The Golden Age of Hollywood: Studios, Stars, the Code and the End

Look at the release calendar for 1939 and it reads like a film-school syllabus: Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Wuthering Heights. All of them came out of the same industrial machine within twelve months. That machine is what people mean by the golden age of Hollywood, roughly the three decades between the arrival of synchronized sound in the late 1920s and the breakup of the studio system in the 1950s. It produced an astonishing number of durable films, and it did so with methods that look, from today, both admirably efficient and quietly ruthless.

Here is how it worked, who ran it, what rules it lived under, and why it ended.

When the golden age of Hollywood began and ended

There is no official start date, but most histories hang the opening on sound. Warner Bros. released The Jazz Singer in October 1927, and within a few years talking pictures had replaced silent films across the industry. The end is fuzzier. Some writers close the era in 1948, when the Supreme Court forced the studios to sell their theaters. Others carry it into the late 1950s or early 1960s, when the old contract system had clearly collapsed. I tend to think of it as a slow fade rather than a single date, which is roughly how the people who lived through it described it.

The studio system: five majors and three minors

The defining feature of the period was vertical integration. The biggest companies made films, distributed them and owned the theaters that showed them. Historians usually divide the industry into two groups.

The Little Three owned few or no theaters, which left them dependent on the majors’ screens. Below them sat the Poverty Row companies, such as Republic and Monogram, turning out Westerns and serials on tiny budgets.

Owning theaters gave the majors practices that independent exhibitors hated. Block booking required a theater to rent a group of films, sometimes sight unseen, to get the one it wanted. It also guaranteed a market for the B pictures that filled the bottom half of double bills. Series films such as Paramount’s Henry Aldrich movies lived in that slot: short, cheap, dependable, and made by units that could turn a script around in weeks.

Stars under contract

Actors, writers, directors and technicians worked under long-term contracts, typically seven years, with the studio holding options to renew or drop them at regular intervals. A contract player could be loaned to another studio, assigned roles they did not want, and suspended without pay for refusing. Suspension time was often added to the end of the contract, which meant a seven-year deal could stretch well past seven years.

The studios also manufactured stardom. Publicity departments invented or adjusted backstories, changed names, arranged photo sessions and placed stories in fan magazines. Portrait photographers, costume designers and makeup departments shaped a consistent screen image, which is a subject I go into in my piece on old Hollywood glamour.

The system began to crack from the inside. In 1944 Olivia de Havilland won a lawsuit against Warner Bros. in the California courts, which confirmed that a personal-service contract could not be extended beyond seven calendar years by tacking on suspension time. The ruling is still known as the De Havilland Law, and it gave every contract player a firmer exit.

The Production Code

The other defining structure of the era was censorship, and it came from inside the industry. The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, led by Will Hays, adopted a Production Code in 1930 to head off government censorship and religious boycotts. For the first few years it was loosely applied, which is why films from 1930 to mid-1934 can be startlingly frank. I cover that period in detail in my guide to pre-Code Hollywood.

In 1934, under pressure from the Catholic Legion of Decency, the industry created the Production Code Administration under Joseph Breen. From July 1934 a film needed the PCA’s seal of approval to be released by member companies and shown in their theaters. The Code ruled out a long list of subjects and treatments: crime could not be made attractive, adultery could not be justified, and clergy could not be mocked. In practice, even married couples were usually shown in twin beds.

The Code shaped the look and feel of the golden age as much as any studio head. Writers learned to work by implication, which partly explains why the era’s best dialogue is so layered. Screwball comedy and film noir both developed their own ways of saying what could not be said outright.

What the system did well

It is easy to list the abuses, but the studio system also explains the sheer depth of the era’s filmography. Each lot kept permanent departments for art direction, costume, sound, music, special effects and editing. A cinematographer might shoot four or five features a year with the same crew. Composers such as Max Steiner at Warner Bros. scored film after film, and the studios built recognizable house styles as a result. You can often guess a 1930s studio from a few minutes of footage: MGM’s bright, expensive sets, Warner’s gritty city streets, Universal’s fog and castles.

Power sat with the front office rather than the set. At MGM, Irving Thalberg supervised production under Louis B. Mayer until his death in 1936; Darryl F. Zanuck ran production at 20th Century-Fox; Jack L. Warner presided over his family’s studio. These executives chose the stories, assigned the stars and often recut the finished films. Directors who wanted control over their own work, and a few did get it, usually had to earn it with hits first.

The constant output also trained people. Directors who began on B pictures moved up to features, actors learned their craft in small parts, and the system could absorb the waves of European talent who came to Hollywood in the 1930s. The roster of directors who worked inside it, from John Ford to Howard Hawks to Billy Wilder, is a subject of its own.

How it ended

Three forces did the damage, more or less together.

1. The Paramount decision. In May 1948 the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. that the majors’ control of exhibition and practices like block booking violated antitrust law. Over the following years the studios signed consent decrees and divested their theater chains. Without guaranteed screens, there was no reason to keep a B-picture factory running.
2. Television. As TV sets spread through American homes in the late 1940s and 1950s, the habit of going to the movies every week weakened. Hollywood answered with widescreen processes, color and spectacle, but the audience for routine features never came back at the old scale.
3. Independence. Stars and directors increasingly formed their own production companies and worked film by film, often for a share of the profits. Agents gained power, and the long contract faded out.

The Production Code lasted longer than the studio system that had built it. It weakened through the 1950s and 1960s as foreign films, independent releases and changing audiences pushed against it, and in November 1968 it was replaced by the MPAA rating system.

A starter list for the era

If you want to see the golden age at full strength, these are a good cross-section of studios and genres.

• It Happened One Night (1934, Columbia, Frank Capra): the romantic comedy that swept the major Academy Awards.
• The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938, Warner Bros., Michael Curtiz and William Keighley): three-strip Technicolor at its most vivid.
• The Wizard of Oz (1939, MGM, Victor Fleming): MGM’s departments working at full capacity.
• The Grapes of Wrath (1940, 20th Century-Fox, John Ford): Zanuck’s social conscience in its strongest form.
• Casablanca (1942, Warner Bros., Michael Curtiz): the system’s craft at its most seamless.