Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie-Makers (1950), 25-27

Perhaps the most fundamental and striking characteristic of the motion picture as an institution is that the making of movies is both a big business and a popular art. Certainly its financing, its relationships with banks, boards of directors and stockholders its distribution and advertising, its problems of markets, domestic and foreign, and its labor relations are all the well-recognized parts of any big business. But its product is not like those of other businesses. The product of the movie industry is a story, told primarily in visual imagery and movement, and, since the introduction of the sound track, with dialogue. The movie shares the function of all storytelling, of all literature, of all theater: that of a comment on some phase of existence. Artists -- including directors, writers actors, photographers, musicians, cutters -- are necessary to fulfill this function.

The general attitude in Hollywood, and out of it too, is to try to escape this essential' dualism: Making movies must be either business or art, rather than both. For most people in executive positions it is a business, where, according to the folklore "for a nickel you get a dollar." The goal is profits, large and quick ones. They call themselves "showmen," and my talk about the movies as art is for them the height of absurdity and unreality. Their problem is to find the least common denominator that will please the most people and therefore bring in the most profits. For them there is a search for a "sure-fire" formula which will always work, in the same way that

a certain formula for steel can be counted on to produce the best steel.

This point of view is well expressed in the following editorial by W. R. Wilkerson in the Hollywood Reporter (September 29 1947):

The drawing-room set is yelling: "Stop making pictures for Glendale. Stop catering to the morons and bring pictures up to an intelligent level." . . . . We believe the majority of men at the head of this business--showmen that they be--are possessed of as much intelligence as the drawing-room set. We feel that they too would like to lift our pictures up to a higher plane but every time they have shouldered that load they have found it too much to carry. As a consequence, they move down into the bracket that most of our theater customers patronize -- shooting stories without too much of a problem, yarns that are easy to understand, making pictures that WILL entertain instead of making their audiences unhappy. Pictures are essentially for entertainment. That's what has built this great industry--ENTERTAINMENT. Pictures are made for Glendale, for Kansas City and New York. Our pictures are made for the whole world, and that whole world has been buying them, which affords the tremendous pay checks handed out here every week and makes it possible for tremendous story costs. . . Glendale has been good enough for us for thirty years. It should be good for another hundred.

For the artist there is another traditional goal. He tries to give his interpretation of a segment of experience he has either known or observed, which he wants to communicate to others. This need for the individual artist to communicate his ideas to an audience seems far removed from the need to accumulate large profits. But the contradiction is not a true one. If the audience is large and the artist succeeds in communicating with it, profits follow naturally. Much money has been made by successful artists fulfilling their functions in the theater, and in literature, music and painting. The artists and the executives in the studios are both unrealistic in insisting on an

"either-or" point of view. Movies are a mass medium and to remain as such in our society they must make a profit. In the end this may be desirable, since otherwise they might become esoteric.

There can, however, be a considerable difference of opinion on what constitutes a fair or good profit and on the amount of experimentation desirable within a profitable business.

The producers and executives seem somewhat unbusinesslike in not recognizing the true nature of their medium and exploiting it to the utmost. To be sure, they employ artists and pay them high salaries, but instead of permitting them to function as such, they insist that the work be done according to the businessman's formula. For this reason the studio frequently does not get its money's worth from the artist. The chemist working in industry is allowed to function more within the framework of his training and background than is the artist in the movies. The most independent people in the latter industry are the cameramen, sound engineers and technicians,

who can experiment and follow through their own ideas.. . .

The conflict between business and art is not confined to different groups of men, but may be found within the same individual. The most businesslike executive is pleased when a reviewer praises his picture in terms other than box-office, and as drama. But in almost the same breath an important producer likens the product of the industry to cans of beans, pointing to some rolls of film lying in his office to make his allusion more striking, and a minute later says that he feels "like a god" with the capacity to make men laugh or cry. He then extols the movies as a combination of all the art forms, and talks of their world-wide significance.

For some men there seems to be continuous conflict, repeated for each picture, between making a movie which they can respect and the "business" demands of the front office. It is assumed, although there are many examples to the contrary, that a movie which has the respect of the artist cannot make money.