Eric Hoyt’s original focus and smart approach provides a new perspective on what we may have considered familiar film history.
Eric Hoyt, Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries Before Home Video, University of California Press, 2014, 288 pp.
As a film historian I think about movies a lot, however I’ve never been more conscious of the physical size and weight of film until a recent visit to a collector’s apartment in Manhattan. Standing in his kitchenette – one of the many rooms given over to his film collection – he explained: “I removed the stove for more space. I couldn’t use it anyway because the heat would damage the film. Now I just microwave everything.” I returned a look that expressed something of both awe and concern. The space, effort, and cost required to preserve film proves considerable so if you’re not storing it out of love it needs to have value. While individuals may be susceptible to the former, the latter motivates corporations. “When did old movies become valuable?” This is the question Eric Hoyt asks at the start of his book Hollywood Vault, which traces the changing valuation of film libraries across six decades from their emergence in the silent era through to their acquisition by conglomerates in the late sixties (2).
Hoyt’s study presents the first thoroughly researched history of the business of American film libraries. Challenging commonly cited linear accounts and assumptions about how film libraries became more valuable over time via the introduction of new technologies, Hoyt chronicles a narrative “rooted in markets” comprised of “starts and stops, buyer demand and studio resistance, and most of all, a shifting media and cultural marketplace” (4, 2). As Hoyt states, the “business of film libraries is not a top-down, supply-side model. It has always hinged on the interrelated marketplace participants including exhibitors, audiences, critics, and labor groups” (116). Therefore, drawing upon numerous archival sources originating from studios, court records, fans, and historical trade papers, Hoyt reconstructs for the reader the “entire ecology of media industries” that enabled (or prevented) the circulation of reissued films reaching theaters and televisions (6). The book’s primary focus “on the economic value of film libraries in a marketplace context” locates Hoyt’s book within the field of media industry studies aligning it with a number of scholars that include: Thomas Schatz, Douglas Gomery, Kristen Thompson, Derek Kompare and David Pierce (5). The author’s original focus and smart approach provides a new perspective on what we may have considered familiar film history, while at the same time telling the story of how Americans came to watch old movies.
Comprehensively and chronologically organized over six chapters, each chapter of Hollywood Vault spans a decade of film library history starting with the 1910s. The book also contains an epilogue in which Hoyt convincingly argues that the “early history of film libraries offers many lessons for the contemporary digital marketplace”(3). Engagingly written, chapters open by addressing a dramatic tension surrounding the circulation of reissues, which Hoyt then contextualizes by providing a macro structural analysis of the marketplace before returning his focus to illustrative case studies. What could have proved something of a dry subject about industry dealings becomes enlivened by the author’s descriptions of studio strategies, fan culture, stars, key personalities and films.
While each chapter can be read as a standalone account of the business of film libraries during a particular decade, it proves rewarding to consider the work in its entirety as telling the story of film vaults as their value transforms alongside industry and cultural upheavals. In the 1910s owners of previously distributed movies learned to exploit their films by retitling and reissuing them to theaters across the country. This practice elicited accusations of defrauding the public and prompted various legal decisions relating to copyright. While the 1910s demonstrated the financial advantages of reissuing films, in the 1920s film studios subordinated the business of reissues to pursue their other entrenching interests such as production and controlling a market share via their first-run theaters. By the 1930s, following the widespread adoption of sound, the value in owning libraries shifted from the right to copy and reissue films, to the right to employ old films for their derivative use as stock footage and remakes. For example, Warner Bros. the “largest library of silent feature films in world history” harvested their vault for stock footage before destroying a modestly estimated 626 films (74). It wasn’t until the postwar years of the 1940s that the studios began using their film vaults as profit centers that had the added advantage of blocking competitors attempting to enter the industry. In the 1950s and 60s intermediary syndicators Matty Fox and Eliot Hyman developed models that would exploit film libraries for television, with Hyman going on to “aggressively harness libraries as foundations for cross media expansion” thus facilitating his establishment of the production company Seven Arts (3). Hollywood Vault allows the reader to follow this developing story, and to trace with the author the key thematic concerns surrounding film libraries that run throughout the decades, arising at different levels of the film business.
Hoyt identifies five key recurring concepts that come to influence the value of film libraries. These thematic concerns prove interrelated and receive equal allotted attention. For example, intricately tied to the reissue of old movies, is labors’ campaign for artistic control and remuneration, which arises in every decade that Hoyt’s study covers. Hoyt writes, that “the workers who built the films in Hollywood’s vault are an essential part” of the story of film libraries (11). For example, in the tens Henry Aitkin the co-founder of Triangle Film Corporation discovered the newly established star system meant the most successful reissues proved to be star-driven pictures. Owning the copyright to early films featuring the major stars William S. Hart and Douglas Fairbanks, Aitkin retitled, occasionally recut, and reissued these films under the banner the “Good one’s Never Die.” Hart and Fairbanks both filed suit claiming Triangle was defrauding their fans. Later stars such as Ingrid Bergman and John Wayne would also find their current pictures competing with their earlier ones as studios exploited the stars’ successes. Hoyt demonstrates that labor disputes did not simply begin in the thirties with unionization. By telling the story of film libraries, Hoyt not only reframes assumptions about the history of technology, but also demonstrates how “the history of labor’s demand for residual payments and moral rights has a much longer legacy – one fundamentally about power and equity” (11).
Hoyt writes history with an archivist’s eye, registering along the way where archives were unintentionally created such as in instances of piracy, or when Warner Bros. culled their films for stock footage. Given Hoyt’s appreciation for the role that film libraries and archives have played in fostering film culture and scholarship it seems more than fitting he should be one of the chief architects behind the search platform Lantern that serves the extensive Digital Media History Library (DMHL). This invaluable online resource providing access to historical trade and fan papers is transforming media scholars’ research and publications. As not just one of the creators of the DMHL, but also a user, Hoyt demonstrates on his website that accompanies the book examples of how his research drew upon a variety of now readily available source material from this online library.
While the historical scope of this study ends in 1970, Hollywood Vault provides a background to several contemporary concerns within the industry. This study feels most timely as today companies such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu vie for studio back catalogs while subscribers lobby online and check eagerly to discover which of their favorite movies and television shows will next become available for streaming. As my opening example of one nutritionally deprived film collector illustrates to an extreme, people love to re-watch their favorite old movies and will often pay a high price to see them again and again; Hollywood Vault tells the story of the maneuvers that have made this practice possible.