WHO CARES WHAT PICTURE YOU SEE [221]

Talking about business when talking about art feels vulgar, but “Hollywood” means both, and its success is measured in box office figures and, perhaps soon, subscribers.

Each media conglomerate – behemoths like Disney; Comcast, owners of Universal Pictures, Sky TV and NBC; AT&T, recent buyers of Warner Bros. and HBO; and ViacomCBS, which includes Paramount Pictures – will soon have their own streaming services, requiring you to opt in to their service to get the shows they make, and the films they own. Netflix are already concentrating on their own productions as a result, saddling themselves with debt in the process. The entry of a phone company, AT&T, into this industry is not unusual, with technology and IT infrastructure companies already running their own services, like Google, Amazon and Apple.

Hollywood is now part of a vertically-integrated media industry, as in one company will now own the entire process from making a film to releasing it, controlling access to it at each stage. Ironically, the Hollywood studios were engaging in this themselves over seventy years ago, to the point where it was outlawed. 

Paramount Pictures is singled out in Classical Hollywood history for this, only because the name of the court case, “United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc,” named the largest studio, but all the main studios were caught up in what became known as the “Paramount Decree,” which separated film studios from the theatre chains they owned. 

Through these chains, the studios were able to engage in practices such as “block booking,” which tied theatres into showing a number of films from one studio for a particular time – this could also be tied into “blind buying,” where the block could be bought without the theatre knowing what the films were. Other short films that made up a programme, like documentaries or cartoons, could be included as part of the block that had to be shown alongside the main features.

Theatre chains and film studios were linked for a number of reasons. Paramount started their own chain, while Warner Bros bought one that gave them a share in a bigger studio, First National, which they also bought. Meanwhile, the Loew’s theatre chain bought one film company to provide them with films, then bought another to increase the quality, then hired a manager for both of them by buying out their company as well – this became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in that order.

As early as 1925, the Loew’s, Paramount and First National chains, and the film studios that made and distributed their films to them, were being described as a “film trust,” the same kind of trust that established Hollywood as the centre of the film industry in  the first place: the enforcement, by the Motion Picture Patents Company, of Thomas Edison’s patents for film cameras led to an exodus of many producers from New York by 1915, when it was deemed to have been illegally restraining the filmmaking trade, particularly in attempting to restrict films to one reel in length (about 11-16 minutes).

Like the “Edison trust,” the theatre practices were broken both by progress, and a court case. The US federal government took Paramount, MGM, Warner Bros, 20^th Century-Fox, RKO (another studio founded by a theatre chain), Universal, Columbia and United Artists to court over the control they exerted as theatre owners, or through block booking their films. The new rules established in 1943, but only enforced after the case reached the Supreme Court in 1948, was that block booking would be limited to five films in each block, with no shorter films included, and studios had to screen films to exhibitors so they knew what they were booking... and the studios had to sell their theatres.

[Warner Bros sold their pre-1950 library to a.a.p. in 1956, for just $21m. 2019 value: $197.3m]

That this happened in 1948 is more crucial, as this was when television started properly entering homes, and the first full schedules of programming appeared on TV networks. Film studios made numerous deals to sell the rights for their films to TV – in some cases, studios like Warner Bros left themselves with no rights to their films prior to 1950, as there was no other way to make money from them at the time. Warner Bros would finally buy those rights back in 1996, after the home video boom, but ahead of online streaming.

Ultimately, the “Paramount decree” made it easier for independent film companies, previously reliant on the bigger studios for exposure, to put films into cinemas. One such company had always believed its films were worth more than what RKO had been paying them, never having sold them away to TV, eventually setting up their own distributor in 1953, named Buena Vista [“good view”] Film Distribution Company, since renamed Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

AND IT WAS ALL YELLOW [121]

On 1^st September 2017, Yell Limited announced the next edition of the Yellow Pages will be the last, with the final Brighton edition for 2019 coming fifty years after the book was piloted there. Like Pears’ Cyclopaedia, whose final edition, after 120 years, was announced by Penguin Books on the same day, when did anyone last use the Yellow Pages?

Let’s see: opening up the final edition for my area, which arrived last month, I randomly find the category “Video & DVD Hire & Retail.” In the UK, the final Blockbuster Video closed in 2011, and the first Blu-ray disc went on sale in 2006. Yes, the same category in the previous year’s Yellow Pages didn’t have anything listed under it either, save from telling me to turn to the section titled “Music Shops (CDs & DVDs)”. Both editions have only one listing there, for an independent record store based over thirty miles away, in another county altogether – there is one in my home town, and it is not listed, along with three others I can think of, and perhaps many more besides them.

Before getting on to how the internet changed everything, TV ads for the UK Yellow Pages focussed entirely on the good things in life, rather than just referring to the book when you have a blocked drain or a broken window, which were the examples they gave. Instead, you have the examples of how it can solve problems for the better, like finding a French polisher before your parents get back, or finally finding a copy of the book on fly fishing you once wrote. On the other side, businesses will want to pay to advertise in the Yellow Pages because everyone is likely to use it – I remember the banks of shelves in my local library that collected all the phone books for the whole UK, but I haven’t been there in some time.

Bristol 2005-06 and 2016-17 editions

Now, there are simply easier, quicker, cheaper and more effective ways of finding the same information, and this was foreseen very early. Yell.com has operated since 1996, pre-dating Google by two years, and offers free listings for businesses, while continuing to make money off both online advertising and their directory enquiries number 118 247, which began in 2003. Their main competitor, the Thomson Directory, launched when British Telecom took over Yellow Pages production from Thomson in 1980, has already ended in print form, and now specialises in website design, SEO builders, and all the stuff to make your business easier to find online – their 2014 printed directory, which I found in our garage, didn’t list even one music shop. Even the major classified ad magazine Exchange & Mart converted to online only in 2009, and forms the backbone of classified ads for a number of local newspapers, although 2009 was also the year I opened an account with eBay.

The end of the Yellow Pages is really just another story of something ending that we already thought had done: it was still relevant where the enormously comprehensive books could not fit through your letterbox, but some novels are longer than the 192-page final edition I received. However, the “let your fingers do the walking logo” will continue online – it was originally designed for the US Bell System (now AT&T) in 1962, but because it was never trademarked (and AT&T were too late when they remembered to try) it is now in the public domain, alongside the gay pride flag and the Smiley Face. I could use it to launch my own Yellow Pages, but I’d need to Google the information to go into it.

GIVE US TIME TO WORK IT OUT [37]

I am lucky that my time studying for a degree was before the internet became the place where everybody, and everything, lives. Researching for essays between 2001 and 2004, I had to physically go and look for information, in bookshops and libraries, making copious notes and photocopies, and thinking about what it all means – I am in my thirties, making myself sound old. 

It is not enough knowing where you can go, it’s making sense of what you find. I am still doing that with the world now, let alone all those years ago, and that is how it should be – anyone who thinks they have it all worked out should be checked to see if they are already dead.

What stuck with me since is how the world was interpreted, in the latter half of the last century, as a time of “postmodernity.” Many thinkers, most of them French - Jean-François Lyotard, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jean Beaudrillard, Walter Truett Anderson, and so on - made their own observations, that have coalesced into a theory, borne out by movements in art and architecture at the time.

I can only be brief when describing what it all means here, because the subject is that big, and my decade-plus-old notes are that numerous. If the following makes you want to look further into the subject, my job is done.

As I understand it, postmodernity reacts against the notion of modernity, which embodied constant change, in the pursuit of progress. However, if everything is constantly changing, there is no need for the idea of progress – we are already there. We will still have new ideas, and new developments, but instead of existing to replace and overcome what came before, they now join the old ideas, bumping the out-there with the outdated, high culture and low culture, in a giant smorgasbord of, well, everything.

Everything bubbles to the surface, and what a surface to pick from. Let’s make a building that looks like a grandfather clock, like the AT&T Building in New York, now owned by Sony. Instead of straight lines and blank walls, let’s add old-style adornments, but make our own versions of them, like the eggcups on top of the former TV-am building in London, made for a breakfast TV company. Let’s collide a dystopian city landscape with 1940s film noir, as in the film “Blade Runner”. Let’s contort the human body, playing with conventions of gender, as Grace Jones, Klaus Nomi and David Bowie did. Let’s paint the Coca-Cola logo on a Han dynasty vase, making it more worthy, and worth more, as Ai Weiwei did.

In this small number of examples, there is a deliberate, ironic mixing of styles – everybody knew what they were doing, and were not just mashing things up in the hope of a nice effect. To achieve this ability of feeling that there are no rules, there is an inherent scepticism, or mistrust, of the existing through lines of history that explain all about everything to everyone, referred to as “grand narratives.” Like looking up quotations for an essay, you have to think about who came up with these narratives, why they did, and the choices they made about what to talk about, and what to leave out.

Critics of postmodernism often take this to mean there is no such thing as the truth, only interpretations, and neither does it mean you are incapable of finding the truth: if it was, you could either say whatever you liked, or nothing at all. If you can put aside the usual attempts to find a rational, objective, absolute truth, and think about how truth and knowledge are constructed out of all the discussions and interpretations that led to it, then you will understand it more than just having it handed to you on a plate.

It is generally agreed that postmodernism was no longer the prevailing view of the world by the time I learned of it, and this is at the expense of progress – when technology starts becoming indistinguishable from magic, as Arthur C. Clarke already saw in his lifetime, we are looking at how the world can become better than it already is. Perhaps, this is out of a need to destroy what makes it bad, whether it be a never-ending war against terrorism in all its forms, or mindlessly-written death threats on Twitter from people that can operate a computer, but don’t know how to boil an egg, even if they know where to look it up.

I will continue looking at postmodernism, seeing what more I can understand from it, but If everyone needs to look up right now, I am quite happy to continue looking across, making sense of where we stand.