Two Reviews - Hollywood: The Oral History and MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios
Old Hollywood, New Hollywood, and Marvel Studios
Hollywood: The Oral History
Over the summer I finally finished reading the 739-page Hollywood: The Oral History (TOH), putting my total consumption of showbiz oral histories over the past year at nearly 3,000 pages.1 The book was written by Jeanine Basinger, a pioneering film scholar who founded Wesleyan University’s Cinema Studies department, and Sam Wasson, who is famous to me because of his fantastic book on improv that is a must-read for anybody interested in the history of American comedy.
Basinger and Wasson purport to have delivered “the definitive portrait of workaday Hollywood.” To some extent that’s true. Their primary sources for the book were transcripts of interviews and lectures given at the American Film Institute, as well as some interviews conducted by the authors themselves. Readers looking for first-person perspectives of the silent-film era, and Hollywood’s Golden Age (running from roughly the introduction of sound in 1927 to 1960, when the studio system’s collapse became more apparent) won’t be disappointed.
During the studio system’s heyday, most participants in the business worked under a (usually exclusive) contract with a single studio. Those contracts provided predictability and stability as a writer, actor, or makeup artist would move from picture to picture within the same studio, probably going to work at the same place every day. This factory-like structure made sense for the studios because they pumped out roughly 40-60 films per year to keep their affiliated exhibition businesses stocked with new product.2 In general, producers working for the studios held substantial power over the end product, and at studios like MGM and 20th Century-Fox, senior executives like Irving Thalberg and Darryl Zanuck dominated the entire creative process, from assigning a script to a writer to the film’s final cut.3
Irving Thalberg: Hollywood’s Boy Wonder who was the creative engine of Mayer’s MGM and inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. His prodigious work ethic and dedication to his films made him one of the early geniuses of Hollywood, but lifelong health struggles led to his early death at 37.
The studios also had their own personalities, which presumably filtered into how audiences received their films. Universal (largely a Westerns-and-horror outfit) was “a happy-go-lucky place, seldom getting top-budget pictures. But they were pretty unconcerned about it.” MGM had a reputation for glossy, perhaps extravagant glamor; studio head Louis B. Mayer claimed his studio had “more stars than there were in the heavens,” and also spent liberally to ensure that creators had every available resource at their disposal.4
But for complex reasons, over a few decades from roughly the fifties to the mid-seventies, the studio system faded.5 The Paramount Decrees compelled separation of film distribution and exhibition, so no more vertical integration. Television started to compete with movie theaters for Americans’ eyeballs and spare time. Various Hollywood trades (directors, actors, etc.) organized, which shifted some of the control over the how and what of moviemaking to those professionals instead of concentrating it in studio leaders. Stars began to demand compensation and creative control that matched their importance to a film’s ultimate box office take. Tastes changed, and eventually the “New Hollywood” directors (Coppola, De Palma, Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese, etc.) with distinct visions became the hot new thing.6 In various ways, all these changes resulted in a redistribution or a shifting of creative control from studio producers to freelance directors and other talent working on a per-project basis instead of under a contract running for a defined period of time.7 That’s the Hollywood we tend to recognize today: we go to see a Tarantino or DiCaprio film and rarely think twice about whether it’s from Warner Brothers or Universal. It’s a fascinating story that TOH tells quite well, and for that reason alone, the book is worth picking up.
“New Hollywood” at George Lucas’s 50th birthday party. Left to right: Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, Robert Zemeckis, Francis Ford Coppola.
After the studio system’s collapse, TOH fades in the homestretch into yada yadas; the studio system ends on page 516, and the book ends at page 739. There’s some good stuff in those last 200 pages, but not nearly the same degree of detail as I came to expect from Basinger and Wasson based on the first 500 pages.8 Names in the book become more familiar, but the speakers’ reflections are frequently anodyne, presumably because of a professional interest in avoiding offending anybody. Live From New York (an SNL oral history) and The Fifty-Year Mission (a two-volume oral history of the Star Trek franchise) share the same problem; this is probably an unavoidable drawback of the oral history model, where every statement has the speaker’s name next to it. It’s not a fatal flaw, but it does mean that TOH doesn’t exactly deliver on its implied promise to cover the history of Hollywood from the silent era to present.
MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios
This year I also read MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios. It’s a book so burly and ambitious in scope that it took three authors (Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards) to tell the story of how the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” (MCU) developed. Even the most dyed-in-the-wool Marvel fanboy will find new tidbits here.9 Who would have thought that the making of 2008’s The Incredible Hulk taught the burgeoning Marvel Studios valuable lessons about controlling talent and process? Apparently star Edward Norton was uninterested in the intense technical motion-capture work necessary to portray the Hulk, despite insisting that he portray both the green monster as well as Hulk’s human alter-ego Bruce Banner.
If you read both TOH and MCU in short order, it’s clear that Marvel Studios has adapted its development and filmmaking processes to serve Marvel’s unique needs. To date, Marvel has released more than 30 films10 since 2008’s Iron Man, and all of those films are intertwined in a larger story, which necessitates close coordination of scripts, schedules, talent’s multi-picture deals, you get the idea.11 All the merchandise that accompanies a Marvel release also needs pre-planning. These demands called for a centralized process more robust than the “New Hollywood” system could deliver, unless Marvel Superproducer Kevin Feige and his staff made some tweaks.
Kevin Feige: Marvel’s Irving Thalberg, and Chief Hat Enthusiast.
Possibly the most significant tweak Marvel Studios has made to the reigning system of film production is its reliance on a visual development department. MCU’s authors trace this innovation to the role played by the Weta design team on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, who ensured that units shooting three films scattered all over New Zealand all looked coherent. Instead of employing visual development artists on a per-project basis, Marvel Studios keeps them on staff and involves them in initial concept art (e.g., designing the look of Iron Man’s armor) through postproduction (where they can help polish visual effects), and then has them stay on staff to work on the next film and provide continuity in the films’ visual language.12 According to MCU, filmmakers—the directors—receive ideas from the visual development team, making “viz-dev” a crucial early voice in the creative process. As viz-dev-er Andy Park put it, “‘We’re designing, essentially, the look and feel of the film.’”
In addition to early conceptual and postproduction work, viz-dev evolved to define “keyframe” moments in the films.
Keyframe from The Avengers: The shot starting at about 1:19 where we circle the whole team is a literal applause moment in the film, and is an example of the type of “keyframe” sequences that Marvel’s viz-dev contributes to each project.
Marvel Studios also makes extensive use of “pre-visualization,” whereby the studio animates key sequences—especially action scenes—before production even begins. MCU: “Almost two-thirds of [Captain America: The Winter Soldier] existed in pre-viz before it was shot, taking the guesswork—and the spontaneity—out of the production process. The cinematography and pacing were largely determined beforehand.” The extent of the director’s involvement in pre-viz is unclear, but MCU suggests that this process can sideline the director: a director who was a candidate for Black Widow was told not to worry about the action scenes because Marvel’s pre-viz would handle them. The authors also observe that Marvel directors seem to go out of their way to emphasize that they contributed to the pre-viz process. In an interview, Chloe Zhao, director of The Eternals, said that “for a year and a half, three times a week for a couple hours a day, I was sitting in front of a big screen making decisions for every detail of how visual effects could look in the real world.”
A discussion of pre-viz in the creation of one of the pivotal action sequences of Avengers: Endgame.
So is it true that pre-viz artists supplant Marvel’s directors? Who knows. Marvel’s main pre-viz vendor certainly has an interest in overstating its importance to the process, while the directors in an otherwise auteur-obsessed film culture are unlikely to cop to taking a backseat on their own movies.
However, consider this: many Marvel directors are relatively untested at the scale, expense, and complexity of a Marvel film. The aforementioned Chloe Zhao directed Nomadland, about a woman who lives in a van, before Eternals. She had stellar credentials, including several Oscars for Nomadland, but had not worked on a project with the scale of a Marvel film. Same goes for the golden-boy Russo Brothers (Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Civil War; Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame), who caught Kevin Feige’s attention because of their work on the television comedy Community. These directors don’t necessarily enter the process with deep familiarity with visual effects or stunts that are the bread-and-butter of the Marvel films. Nevertheless, Marvel Studios thrusts them into a high-profile role managing an entry in the flagship brands of one of America’s leading companies, where adherence to deadlines and a house style are both crucial. Failure will be public and painful. Why might Marvel be comfortable doing that? Probably because first-time Marvel directors are surrounded by people like Third Floor’s Gerardo Ramirez, who has done pre- and post-viz on at least six Marvel projects. Does that mean directors play no role in determining looks via pre-viz? Definitely not. But it probably does mean that they are more likely to lean on the experience of the people who have been there before: the Marvel Studios executives, and the pre-viz and viz-dev teams.
Marvel Studios’ viz-dev and pre-viz innovations are a throwback to the approach of the old-school studio system: salaried studio employees working from picture to picture as if on a production line.13 In that sense, Marvel isn’t innovating so much as they’re riffing on an older way of doing business.
So can Marvel chug along in perpetuity with a couple flicks per year in the house style? Are we, the viewing public, condemned to a future of cookie-cutter films, each of which climaxes with a few beautiful people grimacing at the camera as they blast each other with varied hues of computer-generated energy? Maybe not. The box-office struggles of projects like Ant Man And the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels suggests that a Marvel logo alone is insufficient to guarantee turnout. Marvel itself has admitted that the luster is fading, and audiences are less interested in catching the latest Marvel release than they were say, ten years ago. It’s too early to tell, but the centralized approach that has served Marvel Studios well for nearly twenty years may no longer work. In an attempt to gin up excitement for Marvel’s future, the studio announced the return of Robert Downey Jr. to the fold as Doctor Doom. Maybe that’s an acknowledgment that talent and stars still matter, even when they have to share billing with the underlying intellectual property. It’s too early to tell if the RDJ announcement signals a shift to a less-centralized model for the MCU, but here’s hoping.14
The views expressed here are mine alone (and I don’t even know that I’ll stick to them, if pressed). They should not be attributed to anybody else, including (but not limited to) my employer, employer’s clients, friends, family, or pets (current, former, or future).
Live From New York (SNL oral history - 745 pages) + The Fifty-Year Mission (two-volume oral history of Star Trek - 554 pages + 843 pages respectively) + H:TOH = grand total of 2,881 pages.
Compare those release numbers (amounting to as many as 350 films released in a single year) to the 130 theatrical wide releases in the U.S. in 2023, according to Variety. That 2023 figure was a 41 percent increase over 2022’s 92 releases. Variety attributed the increase to studios’ frontloading of releases in anticipation of strikes that would prevent talent from promoting projects. There may also have been titles that were held back in ’22 due to COVID concerns.
It would be a mistake to over-generalize this point though. Paramount’s Buddy DeSylva was, apparently, more hands-off which may have led to that studio’s reputation as a “director’s studio” rather than a producer’s. Republic, which was a B-tier studio, also probably gave directors more leeway.
If you want to learn about studio heads like Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, Adolph Zukor, and the Warner Brothers, I’d recommend Neal Gabler’s An Empire Of Their Own.
For more on the post-studio-system era, try Peter Biskind or William Goldman. Biskind’s Easy Rider, Raging Bulls covers the birth of the cult of the director through the two titular films, as well as Jaws, The Godfather, Chinatown, etc. and Down and Dirty Pictures on the rise of independent film in the late 80s and early 90s (sc. Miramax and the Weinstein Bros., Clerks, Sundance, Pulp Fiction, The Crying Game). Note that Biskind’s subjects often dispute the veracity of stuff he relates in his books. Goldman wrote the essential Adventures in the Screen Trade, and Which Lie Did I Tell? is also good.
There was a generation of directors even before the “Movie Brats” whom I listed, but you’re probably less likely to recognize the names. Still, the broader theme holds: all these directors brought distinct sensibilities to their work that was less compatible with the studios’ factory style.
Again, don’t overread the point: “talent” might have a strong relationship that leads them to work frequently with/for the same studio, but the big stars’ negotiating power, and ability to cross the street to a different studio if they don’t get what they want, improved as the studio system faded.
For more casual fans, consider the four-part podcast With Great Power: The Rise of Superhero Cinema from Ben Fritz of the Wall Street Journal.
We’re moving from the late 40s up to the 70s in this paragraph.
Arriving at an exact number requires you to decide whether the Tom Holland Spider-Man films (made and released in cooperation with Sony) count.
Some are obviously more intertwined than others.
That might not be a great thing if you think Marvel movies tend to blur together, but that’s a topic for another day.
Granted, Marvel works a lot with outside vendors (namely The Third Floor), so a lot of pre-viz is probably contractors rather than studio employees, but they’re still moving from Marvel film to Marvel film, unlike the directors who are often one-time hired help.
A less-centralized model might look more like the scattershot approach that Marvel’s rival, DC, has backed into due (largely) to a succession of poorly-received projects. One compelling argument against the DC model and in favor of Marvel’s regimented approach is that Marvel’s core strength is the interconnected stories and characters who can appear in each other’s movies, so loosening up on the massive universe would destroy what’s special about the franchise to begin with. That’s true, to a point, but decades of experience with this concept in comic books demonstrates that eventually these universes become so interconnected that they are impenetrable to all but the most dedicated fans, which necessitates periodic “reboots.” The same thing appears to be happening with the MCU, as plot points in the movies draw on television shows (and vice-versa), and watching one of the films now feels like showing up to class for the first time halfway through the semester and without doing any of the assigned reading.