Sunday, September 26, 2010

ATPS: Chapters 4, 5, and 6

To start off with I want to say that I was sometimes confused with what time in history events were occurring in relation to other cinematic events. Fuller tends to jump around in dates frequently so this threw me of occasionally.

I didn’t realize that there were films during the 1910’s to 1920’s that were created by companies that posed as educational films when in actuality they were advertisements. I thought that the Ford Company was genius in opening up a film department for media and promoting their company through films. It was interesting to see how these films them started to become regulated by the CMPB because the church was becoming a problem with their religious views and people wanted to know what type of content they would be seeing. Obviously this reminds me of the MPAA now, however, it was slightly different. This group would tailor their judgments based on the supposed crowd that would be going to see the movie. For example for soldiers in the war, they were less strict on the violent images since soldiers were more prepared for this kind of content. This specialization in “ratings” is much more detailed and obviously could not be done now but was cool to see how this one organization tried to add it’s opinion on what people needed to know before entering the theater.

New York City runs things! I know this is a snobby New Yorker thing to say but as Fuller shows in this reading, since a lot of the industry was NY (and a few other cities), it was the center for setting the industry standards. It wasn’t great to see it associated with dingy nickelodeon theaters, but hey that’s the city. What was messed up and I’m glad doesn’t happen anymore is the temporary monopoly that film producer and distributors had on the market when they owned 20% of theaters in the city. This was completely corrupt and created an unfair market, which lead to non-company affiliated theaters receiving fuzzy and snowstorm-ridden films.

Lastly, but not least, I can’t believe how easy it was to send in script back then. Okay, they weren’t really scripts, but scene scenarios. It was basically a page, with just an idea of what people could be doing, since there was no dialogue there wasn’t that much heavy lifting that had to go on. Also, no unions yet to stop your script from getting through or having to worry about representation. No wonder, companies just ripped off these people by just making their movies without permission, it seems like the writers were asking for it.

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