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Science Why it's so hard to treat pain in infants. Science The controversial sale of 'Big John,' the world's largest Triceratops. Science Coronavirus Coverage How antivirals may change the course of the pandemic. Science Coronavirus Coverage U. Travel A road trip in Burgundy reveals far more than fine wine. On December 28, , the first American "test-tube baby," a child born as a result of in-vitro fertilization, is born in Norfolk, Virginia.
Considered a miracle at the time, births like that of Elizabeth Jordan Carr are now common. In-vitro fertilization is a process in which At dawn, the most destructive earthquake in recorded European history strikes the Straits of Messina in southern Italy, leveling the cities of Messina in Sicily and Reggio di Calabria on the Italian mainland.
The earthquake and tsunami it caused killed an estimated , Calhoun becomes the first vice president in U. Born near Abbeville, South Carolina, in , Calhoun was an advocate of The Knights of Labor, a labor union of tailors in Philadelphia, hold the first Labor Day ceremonies in American history. The Knights of Labor was established as a secret society of Pennsylvanian tailors earlier in the year and later grew into a national body that played an South Vietnamese troops retake Binh Gia in a costly battle.
The Viet Cong launched a major offensive on December 4 and took the village of Binh Gia, 40 miles southeast of Saigon. The South Vietnamese forces recaptured the village, but only after an eight-hour battle and three Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. He attended private schools and graduated from Princeton University in before studying law at the University of Virginia and earning his Ph.
By , Technicolor had designed a three-color system with more realistic results, and for the next 25 years, all color films were produced with this improved system. Despite the success of certain color films in the s, Hollywood, like the rest of the United States, was feeling the impact of the Great Depression, and the expenses of special cameras, crews, and Technicolor lab processing made color films impractical for studios trying to cut costs.
The spike in theater attendance that followed the introduction of talking films changed the economic structure of the motion picture industry, bringing about some of the largest mergers in industry history. By , eight studios produced 95 percent of all American films, and they continued to experience growth even during the Depression. The five most influential of these studios—Warner Bros.
However, postwar inflation, a temporary loss of key foreign markets, the advent of the television, and other factors combined to bring that rapid growth to an end. In , the case of the United States v. Paramount Pictures —mandating competition and forcing the studios to relinquish control over theater chains—dealt the final devastating blow from which the studio system would never recover. Control of the major studios reverted to Wall Street, where the studios were eventually absorbed by multinational corporations, and the powerful studio heads lost the influence they had held for nearly 30 years.
James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture , ed. James Press, , vol. While economic factors and antitrust legislation played key roles in the decline of the studio system, perhaps the most important factor in that decline was the advent of the television.
In an attempt to win back diminishing audiences, studios did their best to exploit the greatest advantages film held over television. For one thing, television broadcasting in the s was all in black and white, whereas the film industry had the advantage of color.
While producing a color film was still an expensive undertaking in the late s, a couple of changes occurred in the industry in the early s to make color not only more affordable but also more realistic in its appearance.
In , as the result of antitrust legislation, Technicolor lost its monopoly on the color film industry, allowing other providers to offer more competitive pricing on filming and processing services. At the same time, Kodak came out with a multilayer film stock that made it possible to use more affordable cameras and to produce a higher quality image.
In the late s, only 12 percent of features were in color; however, by after the release of Kodak Eastmancolor more than 50 percent of movies were in color.
Another clear advantage on which filmmakers tried to capitalize was the sheer size of the cinema experience. With the release of the epic biblical film The Robe in , 20th Century Fox introduced the method that would soon be adopted by nearly every studio in Hollywood: a technology that allowed filmmakers to squeeze a wide-angle image onto conventional mm film stock, thereby increasing the aspect ratio Width-to-height ratio of a film.
This wide-screen format increased the immersive quality of the theater experience. Nonetheless, even with these advancements, movie attendance never again reached the record numbers it experienced in , at the peak of the Golden Age of Hollywood. The Cold War with the Soviet Union began in , and with it came the widespread fear of communism, not only from the outside, but equally from within.
To undermine this perceived threat, the House Un-American Activities Committee HUAC commenced investigations to locate communist sympathizers in America, who were suspected of conducting espionage for the Soviet Union.
In the highly conservative and paranoid atmosphere of the time, Hollywood, the source of a mass-cultural medium, came under fire in response to fears that subversive, communist messages were being embedded in films.
These 10, later known as the Hollywood Ten, were fired from their jobs and sentenced to serve up to a year in prison. The studios, already slipping in influence and profit, were eager to cooperate in order to save themselves, and a number of producers signed an agreement stating that no communists would work in Hollywood.
Over individuals lost their jobs in the film industry as a result of blacklisting the denial of work in a certain field or industry and HUAC investigations. These four films in particular grossed so much money at the box offices that producers began churning out low-budget copycats to draw in a new, profitable market. While this led to a rise in youth-culture films, few of them saw great success. New York: McGraw-Hill, , —2 In the s, with the rise of work by Coppola, Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and others, a new breed of director emerged.
These directors were young and film-school educated, and they contributed a sense of professionalism, sophistication, and technical mastery to their work, leading to a wave of blockbuster productions, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind , Star Wars , Raiders of the Lost Ark , and E. The computer-generated special effects that were available at this time also contributed to the success of a number of large-budget productions.
In response to these and several earlier blockbusters, movie production and marketing techniques also began to shift, with studios investing more money in fewer films in the hopes of producing more big successes.
With the opening of Jaws , one of the five top-grossing films of the decade and the highest grossing film of all time until the release of Star Wars in , Hollywood embraced the wide-release method of movie distribution, abandoning the release methods of earlier decades, in which a film would debut in only a handful of select theaters in major cities before it became gradually available to mass audiences. Jaws was released in theaters simultaneously, and the big-budget films that followed came out in anywhere from to 2, theaters nationwide on their opening weekends.
Additionally, corporations sought revenue sources beyond the movie theater, looking to the video and cable releases of their films. Introduced in , the VCR became nearly ubiquitous in American homes by with And the newly introduced concept of film-based merchandise toys, games, books, etc. The s saw the rise of two divergent strands of cinema: the technically spectacular blockbuster with special, computer-generated effects and the independent, low-budget film.
The capabilities of special effects were enhanced when studios began manipulating film digitally. Early examples of this technology can be seen in Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Jurassic Park Films with an epic scope— Independence Day , Titanic , and The Matrix —also employed a range of computer-animation techniques and special effects to wow audiences and to draw more viewers to the big screen.
At the same time, independent directors and producers, such as the Coen brothers and Spike Jonze, experienced an increased popularity, often for lower-budget films that audiences were more likely to watch on video at home.
Only one movie from a big film studio was nominated— Jerry Maguire —and the rest were independent films. The growth of both independent movies and special-effects-laden blockbusters continues to the present day. You will read more about current issues and trends and the future of the movie industry later on in this chapter. Identify four films that you would consider to be representative of major developments in the industry and in film as a medium that were outlined in this section.
Imagine you are using these films to explain movie history to a friend. Consider the following questions:. Previous Section.
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