‘Vertical Integration actively stifles creativity in the movie industry’

 

Vertical Integration is Production, Distribution and Exhibition. This means that the studio had total control over the movie stars and the people who worked there. Something that was also used was ‘Block Booking’ this was important to the studios because the company would sell multiple films to theatres as a unit. It would typically include one attractive A-Budget movie and the rest would be a mix of A-Budget movies and then B-Budget movies. Typically film studios would own their own theatres and this way they would be taking control of the whole studio process. By doing this it gave the studios more power ‘owning’ their stars. 

Vertical Integration stopped creativity because it didn’t allow actors and actresses to express themselves and branch out into other movies because they were ‘owned’. This way external studios couldn’t express themselves and this way they couldn’t expanded, but also actresses and actors couldn’t go to other movies that were picked just for them so the creativity of other films that were ‘perfectly’ right for one actor couldn’t be used due to the ‘star theory’. ‘Star Owning’ this was something that the studios did and they would control everything that they would do. Make them change their look and date other stars to make their studio look better. If a director wrote a film for someone that was controlled by another studio they wouldn’t be allowed to par take in the making of that film. Paramount had a star called Paulette Goddard and when she first joined Paramount this was a turning point in her careers, before she joined Paramount she was controlled by Charlie Chaplin and his studio called 'Charlie Chaplin Studios' she also dated him so when he hired her she soon became controlled by him.  She was put in his next box office hit, Modern Times in 1936. She signed a contract with David O. Selznick and appeared with Janet Gaynor in the comedy The Young in Heart (1938) because she wanted to be known because after 'Modern Times' she didn't have any up coming films. Before this Selznick loaned her to MGM to appear in two films but Selznick was worried about legal issues by signing her to a contract that might conflict with her pre-existing contracts with the Chaplin studio.

Paramount studios owned a chain of theatres the first theatre they owned was called ‘The Barn’ and the first film they showed was in Utah America and their studios were located in Hollywood America. Paramount ran two studios one in New York and one in Hollywood this made Paramount one of the big five because they owned two, they would have owned twice the amount of stars.

Paramount’s owner and founder Zukor built the ‘The Public Theatres Corporation’ which nearly had 2,000 screens this way they were producing a lot of money, there were 106m people compare to the UK they had about 44m. This meant that they were producing a lot more money than the UK theatres and during the 1920 in America there were a lot of immigrants coming over and the theatre was a ‘new’ place for them to visit. Also during this time it was the ‘silent ear’ so the films were easy to follow. Alfred Hitchcock was a famous director of manipulating sound he was one of the first to play with the sound to create tension and suspense. Richard Dyer said that ‘Stars as an image are constructed in all kinds of media texts other than films, but none the less films remain privileged instances of the stars image’. This shows that the films made the ‘stars’ that weren’t recognised for being them because they were opened by the studio they were only noticed for that.