Studios and the Star System

The studio system of movie production in the Classical Hollywood era was a method of producing films in a factory-based, assembly line method creating hundreds of films a year in predictable formulas. One particular aspect of this method utilized by the few most powerful studios of the time was called the star system. With this approach, popular actors deemed “stars” were contracted by the studios and used in many of their films, often becoming associated with a certain genre and role which the star often if not always played.

Because the studios knew people would not flock to see a movie simply because it was a crime or romance film, they were forced to come up with some other method to attract their audience to the theater. Their solution came in the form of the star system. Instead of simply marketing a film based on its content, the studios found that it was much more profitable to base their promotions around the stars themselves because the people were not drawn to the movies necessarily because of the subject matter but because of the stars. Because of this, many stars became associated with certain types of roles, such as Judy Garland as a lovable girl who sang to musical numbers, and these stars were the faces of the studios that contracted them. Since this system brought in huge profits for the major studios, they continued to recycle the same ideas and storylines as their movies grew repetitive, establishing genres such as western, horror, musical, and crime.

A good example of the effects of the star system in action is the career of Humphrey Bogart. After starring in the film “The Maltese Falcon”, Bogart became the symbol of a hardboiled and cynical character, someone courageous, sly, and possessing his own ideas on morality. In such later films as “Casablanca”, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”, and “The Big Sleep”, Bogart reprised the same sort of role, donning the fedora and clever demeanor. Bogart was the face of Warner Bros. and specifically the detective/crime genre, himself the main attraction for many films in the classical era of Hollywood. 

The Big Sleep Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGp26VI2270&feature=channel