The Oxford History of World Cinema (19 page)

Commandments ( 1956).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brownlow, Kevin ( 1968), The Parade's Gome By. DeMille, Cecil B. ( 1959), The

Autobiography of Cecil B DeMille. Higashi, Sumiko ( 1985), Cecil B DeMille: A Guide

to References and Resources. Higham, Charles ( 1973), Cecil B DeMille.

Lillian Gish (1893-1993)

Dorothy Gish (1898-1968)

Lillian and Dorothy Gish were born in Ohio, daughters of an actress and her absentee

drifter husband. Stage juveniles being in constant demand, both girls were acting

professionally before they were 5. They were enticed into movies by their friend Mary

Pickford, who was already working for D. W. Griffith, and they made their screen début

together in his An Unseen Enemy ( 1912).

Over the next two years the sisters played numerous roles for Griffith's company, both

together and separately. At first Griffith had trouble telling them apart (tying coloured

ribbons in their hair, he addressed them as 'red' and 'blue') but their very different

characters, and screen personae, soon emerged. Dorothy was effervescent, gregarious, a

natural comedienne. Lillian was serious, intense, with a toughness belied by her delicate

looks. 'When Dorothy arrives the party begins,' Lillian once remarked, adding wryly,

'When I arrive it usually ends.'

Dorothy, Griffith noted, 'was more apt at getting the director's idea than Lillian, quicker to

follow it, more easily satisfied with the result. Lillian conceived an ideal and patiently

sought to realize it.' Since this dedicated approach appealed more to Griffith's own

workaholic temperament, Lillian generally got the better parts, and was awarded the lead

in his epoch-making Civil War epic The Birth of a Nation ( 1915). As Elsie Stoneman,

daughter of a family split by the conflict, she transcended the heartsand-flowers, virgin-

in-jeopardy elements of the role with a performance of sustained emotional truth. The

film made her a major star, as Griffith acknowledged in casting her as the iconic cradle-

rocking Mother linking the four stories of his next epic, Intolerance ( 1916).

There seems to have been no rivalry between the sisters. Lillian suggested Dorothy as a

rowdy Frenh peasant girl in their first major film together, the First World War drama

Hearts of the World ( 1918), and was amused when Dorothy stole the picture. Even so,

Dorothy continued to work for other directors, while Griffith reserved Lillian ('She is the

best actress I know. She has the most brains') for his own films.

Lillian's supreme performance for Griffith was as the abused child of Broken Blossoms

( 1919), terrorized by a brutal father and finding tenderness with a lonely young

Chinaman in nineteenth-century Limehouse. It was pure Victorian melodrama, dripping

with sentiment, but transmuted by the subtlety of Gish's acting and the power -- for all her

ethereal looks -- with which she could convey raw emotion. Way Down East ( 1920), no

less melodramatic, made equally good use of her blend of physical frailty and inner

tenacity.

Dorothy continued to specialize in comedies, including one directed by Lillian,

Remodelling her Husband ( 1920). It did well, but Lillian found directing 'too

complicated' and refused to try it again. Dorothy's range reached far beyond comedy, as

shown by their finest film together, Orphans of the Storm ( 1921). The played sisters

caught up in the French Revolution; Dorothy's performance as the blind sister, moving but

not for a moment mawkish, is in no way overshadowed by Lillian's.

Opposite:
Lillian and Dorothy Gish in D. W. Griffith's Orphans of the Storm ( 1921)

It was their last film for Griffith, who could no longer afford Lillian's salary. They

parted from him amicably and moved to the Inspiration Company, where they made

Romola ( 1924) together -- from George Eliot's novel -- before Lillian signed a contract

with MGM. Dorothy went to London for four films for Herbert Wilcox , of which the

most successful was Nell Gwynne ( 1926).Lillian was now one of the highest paid

($400,000 p.a.) actresses in Hollywood, able to approve her own scripts and diretors. She

chose Victor Sjöström to direct her in two of her greatest roles: a passionate, wayward

Hester Prynne in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter ( 1926), and the gentle wife whipped

into desperation by the elements in The Wind ( 1928), a performance of awesome

physicality.But fashions were changing. Garbo's star was in the ascendant, and Lillian was

too identified with virginal virtues and the silent cinema. Irving Thalberg offered to

fabricate a scandal for her; she coolly declined, and returned to the live stage. Dorothy did

the same, her film career virtually over. Lillian, though, appeared in a dozen or so films

after 1940, of which the finest was Laughton's Gothic fable The Night of the Hunter

( 1955). In it she portrays, as Simon Callow ( 1987) comments, 'the spirit of absolution

and healing. . . with a kind of secular sanctity which cannot be forged'. Gish relished

making the film: 'I have to go back as far as D. W. Griffith to find a set so imbued with

purpose and harmony.' Coming from her, there could be no greater praise.Lillian outlived

her sister by a quarter-century, ageing gracefully and still acting in her mid-nineties. Well

before her death, she saw herself securely reinstated as the supreme actress of the silent

cinema. Dorothy, a fine actress if not a great one, still awaits fair reassessment.

PHILIP KEMP
SELECT FILMOGRAPHY
Lillian The Birth of a Nation ( 1915);

Intolerance ( 1916); Broken Blossoms ( 1919); True Heart Susie ( 1919); Way Down East

( 1920); La Bohème ( 1926); The Scarlet Letter ( 1926); The Wind ( 1928); Duel in the

Sun ( 1946); The Night of the Hunter ( 1955); The Cobweb ( 1955); The Unforgiven

( 1955); A Wedding ( 1978); The Whales of August ( 1987) Dorothy Remódelling her

Husband ( 1920); Nell Gwynne ( 1926) Lillian and Dorothy Hearts of the World ( 1918);

Orphans of the Storm ( 1921); Romola ( 1924)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gish, Lillian ( 1969), The Movies, Mr Griffith and Me.

-- ( 1973), Dorothy and Lillian Gish.

Slide, Anthony ( 1973), The Griffith Actresses.

THE RISE OF HOLLYWOOD

The Hollywood Studio System

DOUGLAS GOMERY

Around the year 1910 a number of film companies set up business in and around the

small suburb of Hollywood to the west of Los Angeles. Within a decade, the system they

created came to dominate the cinema, not only in the United States but throughout the

world. By concentrating production into vast factory-like studios, and by vertically

integrating all aspects of the business, from production to publicity to distribution to

exhibition, they created a model system-the 'studio system'-which other countries had to

imitate in order to compete. But attempts at imitating the American system were only

partially successful, and by 1925 it was the ' Hollywood' system, rather than the studio

system as such, which dominated the market from Britain to Bengal, from South Africa to

Norway and Sweden. By that time, Hollywood had not only seized control of the majority

of world markets but had made its products and its stars, such as Charlie Chaplin and

Mary Pickford, the most famous cultural icons in the world.

Throughout the period of its inexorable rise, Hollywood fashioned the tools of modern

business, from economics of scale to vertical integration, to give it the edge over all

possible competitors. It developed cost-effective methods of production, extended the

market for its product to cover the entire globe, and ensured the flow of films from

producer to consumer by acquiring ownership of key theatres in major cities, not just in

the United States but in other countries as well. European nations tried various

protectionist measures, such as special taxes, tariffs, quotas, and even boycotts, to keep

Hollywood's domination at bay, but to no avail. Although the Japanese market remained

hard to penetrate, and the Soviet Union was able to close its frontiers against foreign

imports in the mid-1920s, as far as the rest of the world was concerned it was only a

matter of time before the Hollywood film became standard fare on the nation's screens.

The emergence of Hollywood as the centre of this allpowerful industry can be found in

the failures of the Motion Picture Patents Company's attempt to monopolize the film

business. This was a combination of ten leading American and European producers of

movies and manufacturers of cameras and projectors, who in 1908 combined to form a

'Trust' to inflate the prices of equipment they alone could manufacture. The Trust pooled

patents and made thousands of short films. Only co-operating companies, licensed by the

Trust, could manufacture 'legal' films and film equipment. The Trust extracted profits by

charging for use of its patents. To use a projector legally an exhibitor needed to hand over

a few dollars; to make movies, producers paid more.

However, the Trust found it difficult to maintain control, and in the space of half a dozen

years ( 1909-14) independents such as Carl Laemmle and William Fox rose in opposition

to the Trust, sowing the seeds of what we now know as Hollywood. Adolph Zukor put

together Paramount; Marcus Loew created what was to become MGM; William Fox

fashioned his movie empire.

These and other independent exhibitors and moviemakers differentiated their products,

making longer and more complicated narratives while the Trust tended to stick with two-

reel, fifteen-minute stories. The independents raided pulp magazines, public domain

novels, and successful plays for plots. Westerns supplied the most popular of these 'new'

movie genres and helped spark interest in shooting on location 'out West'. In time the

independents found their home in southern California, 2,000 miles away from the New

York headquarters of the Trust and, with its temperate climate, cheap land, and lack of

unions, an ideal place to make their new low-cost 'feature-length' motion pictures.

By 1912 the independents were producing enough films to fill theatrical bills. Each movie

became a unique product, heavily advertised. With more than 20,000 cinemas open in the

USA by 1920, the ever-increasing number of feature-length 'photoplays' easily found an

audience. Distribution into foreign markets proved a bonus; in this era of the silent

cinema, specialists quickly translated intertitles, and produced foreign versions for

minimal added production costs.

The independents also began to take control of exhibition in the USA. They did not

attempt to buy up all the 20,000 existing movie houses, concentrating instead on the new

movie palaces in the largest cities. By 1920 these 2,000 picture palaces, showing

exclusive first-runs, were capturing over three-quarters of the revenue of the average film.

From these chains of movie palaces from New York City to Chicago to Los Angeles, the

major Hollywood companies, led by Paramount, Fox, and MGM, were able to collect

millions of dollars per year in profit.

By this time the independents were independents no longer. They had become the system.

The most successful of these former independents succeeded at what the wellfinanced

members of the Trust had failed to accomplish -control of the production, distribution,

and exhibition of movies. From this massive base they moved to dominate the world.

With any one film costing $100,000 or more to produce, the extra few thousand dollars to

make prints and send them around the world proved relatively small.

This world-wide popularity in turn created a demand which required non-stop production.

To meet this requirement, the Los Angeles basin offered year-round sunshine and thus

long working days outdoors, in addition to all possible combinations of locations for

filming. Nearby farmland (now swallowed up by suburbs) fronted for the Midwest; the

Pacific Ocean stood in for the Caribbean and Atlantic; mountains and desert, just a day

away, gave Westerns an authentic feel.

By the early 1920s the social impact of Hollywood's glamorous image was enormous. As

early as 1920, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce was obliged to run advertisements

begging aspiring actors and actresses to stay at home, pleading: 'Please Don't Try to Break

into the Movies.'