Schatz is more interested in the former than the latter.

Of course, it also comes with its downsides-such as the final say on a project resting in the hands of executives and the ease of exploitation of talent.

Steady paychecks, resources, and access to talented personnel across the board (even if that access sometimes came with hefty price tags and contract negotiations), as well as the services studios have always provided-distribution and marketing. While we live in a largely post-studio system world (although I could see some parallels drawn with the rise of films in connected universes and the ascendency of the Marvel House Style), there’s certainly some things to recommend a system like that. This obviously excludes 21st Century Fox, among others, but Schatz points out in his introduction that he had to draw the line somewhere or get bogged down in minutiae when the bigger picture is his entire point. Selznick’s various independent companies in his portrait of the Hollywood studio system of the early twentieth century, The Genius of the System.

The studio system that once dominated all of American cinema no longer exists, shattered into a thousand pieces by the Red Scare, the coming of television, and creative types chafing under the seemingly oppressive regime of the major studios-a designation Thomas Schatz bestows upon Universal, MGM, Warner Brothers, and David O. But, as Captain Cinema often reminds me, everything was weird once. A lot of the world feels like that, sometimes, because I rarely interact with it, don’t have context for it, or whatever. To me, Classic Hollywood feels like a monolith that has always been there. (I’m not a Only Lovers Left Alive-esque immortal pop culture junkie, although I pretend to be sometimes.)īut I think that total unfamiliarity might actually be why it fascinates me. Which sometimes makes me wonder why I’m so fascinated with Anne Helen Petersen’s pieces on Old Hollywood when I have no context or nostalgia for them. My mother’s cinematic tastes run towards British film, my father’s cinematic tastes run towards near-future sci-fi, and all their nostalgic childhood movies are French.

Despite living a stone’s throw away from Atlanta (assuming that you can throw a stone with enough force to make it fly through the air for an hour) as a kiddo, my family never really cranked up the old Turner Classic Movies-or any classic Hollywood movies, really.

The genius of the system thomas schatz