studio history

Hollywood in the 1930's


The advent of sound into motion pictures during the late 1920s consolidated the workings of the American film industry into what has been labeled the studio system. Through the 1930s and 1940s, under an arrangement known as "vertical integration," eight companies dominated not only the making of narrative feature films, but also their international distribution and in many cases their national and even international exhibition in theaters.

Five corporations-Paramount, Loew's (parent company of the more famous MGM), Fox Film (later 20th Century-Fox), Warner Bros., and Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO)-each owned a studio, a worldwide network of offices, and a chain of theaters. Three minor companies-Universal, Columbia, and United Artists-owned no theaters but cooperated with the oligopolistic aspirations of the "Big Five" in excluding all other interests from the Hollywood studio system.
The Big Five, by controlling picture palaces in all of America's downtow...