ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the case study of the Jones/Warner Bros. golf instruction films in an effort to reveal the importance of short films to the overall studio output. Such short films, whether cartoons, serials, or instructional films, served as a site where studios could experiment with emerging technologies and also as a kind of testing ground where studios could showcase new talent with minimal financial investment or risk. In short, it is important to examine all of a studio’s output with regard to filmic texts, not only Class A features or star vehicles. I address an underreported area of film’s history: the importance of these short films-financially, technologically, and as a site to debut untested talent-to the overall production structure of the classical studio system. The Jones/Warner Bros. films are noteworthy for a variety of reasons, but one line of inquiry stands out. What was the impetus for the “studio of the people” (Warner Bros.), a studio closely associated at that time with the introduction of sound to motion pictures, gangster and social problem films, and its Fordist-efficient production strategies, to produce eighteen golf instructional films at the beginning of the Depression? This question requires a discursive analysis of the industrial production of the exhibition “grind” designed to ensure a “balanced program” for theaters. For example, Donald Crafton calls such short films “the sound of custard” on a bill that “acted as a buffer, a curtain-raiser to prepare the audience for the feature that followed” (1997, 381). Not all of the majors produced their own short films, but all of the studios that owned theaters needed such “filler” fare to offer a broad range of filmed entertainment options in an effort to address the broad (and nebulous) desires of their patrons. Warner Bros. was among the few studios that did produce their own short films. Jones suggested that one of his main attractions to the “talking pictures” was the combination of sound and image for instructional purposes. Douglas Gomery details that Warner Bros. had many reasons to adopt the early sound technology, not least of which was to capitalize on the technology and thus change Warner’s standing as a minor studio. More importantly, Warner Bros. “never set out to make talkies as features but rather to provide one-or tworeel length recordings of musical and vaudeville acts that theater owners could provide as ‘stage shows’ ” (Gomery 1992, 218). Thus, for Warner Bros., the short subject offered an additive quality for its audiences; the short subject with sound was a novelty item for filling out “the balanced program.” Interestingly, while Warner Bros./Vitaphone made their own short subjects in an attempt to assess new talent and test new technological innovations, larger studios such as Paramount and MGM distributed shorts produced by independents (notably Hal Roach for MGM). Richard Ward suggests that Warner Bros. produced shorts because they “took up slack time in support units (such
as the sound department) between major productions, keeping the studio workforce busy and permitting overhead charges to be spread over more product” (2003, 222). Ward further reports that Warner Bros. produced and distributed shorts as a way “to brighten up the program a bit” (222); that is, to balance the studio’s output of gangster films or social problem films such as The Public Enemy, Three on a Match, or I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Anecdotal evidence is that, at times, the short films may have eclipsed the features in popularity within a given theater or city. Dana Benelli reports:
In the trade press, there is ample evidence that theaters promoted the content of their newsreels by giving it marquee status above the feature film listing on those occasions when the newsreels covered events of particularly intense current public interest. . . . Among series of shorts on sport topics, Knute Rockne’s demonstrations of football strategy and Bobby Jones’s golf tips achieved a degree of popularity which eventually also earned them frequent above-the-feature marquee preeminence in some theaters’ promotions of their film programs.
