1929 - 1945 The Glamor Years Jump to:
1929 - 1945 The Glamor Years Jump to:
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By the time of the Wall Street Crash in 1929 Hollywood had switched over entirely to "talkies", but even six months later no more than half of the 22,624 movie theaters in the United States had been wired for sound. The conversion cost theaters $300 million, and encouraged a boom mentality that carried the industry over the earliest years of the Depression. Read More
Few Americans understood the economic causes of the Crash, but there was a widespread view that the Depression was a result not so much of the unstable economic expansion of the Jazz Age as of its hedonism. The movies themselves... Read More
To provide a comprehensive service to its exhibitors, a studio also needed to keep a stable of stars representing each of the most prominent types. Competition between stars was exaggerated by studio publicity and fan magazines, which... Read More
Between the beginning of the Depression in 1930 and the early days of the Roosevelt administration in 1933, when confusion and desperation gripped much of the country, Hollywood momentarily floundered. Not only did the studios have to make the difficult transition to sound, they had to adjust to the rapidly changing tastes of a nation in upheaval. Read More
Little by little the various firms reorganized themselves, and American firms either opened branches in France or made arrangements for French distributors to handle their output. Various changes were made on the producing side and by 1915 the industry was once more functioning almost normally. Read More
The United States, the largest consumer economy in the world despite the Depression, remained immune to cultural incursions from abroad, and had no difficulty in following a policy of cultural as well as political isolationism. Read More
"If it's December 1941 in Casablanca," Humphrey Bogart asks Dooley Wilson, "What time is it in New York? I bet they re asleep in New York.I bet they're asleep all over America." Working with the US government's Office of War Information (OWI), one of Hollywood's wartime roles was to wake the United States up to the end of its period of international isolation. Read More
Among the combatant nations of World War ll, only the Soviets had a cinema which was dedicated completely to the war effort, with all its production geared "to help in the moral, political and military defeat of Fascism". Such unembarrassed propaganda was possible in the Soviet Union, where the media openly operated as instruments of the state. Read More
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Chapters: 
4 
