Film studio
A film studio (also known as movie studio or simply studio) is a major
entertainment company or motion picture company that has its own privately
owned studio facility or facilities that are used to make films, which is handled
by the production company. Most firms in the entertainment industry have
never owned their own studios, but have rented space from other companies.
There are also independently owned studio facilities, who have never produced
a motion picture of their own because they are not entertainment companies or
motion picture companies; they are companies who sell only studio space.
The largest film studio in the world is Ramoji Film City, in Hyderabad,
India.[1][2]
Contents
Beginnings
The "majors"
The minors
The independents
Typical major film studio components
Film to television
Today
Independent film and the studios
See also
References
External links
Beginnings
In 1893, Thomas Edison built the first movie studio in the United States when
he constructed the Black Maria, a tarpaper-covered structure near his
laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey, and asked circus, vaudeville, and
dramatic actors to perform for the camera. He distributed these movies at
vaudeville theaters, penny arcades, wax museums, and fairgrounds. The first
film serial, What Happened to Mary, was released by the Edison company in
1912. The pioneering Thanhouser film
studio was founded in New Rochelle, New
York in 1909 by American theatrical
impresario Edwin Thanhouser. The
company produced and released 1,086
films between 1910 and 1917, successfully
distributing them around the world.
In the early 1900s, companies started
moving to Los Angeles, California.
Although electric lights were by then widely The Babelsberg Studio near Berlin
available, none were yet powerful enough was the first large-scale film studio in
to adequately expose film; the best source the world and the forerunner to
of illumination for motion picture Hollywood. It still produces movies
every year.
production was natural sunlight. Some
movies were shot on the roofs of buildings
in Downtown Los Angeles. Early movie
producers also relocated to Southern California to escape Edison's Motion
Picture Patents Company, which controlled almost all the patents relevant to
movie production at the time.
The first movie studio in the Hollywood area was Nestor Studios, opened in
1911 by Al Christie for David Horsley. In the same year, another 15
independents settled in Hollywood. Other production companies eventually
settled in the Los Angeles area in places such as Culver City, Burbank, and what
would soon become known as Studio City in the San Fernando Valley.
The "majors"
The Big 5
By the mid-1920s, the evolution of a handful of American production
companies into wealthy motion picture industry conglomerates that owned
their own studios, distribution divisions, and theaters, and contracted with
performers and other filmmaking personnel, led to the sometimes confusing
equation of "studio" with "production company" in industry slang. Five large
companies, 20th Century Fox, RKO Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Warner
Bros., and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer came to be known as the "Big Five," the
"majors," or "the Studios" in trade publications such as Variety, and their
management structures and practices collectively came to be known as the
"studio system."
The Little 3
Although they owned few or no theaters to guarantee sales of their films,
Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures, and United Artists also fell under these
rubrics, making a total of eight generally recognized "major studios". United
Artists, although its controlling partners owned not one but two production
studios during the Golden Age, had an often-tenuous hold on the title of
"major" and operated mainly as a backer and distributor of independently
produced films.
In fall 2019, movie mogul Tyler Perry opened Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta.
The studio is bigger than any movie studio in Hollywood. [3]
The minors
Smaller studios operated simultaneously with "the majors." These included
operations such as Republic Pictures, active from 1935, which produced films
that occasionally matched the scale and ambition of the larger studio, and
Monogram Pictures, which specialized in series and genre releases. Together
with smaller outfits such as PRC TKO and Grand National, the minor studios
filled the demand for B movies and are sometimes collectively referred to as
Poverty Row.
The independents
The Big Five's ownership of movie theaters was eventually opposed by eight
independent producers, including Samuel Goldwyn, David O. Selznick, Walt
Disney, Hal Roach, and Walter Wanger. In 1948, the federal government won a
case against Paramount in the Supreme Court, which ruled that the vertically
integrated structure of the movie industry constituted an illegal monopoly. This
decision, reached after twelve years of litigation, hastened the end of the studio
system and Hollywood's "Golden Age".
Typical major film studio components
By the 1950s, the physical components of a typical major film studio had
become standardized. Since then, a major film studio has usually been housed
inside a physically secure compound with a high wall, which protects
filmmaking operations from unwanted interference from paparazzi and crazed
fans of leading movie stars.[4] Movement in and out of the studio is normally
limited to specific gates (often capped with grand decorative arches), where
visitors must stop at a boom barrier and explain the purpose of their visit to a
security guard. Studio premises generally feature multiple sound stages along
with an outside backlot, as well as offices for studio executives and production
companies.[5] There is normally a studio "commissary", which is the traditional
term in the film industry for what other industries call a company cafeteria.[5]
The largest film studios are full-service enterprises offering the entire range of
production and post-production services necessary to make a film, including
costumes, props, cameras, sets, special effects, cutting, editing, mixing, scoring,
ADR, re-recording, and foley.[5] Early nitrate film was notoriously flammable,
and sets were and are still very flammable, which is why film studios built in the
early-to-mid 20th century have water towers to facilitate firefighting.
Film to television
Halfway through the 1950s, with television proving to be a lucrative enterprise
not destined to disappear any time soon—as many in the film industry had once
hoped—movie studios were increasingly being used to produce programming
for the burgeoning medium. Some midsize film companies, such as Republic
Pictures, eventually sold their studios to TV production concerns, which were
eventually bought by larger studios, such as the American Broadcasting
Company which was purchased by Disney in 1996.
Today
With the growing diversification of studios into such fields as video games,
television stations, broadcast syndication, television, theme parks, home video
and publishing, they have become multi-national corporations.
International markets account for growing proportion of Hollywood movie
revenue with approximately 70% of total movie revenue coming from
international ticket sales and the Chinese domestic box office revenue is
projected to outpace those of USA in 2020. [6] The growth of film studios and
filmmaking outside of Hollywood and the USA have produced popular
international film studio locations such as Hollywood North (Vancouver and
Toronto in Canada), Bollywood (Mumbai, India), and Nollywood (Lagos,
Nigeria).[7]
As the studios increased in size they began to rely on production companies,
like J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot Productions, to handle many of the creative and
physical production details of their feature films. Instead, the studios
transformed into financing and distribution entities for the films made by their
affiliated production companies. With the decreasing cost of CGI and visual
effects, many studios sold large chunks of their once massive studio spaces or
backlots to private real-estate developers. Century City in Los Angeles was once
part of the 20th Century Studios backlot, which was among the largest and
most famous of the studio lots. In most cases, portions of the backlots were
retained and are available for rental by various film and television productions.
Some studios offer tours of their backlots, while Universal Pictures allows
visitors to its adjacent Universal Studios Hollywood theme park to take a tram
tour of the backlot where films such as Psycho and Back to the Future were
once shot.
Independent film and the studios
In the 1980s and 90s, as the cost of professional 16mm film equipment
decreased, along with the emergence of non-film innovations such as S-VHS
and Mini-DV cameras, many young filmmakers began to make films outside the
"studio system". Filmmakers and producers such as Mike Judge, Adam
Sandler, Jim Jarmusch, Robert Rodriguez, Steven Soderbergh, Quentin
Tarantino, Kevin Smith and Richard Linklater made films that pushed
boundaries in ways the studios were then reluctant to do. In response to these
films, many distributed by "mini-studios" like Miramax the "majors" created
their own in-house mini-studios meant to focus on edgier "independent"
content. Focus Features was created by Universal Pictures and Fox Searchlight
was created by 20th Century Fox for this purpose.
See also
Film producer
Film release
History of film
Major film studio
Outline of film
Prestige picture
Production company
References
1. "Guinness world record" ([Link]
ds/largest-film-studio).
2. "China to build world's most expensive film studio" ([Link]
.com/film/2013/sep/23/china-studio-wang-jianlin-world-s-most-expensive).
3. Johnson, CJk; Johnson, Tee (November 4, 2019). / "Tyler Perry Studios
Opens In Atlanta" ([Link]
4. Scott, Allen J. (2005). On Hollywood: The Place, the Industry ([Link]
[Link]/books?id=EzCOBoy1o_MC&pg=PA91). Princeton: Princeton
University Press. p. 91. ISBN 9780691116839. Retrieved 3 April 2020.
5. Scott, Allen J. (2005). On Hollywood: The Place, the Industry ([Link]
[Link]/books?id=EzCOBoy1o_MC&pg=PA82). Princeton: Princeton
University Press. p. 82. ISBN 9780691116839. Retrieved 3 April 2020.
6. Phibs, Melissa. "The Increasingly Important Foreign Box Office" ([Link]
[Link]/[Link]). How Stuff Works.
Retrieved 26 September 2019.
7. Brook, Tom. "How the global box office is changing Hollywood" ([Link]
[Link]/culture/story/20130620-is-china-hollywoods-future). BBC Culture.
External links
Who built the first film studio in the United States? ([Link]
web/20180717085326/[Link]
studio-in-the-united-states)
Columbia Pictures Production Crew Contract 1945 ([Link]
[Link]/hollywood/[Link])
A Film Studio for the Age of Virtual Reality ([Link]
m/news/534791/a-film-studio-for-the-age-of-virtual-reality/). "A Montreal-
based film studio is making movies that you’ll watch with a virtual-reality
headset, pointing the way to a whole new form of entertainment." Rachel
Metz, MIT Technology Review
Retrieved from "[Link]
This page was last edited on 3 April 2020, at 20:55 (UTC).
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