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Film Industry

There are two things you always hear about Hollywood from people who work in Hollywood: 1) There are no rules, only success and failure, and 2) Hollywood is high school with money.

While somewhat flip, these clichés accurately describe a volatile environment created by a group of individuals who are continually chasing the intersection of commerce and fantasy. Any discussion of leadership within this industry requires first a brief history of the business, as well as an overview of modern Hollywood. Once an historical context is provided, one is able to analyze the different spheres that exist in Hollywood as they pertain to leadership.

Brief History of Hollywood

The original leaders of the film industry who created the Hollywood system—Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, William Fox, Louis B. Mayer, and Benjamin Warner—developed the first film studios, which still operate today (Universal Pictures, Paramount, Fox, MGM, and Warner Brothers respectively).

Although they did not know each other before arriving in Hollywood, it is striking how much they had in common: they were predominantly Jewish immigrants or sons of recent immigrants of Eastern European origin. They describe themselves as coming from unstable and dysfunctional homes with weak or absent fathers. Most of their relatives were in retail businesses so that they had some basic familiarity with the concept of public taste, merchandising, market swings, and competition. They were eager to assimilate in an anti-Semitic and xenophobic post–World War I American climate.

Something drove them to a ferocious, even pathological, embrace of America…. [and] to deny whatever they had been before settling here…. within the studios and on the screen, they could simply create a new country—an empire of their own, so to speak—one where they would not only be admitted, but would govern as well. They would fabricate their empire in the image of America as they would fabricate themselves in the image of prosperous Americans. They would create its values and myths, its traditions and archetypes. It would be an America where fathers were strong, families stable, people attractive, resilient, resourceful and decent. This was their America, and its invention may be their most enduring legacy. (Gabler 1998, 4–6)

From the beginning, leadership was connected to perception in Hollywood. When the studio founders successfully projected the image they sought on the screen, it somehow reflected back to them. They began emulating the world they created on film: lavish homes, glamorous cars, and parties. Creating a perception of power often became as good as having the real thing. This notion holds true in contemporary Hollywood as well.

Overview of Contemporary Hollywood

Hollywood is a nexus of commerce, art, entertainment, and wish fulfillment. Making films is a collaborative art form involving hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of people.

In addition, there is usually a huge amount of money at stake every time a feature film is made. In the modern age of the blockbuster (each with a production cost of from 75 to 200 million dollars), feature-length filmed entertainment is responsible for roughly 35.5 billion dollars a year or 0.4 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). If one were to include all entertainment media and ancillary markets (television, DVD/VHS, publishing, music, etc.) the number would exceed 5 percent of the GDP. As a result, commercial and financial interests increasingly influence the filmmaking process, determining everything from subject matter, to budget, to actor choice. This leads to an inevitable conflict between commercial and artistic interests.

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