THE chief trend going on in Hollywood at present is toward the formation of independent movie organizations which might be expected some day to make movies that are appreciably less cowardly and commercialized than the present major-studio product. At least a dozen of these companies have been formed in the last two years, but they are as yet only halfway independent, because many of them are partly financed by the large studios and all of them must distribute their pictures through the major studios’ chains. The names and owners of some of these new studios are: California Pictures (Preston Sturges and Howard Hughes), International Pictures (William Goetz and Leo Spitz), William Cagney Pictures (the Cagney brothers), Vanguard Films (Selznick), and other units run by Bing Crosby, Sam Wood, Monter and Ripley, Hal Wallis, etc. The reason they were formed, it is said, was to allow their owners to cut down their income taxes: by forming their own corporations, these people can make a few pictures each year on nominal weekly salaries, and report their income-tax returns on the basis of capital gains. According to the internal-revenue rules, capital gains are permitted greater retention of profits than are salaries or fees. This may or may not be the reason for the new units, but many of these people are talented, intelligent and sensible film technicians and they might also want to make more important pictures than the big-studio product.
The trend isn’t taken very seriously by the large studios, since a similar one turned up during the First World War and got nowhere; also since they have a strangle-hold on distribution, they will not distribute films that make their own movies look inadequate. But one or two of these new organizations—for instance, International Pictures, which has Nunnally Johnson, Casey Robinson and Gary Cooper under contract, and a box-office hit, “Casanova Brown,” to start off with, and the Sturges-Hughes company, which isn’t likely, on Sturges’ past record, to make unsuccessful pictures—will probably end up as completely independent companies with their own distribution facilities, making pictures that might cause the large studios surprise and worry.
Since many of the people in these new groups have been concerned in the past with making above-the-average films, they will probably turn out even better ones on their own. But I doubt that they will make movies which are frankly original in their styles or independent in their ideas, mainly because they are all Hollywood-bred or, just as important, are working in Hollywood: there are many things about the place that make for a certain kind of movie in the way that a cold climate makes for certain kinds of animals. Put a person to producing films in Hollywood, and he invariably starts thinking in terms of photographed plays rather than movies, of art being separate from entertainment and so not for him, and of not making a movie that will try to change thought or feeling. I would advise all of these independents to go somewhere else in the United States to make their movies. My pessimism over what they can do in Hollywood is prompted by the pictures that have been made so far by the independents: “Casanova Brown,” “Lady of Burlesque,” “Johnny Come Lately,” “Flesh and Fantasy,” which have been so little different from the average Hollywood film as not to matter under what conditions they were filmed. The one very different film they have made, “The Voice in the Wind,” by Monter and Ripley, is a 1928 version of the kind of movie made today, mixed in with very good intentions and influences from the worst European “art” movies.
The other Hollywood trend—that of making longer and longer movies—may not be so important as the outburst of half-independent producers, but it has already made several films tiresome that didn’t have to be, and threatens to do other things like replacing double-feature programs with one picture as long as two. Seventy movies have been produced this year which run for at least an hour and forty minutes; twenty-seven have run for two hours, and six—“Dragon Seed,” “Since You Went Away,” “Frenchman’s Creek,” “An American Romance,” “Wilson” and “Mr. Skeffington”—average two hours and forty minutes, and at least $3,500,000 each to produce. The chief reason for alarm over such ballooning is that it may cause the producers to cut down on their production of cheap movies, which have always been the most likely entering wedge for new people, the most likely place to find unconventional subject matter and techniques, and things generally more relaxed and human. The movie people say the whole trend is a temporary phenomenon, and the demand for cheap films—and double features—by the public is too great to stop the production of B movies. At any rate, Hollywood seems to be increasingly of the opinion that a major film can’t be made for less than a million dollars or shorter than an hour and a half, and once it gets set in that idea, you can generally expect a more academic, conservative major film.
August 28, 1944