Roaring Twenties

The Motion Picture Industry in the 1920s

The 1920s were the golden age of the silent film and the decade in which the modern American motion picture industry was built. By 1929, the major studios were selling roughly 60 million movie tickets a week — an average of one ticket per American per week, in a country of 120 million. The industry was vertically integrated, internationally dominant, and culturally central. Movie stars were the most famous people in the world, and Hollywood was already the synonym for the American entertainment industry.

The decade ended, as it had to, with the introduction of synchronized sound — first used in the Vitaphone shorts that accompanied Don Juan (1926), then dramatized in the jazz-themed feature The Jazz Singer (October 6, 1927), and finally universalized in the 1928–30 conversion of the industry to “talkies.” The transition from silence to sound was the most consequential technological change in film history, and it happened in the last three years of the decade.

For the technology and conventions of the silent era itself, For the breakthrough moment of synchronized sound, For the actors who defined the decade, For the studio system and its cultural consequences, see also the golden age of Hollywood page.

The Studio System

The American film industry of the 1920s was organized around a small number of vertically integrated studios that owned the production lots, the distribution arms, and the chains of movie theaters. This structure, known as the studio system, gave the studios enormous power over what films were made, who appeared in them, and how they were marketed and exhibited.

The “Big Five” studios were:

The “Little Three” were smaller but still major:

A handful of smaller studios rounded out the industry, including the Hal Roach Studios (best known for comedy shorts), Educational Pictures, and the American Releasing Corporation (later Monogram Pictures).

The Big Five’s ownership of theater chains — particularly Paramount’s near-monopoly — was a major antitrust issue. The Federal Trade Commission investigated in the 1920s, and a consent decree forced partial divestiture in 1940. The full vertical integration lasted until United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948), which broke up the studios’ theater chains and ended the classic studio system.

The Moguls

The studio system was run by a small group of mostly Jewish-immigrant businessmen who had entered the industry in its nickelodeon and early-feature days. The most important were:

The moguls, many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants, were a self-made group. They were also famous for their autocratic management style, their ruthless business practices, and their prodigious output. By the late 1920s, they had built an industry that was the largest in the world.

The Star System

The 1920s saw the star system — the practice of marketing actors by name — become the industry’s central business strategy. A small number of actors became nationally and internationally famous, with salaries to match. The most important were:

The actors earned extraordinary sums for the era. By the late 1920s, top stars earned $10,000 a week and more; Gloria Swanson reportedly earned $20,000 a week at the height of her fame. ## The Move to Hollywood

The 1920s saw the consolidation of film production in Hollywood, the Los Angeles neighborhood that had been an orange grove just two decades earlier. The reasons for the consolidation were partly climatic (the weather allowed year-round outdoor shooting), partly scenic (the variety of landscapes), partly financial (cheap land and labor), and partly legal (the distance from the East Coast made it easier to evade the patents held by the now-defunct Motion Picture Patents Company).

The first major studio in Hollywood was Nestor Studios (1911), but the move accelerated in the 1920s. By the mid-1920s, virtually all major American film production was based in Hollywood. The earlier centers — New York City, Fort Lee, New Jersey, and even Culver City — declined. Hollywood became, and remains, the global center of the film industry.

The cultural consequences of the move to Hollywood were significant. The West Coast location, with its frontier mythology, its climate, and its relative distance from East Coast cultural authority, gave the new industry a distinctive identity. The studios built a self-contained world of backlots, bungalows, and soundstages that defined American popular culture for the rest of the century.

Silent Film Conventions

The silent film of the 1920s was a sophisticated art form, and the decade saw the development of nearly all the basic techniques of motion picture storytelling. The conventions of the silent era included:

The most important directors of the silent era — D.W. Griffith, Ernst Lubitsch, Cecil B. DeMille, King Vidor, F.W. Murnau (the German director of The Last Laugh [1924] and Sunrise [1927]), Sergei Eisenstein (the Russian director of Battleship Potemkin [1925]), and Fritz Lang (the German-Austrian director of Metropolis [1927]) — were artists of the highest order. Silent film was a legitimate art form and a genuine popular entertainment at the same time.

Box Office and the Audience

The audience for motion pictures in the 1920s was enormous. The peak of movie attendance came in the late 1920s, when the United States had about 120 million people and the industry was selling roughly 60 million tickets a week. The average American went to a movie roughly once a week. The movie palace — a large, ornate theater in every major city — was the dominant entertainment venue.

The audience was not just the urban middle class. The 1920s saw the spread of movie theaters into smaller towns, working-class neighborhoods, and rural areas. The nickelodeon of the 1900s had been replaced by the movie palace of the 1920s — a plush, often palatial theater, often built in a flamboyant architectural style (foreshadowing Art Deco) and seating a thousand or more viewers. The 1927 Fox Theatre in Detroit, the 1922 Roxy Theatre in New York, and the 1926 Pantages Theatre in Hollywood were typical. For more on the architecture of the era, see the art deco design page.

Censorship and the Hays Office

The 1920s saw a growing movement to censor the movies, which were seen as vulgar, morally suspect, and a bad influence on the young. The Catholic Legion of Decency was a leading advocate, but the industry’s response was the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), an industry self-regulatory body founded in 1922 under the presidency of Will H. Hays, the former Postmaster General. The MPPDA, soon known as the Hays Office, produced a list of “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” for filmmakers in 1927. The more elaborate Hays Code, a strict moral code governing movie content, was written in 1930 and enforced beginning in 1934. The 1927 establishment of the Hays Office was the industry’s first organized response to the censorship movement.

The International Market

The American film industry of the 1920s was the dominant producer in the world market. Hollywood films accounted for an estimated 80 percent of films shown in Europe in the late 1920s, and major stars — Valentino, Chaplin, Garbo, Fairbanks — were internationally famous. The European industry, badly damaged by World War I, was unable to compete. The German UFA studio (the producer of Lang and Murnau) was the most serious international rival, but even UFA could not match Hollywood’s scale. The result was an American cultural dominance that has never really been broken.

The Introduction of Sound

The decade ended with the most consequential technological change in film history. Several companies had been working on synchronized sound for movies since the early 1920s. The breakthrough came from Warner Bros., which had purchased the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system developed by Western Electric and Bell Labs. The first feature film to use the Vitaphone system (for musical accompaniment) was Don Juan (1926), starring John Barrymore. The first feature with synchronized dialogue and music was The Jazz Singer (October 6, 1927), starring Al Jolson.

The Jazz Singer was a huge popular and critical success. The industry rushed to follow Warner Bros.’ lead. By 1930, virtually all major Hollywood productions were “talkies” — silent film production was effectively over. The transition had enormous consequences: many actors (including John Gilbert, Norma Talmadge, and others) had voices unsuited to the microphone; some foreign-born stars (notably Greta Garbo, who spoke excellent English with a Swedish accent, and Maurice Chevalier) were unaffected; and the economics of film production changed radically. The transition is detailed in the first talking picture.

The end of the silent era was, paradoxically, a demonstration of the silent era’s power. The mass audience had grown up on silent film, had learned to follow complex storylines through visual storytelling, and was ready for the medium to take its next step. The stars, the studios, the moguls, the audiences, and the technology of the 1920s had created a foundation on which the sound era could be built.

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