How the Little Three Rationalized Production

The Columbia production policy was described by Harry Cohn:

Every Friday the front door opens and I spit a movie out into Gower Street…. I want one good picture a year. That’s my policy … and I won’t let an exhibitor have it unless he takes the bread-and-butter product, the Boston Blackies, the Blondies, the low-budget Westerns and the rest of the junk we make. I like good pictures too, but to get one I have to shoot five or six, and to shoot five or six I have to keep the plant going with the program pictures. (Quoted in Joel W. Finler, The Hollywood Story [New York: Crown, 1988], p. 71)

Columbia mainly serviced the B-feature market. From 1930 to 1934, the studio produced thirty pictures a year; afterward, as a result of the spread of double features, the annual output increased to more than forty. The B films and programmers cost from $50,000 to $100,000; the better-grade pictures, around $200,000. To build a firm financial base, the studio also produced series Westerns starring Buck Jones, Tim McCoy, and Ken Maynard and a wide selection of cartoons, comedy shorts, and serials.

Columbia’s policy was to follow trends and to churn out economy versions of hit class-A pictures produced by the Big Five. 58 During the first half of the decade, Columbia specialized in contemporary stories with realistic settings, such as crime pictures, mysteries, and comedies. Later in the decade, Columbia further rationalized its B output by initiating series, among them the Lone Wolf in 1935 and Blondie in 1938.

Shorts and B pictures paid the overhead, but Columbia needed a hit now and then to maintain its credibility as a principal player in the industry. Columbia could have existed without hits as a Poverty Row studio, but as a member of the Little Three, it needed box-office winners to strengthen its financial reserves, to pay dividends to stockholders, and to keep the interest of Wall Street. Since producing a hit was a difficult and elusive task, the studio needed stars. To secure Page 104  them, the studio had three options: (1) it could develop stars by casting players in different roles and testing audience reaction; (2) it could borrow stars from other studios; or (3) it could pretend it had stars and hope that exhibitors and the public would play along. Early in the Thirties, the studio chose the third option. For example, the studio “starred” Jack Holt in over a dozen pictures. A typical Holt picture contained plenty of “love interest, melodramatics, outdoors and he-man stuff,” said Variety. In its review of THE WOMAN IS TOLE (1933), Variety said, “Jack Holt has been making pictures like this for years and has prospered. There’s nothing especially distinguished in the output, but it is all eminently saleable material. Factory product, but factory product of a successful kind, with a ready market and satisfactory returns.”

Since developing stars required time and money, Columbia typically opted to borrow stars from the majors to produce its class-A pictures. The best example of this practice is Capra’s great hit IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (1934), whose stars, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, came from MGM and Paramount, respectively. Columbia’s A pictures were grouped mainly around its prize director, Frank Capra, and a few free-lance directors, such as Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey, and George Cukor.

Universal’s principal market was the rural, small-town theater. Like Columbia, the studio specialized in series Westerns and inexpensive versions of popular class-A genres. Early in the decade the studio tried to break into the first-run market by producing a prestige picture, ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT , and a number of horror films, such as DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN , but after Carl Laemmle was bought out, the new owners reverted to the previous production policy of concentrating on the low end of the market. 60 To produce the occasional class-A picture, Universal borrowed talent from the majors, just like Columbia. The studio did not develop a top star of its own until it discovered Deanna Durbin near the end of the decade.

United Artists, the smallest company of the Little Three, was solely a distributor of quality independent productions. Independent producers had existed since the earliest days of the industry, but during the period of oligopoly control, three types did business: (1) indies that owned their own companies and produced quality product for release by United Artists; (2) indies connected with the majors as producers or directors; and (3) Poverty Row companies that worked outside mainstream Hollywood .

By the 1930s, UA had carved a secure niche for itself as a distributor of independent productions. 61 Of the four founders, only Charlie Chaplin remained active as a producer. Because the star system was now firmly controlled by the majors, the day of the actor-producer had passed. Chaplin was therefore an anomaly in the business. He not only produced his pictures using his own money, but he also wrote, directed, and starred in them as well—a one-man show. He produced two pictures during the decade, CITY LIGHTS (1931) and MODERN TIMES (1936).

UA’s most active producers were Samuel Goldwyn, Alexander Korda, David O. Selznick, Twentieth Century Pictures, Howard Hughes, Edward Small, Walter Wanger, and a few others. Two members of the group, Goldwyn and Korda, were also partners in the company. These producers constituted a new breed of independent; such a producer typically headed his own production company and produced only a few pictures a year. What linked these producers to UA was the distribution contract, a document guaranteeing that in return for a fee, UA would sell and promote a picture in all the principal markets of the world. UA released relatively few pictures each year, from fifteen to twenty, but the pictures were consistently among the most acclaimed. Using Film Daily’s Top Ten as an indicator of public esteem during the decade, UA, with sixteen pictures, ranked second behind MGM, with thirty-five. Warners came in third with thirteen.

UA’s archetypical producers, Goldwyn and Selznick, obtained production financing from commercial banks, such as the Bank of America, in the form of residual loans. To qualify for a residual loan, a producer needed a distribution contract in hand and completed pictures in release. In return for a loan, the producer had to mortgage his old pictures by pledging whatever residual revenues remained in them as well as the net producer’s share of the revenue from the proposed picture. Such conditions made it extremely difficult to break into the business and help explain why so few first-class independents existed during this period.

In tailoring pictures for the high end of the market, first-class independents modeled their operations on the majors. Selznick operated out of the old RKO-Pathé studio in Culver City, which he renamed Selznick International Studios. Goldwyn operated out of the United Artists Studio in Hollywood, a rental facility originally owned by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, which was renamed the Samuel Goldwyn Studios. Unlike the contract producer at one of the majors who was concerned mainly with the creative end of motion pictures and had an entire studio backing him, Selznick and Goldwyn also had to know the business end of motion pictures. Another difference was the way each type of producer interrelated with his staff. Playwright and screenwriter Sidney Howard described the collaboration process at Goldwyn as follows:

The larger studios of Hollywood divide their picture making into various departments which have little contact with one another. Smaller production units, notably Mr. Sam Goldwyn’s, are too clever for this. It is Mr. Goldwyn’s custom to keep his highly gifted art director, Mr. Richard Day, in constant touch with the progress of the script. The result of this triple collaboration is a completely illustrated edition de luxe of the script which contains literally dozens upon dozens of thumbnail sketches both of photographic compositions and of camera angles. (“The Story Gets a Treatment,” in Nancy Naumberg, ed., We Make the Movies [New York: W. W. Norton, 1937], p. 43)

Selznick said, “With me [the director] is in on the script as far in advance as it is possible for me to have him. He is in the story conferences with me and the writers, in the development of the script, and I always have my director in on the cutting right up to the time the picture is finished. That is not obligatory with me, nor is it the custom in most of the larger studios.”

UA’s most prolific producer, Goldwyn made forty pictures during the decade, all of which he personally financed. His production staff included some of the best talent around—art director Richard Day; cinematographer Gregg Toland; music director Alfred Newman; directors John Ford, Leo McCarey, King Vidor, and William Wyler; and writers Sidney Howard, Elmer Rice, Maxwell Anderson, Lillian Hellman, Ben Hecht, Robert E. Sherwood, and S. N. Behrman. Goldwyn   specialized mainly in musicals and prestige women’s pictures. His best musicals consist of six Eddie Cantor vehicles, starting with WHOOPEE ! (1930), which was shot in two-strip Technicolor and marked Busby Berkeley’s entry into the movies. Goldwyn’s prestige women’s films included three abortive attempts to launch his Russian-born protégée, Anna Sten, as another Garbo or Dietrich, and moreadmired fare such as King Vidor’s CYNARA (1932) and STELLA DALLAS (1937) William Wyler’s THESE THREE (1936), DODSWORTH and WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1939).

Selznick’s production staff consisted of production manager Ray Klune; story editors Val Lewton and Katharine Brown; art director Lyle Wheeler; editor Hal Kern; and color cameraman Howard Greene. Selznick also specialized in prestige pictures and the women’s market. The prestige pictures consisted of adaptations of literary classics, such as LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY (1936), THE PRISONER OF ZENDA (1937), and THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER (1938); the women’s films, of such romantic dramas as A STAR IS BORN (1937), MADE FOR EACH OTHER (1939), INTERMEZZO (1939), and GONE WITH THE WIND (1939).