Collaboration

PARTNERSHIPS IN EARLY CINEMAAND THE STUDIO ERA

From the very inception of the film industry, from the ranks of relatively anonymous individuals plying their respective trades, certain creative collectives emerged that represent film history's most exemplary partnerships. Beginning in the mid-1890s, groundbreaking entrepreneurial inventors—Auguste (1862–1954) and Louis Lumière (1864–1948) in France, and William K. L. Dickson (1860–1935) and Thomas Edison (1847–1931) in America—formed partnerships to develop and exploit a system for photographing and exhibiting motion pictures. The Vitagraph Company, the most important of the pre-1910 American studios, was the first to build up a stock company of players and directors, including Florence Turner, Maurice Costello, and John Bunny. In 1911 Gaston Méliès (1843–1915) emigrated from France to Texas to form his Star Ranch stock company for the production of westerns, including The Immortal Alamo (1911), the first film ever made on that subject. D. W. Griffith (1875–1948) formed his own stock company of actors and technicians for the more than four hundred one- and two-reelers he directed for the Biograph Studio from 1909 to 1913. Late in 1911 in Los Angeles, Thomas Ince (1882–1924) established Inceville, a self-contained facility for the production of westerns and dramas that systematized standard studio working procedures under one roof, featuring backlots, stages, dressing rooms, prop storage, a power house, and administration offices. The founders of United Artists, Mary Pickford (1892–1979), Douglas Fairbanks (1883–1939), Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977), and Griffith, worked throughout the 1920s with their own respective production companies, each a collective consisting of hand-picked artists and craftsmen. In the 1920s and 1930s producers such as Adolph Zukor (1873–1976) established factory systems that manufactured, distributed, and exhibited films in the assembly-line fashion pioneered by the automobile industrialist Henry Ford and which was soon to become the dominant production paradigm throughout the world. The so-called Big Five studios—RKO, Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros., and MGM—were small cities, combining soundstages, backlots, carpentry shops, and administrative offices.

In the studio era, genre films, in particular, demanded systematic efficiency. In the 1930s no studio surpassed Warner Bros. in its flood of Depression-era gangster and social-problem films, crafted with machinelike efficiency by a stable of producers, contract directors, technicians, and performers, including the producer Darryl F. Zanuck (1902–1979), director Michael Curtiz, and actors James Cagney and Bette Davis. At MGM the producer Arthur Freed worked systematically with directors (Vincente Minnelli, George Sidney, and Stanley Donen), choreographers (Hermes Pan), and performers (Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Cyd Charisse, Donald O'Connor) in a celebrated series of musical comedies. RKO made use of the talents of the set designer Van Nest Polglase, the storyboard artist Perry Ferguson, and the directors George Stevens and Lloyd Bacon for the elegant Astaire-Rogers musicals. At Fox, Zanuck gathered around him a team of writers (including Dudley Nichols), directors (Henry King, H. Bruce Humberstone), and a stable of "Fox Blondes" (Alice Faye, Betty Grable, and June Haver) for a series of literary adaptations (such as The Grapes of Wrath in 1940) and splashily nostalgic backstage Technicolor musicals ( Down Argentine Way in 1940 and Hello Frisco, Hello in 1943). Meanwhile, maverick Orson Welles (1915–1985) brought his Mercury Theatre team from Broadway to Hollywood and produced a masterpiece, Citizen Kane (1941); but when the creative lights were no longer able to work harmoniously with RKO executives, the partnership deteriorated, and what followed was the unfinished The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and a host of flawed (albeit memorable) productions. Significantly, Welles's later work without his Mercury colleagues was never as productive. The same might be said about Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) in the 1970s and later. Kubrick enjoyed a much-vaunted independence with Warner Bros., but his idiosyncratic Barry Lyndon (1975) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) hardly matched the standards set by Paths of Glory (1957) and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

Within the studio system, headlining actors like Mary Pickford and Frances Marion depended on collaborations with writers to obtain scripts tailored to their special talents. Comedians such as Chaplin did their best work when cameramen such as Rollie Totheroh adapted their techniques appropriately. Directors leaned on the talents of sympathetic scenarists, as Billy Wilder did with Charles Brackett; on composers (Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, Michael Curtiz and Max Steiner); on editors (Orson Welles and Robert Wise); and on stars (John Ford and John Wayne, Clarence Brown and Greta Garbo, Woody Allen and Diane Keaton). Animators such as Walt Disney (1901–1966) and the Fleischer Brothers (Max [1883–1972] and Dave [1894–1979]) relied on a creative stable of artists, story men, inkers, and sound technicians. Despite the appearance of Walt Disney's name above the title of every product released from his studio, he practiced what he called "committee" art, dependent on the contributions of his associates, particularly those top animation producers affectionately known as the Nine Old Men.

Meanwhile, foreign filmmakers were making similar collaborative advances. In Sweden the directors Mauritz Stiller (1883–1928) and Victor Sjöström (1879–1960) worked closely with the Svenska Filmindustri entrepreneur Charles Magnusson and with cinematographers such as Julius Jaenzon and writers such as the novelist Selma Lagerlöf to produce notable comedies and dramas before 1925, including Berg-Ejvind och hans hustru ( The Outlaw and His Wife , Sjöström, 1918), Erotikon (Stiller, 1920), and Gösta Berlings saga ( The Saga of Gosta Berling , Stiller, 1924). Sweden again came into prominence after World War II, when the existentialist director Ingmar Bergman (b. 1918) turned from theater to cinema. Bergman's allegorical fable of faith, Det Sjunde inseglet ( The Seventh Seal , 1957), for example, perfectly captured the concerns of what has been called the postwar Age of Anxiety. Bergman's governing conception begins with the image of a knight returning from the Crusades, surviving by his wits in a plague-ridden country. Creating the black-and-white starkness of his vision required an effective collaboration between the director

and his gifted cameraman Gunnar Fischer, who worked on many early Bergman films (Sven Nykvist shot most of the later ones).

Using the full resources of the German studio combine known as UFA, Fritz Lang (1890–1976) worked with his wife, the scenarist Thea von Harbou, on his spectacular 1920s successes, Die Nibelungen (1924), Metropolis (1927), and Frau im Mond ( Woman in the Moon , 1929). Jean Renoir (1894–1979) and Marcel Carné (1909–1996) reached the full flowering of their careers in the 1930s in their collaborations with Popular Front and "poetic realist" artists like the writer and actor Jacques Prévert, the designer Eugène Lourié, and actors Jean Gabin and Arletty. In Russia in the 1920s the triumvirate of director Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), cinematographer Eduard Tisse, and scenarist Grigori Aleksandrov produced several of Soviet Russia's most esteemed films, including Bronenosets Potyomkin ( Battleship Potemkin , 1925), Oktyabr ( Ten Days That Shook the World and October , 1927), and Staroye i novoye ( Old and New , 1929). The Japanese master Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998) was associated with the performances of Toshiro Mifune, a director-actor pairing no less significant than the John Ford–John Wayne association. Moreover, Kurosawa consistently worked with the cinematographer Asakazu Nakai and composer Fumio Hayasaka within a studio system that enforced ensemble collaboration. The postwar Italian cinema came to global prominence in the collaboration of the neorealist director Vittorio De Sica (1902–1975) with scenarist Cesare Zavattini (1902–1989) on Ladridibiciclette ( Bicycle Thieves , 1948) and Umberto D (1952). De Sica translated the economic desolation of postwar Europe into human terms through his work with Zavattini, who laid out the groundwork for neorealist cinema, the purpose of which was to find significance in the everyday lives of ordinary citizens.