ABSTRACT
In the fall of 1935 one final corporate event capped the changes that had so altered the film industry in the previous two years. The Fox Film Corporation, one of Hollywood's oldest and most financially precarious studios, was merged with Darryl F. Zanuck's new upstart Twentieth Century Pictures. With Zanuck at the helm, the company's profile was immediately and immensely transformed. Fox's old parade of quirky money-losers was succeeded by a brass-plated win-win series of musicals and comedies and mysteries. Everything was sunny and Shirley Temple, cheerful and Charlie Chan and Code-proof. The Fox merger covered all the bases: financial, artistic, philosophical, social, technological. With it, the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood was now firmly in place, and in the transition from Fox to Twentieth Century-Fox the precepts and ethos of this age are precisely demonstrated:
From start to finish, America's movies were its most complexly engineered, meticulously tooled manufactured product.
The American film industry was set up as a hierarchy of major and minor companies, each with its distinctive style and format.
With all the problems surrounding the transition to sound now erased, the studios' production machinery was being honed to an awe-inspiring level of expertise.
The most efficiently run studios were governed by one dominant personality, be it Zanuck at Fox, Jack L. Warner at Warner Bros., or Herbert J. Yates at Republic.
With Fox's golden child, Shirley Temple, leading the way, the star system had assumed its magically ruthless configuration of making, maintaining, and replacing the studios' prime assets.
The Production Code Administration was intimately involved with the writing and production of every Hollywood film. Both the script and the final cut of a movie were subject to approval by the Breen Office. After its release, a film could be subjected to further deletions ordered by state censorship boards or the Legion of Decency.
Audience attendance was on the increase, profits and film budgets were taking an upturn, and the corporations that owned the studios also owned theater chains—thus guaranteeing both supply and demand.
Seldom was a movie script the result of one dominant artistic force. For every writer credited on a film, there were generally ten to fifteen uncredited.
A few directors (John Ford, Fritz Lang, Cecil B. DeMille) were permitted a distinctive or idiosyncratic voice. Far more directors were gifted technicians whose work was tailored to reflect a "house" style.
The film industry was perhaps the country's biggest secret haven for gay men and lesbians, who were under contract to all studios as creative personnel, staff, and talent. Although an official code of silence protected their personal lives from public scrutiny, they were often able to impart glimmers of secret selves to the films they helped to create.
