WI No Hollywood?

It would be possible to another country rivals the U.S in the domination of movie production during the 20th. Century? What PODs are necessary to the movie industry become multipolarized or at the least with two or three heavy players
 
Unless a more spread out and regional film industry presents itself, it's not going to change the film industry's culture/business model in the big picture of things (yes the pun was intended). Whether in Florida or California, we'd still end up with unimaginative bean counters who try and slap together the most mediocre and simplistic of plots, with a preference for sequels and remakes of past successful films.

Yeah, that's probably true. And in fact, with a more monopolized move industry, particulary one based on the East Coast, might just have it worse than OTL in terms of quality issues(particularly one based in Jacksonville above all).

Now that is where we'd see the most changes to this TL, which would alter Californian and US demographics.

Possibly. L.A. certainly wouldn't have quite as much prestige as did IOTL were it not for Hollywood, which could indeed have knock-off population effects as well.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
It would be possible to another country rivals the U.S in the domination of movie production during the 20th. Century? What PODs are necessary to the movie industry become multipolarized or at the least with two or three heavy players

Avoid WW1/WW2. France and Germany had powerful film industry. If you have a German sphere of influence where the language of trade is German, it will help buff the German Film industry. Same for French empire surviving and more parts becoming French/Metropolitan. Russia not being gutted could help build a Russian/Slavic film industry. It is easy to see a world where Hollywood is just one of many movie centers not the dominant one.

Now if you add a second POD where the USA/UK relations plummets, you can even split the English world into two major film markets. Replace say the 1914 Serbian assassination with some Canadian nationalist killing Wilson would be enough for a single POD to get you to where you need to go. Just have to have the assassin with some ties to the Canadian government, or suspected ties.
 
Even if you had a film industry with multiple centers(in the US I mean), you probably wind up with different film making philosophies. As a result, eventually one of them is gonna be proven superior to the others, and unless the studios in the other cities learn to adapt fast enough, they will eventually all die out, leaving one big behemoth in one city like we have IOTL, it just happens a different way from OTL.
 
othyrsyde said:
we'd still end up with unimaginative bean counters who try and slap together the most mediocre and simplistic of plots, with a preference for sequels and remakes of past successful films.
That's more a product of success, tho, than of geography, isn't it? If you don't see "Jaws", you don't see, or see as much, the mania for more blockbusters. And, as I understand it, there was an important move toward blockbusters: Tom Laughlin's marketing of "Billy JacK", opening in hundreds (thousands?) of theatres all at once, which Hollywood had never done.:eek: So, suppose you change that?
John Fredrick Parker said:
Could the circumstances in the OP give us a US film industry that was worse in this respect?
:eek::eek: Hard to believe it could get worse.
CaliBoy1990 said:
Stronger regional film industries can definitely be done, though, even with a Hollywood as influential as OTL's. Just find a way to make a few of the smaller companies really successful; maybe somebody makes a major sleeper blockbuster hit? :D
Seems to me you don't even need that. Without a dedicated exodus to Hollywood, all you'd need is for one influential filmmaker to follow Buster Keaton to Chicago, after his success at Essanay. (Have I got my Keystone Kops right, there?) Or even for Essanay to keep him a bit longer.
othyrsyde said:
Now that is where we'd see the most changes to this TL, which would alter Californian and US demographics.
What kinds of changes are you seeing?
 
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Are we talking aesthetic philosophies, production philosophies, business philosophies, what?

Quite possibly all of the above, but the business end of things was always the chief source of influence on the other two areas. If you look at film history(specifically that of hollywood), it has gone through a series of 'ages.' You've got the Silent Era(pretty much self explanatory), The Golden Age(1920-1960's), New Hollywood(1960's-1980's), and The Blockbuster Era(1970's-present).

Each era marked a major change in the style of film making, how the studios did business, and how the films were produced. However, each change was largely the result of a change in how the bean counters wanted things run.

The bean counters decide what the directors and producers can do. Similarly this affects how the actual production is structured as far as the basic mechanics of making the film: location shooting vs. shooting on a set, how big a production crew you have, union contracts saying what staff like key grips and best boys and whatnot can do and what they can't do, and how much time is allotted for each stage of production, etc.

So, the Silent era was kind of a big mess, there were a lot of different small studios as well as the big ones, you had Edison acting like a mob boss trying to stop people from doing things he didn't like, you had vaudeville trying to compete with the films. This of course was because the whole business was brand new and noboby knew exactly how to do things right.

Then you've got the Golden Era which was highly structured. Films were churned out in an industrial fashion, directors and actors were often treated like indentured servants with multi-picture deals that they had little control over(bigger stars had more freedom, but often, many of them just had to go along with whatever the studios told them to do) writers were thoroughly limited in what they could put to paper, and the Hays Code was there too.

Finally in the 60's the Hays Code was abolished and a new batch of directors came on the scene, these guys used the freedom afforded them by the lack of strict censorship of the Hays Code to make increasingly explicit and graphic films using new artistic techniques. As the public ate up these new kinds of films which were a refreshing change from the formulaic stuff put out during the golden age, the studios decided that they should just give their directors carte blanche to make whatever they wanted. This worked fine up until the early '80s with a series of flops that culminated in Heavens Gate and One From the Heart which were unmitigated disasters.

Meanwhile, films like Jaws and Star Wars showed that a different kind of movie could be successful and the Blockbuster Era was born. The Blockbuster Era is marked by increasingly large budget films with a decrease in overall volume of films produced. There is more structure and restriction than you had during the New Era, but not anywhere near as much as during the Golden Era. It is more corporate and businesslike. Personally, I think we may be seeing the twilight of this era as Studios are being forced to shell out quarter billion dollar sums with only something like a 50-60% chance of making a decent profit. Meanwhile you've got rather low budget films that have a blockbuster feel to them like 300 or Skyline. These films rely much more heavily on visual effects and as a result cost only a fraction of what comparable films would. The beauty is that even a stinker like Skyline can make a profit with just an opening weekend gross of fifty or sixty million(which would be viewed as a disaster for films like Avengers or one of the Transformers films) because they only cost something like 20-30 million to make.

Anyway, the point is that IOTL, the different eras had a certain period of overlap, because it took a few years for the studios and bean counters to realize that the new model of film making was superior to the old one. So in a situation where you've got multiple different nexus' of film production with different philosophies operating simultaneously, it's more or less like having multiple different eras of film making happening at once, eventually there is going to be one model that comes across as superior to the others which will eventually whither and die. This will probably take decades, because by the point of the POD suggested, film making was still in its infancy and nobody knows what they are doing. So, I figure that maybe by the 50's or 60's you will probably wind up with the film industry centered around a single city as the industry there manages to outshine all the others.
 

Wonderful! Many thanks for such a well written answer Dan :)

So the first question is whether TTL's Silent Era will be even more of a mess, in terms of an unclear business philosophy, than OTL's, or whether they'll unite around a clear idea sooner? I'd say without a legal monopoly, Edison won't be sending thugs to kill filmmakers, so that'll quiet things down, and I'd say a clearer relationship to Eastern investors would only add to the likelihood of consensus. So the question then is, what kind of business philosophy would American film adapt if non-cinema focused bean counters have this kind of influence? My guess is it'll resemble the New Hollywood Era and especially the Independent Film Industry of OTL more than the Golden Age, since that's where OTL sees the most impact being made by outside investors.
 
Dan Reilly The Great said:
Quite possibly all of the above.... I figure that maybe by the 50's or 60's you will probably wind up with the film industry centered around a single city as the industry there manages to outshine all the others.
Very informative.:cool: Thx. I do disagree with your conclusion, tho. I can see how all centers (presuming there are 3-4) all end up doing things much the same way. I don't see how that means they all move to California.:confused:

Something else: since the money's going to be coming from NYC anyhow, does it really matter where the films are made?

Also, doesn't the way films are distributed & shown have as much effect on how they're made? That is, the "industrial" output of the major studios was driven in part by being able to control what theatres showed, by blind booking & block booking, both of which were ruled anti-competitive. When they were, the number of films made dropped about 2/3.:eek: Plus the studios had to divest their theatres. What you got was studios with no actual sound stages: what today'd be called distributors, I think. They allowed independent filmmakers to do what they wanted (within the bounds of the Hayes Code:rolleyes:).

Speaking of the Code, can you explain how, exactly, it was enforced? That is, if a filmmaker wanted to include nudity or adultery, what was to stop him? (Provided he could get a distrubutor...:rolleyes:)
 
Speaking of the Code, can you explain how, exactly, it was enforced? That is, if a filmmaker wanted to include nudity or adultery, what was to stop him? (Provided he could get a distrubutor...:rolleyes:)

During the Golden Age of Hollywood, what the filmmaker wanted to donjust wasn't that important; it was the studios that controlled every aspect of production. "Independent Film" just wasn't much of a thing back then...
 
John Fredrick Parker said:
During the Golden Age of Hollywood, what the filmmaker wanted to donjust wasn't that important; it was the studios that controlled every aspect of production. "Independent Film" just wasn't much of a thing back then...
Noted. Again, tho, what was to stop a studio making any kind of film it pleased? Given the threat of boycott isn't intimidating. (I grant it was likely to be; I'm trying to understand just how much the Code could actually accomplish, & how.)
 
Noted. Again, tho, what was to stop a studio making any kind of film it pleased? Given the threat of boycott isn't intimidating. (I grant it was likely to be; I'm trying to understand just how much the Code could actually accomplish, & how.)

Well, initially it was two things -- (1) until 1948, the distributors and the studios were once one and the same -- basically a cartel of MGM, Warner Bros, and Paramount -- who wanted as wide an audience as possible. (2) Until 1952, the Supreme Court held that local governments had every right to censor and ban films, as they were not protected under the first amendment -- ergo, penetrating this mass market meant doing everything possible to avoid getting banned (which in practice meant getting the green light from organizations like the Catholic Church).
 
John Fredrick Parker said:
Well, initially it was two things
Thx for clearing it up.
John Fredrick Parker said:
Until 1952, the Supreme Court held that local governments had every right to censor and ban films, as they were not protected under the first amendment
I keep forgetting about this...:eek:

Put a spin on it, tho. Suppose a small studio/independent maker challenges it, tho: the decision was about the business (the theatre operation), not about the product. (And eventually, after Paramount, filmmakers just ignored Hayes, so not out of the question, is it?)
 
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