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😠 Sometimes things make me frowny face so hard that I have to write about them. I call it "the grump." This grump is about when journalists and essayists write sweeping declarations about film history without actually... studying the history of the film industry!!

Now, it's true that I'm a contrarian who has built an academic career around studying things that other people think are inconsequential and would probably rather forget. But it's also true that it's not that hard to read a book about how the film industry operated as a business in the first half of the 20th century. And when a writer doesn't do that, that writer can end up making appallingly ahistorical arguments in a major outlet.

The Netflix Misconception

Take, for example, this claim by Will Tavlin in an n+1 essay about how Netflix broke the movies:

For a century, the business of running a Hollywood studio was straightforward. The more people watched films, the more money the studios made. With Netflix, however, audiences don't pay for individual films. They pay a subscription to watch everything, and this has enabled a strange phenomenon to take root. Netflix's movies don't have to abide by any of the norms established over the history of cinema: they don't have to be profitable, pretty, sexy, intelligent, funny, well-made, or anything else that pulls audiences into theater seats.

It sounds reasonably well-argued, and yet it is simply not true. It's so not true that the United States government took Paramount Pictures all the way to the Supreme Court about it in 1948. The resulting anti-trust standard, known as the Paramount Decree, completely reshaped Hollywood, ended the studio system, paved the way for European, arthouse, and porn cinema to gain popularity in the US, and eventually led (albeit indirectly) to Rudy Giuliani being a man we had to watch sweat out his hair dye in public.

The Block-Booking Reality

When the US won its Supreme Court case against Paramount in 1948, the resulting judgement forced the major movie studios to do a couple of things, including end the long-established practice known as "blind buying," and reduce the amount of "block booking" they could force exhibitors into. So while an audience member pre-1948 might have paid for an individual film (but more likely a double feature, or a program of shorts and a feature), the theatres themselves were forced to essentially "subscribe" to a block of a studio's output, sight unseen.

The studios loved this pre-1948 arrangement, because it meant they could produce mostly forgettable garbage (film prints were literally thrown away once they had been screened enough times) alongside a small handful of big budget, quality pictures with big stars that were guaranteed to draw audiences. Small theatre chains and independent exhibitors, on the other hand, were trapped in a deal with the devil: if they wanted the big pictures that equaled big ticket sales, they had to junk up their schedules with the dreck, too. Again, this was such a problem that the US Supreme Court had to step in.

Quality vs. Quantity in Studio Output

Tavlin goes on to write that "high output alone can't account for Netflix's garbage quality. In the 1920s and '30s, studios like Paramount and Warner Bros. put out as many as seventy movies per year," without asking whether or not all 70 movies in a year would have been good, successful, or even marginally memorable.

Of course they weren't.

Let's take Paramount's 1933 for example: out of the 60 films the studio released that year, there are some gems, like the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup and Ernst Lubitsch's Design for Living (the former is now in the Library of Congress, the latter in the Criterion Collection). There are a couple of lesser-known films with historical significance, like the Mae West-Cary Grant sex comedy She Done Him Wrong (in the LoC) and the Mae West-Cary Grant sex comedy I'm No Angel.

There's also the brutal William Faulkner adaptation The Story of Temple Drake, which was only recently restored and made widely available (and is also in the Criterion Collection). But have you ever even heard of The Thundering Herd or College Humor or King of the Jungle or Hello, Everybody! or Big Executive or Song of the Eagle, let alone seen them? How about International House, Tillie and Gus, or the live-action Alice in Wonderland, all of which starred W.C. Fields (who also had 5 short films distributed in theatres during the same year)?

The Mythical Golden Age of Exhibition

I've grumped too long already but it's also worth mentioning that our idea of a quiet, respectful, fully-engaged moviegoing experience (as opposed to the distracted viewing we do at home) is fundamentally ahistorical as well. For most of moviegoing history, the theatre was not a place where we viewed movies without distractions. Quite the opposite, especially in the era when a movie ran back-to-back all day long and patrons could enter and exit at any point. (And then there was the porn theatre era...)

With all of that said, "Tide Pod cinema" is a wonderful phrase, and I do think it describes something important about contemporary streaming cinema. But I maintain that the point could be made without lapsing into ahistoricism!