Un programma e un libro a cura di / A programme and a book by Richard Koszarki
Film in programma / Films scheduled for showing
HIS NIBS (Exceptional Pictures, US 1920-21)
ENCHANTMENT (Cosmopolitan Productions, US 1921)
THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN (Legend of Sleepy Hollow Corp., US 1922)
THE GREEN GODDESS (Distinctive Productions, US 1923)
LITTLE OLD NEW YORK (Cosmopolitan Pictures, US 1923)
JANICE MEREDITH (Cosmopolitan Pictures, US 1924)
THE SHOW OFF (Famous Players-Lasky Corp., US 1926)
Introduzione/Introduction
Schede film/Programme notes
Introduction
Edison and Dickson perfected their moving picture system in New Jersey in the 1890s, and within a few years most American filmmakers could be found within a mile or two of the Hudson River. They planted themselves here because they needed what D.W. Griffith called “the money and the brains”, an artistic and entrepreneurial energy which Griffith realized New York had in abundance. But to stay here they also needed to pay the going rate for land and labor, and as their business grew more industrialized most of them would move to a series of gigantic film factories scattered across Southern California.
The way most histories have explained it, the role of New York in the development of the American film ended right there. True, many allowed that the back-office function, the administrative center, the corporate headquarters where deals were made and contracts were signed, never left town. But most historians were simply oblivious to the fact that while the mass production of feature films had been centralized on the West Coast, many writers, producers, and directors continued to work in the East, especially if their independent vision was too big for the Hollywood production line.
No one has ever made films in New York in order to save money. So during the 1920s D.W. Griffith, Rudolph Valentino, William Randolph Hearst, and Gloria Swanson – many of whom had an undisguised hatred of the regimented studio system in California – all had more important reasons for working here. Rebellious and unconventional, they saw the New York studios as laboratories, not factories, and used them to pioneer the development of new technologies, new genres, and new audiences. By the 1950s and 60s, the innovative new style of commercial cinema which they (and those who followed them) had pioneered would become the way everyone in the industry made movies. No need for backlots, long-term contracts, or seasonal production slates. Dramatic conventions and censorship restrictions were seen as boundaries to be tested and overcome. It was a system designed to put the independent filmmaker at the center, not the margins.
There is no way that the selection of a few programs here can tell this entire story. Limiting ourselves to the 1920s, the start of this movement, will show us more about how the old system died than how the new system was created. Paramount, for one, continued to operate its Astoria studio as a “miniature Hollywood” until 1932. By focusing on feature-length films we ignore some of the strongest East Coast genres, notably animation and non-fiction. And by excluding talkies we eliminate the most interesting examples of this new independent cinema, everything from Yiddish cinema to the films of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. I have tried to tell that larger history, at least through 1941, in Hollywood on the Hudson: Film and Television in New York from Griffith to Sarnoff (Rutgers University Press, 2008).
What we can do here is suggest how the brick-and-mortar studio model pursued by Paramount began to evolve, first into the personal fiefdom of William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan, then into a diffuse assortment of equipment houses, free-lance technicians, and rental “studios,” an industrial infrastructure as impermanent as any other piece of Manhattan real estate.
The Giornate has already featured the work of such significant New York directors as Herbert Brenon and D.W. Griffith (whose New York productions Sally of the Sawdust, The Sorrows of Satan, and The Struggle bring the festival’s mammoth Griffith Project retrospective to a close this year). Allan Dwan, Gloria Swanson, and Rudolph Valentino can be saved for another day. Instead we have three films of Marion Davies, not all of which are costume pictures; a trio of comedy features from Gregory La Cava, one of the few major directors recruited from the cartoon studios; a small sampling of the work of Joseph Urban, the industry’s most remarkable production designer; and all but one of the surviving East Coast appearances of Louise Brooks. A separate section is devoted to the comedies of W.C. Fields, a Ziegfeld Follies favorite whose idiosyncratic film career flourished under the auspices of William Le Baron, an innovative producer responsible for much of the best work then being produced in the East.There were many Broadway celebrities whom local producers attempted to turn into movie stars, but success was far from automatic. Ed Wynn never became a favorite of film audiences, while Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers, and W.C. Fields himself, all found talkies more congenial than silent pictures. Le Baron (who later championed Mae West and the comedy team of Wheeler and Woolsey) spent years tinkering with the irascible persona Fields had developed on Broadway, trying to shove this square peg into the round hole of Hollywood cinema. The distance between what Fields had to offer and what Hollywood was willing to accept was a considerable gulf, but not, ultimately, unbridgeable. During the 1920s and 30s an entire school of East Coast filmmakers would navigate it, and eventually learn the difference between crossing over and selling out. - Richard Koszarski
