The Dream Factories

The Dream Factories

            It’s interesting to think how closely the, during the Golden Age of classic Hollywood, movie industry resembled the automobile industry. MGM and Warner Bros. were very much like Ford and GM: large corporations making similar, yet distinct, products. Both industries worked off the ideas of vertical integration and to that effect both used the assembly line style of creation pioneered by Henry Ford around 1908.

            Continuing the comparison, let’s consider the use of templates or genres. Both industries made, and in many cases still make, use of this idea. Every car company makes the standard lines types of cars, SUVs, Sedans, Vans etc. in the same way that the studios of classic Hollywood made films in the standard line of genre’s, horror, romance, slapstick, musicals etc. This lent the films of classic Hollywood a certain amount of predictability, the gangster would always meet a grizzly end, and there would always that final shootout, in the same way that we expect a mini-van to have three rows of seats in addition to sliding doors. The films of the classic Hollywood studios were homogenized according to there respective genre’s, and much like how the modern day automakers are generally synonymous with a certain make of automobile, the studios were synonymous with particular genres.

            A good example of this is the original King Kong which was produced at RKO studios. A classic monster film it includes the following genre staples: a damsel in distress, the monster’s grizzly end, and the lust of the monster for that damsel that leads to it. King Kong also fit into the Jungle Film-genre, which included strange and wild creatures, explorers, and of course a voyage typically taken by American scientists or explores. The way this movie illustrates my point is that it is the epitome of predictable: the moment we see the beautiful Fay Wray we know the monster will set it sights on her, and also that in the end it will die. While people may have been shocked and moved by the visuals and story, no-one was surprised when “beauty killed the beast”.