STACK December 2016 Issue No. 146

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greatest medium of mass communication the
world had ever seen.
In the early 1920s Hollywood was awash
with small, independent motion picture
companies, but less than a decade later
practically all of them had been bought out and
absorbed by a few astute Jewish immigrant
businessmen such as Adolph Zukor, William
Fox, the brothers Warner and Marcus Loew.
These so called “movie moguls” studied
the manufacturing and distribution processes
which were innovated during the 1920s at the
General Motors Automobile Corporation, and
adopted the concept for their individual film
companies. The result was a virtual factory
system for manufacturing motion pictures
based on rigid control of the labour force
with long term contracts for actors, directors,
writers, composers and lavish in-house
production facilities and publicity departments.
Actor Cary Grant perfectly captured, in
One afternoon in March 1954, after
dubbing part of the soundtrack of
his latest movie Betrayed , Clark
Gable drove his custom made Jaguar car out
of the gates of MGM for the last time. He
would never return to the studio that had made
him the most famous movie star in the world.
During his 23-year reign as “The King of
Hollywood”, Gable had made over 50 movies
for Metro including the timeless classic Gone
with the Wind(1939). But the majority of
his early 1950s films had been box office
failures, resulting in MGM president Dore
Schary deciding he could no longer afford
Gable’s $520,000 salary, and as a consequence
wanted to re-negotiate his contract.
Gable instructed his agent to “see how high
you can get those sons-of-bitches to go. When
you get their best offer, tell them to take their
money, their studio, their cameras and lighting
equipment and shove it all up their ass!”
This acrimonious episode has been
identified by many film historians as the
beginning of the end of the Golden Age of
Hollywood and its once highly innovative and
hugely successful so called “studio system”.
Hollywood did not invent the movies but it
honed and perfected the art of making them
and the business of selling them to a global
audience of millions, making it at the time the
The Golden Age of
Hollywood:
1930-1955
26 DECEMBER 2016
EXTRAS
visit
Part 1
Adolph Zukor, the founder of
Paramount Pictures, on the
cover of Time magazine 1929
The Warner Brothers: Sam, Harry, Jack and Albert
Hollywood did not invent
the movies but it honed
and perfected the art of
making them and the
business of selling them
to a global audience