1930-1948 time frame

Today, we learned about the history that happened in the time frame of 1930-1948. If we start off by the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, which lasted from the end of the silent era in American cinema in the late 1920s to the late 1950s, thousands of movies were issued from the Hollywood studios. Throughout the 1930s, as well as most of the golden age, MGM dominated the film screen and had the top stars in Hollywood, and was also credited for creating the Hollywood star system altogether. Some MGM stars included "King of Hollywood" Clark Gable, Lionel Barrymore, Jean Harlow, Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, Jeanette MacDonald and husband Gene Raymond, Spencer Tracy, Judy Garland, and Gene Kelly. Another great achievement of US cinema during this era came through Walt Disney's animation company. In 1937, Disney created the most successful film of its time, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Also in 1939, MGM would create what is still, when adjusted for inflation, the most successful film of all time, Gone with the Wind. Many film historians have remarked upon the many great works of cinema that emerged from this period of highly regimented film-making. One reason this was possible is that, with so many movies being made, not everyone had to be a big hit. A studio could gamble on a medium-budget feature with a good script and relatively unknown actors for example Citizen Kane, and often regarded as the greatest film of all time, fits that description.

Unfortunately, the studio system and the Golden Age of Hollywood succumbed to two forces that developed in the late 1940s:

• a federal antitrust action that separated the production of films from their exhibition;
• The advent of television.

In 1938, Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released during a run of lackluster films from the major studios, and quickly became the highest-grossing film released to that point. Embarrassingly for the studios, it was an independently-produced animated film that did not feature any studio-employed stars. This stoked already widespread frustration at the practice of block-booking, in which studios would only sell an entire year's schedule of films at a time to theaters and use the lock-in to cover for releases of mediocre quality. This is where Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold, a noted "trust buster" of the Roosevelt administration, took this opportunity to initiate proceedings against the eight largest Hollywood studios in July 1938 for violations of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The federal suit resulted in five of the eight studios (the "Big Five": Warner Bros., MGM, Fox, RKO and Paramount) reaching a compromise with Arnold in October 1940 and signing a consent decree agreeing to, within three years:

• Eliminate the block-booking of short film subjects, in an arrangement known as "one shot", or "full force" block-booking.
• Eliminate the block-booking of any more than five features in their theaters.
• No longer engage in blind buying (or the buying of films by theater districts without seeing films beforehand) and instead have trade-showing, in which all 31 theater districts in US would see films every two weeks before showing movies in theaters.
• Set up an administration board in each theater district to enforce these requirements.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_the_United_States#Golden_Age_of_Hollywood