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American Cinema Productions was an independent Hollywood film production company that was founded in 1975 and filed for bankruptcy in 1981. The company, a division of American Communications Industries, began as a distribution operation known as American Cinema Releasing before several early successes led it to branch out into film production.
- 1981; 42 years ago
- 1975; 48 years ago
- Bankruptcy
- Film
Cinema of the United States. The cinema of the United States, consisting mainly of major film studios (also known metonymously as Hollywood) along with some independent films, has had a large effect on the global film industry since the early 20th century.
- 14 per 100,000 (2017)
- 646 (98.5%)
- 10 (1.5%)
- 40,393 (2017)
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Sep 29, 2023 · As American film evolves, it remains a strong narrative medium with the capacity to influence and inspire future generations. Embark on a retrospective journey through the rich tapestry of American cinema, exploring its humble silent beginnings to the revolutionary impact of the digital age.
In the American and international markets, the major film studios, often known simply as the majors or the Big Five studios, are commonly regarded as the five diversified media conglomerates whose various film production and distribution subsidiaries collectively command approximately 80 to 85% of U.S. box office revenue.
- Overview
- Post-World War I American cinema
During the 1920s in the United States, motion-picture production, distribution, and exhibition became a major national industry and movies perhaps the major national obsession. The salaries of stars reached monumental proportions; filmmaking practices and narrative formulas were standardized to accommodate mass production; and Wall Street began to invest heavily in every branch of the business. The growing industry was organized according to the studio system that, in many respects, the producer Thomas Harper Ince had developed between 1914 and 1918 at Inceville, his studio in the Santa Ynez Canyon near Hollywood. Ince functioned as the central authority over multiple production units, each headed by a director who was required to shoot an assigned film according to a detailed continuity script. Every project was carefully budgeted and tightly scheduled, and Ince himself supervised the final cut. This central producer system was the prototype for the studio system of the 1920s, and, with some modification, it prevailed as the dominant mode of Hollywood production for the next 40 years.
Virtually all the major film genres evolved and were codified during the 1920s, but none was more characteristic of the period than the slapstick comedy. This form was originated by Mack Sennett, who, at his Keystone Studios, produced countless one- and two-reel shorts and features (Tillie’s Punctured Romance, 1914; The Surf Girl, 1916; Teddy at the Throttle, 1917) whose narrative logic was subordinated to fantastic, purely visual humour. An anarchic mixture of circus, vaudeville, burlesque, pantomime, and the chase, Sennett’s Keystone comedies created a world of inspired madness and mayhem, and they employed the talents of such future stars as Charlie Chaplin, Harry Langdon, Roscoe (“Fatty”) Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, and Harold Lloyd. When these performers achieved fame, many of them left Keystone, often to form their own production companies, a practice still possible in the early 1920s.
Chaplin, for example, who had developed the persona of the “Little Tramp” at Keystone, went on to direct and star in a series of shorts produced by Essanay in 1915 (The Tramp, A Night in the Show) and Mutual between 1916 and 1917 (The Vagabond, One A.M., The Rink, Easy Street). In 1917 he was offered an eight-film contract with First National that enabled him to establish his own studio. He directed his first feature there, the semiautobiographical The Kid (1921), but most of his First National films were two-reelers. In 1919 Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, the four most popular and powerful film artists of the time, jointly formed the United Artists Corporation in order to produce and distribute—and thereby retain artistic and financial control over—their own films. Chaplin directed three silent features for United Artists: A Woman of Paris (1923), his great comic epic The Gold Rush (1925), and The Circus (1928), which was released after the introduction of sound into motion pictures. He later made several sound films, but the two most successful—his first two, City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936)—were essentially silent films with musical scores.
Buster Keaton possessed a kind of comic talent very different from Chaplin’s, but both men were wonderfully subtle actors with a keen sense of the tragic often contained within the comic, and both were major directors of their period. Keaton, like Chaplin, was born into a theatrical family and began performing in vaudeville skits at a young age. Intrigued by the new film medium, he left the stage and worked for two years as a supporting comedian for Arbuckle’s production company. In 1919 Keaton formed his own production company, where over the next four years he made 20 shorts (including One Week, 1920; The Boat, 1921; Cops, 1922; and The Balloonatic, 1923) that represent, with Chaplin’s Mutual films, the acme of American slapstick comedy. A Keaton trademark was the “trajectory gag,” in which perfect timing of acting, directing, and editing propels his film character through a geometric progression of complicated sight gags that seem impossibly dangerous but are still dramatically logical. Such routines inform all of Keaton’s major features—Our Hospitality (1923), Sherlock, Jr. (1924), The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances (1925), and his masterpieces The General (1927) and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). Keaton’s greatest films, all made before his company was absorbed by MGM, have a reflexive quality that indicates his fascination with film as a medium. Although some of his MGM films were financially successful, the factory-like studio system stifled Keaton’s creativity, and he was reduced to playing bit parts after the early 1930s.
Important but lesser silent comics were Lloyd, the team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Langdon, and Arbuckle. Working at the Hal Roach Studios, Lloyd cultivated the persona of an earnest, sweet-tempered boy-next-door. He specialized in a variant of Keystone mayhem known as the “comedy of thrills,” in which—as in Lloyd’s most famous features, Safety Last! (1923) and The Freshman (1925)—an innocent protagonist finds himself placed in physical danger. Laurel and Hardy also worked for Roach. They made 27 silent two-reelers, including Putting Pants on Philip (1927) and Liberty (1929), and became even more popular in the 1930s in such sound films as Another Fine Mess (1930) and Sons of the Desert (1933). Their comic characters were basically grown-up children whose relationship was sometimes disturbingly sadomasochistic. Langdon also traded on a childlike, even babylike, image in such popular features as The Strong Man (1926) and Long Pants (1927), both directed by Frank Capra. Arbuckle, however, in his few years of stardom, created the character of a leering, sensual adult. Arbuckle’s talent was limited, but his persona affected the course of American film history in a quite unexpected way.
Arbuckle was at the centre of the most damaging scandal to affect American motion pictures during the silent era. In September 1921 the comedian and several friends hosted a weekend party in a San Francisco hotel. During the party a young actress named Virginia Rappe became ill, and she later died in a hospital of peritonitis. Press reports of the event as a drunken orgy inflamed public opinion. Amid the volatile social transformations of the post-World War I era, with issues such as immigration restriction and the national prohibition of alcoholic beverages deeply dividing the country, many had come to regard movies as a disturbing instigator of social change and its high-living stars as threats to moral order and values. The Arbuckle scandal seemed to encapsulate these fears, and prosecutors responded by accusing the actor of rape and murder. Eventually indicted for manslaughter, he was tried three times; the first two trials ended in hung juries, and in the third the jury deliberated for six minutes and voted for acquittal. But Arbuckle’s career as an actor was in ruins, and he was banned from the screen for more than a decade. Other sensational deaths involving Hollywood personalities, through murder or suicide or drug overdose, fueled the public furor.
During the 1920s in the United States, motion-picture production, distribution, and exhibition became a major national industry and movies perhaps the major national obsession. The salaries of stars reached monumental proportions; filmmaking practices and narrative formulas were standardized to accommodate mass production; and Wall Street began to invest heavily in every branch of the business. The growing industry was organized according to the studio system that, in many respects, the producer Thomas Harper Ince had developed between 1914 and 1918 at Inceville, his studio in the Santa Ynez Canyon near Hollywood. Ince functioned as the central authority over multiple production units, each headed by a director who was required to shoot an assigned film according to a detailed continuity script. Every project was carefully budgeted and tightly scheduled, and Ince himself supervised the final cut. This central producer system was the prototype for the studio system of the 1920s, and, with some modification, it prevailed as the dominant mode of Hollywood production for the next 40 years.
Virtually all the major film genres evolved and were codified during the 1920s, but none was more characteristic of the period than the slapstick comedy. This form was originated by Mack Sennett, who, at his Keystone Studios, produced countless one- and two-reel shorts and features (Tillie’s Punctured Romance, 1914; The Surf Girl, 1916; Teddy at the Throttle, 1917) whose narrative logic was subordinated to fantastic, purely visual humour. An anarchic mixture of circus, vaudeville, burlesque, pantomime, and the chase, Sennett’s Keystone comedies created a world of inspired madness and mayhem, and they employed the talents of such future stars as Charlie Chaplin, Harry Langdon, Roscoe (“Fatty”) Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, and Harold Lloyd. When these performers achieved fame, many of them left Keystone, often to form their own production companies, a practice still possible in the early 1920s.
Chaplin, for example, who had developed the persona of the “Little Tramp” at Keystone, went on to direct and star in a series of shorts produced by Essanay in 1915 (The Tramp, A Night in the Show) and Mutual between 1916 and 1917 (The Vagabond, One A.M., The Rink, Easy Street). In 1917 he was offered an eight-film contract with First National that enabled him to establish his own studio. He directed his first feature there, the semiautobiographical The Kid (1921), but most of his First National films were two-reelers. In 1919 Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, the four most popular and powerful film artists of the time, jointly formed the United Artists Corporation in order to produce and distribute—and thereby retain artistic and financial control over—their own films. Chaplin directed three silent features for United Artists: A Woman of Paris (1923), his great comic epic The Gold Rush (1925), and The Circus (1928), which was released after the introduction of sound into motion pictures. He later made several sound films, but the two most successful—his first two, City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936)—were essentially silent films with musical scores.
Buster Keaton possessed a kind of comic talent very different from Chaplin’s, but both men were wonderfully subtle actors with a keen sense of the tragic often contained within the comic, and both were major directors of their period. Keaton, like Chaplin, was born into a theatrical family and began performing in vaudeville skits at a young age. Intrigued by the new film medium, he left the stage and worked for two years as a supporting comedian for Arbuckle’s production company. In 1919 Keaton formed his own production company, where over the next four years he made 20 shorts (including One Week, 1920; The Boat, 1921; Cops, 1922; and The Balloonatic, 1923) that represent, with Chaplin’s Mutual films, the acme of American slapstick comedy. A Keaton trademark was the “trajectory gag,” in which perfect timing of acting, directing, and editing propels his film character through a geometric progression of complicated sight gags that seem impossibly dangerous but are still dramatically logical. Such routines inform all of Keaton’s major features—Our Hospitality (1923), Sherlock, Jr. (1924), The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances (1925), and his masterpieces The General (1927) and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). Keaton’s greatest films, all made before his company was absorbed by MGM, have a reflexive quality that indicates his fascination with film as a medium. Although some of his MGM films were financially successful, the factory-like studio system stifled Keaton’s creativity, and he was reduced to playing bit parts after the early 1930s.
Important but lesser silent comics were Lloyd, the team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Langdon, and Arbuckle. Working at the Hal Roach Studios, Lloyd cultivated the persona of an earnest, sweet-tempered boy-next-door. He specialized in a variant of Keystone mayhem known as the “comedy of thrills,” in which—as in Lloyd’s most famous features, Safety Last! (1923) and The Freshman (1925)—an innocent protagonist finds himself placed in physical danger. Laurel and Hardy also worked for Roach. They made 27 silent two-reelers, including Putting Pants on Philip (1927) and Liberty (1929), and became even more popular in the 1930s in such sound films as Another Fine Mess (1930) and Sons of the Desert (1933). Their comic characters were basically grown-up children whose relationship was sometimes disturbingly sadomasochistic. Langdon also traded on a childlike, even babylike, image in such popular features as The Strong Man (1926) and Long Pants (1927), both directed by Frank Capra. Arbuckle, however, in his few years of stardom, created the character of a leering, sensual adult. Arbuckle’s talent was limited, but his persona affected the course of American film history in a quite unexpected way.
Arbuckle was at the centre of the most damaging scandal to affect American motion pictures during the silent era. In September 1921 the comedian and several friends hosted a weekend party in a San Francisco hotel. During the party a young actress named Virginia Rappe became ill, and she later died in a hospital of peritonitis. Press reports of the event as a drunken orgy inflamed public opinion. Amid the volatile social transformations of the post-World War I era, with issues such as immigration restriction and the national prohibition of alcoholic beverages deeply dividing the country, many had come to regard movies as a disturbing instigator of social change and its high-living stars as threats to moral order and values. The Arbuckle scandal seemed to encapsulate these fears, and prosecutors responded by accusing the actor of rape and murder. Eventually indicted for manslaughter, he was tried three times; the first two trials ended in hung juries, and in the third the jury deliberated for six minutes and voted for acquittal. But Arbuckle’s career as an actor was in ruins, and he was banned from the screen for more than a decade. Other sensational deaths involving Hollywood personalities, through murder or suicide or drug overdose, fueled the public furor.
The Octagon (1980) R | 103 min | Action, Drama, Romance. 5.0. Rate this. 48 Metascore. A martial artist must defeat a plan by ninjas to create a worldwide training camp for terrorists. Director: Eric Karson | Stars: Chuck Norris, Karen Carlson, Lee Van Cleef, Art Hindle. Votes: 6,000 | Gross: $18.97M. 3. A Force of One (1979)
A notable development in American cinema was the rise of significant female filmmakers, including Kathryn Bigelow, Patty Jenkins, Sofia Coppola, and Greta Gerwig. Bigelow’s films included the cult-classic vampire movie Near Dark (1987); the police thriller Blue Steel (1989); Point Break (1991), about an undercover FBI agent; and the science ...
