Glitz. Glam. Lights. Action. The intangible and inexplicable magic of Hollywood beckons Mabel Sunday across the United States and transforms her from an ignorant ragamuffin to a movie star. In the world of cinema, Mabel finds love and reason in her life. Unfortunately for Mabel, her passion, ambition, and determination to be great have to go head-to-head with Hollywood’s studio system.
Thomas Edison thundered into the twentieth century as the foremost innovator of American film—he owned patents for his phonograph, cameras, and projectors—and he sought to be the only name in cinema. He hired strong legal teams to file patents on his inventions so that other young film companies would have to both fear and pay him, lest they face litigation. Edison then pooled the interests of the bigger film companies with Edison Company, known as The Trust, creating a monopoly on equipment and distribution of early films. Independent theaters had to pay rental fees on blind bid films—collections of films they were forced to buy without seeing them—in addition to $2 a week to show them. But regardless of the legal and economic appearances of The Trust, it essentially functioned as a protection racket. Edison, determined to be the only face and relevant figure in film, hunted down and dismantled the productions of smaller companies.
Would-be filmmakers initiated a migration west (perhaps exodus is more fitting) in an attempt to avoid Edison and The Trust. Young and ambitious executives and filmmakers sought cities to establish their names, free from control of the pursuing Trust. Eventually these young businessmen, who included David O. Selznick, Adolph Zukor, Louis Mayer, and Samuel Goldwyn, settled in the rolling hills of Los Angeles, as far from Edison muscle as they could geographically get. Around the same time, a Supreme Court case entitled United States v. Motion Picture Patents Company (1915) deemed The Trust unlawful, and these new studio heads had a lot less Edison, and a lot more sunshine.
Soon there was the Big 5: MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., RKO, and Fox, and the Little 3: Universal, Columbia, and United Artists. Without blowback from the Trust, they had all the freedom in the world, which meant they had the freedom to become just as controlling as Edison’s Trust. These studios employed vertical integration, controlling both filmmaking and distribution at every level; they held long-term exclusive contracts with directors, writers, producers, and most actors, whose work they owned outright. Studios consistently put out a film a week, which they packaged and sold to movie theatres as a unit. In 1948, an anti-trust case United States v Paramount Pictures, Inc, ruled that studio’s vertical integration was illegal, and forced them to separate the production and distribution of films, which eventually saw the end of the studio’s monopoly on its artists.
Mabel fled from a world of greed and overbearing to the Mecca of greed and overbearing. As one character says of a particularly fiendish would-be entertainment entrepreneur, “You’re nothing but dirt covered with a greasy shine.” That seems to go for everyone caught up in early Hollywood: They want to make names for themselves, but are faced with the compromises they’re asked to make by a system that trades on glamour, illusion, and insatiable appetites for entertainment and sensation.
—Maxwell Kaplow