Roaring Twenties

The Golden Age of Hollywood: Silent Films to Talkies

By 1930, the American film industry had consolidated into an oligopoly of eight studios headquartered in a small district of Los Angeles that had been, twenty years before, an orange grove. The studios controlled every stage of film production, distribution, and exhibition, owned the theaters that showed the product, and signed the actors, directors, writers, and technicians to long-term contracts. The era in which this consolidation occurred, roughly from the establishment of the first real studios in the 1910s to the consolidation of the studio system in the late 1920s and the early 1930s, has come to be called the Golden Age of Hollywood. The decade of the 1920s was the formative period of the Golden Age. The film industry grew into a true mass medium; the major studios were built; the silent film, the most distinctive American art form of the early century, was perfected; and the technical revolution of synchronized sound was introduced.

For the wider cultural context, return to the 1920s Arts and Entertainment pillar overview. For the geographic and economic history of the industry, For the directors who defined the era, For the technical revolution of synchronized sound,

The Major Studios and the Moguls

The studio system of the 1930s was dominated by what the industry called the “Big Eight.” Five were vertically integrated majors that owned production, distribution, and exhibition, and three were smaller companies (sometimes called the “Little Three”) that depended on the majors for distribution.

The five integrated majors were Paramount Pictures (founded as the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation in 1916, reorganized as Paramount in 1927, led by Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky); Loew’s Inc./Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), formed in 1924 by the merger of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, and Louis B. Mayer Pictures, and led by Louis B. Mayer and the boy-genius producer Irving Thalberg; Twentieth Century-Fox (Fox Film Corporation, founded 1915, was already a major studio in the 1920s); Warner Bros., founded in 1923 by the four brothers Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner, the sons of a Polish-Jewish cobbler from Youngstown, Ohio; and RKO Radio Pictures, formed in October 1928 by the merger of RCA, the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain, and the Film Booking Offices. RKO would be the most troubled of the majors and the first to collapse (it went into receivership in 1933).

The “Little Three” were Universal Pictures, founded in 1912 by Carl Laemmle; Columbia Pictures, founded in 1924 as CBC Film Sales by Harry Cohn; and United Artists, founded in 1919 by D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks as a distribution company for the founders’ own films, and the only one of the studios that did not own theater chains.

The moguls who ran these studios in the 1920s were the most concentrated body of executive power in the American entertainment industry. Louis B. Mayer, who had built the largest of the production companies into a vertically integrated empire, was the most powerful. Irving Thalberg, the “Boy Wonder” who had run Universal at 21 and who took over production at MGM at 24, was the most respected; he died in 1936 at 37. Adolph Zukor, the Hungarian immigrant who had founded Paramount, was the longest-lived of the moguls. The Warner brothers were the only major moguls who did not have Jewish middle-European roots, and the most combative.

The Star System and the Publicity Machine

The major studios developed in the 1920s the star system, the practice of promoting a small number of contract players as the principal selling point of their films. The first studio to use the technique systematically was Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount), which from 1912 had cast Mary Pickford as the studio’s principal attraction, and which in 1914 had imported Charlie Chaplin from Fred Karno’s London company and made him, by 1917, the most famous person in the world.

The publicity apparatus that grew up around the stars was unprecedented. The fanzines of the period, particularly Photoplay (founded 1911), Motion Picture Magazine (founded 1911), and Picture Play (founded 1915), were the primary vehicles for the studio publicity machines. The studios cultivated the personal lives of the stars with the same care that they used to manage their film roles, and the marriage of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in 1920, the Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle scandal of 1921, the suicide of Olive Thomas in 1920, and the murder of William Desmond Taylor in 1922 became the prototype of the Hollywood scandal as a public event. (For the major stars of the era,

The Silent Film Masterpieces

The 1920s produced the most concentrated body of great films in the medium’s history. The major films of the decade, in roughly chronological order, included The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920, Robert Wiene, the founding work of the German Expressionist film style), The Kid (1921, Charlie Chaplin with Jackie Coogan), Nosferatu (1922, F.W. Murnau, the first screen vampire), The Ten Commandments (1923, Cecil B. DeMille), Our Hospitality (1923) and The Navigator (1924, Buster Keaton), Greed (1924, Erich von Stroheim, an eight-hour adaptation of Frank Norris’s McTeague), The Gold Rush (1925, Charlie Chaplin, the most commercially successful silent comedy ever made), Ben-Hur (1925, the most expensive silent film ever made to that point), The Big Parade (1925, King Vidor, the most commercially successful silent film of the decade), Metropolis (1927, Fritz Lang, the founding work of the science-fiction epic), Wings (1927, William A. Wellman, the first Best Picture winner), The General (1927, Buster Keaton, the most ambitious of his silent features), Sunrise (1927, F.W. Murnau, the most honored silent film of its era), and The Jazz Singer (1927, Alan Crosland, the first feature-length talkie).

The Major Directors

The directors who worked in Hollywood in the 1920s formed one of the great generations of filmmakers. Cecil B. DeMille (1881-1959) was the founding director of the Hollywood feature film, the most prolific producer-director of the silent era, and the principal shaper of the biblical epic as a Hollywood form. D.W. Griffith (1875-1948) was the founding figure of the American feature film, the director of The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), and a co-founder of United Artists. Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977) was the most famous person in the world by the early 1920s; his silent features The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928, which won a special Academy Award), and City Lights (1931, made after the introduction of sound but silent except for its musical score) defined the form of the silent comedy. Buster Keaton (1895-1966) was the great stone-face of the silent screen, the director and star of Our Hospitality (1923), The Navigator (1924), Sherlock Jr. (1924), The General (1927), and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928).

Erich von Stroheim (1885-1957) was the most extravagant directorial talent of the silent era, the director of Blind Husbands (1919), Foolish Wives (1922), Greed (1924), and The Wedding March (1928). F.W. Murnau (1888-1931) was the German-born director of Nosferatu (1922) and The Last Laugh (1924) before his move to Hollywood, where he made Sunrise (1927) and Tabu (1931); Murnau died in a car accident in California in March 1931. Fritz Lang (1890-1976) was the Austrian-born director of the German expressionist cycle, including Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), the Die Nibelungen films (1924), Metropolis (1927), and M (1931). King Vidor (1894-1982) was the Texas-born director of The Big Parade (1925), The Crowd (1928), and Hallelujah (1929). John Ford (1894-1973) began his directing career in the silent era and would work through the 1970s. Frank Capra (1897-1991) had worked in the silent era as a gag writer and director of two-reel comedies and would become, in the 1930s, the most awarded American director of his time. Howard Hawks (1896-1977) had worked in the silent era as a director and writer and would go on to define the American genre film for the next forty years.

The Introduction of Synchronized Sound

The most consequential technical event in the history of cinema was the introduction of synchronized sound. The technology had been demonstrated in 1900 by the French inventor Auguste Baron, and various systems had been tried in the 1920s, but the first commercially successful system was Vitaphone, a sound-on-disc system developed by Western Electric and licensed to Warner Bros. in 1925.

Warner Bros. used Vitaphone to provide synchronized musical scores for the silent film Don Juan (1926) and the historical variety film The Better ‘Ole (1926), both of which played in specially equipped theaters. The following year, the studio released The Jazz Singer (1927), starring Al Jolson as the son of a Jewish cantor; the film had a synchronized musical score and several synchronized dialogue sequences, including the famous line “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” The film was not technically the first talkie (the first all-talking picture, The Lights of New York, would be released by Warner Bros. in 1928), but it was the first to demonstrate to the industry that audiences would pay to hear actors speak, and the conversion to sound was on.

The rival systems developed quickly. Fox introduced the Movietone sound-on-film system in 1927-28, and the newsreels produced by Movietone (including the first sound footage of Charles Lindbergh returning from Paris in June 1927, taken by Fox and Paramount cameramen on the same day) became the principal newsreel product of the late 1920s. RCA developed the Photophone sound-on-film system, which was adopted by RKO and by some of the independent producers. By 1930, silent film production in the United States had effectively ended.

The 1927 Academy Awards and the Birth of Self-Regulation

The 1927 Academy Awards ceremony, the first Academy Awards, took place on May 16, 1929, at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had been founded in May 1927 by Louis B. Mayer and a group of thirty-six industry leaders (including the actors Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford), and the first ceremony honored films released between August 1, 1927, and July 31, 1928. Wings (1927) won Best Picture, Sunrise won the separate Best Unique and Artistic Production award (a category created at the request of Douglas Fairbanks that was not continued after the first year), Emil Jannings won Best Actor for The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh, and Janet Gaynor won Best Actress for 7th Heaven, Street Angel, and Sunrise.

The Academy Awards were conceived, in significant part, as a public-relations response to the labor unrest of 1926-27, the wave of strikes, salary disputes, and a few highly publicized deaths of studio employees that had brought the industry negative attention. The formation of the Academy and the parallel formation of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) under Will H. Hays, the former Postmaster General, in 1922, were the industry’s twin responses to the threat of federal and state censorship. The Hays Code, the production code named for Hays and elaborated by the Catholic layman Martin Quigley and the Jesuit priest Daniel A. Lord, was first published in 1930, was not strictly enforced until 1934, and would remain in effect in its enforced form until 1968. The Code prohibited profanity, nudity, explicit sex, “excessive” violence, the depiction of drug use, and the sympathetic depiction of crime; it required that “the forces of good and evil” be unambiguously distinguished, and it required that “the sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home” be maintained. The Code would, in the 1930s, shape the content of American film more decisively than any other single piece of regulation.

The International Market and the American Domination of World Cinema

By the late 1920s, the American film industry dominated the world market. American films accounted for roughly 80 percent of screen time in the United Kingdom by 1925, and the European market, particularly the French and German markets that had been the most resistant, was opening up as the cost of producing sound films forced the smaller national industries out of business. The German UFA (Universum Film AG) studio, the European leader of the silent era, ran into severe financial difficulty in 1928-29 and was forced to take American loans; the studio was effectively absorbed by the German government in 1933. The French and Italian film industries, which had been the most active in Europe before the war, did not recover a substantial share of their own markets until the 1930s. By the time the talkie transition was complete in 1930, the American film industry was, in a very real sense, the film industry of the world.

The 1920s were the formative decade of the American film industry, and the studio system, the star system, the technical infrastructure, and the institutional framework that had been built in those ten years would persist, with relatively modest changes, for the next thirty years. The Golden Age, in the sense of the time of the greatest concentration of talent, the greatest commercial reach, and the greatest aesthetic achievement, was the period from roughly 1930 to 1960, but its foundations were laid, decisively and irreversibly, in the 1920s.

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