Israelite Cities, p. 191, ff.
[9] See Annals of Archæology and Anthropology, VII, Liverpool,
1914, pp. 1-10.
[10] So called from the name of the mountain on which it is written.
[11] First published by Hilprecht, Babylonian Expedition of the
University of Pennsylvania, Vol. XX, No. 47; cf. p. 46.
[12] See Poebel, Historical and Grammatical Texts, Philadelphia,
1914, Nos. 2-5, and Historical Texts, Philadelphia, 1914, pp. 73-140.
[13] It is the prevailing view of scholars that Arabia was the cradle-
land of the Semites. The reasons for this view as well as a résumé of
other views will be found in G. A. Barton’s Sketch of Semitic Origins,
Social and Religious, New York, 1902, Chapter I.
[14] In Gen. 10:11 it is by implication said that the city was founded
by Nimrod.
[15] For a discussion of the reasons for the view here stated, and a
presentation of other views, see Part II, p. 374, ff.
[16] The Chaldæans were a Semitic people who came into the
marsh-lands of southern Babylonia from Arabia. We can first detect
their presence in Babylonia about 1000 b. c.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-63-2048.jpg)
![[17] Those who desire fuller accounts of the history should read L. W.
King’s History of Sumer and Akkad, London, 1910, and R. W. Rogers’
History of Babylonia and Assyria. 2d ed., New York, 1915.
[18] In the Mitteilungen der vorderasiatischen Gesellschaft, 1899,
Heft. 4.
[19] In the Mitteilungen der vorderasiatischen Gesellschaft, 1900,
Hefte 4 and 5.
[20] See Pumpelly, Explorations in Turkestan, Washington, 1908, I, p.
50, f.
[21] See L. W. King, Chronicles Concerning Early Babylonian Kings,
London, 1907, Vol. II, p. 22.
[22] History of Egypt, II. 404, 405.
[23] Expository Times, November, 1914, p. 91.
[24] Asien und Europa nach altägyptischen Denkmälern, 319, note 3.
[25] Ancient Records, Egypt, I, 227, 228.
[26] Breasted’s Ancient Records, Egypt, II, § 773.
[27] Winckler in Mitteilungen der vorderasiatischen Gesellschaft,
1913, Heft 4, p. 81.
[28] Itinéraire de Paris a Jérusalem, Paris, 1811.
[29] Travels in Syria, 1821.
[30] Souvenirs, impressions, el paysages, pendant un voyage en
Orient, Paris, 1835.
[31] For a more complete account see F. J. Bliss, The Development of
Palestine Exploration, New York, 1906.
[32] See Official Report of the United States Expedition to Explore the
Dead Sea and the River Jordan, Baltimore, 1852.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-64-2048.jpg)
![[33] See his “Identification of Pisgah” in the third Statement of the
American Exploration Society, 1870.
[34] See his East of the Jordan, New York, 1883.
[35] Warren’s results were first published in The Recovery of
Jerusalem, London, 1870, and more fully in Jerusalem, London, 1889,
one of the Memoirs of the Palestine Exploration Fund. The arch
mentioned is called “Robinson’s Arch,” because its significance was
first perceived by Robinson.
[36] Across the Jordan, London, 1886; Jaulan, London, 1886, and
Abila, Pella, and Northern Aijlun, London, 1889.
[37] Die Provincia Arabia, Strassburg, 1904-1909 (3 volumes).
[38] Petra, Leipzig, 1908, and Neu-Petra Forschung, Leipzig, 1912.
[39] Archæological Researches in Palestine, London, 1896-1899.
[40] Geology of Palestine and Arabia Petræa, London, 1886.
[41] See Petrie, Tell el-Hesy (Lachish), London, 1891.
[42] See his Mound of Many Cities, London, 1894.
[43] See Bliss, Excavations at Jerusalem, London, 1898.
[44] An artificially made precipice on which a fortress once stood. It
is named from an Englishman, Maudsley, who first perceived its true
nature.
[45] Bliss and Macalister, Excavations in Palestine during the Years
1898-1900, London, 1902.
[46] See his Archæological Researches in Palestine, II, p. 251, f.
[47] This is the period called by Petrie and Bliss “Seleucid.”
[48] See Macalister, The Excavation of Gezer, London, 1912, II, 381-
403.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-65-2048.jpg)
![[49] Ibid., 406-408.
[50] Ibid., I, 256-268.
[51] See Macalister, The Excavation of Gezer, London, 1912, II, 200-
223.
[52] Ibid., 236-266.
[53] See the Annual of the Palestine Exploration Fund, Vols. I and II,
for the details here given, and for many others.
[54] Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins.
[55] See Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins, V, pp. 7-204.
[56] See Schumacher und Steuernagel, Tell el-Mutesellim, Leipzig,
1908.
[57] Sellin, Tell Taanek, Wien, 1904.
[58] See Mitteilungen der deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft, No. 29,
Berlin, 1905, p. 14, f.
[59] See Sellin und Watzinger, Jericho, Leipzig, 1913.
[60] See Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. XXII, Boston, 1903, pp.
164-182; XXIV, 196-220; XXV, 82-95.
[61] See Harvard Theological Review, Cambridge, Mass., I, 1908, p.
92.
[62] Ibid., II, 102-113; III, 136-138, 248-263.
[63] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, xiii, 10, 2 and 3; Wars of the
Jews, i, 2, 7.
[64] Revue biblique, 1912 (Paris), pp. 86-116.
[65] Biblical World, Vol. XXXIX, Chicago, 1912, pp. 295-306.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-66-2048.jpg)
![[66] See Germer-Durand in Revue biblique, 1914, pp. 71-94, and
Frontispiece.
[67] See Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund,
October, 1914, p. 167, f. Additional material on Ophel and Balata is
given in the Appendix, p. 446.
[68] First noticed by Prof. George L. Robinson, of McCormick
Seminary, Chicago, and afterward by Prof. Samuel Ives Curtis, of the
Chicago Theological Seminary; see Chapter XI, p. 173, f.
[69] Discovered in 1902 by Dr. J. P. Peters and Dr. Thiersch; see their
Painted Tombs of Marissa, London, 1905.
[70] Reference should also be made to the expedition from Princeton
University, referred to on p. 107, led by Prof. H. C. Butler, which went
out in 1899-1900, in 1904-1905, and in 1909, and examined the ruins
in the Hauran (or region east of the Sea of Galilee), in the Lebanon
Mountains, and in that part of Syria to the east of Lebanon. The
expedition gathered many inscriptions, most of which belong to the
Christian period. The results of this exploration are published in The
Publications of an Archæological Expedition to Syria in 1899-1900,
New York, 1904, and Publications of the Princeton Archæological
Expeditions to Syria in 1904-1905 and 1909, Leyden, 1908-1914.
[71] See R. A. S. Macalister, History of Civilization in Palestine,
Cambridge University Press, 1912, pp. 10, 11.
[72] See Barton, A Year’s Wandering in Bible Lands, Philadelphia,
1904, p. 143.
[73] See Barton, in the Biblical World, Chicago, 1904, Vol. XXIV, p.
177.
[74] See Conder, Survey of Eastern Palestine, I, pp. 125-277, and
Mackenzie in the Annual of the Palestine Exploration Fund, I, pp. 5-
11.
[75] See Gen. 14:5; 15:20.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-67-2048.jpg)
![[76] See H. S. Cowper, The Hill of the Graces, a Record of
Investigation among the Trilithons and Megalithic Sites of Tripoli,
London, 1897, and Brandenburg, Über Felsarchitektur im
Mittelmeergebiet in Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatischen Gesellchaft,
1914.
[77] See the Annals of Archæology and Anthropology, Vol. V,
Liverpool, 1913, pp. 112-128.
[78] See Macalister, The Excavation of Gezer, I, 72-152.
[79] See Macalister, The Excavation of Gezer, I, 145-152.
[80] Ibid., 236, ff.
[81] R. A. S. Macalister, Bible Side-lights from the Mound of Gezer,
London, 1906, Chapter II.
[82] See P. E. Mader in Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins,
Vol. XXXVII, 1914, pp. 20-44.
[83] See Amos 4:4; 5:5.
[84] See Dr. Masterman, in Biblical World, XXXIX, 301, f.
[85] See the legend concerning him translated in Part II, p. 310, f.
[86] See Clay, Amurru, Philadelphia, 1909, pp. 102, 103.
[87] See Recueil de travaux relatifs à phil. et à arch. egpt. et assyr.,
XXXIV, 105-108.
[88] See Breasted, Ancient Records, Egypt, Vol. I, Chicago, 1906, §
315.
[89] See Chapter II, p. 59.
[90] Translated in Part II, p. 313, f.
[91] See Part II, p. 293.
[92] See Part II, p. 290, ff.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-68-2048.jpg)
![[93] See Part II, p. 299, ff.
[94] See Breasted, Ancient Records, Egypt, I, p. 233, f.
[95] See Barton, Commentary on Job, New York, 1911, pp. 5-7, and
Breasted, Ancient Records, Egypt, I, p. 238, note a.
[96] See Breasted, Ancient Records, Egypt, § 680, and Barton in
Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. XXVIII, p. 29.
[97] Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, I, 238-243 and 253.
[98] Tell el-Mutesellim, Tafeln, vii-xi.
[99] See Chapter IV, p. 96.
[100] See Chapter II, p. 59, f.
[101] See Chapter I, p. 28.
[102] See Chapter III, p. 75, f.
[103] See Chapter IV, pp. 89, 91.
[104] See Breasted, Ancient Records, Egypt, III, § 616.
[105] Translated from W. Max Müller’s publication in the Mitteilungen
der vorderasiatischen Gesellschaft, 1907, Heft 7.
[106] Hammath means “hot.”
[107] See Chapter I, p. 29.
[108] See pp. 79, 80, and 345.
[109] See the letters of its king translated in Part II, p. 345, f.
[110] Chapter XIII.
[111] See Chapter III, p. 78, f.
[112] See Part II, p. 349, f.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-69-2048.jpg)
![[113] See Breasted’s History of Egypt, New York, 1909, p. 414.
[114] See Breasted’s Ancient Records, Egypt, III. §§ 81 and 140.
[115] Translated from W. Max Müller’s Egyptological Researches,
Washington, 1906, pl. 59, ff.
[116] See Part II, p. 311.
[117] See Sir Arthur Evans. Scripta Minoa, Oxford, 1909, pp. 280,
282, and R. A. S. Macalister in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish
Academy, Vol. XXX, § C, p. 342; also his Philistines, Their History and
Civilization, London, 1913, pp. 84, 85.
[118] See Sitzungsberichte of the Berlin Academy, 1909, p. 1022, f.
[119] Caphtor is the same as Keftiu of the Egyptian inscriptions, but
it is uncertain whether Keftiu refers to Crete or Asia Minor.
[120] Translated from W. Max Müller’s Egyptological Researches, I, pl.
64, f.
[121] See Macalister, The Excavation of Gezer, I, p. 21.
[122] See p. 99.
[123] See p. 95.
[124] See the books of I and II Samuel.
[125] See Chapters VI, IX, and XI.
[126] See Part II, Chapter XVII.
[127] See Part II, p. 385, f.
[128] See J. A. Montgomery, The Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish
Sect, Their History, Theology, and Literature, Philadelphia, 1907.
[129] For the narrative of the struggle, see the book of I Maccabees,
and S. Mathews, History of the New Testament Times in Palestine,
New York, 1908.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-70-2048.jpg)
![[130] See I Macc. 14:41.
[131] For details see Guy Le Strange, Palestine Under the Moslems,
London, 1890.
[132] For details see C. R. Conder, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem,
London, 1897.
[133] See Chapter XIV.
[134] See p. 94.
[135] On these walls, see Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, I, 236-256.
[136] Petrie, Tell el-Hesy, p. 17 and Plates 2 and 3.
[137] See his Tell Taanek, p. 13.
[138] See p. 96 and Fig. 41.
[139] See p. 91.
[140] Harvard Theological Review, III, 137.
[141] Palestine Exploration Fund’s Annual, II, 17, f.
[142] Sellin and Watzinger’s Jericho, p. 29, f. and Tafel I.
[143] Ibid., 54, ff.
[144] See Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, I, 244.
[145] See Dickie, in Quarterly Statement of Palestine Exploration
Fund, 1897, 61-67.
[146] These remarks about the house are based on the excavation at
Gezer. The excavators of other sites have not given as much attention
to the construction of houses as Mr. Macalister did.
[147] Sellin, Tell Taanek, p. 21.
[148] One of these is translated in Part II, p. 350.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-71-2048.jpg)
![[149] See the writer’s article, “Corners,” in Hastings’ Encyclopædia of
Religion and Ethics, Vol. IV 119, ff.
[150] Sellin, Tell Taanek, p. 61.
[151] Schumacher, Tell el-Mulesellim, pp. 45, 54.
[152] See Macalister, The Excavation of Gezer, I, 240.
[153] In 2 Sam. 12:27 we should read “pool of waters” instead of
“city of waters”; see Barton in Journal of Biblical Literature, XXVII,
147-152.
[154] See Polybius, V, 71.
[155] Josephus, Jewish Wars, I, xix, 5, ff.
[156] For the conflicting evidence and theories, see G. A. Smith,
Jerusalem, I, 124-131.
[157] Josephus, Antiquities, XVIII, iii, 2.
[158] See p. 85.
[159] See Thomsen in Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins,
XXVI, 170, ff.
[160] See Chapter XIV.
[161] See Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, I, 199, f; II, 22, ff.
[162] See Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, II, 22, f.
[163] The reader who cares to pursue the subject is referred to
Macalister’s Excavation of Gezer, II, 48, ff., and Sellin’s Tell Taanek,
61, f., and Bliss and Macalister’s Excavations in Palestine, 1898-1900,
pp. 193, 196, f., 208, 227, and 248.
[164] See Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, II, 1-15.
[165] See Pumpelly, Excavations in Turkestan, Washington, 1908, p.
384, f.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-72-2048.jpg)
![[166] See Schumacher, Mutesellim, p. 89.
[167] Ward, Seal Cylinders of Western Asia, p. 422, and Nos. 554,
556, 1126, and 1254.
[168] See Dr. John P. Peters’ article “The Cock” in the Journal of the
American Oriental Society, Vol. XXXIII, pp. 363-396.
[169] See Peters and Thiersch, The Painted Tombs of Marissa,
London, 1905.
[170] See Sellin, Tell Taanek, 61, f.
[171] Especial mention may be made of the following: Petrie, Tell el-
Hesy; Bliss and Macalister, Excavations in Palestine, 1898-1900, Part
II; Vincent, Canaan d’après l’exploration récente, Paris, 1907, Chapter
V, and Macalister, The Excavation of Gezer, II, 128-231.
[172] A “button” handle is a “ledge” handle made into a round knob.
[173] See Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, II, 158.
[174] See Chapter V, p. 115, f., and Figs. 108, 109.
[175] For discussions of the subject, see Bliss and Macalister,
Excavations in Palestine, 1898-1900, 106-123; Macalister in the
Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund, 1905, 243 and
328; also Excavation of Gezer, II, 209, ff., and Vincent, Canaan
d’après l’exploration récente, pp. 357-360.
[176] See Sellin, Jericho, p. 156.
[177] For a fuller discussion of children’s toys, see Rice, Orientalisms
in Bible Lands, pp. 49-58.
[178] An early Christian writer, born in 315, died in 403 a. d., who
was bishop of Salamis in Cyprus.
[179] From this equivalence the reader can easily compute the value
which the intermediate measures would have according to this](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-73-2048.jpg)
![theory. The multiples of the Log which formed the Cab, etc., are
given above.
[180] See Père Germer-Durand, “Mesures de capacité des Hebreux
au temps de l’évangile” in Conferences de Saint-Étienne, Paris, 1910,
pp. 89-105, and Fig. 185.
[181] The Jewish name for an offering to God. (See Mark 7:11.)
[182] “Mana” is both the Babylonian and the Hebrew term. In English
it has usually been corrupted to “Mina.”
[183] Some scholars understand MENE to be such a reference.
[184] The weight is now in the library of Haverford College, near
Philadelphia.
[185] The words rendered “the price was a pim” are translated in the
Authorized Version, “they had a file,” margin, “a file with mouths”; in
the Revised Version, “they had a file,” margin, or “when the edges ...
were blunt.” The Revisers add, “The Hebrew text is obscure.” The
Hebrew word rendered “file” and “blunt” comes from a root that
means “to prescribe” or “appoint.” It could easily mean the
“established price,” but can mean neither “file” nor “blunt.” Pim
means “mouths” and is employed figuratively for “edges,” but neither
of those meanings fits the passage. The discovery of these weights
has cleared up the whole obscurity. This interpretation was suggested
by Pilcher in the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement,
1914, p. 99.
[186] See Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, II, 279.
[187] See Macalister, ibid., pp. 278-293.
[188] See Bliss and Macalister, Excavations in Palestine, 1898-1900,
p. 61.
[189] See Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, II, 291.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-74-2048.jpg)
![[190] See Breasted, Ancient Records, Egypt, II, §§ 436, 489, 490,
518, and History of Egypt, 2d ed., pp. 277, 307.
[191] See Schrader’s Keilinschriftliche Bibliothek, I, 105 (cl. III, 62).
[192] See C. H. W. Johns, Assyrian Deeds and Documents, I, Nos. 38,
39, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 50, and 108; cf. also III, 8.
[193] See Hill, Catalogue of the Greek Coins of Palestine, London,
1914, p. xciii, ff.
[194] Cf. Luke 21:2.
[195] The temples of Solomon, Zerubbabel, and Herod are treated in
Chapter XIII, on Jerusalem.
[196] See Macalister, The Excavation of Gezer, I, 102; II, 378, ff.
[197] See Schumacher, Tell el-Mutesellim, 156, ff.
[198] In Gen. 22:9 Abraham, we are told, built the altar. He did not,
therefore, intend to use the rock-altar. The analogy of this altar with
the other two is not quite complete. It appears to have no cup-marks
on its surface.
[199] See Bliss and Macalister, Excavations in Palestine, 1898-1900,
p. 31, ff.
[200] See Macalister, The Excavation of Gezer, I, 51, 105-107; II,
381-404.
[201] See Part II, p. 364.
[202] See C. H. Toy, Introduction to the History of Religions, Boston,
1913, §§ 250, 257.
[203] Tell Taanek, p. 68, ff.
[204] See Part II, p. 442.
[205] For descriptions of this high place, see the article by its
discoverer, George L. Robinson, in the Biblical World, XVII, 6-16; by](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-75-2048.jpg)
![S. I. Curtis in the Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration
Fund, October, 1900, pp. 350-355; Savignac in Révue biblique, 1903,
280-284; Libby and Hoskins, The Jordan Valley and Petra, New York,
1905, II, 172, ff.; Brünnow and Domaszewski, Provincia Arabia, Vol.
I, Strassburg, 1904, 239-245; Dalman, Petra, Leipzig, 1908, 56-58.
[206] See the writer’s A Year’s Wandering in Bible Lands,
Philadelphia, 1904, pp. 193, 194.
[207] Those interested in them will find them described in Brünnow
and Domaszewski’s Provincia Arabia, I, 246, ff., and in Dalman’s
Petra, 142, 225, 272, etc.
[208] See Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, II, 405, ff.
[209] Schumacher, Tell el-Mutesellim, 110-124.
[210] Schumacher, Tell el-Mutesellim, 105-110.
[211] Ibid., 125-130.
[212] See Harvard Theological Review, II, 102-113; III, 248-263.
[213] See Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XV, viii, 5, and Wars of
the Jews, I, xxi, 2.
[214] See especially Fig. 269.
[215] See Chapter V, p. 105.
[216] See Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, I, 286.
[217] Ibid., p. 122, f.
[218] Palestine Exploration Fund’s Annual, II, 42, ff.
[219] For a Babylonian parallel, see Part II, p. 423, ff.
[220] See Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, II, 429, f.
[221] See Biblical World, Vol. XXIV, p. 177.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-76-2048.jpg)
![[222] See Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, I, 288, f.
[223] Ibid., 289, ff.
[224] See Bliss and Macalister, Excavations in Palestine, 1898-1900,
p. 9, ff.
[225] So called because of a tradition that the members of the
Sanhedrin were buried there. The tradition probably arose because
the kôkim and shelves make provision for seventy bodies.
[226] See Journal of Biblical Literature, XXII, 1903, p. 164, ff.
[227] See Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XX, ii, 1; iv, 3.
[228] See Peters and Thiersch, Painted Tombs at Marissa, London,
1905.
[229] All who can do so should read George Adam Smith’s Jerusalem
from the Earliest Times to A. D. 70, New York, 1908, and Hughes
Vincent’s Jerusalem, Paris, 1912. Or, if this is not possible, L. B.
Paton’s Jerusalem in Bible Times, Chicago, 1905.
[230] See Dr. Masterman in the Biblical World, Vol. XXXIX, p. 295, f.
[231] See Part II, Chapter XV, Letter V, and the writer’s note in the
Biblical World, XXII, p. 11, n. 5.
[232] See Biblical World, XXXIX, 306.
[233] See Part II, Chapter XV.
[234] See Chapter VI, § 8.
[235] Some scholars think the words are a distorted repetition of “in
Millo,” which was accidentally repeated by a scribe.
[236] Bliss and Dickie, Excavations at Jerusalem, 1894-1897, passim,
and p. 319, ff.
[237] For “Bethso,” see Josephus, Wars of the Jews, V, iv, 2.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-77-2048.jpg)
![[238] See J. E. Hanauer, Walks about Jerusalem, London, 1910, 88,
89.
[239] The writer is well aware that the name Moriah for this part of
the hill rests on slender evidence, but he employs it nevertheless as a
convenient term, since it is well understood by readers of the Bible.
[240] Warren and Conder, Jerusalem, pp. 148-158.
[241] See Chapter XI, p. 168.
[242] Wars of the Jews, V, v, 1.
[243] So Stade, Geschichte des Volkes Israels, Berlin, 1889, I, 314,
and G. A. Smith, Jerusalem, II, 60.
[244] In giving the dimensions of the various temples, the writer has
followed the calculations of George Adam Smith in his Jerusalem. W.
Shaw Caldecott has published four volumes, one on the Tabernacle,
one on Solomon’s Temple, one on the Second Temple, and one on
Herod’s Temple, in which he claims to have discovered a key that
harmonizes all the Biblical statements as to the measurements of
these structures. His supposed key is his belief that the Babylonians
had three different cubits which they used side by side, that these
cubits were known to Moses, and that their use was perpetuated in
the temple. Should these pages be read by one who has accepted
that claim as true, it is but fair that he be informed that Caldecott’s
whole system is based upon a misinterpretation of a Babylonian
tablet that was published in Rawlinson’s Cuneiform Inscriptions of
Western Asia, Vol. IV, p. 37. (See Tabernacle, pp. 107-139, and
Solomon’s Temple, pp. 215, 216.) This tablet contains a table of time
and of distances. The unit of time in Babylonia was a kaskal-gid. An
astronomical tablet published thirty years ago in the book most
widely used by beginners in Assyrian says that at the equinox “six
kaskal-gid was the day, six kaskal-gid the night.” The kaskal-gid was,
then, a period of two hours’ duration. Just as in many countries the
word for “hour” is used for distance, and a place is said to be so
many “hours” away, so in Babylonia and Assyria kaskal-gid was used](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-78-2048.jpg)
![as a measure of distance. The tablet referred to gives a table of the
ways of writing fractions of kaskal-gid and its other divisions in the
simplest of the two Babylonian numerical systems. The Assyriologist
learns from this tablet that 1 kaskal-gid (the distance of two hours)
equalled 30 ush, that 1 ush equalled 60 gar, that 1 gar equalled 12 u
or cubits, and that 1 u equalled 60 shu or “fingers.” Caldecott,
however, mistook the sign gid for a numeral five, the sign kaskal for a
word meaning “ell,” and the word u meaning “cubit” for a sign
signifying “plus”! He accordingly makes gar a “palm”; shu, a “three-
palm ell”; ush, a “four-palm ell,” and kaskal-gid, a “five-palm ell”! His
whole system is without foundation.
Tables similar to the one published by Rawlinson were compiled in
the scribal school at Nippur. One was published without translation by
Hilprecht in 1906 in the Babylonian Expedition of the University of
Pennsylvania, Vol. XX, and interpreted by the present writer in 1909
in The Haverford Library Collection of Cuneiform Tablets, Part II, pp.
13-18. The writer has examined other similar tablets in the University
Museum, Philadelphia.
[245] See Chapter IX, p. 151. According to I Kings 7:48, there was a
“golden altar” here also, but as this is not mentioned in chapter 6
many scholars think that it is a post-exilic gloss, introducing a feature
from the second temple.
[246] Antiquities of the Jews, VIII, v, 2.
[247] See translation, Part II, p. 377.
[248] See Bliss, Excavations at Jerusalem, pp. 96-109.
[249] See G. A. Smith, Jerusalem, I, 226. For another view, see
Paton, Journal of Biblical Literature, XXV, 1-13.
[250] See G. A. Smith, Jerusalem, II, Chapters X and XI.
[251] See Chapter II, p. 66; also Part II, p. 385, f.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-79-2048.jpg)
![[252] Ezra 5:16 states that Sheshbazzar laid the foundations of the
house in the reign of Cyrus, but as Haggai and Zechariah give no hint
of this, many scholars think there must be some error in the text.
[253] Antiquities of the Jews, XIII, xiii, 5.
[254] See the Mishnah, Middoth 3:6.
[255] Excavations at Jerusalem, 16, ff.
[256] See Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XI, vii, 1; cf. also G. A.
Smith, Jerusalem, II, 358-361.
[257] See Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XII, i.
[258] See Ecclesiasticus iii-v, vii, ix, xxiii, xxv, ff., and xxviii.
[259] See Eccles. 50:1-4.
[260] Cf. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XII, v, 1.
[261] See Selah Merrill, Ancient Jerusalem, New York, 1908, pp. 83-
88.
[262] See G. A. Smith, Jerusalem, II, 447-452.
[263] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XII, v, 1.
[264] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XIII, vi, 7.
[265] See Chapter V, p. 119.
[266] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XV, xi, 4; XVIII, iv, 3.
[267] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XX, viii, 11; Wars of the
Jews, II, xvi, 3.
[268] Merrill, Ancient Jerusalem, p. 88.
[269] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XIV, iv, 2, and Fig. 255.
[270] Because its identity as a part of this bridge was first perceived
by Prof. Edward Robinson, of Union Seminary, New York.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-80-2048.jpg)
![[271] Josephus, Wars of the Jews, I, vii, 2.
[272] Warren and Conder, Jerusalem, 178, f.
[273] See Chapter VI, p. 131.
[274] Quoted by Alexander Polyhistor and Eusebius; see G. A. Smith,
Jerusalem, II, 462.
[275] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XIII, xiii, 5.
[276] Ibid., XIV, ii, 1.
[277] Ibid., XIV, iv, 2.
[278] Ibid., XIV, xiii, 3, 4, 5.
[279] Ibid., XIV, xv, 2; xvi.
[280] Ibid., XV, viii, 5.
[281] Josephus, Wars of the Jews, V, iv, 3.
[282] Ibid., V, iv, 4. (See Fig. 256.)
[283] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XVII, ix, 3; Wars of the Jews,
II, ii, 2; xiv, 8.
[284] Colonel Conder, the late Dr. Merrill, Georg Gatt, Dr. Rückert,
and Dr. Mommert.
[285] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XV, viii, 1.
[286] See Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund,
1887, p. 161, ff. Dr. Schick calls it an amphitheater, but it is simply a
theater of the Greek type.
[287] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XV, xi, 2.
[288] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XX, ix, 7.
[289] Ibid., XV, xi, 3.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-81-2048.jpg)
![[290] Above it was a chamber 30 cubits high.
[291] Josephus, Wars of the Jews, V, v, 6.
[292] See Josephus, Wars of the Jews, V, v, and the Mishna tract
Middoth for the authority for this description. For a fuller description,
see G. A. Smith, Jerusalem, II, Chapter XVIII.
[293] See Chapter VI, p. 131.
[294] That is, the “Pool of Israel.”
[295] Wars of the Jews, V, iv, 2.
[296] The city, restored under the heathen name of Ælia Capitolina
by the Emperor Hadrian in 135 a. d., made Christian by Constantine
in 325, sacked by the Persian Chosroes in 614, taken by the Arabs in
636, captured after many vicissitudes in 1072 by the Seljuk Turks,
made by the First Crusade the seat of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem
from 1099 to 1187, when Saladin took it, was once more after many
other vicissitudes captured by the Ottoman Turks in 1517.
[297] Historia Naturalis, V, xviii, 74.
[298] Josephus, Wars of the Jews, I, vii, 7.
[299] See Chapter V, p. 111.
[300] See Schürer, Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu
Christi, Leipzig, 1907, II, 172, and note 321.
[301] See Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XII, iv, 5.
[302] See Barton, A Year’s Wandering in Bible Lands, Philadelphia,
1904, p. 176.
[303] See Neubauer, Géographie du Talmud, Paris, 1868, 238-240.
[304] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XII, viii, 4.
[305] Brünnow and Domaszewski, Provincia Arabia, III, 107-144, and
Fig. 267.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-82-2048.jpg)
![[306] See Polybius, V, 71.
[307] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XIII, xiii, 3.
[308] Schürer, Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu
Christi, 4th ed., II, 1907, p. 175.
[309] Neubauer, Géographie du Talmud, 274.
[310] See Merrill, East of the Jordan, New York, 1883, 184, ff. and
442, f.; also Schumacher, Across the Jordan, London, 1886, p. 272, f.
[311] Merrill, ibid., 298, and G. A. Smith, Historical Geography of the
Holy Land, map.
[312] So Brünnow and Domaszewski, Provincia Arabia, III, 264.
[313] Josephus, Wars of the Jews, I, iv, 8.
[314] See Merrill, East of the Jordan, 281-284; Schumacher in
Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins, XXV, 1912, 111-177;
Brünnow and Domaszewski, Provincia Arabia, II, 234-139; Barton, A
Year’s Wandering in Bible Lands, 158, f.
[315] See Polybius, V, 71.
[316] See 2 Sam. 12:27 and Barton in the Journal of Biblical
Literature, XXVII, 147-152.
[317] See Josephus, Wars of the Jews, I, xix, 5.
[318] See Merrill, East of the Jordan, 399, ff.; Schumacher, Across the
Jordan, 308; Brünnow and Domaszewski, Provincia Arabia, II, 216-
220, and Barton, A Year’s Wandering in Bible Lands, 155, f.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-83-2048.jpg)
![[319] Ramsay, St. Paul the Traveller and Roman Citizen, New York,
1896, 243, ff.
[320] See Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, II, Oxford, 1896, 618-
699.
[321] See American Journal of Archæology, 2d series, II, 133, f.; III,
204, f.; IV, 306, f.; VI, 306, f, 439, f.; X, 17, f., and XIV, 19, f.
[322] See Benjamin Powell in American Journal of Archæology, 2d
series, VII, 60, f., and Fig. 275.
[323] See Ramsay’s article “Ephesus” in Hastings’ Dictionary of the
Bible, Vol. II, p. 721, f., for further details.
[324] Book II, 1. 868.
[325] See Hogarth’s Ionia and the East, Oxford, 1909, p. 45, f.
[326] See De Neocoria, p. 38.
[327] See Ramsay in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible, III, 750.
[328] Wood, Discoveries at Ephesus, London, 1877. See Fig. 279.
[329] Hogarth, Excavations at Ephesus, London, 1908.
[330] See Couze (and others), Ausgrabungen zu Pergamos, Berlin,
1880, and Thrämer, Pergamos, Leipzig, 1888; also F. E. Clark, The
Holy Land of Asia Minor, New York, 1914, p. 67, f.
[331] See Bousset, Die Offenbarung des Johannes, Göttingen, 1896,
p. 245, ff.; Ramsay, The Letters to the Seven Churches, New York,
1905, 283, ff., and Moffat in The Expositor’s Greek Testament, Vol. V,
New York, 1910, p. 355, f.
[332] See Ramsay, The Church and the Roman Empire, New York,
1893, p. 252, f.
[333] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XII, iii, 1.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-84-2048.jpg)
![[334] See Ramsay, Letters to the Seven Churches, p. 325, ff.
[335] See Butler in American Journal of Archæology, 2d series, Vol.
XVIII, 1914, p. 428.
[336] Book, I, 7.
[337] See Herbig’s article, “Etruscan Religion,” in Hastings’
Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. V, New York, 1912, p. 532,
ff.
[338] American Journal of Archæology, Vol. XVII, 1912, p. 474.
[339] Barton, A Year’s Wandering in Bible Lands, 76-79.
[340] See American Journal of Archæology, Vols. XIV-XVIII, and Fig.
285.
[341] Ibid., XV, 452.
[342] Ibid., XV, 457.
[343] Ibid., XVI, 475, ff., and Fig. 286.
[344] See “Altar (Christian)” in Hastings’ Encyclopædia of Religion
and Ethics, Vol. I, p. 338, f.
[345] Ecclesiastical History, X, 4.
[346] See Barton, A Year’s Wandering in Bible Lands, p. 71.
[347] See Chapter XIV, p. 217, f.
[348] Ramsay, Letters to the Seven Churches, 407, ff.
[349] Ibid., 410, ff.
[350] See Curtius, Philadelphia, Berlin, 1873, and Barton, A Year’s
Wandering in Bible Lands, 79, ff.
[351] Ramsay, Letters to the Seven Churches, 25, 1.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-85-2048.jpg)
![[352] See Ramsay, Letters to the Seven Churches, 257 and 274, ff.
[353] See Barton, A Year’s Wandering in Bible Lands, p. 82.
[354] See Ramsay, The Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia, Oxford,
1895, p. 32, f.
[355] See Ramsay, Letters to the Seven Churches, 424, ff.
[356] See F. E. Clark, The Holy Land of Asia Minor, New York, 1914,
p. 145, f.
[357] Other translations of this epic have been made. The most
important are as follows: Zimmern, in Gunkel’s Schöpfung und
Chaos, pp. 401, ff.; Delitzsch, Das Babylonische Weltschöpfungsepos
(Abhandlungen der sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, Bd.
XVII, 1896); Muss-Arnolt, in Assyrian and Babylonian Literature,
Aldine ed., edited by R. F. Harper; Jensen in Schrader’s
Keilinschriftliche Bibliothek, Bd. VI; L. W. King, The Seven Tablets of
Creation; Dhorme, Choix de textes religieux assyrobabyloniens;
Ungnad, in Gressman’s Altorientalische Texte und Bilder zum Alten
Testament; Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament. A
fragment of this tablet is shown in Fig. 290.
[358] That is, Sea and Abyss, mentioned in lines 3 and 4. Apsu was
the waters underneath the dry land and Tiâmat the salt sea.
[359] I. e., the spirits of earth.
[360] Another name for Tiâmat.
[361] Marduk’s temple in Babylonia.
[362] I. e., the captive gods of line 27.
[363] The name which the Babylonians gave themselves.
[364] Translated from Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in
the British Museum, Part XIII, p. 35, ff.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2474652-250619040819-3b6012a1/75/Postclassical-Hollywood-Film-Industry-Style-And-Ideology-Since-1945-Barry-Langford-86-2048.jpg)
Postclassical Hollywood Film Industry Style And Ideology Since 1945 Barry Langford
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- 5. POST-CLASSICAL BARRY LANGFORD ISBN 978 07486 3858 1 Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Jacket image: Thandie Newton and Matt Dillon in Crash (2005). © Lions Gate/The Kobal Collection Jacket design: www.paulsmithdesign.com E dinburgh POST-CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD FILM INDUSTRY, STYLE AND IDEOLOGY SINCE 1945 BARRY LANGFORD At the end of World War II, Hollywood basked in unprecedented prosperity. Since then, numerous challenges and crises have changed the American film industry in ways beyond imagination in 1945. Nonetheless, at the start of a new century Hollywood’s worldwide dominance is intact – indeed, in today’s global economy the products of the American entertainment industry (of which movies are now only one part) are more globally pervasive than ever. How does today’s ‘Hollywood’ – absorbed into transnational media conglomerates like NewsCorp., Sony and Viacom – differ from the legendary studios of Hollywood’s Golden Age? What are the dominant frameworks and conventions, the historical contexts and the governing attitudes through which films are made, marketed and consumed today? How have these changed across the last seven decades? And how have these evolving contexts helped shape the form, the style and the content of Hollywood movies, from Singin’ in the Rain to Pirates of the Caribbean? Barry Langford explains and interrogates the concept of ‘post-classical’ Hollywood cinema – its coherence, its historical justification and how it can help or hinder our understanding of Hollywood from the forties to the present. Integrating film history, discussion of movies’ social and political dimensions, and analysis of Hollywood’s distinctive methods of storytelling, Post-Classical Hollywood charts key critical debates alongside the histories they interpret, while offering its own account of the ‘post-classical’. Wide-ranging yet concise, challenging and insightful, Post-Classical Hollywood offers a new perspective on the most enduringly fascinating artform of our age. BARRY LANGFORD is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond (Edinburgh University Press, 2005) and co-editor of Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film (2007). FILM INDUSTRY, STYLE AND IDEOLOGY SINCE 1945 BARRY LANGFORD POST-CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD HOLLYWOOD FILM INDUSTRY, STYLE AND IDEOLOGY SINCE 1945
- 6. Post-Classical Hollywood M2218 -LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd i M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd i 4/5/10 15:01:00 4/5/10 15:01:00
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- 8. Post-Classical Hollywood Film Industry,Style and Ideology since 1945 Barry Langford Edinburgh University Press M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd iii M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd iii 4/5/10 15:01:00 4/5/10 15:01:00
- 9. © Barry Langford,2010 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Monotype Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3857 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 3858 1 (paperback) The right of Barry Langford to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published with the support of the Edinburgh University Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund. M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd iv M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd iv 4/5/10 15:01:00 4/5/10 15:01:00
- 10. Contents Illustrations vii Acknowledgements ix Introductionxi Part I: Hollywood in Transition 1945–65 1 Introduction to Part I 3 1 The Autumn of the Patriarchs 11 The Biggest, the Best: 1946 (The Best Years of Our Lives) 41 2 The Communication of Ideas 45 The Biggest, the Best: 1955 (Marty, Cinerama Holiday) 69 3 Modernising Hollywood 73 Part II: Crisis and Renaissance 1966–81 97 Introduction to Part II 99 The Biggest, the Best: 1965 (The Sound of Music) 104 4 The Changing of the Guard 107 5 New Wave Hollywood 133 The Biggest, the Best: 1975 (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Jaws) 154 6 Who Lost the Picture Show? 157 M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd v M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd v 4/5/10 15:01:00 4/5/10 15:01:00
- 11. vi post-classical hollywood PartIII: New Hollywood 1982–2006 181 Introduction to Part III 183 7 Corporate Hollywood 191 The Biggest, the Best: 1985 (Out of Africa, Back to the Future) 216 8 Culture Wars 219 The Biggest, the Best: 1995 (Braveheart, Toy Story) 241 9 Post-Classical Style? 245 The Biggest, the Best: 2005 (Crash, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith) 265 Conclusion: ‘Hollywood’ Now 269 Appendix 285 Further Reading 287 Index 295 M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd vi M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd vi 4/5/10 15:01:00 4/5/10 15:01:00
- 12. Illustrations 1 Looking aheadto an uncertain future: The Best Years of Our Lives (Goldwyn 1945). Reproduced courtesy of The Kobal Collection 12 2 The ‘Hollywood Ten’ and their families protest in vain against their prison sentences in 1947. Reproduced courtesy of The Kobal Collection 46 3 Publicity for This Is Cinerama (1953), the opening salvo of the widescreen era. Reproduced courtesy of The Kobal Collection 72 4 Hunt’s Cinestage, Columbus, roadshow-era showcase. Reproduced courtesy of the Columbus Metropolitan Library Photo Collection 98 5 ‘Just drifting’: Mike Nichols (standing, in sunglasses) directs Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (Avco Embassy 1967). Reproduced courtesy of The Kobal Collection 108 6 ‘Sappy Endings’: New York, New York (United Artists 1977). Reproduced courtesy of The Kobal Collection 132 7 Jaws (Universal 1975): the start of a new era. Reproduced courtesy of The Kobal Collection 155 8 Living up to a ‘big rep’: McCabe (Warren Beatty) plays the hero in Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Warner Brothers 1971). Reproduced courtesy of The Kobal Collection 158 9 Marty McFly invents rock ’n’ roll: Back to the Future (Universal 1985). Reproduced courtesy of The Kobal Collection 190 10 Making his mark on history: Forrest Gump (Paramount 1994). Reproduced courtesy of The Kobal Collection 220 11 ‘Welcome to Jurassic Park!’ The digital sublime in Jurassic Park (Universal 1993). Reproduced courtesy of The Kobal Collection 244 M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd vii M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd vii 4/5/10 15:01:00 4/5/10 15:01:00
- 13. viii post-classical hollywood 12Crash (Lionsgate 2005). Reproduced courtesy of The Kobal Collection 266 13 Hollywood’s nightmare: pirated DVDs seized by police. Reproduced courtesy of The Kobal Collection 268 M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd viii M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd viii 4/5/10 15:01:00 4/5/10 15:01:00
- 14. Acknowledgements Numerous people havecontributed, without necessarily always knowing it, to the development of the ideas that inform this book. My thanks to several generations of students on my Post-Classical Hollywood course at Royal Holloway, University of London, who have helped enormously, often by making me answer – and ask – questions I would not otherwise have consid- ered. My colleagues in the Department of Media Arts at Royal Holloway have offered extremely helpful feedback and canny insights when various parts of this project have been presented at departmental research seminars. Dr Jacob Leigh read some chapters in draft form and responded in a characteristically helpful and constructive fashion. Part of Chapter 9 was presented as a paper at the 2007 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Philadelphia; my thanks to the conference committee, to the British Academy for the award of an Overseas Conference Grant allowing me to make the trip, and to the audience at the Contemporary Filmmakers panel who responded in such stimulating and challenging ways to my thoughts on Steven Spielberg and the dialectic of spectacle. The research and writing of the book were supported by the Faculty of Arts at Royal Holloway, which offered an invaluable period of sabbatical leave in 2007, and the Department of Media Arts, who funded a trip to gather research on moviegoing in Columbus, Ohio. In Columbus, my warmest thanks to Professor David Stebenne of the Department of History at The Ohio State University for his hospitality; and a particular thanks to David’s graduate student Frank Blazich, who undertook vital long-distance research assistance at a late stage of drafting the book. At Edinburgh University Press, Sarah Edwards saw the book through the commissioning stage, and Esmé Watson was helpful and – not least – patient as several deadlines came and went without the manuscript arriving. My thanks and I hope it was worth the wait. M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd ix M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd ix 4/5/10 15:01:00 4/5/10 15:01:00
- 15. x post-classical hollywood Abook such as this obviously owed an enormous debt to other scholars: in the case of Hollywood studies, foremost among these, inevitably, is David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and Janet Staiger’s pioneering The Classical Hollywood Cinema. It will be apparent from the following pages just how important I consider their work to be, even when I disagree with some of its conclusions. Obviously, wherever I have profited from their or other schol- ars’ labours, the responsibility for any errors of emphasis or interpretation is entirely mine. The final vote of thanks goes to my long-suffering family, who have coped with the colonisation of the kitchen (because it overlooks the garden) by papers, notes and books, and still more with my testing transformation into a recluse, and an often ill-natured one at that, throughout much of the summer of 2009. I hope my wife, Carole, and my son, Noah, know what their love and support means to me, though even from among the unduly large number of words in this book it is difficult to find the few simple words that can express just how much it does mean. This book is dedicated to Noah, who likes Hollywood movies and who can now retrieve his dad and once again whup him on Mario Karts to his heart’s content. M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd x M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd x 4/5/10 15:01:00 4/5/10 15:01:00
- 16. Introduction The Hollywood filmindustry compels and receives universal attention, and for obvious reasons: for most of the last 100 years, Hollywood has set the terms of global film culture, and while that pre-eminence has frequently been criticised it has – notwithstanding the many other worldwide centres of cinematic excellence, some of them extremely successful – yet to be seriously challenged. Indeed, as I will repeatedly have cause to note in this book, an important dimension of Hollywood’s enduring success has been its facility in adopting and adapting the attributes and the technical and stylistic inno- vations of its competitors, from pre-World War I Italy and Scandinavia to Weimar Germany, through the European New Waves of the 1960s, and on to Bollywood and Hong Kong today. Since the end of World War II above all, Hollywood has been without question the dominant global film industry. The seven decades since 1945 have certainly confronted American cinema with challenges and crises that could not easily have been – and were not – anticipated as the Hollywood studio system prepared in 1945 to enjoy the fruits of victory (Hollywood’s own contribution to the war effort having enhanced its public profile and reputa- tion). Notwithstanding these challenges, and the era-defining social, politi- cal and economic changes that gave rise to them, by the end of the so-called ‘American century’ Hollywood’s worldwide dominance remained self-evident – indeed, in a largely borderless global economy the products of the American entertainment industry are more ubiquitous now than ever. Yet today’s ‘Hollywood’ – that is, the ‘filmed entertainment’ divisions of the transnational media conglomerates NewsCorp, Sony, Time Warner, Walt Disney, GE1 and Viacom, alongside numerous ‘mini-majors’ and independ- ent production companies of various kinds – and how it differs from the old studios of popular legend, remains obscure to most of its audience. This mis- understanding testifies partly to the confusing, ramified and multi-dimensional M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd xi M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd xi 4/5/10 15:01:00 4/5/10 15:01:00
- 17. xii post-classical hollywood natureof the contemporary corporate American entertainment industry and partly to the enduring myth of the ‘Hollywood studio’, whose iconic brands (Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney) remain part of the contemporary scene, though bar their names and common histories they share little with the vanished personal fiefdoms of the long-gone moguls. Partly, too, it reflects persistent assumptions that how movies are made – the industrial structures and business practices governing the decision to ‘greenlight’ any given picture – is less important than the creative impulses of visionary filmmakers, and certainly less interesting than the artistry of the films themselves. Over the last twenty-five years, such scholars as Thomas Schatz, Douglas Gomery, David Bordwell and many others working in the fields of film history, stylistic analysis and critical interpretation have demonstrated conclusively that the meanings and motives of Hollywood films cannot be adequately understood without systematic explication of the architecture of Hollywood: the dominant frameworks and conventions, the historical contexts and the governing atti- tudes which enable certain films to be successfully made and marketed, others to fail, and countless others never to reach the multiplex or to disappear into ‘development hell’. Equally, however, if film history is to be more than business history or the history of technology, the complex linkages between economics and film aesthetics need careful examination and analysis. So too does the question of how films make meanings for their audiences, in the shared context of their times – an understanding which has to move beyond unexamined auteurist assumptions as well as simplistic notions of how film ‘reflects’ social reali- ties. The journey from The Best Years of Our Lives (Academy Award for Best Picture and top earner of 1946) to The Dark Knight (the top-grossing film of 2008, taking in more than half a billion dollars at the US domestic box office alone) is not a straightforward one. This book therefore combines analysis of the changing film industry with detailed discussion of both the principal sty- listic characteristics and the ideological content of Hollywood motion pictures across their postwar history/histories. As the title makes obvious, an overarching aim of the book is to elucidate in what fashion and to what extent films and filmmaking have moved away from the ‘classical Hollywood cinema’, as expounded in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson’s 1985 study with that title, itself now a classic and surely one of the most influential and agenda-setting works of recent scholarship in any field. As The Classical Hollywood Cinema acknowledges, the use of the term ‘classical’ to describe Hollywood filmmaking in the studio era probably originates in the French film theorist André Bazin’s declaration in an essay of the early 1950s that by the outbreak of World War II the sound film in the USA (and France) ‘had reached a level of classical perfection’. The films of William Wyler, John Ford and other studio filmmakers, Bazin wrote, M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd xii M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd xii 4/5/10 15:01:00 4/5/10 15:01:00
- 18. introduction xiii brought cinemato ‘its perfect balance, its ideal form of expression’ through firmly established paradigms and protocols of genre, visual style and editing – ‘a complete harmony of image and sound . . . In short, here are all the char- acteristics of a classical art’.2 Bazin was not concerned to specify or systematise the idea of the ‘classi- cal’ cinema in more than a general way. In The Classical Hollywood Cinema, Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson set out to do just that. This book will explore in detail the paradigm of Hollywood practice they identify, but its general outlines – a stable temporal and spatial regime, achieved through adherence to continuity principles and a general though not absolute commitment to stylistic transparency, in the service of linear, character-centred narratives – are well known. The ‘classicism’ of this model of filmmaking consists in the classical Hollywood cinema’s properties of ‘decorum, proportion, formal harmony, respect for tradition, mimesis, self-effacing craftsmanship, and cool control of the viewer’s response – canons which critics in any medium usually call “classical”’.3 Determining the validity and the limitations of this model – developed over 500 double-columned pages with a hitherto unprecedented wealth of textual and documentary evidence, as well as a (somewhat contro- versial) ‘unbiased sample’ of 100 films produced between 1915 and 1960 – has set the agenda for how Hollywood style is discussed in historical contexts for the last twenty-five years. Among the several vexed issues raised by The Classical Hollywood Cinema, one particular crux is the confusing question of ‘classicism’ as a stylistic, rather than a historical, category. That is, to what extent does the ‘group style’ of studio-era films – around the existence, if not the nature, of which there is a reasonable measure of scholarly consensus – actually display the decorous, proportional, etc. qualities identified by Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson as ‘classical’? How ‘classical’, exactly, was ‘classic Hollywood’? Various com- mentators have pointed out that ‘classicism’ hardly seems to cover the stylistic variety and at times sheer oddity of Hollywood films, which range from three- hour-plus Biblical epics to singing cowboys;4 nor, in its emphasis on narrative as the ‘ultimately determining instance’ of film style, does this model seem fully to take account of the obvious appeal Hollywood films make through various kinds of visual spectacle.5 All of these unresolved problems are natu- rally exacerbated when one comes to consider the – quite evidently very dif- ferent – production contexts and practices of Hollywood since the end of the studio system, and the stylistic regimes that have emerged from them. Since the 1970s the term ‘post-classical Hollywood’ has come into increas- ingly wide, though by no means consistent, critical usage to describe various aspects of this contemporary Hollywood cinema. Current scholarship approaches Hollywood from a wide variety of methodological and interpre- tative perspectives, and has identified numerous ways in which the making, M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd xiii M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd xiii 4/5/10 15:01:00 4/5/10 15:01:00
- 19. xiv post-classical hollywood marketing,form, content and reception of films have all changed significantly since the studio era. Yet critical consensus on ‘post-classical Hollywood’, its timeline, defining aspects, limits and prospects, remains obstinately unach- ieved. Both David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson in their recent work have argued against any sense of a decisive break in film style since 1960 (when The Classical Hollywood Cinema ends). Justin Wyatt and others, by contrast, argue that a fundamentally different political and aesthetic economy of moviemaking sets in around 1980. There is terminological confusion here too. Peter Krämer identifies the ‘New Hollywood’ – a term in general circulation, to describe Hollywood since the end of the old studio system, since at least 1957, and which overlaps with ‘post-classical Hollywood’ – specifically with the period 1967–77 (also known as the ‘Hollywood Renaissance’ or ‘auteur renaissance’); Geoff King distinguishes two consecutive ‘versions’ of New Hollywood(s). Tom Schatz’s New Hollywood is defined by the emergent hegemony of the blockbuster; Jim Hiller’s, by the proliferation of production centres and sectors (mainstream, exploitation, independent, etc.).6 One aim of this book, therefore, is quite simply to elaborate, explain, and interrogate critically the various understandings of the ‘post-classical’ – its coherence, historical justification and relevance to our understanding of Hollywood filmmaking, historically and in the present. I will do this by chart- ing the key critical debates alongside the histories they interpret, and offering my own account of the ‘post-classical’. I have chosen to approach Hollywood since 1945 chronologically. The postwar period as a whole is divided into three sections, from 1945 to 1965, 1966 to 1981 and 1982 to 2006. These divisions correspond in broad terms to the established periodisation of Hollywood historians: each focuses on a period delimited and defined by major shifts and/or historical watersheds. The first covers the two decades immediately following World War II, years in which the American film industry underwent major reorganisation fol- lowing the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. et al. that ended the vertically integrated studio system, and faced chal- lenges from declining audiences and the rise of television. How Hollywood adapted to these changing circumstances, institutionally and stylistically, is the focus of this section. The second section covers the period in which, under continuing financial pressure, the studios first turned to a new genera- tion of filmmakers to court younger audiences with, in part, more topical and unconventional styles and subject matter; but then, following the runaway success of Jaws and Star Wars, shifted again in the late 1970s, towards a more spectacular, action-oriented cinema of sensation and away from the (somewhat) more character-centred and (sometimes) challenging films of the ‘Hollywood Renaissance’. The final section explores the Hollywood that emerged from these three postwar decades of upheaval and transitions, M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd xiv M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd xiv 4/5/10 15:01:00 4/5/10 15:01:00
- 20. introduction xv restabilised –but stabilised in new ways – by Hollywood’s incorporation as one arm of a diversified and constantly expanding contemporary global media industry. A shorter final chapter, ‘“Hollywood” Now’, brings the story up to date. Each chronological period/section is subdivided into three chapters, each of which takes a different perspective on the whole of the period at hand. The first chapter in each section summarises and interprets the evolving history of the American film industry, its key personnel, its business models and insti- tutional practices. The second considers Hollywood films in relation to their social, cultural and political contexts. The third considers the visual style, approaches to narrative and other stylistic elements most characteristic of the films of a specific period. This structure is intended to plot a clear pathway through the book and to enable direct comparisons across periods. The order reflects my own general belief that forms of creative cultural practice, and the nature and degree of artistic innovation, are strongly influenced by their economic and social contexts – though this is certainly not to say they are reducible to them. The inclusion of a strand on social context and ideology clearly differenti- ates this book’s approach from that of The Classical Hollywood Cinema, which explicitly brackets off any discussion of ‘ethico-social-political norms’. I hope to show, by contrast, that the stories Hollywood films tell – the kinds of stories they can tell – are profoundly influenced by, and responsive to, both concrete historical issues and events (such as anti-communism or the Vietnam War and its aftermath) as well as the ideological currents that circulate around and through such events and supply the terms on which they are available to be understood. Because this obviously does not happen in an unmediated or straightforward fashion, these chapters will pay extensive attention to generic trends, using genre as a means of mediating the relationship between film and social, political and economic contexts. I have written elsewhere that genre study can offer ‘a historically-grounded method of establishing “family resem- blances” between films produced and released under widely differing circum- stances, and of mediating the relationship between the mythologies of popular culture and social, political and economic contexts’, and maintain that meth- odology here.7 These chapters are intentionally placed between the industrial/ historical and the stylistic/analytical chapters to make the point that film form is not, and cannot be, ideologically innocent. Only in the second section of the book, dealing with the period 1966–81, is this order reversed, with the chapter on form (‘Hollywood New Wave’) preceding that on ideology (‘Who Lost the Picture Show?’). This is not supposed to indicate the primacy of form in the Hollywood Renaissance, but rather the reverse: to illustrate that in this period, there is an unusually self-conscious and clearly articulated ‘politics of form’ by which the range and nature of stylistic options and innovations is largely M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd xv M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd xv 4/5/10 15:01:00 4/5/10 15:01:00
- 21. xvi post-classical hollywood governed,but which also limits the capacity of these films to offer authentic ideological challenge. Two other strands, also chronologically sequenced, are interwoven with these large historical blocks. Each historical section has an introduction review- ing the changes to the film industry as experienced ‘on the ground’, that is as cinemagoers and movie spectators (in the age of television, home video and digital download these are, of course, no longer the same thing) have encoun- tered them during each of these periods. I do this by summarising the changes in film exhibition and consumption in one mid-size American city, Columbus, Ohio, from 1946 to the present. The choice of Columbus was governed by its size, its Midwest location, Ohio’s reputation as a ‘bellwether’ state in electoral politics, and its own widely-recognised ‘representative’ qualities (which have long made it a favoured test market for new products), all of which make it arguably more illustrative of industry trends (which themselves are of course affected by social trends, such as the demise of the downtown picture palaces in favour of first duplex and triplex, and then multiplex cinemas in suburban shopping malls) than a ‘world city’ such as New York or Chicago. Of course every community is unique and affected by different factors, but as these ana- lyses make clear, Columbus’s experience of consuming Hollywood films could largely be replicated throughout the USA (and increasingly worldwide). The remaining elements in the book are short sections, ‘The Biggest, the Best’, that take the temperature of Hollywood cinema at the midpoint of each decade covered by this book (starting in 1946, and then touching down at 1955, 1965, and so on) by discussing the top-earning/highest grossing film8 and the winner of the Academy Award for the year’s Best Picture. (For 1946 and 1965 these were the same film.) Neither of these milestones is intended as a straight- forward criterion for estimating excellence or even ‘popularity’. (We can know that more people saw one film than any other, but we cannot always be sure what they thought of it.) The Best Picture award, in particular, I take to reflect the industry’s estimation of its own virtues and the preferred self-image Hollywood projects to the world. In some cases both films are discussed, in others one film receives a good deal more attention than the other (I am afraid I struggled to find much to say about Braveheart). These sections, interpolated over the course of the book, also allow for more close analysis of individual films than can always be included in the necessarily wider-ranging perspective of the main chapters. The book’s title delimits its coverage, so readers will find that apart from some discussion of some forms of independent production as it has intersected with and affected ‘mainstream’ Hollywood, this book does not cover docu- mentary or experimental film, or explore anything like the full range of ‘indie’ and other semi-autonomous forms of narrative filmmaking. (For the latter, the reader is referred to excellent recent studies by Geoff King and Yannis Tzioumakis.) M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd xvi M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd xvi 4/5/10 15:01:00 4/5/10 15:01:00
- 22. introduction xvii notes onstatistics Except where otherwise noted, industry statistics (annual attendances, number of US cinemas, number of releases, etc.) are taken from the data collated in Joel Finler, The Hollywood Story, revised edition (London: Wallflower, 2003), pp. 356–81. Box office returns as cited here are of two kinds: before 1981, the figures are for rentals (that is, the money returned to distributors by exhibitors after deducting their percentage of the box office takings and the ‘house nut’, the sum allocated for the theatre’s own operating costs). Rentals were how Variety and other industry trade publications recorded box office performance through the late 1970s. Since the 1980s, the figure reported has been the box office gross, the total amount of money taken at the box office during a film’s theatrical release. Chapters 1–6, therefore, use rentals; Chapters 7–10, box office gross. Except where otherwise noted, these figures are derived from the records in the ‘Revenue Database’ at www.boxofficereport.com and the ‘Yearly Box Office Results’ at www.boxofficemojo.com note on references This book draws on a wide range of contemporary sources, primarily from trade and business press. These are fully cited in the endnotes to each chapter. A list of suggestions for Further Reading at the end of the book, organised according to chapter, is limited to secondary sources, many, but not all, directly cited in the text. notes 1. Shortly before this book went to press, cable TV operator Comcast announced a deal with GE to acquire a majority stake in NBC Universal; with this deal the company rejoined the giant dedicated media conglomerates, having exited their ranks in 1995 when the former owners Matsushita sold the then Universal Studios to the Canadian liquor distributor Seagram (see Chapter 7). 2. André Bazin, ‘The evolution of the language of cinema’, [1950, 1952] in What Is Cinema? trans., ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 29–30. 3. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 5. (Hereafter CHC.) 4. My thanks to Lee Grieveson for this pithily made point. 5. See for instance Elizabeth Cowie, ‘Storytelling: classical Hollywood cinema and classical narration’, in Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds), Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 178–90. M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd xvii M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd xvii 4/5/10 15:01:00 4/5/10 15:01:00
- 23. xviii post-classical hollywood 6.Peter Krämer, The New Hollywood: From Bonnie and Clyde to Star Wars (London: Wallflower, 2005); Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001); Thomas Schatz, ‘The New Hollywood’, in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins (eds), Film Theory Goes to the Movies (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 8–36; Jim Hillier, The New Hollywood (London: Studio Vista, 1993). 7. Barry Langford, Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 3. 8. See the note on grosses and rentals. M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd xviii M2218 - LANGFORD PRELIMS.indd xviii 4/5/10 15:01:01 4/5/10 15:01:01
- 24. part i Hollywood inTransition 1945–65 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 1 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 1 4/5/10 15:01:16 4/5/10 15:01:16
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- 26. Introduction to PartI Friday, 30 August 1946: the first peacetime summer in five years draws to a close and the long Labor Day holiday weekend beckons. Filmgoers strolling through downtown Columbus, Ohio, on this balmy Friday (tem- peratures approaching 74°F) faced a wide range of moviegoing choices typical of the nation as a whole. Columbus boasted four major first-run theatres, ornate ‘picture palaces’ constructed in the silent era, each capable of holding some 2,000 spectators, in a city with a population of just over 300,000).1 As in all the principal urban markets in North America, these showcase cinemas were owned by one or other of the so-called ‘Big Five’ vertically integrated producer-distributor-exhibitors: in this case, the Broad and the Ohio were owned by Loew’s (parent company of MGM), the Grand and the Palace (proudly promoted on its opening in November 1926 as ‘One of the World’s Most Beautiful Playhouses’2 ) by Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO). (The other members of the Big Five were Paramount, Warner Bros., and Twentieth Century-Fox.) Because the majors’ theatre chains tended to be geographically concentrated, a pooling system enabled their theatres to receive new releases not only from their own companies but also from other Big Five studios who did not own theatres in that area, as well as – on slightly less favourable terms, although moviegoers would not be aware of this – from the ‘Little Three’ producer-distributors who owned no theatre chains of their own: Universal,3 Columbia and United Artists. Thus, on this late summer Friday, the Grand and Palace theatres proudly offered two major seasonal attractions released through RKO itself: The Kid from Brooklyn, a Technicolor comedy vehicle for new contract star Danny Kaye (held over for its ’2nd Big Week!’) and Alfred Hitchcock’s latest roman- tic thriller, Notorious!, starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman.4 In fact, both films were RKO distributed but independently produced, from veteran freelancers Samuel Goldwyn and David O. Selznick, respectively, reflecting M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 3 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 3 4/5/10 15:01:16 4/5/10 15:01:16
- 27. 4 post-classical hollywood RKO’srelative weakness compared to the other majors in securing and retain- ing top-line contract talent; again, such contractual niceties passed by most casual moviegoers completely. Loew’s Broad, on the other hand, was showing a Twentieth Century-Fox production, the Jerome Kern-scored musical Centennial Summer, transferring down the street from the Ohio for a ‘2nd Overwhelmingly Wonderful Week!’; newly opened at the Ohio itself was Columbia’s mid-budget Western Renegades (promoted to appeal across the gender divide with poster art featuring leading lady Evelyn Keyes holding both a six-shooter and a newborn baby). Two of these films would feature in Variety’s list of the year’s top-earning films: Notorious came in eighth and The Kid From Brooklyn sixteenth. All of these programmes bar Notorious, whose star appeal and commercial prospects were reflected in the decision to present it as a single feature, offered the stand- ard supporting film to bulk out the evening’s entertainment, often, as here, supplied by either Columbia or Universal, the most parsimonious studios: The Kid From Brooklyn was partnered with Universal’s Danger Woman, Centennial Summer with Columbia’s The Unknown, and Renegades with Columbia’s It’s Great To Be Young.5 There were four other theatres in the immediate downtown area, but these did not compete directly with the first-run houses: as again was the norm nationwide, such second-run theatres offered a mixture of genre B-movies from either the majors’ own B production units or the ‘Poverty Row’ minor studios – such as Universal’s River Gang and Republic’s hoary (1941) Death Valley Outlaws, sharing a double bill at the Majestic – and major studio productions which had completed their profitable first-run engagements at studio-owned houses, such as Universal’s Patrick the Great and Warners’ One More Tomorrow. Beyond these downtown subsequent-run theatres were no fewer than forty-one other cinemas serving the city’s outlying neighbourhoods (‘nabes’ in Variety-speak), providing, taken together with the downtown theatres, roughly one theatre for every 6,000 inhabitants. The nabes typically comprised a few individual ‘mom and pop’ theatres and – the majority – local and regional chains such as the Academy Theatres (‘delux [sic] entertain- ment’), owners of six local cinemas, or Neth’s, who ran another seven. In this segment of the exhibition business, unlike the cosy closed-shop of the first-run market, margins were tight and competition for sellable product was genuine and intense. (However, the smallest exhibitors persistently complained that the chains, who obviously generated more business, received preferential treatment from the big distributors.) As ever, the most attractive product was a major studio release, once ‘cleared’ by the majors’ own distribution exchanges for second- and subsequent-run exhibitors, usually two or three months after completing their first runs. Independent exhibitors determined neither the timing nor in many cases the choice of their presentations, of necessity M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 4 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 4 4/5/10 15:01:16 4/5/10 15:01:16
- 28. introduction to parti 5 conforming to the studios’ strictly worked out system of ‘runs’ and ‘clearances’ which siphoned a film down through the less profitable stages of its distribu- tion in any given market over the course of many months, and frequently having to accept less desirable, low-grade studio pictures bundled in with the top-line A-picture attraction. The reward for deferring the pleasure of seeing the latest release (to say nothing of foregoing the exotic splendours of the picture palaces themselves in favour of modest neighbourhood theatres) was a lower ticket price than was charged for admission downtown – sometimes far lower, depending on how late in a movie’s progress through second-run and outlying theatres the moviegoer waited to see it. At these theatres at the end of August 1946 could be seen such studio hits from earlier that year as MGM’s The Green Years, premiered in first run in April, and The Postman Always Rings Twice, which had opened in early May. (These two films would rank twelfth and twentieth, respectively, in the year-end round-up.) Given the nabes’ low ticket prices and the relatively small catchments of subsequent-run theatres, a rapid turnover of attractions was a business necessity; films were rarely booked in for more than a few days, and audiences thus enjoyed the benefit of an enormous variety of programming, albeit some of it fairly long in the tooth. Across the city as a whole, including both main features and supporting pictures, in the single week beginning Thursday (changeover day at the first-run houses) 29 August 1946, Columbus moviegoers had a choice of well over 200 different films. This profusion of picturegoing options testified to two unchallengeable facts: that ‘going to the movies’ remained in 1946, as it had been for the previ- ous quarter-century and more, by far Americans’ favourite leisure pastime; and that 1946 itself was the highpoint – as reflected in attendances, box office receipts and the major studios’ corporate profits alike – of Hollywood’s for- tunes to date (and, as it would prove, for a very long time to come, inflation notwithstanding). More Americans bought more cinema tickets in 1946 than ever before or since: that year over 4 billion tickets were sold at US box offices, and the average American went to the movies over thirty times. Moviegoing accounted for almost 25 cents of every dollar Americans spent on recreation of all kinds, and more than 80 per cent of spectator expenditure (including theatre and sports). The studios boasted combined record profits of over $125 million.6 The value of motion picture shares, which had tripled between 1940 and V-J Day, doubled again in the next ten months. The studios, several of which had teetered on the verge of financial collapse during the Depression years of the 1930s, thus embarked upon the postwar era in apparently rude financial health. Of course, not every picture was a classic: though popular at the time, today only film historians and cinephiles pay much attention to Paramount’s Blue Skies (the year’s fifth highest-grossing film), MGM’s Till the Clouds Roll By (ranked ninth), or Fox’s Margie (fourteenth). But then M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 5 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 5 4/5/10 15:01:16 4/5/10 15:01:16
- 29. 6 post-classical hollywood theydid not all need to be classics: there were some 370 US-produced films released that year by the major and minor studios combined, more than one for every day of the year, and with audiences buoyant almost all of them had a guaranteed market. Ten years later, the weather in Columbus was pretty much the same; but changes had begun to make themselves felt, here as across the country, in the way Americans watched movies, in which movies they watched and how often, and – though this was harder to quantify – in their relationship to, and their expectations of, the medium. The downtown first-run theatres remained. Following the Supreme Court’s landmark 1948 decision in the antitrust case United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. et al. the Palace and Grand were no longer owned by RKO Pictures (which itself had just eighteen months to live) and Loew’s, somewhat belatedly, was in the process of divorcing its production-distribution activities from its theatre chain, including the Ohio and Broad in Columbus.7 But the studios still maintained cordial relations with their erstwhile exhibition arms’ sibling companies and reserved top-of- the-line studio productions for exclusive runs at the downtown houses:8 this week Warners’ Mister Roberts, the year’s top-grossing studio film (held over at the Grand for a fifth successive week), and The McConnell Story, MGM’s Gene Kelly musical It’s Always Fair Weather, and the enduringly popular Alfred Hitchcock’s latest, To Catch a Thief. All were colour productions, the first three filmed in the hugely successfully CinemaScope widescreen process introduced by Fox in 1953 and To Catch a Thief in Paramount’s own pro- prietary large-screen process VistaVision. One intriguing innovation in the exhibition sector was the advertisement of a live closed-circuit TV broadcast of Rocky Marciano’s upcoming world heavyweight title fight against Archie Moore, showing on a reserved-seat basis at the Palace on 30 September – despite some previous disappointments, in the mid-fifties the industry con- tinued to harbour hopes for ‘theatre TV’. In general, however, little at the first-run theatres suggested an industry any less robust now than at the war’s end. (Peer ahead one year, however, and more cracks are visible, even at this top end of the market, the Grand belying its name with a gutter-trawling double bill from exploitation quickie specialist AIP (American International Pictures), Girls in Prison and Hot-Rod Girl.)9 The second- and subsequent-run markets more obviously bore witness to an industry undergoing major change. Perhaps surprisingly, the overall number of cinemas in Columbus remained virtually unchanged at forty. However, fourteen of the city’s neighbourhood ‘four-wall’ theatres had closed since 1946 (another two would go dark in the coming year). Three of the survivors were now courting a very specific niche audience as self- proclaimed ‘Art Theaters’: a category that at this stage denoted less a focus on highbrow or art house films than the promise of racier fare – often imported M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 6 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 6 4/5/10 15:01:16 4/5/10 15:01:16
- 30. introduction to parti 7 from socially more liberal Europe (hence the ‘art’ label, a defence against anticipated or real opposition from local bluenoses). The Bexley offered The Young and the Damned (‘“Shocking!” – N.Y. Times’), the Indianola Love Island (‘Throbbing Adventure and Blazing Lips!’ starring ‘Sultry’ Eva Gabor, sister of the more notorious Zsa Zsa). The shortfall was made up by a category of theatre unknown in Columbus, though not elsewhere in the USA, in 1946: drive-ins, or in industry parlance ‘ozoners’. Thirteen of these now operated in and around the city, offering an undemanding diet of Westerns at eight sites, family fare such as Hans Christian Andersen and Disney’s animated ’Scope feature Lady and the Tramp, and exploitation fare aimed at the teen market: at the Riverside, a double bill of two Columbia B-movies, It Came From Beneath the Sea and Creature with the Atom Brain. Although the number of screens in Columbus remained stable, the variety of programming was reduced: some 110 different films – still a considerable number – were scheduled for the week beginning Thursday, 31 August. Arguably, tonal and generic as well as simple numeric variety was reduced; undoubtedly reflecting contemporary tastes but also the increasingly youthful profile of mid-fifties moviegoers, at least a third were Westerns and horror or science fiction films (the last a virtually non- existent genre before the dawn of the atomic age) aimed primarily at youthful moviegoers. The rise of drive-ins, which specialised in such fare, tilted the overall trend in this direction. In none of these aspects was Columbus anything but typical of general trends industry-wide. Across the USA, for example, while the total number of cinemas had remained roughly stable throughout the preceding decade at just under 19,000, this headline figure masked the real story, that the burgeoning ‘ozoners’ (up from just 300 in 1946 to 4,600 in 1955, a fifteenfold increase) were making good the precipitous decline of more than 25 per cent (from 18,700 to just over 14,000) in four-wall theatres – the great majority of them, as in Columbus, subsequent-run houses in outlying neighbourhoods and rural areas.10 (See Appendix: Figure 2.) The emergence of teenagers as a discrete and influential demographic – a 1955 survey conducted by ABC-Paramount Theatres reported that the 15–30 age group now supplied some 65 per cent of the movie audience – and the adjustment of production priorities to cater increasingly to juvenile tastes would come increasingly to dominate studio strategy in the years ahead.11 The overall reduction in exhibited films reflected a sharp decline in the number of releases by the major studios as they consoli- dated their operations in the challenging business climate of the fifties, con- centrating on fewer, mostly bigger pictures – in turn enabling the emergence of new outfits such as AIP to supply exhibitors with cheap, crowd-pleasing entertainment. The reason for the wave of closures of small theatres was equally plain: nationally, in 1955 US cinemas saw barely half as many admis- sions (just under 2.1 billion) as in 1946. Box office receipts were down too, from M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 7 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 7 4/5/10 15:01:16 4/5/10 15:01:16
- 31. 8 post-classical hollywood $1.7billion in 1946 to $1.3 billion in 1955, a 17 per cent reduction (inflation and higher ticket prices partly compensated for the lost millions of moviego- ers). As industry spokesmen bullishly insisted throughout the decade, with some 50 million admissions every week, moviegoing remained by any measure Americans’ most popular spectator amusement. But the industry’s direction of travel, measured in traditional terms, was downwards nonetheless. A major factor, of course – though not, as we shall see, the only one – was television, since 1949 as much a fact of daily life in Columbus, with its three network affiliates,12 as in the more than 500 other markets which now boasted their own TV stations.13 A glance at the schedules confirms that, at least as far as the majors were concerned, television in 1955 remained a major part of the industry’s postwar problems, rather than – as it would soon become – the solution to them. The prime-time schedules were showcases for anthology drama series broadcast live from the networks’ New York studios: in 1955, the episodic series that would soon overwhelm live drama were still second best, mostly corralled in early or late evening slots and produced not by the studios, whose high overheads and luxurious production schedules made it hard for them compete, but by pioneer telefilm companies such as Ziv (Waterfront, 10.30 p.m. Friday on NBC affiliate WBNS). As a secondary market for theatrical releases, television was still off-limits in 1955; with the majors refusing to license their film libraries to broadcasters, the networks padded out their late-night and afternoon schedules with older Poverty Row films such as Monogram’s 1938 Michael O’Halloran (late Friday on NBC) or British imports such as Rank’s Latin Quarter (1947, same time slot on ABC). However, the upstart medium’s appeal to Hollywood talent (now largely liber- ated from the long-term studio contracts of the 1940s) was apparent at both ends of the Hollywood spectrum, whether in longtime B-movie heavy George Raft’s turn upholding justice as Police Lt George Kirby in the filmed series I’m the Law on ABC, or the live Ray Milland Show on NBC. A sign of things to come, the latter was produced by Revue, the production arm of the domi- nant Hollywood talent agency MCA (Music Corporation of America), which by the early 1960s would not only come to dominate TV entertainment but, through its relationship and eventual ownership of Universal Pictures, would help transform Hollywood as a whole.14 Spool forward a further five years to 1960, and a measure of stabilisation seems to have set in. There were still forty theatres in Columbus, and the four first-run houses had been joined by the 1959 opening of Hunt’s Cinestage (previously the Uptown) a little to the north of the traditional downtown dis- trict. Hunt’s would henceforth be the preferred showcase for the ‘roadshowed’ (booked into long exclusive runs on a premium-priced, hard-ticket basis) historical epics and large-scale musicals that were Hollywood’s current top- of-the-line product. In September 1960, almost a year after its release, Hunt’s M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 8 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 8 4/5/10 15:01:16 4/5/10 15:01:16
- 32. introduction to parti 9 was still showing Ben-Hur (MGM 1959) in Technicolor and six-track stereo. There were seventeen nabes and fifteen drive-ins, but some of the fare on offer suggested that exhibitors faced impoverished choices: the Bexley was reduced to showing the cheap British series comedy Carry On Nurse. This reflected a downturn in domestic production, most marked at the top end of the market as the studios put an ever larger proportion of their production investment into fewer roadshow-style blockbusters: studio releases were down 15 per cent since 1955, from 215 to 184. Imported films – many of them, such as Come Dance with Me with Brigitte Bardot at the World, featuring Continental starlets in varying states of undress – had increased correspondingly. The roadshows relied on peeling Hollywood’s traditional undifferentiated mass audience away from its TV sets and back into theatres for the big-screen expe- rience. But elsewhere it became apparent that the underlying trend was in the opposite direction, towards the demographic fragmentation of audiences. The three films on widest release that week in September – Jerry Lewis, one of the few bankable new studio stars of the period, in The Bellboy (Paramount), at six theatres; Joseph E. Levine’s dubbed Italian import Hercules Unchained, also at six; and Roger Corman’s House of Usher for AIP, at seven – all appealed primarily to the youth market. More significant still was the ‘For Adults Only’ warning for Elmer Gantry, opening at the Ohio. Eight years before the age- based ratings system, this indicated that Hollywood recognised that the future lay in marketing movies effectively to particular niche audiences.15 It would be plausible enough to characterise this scene as one of inexorable decline, and several histories of postwar Hollywood do. Decline, however, is only one part of the big picture of Hollywood history in this period. The time-lapse sequence recorded here, with the city of Columbus as its lens, is accurate as far as it goes, using the health of the domestic theatrical market as the traditional barometer of the film industry’s well-being. Yet like the image in a camera obscura, the picture is, though detailed, limited by what it cannot see and is in any case inverted, because, by the early 1960s, the fortunes of ‘Hollywood’ – which at the end of World War II denoted an industry equally involved in the production, distribution and exhibition of motion pictures – were for a number of reasons far less securely shackled to those of cinema owners and exhibitors than had once been the case, and thus at once both more volatile, more flexible and, potentially, more recuperable than the bleak view from Main Street might suggest. In fact, if Main Street had by the early 1960s become an inadequate vantage point from which to estimate Hollywood’s fortunes (and in reality the view from Wall Street had always been just as important), this in turn tells us something about the direction the film industry had started to take, and the kind of entertainment industry into which even at this early stage, and at this low ebb of its fortunes, Hollywood had begun to transform itself. In truth, M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 9 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 9 4/5/10 15:01:16 4/5/10 15:01:16
- 33. 10 post-classical hollywood bythe mid-sixties a ‘New Hollywood’ had already been constituted by the many and far-reaching changes that had confronted the film industry since the end of World War II. More ‘New Hollywoods’ would be born in subsequent decades, of various kinds and longevity. But arguably the heaviest labour and the most significant metamorphosis from Old to New Hollywood had already taken place well before the dramatic upheavals of the late 1960s and 1970s. To understand this process, how it unfolded and what it entailed, we need first to return to Hollywood at the zenith of its fortunes – its ‘high noon’, in the words of film historian Thomas Cripps – and examine the delicate dynamic balance on which the enormous success of that system was, at least as it seemed in 1946, so securely founded. notes 1. The 1940 US Census recorded the population of Columbus as 306,087. http://www. census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab17.txt 2. Phil Sheridan, Those Wonderful Old Downtown Theatres (Columbus, OH: Sheridan, 1978), p. 47. 3. Universal had owned a small chain of theatres in the early 1930s but was forced to sell them in 1934 to stave off bankruptcy. 4. The exclamation point is usually omitted in critical discussions of the films but featured emphatically in promotional artwork. 5. Columbus Dispatch, 30 August 1946, pp. 17–18. 6. ‘Hollywood shakes its slump’, Business Week, 11 February 1950, p. 82. 7. On Paramount, see below, Chapter 1, pp. 17–21. 8. In traditional Old Hollywood style, some business relationships were thicker than water: when Twentieth Century-Fox set about complying with the Court ruling in Paramount, Spyros Skouras remained head of the production-distributor arm while his brother Charles took over the new Fox Theatres. In 1954 the Supreme Court rejected a suburban Baltimore exhibitor’s complaint that the majors’ continuing refusal to allow smaller outlying theatres access to first-run pictures constituted illegal restraint of trade. See ‘Sherman Act redefinition’, Time, 18 January 1954, p. 86. 9. Columbus Citizen, 2 September 1955 p. 9; Columbus Dispatch, 2 September 1956, p. 7. 10. Motion Picture and Television Almanac 1956; ‘Cinema count’, Newsweek, 18 October 1954, p. 100. 11. ‘Bid for teens’, Business Week, 14 May 1955, pp. 114–15. 12. WTVN switched to ABC from the collapsing Dumont network early in 1955. 13. The great majority of these opened after 1952, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ended its four-year moratorium on new station licences. 14. Columbus Dispatch, 2 September 1955, p. 21B. 15. Columbus Citizen-Journal, 1 September 1960, p. 9. M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 10 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 10 4/5/10 15:01:16 4/5/10 15:01:16
- 34. chapter 1 The Autumnof the Patriarchs As everyone knows – scholars, journalists, novelists, poets, pundits and most certainly filmmakers – ‘Hollywood’ is a myth. The subsumption of the American commercial film industry as a whole beneath the name of a Los Angeles suburb has in some measure always been simply a universally convenient shorthand that obscures a great deal of what it denotes. It is a metonym: the use of a part to designate a larger, and certainly in this case a much more complex, whole. In fact, the metonym is doubled, for just as ‘Hollywood’ blurs or brackets the relationship between what Leo Rosten called ‘the movie colony’ nestled amid the palm and orange groves of Southern California and its financial and strategic overseers in grimy Manhattan, so the equally conventional term ‘studio’ empha- sises one, highly visible and glamorous, dimension of the motion picture indus- try over another. By design, the overwhelming focus of mainstream (though not business) media, cultural commentators and politicians – to say nothing of the self-generated torrent of publicity, fan literature and the like – throughout Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’ (1927–45) was always on the physical creation of movie narratives on studio lots and soundstages by writers, producers, directors, technicians, craft workers and of course stars, their creative energies all cor- ralled and driven relentlessly onward by the cigar-chomping production head of popular legend, at the expense of other, more obscure industrial procedures that often took place far away from the shores of the Pacific. Yet these other activities – specifically the distribution and exhibition of motion pictures – were not only chronologically the senior elements in the evolution of the American film indus- try, they were the raison d’être of the entire system. If the studio lot was the shop floor of the ‘dream factory’, like any other factory its very existence depended in the first place on the strategies and decisions taken by accountants, lawyers and executive boards; its products in turn justified the considerable labour of their own creation not only, or indeed primarily, as expressions of creativity but to the degree they could be brought efficiently and profitably to market. M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 11 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 11 4/5/10 15:01:16 4/5/10 15:01:16
- 35. 12 post-classical hollywood Asthis book will demonstrate, ‘Hollywood’ (and for that matter, Hollywood) changed profoundly over the sixty-five (and counting) years covered in these pages. In some ways the confusion of Hollywood the place and the Hollywood film industry has been clarified – for example, by the reloca- tion of the studios’ corporate headquarters from East Coast to West during the recessionary late 1960s and early 1970s; in some ways it has become more acute – for instance, the dismantling of the old centralised production machinery and its replacement by a ramified, globally dispersed congeries of interrelated and often short-lived freelance entities on the one hand and titanic diversi- fied multimedia conglomerates on the other. To unpick this tangled skein we need not start from the very beginning, with the origins of the Hollywood film industry and the studio system; but we do need to understand the mature form of the organism whose ongoing evolution is this book’s subject. tipping the balance By common consent, both critical and popular, America’s entry into World War II found the studio system at its apogee. Fans and historians like to debate Looking ahead to an uncertain future: The Best Years of Our Lives (Goldwyn 1945). Reproduced courtesy of The Kobal Collection M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 12 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 12 4/5/10 15:01:16 4/5/10 15:01:16
- 36. the autumn ofthe patriarchs 13 whether 1939 (the year of Gone With the Wind, Stagecoach, Mr Smith Goes to Washington and The Wizard of Oz), 1940 (The Grapes of Wrath, Pinocchio, His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story), or perhaps 1941 (Citizen Kane, Sullivan’s Travels, The Maltese Falcon, Sergeant York, How Green Was My Valley) was ‘Hollywood’s greatest year’. Others would argue the case for 1946, the last real year of that older Hollywood, and the year this book’s narrative begins. Adjudicating such arguments is hardly possible and anyway misses the point. Whatever one’s preference, that list of titles – highly selective, omitting numerous other excellent pictures as well as many that were mediocre or worse – makes it clear that this was an industry capable of producing a rich stream of technically and artistically outstanding work that was also, despite the system’s factory-like aspects, richly varied in tone and content. At the same time, these films all bore Hollywood’s unmistakable stamp: they did not look or feel quite like the pictures of any other national cinema (though they drew for inspiration on many of them). One, not entirely conventional, way to understand the studio system at its zenith is as a carefully balanced regulatory system. ‘Regulation’ in business generally means government-mandated controls on business practices; in this sense of the term, Hollywood at the end of World War II was very lightly regulated indeed. Yet a variety of forms of regulation, broadly conceived, both internal and external, played a vital role in sustaining the intricate and profitable mechanisms of the studio system. The most obvious and visible of these was the self-censorship of motion picture content though the industry- sponsored, arm’s-length Production Code Administration (PCA), run since 1934 – when the largely ineffectual ‘Hays Code’ was revamped in the face of pressure from politicians and religious groups and given meaningful powers of enforcement – by Joseph Breen. The ‘Breen Office’ was anything but inef- fectual. At every stage from the acquisition of a property (a novel or stage play) through to post-production, but above all during the screenwriting process, the PCA applied the rigorously conservative moral standards enshrined in the 1934 Code to the narrative content, dialogue, stated and implied attitudes and visuals of every picture distributed by a member of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA). The studios for their part contracted to abide by the PCA’s decisions and undertook neither to distribute nor, on behalf of their theatre chains, to exhibit any film distributed without a Code Seal of Approval. Self-regulation was motivated by concern to avoid regulation from outside – a very real prospect in both the early 1920s and the early 1930s. As odious as the Code’s antediluvian positions on sexual and social relations may have been to many in the Hollywood creative community (it was antediluvian even by the standards of the 1930s, let alone the considerably altered American society emerging from World War II), nonetheless the Code achieved its primary goal for over a decade, which was to ensure the smooth M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 13 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 13 4/5/10 15:01:16 4/5/10 15:01:16
- 37. 14 post-classical hollywood runningof the distribution of films to audiences, with minimal risk of interfer- ence from state or municipal censorship bodies.1 In a different sense, the effective regulation of output through the opera- tions of an assembly line-like system of production, distribution and exhibi- tion was central to the business model of the Big Five studios. The agreement (collaboratively between production head in Los Angeles and the studio’s chief executive in New York, with the latter generally having the final say2 ) of an annual ‘slate’ of releases categorised by budget, from top-class ‘prestige’ pic- tures through mid-range ‘programmers,’ to B-films and series; the assignment of the creative responsibility for delivering the finished picture to a producer and thence to contracted, salaried studio personnel (writer(s), director, stars, cinematographer, production designer, all the way down to grips, electricians, set painters and carpenters); the production itself, filmed on the studio lot under the close supervision of the assigned producer, with rewrites, reshoots and cuts at his (and not the star’s or director’s, let alone screenwriter’s) behest, typically with a careful eye on potential cost overruns; the distribution of the finished film, rolling out nationwide in carefully staged sequence over several months or more through the ‘run clearance’ system3 ; the ruthless manipula- tion of the studios’ market advantage (secured through their domination of the first-run exhibition sector) to extract preferential terms from independ- ent exhibitors wishing to screen studio films: this entire complex process, first synthesised by Adolph Zukor at Paramount in the late 1920s, entailed a careful regulation of investment and expenditure-limiting economies of scale to deliver a reliable flow of profits to the parent company and its shareholders in New York. Where this system had wavered, its problems were typically due to misguided corporate strategies (such as William Fox’s over-expansion of his theatre chains in the Depression-ridden early 1930s) or inadequate leader- ship (as afflicted RKO, youngest and weakest of the Big Five, throughout the 1940s). The system itself was, if not foolproof, then certainly robust enough to survive all of the challenges (including the Great Depression) it had faced in its twenty-odd years of existence. Another crucial dimension of the studio system was the careful regula- tion of labour relations, which operated both at the highly visible top end of the industry salary scale – the star system – and down through the ranks to the studio craft workers. The latter, though belatedly unionised in the 1930s partly as a consequence of Roosevelt’s union-promoting National Recovery Administration (NRA) programmes, were under more or less constant pres- sure throughout the studio era, enduring among other woes the takeover of the principal craft union by mobsters who were bribed by studio bosses to impose sweetheart deals and wage restraint upon their members. Although Hollywood was one of the most thoroughly unionised sectors of American industry, its labour force, paradoxically, was always in an uneasy position, M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 14 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 14 4/5/10 15:01:16 4/5/10 15:01:16
- 38. the autumn ofthe patriarchs 15 its hard-won gains never wholly assured in the face of the persistent hostility of Hollywood’s capitalist establishment (Walt Disney was a persistent union antagonist throughout the 1940s).4 Stars, of course, enjoyed financial rewards beyond the dreams of set paint- ers and make-up artists; but their fortunes were also precarious, at the mercy both of fickle public favour and of their employers’ unremittingly instrumental perception of talent as a resource which the studios had bought and paid for and which they were entitled to exploit on their own terms. The studios set out to ensure a steady return on their considerable investment in their top name stars by applying identical strategies to those by which they managed their other personnel and their physical plant. Assigning staff writers to create scripts tailored to each leading man or lady’s particular qualities and abilities, for example, ensured a steady throughput of star vehicles and avoided any costly periods of underemployment for their prize ponies. Star personae, once established, locked performers into generic paradigms from which they would sometimes struggle to break free – for example, the ‘tough guy’ roles which by the late 1930s James Cagney at Warners was chafing intensely against. In fact the stars themselves, locked into seven-year contracts with no right to renegotiate terms however popular they became, for all the flattering glamour in which they were bathed by studio publicity machines had little control over the trajectory of their own careers: by mutual consent, MPPDA member studios did not poach each other’s stars (hence stars were denied the opportunity to improve their contracts and working conditions by soliciting better offers elsewhere). Inter-studio loan-outs (usually from a larger to a smaller studio), conversely, were commonplace – as, for example, MGM’s loan of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert to Columbia in 1934 for Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (as it turned out, a multi-Oscar-winning major hit). Those stars bold enough to complain of substandard scripts or stereotyping found themselves subject to punitive treatment. In more extreme cases, stars who refused to accept a particular role could find themselves charged with breach of contract and suspended without pay – Bette Davis at Warner and David Niven, under contract to independent producer Samuel Goldwyn, both found themselves on the receiving end of such treatment. Such actors could easily acquire a reputation for being ‘difficult’ which could mar their prospects in what was to all intents and purposes a company town. In this as in other regards, even Hollywood aristocracy had to accept that they were looked on effectively as chattels by the real powers of the film business. (Such facts of Hollywood life naturally applied all the more to supporting players and extras. Hollywood actors had used their obvious leverage to unionise successfully through the Screen Actors’ Guild in the mid-1930s, but the contract system still weighted the conditions of their labour heavily in the studios’ favour.) M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 15 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 15 4/5/10 15:01:16 4/5/10 15:01:16
- 39. 16 post-classical hollywood Allof these practices, ideally arranged to the benefit of the studios – which is to say with an eye to what ultimately mattered, the bottom line – relied in the final analysis on the most fundamental, though unacknowledged, form of industry self-regulation, that is to say the relationship, to all intents and purposes a partnership, between the ostensibly competing companies who dominated the American film marketplace. Not for nothing has the classical Hollywood studio system been described as a ‘mature oligopoly’: that is, rule by a few (companies), the ‘maturity’ of the arrangement consisting precisely in the members’ basically collaborative relations. Of course each studio set out to produce the most profitable pictures it could; but ‘facts on the ground’, such as the different strengths and geographical concentrations of the Big Five’s exhi- bition arms (the oldest integrated company, Paramount, had by far the most theatres, while the much smaller size of Loew’s/MGM’s and RKO’s chains, each barely a tenth of Paramount’s, was partly compensated by their control of the lucrative New York market) promoted cooperative relations. During the war years in particular, pretty much everybody won, with even the tradition- ally weaker studios posting record results (Warner Bros., for example, saw profits rise from just $1.7 million in 1939 to $19.5 million in 1946).5 Above all, the collusive regulation of competitive relations between the major studios worked effectively to exclude new entrants to the market.6 The studio system conceded a limited, and by the early 1940s growing, role to independent producers, especially the prestigious boutique outfits headed by former studio moguls like David O. Selznick and Samuel Goldwyn which produced a handful of high-class pictures each year (including some enormous popular and critical hits, most famously Selznick’s Gone with the Wind in 1939), from which the studios in any case benefited by distributing;7 but none of these – let alone the typically ephemeral production companies occasionally established by individual stars or directors, or the impoverished beneath-the-radar efforts of producers targeting the urban ethnic and ‘race’ (African American) markets – posed any threat to dominion by the majors.8 The majors generally perceived a challenge to any one of them as a challenge to all – rightly, given the extent of their collusion on all aspects of industry practice. The MPPDA allowed the studios to come to common arrangements on a variety of industry issues in the guide of a ‘trade association’, thus cir- cumventing antitrust laws. Two different, but representative, examples of collective wagon-circling under threat in the same year, 1941, were the com- bined majors’ proposal to purchase (and destroy) the negative of Citizen Kane from RKO, under fire from press baron W. R. Hearst, scathingly portrayed in Orson Welles’s film; and Twentieth Century-Fox chairman Joe Schenck (brother of Loew’s chief executive Nicholas Schenck) ‘taking the fall’ and serving time for the mob/union payoffs of which all the studio leaders were equally guilty.9 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 16 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 16 4/5/10 15:01:16 4/5/10 15:01:16
- 40. the autumn ofthe patriarchs 17 This cooperative quasi-competition was the stable and profitable heart of the Hollywood film industry and fundamental to the self-regulated studio system from the start of the sound era until after the end of World War II. In the end, however, it was this same collusive architecture of Hollywood’s political economy that proved its Achilles heel and, in hindsight, leveraged the restructuring of the industry as a whole. The decisive intervention of external regulation, in the shape of the Federal Government, revealed how delicate and fragile was the balance that the studio system in its brief heyday had achieved; and, logically, the dismantling of the system’s economic founda- tions led in short order to the old Hollywood’s wholesale supersession by the (first) New Hollywood. When after the war Truman’s Justice Department renewed the antitrust suit first launched by the Roosevelt administration in 1938, the studios fought the court decisions against their interests all the way until they ran out of road in the Supreme Court. The decision the Court finally handed down in 1948 in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. et al. – the famous ‘Paramount Decree’ – revisited and definitively resolved the question of whether the major studios constituted a ‘trust’ in the terms of US commer- cial law, that is, a cartel operating illegitimately to restrict market freedom in a given industry. The Court found, to no one’s surprise, that the studios were indeed a trust and acted decisively to remedy the situation, going far beyond the terms of the compromise consent decree by which the previous suit had been resolved in 1940 (revised in 1941). That decision had tried to settle disputes between theatre owners and the studios through arbitration, while eliminating some of the most egregious anti-competitive abuses in the terms on which exhibitors acquired studio product.10 Paramount, by contrast, addressed the structural causes of exhibitors’ complaints in the studios’ monopoly control of the film business through the vertical integration of production, distribution and exhibition. The Court took a strong line and required the studios to divest themselves wholly of their exhibition interests (the theatre chains). They also prohibited the studios’ predatory and unfair practices in dealing with independent exhibitors, such as blind- and block-booking (which compelled theatre owners to accept bulk consignments of inferior studio B-movies, often sight unseen, as the price of acquiring a hit A-picture). This last ruling highlighted a striking aspect of the studio system. For years the majors had been turning out a torrent of product, much of it of frankly inferior quality. Yet it might be asked why the studios persisted in churn- ing out such a large amount of substandard product? Why not concentrate on fewer, better, productions and save everyone the bother? The answer is that the system the studios had built led inevitably to over-production. The large overheads the majors incurred as they expanded (the size of the average workforce in the film industry increased fivefold between 1927 and 1937, years M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 17 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 17 4/5/10 15:01:16 4/5/10 15:01:16
- 41. 18 post-classical hollywood inwhich the size of studio lots also expanded greatly) prohibited extended periods of idleness. Only an almost constant stream of pictures could justify the sizeable investment in production facilities and contract personnel. In this sense the studios not only were, but needed to be, if not factories then at least factory-like. By the same token, it made sense to spread financial risk across as many productions as possible rather than betting the studio’s fortunes on a few ultra-expensive releases. Equally, however, the system only made sense, and could only sustain itself, in the artificial market environment the studios had themselves created. In effect, the studios could dump the results of their over-production on the market, confident that their monopoly control, combined with the ongoing demand for their premium product, ensured they would suffer no backlash. Audiences and exhibitors, after all, had nowhere else to go, or so it seemed. (Audiences, however, were not passive or uncritical dupes: a legislative initia- tive to ban double features in Illinois in 1938 – in reaction against the poor quality of supporting features – only narrowly failed to reach the statute books.)11 Such a strategy meaningfully hedged against the inherently risky business of successfully anticipating and responding to changing public tastes – to the gratification of Wall Street, upon whose continuing support the studios, like any other big business, relied for investment and affordable credit. And it ensured that the public, who particularly during the war dis- played an enthusiasm for moviegoing that seemed almost blind to considera- tions of quality, would continue to have their habit fed by a reliable supply of fresh (or at least new) films two or three times a week at their local theatres. Theatrical exhibition was the heart of the old Hollywood; it was in every case the sector in which the founding generation of studio owners (Marcus Loew and Nick Schenck at MGM; Harry, Jack and Abe Warner; William Fox; Adolph Zukor at Paramount) had first entered the business back in the nickelodeon days at the start of the century. The original motivation for estab- lishing their production arms (initially in New York and New Jersey, shifting to the West Coast in the mid-teens) was essentially to provide a reliable supply of suitable, marketable product for the expanding theatre chains each company controlled, and to make proper use of the national distribution systems they had established to deliver films and collect receipts from theatres. Key strate- gic corporate decisions – including the approval of annual production slates – were taken in New York, not in Hollywood. The vertically integrated system pioneered by Adolph Zukor at Famous Players (the precursor of Paramount) and subsequently adopted by all of the Big Five was predicated on a simple and obvious premise: money was made in the film business when audiences bought movie tickets; the greater your control of the exhibition sector, the greater your ability to maximise your share of box office revenues, both in the theatres you controlled directly and in the remainder who required your premium M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 18 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 18 4/5/10 15:01:17 4/5/10 15:01:17
- 42. the autumn ofthe patriarchs 19 product to keep their own businesses on a paying basis. The majority decision in Paramount noted that while the Big Five owned, wholly or in partnership, around 20 per cent of all the nation’s theatres, in America’s ninety-two largest cities the Big Five controlled over 70 per cent of first-run theatres. (As we have seen, in Columbus – in 1946 the twenty-sixth largest US city – all four downtown first-run theatres were studio-owned.) The Big Five’s domina- tion of these metropolitan markets, by far the most profitable sector, through their chains of downtown picture palaces, enabled them both to cream off the revenues their A list pictures generated and to command premium rates and terms for allowing independent exhibitors access to such films in second and subsequent runs.12 Whereas in later years, as we shall see, new emergent ancillary markets would massively expand the studios’ range of profit-taking opportunities, in the late 1940s these were all in Hollywood’s future. The money to be made from motion pictures relied entirely, as it had done since the medium’s earliest days, on distribution fees and box office receipts; and while overseas markets made a very significant contribution, domestic US first-run release was much the most important element, outstripping foreign sales by a ratio of around two to one. (Re-releases had limited value; some high-visibility individual pictures – such as Gone With the Wind, profitably re-released several times in the late 1940s and 1950s – and some categories of film – notably Disney’s animated shorts and features, which had a self-renewing constituency of new child audiences every few years – could deliver repeat business over time, but in most other cases a film’s value to a studio was pretty much exhausted once it had finished its initial run in theatres.)13 Exploiting this single profit window to the fullest degree was therefore the studios’ paramount concern. To ensure that every film wrung the last possible cent from its markets entailed both the constant adjustment of ‘rental’ income (the percentage of box office receipts returned from theatres to distributors, using the Big Five’s control of the first-run market as leverage) and the careful manipulation of a film’s availability in different market segments over the course of its lifetime in active release, always with the aim of directing as large a proportion of audiences as possible to see the film at higher ticket prices in the earlier stages of its release in first-run (studio-dominated) theatres.14 This latter strategy was the ‘run clearance’ system which saw studio films booked first into the studio’s own downtown picture palaces – their most prestigious and profitable runs; they were then withdrawn from the market altogether for a predetermined period (usually several weeks) before their release to the second-run houses; and so on down through to the independent theatre chains and finally the individual ‘mom-and-pop’ theatres typically located in rural areas. A successful film’s lifespan through the entire run clearance programme could easily take months, even up to a year. This process – which among other M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 19 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 19 4/5/10 15:01:17 4/5/10 15:01:17
- 43. 20 post-classical hollywood advantagesto the studios reduced the need to strike expensive and quickly redundant multiple prints, since a given film would only ever be distributed to a limited number of cinemas at any one time15 – could also be seen as a form of sophisticated regulation of the market. life after paramount: the rise of the independents The Paramount decision threw out virtually at a stroke the business model on which the majors’ success had been founded. The case opened up the prospect of each film having to sell itself to exhibitors and audiences on its individual merits (or at least on the qualities which could be advertised through mas- sively increased spending on marketing and publicity). The Court had also outlawed the sweetheart (‘you scratch my back’) deals whereby studio pictures gained preferential access to first-run theatres owned by other studios in markets where they themselves were weaker. This inevitably implied a much fiercer competition among the studios for market share – which of course was precisely the intention of the judgment. Finally, a very serious problem posed by divestment was the loss of the valuable real estate represented by the theatres, whose collateralisation against bank loans used for production finance gave the Big Five a crucial competitive advantage against smaller studios and independents. Small wonder then that the studios dragged their heels on complying with the Court’s demands for as long as possible (Loew’s finally divorced its theatre chain from MGM only in 1957); nor that some of the old guard of studio leaders – men in any case of pensionable age by the mid-1950s – preferred comfortable retirement to the effort of equipping their companies for a new and uncertain business environment. Harry Warner, Nicholas Schenck at MGM, and Y. Frank Freeman, Barney Balaban’s longtime head of production at Paramount, all stepped down from executive responsibility in the 1950s. Balaban himself and Spyros Skouras at Twentieth Century-Fox followed suit in the early 1960s. A more dismal fate awaited RKO, always the weakest of the Big Five, which following its takeover by Howard Hughes in 1948 and the loss of its theatre chain in 1950 (the first of the majors to comply with the Court ruling) stumbled through several years of drastically reduced output and disastrous losses before Hughes wound the company up and sold off its assets in 1957. Still, although some textbooks maintain that the effect of the Paramount decision was immediate and dire,16 in fact the direct impact of the judgment was necessarily limited. As already noted, it was the best part of a decade before the majors finally all exited the exhibition business as the Court directed M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 20 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 20 4/5/10 15:01:17 4/5/10 15:01:17
- 44. the autumn ofthe patriarchs 21 – an extended transition that reflects their collective attempts to find a new way of doing business before they turned their back forever on the old one. The larger problem was that Paramount was far from the only challenge confront- ing the studios in the postwar period. Industry revenues plummeted in the late 1940s: collective studio profits in 1948 were barely $50 million (a figure that included a $3.2 million loss at Universal, the first posted by any of the majors since 1940), down a whopping 60 per cent from 1946.17 The combined balance sheet would dwindle further, to $30 million in 1950, prompting the financial press to diagnose movies as America’s ‘New Sick Industry’; but Paramount had little to do with any of this.18 In fact, by 1948 the film business was already being buffeted by the first blasts of what would prove over the next few years a perfect economic storm. Paramount ensured it would be no passing squall. The air started to leak from the industry’s postwar balloon of confident prosperity when overseas revenues took a sudden and drastic downturn in the summer of 1947. Towards the war’s end and in its immediate aftermath, Hollywood had profited immensely from its renewed access to continental European markets inaccessible during wartime. Four or more years’ worth of American films, penetrating liberated Europe in the footsteps of the advanc- ing Allies, were able to satisfy pent-up demand facing little or no competition from physically and morally prostrated domestic European film industries (this was particularly true of Germany, which before 1933 had boasted the best capitalised, most technically advanced and aesthetically ambitious world film industry outside Hollywood itself). However, European governments quickly fought back, alarmed at both the cultural and the commercial implications of Hollywood domination. In 1947 Britain, for whom Hollywood’s hegemony (of 465 feature films shown in the UK in 1946, 328 were American imports) and the associated flight of dollar payments back to the USA exacerbated a catastrophic postwar balance of payments deficit, slapped a 75 per cent tax on foreign film earnings.19 Other countries in Europe and Latin America followed, imposing punitive tariffs and quotas on US films and the dollars they repatri- ated.20 Hollywood remittances from abroad accordingly dropped by some $50 million between 1946 and 1948, while motion picture company share values dropped accordingly.21 To get around tariffs, the studios invested in a wide diversity of overseas operations, from Swedish shipbuilding to Italian marble and Finnish bibles – all imported to the USA and finally sold for dollars.22 At home, meanwhile, the falling arc of studio revenues met a rising curve of production costs. Peace put an end to the wartime culture of patriotic self- denial: wage claims and consumer demand alike accelerated out of fifteen years of Depression and war, generating a mutually reinforcing inflationary spiral that hit movie production along with every other sphere of the US economy. During the wartime movie boom, the negative cost of an average A production had already ballooned, nearly tripling from $304,000 in 1940 to $900,000 in M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 21 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 21 4/5/10 15:01:17 4/5/10 15:01:17
- 45. 22 post-classical hollywood 1946.23 Asthe postwar chill set in, the studios publicly declared their intention to reduce production costs; but with salaries in a heavily unionised industry accounting on average for 85 per cent of a picture’s negative cost, such savings proved easier to announce than to deliver. The rate of increase slowed, but production costs continued to rise; by 1950 the price of an A-picture had hit the $1 million mark and – with the move towards blockbuster production pro- pelling costs upwards – continued to rise much faster than inflation, by about 50 per cent every five years for the next two decades. Beyond all this, the inescapable bottom line – the perspective which mag- nified every other challenge the movie industry faced in the late 1940s – was that Hollywood’s audience was rapidly shrinking. No sooner had the industry basked in its record 1946 receipts than a steep decline in attendances set in. Admissions tumbled 10 per cent in 1947 alone, and a further 18 per cent over the next three years. By 1950 over a billion moviegoers annually had been lost to theatres in just five years. (See Appendix: Figure 1.) That attendances and revenues could not be sustained at wartime levels in itself came as little surprise. With many other spectator amusements, such as major league baseball, cancelled for the duration, an influx of labour to big cities (disproportionately dominated by studio-owned theatres) to man the war effort, and a public naturally eager to find both inspiration for and distraction from the stresses of conflict, wartime for Hollywood was an artificially benign business environment. The studios’ corporate strategies during the wartime boom, retiring debt and strengthening their reserves of working capital, indi- cated a general recognition that the good times could not last indefinitely. But the extent and rate of the apparently bottomless drop into which attendances tumbled in the years from 1947 found the studios scrambling to understand what, it soon became apparent, was actually a tectonic shift in patterns of American leisure and entertainment that amounted to the wholesale abandon- ment by tens of millions of Americans of moviegoing as a habitual practice. The dramatic social and demographic shifts of the postwar period (see Chapter 2) domesticated patterns of leisure consumption and expenditure in American life, diverted discretionary spending into consumer goods, discour- aged large numbers of young newlyweds and first-time parents from develop- ing the moviegoing habit, fragmented the traditional moviegoing family unit into demographic bands with increasingly diverse tastes and social practices, physically removed newly suburbanised spectators from the downtown areas in which the first-run houses were traditionally clustered, and ultimately left moviegoing the occasional pleasure of a constantly dwindling customer base, rather than the ubiquitous national pastime of previous decades. All this of course happened quite regardless of Supreme Court decisions. In a radically more challenging business environment, the unmistake- able lesson of Paramount was that the studios had to overhaul their business M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 22 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 22 4/5/10 15:01:17 4/5/10 15:01:17
- 46. the autumn ofthe patriarchs 23 practices root and branch. The old assembly-line model of studio film pro- duction had become unsustainable. What in the old days of monopolistic internal regulation were economies of scale now stood revealed as wasteful and inefficient. With the end of their armlock on exhibition, the studios lost their guaranteed market for every film. Unreformed, there was a real danger that the system would turn out a glut of films that quite simply no exhibitor wished to show, and which no one could any longer compel them to show – a problem dramatically evidenced in late 1948 when Warner Bros., faced with a growing backlog of unreleased features and an $11 million fall in profits year-on-year, shut down production for three months. Jack Warner spoke publicly merely of ‘appraisal, analysis and planning for the future’24 but the unmistakeable reality was the need for a radical reorientation of studio activities. Paramount issued in a period of reappraisal and restructuring across the industry. Strategies of adaptation varied from one company to another, but the ‘survival two-step’ was industry-wide: each major studio set themselves first to consolidate and cut costs before exploring where, in the transformed industry, the opportunities to actually make money were. The obvious way to economise was to produce fewer films. This was indeed the logic of Paramount, which deprived the studios of their captive market for each and every release. But reduced production in turn dictated that the massive overheads incurred by the armies of contract personnel on virtually round-the-clock production shifts no longer made economic sense. As long as the studios remained in the business of actually producing pictures themselves it made sense to retain some craft and office staff on the studio lot to maintain capacity, but in reduced numbers and with some radical corporate surgery. Warner Bros.’ outright elimination of its story department in spring 1951 was a dramatic example. Given the story department’s crucial importance to the old studio system – finding and developing the material on which the entire production cycle relied – its dissolution implied not simply cutbacks in but a significant redirection of studio activity as a whole. Warners’ decision was itself both symptomatic of and a response to other moves already underway in that studio and throughout the industry. For while the studio, as a production facility, could still justify the cost of retain- ing a proportion of its studio workers as long as there was work to be done, the greater expense of keeping salaried talent on the traditional long-term contract was evidently obsolete. A Bogart, or Cooper, or Hepburn only paid their way as long as they were put to good use in two or three pictures a year. Without such a guaranteed throughput of product, stars (and this held equally good for other top-line talent, including directors, producers and writers) were on a week-to-week basis an unaffordable luxury: better to rent, lease or partner with them as needed and wanted on individual projects. The decade 1945–55 accordingly saw the total number of contract players at the major M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 23 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 23 4/5/10 15:01:17 4/5/10 15:01:17
- 47. 24 post-classical hollywood studios(apart from MGM) decrease from 804 to 209: in early 1953 Newsweek reported that Paramount had just twenty-six contract players, mostly low- salaried youngsters, and only three bona fide stars (Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and William Holden).25 At the same time, having drastically reduced their own production rosters, the studios needed additional independently produced films to maintain a full slate of releases. So began the shift towards a new industrial model, in which the old studios26 came increasingly to function as financier-distributors to independent producers who in turn took on the lion’s share of the creative work. Warners’ abolition of its story department clearly signposted an anticipated future in which independents originated and devel- oped material they then brought to the studios. (Over the same ten years, the total number of writers under contract at the majors dwindled from 490 to just sixty-seven.27 ) Such a shift was both in keeping with trends that had been underway since the earlier 1940s and readily coincided with the plans of top talent in the postwar period. MGM’s windfall with Selznick’s Gone With the Wind had persuaded the other majors to mitigate their historic coolness to independent productions. Arguably, the limitations on blind- and block-booking set by the interim antitrust consent decree in 1940 also helped prioritise the recruitment of top-line talent, rather than the studio ‘brand’ or house style, as a key mar- keting tool for promoting studio pictures to exhibitors.28 Last and certainly not least, incorporation enabled top earners – who during the war faced marginal personal tax rates as high as 90 per cent – to have their income taxed not as salary but as capital gains, at a far lower rate. This strategem saw stars such as James Cagney (with Cagney Productions, incorporated in 1941) set up financing/distribution deals, most often with either United Artists (which, lacking any production facilities of its own, had since its inception in 1919 specialised in distributing independent productions), the other two members of the non-vertically integrated ‘Little Three’ (Columbia and Universal), or with RKO, the most receptive of the Big Five – particularly after George Schaefer’s arrival as president in 1938 from UA – to prestigious independent producer-directors such as Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock (Notorious!, it will be recalled, played the RKO Palace in Columbus as an RKO release). Thus by the late 1940s, just as the majors started to shift their production strategy, an embryonic infrastructure of independent production was in place. The enormous success of high-end postwar independent productions such as Goldwyn’s The Best Years of Our Lives and Selznick’s ‘adult Western’ melo- drama Duel in the Sun (both 1946) spurred a boom in independent production companies of all kinds in this period. But independence remained a risky business, particularly given ongoing increases in production costs, as even a major player like Selznick discovered, following the successive box office catastrophes of The Paradine Case (1947) M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 24 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 24 4/5/10 15:01:17 4/5/10 15:01:17
- 48. the autumn ofthe patriarchs 25 and Portrait of Jennie (1948) which effectively ended his Hollywood career. Lacking the collateral and credit lines of the publicly traded majors, any independent was only as seaworthy as its last success or failure. As Stanley Kramer, one of the most successful postwar independents, observed in 1951 after Cyrano de Bergerac’s critical acclaim failed to reap comparable box office rewards, ‘The independent producer can’t afford what department stores call a loss leader. One of these will put him out of business’.29 In 1947 Congressional tax reforms closed off the loopholes that had made independ- ence such a lucrative proposition, and with bank credit now harder to secure in the industry-wide downturn, many independents either shut down altogether or sought the security of long-term financing arrangements with the majors, such as Frank Capra’s Liberty Films at Paramount. Such partnerships, however, threatened to compromise the other great attraction for top talent of independent production, beyond its financial incen- tives: the elusive prize of ‘creative freedom’. Capra himself, following his move to Paramount – ostensibly as an ‘in-house independent’ – found the reality of the renewed constraints of studio control intolerable and within four years had effectively retired from filmmaking altogether. Capra’s timing was singu- larly unfortunate: as the ripples of Paramount widened, the balance between independents and studios shifted definitively and Capra’s own erstwhile partners in the (now defunct) Liberty, George Stevens and William Wyler, emerged as principal luminaries of the new dispensation.30 During 1950–1, first the smaller companies – Columbia and some of the old Poverty Row studios – followed by Paramount, Warner Bros. and Twentieth Century-Fox all started to recruit independent producers. But the studios still preferred to keep as close a hold as possible over these semi-autonomous production units – in effect confining in-house independent producers’ freedom of movement within bounds that could seem often little more expansive than those of the old ‘producer unit’ system. It took a studio that in 1950 was not only industrially marginal but on the verge of bankruptcy to change things. United Artists was the studio that had done most to nurture and sustain independents throughout the studio era; ironically, however, owing to a poor recent track record and weak manage- ment, UA was at first poorly placed to capitalise on the independents’ ‘boom’. But following UA’s takeover by Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin in 1951,31 UA once again took the lead by changing the terms of the relationship between studio (that is, financier/distributor) and creative talent. UA was prepared to concede much creative control to its chosen producers, subject only to initial story, cast and budget approval. (UA’s lack of a backlot meant that produc- tion was in any case physically removed from studio oversight: whereas the majors, as noted above, tended to see independent production as a means to keep studio technical facilities in use and thus help pay for overheads, but also M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 25 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 25 4/5/10 15:01:17 4/5/10 15:01:17
- 49. 26 post-classical hollywood convenientlyclose at hand.) UA also offered producers a more attractive finan- cial package at both the front (no administrative overhead) and back (reduced distribution fees) ends. In effect, UA rebranded itself as a supplier of services to filmmakers rather than an old-style hands-on producer; during the fifties UA would sponsor further downstream movie service providers and ‘packag- ers’ such as the Mirisch Corporation. Krim and Benjamin were naturally moti- vated not by idealism but by the urgent need to secure the struggling company a slice of the market for top talent. With this move not only did UA gain a com- petitive edge with the most ambitious independent filmmakers of the period such as Otto Preminger, but they established a new way of doing business in Hollywood, one the other studios would duly follow. Most persuasively of all, UA’s example proved immensely profitable: having posted a loss of $200,000 in 1949, by 1959 the company was turning a profit of $4.1 million.32 The move towards independent production also tilted the Hollywood balance of power. The studios’ emerging role as the godfathers to already gestating projects presupposed that someone – someone else, that is – had the wherewithal to oversee the early stages of development and bring the ready-to- go picture to the table. Yet while some independents – notably those created around leading stars such as Hecht-Hill-[Burt] Lancaster – had a measure of star power of their own, few independent producers were in a position to retain contracted talent even if they wished to. Moreover, as HHL’s own boom- to-bust life cycle from 1954 to 1960 would demonstrate, the most successful independents were prone to the perils of unsustainable expansion: as former MGM production head Dore Schary pithily summarised it, ‘this [kind of] ‘independent’ may turn into a major studio, with all the problems that drove people in the major studios to become independents’.33 For their own part, the newly enfranchised actors, directors and writers were very conscious of the advantageous bargaining position they derived from their marketability.34 But they were in the main ill-suited to exploit their situation to maximum advan- tage. Thus, almost inevitably, power in what was becoming a recognisably ‘New Hollywood’ increasingly devolved on to those who did have access to a range of talent and were skilled in the art of the deal. These were not the old- style prestige independents like Goldwyn, but newcomers – talent agencies. Specifically, one agency, MCA, and one pre-eminent and perspicacious agent above all, Lew Wasserman. Wasserman, who ran MCA in partnership with its founder Jules Stein, had during the 1930s helped the agency achieve a virtual monopoly in the music industry, moving from representing individual musical performers to booking complete ‘packages’ of live entertainers of all kinds to venues and subsequently radio broadcasters. When MCA expanded rapidly into Hollywood in the early 1940s, principally by aggressively acquiring numerous smaller agen- cies, Wasserman quickly set about applying the same principles to the film M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 26 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 26 4/5/10 15:01:17 4/5/10 15:01:17
- 50. the autumn ofthe patriarchs 27 industry, his company’s newly ubiquitous reach earning it the half-admiring, half-fearful soubriquet ‘The Octopus’. In the old Hollywood of long-term contracts and studio micromanagement of star profiles, the role of agents – widely despised as parasitic bottom-feeders – was strictly limited. In the new free-market Hollywood, by contrast, agents were enormously empowered, and MCA’s control of so many key players by design increased that power exponentially. Even before the postwar downturn, Wasserman was promot- ing the advantages of independence and incorporation to his clients. Olivia de Havilland’s successful lawsuit against her contract with Warner Bros. in 1943 had greatly enhanced the freedom and power of stars; at the same time, the studios’ retrenchment made star power an even more crucial dimension for those films that did get made, and correspondingly empowered newly enfran- chised freelance talent – and their agents – to drive hard bargains. Wasserman established himself as the new sheriff in town in 1950 by negotiating a historic profit-participation deal that secured MCA client James Stewart 50 per cent of the profits from the Universal Western Winchester ’73 – ultimately netting Stewart over $600,000.35 Over the course of the 1950s, MCA consolidated its power, becoming a major player in the new telefilm market (see below). Its TV production requirements spurred MCA to acquire the 420-acre Universal City for $11.25 million in 1959; Universal as a result became briefly a tenant on its own lot, before Wasserman took the final step of acquiring the entire studio in 1962 and thus inaugurated the new era of Hollywood conglomeration (see Chapter 4). Like UA’s ascendancy, MCA’s rise to prominence was emblematic of the postwar inversion of the old Hollywood class system. It was the smaller, nimbler minor studios – long accustomed to thinking on their feet and chis- elling profits off tight margins – who set the tone in the 1950s alongside some established independent producers, above all Walt Disney. This was never truer than with the most important of all the post-Paramount develop- ments, Hollywood’s halting but ultimately unequivocal accommodation with television. coming to terms with television Whether television should be seen as the cause of the dramatic drop-off in movie attendance in this period (and beyond), or simply as catalysing a trend that had already begun by the late 1940s, remains intensely controversial. Perhaps we can most productively think of television as the perfect evolution- ary predator in the altered circumstances of the 1950s: that is, as the medium best adapted to profit from the environmental changes facing the entertainment industry at this time. As we shall see, those Hollywood studios that suffered M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 27 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 27 4/5/10 15:01:17 4/5/10 15:01:17
- 51. 28 post-classical hollywood theleast from the universal downturn of the early 1950s were those that recog- nised the new business logic established by television’s emergence and moved most quickly to establish relations of peaceful coexistence or cooperation with television. Those that viewed the new medium with hostility or pretended indifference, by contrast, could expect a much rockier passage ahead. The truth was that the coincidence of Paramount and the novelty of real competition for the American entertainment dollar was a watershed in Hollywood history, marking the shift from the (theatrical) exhibition orien- tation that had characterised the industry’s first half-century, and in which Hollywood itself had its roots, and towards a new reality driven by domestic, rather than theatrical, consumption. This was, however, by no means as self- evident in 1950 as it seems today, with the benefit of hindsight. Indeed, only a handful of far-sighted individual business leaders seem to have fully perceived the dimensions of the change at hand, and it was the organisations steered by men such as Walt Disney and Lew Wasserman which would set the pace in the decades to come. In its broad outlines, the story of television’s transformative impact on American entertainment is very well known. Television began its long march into America’s living rooms soon after the war. Take-up was initially modest, with just 1 million sets sold by 1949 (though this figure certainly underes- timates television’s overall impact, with many sets located as crowd-pullers in neighbourhood bars and other communal gathering places). But the pace quickened rapidly, and growth soon became exponential: by 1954, 56 per cent of American households had acquired a TV. (See Appendix: Figure 3.) Television stations also multiplied, many of them affiliated to the three broad- cast networks CBS, NBC and ABC.36 Its full impact may not have been not anticipated, yet television did not take the film industry by surprise. Given the cultural importance of radio, it was a fair bet that a domestic broadcast medium that could add pictures to radio’s existing equation of immediacy and intimacy would be successful. In fact, Hollywood’s early relationship with television resembled less the hostile rivalry of legend than that stock figure of silent comedy, the lummox – the shambling suitor, at a loss how to convert his admiration into marriage.37 Initially, the major studios could not conceive of a profitable relationship to television outside the ‘supply-side’ strategies that had proved so successful in the foundational years of the movie industry: that is, controlling distribution and exhibition. The major studios’ initial attempts to cut themselves a slice of the new pie, however, foundered in the tightened post-Paramount regulatory climate. Paramount’s own attempted acquisition of TV stations in the late 1940s and Fox’s proposed takeover of ABC both fell foul of the FCC. Other industry attempts early in the television era to co-opt the new medium – such as closed-circuit live broadcasts in theatres, or primitive versions of pay-TV M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 28 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 28 4/5/10 15:01:17 4/5/10 15:01:17
- 52. the autumn ofthe patriarchs 29 – failed for technical, aesthetic or social reasons. It was this frustration of their overtures, rather than systemic rivalry, that saw the Hollywood majors revert through the middle of the fifties to an uneasy cold war with television, typified by MGM’s condescending rebuttal of NBC’s overtures to explore a production partnership in 1950.38 In one area in particular, however, the studios were uniquely well placed to supply the networks with something they urgently needed: product. Fifties television is famous as a ‘golden age’ of broadcast drama, in the anthol- ogy series showcasing original work written and directed by such major talents as Rod Serling, Abby Mann, Paddy Chayefsky, Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer and many others (many of them important future Hollywood filmmakers). But these prestigious vehicles, performed and broadcast live from the networks’ New York studios using Broadway and off-Broadway talent, were not the broadcasts by which fifties America came to set its collective watch and in front of which it would eat its frozen TV dinners. The shows that became synonymous with the era and which drew enormous weekly audi- ences and stratospheric advertiser rates were the generic comedies and dramas, typically starring second-string or superannuated Hollywood players in such time-honoured Hollywood B-formats as the police thriller and the Western. Although TV industry spokesmen deprecated Hollywood-originated telefilms as inferior fare compared to live performance, the commercial sponsors who underwrote early US television output recognised soon enough that a filmed half-hour programme would cost them a fraction of the same amount of live airtime. Moreover, the FCC’s cessation of its four-year freeze on the issuance of new television licences in 1952 created a burgeoning demand for entertain- ment to fill airtime that the networks alone simply could not supply. The emerging market for filmed TV sparked a short-lived boom in shoe- string start-up production companies from 1950 to 1952 that observers com- pared to the Gold Rush – or to the earliest, Keystone Kops years of the movie business itself. The vast majority of the speculative production undertaken in this period by fly-by-night companies in corner lots and converted garages throughout the LA region failed to find buyers and evaporated as quickly as it had sprung up, leaving – by one estimate in late 1952 – some two dozen ‘solid’ telefilm producers, including such old Hollywood hands as Hal Roach and Bing Crosby. But the market remained, and for companies that were sufficiently well capitalised and possessed the appropriate facilities, the esti- mated 1,500-plus hours of filmed entertainment (almost double Hollywood’s combined yearly output of theatrical pictures) broadcast annually by the net- works was an irresistible honeypot. As standards (and hence prices) of filmed television rose by the mid-fifties (allowing the studios, with their heavy fixed overheads, to compete more effectively in what was a high-volume, fast-paced, tight margin business quite different from their more leisurely traditional pace M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 29 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 29 4/5/10 15:01:17 4/5/10 15:01:17
- 53. 30 post-classical hollywood oftheatrical production), the studios recognised that television could be a life- saver given the straitened circumstances of the theatrical market.39 It was members of the Little Three – who, lacking theatrical holdings, had always operated on a different business model as well as on far tighter margins than the fully vertically-integrated majors – that were quickest to anticipate and accommodate the new medium. The weakest of these, Universal – deeply in the red following a slew of expensive box office failures in the 1947–8 seasons – was the first to establish a television production subsidiary, but the most successful was Harry Cohn’s Columbia, whose Screen Gems opened for business in summer 1949 under the management of Cohn’s nephew Ralph. By mid-1952, when Screen Gems became the first major studio to announce a contract to produce a sponsored series of telefilms for network broadcast, Cohn established what would become Hollywood’s standard model for profit- able telefilm production: producing episodic series for a sponsor – in this first case, Ford Motors – or network at an initial loss (that is, the purchaser paid the studio below cost for the first-run rights to the show) but retaining resale rights for the series thereafter and looking to reap handsome dividends in the subsequent-run syndicated TV markets. By the late 1950s, television production had firmly established itself at the centre of Hollywood production. The same studio lots that had all but fallen silentinthepostwardownturnwereonceagainoccupied,producingfilmedseries – Screen Gems’ productions were using one-third of Columbia’s studio space – and both trade and mainstream press excitedly reported Hollywood’s transfor- mation into a television town and its value to the industry. New York-based live production was being phased out as the networks drew ever more heavily on the armies of talent available on the West Coast. Hollywood had come to dominate network broadcasting as the majors had dominated first-run exhibition, supply- ing 40 per cent of all network programming and 78 per cent of primetime sched- ules. TV production thus provided an important new revenue stream and kept Hollywood personnel in employment in lean times (albeit for all but a handful of household names less well-paid, and undeniably less glamorous and prestigious). This was indeed, as Time proclaimed in 1957, a ‘New Hollywood’.40 Much TV production was in the hands of the companies who had got in early and weathered the industry’s birthing pains, like Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball’s DesiLu, which employed more than 1,000 people to turn out I Love Lucy and fourteen other primetime shows with an annual turnover above $21 million. Having secured a unique waiver from the Justice Department allow- ing it simultaneously to represent talent and produce entertainment, MCA was also a major player through its TV subsidiary Revue Productions. But the studios were also heavily involved, with Columbia (where Screen Gems compensated for the feeble performance of the theatrical division and helped keep the company afloat throughout the late 1950s), Universal and Warners M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 30 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 30 4/5/10 15:01:17 4/5/10 15:01:17
- 54. the autumn ofthe patriarchs 31 especially prominent. Republic, the Poverty Row producer celebrated for its series Westerns, converted itself into a dedicated television company. Even the studios that were slowest to move into TV production saw benefits: at MGM, TV revenues amounted to only 10 per cent of gross income in 1959 but accounted for over 40 per cent of profits.41 As Hollywood started to profit from television, its hostility to the desire of the TV stations to broadcast theatrical pictures also faded. The majors had all refused to sell or lease their libraries to TV through 1955, although the Poverty Row studios Republic and PRC had cashed in early.42 That initial hostility had been driven by the violent opposition of exhibitors, fearful that the regular availability of moviegoers’ favourite stars on free-to-air TV would devalue the theatrical experience and cause further attrition within their already thinned ranks. But once the studios had complied with Paramount they were no longer so responsive to the concerns of theatre owners. Predictably, it was the maver- ick Howard Hughes who as RKO owner broke the united front when he sold the studio’s entire library outright to a middleman, C&C Television, for $15.2 million in 1955. That same year, Columbia marketed 104 of its pre-1948 titles direct to broadcasters through its own Screen Gems subsidiary. All of the majors shortly followed suit in a series of deals that generated total revenues of some $150 million between 1955 and 1960. The studios initially withheld movies produced since 1948, under continuing pressure from exhibitors – warning direly of ‘a death blow to theaters’43 – and also from the talent guilds, who eventually resorted to strike action to extract a new schedule of residual payments for the broadcasting of their work (unanticipated, hence not covered in traditional Hollywood contracts).44 Once agreement had been reached with the unions, Fox moved to break the 1948 watershed with the broadcast of How To Marry a Millionaire (1953) on NBC in September 1961. Newer films naturally commanded a premium from the networks, for whom ‘Saturday Night at the Movies’ and similar showcase slots quickly became fixtures in the weekly schedules and shock troops in the ratings wars, and the ensuing windfall became a life-support system for the studios in the turbulent mid-sixties. The Walt Disney Company established a different, but in the long run equally influential, model of collaboration with television. Long dissatisfied with the service his animated pictures had received from his distribution deal at RKO, with ambitious ventures like Fantasia (1940) underperforming at the box office, and still chafing from bitter disputes with craft unions in the early forties, by the start of the fifties Disney was less and less invested in his tradi- tional role as a niche producer of theatrical family films. In 1954 Disney struck an innovative deal with ABC, the third television network, to co-produce and broadcast a new weekly anthology programme, to be entitled simply Disneyland – not coincidentally, also the name of Disney’s personal obses- sion, the theme park currently under construction in Anaheim, California, M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 31 M2218 - LANGFORD TEXT.indd 31 4/5/10 15:01:17 4/5/10 15:01:17
- 55. Random documents withunrelated content Scribd suggests to you:
- 56. Fig. 301. PapyrusContaining Sayings of Jesus (after Grenfell and Hunt). Plate 112
- 58.
- 60.
- 62. Footnotes: [1] Century Dictionary,edition of 1903, Vol. I, p. 293. [2] The chronology of Archbishop Usher, printed in the margin of many Bibles, is not a part of the Biblical text, but a collection of seventeenth century calculations and guesses.
- 63. [3] For fulleraccounts of the history of Egypt, see Breasted’s History of the Ancient Egyptians, New York, Scribner’s, 1908; or Breasted’s History of Egypt, second edition, 1909, New York, Scribner’s. [4] See Petrie, Hyksos and the Israelite Cities, London, 1906. [5] See Naville, The Store-City of Pithom and the Route of the Exodus, 4th ed., London, 1903. [6] See Petrie, Hyksos and the Israelite Cities, p. 28, f. [7] See Petrie, The Palace of Apries, London, 1909. [8] See Petrie, Hyksos and the Israelite Cities, p. 191, ff. [9] See Annals of Archæology and Anthropology, VII, Liverpool, 1914, pp. 1-10. [10] So called from the name of the mountain on which it is written. [11] First published by Hilprecht, Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania, Vol. XX, No. 47; cf. p. 46. [12] See Poebel, Historical and Grammatical Texts, Philadelphia, 1914, Nos. 2-5, and Historical Texts, Philadelphia, 1914, pp. 73-140. [13] It is the prevailing view of scholars that Arabia was the cradle- land of the Semites. The reasons for this view as well as a résumé of other views will be found in G. A. Barton’s Sketch of Semitic Origins, Social and Religious, New York, 1902, Chapter I. [14] In Gen. 10:11 it is by implication said that the city was founded by Nimrod. [15] For a discussion of the reasons for the view here stated, and a presentation of other views, see Part II, p. 374, ff. [16] The Chaldæans were a Semitic people who came into the marsh-lands of southern Babylonia from Arabia. We can first detect their presence in Babylonia about 1000 b. c.
- 64. [17] Those whodesire fuller accounts of the history should read L. W. King’s History of Sumer and Akkad, London, 1910, and R. W. Rogers’ History of Babylonia and Assyria. 2d ed., New York, 1915. [18] In the Mitteilungen der vorderasiatischen Gesellschaft, 1899, Heft. 4. [19] In the Mitteilungen der vorderasiatischen Gesellschaft, 1900, Hefte 4 and 5. [20] See Pumpelly, Explorations in Turkestan, Washington, 1908, I, p. 50, f. [21] See L. W. King, Chronicles Concerning Early Babylonian Kings, London, 1907, Vol. II, p. 22. [22] History of Egypt, II. 404, 405. [23] Expository Times, November, 1914, p. 91. [24] Asien und Europa nach altägyptischen Denkmälern, 319, note 3. [25] Ancient Records, Egypt, I, 227, 228. [26] Breasted’s Ancient Records, Egypt, II, § 773. [27] Winckler in Mitteilungen der vorderasiatischen Gesellschaft, 1913, Heft 4, p. 81. [28] Itinéraire de Paris a Jérusalem, Paris, 1811. [29] Travels in Syria, 1821. [30] Souvenirs, impressions, el paysages, pendant un voyage en Orient, Paris, 1835. [31] For a more complete account see F. J. Bliss, The Development of Palestine Exploration, New York, 1906. [32] See Official Report of the United States Expedition to Explore the Dead Sea and the River Jordan, Baltimore, 1852.
- 65. [33] See his“Identification of Pisgah” in the third Statement of the American Exploration Society, 1870. [34] See his East of the Jordan, New York, 1883. [35] Warren’s results were first published in The Recovery of Jerusalem, London, 1870, and more fully in Jerusalem, London, 1889, one of the Memoirs of the Palestine Exploration Fund. The arch mentioned is called “Robinson’s Arch,” because its significance was first perceived by Robinson. [36] Across the Jordan, London, 1886; Jaulan, London, 1886, and Abila, Pella, and Northern Aijlun, London, 1889. [37] Die Provincia Arabia, Strassburg, 1904-1909 (3 volumes). [38] Petra, Leipzig, 1908, and Neu-Petra Forschung, Leipzig, 1912. [39] Archæological Researches in Palestine, London, 1896-1899. [40] Geology of Palestine and Arabia Petræa, London, 1886. [41] See Petrie, Tell el-Hesy (Lachish), London, 1891. [42] See his Mound of Many Cities, London, 1894. [43] See Bliss, Excavations at Jerusalem, London, 1898. [44] An artificially made precipice on which a fortress once stood. It is named from an Englishman, Maudsley, who first perceived its true nature. [45] Bliss and Macalister, Excavations in Palestine during the Years 1898-1900, London, 1902. [46] See his Archæological Researches in Palestine, II, p. 251, f. [47] This is the period called by Petrie and Bliss “Seleucid.” [48] See Macalister, The Excavation of Gezer, London, 1912, II, 381- 403.
- 66. [49] Ibid., 406-408. [50]Ibid., I, 256-268. [51] See Macalister, The Excavation of Gezer, London, 1912, II, 200- 223. [52] Ibid., 236-266. [53] See the Annual of the Palestine Exploration Fund, Vols. I and II, for the details here given, and for many others. [54] Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins. [55] See Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins, V, pp. 7-204. [56] See Schumacher und Steuernagel, Tell el-Mutesellim, Leipzig, 1908. [57] Sellin, Tell Taanek, Wien, 1904. [58] See Mitteilungen der deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft, No. 29, Berlin, 1905, p. 14, f. [59] See Sellin und Watzinger, Jericho, Leipzig, 1913. [60] See Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. XXII, Boston, 1903, pp. 164-182; XXIV, 196-220; XXV, 82-95. [61] See Harvard Theological Review, Cambridge, Mass., I, 1908, p. 92. [62] Ibid., II, 102-113; III, 136-138, 248-263. [63] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, xiii, 10, 2 and 3; Wars of the Jews, i, 2, 7. [64] Revue biblique, 1912 (Paris), pp. 86-116. [65] Biblical World, Vol. XXXIX, Chicago, 1912, pp. 295-306.
- 67. [66] See Germer-Durandin Revue biblique, 1914, pp. 71-94, and Frontispiece. [67] See Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund, October, 1914, p. 167, f. Additional material on Ophel and Balata is given in the Appendix, p. 446. [68] First noticed by Prof. George L. Robinson, of McCormick Seminary, Chicago, and afterward by Prof. Samuel Ives Curtis, of the Chicago Theological Seminary; see Chapter XI, p. 173, f. [69] Discovered in 1902 by Dr. J. P. Peters and Dr. Thiersch; see their Painted Tombs of Marissa, London, 1905. [70] Reference should also be made to the expedition from Princeton University, referred to on p. 107, led by Prof. H. C. Butler, which went out in 1899-1900, in 1904-1905, and in 1909, and examined the ruins in the Hauran (or region east of the Sea of Galilee), in the Lebanon Mountains, and in that part of Syria to the east of Lebanon. The expedition gathered many inscriptions, most of which belong to the Christian period. The results of this exploration are published in The Publications of an Archæological Expedition to Syria in 1899-1900, New York, 1904, and Publications of the Princeton Archæological Expeditions to Syria in 1904-1905 and 1909, Leyden, 1908-1914. [71] See R. A. S. Macalister, History of Civilization in Palestine, Cambridge University Press, 1912, pp. 10, 11. [72] See Barton, A Year’s Wandering in Bible Lands, Philadelphia, 1904, p. 143. [73] See Barton, in the Biblical World, Chicago, 1904, Vol. XXIV, p. 177. [74] See Conder, Survey of Eastern Palestine, I, pp. 125-277, and Mackenzie in the Annual of the Palestine Exploration Fund, I, pp. 5- 11. [75] See Gen. 14:5; 15:20.
- 68. [76] See H.S. Cowper, The Hill of the Graces, a Record of Investigation among the Trilithons and Megalithic Sites of Tripoli, London, 1897, and Brandenburg, Über Felsarchitektur im Mittelmeergebiet in Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatischen Gesellchaft, 1914. [77] See the Annals of Archæology and Anthropology, Vol. V, Liverpool, 1913, pp. 112-128. [78] See Macalister, The Excavation of Gezer, I, 72-152. [79] See Macalister, The Excavation of Gezer, I, 145-152. [80] Ibid., 236, ff. [81] R. A. S. Macalister, Bible Side-lights from the Mound of Gezer, London, 1906, Chapter II. [82] See P. E. Mader in Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins, Vol. XXXVII, 1914, pp. 20-44. [83] See Amos 4:4; 5:5. [84] See Dr. Masterman, in Biblical World, XXXIX, 301, f. [85] See the legend concerning him translated in Part II, p. 310, f. [86] See Clay, Amurru, Philadelphia, 1909, pp. 102, 103. [87] See Recueil de travaux relatifs à phil. et à arch. egpt. et assyr., XXXIV, 105-108. [88] See Breasted, Ancient Records, Egypt, Vol. I, Chicago, 1906, § 315. [89] See Chapter II, p. 59. [90] Translated in Part II, p. 313, f. [91] See Part II, p. 293. [92] See Part II, p. 290, ff.
- 69. [93] See PartII, p. 299, ff. [94] See Breasted, Ancient Records, Egypt, I, p. 233, f. [95] See Barton, Commentary on Job, New York, 1911, pp. 5-7, and Breasted, Ancient Records, Egypt, I, p. 238, note a. [96] See Breasted, Ancient Records, Egypt, § 680, and Barton in Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. XXVIII, p. 29. [97] Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, I, 238-243 and 253. [98] Tell el-Mutesellim, Tafeln, vii-xi. [99] See Chapter IV, p. 96. [100] See Chapter II, p. 59, f. [101] See Chapter I, p. 28. [102] See Chapter III, p. 75, f. [103] See Chapter IV, pp. 89, 91. [104] See Breasted, Ancient Records, Egypt, III, § 616. [105] Translated from W. Max Müller’s publication in the Mitteilungen der vorderasiatischen Gesellschaft, 1907, Heft 7. [106] Hammath means “hot.” [107] See Chapter I, p. 29. [108] See pp. 79, 80, and 345. [109] See the letters of its king translated in Part II, p. 345, f. [110] Chapter XIII. [111] See Chapter III, p. 78, f. [112] See Part II, p. 349, f.
- 70. [113] See Breasted’sHistory of Egypt, New York, 1909, p. 414. [114] See Breasted’s Ancient Records, Egypt, III. §§ 81 and 140. [115] Translated from W. Max Müller’s Egyptological Researches, Washington, 1906, pl. 59, ff. [116] See Part II, p. 311. [117] See Sir Arthur Evans. Scripta Minoa, Oxford, 1909, pp. 280, 282, and R. A. S. Macalister in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Vol. XXX, § C, p. 342; also his Philistines, Their History and Civilization, London, 1913, pp. 84, 85. [118] See Sitzungsberichte of the Berlin Academy, 1909, p. 1022, f. [119] Caphtor is the same as Keftiu of the Egyptian inscriptions, but it is uncertain whether Keftiu refers to Crete or Asia Minor. [120] Translated from W. Max Müller’s Egyptological Researches, I, pl. 64, f. [121] See Macalister, The Excavation of Gezer, I, p. 21. [122] See p. 99. [123] See p. 95. [124] See the books of I and II Samuel. [125] See Chapters VI, IX, and XI. [126] See Part II, Chapter XVII. [127] See Part II, p. 385, f. [128] See J. A. Montgomery, The Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, Their History, Theology, and Literature, Philadelphia, 1907. [129] For the narrative of the struggle, see the book of I Maccabees, and S. Mathews, History of the New Testament Times in Palestine, New York, 1908.
- 71. [130] See IMacc. 14:41. [131] For details see Guy Le Strange, Palestine Under the Moslems, London, 1890. [132] For details see C. R. Conder, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, London, 1897. [133] See Chapter XIV. [134] See p. 94. [135] On these walls, see Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, I, 236-256. [136] Petrie, Tell el-Hesy, p. 17 and Plates 2 and 3. [137] See his Tell Taanek, p. 13. [138] See p. 96 and Fig. 41. [139] See p. 91. [140] Harvard Theological Review, III, 137. [141] Palestine Exploration Fund’s Annual, II, 17, f. [142] Sellin and Watzinger’s Jericho, p. 29, f. and Tafel I. [143] Ibid., 54, ff. [144] See Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, I, 244. [145] See Dickie, in Quarterly Statement of Palestine Exploration Fund, 1897, 61-67. [146] These remarks about the house are based on the excavation at Gezer. The excavators of other sites have not given as much attention to the construction of houses as Mr. Macalister did. [147] Sellin, Tell Taanek, p. 21. [148] One of these is translated in Part II, p. 350.
- 72. [149] See thewriter’s article, “Corners,” in Hastings’ Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. IV 119, ff. [150] Sellin, Tell Taanek, p. 61. [151] Schumacher, Tell el-Mulesellim, pp. 45, 54. [152] See Macalister, The Excavation of Gezer, I, 240. [153] In 2 Sam. 12:27 we should read “pool of waters” instead of “city of waters”; see Barton in Journal of Biblical Literature, XXVII, 147-152. [154] See Polybius, V, 71. [155] Josephus, Jewish Wars, I, xix, 5, ff. [156] For the conflicting evidence and theories, see G. A. Smith, Jerusalem, I, 124-131. [157] Josephus, Antiquities, XVIII, iii, 2. [158] See p. 85. [159] See Thomsen in Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins, XXVI, 170, ff. [160] See Chapter XIV. [161] See Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, I, 199, f; II, 22, ff. [162] See Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, II, 22, f. [163] The reader who cares to pursue the subject is referred to Macalister’s Excavation of Gezer, II, 48, ff., and Sellin’s Tell Taanek, 61, f., and Bliss and Macalister’s Excavations in Palestine, 1898-1900, pp. 193, 196, f., 208, 227, and 248. [164] See Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, II, 1-15. [165] See Pumpelly, Excavations in Turkestan, Washington, 1908, p. 384, f.
- 73. [166] See Schumacher,Mutesellim, p. 89. [167] Ward, Seal Cylinders of Western Asia, p. 422, and Nos. 554, 556, 1126, and 1254. [168] See Dr. John P. Peters’ article “The Cock” in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. XXXIII, pp. 363-396. [169] See Peters and Thiersch, The Painted Tombs of Marissa, London, 1905. [170] See Sellin, Tell Taanek, 61, f. [171] Especial mention may be made of the following: Petrie, Tell el- Hesy; Bliss and Macalister, Excavations in Palestine, 1898-1900, Part II; Vincent, Canaan d’après l’exploration récente, Paris, 1907, Chapter V, and Macalister, The Excavation of Gezer, II, 128-231. [172] A “button” handle is a “ledge” handle made into a round knob. [173] See Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, II, 158. [174] See Chapter V, p. 115, f., and Figs. 108, 109. [175] For discussions of the subject, see Bliss and Macalister, Excavations in Palestine, 1898-1900, 106-123; Macalister in the Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund, 1905, 243 and 328; also Excavation of Gezer, II, 209, ff., and Vincent, Canaan d’après l’exploration récente, pp. 357-360. [176] See Sellin, Jericho, p. 156. [177] For a fuller discussion of children’s toys, see Rice, Orientalisms in Bible Lands, pp. 49-58. [178] An early Christian writer, born in 315, died in 403 a. d., who was bishop of Salamis in Cyprus. [179] From this equivalence the reader can easily compute the value which the intermediate measures would have according to this
- 74. theory. The multiplesof the Log which formed the Cab, etc., are given above. [180] See Père Germer-Durand, “Mesures de capacité des Hebreux au temps de l’évangile” in Conferences de Saint-Étienne, Paris, 1910, pp. 89-105, and Fig. 185. [181] The Jewish name for an offering to God. (See Mark 7:11.) [182] “Mana” is both the Babylonian and the Hebrew term. In English it has usually been corrupted to “Mina.” [183] Some scholars understand MENE to be such a reference. [184] The weight is now in the library of Haverford College, near Philadelphia. [185] The words rendered “the price was a pim” are translated in the Authorized Version, “they had a file,” margin, “a file with mouths”; in the Revised Version, “they had a file,” margin, or “when the edges ... were blunt.” The Revisers add, “The Hebrew text is obscure.” The Hebrew word rendered “file” and “blunt” comes from a root that means “to prescribe” or “appoint.” It could easily mean the “established price,” but can mean neither “file” nor “blunt.” Pim means “mouths” and is employed figuratively for “edges,” but neither of those meanings fits the passage. The discovery of these weights has cleared up the whole obscurity. This interpretation was suggested by Pilcher in the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement, 1914, p. 99. [186] See Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, II, 279. [187] See Macalister, ibid., pp. 278-293. [188] See Bliss and Macalister, Excavations in Palestine, 1898-1900, p. 61. [189] See Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, II, 291.
- 75. [190] See Breasted,Ancient Records, Egypt, II, §§ 436, 489, 490, 518, and History of Egypt, 2d ed., pp. 277, 307. [191] See Schrader’s Keilinschriftliche Bibliothek, I, 105 (cl. III, 62). [192] See C. H. W. Johns, Assyrian Deeds and Documents, I, Nos. 38, 39, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 50, and 108; cf. also III, 8. [193] See Hill, Catalogue of the Greek Coins of Palestine, London, 1914, p. xciii, ff. [194] Cf. Luke 21:2. [195] The temples of Solomon, Zerubbabel, and Herod are treated in Chapter XIII, on Jerusalem. [196] See Macalister, The Excavation of Gezer, I, 102; II, 378, ff. [197] See Schumacher, Tell el-Mutesellim, 156, ff. [198] In Gen. 22:9 Abraham, we are told, built the altar. He did not, therefore, intend to use the rock-altar. The analogy of this altar with the other two is not quite complete. It appears to have no cup-marks on its surface. [199] See Bliss and Macalister, Excavations in Palestine, 1898-1900, p. 31, ff. [200] See Macalister, The Excavation of Gezer, I, 51, 105-107; II, 381-404. [201] See Part II, p. 364. [202] See C. H. Toy, Introduction to the History of Religions, Boston, 1913, §§ 250, 257. [203] Tell Taanek, p. 68, ff. [204] See Part II, p. 442. [205] For descriptions of this high place, see the article by its discoverer, George L. Robinson, in the Biblical World, XVII, 6-16; by
- 76. S. I. Curtisin the Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund, October, 1900, pp. 350-355; Savignac in Révue biblique, 1903, 280-284; Libby and Hoskins, The Jordan Valley and Petra, New York, 1905, II, 172, ff.; Brünnow and Domaszewski, Provincia Arabia, Vol. I, Strassburg, 1904, 239-245; Dalman, Petra, Leipzig, 1908, 56-58. [206] See the writer’s A Year’s Wandering in Bible Lands, Philadelphia, 1904, pp. 193, 194. [207] Those interested in them will find them described in Brünnow and Domaszewski’s Provincia Arabia, I, 246, ff., and in Dalman’s Petra, 142, 225, 272, etc. [208] See Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, II, 405, ff. [209] Schumacher, Tell el-Mutesellim, 110-124. [210] Schumacher, Tell el-Mutesellim, 105-110. [211] Ibid., 125-130. [212] See Harvard Theological Review, II, 102-113; III, 248-263. [213] See Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XV, viii, 5, and Wars of the Jews, I, xxi, 2. [214] See especially Fig. 269. [215] See Chapter V, p. 105. [216] See Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, I, 286. [217] Ibid., p. 122, f. [218] Palestine Exploration Fund’s Annual, II, 42, ff. [219] For a Babylonian parallel, see Part II, p. 423, ff. [220] See Macalister, Excavation of Gezer, II, 429, f. [221] See Biblical World, Vol. XXIV, p. 177.
- 77. [222] See Macalister,Excavation of Gezer, I, 288, f. [223] Ibid., 289, ff. [224] See Bliss and Macalister, Excavations in Palestine, 1898-1900, p. 9, ff. [225] So called because of a tradition that the members of the Sanhedrin were buried there. The tradition probably arose because the kôkim and shelves make provision for seventy bodies. [226] See Journal of Biblical Literature, XXII, 1903, p. 164, ff. [227] See Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XX, ii, 1; iv, 3. [228] See Peters and Thiersch, Painted Tombs at Marissa, London, 1905. [229] All who can do so should read George Adam Smith’s Jerusalem from the Earliest Times to A. D. 70, New York, 1908, and Hughes Vincent’s Jerusalem, Paris, 1912. Or, if this is not possible, L. B. Paton’s Jerusalem in Bible Times, Chicago, 1905. [230] See Dr. Masterman in the Biblical World, Vol. XXXIX, p. 295, f. [231] See Part II, Chapter XV, Letter V, and the writer’s note in the Biblical World, XXII, p. 11, n. 5. [232] See Biblical World, XXXIX, 306. [233] See Part II, Chapter XV. [234] See Chapter VI, § 8. [235] Some scholars think the words are a distorted repetition of “in Millo,” which was accidentally repeated by a scribe. [236] Bliss and Dickie, Excavations at Jerusalem, 1894-1897, passim, and p. 319, ff. [237] For “Bethso,” see Josephus, Wars of the Jews, V, iv, 2.
- 78. [238] See J.E. Hanauer, Walks about Jerusalem, London, 1910, 88, 89. [239] The writer is well aware that the name Moriah for this part of the hill rests on slender evidence, but he employs it nevertheless as a convenient term, since it is well understood by readers of the Bible. [240] Warren and Conder, Jerusalem, pp. 148-158. [241] See Chapter XI, p. 168. [242] Wars of the Jews, V, v, 1. [243] So Stade, Geschichte des Volkes Israels, Berlin, 1889, I, 314, and G. A. Smith, Jerusalem, II, 60. [244] In giving the dimensions of the various temples, the writer has followed the calculations of George Adam Smith in his Jerusalem. W. Shaw Caldecott has published four volumes, one on the Tabernacle, one on Solomon’s Temple, one on the Second Temple, and one on Herod’s Temple, in which he claims to have discovered a key that harmonizes all the Biblical statements as to the measurements of these structures. His supposed key is his belief that the Babylonians had three different cubits which they used side by side, that these cubits were known to Moses, and that their use was perpetuated in the temple. Should these pages be read by one who has accepted that claim as true, it is but fair that he be informed that Caldecott’s whole system is based upon a misinterpretation of a Babylonian tablet that was published in Rawlinson’s Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia, Vol. IV, p. 37. (See Tabernacle, pp. 107-139, and Solomon’s Temple, pp. 215, 216.) This tablet contains a table of time and of distances. The unit of time in Babylonia was a kaskal-gid. An astronomical tablet published thirty years ago in the book most widely used by beginners in Assyrian says that at the equinox “six kaskal-gid was the day, six kaskal-gid the night.” The kaskal-gid was, then, a period of two hours’ duration. Just as in many countries the word for “hour” is used for distance, and a place is said to be so many “hours” away, so in Babylonia and Assyria kaskal-gid was used
- 79. as a measureof distance. The tablet referred to gives a table of the ways of writing fractions of kaskal-gid and its other divisions in the simplest of the two Babylonian numerical systems. The Assyriologist learns from this tablet that 1 kaskal-gid (the distance of two hours) equalled 30 ush, that 1 ush equalled 60 gar, that 1 gar equalled 12 u or cubits, and that 1 u equalled 60 shu or “fingers.” Caldecott, however, mistook the sign gid for a numeral five, the sign kaskal for a word meaning “ell,” and the word u meaning “cubit” for a sign signifying “plus”! He accordingly makes gar a “palm”; shu, a “three- palm ell”; ush, a “four-palm ell,” and kaskal-gid, a “five-palm ell”! His whole system is without foundation. Tables similar to the one published by Rawlinson were compiled in the scribal school at Nippur. One was published without translation by Hilprecht in 1906 in the Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania, Vol. XX, and interpreted by the present writer in 1909 in The Haverford Library Collection of Cuneiform Tablets, Part II, pp. 13-18. The writer has examined other similar tablets in the University Museum, Philadelphia. [245] See Chapter IX, p. 151. According to I Kings 7:48, there was a “golden altar” here also, but as this is not mentioned in chapter 6 many scholars think that it is a post-exilic gloss, introducing a feature from the second temple. [246] Antiquities of the Jews, VIII, v, 2. [247] See translation, Part II, p. 377. [248] See Bliss, Excavations at Jerusalem, pp. 96-109. [249] See G. A. Smith, Jerusalem, I, 226. For another view, see Paton, Journal of Biblical Literature, XXV, 1-13. [250] See G. A. Smith, Jerusalem, II, Chapters X and XI. [251] See Chapter II, p. 66; also Part II, p. 385, f.
- 80. [252] Ezra 5:16states that Sheshbazzar laid the foundations of the house in the reign of Cyrus, but as Haggai and Zechariah give no hint of this, many scholars think there must be some error in the text. [253] Antiquities of the Jews, XIII, xiii, 5. [254] See the Mishnah, Middoth 3:6. [255] Excavations at Jerusalem, 16, ff. [256] See Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XI, vii, 1; cf. also G. A. Smith, Jerusalem, II, 358-361. [257] See Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XII, i. [258] See Ecclesiasticus iii-v, vii, ix, xxiii, xxv, ff., and xxviii. [259] See Eccles. 50:1-4. [260] Cf. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XII, v, 1. [261] See Selah Merrill, Ancient Jerusalem, New York, 1908, pp. 83- 88. [262] See G. A. Smith, Jerusalem, II, 447-452. [263] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XII, v, 1. [264] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XIII, vi, 7. [265] See Chapter V, p. 119. [266] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XV, xi, 4; XVIII, iv, 3. [267] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XX, viii, 11; Wars of the Jews, II, xvi, 3. [268] Merrill, Ancient Jerusalem, p. 88. [269] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XIV, iv, 2, and Fig. 255. [270] Because its identity as a part of this bridge was first perceived by Prof. Edward Robinson, of Union Seminary, New York.
- 81. [271] Josephus, Warsof the Jews, I, vii, 2. [272] Warren and Conder, Jerusalem, 178, f. [273] See Chapter VI, p. 131. [274] Quoted by Alexander Polyhistor and Eusebius; see G. A. Smith, Jerusalem, II, 462. [275] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XIII, xiii, 5. [276] Ibid., XIV, ii, 1. [277] Ibid., XIV, iv, 2. [278] Ibid., XIV, xiii, 3, 4, 5. [279] Ibid., XIV, xv, 2; xvi. [280] Ibid., XV, viii, 5. [281] Josephus, Wars of the Jews, V, iv, 3. [282] Ibid., V, iv, 4. (See Fig. 256.) [283] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XVII, ix, 3; Wars of the Jews, II, ii, 2; xiv, 8. [284] Colonel Conder, the late Dr. Merrill, Georg Gatt, Dr. Rückert, and Dr. Mommert. [285] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XV, viii, 1. [286] See Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund, 1887, p. 161, ff. Dr. Schick calls it an amphitheater, but it is simply a theater of the Greek type. [287] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XV, xi, 2. [288] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XX, ix, 7. [289] Ibid., XV, xi, 3.
- 82. [290] Above itwas a chamber 30 cubits high. [291] Josephus, Wars of the Jews, V, v, 6. [292] See Josephus, Wars of the Jews, V, v, and the Mishna tract Middoth for the authority for this description. For a fuller description, see G. A. Smith, Jerusalem, II, Chapter XVIII. [293] See Chapter VI, p. 131. [294] That is, the “Pool of Israel.” [295] Wars of the Jews, V, iv, 2. [296] The city, restored under the heathen name of Ælia Capitolina by the Emperor Hadrian in 135 a. d., made Christian by Constantine in 325, sacked by the Persian Chosroes in 614, taken by the Arabs in 636, captured after many vicissitudes in 1072 by the Seljuk Turks, made by the First Crusade the seat of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem from 1099 to 1187, when Saladin took it, was once more after many other vicissitudes captured by the Ottoman Turks in 1517. [297] Historia Naturalis, V, xviii, 74. [298] Josephus, Wars of the Jews, I, vii, 7. [299] See Chapter V, p. 111. [300] See Schürer, Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, Leipzig, 1907, II, 172, and note 321. [301] See Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XII, iv, 5. [302] See Barton, A Year’s Wandering in Bible Lands, Philadelphia, 1904, p. 176. [303] See Neubauer, Géographie du Talmud, Paris, 1868, 238-240. [304] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XII, viii, 4. [305] Brünnow and Domaszewski, Provincia Arabia, III, 107-144, and Fig. 267.
- 83. [306] See Polybius,V, 71. [307] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XIII, xiii, 3. [308] Schürer, Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, 4th ed., II, 1907, p. 175. [309] Neubauer, Géographie du Talmud, 274. [310] See Merrill, East of the Jordan, New York, 1883, 184, ff. and 442, f.; also Schumacher, Across the Jordan, London, 1886, p. 272, f. [311] Merrill, ibid., 298, and G. A. Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, map. [312] So Brünnow and Domaszewski, Provincia Arabia, III, 264. [313] Josephus, Wars of the Jews, I, iv, 8. [314] See Merrill, East of the Jordan, 281-284; Schumacher in Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins, XXV, 1912, 111-177; Brünnow and Domaszewski, Provincia Arabia, II, 234-139; Barton, A Year’s Wandering in Bible Lands, 158, f. [315] See Polybius, V, 71. [316] See 2 Sam. 12:27 and Barton in the Journal of Biblical Literature, XXVII, 147-152. [317] See Josephus, Wars of the Jews, I, xix, 5. [318] See Merrill, East of the Jordan, 399, ff.; Schumacher, Across the Jordan, 308; Brünnow and Domaszewski, Provincia Arabia, II, 216- 220, and Barton, A Year’s Wandering in Bible Lands, 155, f.
- 84. [319] Ramsay, St.Paul the Traveller and Roman Citizen, New York, 1896, 243, ff. [320] See Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, II, Oxford, 1896, 618- 699. [321] See American Journal of Archæology, 2d series, II, 133, f.; III, 204, f.; IV, 306, f.; VI, 306, f, 439, f.; X, 17, f., and XIV, 19, f. [322] See Benjamin Powell in American Journal of Archæology, 2d series, VII, 60, f., and Fig. 275. [323] See Ramsay’s article “Ephesus” in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible, Vol. II, p. 721, f., for further details. [324] Book II, 1. 868. [325] See Hogarth’s Ionia and the East, Oxford, 1909, p. 45, f. [326] See De Neocoria, p. 38. [327] See Ramsay in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible, III, 750. [328] Wood, Discoveries at Ephesus, London, 1877. See Fig. 279. [329] Hogarth, Excavations at Ephesus, London, 1908. [330] See Couze (and others), Ausgrabungen zu Pergamos, Berlin, 1880, and Thrämer, Pergamos, Leipzig, 1888; also F. E. Clark, The Holy Land of Asia Minor, New York, 1914, p. 67, f. [331] See Bousset, Die Offenbarung des Johannes, Göttingen, 1896, p. 245, ff.; Ramsay, The Letters to the Seven Churches, New York, 1905, 283, ff., and Moffat in The Expositor’s Greek Testament, Vol. V, New York, 1910, p. 355, f. [332] See Ramsay, The Church and the Roman Empire, New York, 1893, p. 252, f. [333] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XII, iii, 1.
- 85. [334] See Ramsay,Letters to the Seven Churches, p. 325, ff. [335] See Butler in American Journal of Archæology, 2d series, Vol. XVIII, 1914, p. 428. [336] Book, I, 7. [337] See Herbig’s article, “Etruscan Religion,” in Hastings’ Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. V, New York, 1912, p. 532, ff. [338] American Journal of Archæology, Vol. XVII, 1912, p. 474. [339] Barton, A Year’s Wandering in Bible Lands, 76-79. [340] See American Journal of Archæology, Vols. XIV-XVIII, and Fig. 285. [341] Ibid., XV, 452. [342] Ibid., XV, 457. [343] Ibid., XVI, 475, ff., and Fig. 286. [344] See “Altar (Christian)” in Hastings’ Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. I, p. 338, f. [345] Ecclesiastical History, X, 4. [346] See Barton, A Year’s Wandering in Bible Lands, p. 71. [347] See Chapter XIV, p. 217, f. [348] Ramsay, Letters to the Seven Churches, 407, ff. [349] Ibid., 410, ff. [350] See Curtius, Philadelphia, Berlin, 1873, and Barton, A Year’s Wandering in Bible Lands, 79, ff. [351] Ramsay, Letters to the Seven Churches, 25, 1.
- 86. [352] See Ramsay,Letters to the Seven Churches, 257 and 274, ff. [353] See Barton, A Year’s Wandering in Bible Lands, p. 82. [354] See Ramsay, The Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia, Oxford, 1895, p. 32, f. [355] See Ramsay, Letters to the Seven Churches, 424, ff. [356] See F. E. Clark, The Holy Land of Asia Minor, New York, 1914, p. 145, f. [357] Other translations of this epic have been made. The most important are as follows: Zimmern, in Gunkel’s Schöpfung und Chaos, pp. 401, ff.; Delitzsch, Das Babylonische Weltschöpfungsepos (Abhandlungen der sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, Bd. XVII, 1896); Muss-Arnolt, in Assyrian and Babylonian Literature, Aldine ed., edited by R. F. Harper; Jensen in Schrader’s Keilinschriftliche Bibliothek, Bd. VI; L. W. King, The Seven Tablets of Creation; Dhorme, Choix de textes religieux assyrobabyloniens; Ungnad, in Gressman’s Altorientalische Texte und Bilder zum Alten Testament; Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament. A fragment of this tablet is shown in Fig. 290. [358] That is, Sea and Abyss, mentioned in lines 3 and 4. Apsu was the waters underneath the dry land and Tiâmat the salt sea. [359] I. e., the spirits of earth. [360] Another name for Tiâmat. [361] Marduk’s temple in Babylonia. [362] I. e., the captive gods of line 27. [363] The name which the Babylonians gave themselves. [364] Translated from Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum, Part XIII, p. 35, ff.
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