The Genius of the System

"The Genius of the System is a great follow-up to Empire of their Own and contradicts conventional wisdom about Hollywood. The conventional wisdom was that the studio system churned out cookie-cutter cinema and that filmmakers needed to overcome the pressures of the studio system so that works of individual vision and artistry could be made. This is largely what I wrote about in Pictures at a Revolution . The Genius of the System is not a reactionary book. Thomas Schatz isn’t making the case that revolution didn’t need to happen. But, he is exploring how the system made artistry and even individuality possible during the ‘Golden Age of Hollywood.’ “Making a movie is a matter of extreme pressure almost every day” The Genius of the System explodes the notion that studio films were bland or monolithic. He explores the individual styles of each studio. A Warner Brothers movie and a Universal movie and an MGM movie were all distinct. Schatz shows how the house style at each studio evolved over from the 1920s into the 1950s, and adjusted to a changing world. It’s a great book for anybody interested in studio filmmaking at its strongest from 1928, which was the beginning of sound, to 1960. For all the oppressive elements of the studio system, Schatz shows that structure unquestionably allowed for real artistry and the production of fantastic foundationally important work. But, by the early 1960s, that system was outliving its usefulness. His story ends when the rise of interest in non-American cinema begins. Starting in the late 1950s or early 1960s, movies from other countries started to get more distribution. The French New Wave, with directors like Jean-Luc Goddard, the rise of realism and all the films that came out of Italy , like those from Federico Fellini, and the work of Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman, all these exciting currents started to make American cinema exhausted. It’s about how the studio system was on its last legs and gave way to something new in the late 1960s."

"It’s about how gradually the stars became more savvy: they started saying I want to do this or that kind of movie, because people don’t like to be told they’re one sort of star. But people didn’t want to see Bogart going insane for example: he’s a cynic, and also a romantic, and you want to see that Warners’ style. That’s something Schatz deals with ­– that all the major studios developed a very specific house style. MGM was the kind of massive, prestige house – they famously said they never made B-grade movies – whereas Warners had this reputation for gang movies, and Jimmy Cagney was their big star. Universal developed the horror genre which was cheap, and as a result the players that were contracted to these studios fitted those house styles. But the stars become more important, and eventually the directors did too, largely down to Hitchcock, who inspired auteurs like Spielberg, Cimino and Coppola. I suppose the story of his book is that by the 70s these really incredibly well-oiled machines were looked at as stifling creativity and hemming in artists and making them all play to type and so on. Everybody thought that these auteurs who came along with these huge productions, and really just used studios as somewhere they rented space, were the right thing, that they were the future and that movies should be made like this and that the old ways never produced anything good – but that’s nonsense. The studios turned out some of the greatest movies in history: if you look at the period from the 30s through the 40s, maybe even to 1950, the product they turned out is incredible, really high calibre, and amazing stars emerged from it."

"This is an amazing book. It’s an academic book, but it reads like a novel. It was a very important book for me when I was studying film and television. Film theory was dominated for many years by the idea of the auteur, the single visionary director who managed, in the hell of the industrial system that was Hollywood’s studio system, to nonetheless produce amazing individual work. Thomas Schatz’s book is a complete antidote to that. While he doesn’t in any way argue that Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford weren’t great directors, he talks about the vigour and energy of the classical Hollywood system. It’s not about these maverick individuals succeeding by fighting against the system. Hence the book’s title. It’s the push-and-pull of an industrial money-making system that is also a creative system at the same time. And I think that is one of the essences of television now. On the one hand, it’s a money-making machine, so there are a lot of people out there who really just badly want to make a lot of money. Since a lot of things involved in making television and movies are unbelievably expensive – you won’t be able to make a multimillion-dollar movie, or television series with computer graphics, just because you have a good idea – there is always this intersection between money and creativity. The two of them are intimately connected. Schatz’s book goes through the real detail of how it worked, how people made movies like Gone with the Wind , or Warner Brothers crime films, or film noir. I was just looking at it this morning, actually, and there’s a list of ‘Ten Commandments for Studio Readers’ from Thalberg, who ran MGM’s story department for a long time. Number one is, ‘Your most important duty is to find great ideas – you’ll find them buried under tons of mediocre suggestions.’ Another one is, ‘See at least two full-length motion pictures each week.’ Also, ‘Train yourself to recognise sincerity in a story.’ They’re almost exactly the same things that you’d say to a development researcher in a TV company now. I thought it was astounding that so long ago the rules about how to create good ideas were almost the same."