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233

6Moving toward

a New Hollywood

1955–1967

he implementation and enforcement of theSupreme Court’s decision in the Paramountcase in 1948 coincided with a steady decline inbox-office revenues: a 43 percent drop from ahigh of $1.7 billion in 1946 to a low of $955 mil-

lion in 1961. Average weekly movie attendance suffereda similar decline: in 1947, 90 million people went to themovies every week, but by 1957 the average weeklyattendance was down to 40 million. Much of what transpired in the industry between 1955 and 1967 wasgoverned by a single unpleasant fact of life: the once-prosperous studios were no longer so prosperous. Itseemed entirely possible, as the 1960s unfolded, that thefilm industry, which had survived a devastating economicdepression and a world war, might not survive peacetimeprosperity. The irony was disquieting.

Studio executives came to understand in the mid-1950s that a new Hollywood was necessary andinevitable. The first step toward a more modern movieindustry took shape in the form of a truce between thestudios and their counterpart in television. By 1960 therewere 50 million TV sets in homes across the UnitedStates, and lots of people were watching a lot of televi-son: in 1960 the average daily viewing time for U.S.households with a TV set was over 5 hours a day. In lessthan a decade, television had gone from a curious gadgetto an essential home appliance, from an odd and clum-sily delivered electronic signal received by a handful ofPopular Mechanics subscribers to a viable mass mediumthat the studios could no longer afford to ignore.

Because the Paramount Decision restricted the stu-dios’ investment in the television industry, the studios gotcreative and established what we now term synergies(complex mutually advantageous business relationships)between the two media. Disney led the way, making a

T

Alfred Hitchcockdirecting Janet Leigh in

the famous showerscene in Psycho (1960).

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a henchman with tender feelings for his boss(James Mason), a master spy and killer. And ofcourse there is Norman Bates in Psycho. Althoughhe is not gay (so far as we can tell), he is certainlyeffeminate.

Throughout his years in America, Hitchcockcontinued to develop his signature style, expand-ing his use of the theatrical antimontage tech-niques that inspired him during his time inGermany and England. In The Wrong Man the longtakes and fluid documentary-style cameraworkenable the viewer to inhabit the world of thewrongly accused hero. Such cinematic intimacy isa key to the empathy we come to feel with the char-acter. The theatrical antimontage style is also evi-dent in some of Hitchcock’s bigger studio setpieces. The world that L. B. Jefferies watches fromhis window, for example, is observed through acamera lens in long, fluid takes. The apartmentcomplex across the courtyard is quite like a stageset in a play, a single construction that variouscharacters enter and exit, moving into and thenout of view. The cat-and-mouse scenes in railwaycars, hotels, and finally the villain’s posh modernhome in North by Northwest are also rendered inthis style. Hitchcock was so committed to it thathe composed the entirety of Rope in a single shot.The only cuts in the movie occur when the cam-era operator had to reload his film, and those tran-sitions are masked by distractions, like swingingdoors or a character walking in front of the cam-era. In the absence of expressive editing, Hitchcockmade the most of simple spatial transitionaldevices—stairways, for example, which (as in Psy-cho) one ascends or descends at one’s peril. Wait-ing behind a blind corner atop the stairs in theBateses’ family home is Norman dressed asMother, knife at the ready. Downstairs one findsNorman’s mother preserved like one of the stuffedbirds in the motel office. Like his expressionistpredecessors Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau, Hitch-cock used offscreen space expertly. What we seeon film—what the director holds on film in a longtake—suggests what we don’t and can’t see. And inHitchcock’s films, what we don’t or can’t see canhurt us.

Hitchcock was by popular acclaim Americancinema’s master of suspense. It was a title that atthe very least revealed the American audience’saffection for and familiarity with his oeuvre.

No director before or since has so deftly exam-ined the politics of looking and seeing: the curiousallure of scopophilia (objectification through look-ing) and the seductive kick of voyeurism (a sexualthrill gained by watching in secret). Charactersenjoy furtive looking, but their penchant for spy-ing also gets them in trouble. They see somethingthey shouldn’t see (a murder, for example, as inThe Man Who Knew Too Much, made in 1934 andremade in 1956), something that might meansomething and then again might not (exactly whatdoes Thorwald have in that trunk in his apartmentin Rear Window, and exactly what has he gotburied out there in the flower bed?), or somethingthat turns them on and then turns them into some-one else, someone bad, as in Psycho.

Some thematic concerns common to Hitch-cock’s films verge on idiosyncrasy. For example,there is Hitchcock’s idealization of a highly styl-ized, carefree masculinity and its counterpoint, theeffeminate, perhaps homosexual tendencies of thepolitical or pathological criminal. In Hitchcock’sworld, being macho isn’t necessarily an asset, butbeing quick on your feet and smart in difficult cir-cumstances certainly is. Hitchcock’s admirationfor grace under pressure partially explains hisaffection for actors like Cary Grant and JamesStewart, movie stars who radiated a cool exteriorunder fire. Similarly, the most memorable malehero in Hitchcock’s British films is Richard Han-nay (Robert Donat) in The 39 Steps, who casuallyjokes, after being saved from a bullet to the heartby a hymnbook he by chance has in his pocket,that for the first time in his life he understands thevalue of songs of praise. In contrast, the prototyp-ical killer of the British films is Handel Fane (EsmePercy) in the 1930 picture Murder!, easily identi-fied as a “half-caste,” a slang term for a homosex-ual, who, Hitchcock suggests, kills because he’sattracted to men. Fane is a model of sorts for astring of Hitchcock’s American sociopaths: thethrill killers in Rope (played by John Dall and Farley Granger), stand-ins for the notorious real-life killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb,lovers who kidnapped and killed a boy as an intel-lectual experiment in staging the perfect crime;Bruno (Robert Walker) in Strangers on a Train, amama’s boy who wants his father dead and is will-ing to trade murders to get his wish fulfilled; andLeonard (Martin Landau) in North by Northwest,

262 | Chapter 6: Moving toward a New Hollywood (1955-1967)

Anthony Perkins as the psychoticmurderer Norman Bates in AlfredHitchcock’s 1960 thriller Psycho.

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mercially successful and immediately recognizableas his. More so than the works of any other studiodirector of his time, perhaps of any time, Hitch-cock’s films form an oeuvre, a body of work witha profound stylistic and thematic unity.

But just as clearly as Hitchcock imposed his sig-nature on his films and became at least as wellknown as the films themselves, so, too, did starssuch as Jerry Lewis, Marilyn Monroe, and DorisDay define “their” films. Filmgoers knew before thelights went down what to expect from a Hitchcockpicture, just as they knew what was in store forthem in a picture starring Jerry Lewis, MarilynMonroe, or Doris Day.

Alfred HitchcockAlfred Hitchcock was born in London in 1899 andenjoyed a successful career in England before mov-ing to Hollywood in 1940. Hitchcock’s first forayinto the film business was with Famous Players–Lasky, where from 1920 to 1925 he designed setsand title cards, wrote silent-movie scripts, andworked as an assistant director. In 1925 he beganan association with the German expressionist producer Erich Pommer, who co-produced Hitch-cock’s first complete film as a director, the roman-tic melodrama The Pleasure Garden (1925). Thefilm was shot at Pommer’s studio in Munich, aswas Hitchcock’s second venture, The MountainEagle (1926), a strange potboiler about a womanwho falls for a hermit in the hills of Kentucky.

Hitchcock’s apprenticeship in Germany duringthe 1920s fostered an affection for the antimon-tage style of filmmaking, popularized by F. W.Murnau, which eschewed the cut in favor of a moretheatrical and photographic emphasis on the shot.Rather than depict a scene from a variety of angles,cutting from camera placement to camera place-ment, Hitchcock used deep-focus compositions orsimply moved the camera fluidly through the spaceof the set. Hitchcock’s affection for expressionist-style lighting was very much in evidence through-out his career, from his first important British film,The Lodger (1926), which chronicles a series of Jack

the Ripper–like killings, to his best-known Ameri-can suspense picture, Psycho (1960).

A quick review of Hitchcock’s work in Germanyand England offers a useful introduction to hisAmerican oeuvre—which is to say that the seedsof the genius that he would display in his Ameri-can work was evident in many of his early films.Blackmail (1929), his next important film after TheLodger, is a silent-sound hybrid about a youngwoman, Alice (Anny Ondra), who ditches her bor-ing policeman boyfriend, Frank (John Longden),in order to embark on a clandestine rendezvouswith a handsome painter (Cyril Ritchard) that endswith Alice killing the painter when he tries to rapeher. The picture that cemented Hitchcock’s inter-national reputation was The 39 Steps (1935), a sus-pense film about a man who is falsely accused ofmurder and must navigate his way through anespionage plot in order to prove his innocence, aplotline that Hitchcock would use again in his coldwar spy film North by Northwest (1959). After see-ing The 39 Steps, David O. Selznick invited Hitch-cock to Hollywood to direct Rebecca (1940). Withthat film, Hitchcock’s Hollywood career took off.

Hitchcock’s American oeuvre is significant interms of quality and quantity. The films span sev-eral Hollywood genres: Rebecca is a gothic melo-drama; Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Spellbound(1945), Rope (1948), Strangers on a Train (1951), I Confess (1953), Rear Window (1954), The WrongMan (1957), Vertigo (1958), Psycho, and Marnie(1964) are psychological suspense films; Notorious(1946) and North by Northwest are cold war espi-onage films; The Birds (1963) is a horror picture.

As we look back on Hitchcock’s American films,certain themes emerge. Several of the films offersome variation on the theme of mistaken identity—for example, Shadow of a Doubt, in which UncleCharlie (Joseph Cotten) may or may not be theMerry Widow killer; The Wrong Man, in which amusician (Henry Fonda) is falsely accused of a rob-bery he did not commit; and North by Northwest,in which a happy-go-lucky businessman (CaryGrant) is mistaken for a spy. For Hitchcock, mis-taken identity inevitability carries with it the hor-ror of false accusation and the necessary businessof proving oneself innocent.

As in his breakthrough British film, Blackmail,in which by the 30-minute mark all the principalcharacters are culpable in some sort of crime (Alice

sublime to the ridiculous. After a brief spate ofearnest, progressive cultural observations in filmssuch as Rebel without a Cause and The BlackboardJungle, Hollywood turned more formulaic. Fastcars and fast girls became less causes for concernthan items on a checklist to be included in any self-respecting teen film. It wasn’t until 1967 and therelease of Mike Nichols’s The Graduate (discussedbelow) that the studios would once again takeyoung people seriously. Not incidentally, The Grad-uate, which marks the studios’ rekindled attentionto the youth audience, was not only the number 1film of 1967; it was also the highest-grossing filmof the decade.

TRANSCENDING GENRE,TRANSCENDING HOLLYWOODThroughout American film history a handful ofartists have been able to transcend studio genresand impose their peculiar signature on all the filmsthey produced, directed, or starred in. Take, forexample, Alfred Hitchcock. His work in the UnitedStates between 1940 and 1960 was at once com-

258 | Chapter 6: Moving toward a New Hollywood (1955-1967) Transcending Genre, Transcending Hollywood | 259

The director Alfred Hitchcock in a publicity photographtaken in 1959, the year before the release of Psycho.

Russ Tamblyn as an undercover cop posing as a high-school student and Mamie Van Doren as his oversexed“auntie” in the 1958 teen-exploitation picture High SchoolConfidential! (Jack Arnold).

is a killer, albeit with reason; Frank covers upAlice’s crime and then falsely pins the blame on asleazy blackmailer), several of Hitchcock’s Ameri-can films feature characters locked in an irrecon-cilable moral dilemma. In Notorious, for example,spies trade on the virtue of a young woman (IngridBergman) in order to get to a Nazi on the lam(Claude Rains). Pimping for Uncle Sam sooncomes to trouble her handler (Cary Grant), whodiscovers that he’s in love with the woman he hasput in the arms of another man. The priest in I Confess (Montgomery Clift) becomes a suspect ina murder. He knows the identity of the murderer(O. E. Hasse) but can’t betray the killer’s confi-dence even though the killer has confessed to thecrime solely to prevent the priest from testifyingagainst him. But lest we idealize the priest, Hitch-cock implies that he has had carnal thoughts andmay even have acted on them with a former girl-friend (Anne Baxter). Though the priest did notcommit the murder, he isn’t exactly innocent. InRear Window the hero, L. B. Jefferies, a photo-

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Jazz was born from a rich and complicated Af-rican American experience, drawing on musical traditions from Africa and Europe (as we saw in Chapter 3) and the Caribbean, along with those

that took root in the United States. Imagine jazz as a river, like the Mississipi, fed by numerous tributaries such as blues, ragtime, and marching band music, and you will gain a sense of its nationwide scope.

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b Jelly Roll Morton, the seminal New Orleans pianist, composer, and bandleader, at a 1926 recording session.

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C H A P T E R F I V E

Acting

58 CHAPTER 2 NARRATIVE

make narrative sense of them and to translate thevarious “things” (what we did over the weekend,the courses of our romantic relationships, our edu-cations up to this point, etc.) into stories we can tellour friends, our families, and even ourselves. We dothis by establishing connections among events, cre-ating chains of cause and effect. This activity—inferring causal relationships among events thatoccur in sequence or close to one another—runsthrough our conscious lives, and it sometimes evenfinds its way into our unconscious lives as wedream. Is it any wonder, then, that we’re drawn tostories?

The storytelling impulse runs through motion pic-ture history, and telling the story is often what themost profitable movies are all about. When movieswere first developed, they often limited themselves todocumenting an action—a sneeze, a kiss, the swing ofa bat, the gait of a horse. These early films were onlybriefly interesting to audiences, however, and soonbecame mere curiosities in nickelodeons. Only afterthey began to tell stories did the movies reach a levelof extraordinary popularity with audiences; andtoday, the movies discussed in the common culture,the movies most of us pay to see, the movies we com-monly have in mind when we say the word movies arethose that tell stories.

In telling a movie’s story, filmmakers decidewhat (and what not) to show, how to dress charac-ters and decorate sets, how to direct actors, how touse sound and music, and so on. As a result of thesedecisions, we receive information with which tointerpret the unfolding narrative. When crucialinformation is missing, we fill in details based onour lived experiences, on our sense of what “nor-mally” happens in movies, and on what has beenshown to us already—on what, given the charac-ters and events already portrayed, seems likely tooccur within the world onscreen. The more we seeof a movie, the more precise our predictions andinterpretations become. Similarly, the more movieswe have seen, the better able we are to creativelyanticipate the many directions a movie we’rewatching might take. Obviously, too, our ability toanticipate is shaped by how much life we havelived. But narrative is so tightly woven into ourexperience of life and art, seemingly such a “natur-

LAST OCURRING A HEAD 59

al” part of human existence, that we often can beunaware of its parts and its effects. This chapterwill describe some of those parts and trace some ofthose effects. Because narrative is form, somethingmade, the product of deliberate decisions concern-ing content, we need to look as closely at howmovies tell their stories as we look at “what hap-pens” within the stories. Let’s begin by consideringhow the narratives of contemporary films fit intothe overall production process.

The ScreenwriterThe screenwriter is responsible for creating themovie’s story—either creating it from scratch oradapting it from another format (such as a shortstory, novel, television show, or play)—and(depending on his/her contract) for writing thescreenplay in its various stages. During preproduc-tion, the story is referred to as the “property” andmay be an idea that a writer has “pitched” to theproducer, an outline, or a completed script. Norules determine how an idea should be developedor an existing literary property should be adaptedinto a film script, but the process usually goesthrough several stages, involving many rewrites.Likewise, no rule governs how many people areeventually involved in the process. One person maywrite all the stages of the screenplay, or may collab-orate from the beginning with other screenwriters;sometimes, the director is the sole screenwriter orco-screenwriter.

Before the breakdown of the Hollywood studiosystem and the emergence of the independent film,each of the major studios maintained its own staffof writers, to whom ideas were assigned dependingon their specialty and experience. Each writer wasresponsible by contract to write a specified num-ber of films each year. Today, the majority ofscripts are written in their entirety by independ-ent screenwriters (either as write-for-hires or on“spec”) and submitted as polished revisions. Manyother screenplays, especially for those movies cre-ated for mass appeal, are written by “committee,”meaning a collaboration of director, producer, edi-tor, and others, including script doctors, profes-

1

2

Narrative Form and BiopicA biographical movie, orbiopic, provides particularly rich opportunities to ask why thefilmmakers chose to tell the story the way they did. After all,the facts of the main character’s life are objectively verifiableand followed a particular order. But storytellers’ shaping ofthat material, the form those facts take, determines howcompelling the movie is dramatically, how interesting it iscinematically, and what it means ultimately. (1) GraemeClifford’s Frances, starring Jessica Lange as Frances Farmer,is one type of biopic, relying on objective facts to guide thenarrative and thus encouraging us to analyze other formalstructures within the film, such as the acting. (2) WernerHerzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God, starring Klaus Kinski asDon Lope de Aguirre, is another type, using biographicalfacts as raw material for a more subjective narrative andthus inviting us to compare the historical record with theartistic vision.

What Is Narrative?At its simplest level, a movie’s narrative is thetelling of its story. As you learn more about moviesgenerally, you will learn that narrative, an essentialelement of a movie’s form, contains numerous ele-ments. Overall, the focus of this book is on moviesthat tell a story, works that emphasize a fictionalnarrative. Narratives play an essential part in ourlives, and we are naturally inclined to look for nar-rative structure in life and in art. Although our livesmay seem like “one thing after another” while we’reliving them, we nonetheless continually attempt to

Learning Objectives

Once you have read this chapter, you shouldbe able to

Differentiate between the story and theplot of a movie.

Know the responsibilities of the screen-writer.

Know the difference between diegetic andnondiegetic elements of a movie’s plot.

Understand the importance of the order(chronological or non-chronological), signif-icance (hubs vs. satellites), and duration ofplot events.

Understand the three kinds relationshipbetween screen duration and storyduration.

Distinguish characters by their importance(major vs. minor characters), their com-plexity (round vs. flat), their motivation,and their role in the narrative (protagonist,antagonist).

Explain the significance of setting to filmnarrative.

Know the difference between surprise andsuspense.

Explain what comprises the scope of astory.

Understand the difference between narra-tion and narrator as well as how they com-plement one another.

sional screenwriters who are hired to review ascreenplay and improve it. Whether a screen-writer works alone or in collaboration with others,he or she has significant influence over the screen-play, the completed movie, and, thus, its artistic,critical, and box-office success.

The Evolution of aTypical ScreenplayGoing from idea to finished movie is usually a long,complex process, involving not only the story ideaitself, but also securing of the financing necessaryto permit the idea to evolve into a screenplay. Butfor most producers and directors, the most impor-

tant starting point, in the words of director PedroAlmodovar, is “the value of the script.” Thatvalue—its worth in terms of the combined goals ofthe screenwriter, producer, and director—is whatdrives this process forward. The earliest form ofthe screenplay may be a treatment or synopsis, anoutline of the action that briefly describes theessential ideas and structure for the film. Thetreatment is discussed and developed in sessionsknown as story conferences, during which it istransformed from an outline into what is known asa rough draft screenplay or scenario. At somepoint, these story conferences will be expanded toinvolve such key personnel as the production man-ager and the art director, as well as members oftheir individual teams.

> Because a movie is shot mostly out ofsequence, it is essential to know in advancehow edited shots in a sequence will relate toone another.

> The director must be concerned with the gen-eral continuity of space and time, as well aswith the specific continuity of such elementsas lighting, camera setups, action, props, cos-tume, makeup, sound, and performance.

Next, the director transforms the literal scriptimages of each scene into visualizations of specificshots and setups. The result is a strategy for shoot-ing each scene (and its component shots). Somedirectors keep all this information in their heads;others develop a storyboard before shooting. A sto-ryboard is a shot-by-shot (sometimes a scene-by-scene) breakdown that combines sketches or pho-tographs of how each shot is to look with writtendescriptions of the other elements that are to gowith each shot, including dialogue, sound, andmusic. These images are arranged in the order ofthe action and mounted on sturdy cardboard pan-els, but filmmakers today are increasingly turningto computerized storyboards that, much like aword processing program, offer greater flexibilityin re-arranging the images to pre-visualize.

A storyboard serves several important func-tions. It is a graphic representation of the director’sconception of the film and thus is vital in helping to

60 CHAPTER 2 NARRATIVE LAST OCURRING A HEAD 61

explain his or her concepts to his production team.It serves as an organizational tool, enabling theproduction manager to organize the actual shoot-ing to maximize all resources, especially the assign-ment of personnel. The production team uses thisinformation to see if they have enough shots to“cover” the action into usable and effectivesequences. Furthermore, it assists in maintainingthe continuity of the movie.

Before shooting One of the director’s finalresponsibilities is to prepare the shooting script,which lists the details of each shot and can thus befollowed by the director and actors during filming.Even when a director relies on improvisation (thatis, having the actors make up material on the spot),he or she will also have a detailed shooting script.The costs of making traditional films are simply toogreat to permit even the best-funded director towork without this essential tool. The shootingscript therefore serves as an invaluable guide andreference point for all members of the productionunit, indicating where everything ought to be. Itbreaks down the individual shots by location (inte-rior or exterior), setting (kitchen, football stadium,etc.), type (close-up, long shot, etc.), and the editingtechnique to be used between these shots (cut,wipe, dissolve, fade-out, etc.). Once the shootingscript is developed, the director proceeds with theother key members of the team to determine how

to shoot it. Their decisions will cover everythingfrom fully visualizing the film in setups, determin-ing which shots will be made in the studio andwhich will be made on location, establishing a pho-tographic strategy and determining the visual lookfor each shot, settling the film’s color palette, deter-mining the film’s tempo with final editing in mind,and casting the actors.

Now, imagine you are a filmmaker who wants toadapt a novel for the screen. It’s a complex workwith interlocking major and minor themes, numer-ous characters, settings in many different loca-tions, and a time frame involving both past andpresent actions, but your budget will not permityou to include everything.

Elements Of NarrativeNarrative theory (sometimes called narratology)has a long history, starting with Aristotle and con-tinuing with great vigor today. Aristotle said that agood story should have three sequential parts: abeginning, middle and an end, a concept that hashad a profound effect on the history of playwriting

StoryboardThree frames from the storyboard for AlfredHitchcock’s The Birds (1963).

Regulating Content Social mores, pressure from variousorganizations and authorities, and the desire to please amass audience have helped regulate the content anddistribution of movies, especially of mainstream Hollywoodmovies. During the early 1920s, after several years ofrelatively frank portrayals of sex and violence onscreen (aperiod in which the industry also suffered a wave ofscandals), Hollywood faced a credible threat of censorshipfrom state governments and of boycotts from Catholic andother religious groups.

Development of DialogueSocial mores, pressure fromvarious organizations and authorities, and the desire toplease a mass audience have helped regulate the contentand distribution of movies, especially of mainstreamHollywood movies.

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