ABSTRACT
Many of the policies of the US film industry during its so-called “classic” period (spanning roughly the 1920s through the late 1950s) were motivated by a desire to ensure profits through institutional practices premised on efficiency and standardization. Film is, however, an “intangible” commodity, never entirely susceptible to the mass production protocols and/or ethos that yield the serial production of identical consumer goods. Nonetheless, the US film industry aggressively sought to standardize methods of producing, distributing, and exhibiting films. In The Classical Hollywood Cinema, Janet Staiger describes in some detail the motivation behind and methods pursued by the film industry in an attempt to achieve this standardization at the level of film production.1 Such standardization did, of course, necessarily co-exist with efforts to achieve innovation in the form of product differentiation. While production practices could be efficiently managed and regulated, each commodity produced-that is each film-had to show some degree of difference from every other.
