Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment:
Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)
PART 1
THE CRAP-GAME
CHAPTER 1
TAKING HOLLYWOOD FOR GRANTED
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"MOVIES ARE YOUR BEST ENTERTAINMENT"
(Industry promotional slogan of early 1950, hastily with-
drawn when it was pointed out that its initials spelt
M. A. Y. B. E.)
What do you go for, go see a
show for?"--lyrics to Dames
entertainment is a type of
performance produced for pro-
fit, performed before a gener-
alised audience (the "public"),
by a trained, paid group who
do nothing else but produce
performances which have the
sole (conscious) aim of pro-
viding pleasure.Richard Dyer
The American cinema was a commercial institution, and its films were commercial products. Any assessment of those products must acknowledge this economic fact of
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life, and not merely because Hollywood took an industrial attitude to its own activities. Film, by its very nature, proposes a symbiotic relationship between the commercial and the aesthetic . It exists simultaneously in two states. Materially, it is a roll of celluloid, wound onto a metal spool and stored in a tin can. In use, it is a progressive series of "moving pictures, " evanescent shadow images projected onto a blank white screen. Unlike books or paintings, film undergoes a material transformation when it is viewed or experienced. This transformation is engineered by a combination of mechanical and optical processes needing complex projection equipment as well as a large space across which the magnified image is thrown. The economics of these material prerequisites forcibly encourage film to project itself before as large an audience as possible. The evolution of viewing apparatus, from the Kinetoscope and peepshow to the nickelodeon, picture palace and Cinerama, traces a history and an economic logic of larger pictures projected in front of larger audiences. The institution of the cinema is first of all a physical institution of the buildings in which it takes place.
