Archive: Book Reviews, August 1999
The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era
By Thomas Schatz
London: Faber and Faber, 1998. xiv + 514 pp., 93 illustrations, £14.99 (soft)
A Review by Christofer Meissner, University of Kansas
The Hollywood studio system has been alternately the bane and the boon of contemporary film studies. Many contemporary scholars have used the studio system as an adversary, but one strain of film history has recognized that the studio system offers an abundance of understanding regarding cinematic art, business and organizational dynamics, and American culture during its nearly forty-year existence. Thomas Schatz's book The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era falls firmly into this latter category.
Schatz examines the business and production operations at four of Hollywood's studios: Universal, Warner Bros., MGM, and the various production concerns of David O. Selznick. Schatz's methodological interest is in examining how these studios "worked" in terms of production operations, marketing and sales strategies, and management structure. Schatz justifies limiting his study to four studios in terms of simple efficacy: "looking at one studio cannot convey the richness and diversity of Hollywood filmmaking, while looking closely at them all in a single volume would be impossible due to the mass of information involved" (9). The limitation does not hinder but rather enhances Schatz's analysis. The choice to include and emphasize Selznick is particularly interesting and, in the context of the book's examination of the studio system, enlightening. Because Selznick actually worked at several other studios (including MGM, Paramount, and RKO), the story of his career within the studio system serves both as a professional biography of a studio-era executive and an example of independent production which existed in strict symbiosis with the industrial matrix from which it was supposedly "independent."
Although it causes a certain distortion in the portrait of studio-era Hollywood that he is trying to create, Schatz's focus on these four studios allows for a relatively fine-grained and highly coherent industrial history. Besides Selznick, the "professional biographies" of a number of other notable Hollywood personages are emphasized: Irving Thalberg, whose rise from "boy wonder" at Universal to ailing and embattled production chief at MGM is chronicled; Daryl Zanuck, whose early career at Warner Bros. is highlighted; and Alfred Hitchcock, whose Hollywood career is documented from his early association with Selznick through his free-lance status in the 1950s and his decline in the 1960s. Additionally, dozens of smaller-scale accounts of filmmakers' and actors' careers are used to demonstrate the workings of the studio system: Bette Davis, Erich von Stroheim, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Abbott and Costello, James Cagney, Joan Crawford, Deanna Durbin, Paul Muni, and Katharine Hepburn, as well as Ben Hecht, Mervyn LeRoy, Dore Schary, Walter Wanger, and producers Henry Blanke, Hunt Stromberg, and Arthur Freed are all given this type of treatment. Schatz also provides -- in the intricate industrial context in which they were made -- detailed production histories for films such as Grand Hotel, I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, The Life of Emile Zola, Jezebel, Meet Me in St. Louis, and Mildred Pierce.
As a result of his reliance on industrial papers -- used in perhaps unprecedented fashion and including memos, correspondence, budgets, schedules, story conference notes, daily production reports, and censorship files -- Schatz's narrative includes many types of figures and information that are not generally found in studio-era histories. Heavily emphasized are film budgets; although accounts of current Hollywood filmmaking are rife with budgetary references, studio-era accounts less frequently seem to acknowledge the budgetary dynamics of filmmaking in that period. For example, Schatz emphasizes that the budget for Jezebel climbed from $783,000 to $1,073,000 as it fell five weeks behind schedule (225) and that half the budget of Meet Me in St. Louis consisted of sets and music (budgeted at $497,000 and $234,000 respectively) (374).
Two key phrases which serve as guideposts for Schatz's project are "the genius of the system" and "the whole equation of pictures." The first phrase, of course, is the title of Schatz's book and comes from critic-theorist Andre Bazin, who in 1957 said, "The American cinema is a classical art, but why not then admire in it what is most admirable, i.e., not only the talent of this or that filmmaker, but the genius of the system" (8). Schatz uses the phrase primarily as the guiding principle around which his work is oriented: he is interested in examining not specific individuals or studios but the unique social, cultural, economic, aesthetic, and industrial system which was studio-era Hollywood. The second phrase is from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said, "[Hollywood] can be understood ... but only dimly and in flashes. Not a half dozen men have been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads" (8). If "the genius of the system" describes Schatz's object, he appropriates this second phrase as his objective: to calculate the whole equation of pictures as best he can from the reams of industry documents available to him.
Schatz achieves his objective remarkably well but with one glaring historiographical deficiency. In utilizing the wealth of industrial documents to create an analysis of the Hollywood studio system, Schatz chose not to employ a rigorous method of citing his sources directly. The result is a dense narrative of the workings of the studio system that has no footnotes or endnotes, no way of accessing the nature of the information used to construct the story. Schatz defends his lack of notes and citations by saying that "precise and detailes notes on sources ... would be unwieldy and utterly impractical" (497). He further defends the lack of documentation and its presumed impracticality by claiming that it would add a hundred pages to the text; Schatz fails to recognize that by omitting any detailed documentation, he renders his otherwise remarkable text impractical in different ways, especially to historians who are interested in examining his text historiographically.
Despite this one glaring deficiency, Thomas Schatz's The Genius of the System is an eminently useful and eminently entertaining film history. By providing such a finely detailed account of the Hollywood studio system, Schatz not only tames the adversary that some scholars would like to confront, he offers even more avenues of potential research for those scholars who aim to understand.