Introduction:
The Hollywood Quarterly, 1945–1957
Eric Smoodin
Writing Just After the end of World War II, the editors of the Hollywood Quarterly posed the following question: "What part will the motion picture and the radio play in the consolidation of the victory, in the creation of new patterns of world culture and understanding?" Asked at the beginning of volume I, number I, this question, and the "Editorial Statement" of which it was a part, made particular sense in 1945. Today, more than half a century later, we might ask what made this question plausible, and why did the editors' concerns about peace, education, and aesthetics coalesce around the movies? We need to know, then, why a journal dedicated to the serious study of film, radio, and, later, television might have made such good sense at the time, and how it attracted a collection of writers unmatched in North American film studies, before or since, for the heterogeneity of their intellectual and practical concerns.
The first issue of the Hollywood Quarterly appeared in October 1945. Number I cost $1.25, although a reader could buy a four-issue annual subscription for only $4.00.
[1] In 1946, as a special "Supplement to Volume One," the Quarterly produced a fifth issue for the only time in the journal's history; this was the Annual Communications Bibliography, with listings of recent literature on film, radio, and music in film and radio, along with an article called "Hollywood's War Films, 1942–1944."
The University of California Press published the journal, the daily activities of which were overseen by the members of a five-person editorial board, who were themselves guided by a number of advisers in motion pictures, music, radio, and technology.[2] These advisers included a number of prominent Hollywood professionals: Orson Welles, Gregg Toland, Fritz Lang, Edward Dmytryk, and Vincent Price, among many others.
Number I had major articles under five headings: Motion Pictures, Radio, the Status of the Writer (not surprising for a journal with several prominent screenwriters on its editorial board and advisory committees), Technology, and Problems of Communication (about veterans acclimating toThe editorial board changed and expanded over the years, and in 1951 the Hollywood Quarterly became the Quarterly Review of Film, Radio, and Television. (For the sake of simplicity, and because the original title seems to best capture the aims of the journal, we chose to use Hollywood Quarterly in the title of this collection to cover the entire 1945–57 period of publication.) The cover design changed as well, from Gothic script on a plain background, to starker contemporary lettering, and finally to a mid-century modern spectacle of technological and cultural progress: a ballet dancer, a radio microphone, and two men, seemingly in a western shootout setting, each image in what looks to be a small square television set or movie screen. But the format rarely varied (early on the journal shifted from a two-column to a one-column page), with each issue conforming to the same six-by-nine-inch format and running between 100 and 130 pages, and the price never changed.
The Hollywood Quarterly, and the Quarterly Review of Film, Radio, and Television, continues today, in a manner of speaking, as Film Quarterly, the name the journal took in 1958, when it was fully reorganized and markedly reconfigured in terms of content and form. This probably makes it the longest-running serious film journal in the country, as well as almost certainly the first significant, successful, and regularly published journal of its kind produced in the United States. But the Hollywood Quarterly did not simply spring fully grown from the brow of its editorial committee. There had been major film journals in the United States before the Quarterly. Experimental Cinema and Cinema both began a few years of publication in the United States in 1930, and while distribution information is difficult to come by, Close Up and Sight and Sound probably traveled from Great Britain to the United States during the Great Depression.
[3] For a discussion of the journal Close Up, see James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus, eds., Close Up, 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). The editors discuss Experimental Cinema and Cinema on page 26.
There also had been a pre-Quarterly history of serious film scholarship originating in high-toned general-interest journals publishedNevertheless, in part because there was no successful prewar American journal committed exclusively to the study of film and related media, the misconception persists that little intellectual attention was paid to the movies in the United States before the 1950s. But the Hollywood Quarterly actually appeared toward the end of an eclectic and fertile period of film scholarship, one that included not just isolated essays in journals and magazines, but significant book-length studies by university-based scholars, usually from the social sciences. We might, then, see the Quarterly as maintaining a tradition that can be traced at least as far back as Robert and Helen Lynd's famous study, Middletown, from 1929, and including the Payne Fund Studies, published throughout the 1930s; Margaret Farrand Thorp's still underappreciated America at the Movies, which Yale published in 1939; and, in something of the apotheosis of this movement, sociologist Leo Handel's Hollywood Looks at Its Audience, from 1950 and published by the University of Illinois Press.
The editors of the Quarterly were committed to hearing from a broad range of experts, and so sought practical as well as intellectual contributions from film industry professionals—directors, writers, and exhibitors, for instance. Even here, the editors consolidated a practice that had been in place for many years. Cameramen, writers, directors, and theater owners had frequently written about their jobs for a variety of audiences, in publications ranging from fan magazines to journals such as American Cinematographer to book-length studies.
[4] The contributions of studio workers to professional journals and other publications (such as Academy of Arts and Sciences "Technical Bulletins") are too numerous even to begin to mention them here. For an example from a fan magazine, see Walt Disney, "Exposing Mickey Mouse," in Screen Book (January 1934), 16–17, 68–69. For a book-length study, see, for example, theater manager Frank H. Ricketson's The Management of Motion Picture Theatres (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.), 1938.
Issues not fully related to film scholarship, some broad and some more narrowly focused, also help situate the goals of the Quarterly. To open their editorial statement, the editors explained that "the war, with its complex demands for indoctrination, propaganda, and specialized training, emphasized the social function of film and radio." And, indeed, the war marked the consolidation of a new class of experts, as psychiatrists, psychologists, and a variety of other social scientists became government workers, with many of them using the millions of enlisted men as experimental subjects in the development of a sort of utopian postwar liberal modernism. Film, or, more precisely, the possibility for film to influence and indoctrinate, played an absolutely pivotal role in this development. The government became a film producer on a large scale, but the films the government made were designed to propagandize rather than entertain. Frank Capra's Why We Fight series, made to transform men who until recently had been civilians into a cohesive military force, stands out as the most impressive of the period's mobilization of the movies, but for the government's scientific experts the effectiveness of the series extended well beyond the context of the war. If Capra's documentaries could make nineteen-and twenty-year-olds understand the need to go into battle against the Germans and Japanese, then other movies, after the war, might be used to teach citizens how not to be racist or hypernationalist.
[5] For discussions of the uses of the Why We Fight films, as well as of the wartime contributions of a variety of social scientists, see Carl I. Hovland, Arthur A. Lumsdaine, and Fred D. Sheffield, Experiments on Mass Communication, volume 3 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949); Ron Robin, The Barbed-Wire College: Reeducating German POWs in the United States during World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)
The people involved with the Hollywood Quarterly, many of whom had worked in the war effort, shared this belief in the utopian possibilities of film. They hoped that the journal might become a forum for advancing a politicized, socially responsible cinema, one freed from what their editorial statement called the "‘pure entertainment’ myth, which had served to camouflage the social irresponsibility and creative impotence of much of the material presented on the screen and over the air" both before and during the war.
Film needed to teach, to enlighten, to persuade. In their statement, the editors stressed not only their desire to understand the "aesthetic" principles
During the depression, hundreds of junior high and high schools instructed their students in film appreciation, typically as units in English classes.
[6] For a full analysis of secondary-school film instruction, see Lea Jacobs, "Reformers and Spectators: The Film Education Movement in the Thirties," Camera Obscura 22 (January 1990), 29–49. Also during this period, the Catholic Church organized its own system of film education, marked not so much by the progressivism of the junior high and high school programs, but rather by a determination to teach children to resist the alleged evil of so many Hollywood movies.
Certainly, this curriculum had at least something to do with keeping bored kids occupied as they learned how to evaluate movies that they had seen in local theaters. But film educators—the teachers and social scientists who carefully planned curricula or wrote the textbooks that helped to organize film study principles—also understood the objectives of progressive education. They hoped to use the movies, both the best examples and the worst, to teach students about the effects of racism, class inequality, and war. These extraordinarily New Dealish efforts—on the part of film educators in the 1930s and government social scientists studying enlisted men during the war—had more or less disappeared by the postwar period, but their lessons were not lost on the Hollywood Quarterly editors, even the most moderate of whom were avid New Deal supporters, and all of whom believed in the promise of an enlightened, liberal future emerging from the chaos of a global war.What late-1940s film studies had begun to lose, with the collapse of so much New Deal enthusiasm, it had gained in university attention to the cinema. Robert Gessner, for example, had taught a class in film history and aesthetics at New York University as early as 1938, and during the 1930s and early 1940s, for a variety of reasons, American studies began to flourish on college and university campuses. The faculty finally had started to include scholars whose connection to elite culture was somewhat tenuous, and whose main interests were more regional, vernacular, and popular—Jews, for instance, and a variety of leftists, and those who
The Hollywood Quarterly also developed from a more immediate history, and from a more specific political instance. In October 1943, a group of scholars at the University of California, Los Angeles, along with the Hollywood Writers' Mobilization, sponsored the Writers' Congress on the UCLA campus. The mobilization itself had been formed just after the United States entered World War II, in order to assist in the war effort.
[7] August Frugé, A Skeptic among Scholars: August Frugé on University Publishing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), page 157.
Embodying the Popular Front sensibility of the war period, its members ranged from the liberal Paramount producer Kenneth Macgowan to the hard-line Communist screenwriter John Howard Lawson. In other words, the entire spectrum of the Hollywood left supported the movement, with the congress itself marking the formation of a significant coalition between university intelligentsia and movie studio intellectuals.Even more specifically, the congress provided the opportunity for social scientists, such as UCLA's Franklin Fearing, who specialized in the effects of mass communication, to meet with Hollywood workers who believed strongly in the possibility of an aesthetically informed, leftist commercial cinema. This naturally raised the ire and concern of the Tenney Committee,
The participants in the congress seem to have been bound by a sort of utopian, one-world-style belief in the power of the arts to promote national solidarity and global unity. In a surveillance report, the FBI noted that the congress passed a resolution advocating the "creation of [a] Department of Arts and Letters by [the] U.S. Government," while still other resolutions called for "a cultural and educational congress to meet in Central or South America in the near future, the development of cultural relations between the United Nations, and the establishment of a Continuations Committee of the Congress to explore possibilities of [a] National Congress on [the] problems of war and the post-war period." This was the promise of the mid-1940s, that a useful coalition might be formed between artists and intellectuals, one inspired by the left, but that might include even the likes of Walt Disney, whose visits to and films about Central and South America during the period made him at least initially sympathetic to many of the congress's internationalist goals.
[8] The description of the Writers' Congress can be found in the file that the FBI maintained on Walt Disney. See document no. 100–5377, "League of American Writers."
On a more modest scale, the congress initiated some publishing projects. The first, from 1944, simply collected and presented much that took place at that first gathering, as its title would indicate: Writers' Congress:Proceedings (published by the University of California Press). But the congress also proposed something that would appear more regularly, and that might keep stressing and refining the belief in the benefits of combining the arts with the social sciences: the Hollywood Quarterly. The name itself marked the unusual partnership of the congress. As former University of California Press director August Frugé noted, "Hollywood
[9] Frugé, A Skeptic among Scholars, page 158. For information on the history of the Quarterly, we are indebted to Frugé's book, and in particular chapter 2, "Hollywood and Berkeley: Getting into the Film Business," pages 157–166.
The Hollywood Writers' Mobilization and the University of California cosponsored the journal, with the mobilization appointing two editorial board members and the provost at UCLA appointing two others, with then–UC Press director Samuel Farquhar acting as the fifth member.Kenneth Macgowan and John Howard Lawson were the first editors chosen by the mobilization (although Lawson soon resigned, after HUAC began to persecute him). They were joined by Franklin Fearing and Franklin Rolfe of UCLA, and also by Farquhar. At least in part a victim of McCarthy-era cold war politics, the mobilization disbanded in 1947. For a few months, a group called the Hollywood Quarterly Associates went into business with the university to publish the journal, but by late 1947 the University of California became the sole sponsor. The Press had the good sense to maintain the journal's Hollywood connection, and in 1949 half of an expanded eight-person board still worked in the movies—writers James Hilton, John Collier, and Abraham Polonsky, and actor-director Irving Pichel. According to Frugé, it really was assistant editor Sylvia Jarrico who did most of the work for the board, but as another casualty of the cold war, she left her position rather than take the newly imposed University of California loyalty oath (her husband, screenwriter Paul Jarrico, would be a victim of the Hollywood blacklist).
During those early years, the Quarterly survived a 1946 investigation by the Tenney Committee, and then a 1950 attack by Red Channels, the "bible of the graylist," which concerned itself with Communist infiltration of the broadcast industry.
[10] See Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (New York: St. Martin's Griffon, 1999), page 318.
There were, as well, internal struggles, difficult to reconstruct now but that resulted—depending on whose story one believes, the editorial board's or the Press's—either in the Quarterly falling a year behind in its publication schedule during 1948–49 or in a temporary suspension of publication.[11] Ellen R. Seacoat, the manager of the University Periodicals Department, mentioned the suspension of publication in a memo on 28 May 1954 to the editors of the Quarterly. In a 28 October 1954 memo, editorial committee chair Robert Usinger insisted there had been no suspension, only a delay in publication. (All correspondence cited in this introduction is housed at the University of California Press in Berkeley.)
Subscriptions peaked for the[12] See the Seacoat memo for subscription information. For information about institutional and individual subscriptions, see "Quarterly Review of Film, Radio, & TV: Facts and Figures on Subscriptions and Costs," University of California Press memo, 31 January 1955.
Of course, declining subscription rates concerned both the editorial board and the Press. Board members worried that the very name Hollywood Quarterly "undoubtedly worked to [the journal's] disadvantage so far as subscribers were concerned, since it seemed to imply that the prime consideration … was the Hollywood film industry."
[13] See Usinger's memo for information regarding the board's reaction to declining subscriptions.
As a result, the board considered changing the title to something that would make explicit the journal's combination of aesthetics and social science. The first choice was Arts and Communication Quarterly, but after further consultation between the board and the Press, yet another title finally was decided upon, one that emphasized media rather than methodology: The Quarterly Review of Film, Radio, and Television, appearing for the first time in 1951, on volume 6.For their part, officials at the Press viewed the subscription problem largely in terms of content, and in ways that reflected many of the developments in film studies as a discipline during the 1950s. It was precisely during that period that film studies in the academy became less of a social science practice and much more one associated with the humanities. The reasons for this shift remain unclear but may have had something to do with the diversification of English departments of the era and the shifting interest of sociologists and psychologists from film to television. In any event, in a 1954 memo to Press director Frugé, periodicals manager Ellen Seacoat worried precisely about a kind of disciplinary unpredictability built into the journal. "I feel frustrated," she wrote, adding, "Who is sufficiently interested in all or most of these subjects [covered by the Quarterly] to pay for a subscription?" Seacoat wondered whether "the
[14] Ellen Seacoat, memo to August Frugé, regarding "Quarterly statement of purposes and principles," 3 November 1954.
Frugé himself worried about the continued influence of the social sciences in the journal, lamenting that, after the 1951 name change, the Quarterly "continued for another six years, running gradually down—or so I seem to remember—as the emphasis became more sociological and less cinematic."
[15] Frugé, A Skeptic among Scholars, page 161.
In this narrative, the Quarterly stood out as a dinosaur, as a throwback to a depression-era and wartime interest in the social function of the cinema. By the late 1950s, it seemed much more obvious, and even desirable, that the movies could enlighten through aesthetic uplift rather than liberal pedagogy.The Press did what it could to promote the Quarterly. Volume 8, for instance, featured Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno's "How to Look at Television" (reproduced in this collection), and the Press understood that this was a scholarly event of some moment. A publicity release announced the article, something difficult to imagine today for any theoretical essay about spectatorship. But subscription rates seemed not to receive any boost and, according to Frugé, declined to about three hundred by 1957.
[16] For a discussion of the promotion of Adorno's essay, see Seacoat's memo to Frugé, 3 November 1954. Frugé discusses the subscription decline in A Skeptic among Scholars, page 160.
The Quarterly, clearly, had come to something of a crisis.Frugé has written that he "braced [himself] for trouble with the editorial board." But Kenneth Macgowan, the board chair at the time, understood that the Quarterly was no longer economically viable. The other editors
[17] Both citations come from Frugé, A Skeptic among Scholars, page 160.
Even after its demise, however, at least for a while, the Quarterly maintained its University of California subsidy. Rather than allowing that to revert to the state, Frugé organized another journal, Film Quarterly (with Ernest Callenbach as editor), modeled very much on the British Sight and Sound and the French Cahiers du cinéma—that is, according to Frugé, "devoted to film as an art and not as communication."[18] Ibid., page 161.
In American film studies this as much as anything marked the disciplinary shift, placing cinema scholarship firmly within the realm of the humanities, where, for better and for worse, and despite a recent interest in social science methodologies, it still remains.For its entire life the Hollywood Quarterly steadfastly held to the leftist utopianism of the founding UCLA Writers' Congress and the immediate postwar period, with its determination to mix essays by intellectuals with those by Hollywood filmmakers, its belief in building a more peaceful, tolerant global culture through better films, and its assertion of the high quality of at least some American movies (although modernists that they were, few contributors would have questioned the superiority of Bicycle Thieves or Grand Illusion). The Quarterly maintained an interest in not just film, but all of the major entertainment media, and in issue after issue insisted on the importance of both "aesthetic" and "sociological" methodologies for studying popular culture.
In selecting the articles for this collection, we have tried to preserve the journal's progressive beliefs as well as its intellectual and aesthetic standards. In the spirit of the Quarterly, we have put together special sections on animation, the avant-garde, and documentary to go along with a representative sampling of articles about feature-length narrative films. We also have collected articles on radio and television, reflecting the contents of just about every issue of the Quarterly. Each issue devoted a few pages to short dispatches in a "communications" section, and we have done the same, with some commentary reflecting the journal's interest in directors, here on Jean Vigo, Billy Wilder, and Jean Cocteau, and also a dispatch from Henri Langlois on the Cinémathèque Française and a contretemps
[19] According to Alan Williams, Guitry "profited handsomely and ostentatiously from his films and plays of the Occupation … and he had flagrantly socialized with high German officials. But he had apparently done no more than this," and so the government's case against him eventually was dismissed. See Williams, Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), page 273.
The Quarterly was a place for Hollywood workers to write about their craft and also to practice it, and so the journal featured the occasional publication of scripts. In this collection, we have reproduced Abraham Polonsky's radio play (which was in fact produced), The Case of David Smith. And in keeping with the Quarterly's emphasis on the links between media production and education, we have also provided the commentary that followed.
This interest in practice extended to all aspects of media work. In fact, it was the Quarterly's concern with labor issues that probably served best to separate it from the film journals that followed, journals that tended to focus attention on the finished product rather than on its making. As a result, we have devoted a section to these practical aspects of filmmaking —acting, set design, and fashion, for instance—and have scattered articles in other sections, notably by Georges Sadoul and Charles Boyer, about the less glamorous aspects of film work.
We have tried to achieve something of the style of the Quarterly, a kind of attention to the literary as well as to the purely academic—this was, after all, a journal on which some of the finest American writers from the mid-century served as editors and contributors. So along with a "just the facts" presentation, with sections on animation, practice, and other clearly labeled areas, we have called a section on American filmmaking "The Hollywood Picture," and on European, "Scenes from Abroad." Despite their interest in literary and aesthetic detail, and as if to maintain the journal's academic seriousness, the editors rarely made use of photographs and other images. We have in each case reproduced those few original illustrations—the photos accompanying Lewis Jacobs's two-part series on experimental cinema in America, Edith Head's fashion designs, and Chuck Jones's scientific squiggles—but in keeping with the expectations of modern film scholarship, we have also added some photographs wherever it seemed appropriate and feasible. For each essay's contributor's
Finally, we have attempted to reproduce something of the astonishing eclecticism of the journal, with its interest in high art and housewives, with the heavy seriousness of John Howard Lawson coupled with the humor and good nature of Hugh Gray. Mostly, though, we have tried to give a sense of the full range of journal contributors. It surely says something about the values of the Quarterly that writers ranged from Samuel Goldwyn to Theodor Adorno, from Edith Head to Vsevolod Pudovkin. Exhibitors and existentialists shared the pages of the Quarterly, and that probably more than anything else speaks to the extraordinary moment in film and media studies that the journal captured and helped to create.