In an interview on Hollywood

And The Genius of the System?

It’s about how gradually the stars became more savvy: they started saying I want to do this or that kind of movie, because people don’t like to be told they’re one sort of star. But people didn’t want to see Bogart going insane for example: he’s a cynic, and also a romantic, and you want to see that Warners’ style. That’s something Schatz deals with ­– that all the major studios developed a very specific house style. MGM was the kind of massive, prestige house – they famously said they never made B-grade movies – whereas Warners had this reputation for gang movies, and Jimmy Cagney was their big star. Universal developed the horror genre which was cheap, and as a result the players that were contracted to these studios fitted those house styles. But the stars become more important, and eventually the directors did too, largely down to Hitchcock, who inspired auteurs like Spielberg, Cimino and Coppola.

I suppose the story of his book is that by the 70s these really incredibly well-oiled machines were looked at as stifling creativity and hemming in artists and making them all play to type and so on. Everybody thought that these auteurs who came along with these huge productions, and really just used studios as somewhere they rented space, were the right thing, that they were the future and that movies should be made like this and that the old ways never produced anything good – but that’s nonsense. The studios turned out some of the greatest movies in history: if you look at the period from the 30s through the 40s, maybe even to 1950, the product they turned out is incredible, really high calibre, and amazing stars emerged from it.

In an interview on Where Good TV Ideas Come From

Tell me about your next book, The Genius of the System by Thomas Schatz – about Hollywood in the golden age.

This is an amazing book. It’s an academic book, but it reads like a novel. It was a very important book for me when I was studying film and television. Film theory was dominated for many years by the idea of the auteur, the single visionary director who managed, in the hell of the industrial system that was Hollywood’s studio system, to nonetheless produce amazing individual work. Thomas Schatz’s book is a complete antidote to that. While he doesn’t in any way argue that Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford weren’t great directors, he talks about the vigour and energy of the classical Hollywood system. It’s not about these maverick individuals succeeding by fighting against the system.

Rather, it’s the system that made them who they were…

Hence the book’s title. It’s the push-and-pull of an industrial money-making system that is also a creative system at the same time. And I think that is one of the essences of television now. On the one hand, it’s a money-making machine, so there are a lot of people out there who really just badly want to make a lot of money. Since a lot of things involved in making television and movies are unbelievably expensive – you won’t be able to make a multimillion-dollar movie, or television series with computer graphics, just because you have a good idea – there is always this intersection between money and creativity. The two of them are intimately connected. Schatz’s book goes through the real detail of how it worked, how people made movies like Gone with the Wind, or Warner Brothers crime films, or film noir.

I was just looking at it this morning, actually, and there’s a list of ‘Ten Commandments for Studio Readers’ from Thalberg, who ran MGM’s story department for a long time. Number one is, ‘Your most important duty is to find great ideas – you’ll find them buried under tons of mediocre suggestions.’ Another one is, ‘See at least two full-length motion pictures each week.’ Also, ‘Train yourself to recognise sincerity in a story.’ They’re almost exactly the same things that you’d say to a development researcher in a TV company now. I thought it was astounding that so long ago the rules about how to create good ideas were almost the same.