Organization
ReorganizedThe Hollywood studios
Los Angeles · Since 1910s
The integrated studio system was dismantled after the 1948 Paramount decrees. The companies survived. The factory system they ran did not.
By the 1920s a handful of companies in Los Angeles made most of the films Americans saw. Paramount, MGM, Warner Bros., Fox, and RKO owned the cameras, the lots, the contracts, and often the theaters. The arrangement is called the studio system. It was a factory with a backlot.
This page treats the system as an organization of work, not as a single firm. The companies competed. They used the same division of labor, and they hired from the same pool of people who could not work anywhere else if the studios agreed they should not.
Departments, not geniuses
A film passed through writers under contract, an art department, a wardrobe shop, electricians, editors, and a publicity office. Stars were employees with morals clauses. So were directors, until they were powerful enough not to be. The craft unions, once they were recognized, fixed the job titles: grip, gaffer, best boy, script supervisor. Those titles are still the credits. They were invented as a way to staff a production the way a plant staffs a shift.
The decrees
In 1948 the Supreme Court, in United States v. Paramount, ordered the studios to give up their theater chains and stop forcing exhibitors to take a whole slate. Television then took the weekly audience. The long-term contract faded. The companies survived, merged, and now sit inside larger entertainment groups. The factory, with everyone on salary from the star to the painter, did not. A film is still made by a temporary crew assembled by a company. The crew is no longer the company's household.
The work it organized
- Contract player
- Film editor
- Gaffer
- Publicity writer