Eric Smoodin is Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis. His books include Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons From the Sound Era, Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, and Hollywood Quarterly: Film Culture in Postwar America, 1945–1957 (with Ann Martin).

Regarding Frank Capra

Audience, Celebrity, and American Film Studies, 1930-1960By Eric Loren Smoodin

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2005 Eric Loren Smoodin
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822333845

Chapter One

The National and the Local: Ballyhoo and the U.S. Film Audience

To advertise Flight, Columbia Pictures’s 1929 “all-talking roadshow sensation” about U.S. marine intervention in Nicaragua, the studio announced that technicians had “wired” all of the battle scenes “so that Director Frank R. Capra could talk to any point of the battlefield without leaving his directorial chair.” This information appeared in the studio’s nationally distributed “Exhibitor’s Campaign Book” for the film, which was designed to help theater managers advertise their programs in local newspapers and create ballyhoo in general. In writing about Capra the studio seemed to believe in his marketing potential as the panoptic overseer of U.S. intervention into a Central American civil war, able to have instant contact with any point of “battle” without ever being there. More specifically, the film corporation, with its production facility in Hollywood and its distribution office in New York, depicted Capra as an armchair general as a means of attracting audiences throughout the country, both in big cities and small towns as well as in various regions.

This militarized, omniscient Capra was one of the director’s more significant public relations incarnations from the era-no surprise, perhaps, when one considers that his filmography during the period includes Submarine (1928) and Dirigible (1931) in addition to Flight. Throughout this early period of Capra’s career, before the huge triumph of It Happened One Night in 1934, Columbia worked hard in orchestrating national campaigns to convince the public of the director’s celebrity and to make audiences interpret Capra’s movies as realizations of a filmmaker’s vision and his smooth working relationships with his actors. To supplement these assertions of individual genius, the studio developed national publicity strategies that provided theater managers with less middle-brow forms of ballyhoo that had nothing to do with Capra, but rather extolled the fashion sense of his female stars, recommended marquee displays, and suggested contests that might be connected to the movies. In doing so, the studio crafted methods for linking the movies and the movie theater to varying modes of advertising and a variety of consumers, as well as to a range of consumer activities and leisure sites. Here ballyhoo, as proposed by the studio and practiced by the theaters, helped to build a modern public space of related products and technologies, entertainment and business institutions, and celebrities and fans.

As might be expected, studio-designed publicity sought quite actively to generate interest in and knowledge about Capra and his films, and to create audiences for those movies. Often Columbia developed its publicity and sought out audiences through specifically gendered appeals to women- appeals that rejected the martial approach to Capra’s celebrity and instead stressed romance and chic clothes and the reading of novels. And in doing so the studio asserted its connection to other leisure industries such as publishing. Despite this advice and these campaigns from the corporate office, however, the actual ballyhoo for Capra’s films, at theaters, in newspapers, in shops, and elsewhere, gives us a sense of the relationships between centrally organized national strategies and the local efforts to tailor publicity to relatively small audience groups. In light of this, in this chapter I look at studio suggestions for approaching audiences with publicity and advertising, and then I examine the publicity and advertising themselves as typically practiced by theater managers who followed corporate directives and also adapted them to local needs.

Capra’s films from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s provide excellent case studies in movie advertising and in the ways that studios and local theaters attempted to reach and to create audiences for their films. Between 1926, when he began directing full-time, and 1933, Capra made twenty-two films that covered many of the familiar Hollywood genres from that era: immigration melodrama, newspaper comedy-drama, women’s film, society comedy, working-class comedy, orientalist fantasy, and military action film. He also began his long association with screenwriter Robert Riskin with American Madness, a 1932 social conscience film that served as a prototype for the Deeds/Smith/Doe films of the late 1930s and early 1940s, and as a partial model for It’s a Wonderful Life from 1946. As I discuss in chapter 3 Capra himself became something of a celebrity during this period, making prestige pictures for a studio that, with few major stars under contract, was only too happy to publicize its leading director. Nevertheless, “Capra films” were not the sort of known products that they would become after Lady for a Day in 1933 and especially after It Happened One Night a year later, and so they required significant exploitation by the theaters showing them. And the variety of Capra films from the period helps us to examine the gamut of city and small-town ballyhoo practices from the late 1920s and early 1930s.

The period covered by the national distribution of these films marked a significant, transitional one for both film exhibition and advertising. In 1931, single-feature exhibition was still something of an industry standard. As Tino Balio has noted, “double features established a foothold in New England in 1930,” and by “the middle of 1932, six thousand of the fourteen thousand theaters then operating, or 40 percent, had adopted the practice.” For the next few years, that percentage would only increase. Necessarily, theatrical advertising for single films, as in the cases studied here, differed at least somewhat from advertising strategies aimed at coaxing customers into seeing two movies. Moreover, throughout the 1930s movie advertising came increasingly to be coordinated nationally, with less leeway for input by individual theater managers. Janet Staiger, in what is still the best discussion of movie advertising, has detailed the long history of tension between New York film offices and local theater managers. By the end of the decade that tension may have remained, but advertising practices themselves had shifted, at least somewhat, to the film corporation rather than the theater. But with Capra’s films from the early 1930s we can study the specific, and quickly passing, advertising mode and exhibition practice of single films that was marked by a fair amount of local control, and that also would soon be changed considerably.

The recent historiography of advertising has emphasized, in different but complementary ways, precisely this merging of the national and the local. Some of the most significant examinations of advertising, such as Roland Marchand’s groundbreaking Advertising the American Dream, emphasize the manner in which advertising as a practice and as a profession became increasingly nationalized over the course of the early twentieth century. The development of mass market magazines, such as the Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and Better Homes and Gardens, made it much easier to reach national audiences (with the titles of these magazines also offering a good idea of the centrality of female consumers during this period, which, as we will see, was not lost on the film industry). Advertisers themselves used World War I to demonstrate what Marchand calls their national muscle, as they helped “the government raise funds and recruit military personnel,” as well as “sell war bonds, enlist army and navy recruits … and promote conservation of food and resources.” Developments in media technology and science also aided in the nationalization of advertising and products. The company AT&T sought to control telecommunications nationwide and engaged in national campaigns as early as 1908 in order to convince the public of the efficacy of such a plan. At around the same time, through a massive advertising program Proctor and Gamble turned its new product, Crisco, into something of a national craze. Many other companies developed national ambitions at this time, so that in 1909, as Marchand notes, even the aptly named “National Casket Company embarked on a national magazine campaign.”

Marchand is quick to point out, however, that the benefits of these national projects may have been difficult to determine. Advertisers themselves could never be sure that their campaigns worked, and Marchand himself admits that he could not “prove conclusively that the American people absorbed the values and ideas of the ads” that they saw. Marchand’s work becomes, finally, an examination of the representational systems of the ads of the first part of the twentieth century, and an analysis of the industrial structures of the agencies that created them and the production companies that, like AT&T and Proctor and Gamble, made use of them.

Other scholars, however, have taken a far less nuanced approach and have determined that, following Marchand, advertising and production activities came to be overwhelmingly nationalized during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so much so that the public-in cities, small towns, rural areas, and everywhere else-was helpless against this public relations onslaught. In this formulation, consumption practices also became fully national. Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen’s work adopts this viewpoint while examining the manner in which “mass” images and products came to be aimed at a “mass” audience as a means of “shaping [the] American consciousness.” Two other authors of fundamental works in the field, Jackson Lears and Stephen Fox, look at advertising from about the same angle. Indeed, the title of Fox’s book, The Mirror Makers, implies a homogenizing, one-way transmission of advertising agency-created images that helped to craft an American national identity among tens of millions of consumers. The approach of the Ewens, Lears, and Fox has all too often been adopted as a cultural studies paradigm for understanding twentieth-century American consumers and their relations to those products that they consumed. In this top-down model, as capitalism developed in the United States the local became engulfed by the national, and regional preferences and habits turned into American practices that were virtually the same across the country. The motion picture industry here thus becomes the new medium that fully levelled regional differences and produced a national consciousness.

Some American studies scholars, however, have concentrated on Marchand’s uncertainties about the development of national markets and consumers and have studied quite local interpretations of advertising as well as local uses of the products advertised. Lizabeth Cohen, for instance, has written about the significance between the two world wars of the local “mom and pop” store for urban, working-class consumers. Kathy Newman, in her work on radio, has looked at local responses, particularly consumer boycotts, to national radio advertising campaigns. Thus the work of Marchand covers the nationalization of advertising and the sophisticated networks that distributed products to all parts of the country, with Marchand’s followers overstating the hegemony of these national projects. Concomitantly, the research of Cohen, Newman, and others indicates that local publicity and buying practices still must be considered of central importance to any understanding of the relationships between goods and the consumers for them. In this latter model, one that increasingly has been adopted in cultural studies, American studies, and film studies, the national and the local exist side by side, in tension with each other and also working cooperatively together. And it is the Hollywood film industry from the classical era that precisely demonstrates this mix of production and consumption activities, and the mixture of national and local approaches for reaching the audience in the United States.

Directorial Celebrity

In media studies, the understanding of the relationship between the national and the local has developed alongside an increased awareness of the mechanics of celebrity. The work of Richard deCordova, Kathryn Fuller, Gaylyn Studlar, and Shelley Stamp, among others, has demonstrated the efforts of the film industry in the United States to turn actors into stars, and has shown the exchanges between the movies, fan magazines, book publishing, radio, and other outlets to exploit that stardom as fully as possible to the benefit of the movies and a range of other products, and to create as well as fulfill the varied pleasures of the film audience. This work also gives us a better sense of celebrity before the movies. As Richard Wightman Fox has shown, in his discussion of the fame of nineteenth-century preacher Henry Ward Beecher, “the culture of celebrity was one manifestation of the culture of publicity,” with the latter developing quite fully and quickly in the years following the Civil War. It should come as no surprise, then, that half a century after Beecher’s greatest fame, movie stars would not be the only celebrities developed by the film industry. Indeed, there was ample room for film directors to become stars, and for the studios that employed them to cultivate that stardom and use it to promote their movies.

The 1930s produced a significant intellectual discourse about directing, one that appeared in a number of scholarly and educational sources. But along with this discourse (which I examine later in this book, especially in chapter 3), there was also a popular vocabulary for discussing many of the same issues of quality that interested the era’s film scholars. With Flight, the studio configured Capra as a kind of technologized, militarized visionary. In an article in the campaign book designed for placement in newspapers, Capra weighed in authoritatively on the very nature of the contemporary cinema, as he was “inclined to doubt [that] the introduction of sound and dialogue has in any manner changed the wonders of screen entertainment.” Then, in the same article, the director became nothing less than a great explorer: “Capra is the man who did the impossible a year ago when he made Submarine at the bottom of the sea,” the article claimed, and now, “having conquered the ocean, [his] ambition was next centered upon the air.” The studio had Capra conquering that space too, as the director filmed “above the clouds by using radio and airplanes.” Thus the ballyhoo represented Capra as a fully modern hero, one who invoked Charles Lindbergh and mastered new worlds largely by mastering new technologies.

Unlike Lindbergh, however, Capra was no lone eagle. The director apparently made Flight with cooperation from the federal government, which another article described as pledging the full support of the U.S. marines. The article stressed that the government never automatically cooperated with film studios, particularly after experiences with films that “were not always the kind that reflected credit to Uncle Sam’s forces.” However, when marine officers “learned that Frank R. Capra, director of Columbia’s Submarine, was to handle the megaphone [on Flight] … the officers were ready to listen to Columbia’s proposition.”

From this publicity, of course, it is difficult to tell the exact nature of the military’s involvement, particularly given the industry’s willingness to make things up for the sake of good ballyhoo. Other branches of the federal government had varied relationships with the film industry. For example, the judicial system during this period typically investigated such movie business practices as block booking, and in the next chapter I show how the State Department worked with the studios to make sure that foreign markets remained open for Hollywood films. In the case of Flight, we have evidence of very real cooperation-an officer who had actually seen service in Nicaragua allegedly supervised “every foot of the film”-and also a kind of metaphorical slippage. In what might be called the discursive representation of Capra at work, the articles in the campaign book portrayed the labor of the director on the set as very much the work of the commander in the field, from his technologized oversight of all of the battle scenes to his control of the officers and others working with him.

Continues…
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