Book
Part IV: Production notes: Chapter 20: Standardizing professionalism and showmanship.
| Title: | Part IV: Production notes: Chapter 20: Standardizing professionalism and showmanship. |
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| Authors: | Wurtzler, Steve, Tinkcom, Matthew, Villarejo, Amy |
| Source: | Keyframes: Popular Cinema & Cultural Studies; 2001, p359-346, 18p |
| Abstract: | This chapter focuses on the performance of motion picture projectionists during the early sync-sound era in the U.S. Contemporary film historians often follow the logic of the film industry itself in conceptualizing business practices according to the tripartite distinction between production, distribution, and exhibition. In a largely uninterrogated move, historians take the product of film production to be a single, definitive film text, as if the productive labor of the Hollywood system culminated prior to the physical distribution of films nationally. Some countervailing practices attest to the extent to which the business practices of U.S. cinema often resulted in the production and, importantly, the exhibition of geographically and temporally contingent texts. Newsreels during the early 1930s, for example, were designed so that potentially problematic segments might be eliminated at the discretion of local theater managers. Film studios and theater owners clashed throughout the silent film era over the speed at which local exhibitors and projectionists presented films. While some film producers and cinematographers sought to standardize camera speeds, projectionists, often at the prompting of theater owners and managers seeking to fit an overly long program of films into a predetermined schedule of starting times, operated film projectors at a much faster rate. |
| Database: | Supplemental Index |
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