Sunday, 10 August 2014
During the golden age of Hollywood, which lasted from the end of the silent era in American cinema in the late 1920s to the early 1960s, films were prolifically issued by the Hollywood studios. The start of the golden age was arguably when The Jazz Singer was released in 1927 and increased box-office profits for films as sound was introduced to feature films. Most Hollywood pictures adhered closely to a genre—Western, slapstick comedy, musical, animated cartoon, biopic (biographical picture)—and the same creative teams often worked on films made by the same studio. For instance, Cedric Gibbons andHerbert Stothart always worked on MGM films, Alfred Newman worked at Twentieth Century Fox for twenty years, Cecil B. DeMille's films were almost all made at Paramount, director Henry King's films were mostly made for Twentieth-Century Fox, etc.
After The Jazz Singer was released in 1927, Warner Brothers gained huge success and was able to acquire its own string of movie theatres, after purchasing Stanley Theatres and First National Productions in 1928; MGM had also owned a string of theatres since forming in 1924, known as Loews Theatres, and the Fox film Corporation owned the Fox Theatre strings as well. Also, RKO, another company that owned theatres, had formed in 1928 from a merger between Keith-Orpheum Theaters and the Radio Corporation of America.
