The Culture of Hollywood

Hollywood is fond of celebrating its glorious history, a history that would seem to have continued unbroken to the present moment. Yet much has changed in the American commercial film industry since its genesis in the first decades of the last century. Once there were great "studios," movie factories, in effect, which owned, controlled, and oversaw every element of production, distribution, and exhibition. Actors were mere employees, like costume seamstresses and lighting technicians. Movies were churned out lickety-split, according to well-established formulae. Perched above it all was a powerful central producer who weighed in on nearly every film, leaving his imprint, if not his actual name, on the finished product. Irving Thalberg more or less invented this position while at Universal and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the 1920s; others, such as Darryl Zanuck at Twentieth Century-Fox, left an indelible mark on Hollywood history, almost singlehandedly responsible for molding the images of stars such as Shirley Temple, Tyrone Power, and Rin Tin Tin.

The work of George Custen, Professor of Theatre and Coordinator of the Film Studies Program at The Graduate Center, whose research on the culture of Hollywood includes the books Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (Rutgers University Press, 1992) and Twentieth Century's Fox: Darryl Zanuck and the Culture of Hollywood (Basic Books, 1997), helps to explain Hollywood history--its specificity, changes, and developments--focusing on the period from 1930 to 1960. His biography of Zanuck traces the vaunted producer's rise from aspiring writer to head of his own studio at the age of 31, a position he maintained until he was in his 50s. "I first became interested in Zanuck when I was in Los Angeles doing research for my book Bio/Pics," says Custen. "I was looking at memos that producers wrote to directors, giving them advice and guidance on how to shape the script, and Zanuck's were so much smarter than all the others. To watch him grow from the producer of tabloid films like The Public Enemy to the producer of The Grapes of Wrath and then, after the war Gentleman's Agreement and All About Eve is remarkable."

In his book, Custen examines Hollywood's resistance to interrogate certain social inequities, and Zanuck's willingness to address these issues more than most. "If you look at the number of films that were exposes, The Grapes of Wrath, for example, people said it could not be made because of its indictment of the government's part in agri-business. It was gutsy for Zanuck to make it and Steinbeck said it was far harsher than the novel. It's quite stark-- there's little music, and the actors don't wear makeup. John Ford is given credit for directing it, but if you look at the production memos, you see Zanuck's ideas are used in many cases."

When Custen first conceived of studying Hollywood, people were surprised because most of the serious research was being done on documentary and avant garde films. "So much of our view of the world comes from major motion pictures," counters Custen, "that to not take them seriously in that sense is foolishness. I mean as works of art, it's clear that some are ludicrous. But as serious factors in determining the American consciousness, they are important."