by Laurence Maslon
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| Breadline in New York during the Great Depression and umemployed men. |
By the early 1930s, the theater capital and the film capital of America were separated by an entire continent. In the early days of the Great Depression, artists had to make a choice: stay in New York, with its harsh winters and gray, shuffling breadlines, working for a business staggering from layoffs and cutbacks, or move to Hollywood, where it was sunny all year round and smelled of eucalyptus, and money was thrown at you in fistfuls by studio executives. Which would you choose? It is, of course, a trick question. Although the motion picture studios jumped at the chance to add musicals to their rosters after the introduction of sound with THE JAZZ SINGER in 1927, it was several years before they mastered the technology of filming a successful musical. The actual sound reproduction was tinny and false, and camera movement was severely limited.
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| Poster for the 1929 film THE BROADWAY MELODY. |
None of this kept the Hollywood studios from exploiting the novelty of sound musicals, and they acquired and filmed an enormous amount of material from 1927 to 1932. Film musicals were either portmanteau revues like KING OF JAZZ, HOLLYWOOD REVUE OF 1929, or PARAMOUNT ON PARADE; awkwardly filmed stage adaptations like THE COCOANUTS, SALLY, or SHOW BOAT (1929); or newly crafted stories, often with a backstage theme that glamorized that cosmopolitan city on the East Coast: THE BROADWAY MELODY, BROADWAY BABES, FOOTLIGHTS AND FOOLS. Unfortunately, Hollywood glutted the market with an inferior product and by the early '30s, audiences were turned off by the technical limitations of the film musical.
It was up to a former marine drill instructor and Broadway dance director named Busby Berkeley to turn all this around. In 1933, he conceived the dances to the quintessential backstage film musical, 42ND STREET, and his visual skill at manipulating both chorus girls and the camera finally made a string of backstage yarns for Warner Bros. competitive with their stage counterparts. Soon, the other studios were churning out their own musical styles (Paramount, elegant and sophisticated; MGM, glossy and overblown; RKO, Astaire and Rogers), and the Hollywood musical was glorying in its heyday, with a barrage of original musicals that would enrapture depression-era America.
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| Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and Jerome Kern working with Dorothy Fields. |
Every major songwriter from Broadway was under some kind of film contract by the early 1930s. Their responses to the temptations of the West Coast were no more uniform than their personal styles of songwriting. Irving Berlin was initially distrustful of film technology and studio interference, but he was lured back to write TOP HAT for Astaire and Rogers and began a healthy relationship with various studios. (The greatest hit he -- anyone -- ever wrote, "White Christmas," came out of the 1942 film HOLIDAY INN.) The Gershwins loved the lifestyle of Hollywood but frequently commuted back and forth to the East Coast, until George's experience with "Porgy and Bess" sent him back into the arms of RKO. Jerome Kern, never one to suffer fools gladly, surprisingly liked Hollywood and was given the chance to team up with various studio-contracted lyricists like Dorothy Fields, Johnny Mercer, even Ira Gershwin, and produced some of his most extraordinary songs like "The Way You Look Tonight," "I'm Old-Fashioned," and "Long Ago and Far Away." Cole Porter was easily amenable to the assembly-line method of creating songs in Hollywood; he was always content to toss out one song and start over again on another.
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photo credits: Photofest, National Archives and Records Administration, and the Library of Congress
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