Copyright by Paul MacLusky Monticone 2019 The Dissertation Committee for Paul MacLusky Monticone Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: For the Maintenance of the System: Institutional and Cultural Change within the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, 1922-1945 Committee: Thomas Schatz, Supervisor Janet Staiger, Co-Supervisor Charlie Keil Caroline Frick Kathryn Fuller-Seeley For the Maintenance of the System: Institutional and Cultural Change within the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, 1922-1945 by Paul MacLusky Monticone Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2019 Dedication For my parents. Acknowledgements This process of the dissertation’s origination, development, and completion took several years, and, over that time, I have accrued a number of debts. Without the assistance and support of mentors, colleagues, archivists, and institutions, this dissertation would not have been possible. I would like to thank, first and foremost, my co-chairs, Janet Staiger and Thomas Schatz. I was fortunate to have as supervisors two great advocates for this project and believers in the importance of film history. Janet tirelessly worked through multiple drafts and pieces of this project, pushing me to be more precise and thorough, from sentence to chapter to large-scale section. Tom kept me focused on the bigger picture, the stakes of the project, and its end goal. Both were patient, encouraging, forgiving, and inspiring, generously offering each as needed as this project made its way toward completion. My committee members, Kathy Fuller-Seeley and Caroline Frick, offered invaluable advice and insight at various points, and Charlie Keil, a mentor since my undergraduate years at the University of Toronto, truly went above and beyond, not merely serving as a model of intellectual generosity that I aspire to emulate but providing invaluable encouragement at a crucial moments in the project’s development. I am grateful that my supervisors and committee members generously lent their time and expertise to this project— their scholarship and mentorship have immeasurably benefitted my work and development as a scholar. Beyond this dissertation’s committee, I must credit the exceptional group of scholars under whom I trained at The University of Texas at Austin, Concordia University, and the University of Toronto. I thank my colleagues and students at Rowan University, where I taught as I completed this dissertation. My colleagues at the University of Texas proved both invaluable sounding boards at v various points in this project’s development and great traveling companions with whom to share the rewards and struggles of graduate school. Thank you Joshua Gleich and other members of my cohort, as well as friends and colleagues who preceded and followed me in the program, Mike O’Brien, Paul Gansky, Tupur Chatterjee, Julien Etienne Gomez, Laura Felschow, Amanda Landa, Alfred Martin, Mike Rennett, Alexis Schrubbe, and Colin Tait. Special thanks go to Selena Dickey, Tim Piper, and Samantha Herndon for all of the above and, in particular, crucial assistance in navigating the bureaucratic hoops erected by finishing this dissertation from a distance. I must also add my appreciation for the broader field of film and media studies. I have presented work from this project at the conferences of Society of Cinema and Media Studies (for going on years now) and the International Association for Media and History and have benefitted from the feedback of fellow panelists and audience members—too numerous to list here. Trips to these conferences were made possible by the support of the University of Texas at Austin and my home department, Radio-Television-Film. I am also grateful for the latter institution’s broader support for this project, in the form of a Dissertation Completion Fellowship, which permitted me the resources to complete the research for and much of the writing of this dissertation. As a film and media historian, I am hugely indebted to the librarians and archivists who helped me navigate their institution’s collections and make the best use possible of very expensive time. Jenny Romero (the Herrick Library), Thomas Mcanear and Sarah Waitz (National Archives), and Steve Wilson (Harry Ransom Center) all helped me better understand the layout of collections that would otherwise have overwhelmed. The staff at the Lilly Library and the Indiana State Library were equally helpful. I must thank Lou Malcomb for last minute, remote research assistance in the collections of the Lilly Library. vi Catherine Jurca generously shared the fruits of her own research trips. As a graduate student, I oversaw three student researchers—Siri Svay, Tori Sallee, and Shari Grace Wells—who assisted in early-stage research into the MPPDA’s personnel. I would be leaving out a huge part of my life if I did not mention the support of friends and family without whom graduate school would have been a truly hermetic space. Russ Gerber and Bill Deluise offered outside perspectives on my work and invaluable breaks from it. Andrew Sodroski deserves special credit for that, as well as offering a very comfortable air mattress in his office during regular research trips to Los Angeles. My family—my mother, Sue; my father, John; my aunts, Patty and Ann; and my cousins, Sarah and John—provided unfailing support and encouragement. My sister, Stephanie, and her children, Joseph and Layla, offered respite from the stresses of graduate school and writing a dissertation. The same can be said for the family I’m fortunate to have acquired by marriage—Ted, Diane, Laura, Eric, Dash, and Magnus. Finally, my wife, Colleen Montgomery, bridges both worlds. As a fellow academic, she is a model of commitment to research and scholarship, and her belief in my abilities, even when I doubted them, was instrumental to pushing me to do better. More than that, she is a great partner. I am deeply grateful for her unfailing love and reassurance—to say nothing of her taking on the majority of labor in planning a wedding, a home purchase, and a move— without which I doubt this project would have made it across the finish line. vii Abstract For the Maintenance of the System: Institutional and Cultural Change within the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, 1922-1945 Paul MacLusky Monticone, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2019 Supervisors: Thomas Schatz and Janet Staiger This dissertation traces the formation and development of the Hollywood film industry’s trade association between 1922 and 1945. For nearly three decades, an oligopoly of vertically integrated production-distribution firms dominated the American film industry. Throughout this period these Hollywood majors relied on a powerful trade organization, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) to coordinate cooperative programs aimed at maintaining this form of industrial organization. In the existing literature, the operations of the MPPDA are taken as coincident with the economic imperatives of the major firms who were its sponsors, but this trade association often struggled to coordinate a membership that viewed its efforts with skepticism and outright resistance. Negotiating the competing member interests and reconciling their divergent views of cooperative action were core functions of the viii MPPDA that have been largely overlooked. This dissertation asks how the MPPDA created consensus around cooperative actions, what prevented it doing so by the early 1940s, and what the consequences of this failure were for the industry it represented. In order to account for the internal activities of this trade association and their consequences on the development of the film industry, this dissertation integrates a primary archival methodology with conceptual tools from economic sociology and organizational studies. Part One analyzes the trade association’s structure, resources, and activities in relation to changing economic and political contexts between 1922 and 1938. Part Two offers three case studies of the association’s cooperative actions during the 1940s—lobbying, public relations, and intellectual-property registration—in order to demonstrate how changes in the broader political environment, the workforce at member firms, and the production sector of the film industry exacerbated tensions among stakeholders in the MPPDA and undermined its ability to maintain the support of the oligopoly. This dissertation highlights the value in investigating the collision of various stakeholders, interests, and agendas within seemingly unified institutions. The use of overlooked archival resources reveals new sources for primary research, and the use of theoretical frameworks from fields like economic sociology suggests approaches to understanding aspects of institutions that have been largely neglected in film and media history. ix Table of Contents Chapter 1. Introduction: “For the Maintenance of the System” ............................................................... 1 The MPPDA and the Historiography of the American Cinema ............................................................... 11 “Mouthpiece of the industry”: Cultural Histories of American Film ........................................................... 12 “The Czar of All the Rushes”: Censorship