Hollywood and the Business of Music

Calling the Tune: Hollywood and the Business of Music Author Messenger, Cory Luke Joseph Published 2011 Thesis Type Thesis (PhD Doctorate) School School of Humanities DOI https://doi.org/10.25904/1912/2773 Copyright Statement The author owns the copyright in this thesis, unless stated otherwise. Downloaded from http://hdl.handle.net/10072/366651 Griffith Research Online https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au Calling the Tune: Hollywood and the Business of Music Cory Luke Joseph Messenger BA (Hons, First Class) Griff School of Humanities Humanities and Social Sciences Griffith University Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2010 ii iii Abstract Calling the Tune: Hollywood and the Business of Music combines historical research on the US film and music industries with textual film analysis in order to examine how the growing conglomeration of these two institutions affected outcomes in cultural production in the twentieth century. Ultimately, this study argues, the relationship between commercial film and popular music led, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to the emergence of New Hollywood, a term which encompasses both aesthetic and economic considerations, and which still describes contemporary commercial film production. This thesis traces the origins of New Hollywood back to the late 1920s and the advent of talking motion pictures. During this period issues surrounding the licensing of musical copyrights for inclusion in films led the major Hollywood studios to invest heavily in music publishing, so as to absorb the processes of music composition into the established studio system. After buying the key publishing firms on Tin Pan Alley, the studios soon learned that cross-media ownership enabled them to spread financial risk across interrelated commercial products. Hollywood also came to dominate the board of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, the licensing body which controlled the promotion and dissemination of American popular music. In the 1930s the Hollywood musical emerged as the ideal medium with which to promote new copyrights, which in turn could promote the films they featured in via radio play. But as radio grew in size and influence due to its own reliance on popular music, the major film studios and the US radio networks clashed over licensing fee rates. Radio broke away from ASCAP to form its own licensing body, Broadcast Music, Incorporated, and set about publishing styles of music that Tin Pan Alley had largely disregarded. With the might of radio behind it, BMI stimulated sectors of American music that had previously been denied access to the mainstream music business. In doing so it also empowered the recording industry, which had thus far been a relatively minor player in the music business. As record sales grew to unprecedented levels in the late 1940s and early 1950s—and sheet music sales fell— the established systems of music promotion developed by ASCAP and Hollywood broke down. Having lost control of the music industry, in the 1950s Hollywood attempted an intervention arguably even more dramatic than its investment in iv publishing in the 1920s, and by 1958 all of the major studios had staked a claim in the recording industry. With the US government’s Paramount Decree of 1948 leading to the dismantling of the vertically-integrated studio system, the rise of independent package productions allowed for musical styles other than conventional Hollywood orchestration to infiltrate the film soundtrack. Rock and roll—a musical style that evolved from BMI’s focus on the R&B and country markets—had expanded the market for recorded music, but in Hollywood it was marginalised in low-budget teen films produced by small independent studios. As the audience for Hollywood’s big- budget family movies dwindled throughout the 1960s, Hollywood’s investment in the record business helped save several studios from financial collapse. The corresponding rise of the rock industry not only contributed much-needed revenue, but also alerted emerging entertainment conglomerates such as MCA and Warner- Seven Arts to the possibilities of horizontal integration. As the record business grew into a billion dollar industry in the late 1960s, the major studios, adapting the marketing innovations of their record divisions, began to target a crucial segment of the marketplace they had to that point largely ignored—the youth audience. A new generation of ‘movie brat’ filmmakers allowed Hollywood to capitalise on the youth market’s interest in art cinema by adapting European innovations in sound design, combining art cinema aesthetics with recent rock hits released by the studio labels. The affiliation between film and popular music thus allowed the new entertainment conglomerates to fully capitalise on the emergence of the youth market, via corporate synergy. By the late 1970s unprecedented revenues generated by cross- media packages such as Saturday ight Fever and Grease firmly established New Hollywood. This study argues, then, that as with the contemporary global entertainment conglomerates that underpin it, New Hollywood is, essentially, a product of the film industry’s investment in popular music. With the youth market dictating the terms of contemporary entertainment in the late twentieth century Hollywood transformed itself, with the aid of rock music, into New Hollywood. v This work has not previously been submitted for a degree or diploma in any university. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the thesis itself. ______________________ vi vii Contents List of Abbreviations x Acknowledgments xi Introduction— ‘Sing a Song of Cash’: Cinema, Music and the Advent of ew Hollywood xiii Methodology xv Literature Review xx Defining ‘New Hollywood’ xxiv Chapter Outlines xxvii Chapter One— Hollywood and Music: Origins of the Entertainment Conglomerates 1 After ‘After the Ball’: Music Publishing in the 1890s 3 Mechanical Reproduction, Performance Rights, and the Formation of ASCAP 6 Cinema Exhibition and Music 9 The ‘Wagnerisation’ of Silent Film Musical Accompaniment 10 ASCAP and Cinema Exhibition 14 One Hundred and Ten-Piece Orchestras in Every Small Town 17 ‘The Smothering Talker’: Hollywood Colonises Music Publishing 20 Conclusion 23 Chapter Two— ‘Turn Your Dreams to Gold’: Hollywood and the Battle for Control of Popular Music 29 ‘Tasting big money’: the Early 1930s Publishing Boom 29 The Talkie, Technology and Musical Labour 31 ‘Like Wagner, Only Louder’: King Kong and the Studio Film Score 36 ‘We Got a Lot of What it Takes to Get Along’: Warner Bros. Revives the Musical 41 Hollywood, ASCAP and Radio 47 ‘A major and permanent irritation’: Radio and Music Licensing 49 The Advent of the National Radio Networks 52 Conclusion 54 Chapter Three— The Wages of Synergy: Hollywood Takes on the Radio etworks 59 Competition and Collusion Between Hollywood and the Radio Networks 60 The Warner Bros. Radio Boycott 65 Warner Bros. Goes Off the Air 71 The Immediate Origins of the 1939 ASCAP/Radio War 76 Conclusion 83 viii Chapter Four— ‘The music people like is the music people hear’: Outcomes of the ASCAP/BMI Split for Hollywood and Popular Music 91 Ten Months of Silence on Tin Pan Alley 91 Opening the Pop Stream: the Rise of the ‘Have Not’ Publishers 95 The Rebirth of the Recording Industry 98 A ‘New Racket’: The Record Industry and Music Publishing 100 ‘Hitler and Tojo and Shellac and Petrillo’ 105 Hillbilly and Race Music on the Jukebox 109 The Rise of ‘Non Hollywood’ Musical Styles on Independent Labels 112 ‘Stratosphere Boogie’: Capitol Records and the Commercialisation of Regional Sounds 116 The End of Traditional Song Plugging 119 Conclusion 121 Chapter Five— Scoring for a ew Industry: Film Music in the Early Post-Studio Era 127 Bad Investments: Studio ‘Disk Company Affiliations’ 127 Till the Clouds Roll By: The Hollywood Musical Sustains Tin Pan Alley 129 The Proper Setting: Industrial Self-referentiality in Singin’ in the Rain 133 The Classical Hollywood Score in the 1940s and 1950s 138 Jazz, Pop and Hollywood Scoring Convention 141 Preserving the Composer 146 The Post-Studio Score: Packaged Movies, Packaged Music 149 Conclusion 151 Chapter Six— ‘Infamous! Barbaric!’: Hollywood and the Problem of Rock and Roll 155 ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and the Rise of the Youth Audience 156 The Record Business in the Mid-1950s: R&B, Hillbilly, and Rock and Roll 159 Rock and Roll and the Diegetic Realm of the Teen 162 Rock Around the Clock: Addressing the Unknown Audience 165 ‘Rocksploitation’: Negotiating Generational Division through Rock and Roll 168 The Girl Can’t Help It: Defending the Teen Audience 174 The End of 1950s Rocksploitation 179 Conclusion 181 Chapter Seven— ‘An early clue to the new direction’: arratives of Cross-media Synergy 187 The Elvis Oeuvre: ‘Twelve songs and lots of girls’ 189 Elvis and the Remnants of the Studio System 194 Elvis and the ‘Juvenile Audience Sector’ 197 ‘Their first full length, hilarious action-packed film’: A Hard Day’s ight 200 A Day in the Life: Comparing Loving You and A Hard Day’s ight 203 ‘An Odd, Metatextual Creature’: European Influence in A Hard Day’s ight 208 The ‘Elvis model’, the ‘Beatles model’, and the 1960s LP Market 214 Capitalising on Cross-media Success 217 Conclusion 218 ix Chapter Eight— Hollywood Gets the Blues: the Studios Enter the Record Business 223 The Disc Collectors: Hollywood and

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