The Description of Hollywood as a ‘Dream Factory’ Expresses an Essential Contradiction at the Heart of Hollywood Film.

This piece requires an examination of the term ‘Dream Factory’ in reference to the Hollywood film industry. The contradiction between creativity and artistic dreams and the factory like commercial interests will be examined. An examination of the difference between traditional ‘dreams’ of Hollywood and the reality, will be shown. The detraction from creativity by commercial interest will be analysed in the second paragraph. Finally and examination of the career of Orson Welles will back up the argument running through the text.
The notion of the ‘Dream Factory’ is summed up by this quote from the character Happy Man in Pretty Woman, ‘Welcome to Hollywood, what’s your dream? Everyone comes here. This is Hollywood, land of dreams. Some dreams come true, some don’t, but keep on dreamin’.’ Richard Maltby expands on this, giving an idea of the traditional dream of those who go to Hollywood to seek their fortune, ‘With every viewing, these mundane places are transformed into Hollywood, the movies, a never-never land of wish fulfillment, fantasy and immediate gratification where, as the song says ‘every shop girl can be a top girl’, and every office worker can fulfill her dream of being for a while, Joan Crawford.’ An important part of this dream of young Americans was the aspiring nature that seeing these characters gave. However, this was heavily dependent on the commercial aspect of Hollywood. Bette Davis played a ladylike part in 1933 in Ex Lady, but by 1935 she was a dangerous vamp. Maltby describes this thusly, ‘What could have caused this radical change? The answer must be found in the broader inquiry into how the star system functioned in the American film industry during the 1930s and 1940s, the era of oligopoly control.’ The extent to which Hollywood fed into the dreams of normal, poor Americans to make it big was short lived anyway, with business interests forcing a heavier focus on mass market middle class appeal. R.B. Ray corroborates this, ‘The exclusively working class audience was at most a short lived phenomenon. Film historians have demonstrated that, from the start, the American movie industry sought to attract the middle class ticket buyer.’ The extent to which this dream was a falsehood and a creation of business interests is confirmed by an explanation of the attitudes towards the character portrayed to the viewer. The reality of a heavily commercial business is shown to us by A.J. Scott, ‘Hollywood emerged as the main center of the US motion picture industry, after about 1915, and how its pioneering model of film production, helped to ensure its success by generating an expanding system of agglomeration economies.’ Hortense Powdermaker was a respected anthropologist, who went from examining Hortesian tribes, to the upper echelons of Hollywood. She explained, ‘Just as the Melonesian thinks failure would result from changing the form of a spell, so men in Hollywood consider it dangerous to depart form their formulas.’ Her study corroborates this view of the dream and creativity being restricted, ‘Hollywood…was a site of irretrievable contradictions, both a centre for creative genius and a place where mediocrity flourishes at the same time a important industry with worldwide significance and an environment of trivialities.’
Some have argued that the business does not have such a profound affect on the creativity of those in Hollywood. Jack Valenti, former head of the Motion Picture Association of America argued, ‘Moviemaking is a marriage between art and business.’ Indeed, it is true that The Godfather is massively respected critically, ‘The “Godfather” films remain the 20th-century answer to Shakespeare’s plays of royal succession, with the twist that here Prince Hal grows up, not into Henry V, but Richard III.’ Yet also the film has reaped commercial success, returning over $86 million. However, the mass of critical opinion sees the business aspect of Hollywood as damaging to the creative dream. Neal and Smith argue, ‘For the last two decades, academic criticism has predominantly viewed mainstream cinema as a sequence of emptily expensive, aesthetically impoverished spectacles, literally and metaphorically restricted within the safe action area required by the small screens of Multi Plexes, video and pay TV.’ AJ Scott feels that the commercial aspect has infiltrated movie making and creativity, ‘One of the defining features of contemporary society, at least in the high income countries of the world, is the conspicuous convergence that is occurring between the domain of the economic on the one hand and the domain of the cultural on the other.’ They explained the extent to which Hollywood is now seen as being totally predicated on money, ‘In a contemporary version of the eternal conflict between art and commerce for the soul of the cinema, the economic opportunities provided by globalization and the new technologies of distribution are seen as aesthetic contractions requiring the application of a formula to make it simple and keep it moving.’ The idea that the whole Hollywood system has changed has been challenged in the previous chapter, where it was shown that the star system in the early Hollywood years was based upon the big business finance the town is built on. However, it is true that a change in viewing figures is seen as giving rise to an even greater focus on the factory side of the ‘dream factory.’ Since the 1950s audiences have got younger, by 1979 every other ticket that was bought was by someone aged twelve to twenty. Another thirty per cent of the people going to the cinema were in their twenties. In addition the make up of the sales figures for motion pictures has turned more commercial over years. In 1977 Star Wars took $500 million at the box office, however, by 1980 merchandising goods associated with the film had taken three times this totaling $1.5 billion. In 1989 Batman took $1 billion in merchandising, four times what the box office took. By 1995, less than twenty per cent of film news came from domestic box office receipts. The 1990s blockbuster Jurassic Park showed this to obvious effect. Neale and Smith observed, ‘At one point in Jurassic Park 1993 the camera trails past the Jurassic Park gift shop, showing us a line of T Shirts, lunch boxes and other souvenirs identical to the ones available for purchase in the lobby of the theatre, in toy shops on cereal packets.’ Stringer further highlights the change, ‘The emphasis on plot over character marks a significant departure from classical Hollywood films, including The Godfather and even Jaws, wherein plot tended to emerge more organically as a function of the drivers, desires, motivations and goals of the central characters.’ This provides further evidence for the lack of creativity or dreams, versus the commercial or business aspects of Hollywood. Also, it shows how the change in commercial practice actually changes content of films and requires business interests to be taken into account when movie making. Stringer furthers this argument, ‘From The Godfather to Jaws, to Star Wars, we see films that are increasingly plot driven, incrteasingly visceral, kinetic and fast paced, increasingly reliant on special effects, increasingly fantastic (and thus apolitical), and increasingly targeted at younger audiences.’ Neale and Smith corroborate this argument, ‘The interdependency of cultural production and distribution…has made it increasingly difficult not only to distinguish the film industry from other media or entertainment industries, but also to understand the movies themselves as cultural and textual objects.’ Assessing changes in wider society Scott highlights the role of Ford and the manufacturing economy on Hollywood, ‘There was to be sure, a prevailing attitude among the top echelons of Hollywood executives that Fordist principles of manufacturing could eventually be applied to the production of motion pictures, and a number of the studios actually did try to reorganize elements of their internal operations along the lines of a large factory.’
The extent to which commercialist necessities, and the ideas that this entrenched in the studio executives in Hollywood, controlled creativeness will be shown by attempting a case study of the effect of this on the career of Orson Welles. Welles directly commented on this himself, ‘Film is the great art form of our century. It is just too bad it is…so very meaningless most of the time. When I tell that to people in Hollywood they get mad at me.’ The problems during Welles’ Hollywood career are summed up by the response of the studio executive of RKO, Charles Koerner, to the original cut of Magnificent Ambersons, ‘The picture is magnificent…very good. Far too high for general consumption. However, I enjoyed it but…I don’t think it will have much box office appeal. A good psychological study. Photography excellent but the darkness gets on one’s nerves.’ Half of the films Orson Welles made during his period in Hollywood, three out of six, were noir thrillers. The extent to which this proves that Welles was forced into making films he had no interest in, by commercial incentives is shown by his quote, ‘I have only twice been given any voice at all as to the level of subject matter. In my trunks stuffed with un produced film scripts, there are no thrillers. When I make this sort of picture for which I can pretend to no special interest or aptitude.’ The necessity of sticking to the formula that the studio believed would succeed, as shown in the first paragraph, would lead to studio executives and editors they brought in re-editing Welles’ films so that all the Hollywood pictures, excepting Citizen Kane were not wholly his. Welles said, ‘I didn’t do [The Stranger] with a completely cynical attitude…Quite the contrary. I tried to do it as well as I could. But it’s the one of my films of which I am least the author.’ Furthermore, Touch of Evil was the most well known example, with Welles begging the studio, unsuccessfully to re-edit it to his standards. Lim shows the extent to which this was a Hollywood problem, by comparing it to Europe, ‘Universal balked at what it saw, too murky, too baroque, and Welles lost control of the film. Re-edited and padded out with additional expository scenes, ‘Touch of Evil’, was released on the bottom half of a double bill. It received tepid reviews in the States, although it was right away championed by French critics.’ The factory system in Hollywood was directly attributed to this wrecking of his films by Welles himself, ‘I have lost years and years of my life fighting for the right to do things my own way, and mostly fighting in vain…Among the pictures I have made I can only accept full responsibility for on: Citizen Kane. In all the others I have been more or less muzzled, and the narrative line of my stories…ruined by commercially minded people.’
The idea of the dream factory is predicated upon the idea that young Americans, especially working class, had that they could be a Hollywood star. This was a contradiction because the factory element of the system requires that the star system was heavily controlled during the studio era, and deliberately a part of the marketing drive. More importantly the commercial part of the industry limits creativity and the artist element in the dream aspect of ‘Dream Factory.’ The extent to which this plays a part is shown by the changing nature of films, as the make up of the cinema going audience has changed. The footage of merchandise in the Dinosaur blockbuster Jurassic Park from 1993 shows the changing nature of the content of film in the more heavily commercialized industry, and the impact on the content of the film. The career of Orson Welles provides modern evidence of this to be true. After making Citizen Kane, the most critically successful and a commercial success, Welles was never allowed to make a film in the Hollywood studio system again without being interfered with by the studio system and its editors. In the final analysis, the description of Hollywood as a ‘Dream Factory’ does show us an essential contradiction at the heart of Hollywood film.