BONUS Episode 56 PREVIEW: The Studio System

folks we finally we had an original idea: a podcast about moviesfull episode on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/posts/studio-system-161055406?pr=true

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  So anyway, uh, A, number one, most importantly, don't [__] yourself. Number two, um, next slide. Okay, so United Artists, um, just like a side note of United Artists. Um, United Artists is founded by a series of directors, actors, et cetera, including Charlie Chaplin, D W Griffin.

• 0:20November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's fucked up seeing Chaplin without the mustache.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  It is. It really, it really troubles me. Also, I don't like looking at D W Griffin's face because he does look like, um, like the stand-in for H B Lovecraft. Um, he is the one signing the paper.

• 0:35November Kelly?

  Mary Pickford's so pretty, though.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 0:37November Kelly?

  Um, yes.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  We are getting to the part where I have essentially set aside time for you to go, um, you to go, uh, I think I hope.

• 0:45November Kelly?

  And get 1950s woman dysphoria. Yeah, okay, wonderful.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  Well, Mary Pickford is 1910s, 20s, and 30s.

• 0:52November Kelly?

  I said to you because you're gonna, like, if it's later, I assume we'll be advancing.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  1930s and 40s woman dysphoria, sorry.

• 0:59November Kelly?

  Okay, okay, fine.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  But I, I have set aside time for you to be like, I hope Covid. Um, but specifically in the Hayes Code section. So anyway, uh, so.

• 1:10November Kelly?

  I mean, why do you think I used to do my hair like Veronica Lake, you know?

• 1:13Speaker 00

  And it looked great, you know, your hair looks great. Anyway, so, uh, the idea is that they wanted to do independent production of films because initially Chaplin could not get a production budget increase, and then Pickford and Fairbanks were under contract but weren't getting that contract renewed. And so they collectively hired a private investigator to look into it, and they discovered that Adolf Zucker was planning to merge a series of production companies together, um, by buying theater chain First National, uh, and adding it on to Famous Players Lasky, which eventually became Paramount, to essentially vertically

• 1:51Speaker 00

  integrate film and television and fuck them on budget, uh, on, uh, casting and contract terms, et cetera. So they issued, they wrote something that was like a declaration of independence or whatever, and then founded United Artists. Now, the First National merger didn't happen, but Adolf Zucker succeeded in vertically integrated a lot of, um, a lot of theater chains, and he succeeded in doing it by employing a variety of pretty underhanded tactics, which we're gonna talk about in the next slide. Next slide. Okay, so I'm gonna explain this using the films of Dino de Laurentis.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  So because as as

• 2:32Speaker 02

  I love her. I love, I love, I love his work on Food Network. Yeah.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  Okay. So I have met Jada and she honestly whips like she's really nice.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  I'm really happy to hear that.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  No, she's, she's a cool gal. So just for the listener, I used to work for Dino de Laurentiis's wife, Martha de Laurentiis, rest in peace, at the de Laurentiis company. So I am using the films of Dino de Laurentiis. So imagine, we're gonna explain block booking. Imagine Dino de Laurentiis is a studio, right? You can see him here, holding his Oscars for Knights in Cabiria and La Strada, which I have held and they are really heavy. Next slide, or hit the next button, please.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:13Speaker 00

  So firstly, they will, you want these sort of A films, right? Like your real top tier films. Now, an A film and a B film comes from the idea of having like, it's similarly to having an A side and a B side on a record. It comes from the idea of doing double features. One of them was like the premiere feature that people would come for and one of them was kind of tacked on. In this case, the A films are Serpico and Three Days of the Condor, which I think we can all agree are good films that Dino de Laurentiis produced. Now, next button. The problem is, in order to get Three Days of the Condor and Serpico, Dino de Laurentiis, the studio, is going to force you to buy Kiss the Girls and Let Them Die,

• 3:59Speaker 00

  the, the Italian James Bond spoof. Next button. He is going to force you to buy Orca, the Killer Whale, the Jaws knockoff. Next button. He is going to make you buy Cat's Eye, which is god awful and is a Stephen King adaptation. Next button. He is going to force you to buy Maximum Overdrive, good truck season pick. Also, the first film that Martha de Laurentiis.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Fucking movie. Great fucking movie.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  And then he's gonna make you buy Danger Diabolic.

• 4:33November Kelly?

  I mean, that's worth, actually. Like, this is the thing. You kind of take your weirder shots with your B-movies, and some of them whip.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  Um, did you watch the original one?

• 4:45November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, it's good.

• 4:46Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, you did. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Sorry, I forgot about that. Yeah, I'm not a fan, but I do, I have to say, I'm glad it got remade a bunch of times.

• 4:57Speaker 00

  He will also make you buy Barbarella, which I think that is a real Nova I Hope Covid movie.

• 5:04Justin Roczniak?

  I, what I'm seeing here is a good thing, because it's, you know, you need to have the crappy movies made in order to make the good ones.

• 5:12Speaker 00

  Well, you see, the thing is, you might think that, but the thing that Paramount developed and that every studio adopted was the practice of essentially forcing independent distributors and independent theatrical companies to buy a shit-ton of bad movies that were churned out very quickly and with very little effort put into them, in exchange for also buying one or perhaps two good movies, and then you would have to exhibit them all, right? And you would pay through the nose for the privilege, because of the corporate consolidation. Now, the other portion of it that makes it worse is that sometimes you are like blind buying, right? So rather than saying, "I am buying Serpico, I am buying N. Al Pacino picture," right?

• 5:56Speaker 00

  Which could be Serpico, but it could also be Devil's Advocate, right?

• 5:59November Kelly?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  You don't know what you're buying, and the studios have enough economic leverage that they can make you buy whatever the fuck they are gonna put out. So you, as an independent distributor, are completely at the mercy, pricing structure-wise and content-wise, of the studios. Meanwhile, the studios have bought out this whole distribution chain, where not only do they own the distribution, but they also own a bunch of actual first-party theaters in which these films are exhibited. So they can adjust their film repertoire, and you cannot, because you have paid for a bunch of, you have paid to screen Cat's Eye constantly, right?

• 6:37Justin Roczniak?

  As the theater owner, I like this a lot because it takes a lot of work off of, you know, my end. It's just like, yeah, I'll screen whatever film you tell me.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Give me my slop.

• 6:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  I eat my slop.

• 6:52November Kelly?

  People went to the movies way more than they do now. So like, you can just be like, yeah, we'll go and see whatever Al Pacino picture. It's kind of like less intense on both ends, you know?

• 7:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's like this. This is the only place with air conditioning.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  Everybody's gonna go see.

• 7:10November Kelly?

  It's the only place to hide when you've just assassinated the president of the United States.

• 7:15Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly.

• 7:16Speaker 00

  Everybody's gonna go see, uh, the movie Waterloo directed by Sergey Bodorchuk.

• 7:23November Kelly?

  They should. They should do.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, everybody's gonna go see, uh, I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm going through Dino's, uh, work. Pauline Doctor. Um, everybody's gonna go see, uh, you know, uh, Anzio or Evil Dead 2 or From the Hip, you know?

• 7:42November Kelly?

  Some bangers here.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  They should be seeing Evil Dead 2. Hell yeah.

• 7:47Speaker 00

  Or like, you know, I don't know, uh, Rumpelstiltskin 1995, American fantasy horror comedy.

• 7:55Justin Roczniak?

  I run the only theater in like Atumwa, Iowa, and I, I have to, uh, do a screening of Come and See.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  I mean, kind of. Yeah, yeah, basically. Um, I run, I run the only filmmaker, uh, the only, uh, film.

• 8:13Justin Roczniak?

  The entire town was changed after that.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  I run the only theater in like Fremont, California, and I'm forced to screen Amityville 2: The Possession like every 30 minutes. Um, so anyway, so this is a, this is an amount of monopolistic control that is exerted by the, uh, by the studios that makes it very difficult. I mean, it encourages really shitty filmmaking because you just, you don't need to have a good movie. You just need to have a movie that they can bundle. But it also screws over independent theaters and distributors. Next slide. The other tactic they use is what's called run zone clearance, right?

• 8:47Speaker 00

  Basically, it is a way of staggering when movies are released. So basically keeping them in-house for a very long time. And then eventually parceling them out to a variety of other geographical zones and third-party theaters. So first it only plays in like downtown theaters. Then, you know, and primarily those owned first party by the company. Then it gets sort of parcelled out to less downtown theaters. And so you only get, I don't know, Kiss the Girls and Let Them Die like a year after it's actually been released. If you live in Podunk, Iowa, right? So, um, you know, these.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  You live in Ross's theater alone.

• 9:28Justin Roczniak?

  That's a, that's a, that's a double feature with Come and See.

• 9:33Speaker 00

  Honestly terrible double feature. But maybe, maybe you learn something from it. So, uh, anyway, so the problem is that this makes a whole shit ton of money, right? Because you can charge as, because you are the first to have, as the first party exhibitor. You are the first to have the movie that people, you're the first to have Serpico, for instance. You can charge premium prices for that and people will pay it, right? And so you make a lot of money at every stage of the operation by essentially vertically integrating it all. And using your market power and leverage to crush the competition. Next slide. So if we talk about the built environment, you end up with a lot of physical production studios, right?

• 10:16Speaker 00

  In Los Angeles, because that is where movies are being produced. And you end up with a lot of like facilities, many of which are still here today, like the Paramount Studios lot, or the Universal lot, or the Warner Brothers lot, et cetera. But the other thing is that it doesn't just take production facilities, it takes people. And this is where we get into the weird, uh, awful shit. Next slide.

• 10:38November Kelly?

  Yeah, this is where we get into playing the movies and when you start picking guys up and putting them in plastic surgery.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 10:45Justin Roczniak?

  It was, it was funny taking the Coast Starlight out of Los Angeles to, uh, San Francisco. Cause we did go by a couple of back lots and I was like, holy shit, they're real.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, dude, I could have gotten you on the Paramount lot. I should have done that. Fuck.

• 10:59Justin Roczniak?

  Nah, well, next time.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Next time, next time I'll get you on the actual.

• 11:02November Kelly?

  You're gonna see La Sombrita, you're gonna see Paramount.

• 11:06Speaker 00

  You're gonna see, you're gonna see La Sombrita, you're gonna see that 20th century Fox studio where I once worked with Angela Bassett.

• 11:12November Kelly?

  But like, actually?

• 11:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, we'll go around the corner this time.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  I will say I have worked on a variety of studio lots. Universal sucks because you have to use a golf cart to get anywhere. The 20th Century Fox lot is good because you can walk basically all over it. I worked in the sound.

• 11:30Justin Roczniak?

  This kind of walkable.

• 11:34Speaker 00

  It literally is. The Warner Brothers lot I don't like, but I did get to work on the, in the soundstage where they shot the TV show Bones. Because I worked as a.

• 11:46Justin Roczniak?

  Bone storage?

• 11:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was at the bone storage. And so I worked on 911 and the guys who did all of the production design for 911 are also the guys who did the production design for Bones. So they had all sorts of like stories about Bones. And back to this.

• 12:06Speaker 00

  The, so you're seeing on the left Olivia De Havilland and on the right you're seeing Betty Davis. So here's a couple of things about being an actor, right? Initially, people did not know who stars were, right? Like in any real sense. The, the people that were in the movies were essentially, you know, anonymous, right? And therefore, for a while, you could just kind of get away with throwing whomever in there. And you know what? Actually, I'm sorry. I just looked at the slide and I think I put in two photos of Olivia De Havilland. So.

• 12:51November Kelly?

  That's always legal to do, in my opinion.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  But I'm gonna paste Betty Davis in here. Real quick.

• 12:58November Kelly?

  Is there any relation? Side of the Davis Crawford feud, yes.

• 13:02Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 13:03Justin Roczniak?

  Any relation to the aircraft manufacturer?

• 13:06Speaker 00

  I think so, actually, right?

• 13:08November Kelly?

  Yeah, I think so. I'm not, don't quote me on that, but I think so.

• 13:12Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, good.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  Hold on.

• 13:13Justin Roczniak?

  Glad I got the hat with me right here.

• 13:15Speaker 00

  On the backend and there we go. Does that now show?

• 13:22Justin Roczniak?

  I love Betty Davis, but Jesus Christ.