The history of American silent film begins with one of the greatest innovators the world has ever known, Thomas Edison. It was he, along with a small, internationally scattered group including the Lumiere brothers and George Melies, that first experimented with the capabilities of the moving image. Although there were many people who had invented various early forms of the movie camera, Edison’s Kinetoscope was the first to burst into the American consciousness. Edison built his famous intimidating production studio, Black Maria, to foster the output of film strips for his camera. These initial experimentations had not yet gained favor with the public, and Edison did not see the full creative potential of film that would soon find favor in the exponential growth of the industry. In his short yet illuminating exploration of Hollywood’s infant stages entitled The Silent Screen, Richard Dyer McCann explains this narrow view of film’s capabilities: “These influential pioneers were preceded by a first wave of small-time shopkeepers, led by Thomas Edison, who were aware only of the short range curiosity of the audience – of the desire for momentary surprises and spectacles a perhaps a single twenty minute exploration of the common life”. The “pioneers” that McCann speaks of were the studio heads who truly laid the groundwork for the American film industry, whether it was what movies needed or not.

    There were many business innovators that had a hand in shaping the silent film era, but there were three who had a particular influence on its transformation into a financially viable form of entertainment: Carl Laemmle, William Fox and Adolph Zukor. All three men were born in Europe and emigrated to the United States. Laemmle was the founder of Universal, Zukor started Paramount and Mr. Fox used his own moniker for his company Fox Film Corporations.  Unlike much of the “current conglomerate financiers, these first tycoons were deeply involved in every major decision and loved the whole process of making and selling movies”. Due to their sheer invested control in the trajectory of the cinema, the strategies they used became the status quo in Hollywood. Vertical integration as a corporate system, the top-to-bottom control that is evident in our capitalist society, was the chosen method of growth when these studio-heads “became aware quite early that the movie business was a large enterprise which profited from close controls”. Their power was evidenced in their relationship with exhibitors who owned theaters. The studios used a technique known as block-booking, which was deemed unlawful by the Federal Trade Commission in 1921. They would sell titles to theatre owners with their biggest box-office draws, such as a Mary Pickford or a Clara Bow, but only with the commitment that they would also purchase a chunk of lowly b-grade films. This made it hard for exhibitors to turn a profit, and when this business strategy ran into legal troubles the producers began to buy out the theaters themselves. By 1921 Zukor “had acquired 303 theaters, only a fraction of the 14,000 then operating, but significant because most of Zukor’s houses were first-class, first-run theaters”.

    Zukor was a man who knew what he wanted for the film industry, and that was entertainment that translated into profits. Although this allowed studios to constantly pump out title after title, it would become a detriment to those more willing to take a creative risk. This remains true today, where opening weekend box-office receipts decide the fate of a franchise. McCann notices that “entertainment for the masses is a valuable commodity for society, and Zukor fulfilled that need for many years. But he became the model for all those movie executives who could never say yes to an artist just on a hunch, without worrying about the profits”. D.W. Griffith, one of the first directors to utilize film language in a meaningful way, was a victim of this economic aspect of the industry. Although his films are often considered some of the most effective in cinematic history, he had no interest in the business aspects of Hollywood and commercial success often eluded him. This led to a tarnished legacy. However, “other executives have been more notable for their artistic daring”. Laemmle was one of those early studio heads who decided to take a risk and said “yes in 1918 to Erich Von Stroheim, and Blind Husbands, the first feature Stroheim directed, turned out to be a moneymaker as well as a landmark in critical controversy”. Stroheim would also go on to direct Foolish Wives (1922), in which he used our very own Point Lobos as a set location. William Fox also took a significant chance on bringing F.W. Murnau, the famed german director, to the United States. The resulting film, Sunrise (1927), “was a gamble for attention, and he won that gamble while losing some money he had made from other films. Sunrise has become one of the widely accepted classics of the screen”.  Although these decisions might not have made sense from a fiscal standpoint, they are the films that stand the test of time.

The film industry was a lot different in the silent era, especially in terms of the perception accorded to actors and directors. I began this essay speaking about the influential studio frontrunners because they were the men who had the last say in how a film was made. Directors weren’t considered the driving force behind the success of a film, they were considered more as a piece within a larger framework. This strategy is indicative of the larger business framework known as the “studio system”. Richard Koszarski, in his informative examination of the film industry An Evenings Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, instead refers to this business structure as the producer system, and I believe it’s a more apt description of the industry practice in the silent era. Koszarski recounts the specificities of the producer system through a description of Thomas Ince’s New York Motion Picture Studio. Ince was a pioneering studio mogul who was one of the first executives to utilize the assembly-line system: “Script material was recast into continuity form, which allowed careful preplanning of all production activities. Actors needed to appear only when required; props and costumes could be scheduled on a dependable basis, and the logistics of complicated location trips (or studio trips for that matter) might be clearly predetermined. By closely monitoring the scripting and editing process, a central producer like Ince – or Mack Sennett – could guarantee a uniform standard of quality without having to attend personally to the filming of each scene” . This system would render the director as another cog in the machine.

     - This is the site of Thomas Ince’s New York Motion Picture Studio, located on the Los Angeles coast at the very end of early Sunset Boulevard. It was known as Inceville, and the producer was able to isolate the filmmaking process to this small compound.

    Location shooting quickly became a thing of the past when cost demands and production size became larger and larger. This is an important topic in terms of how Hollywood has become the main base of operations for the industry in the United States. I believe this is the reason that an industry did not flare up in Santa Cruz County, even though many films were made here. It just wasn’t feasible for a producer to coordinate a production in the county when there was no studio for him to manufacture the film. Although the Santa Cruz mountains injected a certain honesty and rawness into Lily of Poverty Flat and Romance of the Redwoods, it wasn’t enough to rationalize a full co-opting of the area as a studio location. Koszarski notices how the transformation of the West coast into industry central was a quick transition: “The concentration of feature productions in Hollywood during the teens was widely noted at the time, especially because few could have predicted the rapidity of this migration. Although visiting companies had worked in Los Angeles since 1908, much of the outlying area was still largely a wilderness in 1915, lacking equipment houses, prop and costume shops, a steady supply of professional actors, or even basic safety sanitation and safety”. Although from this standpoint it seems that Santa Cruz could just have easily transformed into a movie town, but the infrastructure was just not there. By the time films were being made in the county, Hollywood had already begun its supremacy as the movie capital of the world.