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Unless you were filming establishing shots or something similar, your camera would not be leaving the Los Angeles area. The movies made by these Big Five studios would also be stuck to the lot, which means every aspect of the filmmaking was typically done in one place. You can learn a bit more about it in the video below. Due to it being an “all or nothing” deal, many of these independent theaters took what they were offered, resulting in a swath of movies being distributed all across the country.ĭuring the Hollywood studio era, there was also the “Star System,” which was when actors, under contract to a studio, would be sculpted by said studio to fit an ideal, one which could not be tarnished.
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and Paramount theater, you would have no trouble checking out their latest movies.įor all the other movie theaters they didn’t own, they offered them blocks of movies they could distribute, which was known as “block booking.” This involved having, for example, a set of five movies one is actually good, while the rest are middling or just bad. In this way, if you lived in a town with a Warner Bros. The Hollywood studio era involved the Big Five studios controlling all aspects of their movies, with owning their own movie theaters being the most notable. Hollywood Studio Era The Hollywood studio system in action It covers what was known as the Golden Age of Hollywood era, when some real deal classics were produced under the studio system (and the Hays Code). You can learn a bit more about the time period in which these movie moguls ruled in the video below. Mayer (MGM), Jack Warner (Warner Bros.), Adolph Zukor (Paramount), and Darryl Zanuck (Fox). Most of these studios were fronted by major movie moguls who previously owned movie theaters in the 1910s before heading to Los Angeles to run their own studios. This made it extremely difficult for independent studios, distributors, and exhibitors to compete in the industry, but more on that later. All of which were "vertically integrated" meaning that production, distribution, and exhibition were handled "in-house."
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They included Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Bros., Paramount, Fox, and RKO. These were five major film studios that were responsible for the classical Hollywood system. It all starts with what will always be known as the Big Five studios. Big FIve Studios The Big Five (and Little Three)
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