Since the beginning of the 20th Century, Hollywood has waged a war of images and words against every other new entertainment medium. In particular, the film industry seems to have reserved special ire for radio, television and the Internet. Many observers thought that these media posed a threat to the very existence of Hollywood film. However, Paul Young, an English professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, believes film will always exist. In fact, he says these new media actually helped Hollywood.
"People have claimed that the cinema is in danger of dissolving since the moment films were first shown," Young said. "I don't see this happening, not since film became a full-fledged industry in the 1910s. In fact, rival media actually motivate Hollywood to rejuvenate its ideas about filmmaking."
For example, Young says that after broadcast radio began to gain popularity in the early 1920s, Hollywood not only experimented with synchronized sound, but also tried to make its products more intimate and spontaneous, like radio shows. Even though they were not broadcast live or heard in the home, early sound films tried to address the audiences the same way as radio -- as star personalities speaking to "live" observers as if they were trusted friends.
In the case of television, Hollywood studios were so intimidated by the new medium that studios tried to start their own TV networks. When this strategy failed, Hollywood let its films do the talking, Young said. Movies of the 1950s like It's Always Fair Weather and a 3-D film noir called The Glass Web accused television of skimping on both content and image quality compared to the movies and even presented the tube as a device that patronized and lied to its public. Before long, Hollywood found a better use for television. The studios started advertising films on TV and producing dramas and comedies for the networks as early as the late 1940s, with the then-tiny Disney studio leading the way.
In the early 1990s, when the Internet became the new medium everyone wanted to try, Hollywood created movies that made the web look intimidating and threatening. Films like Hackers, The Lawnmower Man and The Net boiled over with anxiety about what the Internet could do to the individual's privacy and even identity.
"But even the most web-phobic films, like The Matrix, had major websites that featured videogames based on the movies," Young said. "Without digital media, neither video games based on film concepts nor the stunning special effects of films like The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers would be possible."
Young is writing a book on the subject titled "The Cinema Dreams its Rivals: New Media and Hollywood's Public Spheres," which is due out this year.
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