The end of an era - Hollywood's decreasing (ePub)

Essay from the year 2002 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,0 (A), LMU Munich (America Institute), course: Introductory Composition, language: English, abstract: Since Thomas A. Edison's invention of the motion picture in 1889, movies have always attracted
and fascinated the audience around the world. The unique combination of moving
pictures and sound had one great advantage in contrast to past cultural events like the vaudeville,
the musical or the theater: Its capability of reaching more people.
In the course of time, smart business people began to found studios in order to produce
full-length pictures. Up to 1948 the American film industry consisted of a certain number of
studios, the so called "Big Five"- Paramount, Twentieth Century-Fox, Warner Bros., RKO,
and MGM- and the "Little Three"- Columbia, Universal, and United Artists (Phillips 327).
Over decades these studios managed to produce the most influential and most profitable movies
worldwide.
Things changed, however, and the era of the studio-production drew to a close as production
of a feature film outside, meaning in the real world, became much cheaper than producing
the picture in expensive stagesets, which had often been special manufactured and
thus could only be used once. Changes were now unavoidable. After directors like Howard
Hawks, George Cukor, Sidney Lumet, Don Siegel, and others influenced the art of motion
picture in the first half of the century, others took over and led Hollywood to new fame and
wealth. At the end of the sixties a new generation of young American filmmakers developed
a more personal cinema, which was a combination of visions and marketing. Steven Spielberg,
George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola were the most popular advocates
of the New Hollywood (Monaco 366). [...]