Engineering Hollywood: technology, technicians, and the science of building the studio system, 1915-1930

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ENGINEERING HOLLYWOOD: TECHNOLOGY, TECHNCIANS,

AND THE SCIENCE OF BUILDING THE STUDIO SYSTEM, 1915-1930

by

Luci Marzola

_________________________________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Critical Studies, School of Cinematic Arts

Copyright Luci Marzola August 2016
ii

For My Mother

iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation was only made possible through the intellectual generosity and
enthusiasm of my incredible mentors and role models. First and foremost, my co-chairs
Laura Isabel Serna and Richard B. Jewell, who have been supportive and encouraging
throughout my time at USC, both fervent believers in the power and importance of good
history. Laura has pushed me to always do better and be more thorough from the sentence
to the chapter to the bigger picture. She has never allowed me to make a lazy argument or
let my sources take over my voice. Likewise, I gained further insights from Laura in her role
as the director of the Visual Studies writing group, where she always knew how to make in-
depth critique for each of us applicable to everyone. Rick has been a stalwart supporter
allowing me to follow my own interests and passions, while always keeping me focused on
the end goal.
This project gained its shape in the seminars of my incredible committee members
Vanessa R. Schwartz and Steven J. Ross. Both of them took great interest in making sure I
built a project with relevance outside of media studies. Vanessa worked tirelessly through
myriad pieces of this project in seminars papers, grant proposals, and chapters, and never
let up in her push to make my writing better, my arguments more sophisticated, and my
ideas bigger. I will forever have her voice in my head asking, ‘So What?’ for which I am
deeply appreciative. Steve always kept my eye on the big picture, making sure I was finding
the most exciting details and ideas and ensuring the trees were worth it. The support of
these two historians has made me a better scholar and writer.
At USC, I gained much in my thinking in the seminars of Priya Jaikumar, Tom
Kemper, Michael Renov, Akira Lippit, and David James. Priya served as a thoughtful and
iv
indispensible interlocutor at my qualifying exams and Tom Kemper introduced me to the
latest work in media historiography that sent me down the path I find myself on now.
Likewise, the staff in the Critical Studies (or Cinema and Media Studies, as of late)
department, including Bill Whittington, Alicia White, Christine Acham, and Linda Overholt,
have been an integral source of support throughout my time here.
I have been fortunate to have many inspiring colleagues during this journey, first
and foremost Lara Bradshaw and Alison Kozberg who were there with me from the first
day of our master’s program through coursework, exams, research, and the dark days of
dissertation writing. They’ve been an essential source of support and gently critical
feedback when I needed it. Umayyah Cable and Roxanne Samer were there with me the last
days of this process, as we cheered each other across the finish line. I got essential feedback
from members of the Visual Studies Research Institute writing group including those
already mentioned above, as well as Feng-Mei Heberer, Kevin Driscoll, Lana Swartz, Kate
Page-Lippsmeyer, Elena Bonomo, Joshua Mitchell, Nadya Bair, Nadine Chan, and Samantha
Carrick.
I must add my appreciation to my colleagues across the wider field of media studies.
I have presented work from this project at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, Society
for the History of Technology, and Berkeley Conference on Silent Cinema, and it has
benefited from the feedback from fellow panelists and audience members. I have been
fortunate to get useful feedback and encouragement from Charlie Keil, Shelley Stamp, Brian
Jacobson, Denise McKenna, Katharina Loew, Eric Hoyt, and Mark Garrett Cooper. Charlie
has kindly served as a mentor and collaborator, offering a model for intellectual generosity
that I aspire to emulate. As those who came through USC before me and gave me models of
v
scholarship and accomplishment to aspire to, Brian and Eric have been generous with their
advice and encouragement. Elizabeth Affuso and Kate Fortmueller have given me
friendship that exceeded the bounds of graduate school.
As a historian committed to archival research, I am hugely indebted to the many
librarians and archivists who have helped me along the way. Without Barbara Hall, Jenny
Romero, and Louise Hilton at the Herrick Library this project would be a shell of its current
form. The Smithsonian Institute aided my research with a Baird Society fellowship and Lilla
Vekerdy, Jim Roan, and Ryan Lintelman offered me helpful guidance and suggestions while
researching in the trade literature collection. James Layton at Eastman House not only
found valuable material for me but also helped me to better understand the inner workings
of Technicolor. Kathy Connor and Jesse Peers guided my through the Eastman
corresponded there as well. I worked in the corporate archives of Bausch & Lomb, thanks
to Jean and Amy there, and Mole-Richardson thanks to Nancy Murray, John Clisham, and
Peter Mole’s grandson Larry Parker. Lori Birrell helped me with the essential collections at
the University of Rochester.
I would be leaving out a huge part of my life if I did not mention the support of the
friends I had going in and somehow managed to keep despite the hermit-inducing graduate
school process. To mention a few, Megan Hyndman kindly offered her diligent copyediting
services, perhaps not realizing what she was getting into with academic writing. Emily
Fisher provided great company and a cozy couch on many of my research trips to
Washington DC. Many other friends, including Sheila Edmiston, Rob Davis, and Stephen
Tramontana, listened to me prattle on about my research or offered childcare, for which I
am forever in their debt.
vi
Most important has been the love and support of my family. My husband Michael
has always believed in my ability to make something great, even when I did not. His own
quest for perfection in his work has pushed me to do better. My son Wolfgang, who
gestated in the research libraries of the Smithsonian and the Academy, brought new joy as
well as determination in the last couple years of this process. His need for my attention
gave focus and urgency to the precious time I had to work on this project. Many people
made finishing my dissertation with a young child possible, including Nicole Starrett,
Michaela Myers, and most of all, my husband and my sister Karina Wolfe. Without them, I
could never have physically done this. My sister Alia and my nephew Orion offered much
needed respite from the stresses of graduate school. Lastly, my parents have been a source
of constant optimism and joy. Though my mother did not get to see the end of this process,
I know she is proud.

vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication ii

Acknowledgements iii

List of Figures ix

Abstract xi

Introduction 1
Hollywood’s Factory Dream 11
The Paradigmatic Creative Industry 16
Understanding Motion Picture Technology 19
The American Technological Character 23
The Engineer in America 27
Understanding Industrial Solidarity 30
A Complete Technological System 33

Chapter 1 Engineering A Society Apart: Cooperation and Competition 39
Among East Coast Motion Picture Technology Manufacturers
Motion Picture Technology Before the War 44
A Standard for Standardization 49
The “Big Men” Enter 55
Looking West 60
A Small Market of Big Customers 69
DuPont’s Challenge to Kodak 75
Conclusion 87

Chapter 2 “Maintained Solely for Your Benefit”: Technological Service 89
Firms And the Hollywood Industrial Cluster
A New Customer in Town 95
Laboratories at Your Service 101
The Hollywood Service Corridor 115
Engineers on the Move 119
Technicolor Moves West 123
The Professional Standard 128
Conclusion 142

Chapter 3 Between the Lines: The Engineer in the Movie Studio 145
The Hands of Hollywood 150
Apprenticeship and Mobility 159
Organizing the ‘Elite’ Technicians 163
Industrial Reflexivity and the American Society of Cinematographers 176
The Engineer in the Studio 186
Conclusion 193
viii

Chapter 4 Bridging the Divide: Trade Collaboration and the First 195
Scientific Endeavor in Hollywood
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: The Reasons Why 202
The ASC Responds: Loyalty, Progress, and Art 207
Inventing the Mazda Tests 214
Making Contact 229
The Engineers Come to Hollywood 234
The Mazda Climax 245
Conclusion 250

Chapter 5 Cooperative Intelligence: Hollywood Trade Organizations 253
and the Building of the Studio System
The Chaos of Sound 257
The Fundamental School of Sound 266
Circulating Knowledge 280
The Society and the Academy 289
Whose Academy? 295
The Evolution of the Producers-Technicians Committee 300
Conclusion 310

Conclusion 312

Bibliography 316

Appendix A: Acronyms 322

ix
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Banquet for the 7
Society of Motion Picture Engineers, Roosevelt Hotel, Hollywood,
California, April 11, 1928

Figure 2. The cover of Bausch & Lomb Magazine, May 1930 71

Figure 3. Ad for DuPont-Pathe Film Manufacturing Corp., American 80
Cinematographer, March 1926.

Figure 4. Advertisement for Eastman Service Building, American 86
Cinematographer, January 1931.

Figure 5. Mole-Richardson studio lamp plant, Hollywood, undated, 89
Mole-Richardson Company Archive.

Figure 6. Advertisement for the Thalhammer tripod, American 99
Cinematographer, December, 1921.

Figure 7. Santa Monica Blvd and Gower St., 1922. 115

Figure 8. The Hollywood Technology Service Corridor, 1929. 116

Figure 9. The Hollywood service corridor and the major motion picture studios. 118

Figure 10. Advertisement for Bell & Howell Camera Company, 1923. 131

Figure 11. Mitchell Camera Ad, American Cinematographer, December 1925. 134

Figure 12. Image from the Bell & Automatic Motion Picture Camera pamphlet, 137
1927.

Figure 13/14. Advertisements from American Cinematographer, June 1927. 139

Figure 15. Cover of American Cinematographer, November 1922. 145

Figure 16. Still from The Wind (MGM, 1928) 195

Figure 17. Still of interior shooting from The Wind (MGM, 1928) 196

Figure 18. The Warner Bros. domestic set for the Mazda Tests. 223

Figure 19. The Mazda Tests, American Cinematographer, February 1928 224

x
Figure 20. ASC President Daniel Clark, Victor Milner, MPPDA’s Will Hays, 226
AMPAS’s Fred Beetson, and Frank Murphy at the Mazda Tests,
Spring 1928.

Figure 21. Cartoon from SMPE Convention issue of American 235
Cinematographer, April 1928.

Figures 22/23. Dubray’s color charts showing the color rendering of various film 239
stock and lighting combinations.

Figure 24. Cartoon by cinematographer Glenn R. Kershner portraying the 278
cinematographers as students going back to school at the Academy’s
sound school.

xi
ABSTRACT

Contrary to our understanding of the Hollywood studio system as an industry built
by pioneering producers and forged through the vertical integration of production,
distribution, and exhibition by the major studios, this project argues for the centrality of
technological infrastructure and collaboration across the larger industrial cluster of
Hollywood. Instead of the vertically-integrated studios, I argue it was the horizontally-
organized trade associations and collaborative endeavors around technology which
allowed the system to dominate motion picture production for decades. By focusing on the
role played by technology, we see a new map of the studio system beyond the backlots of
Los Angeles and the front offices in New York. In this study, Hollywood includes the labs of
industrial manufacturers, the sales routes of independent firms, the garages of tinkerers,
and the clubhouses of technicians’ societies.
Collaboration across the studios and technology manufacturers was facilitated by
the increasingly central role of trade organizations such as the Society of Motion Picture
Engineers and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which united engineers
and technicians from across the studios and technology manufacturers and put them in
dialogue with the producers and administrators running the studios. These organizations
allowed for the increasing presence of engineers and engineering principals into the
studios. They created a major role for themselves by convincing the producers of the
benefits for knowledge sharing, particularly around technologies that were seen as non-
competitive. While we tend to focus on the role of innovative technologies, these trade
associations recognized the importance of mundane technologies in creating a
professionalized industry.
xii
The dominant narrative of motion picture technology in the 1920s has focused on
revolutionary advances such as sound and color, but it was the mundane everyday
technologies such as lighting, film stock, and cameras around which the infrastructure of
the system was built. The focus in scholarship on innovation and its effects on artistic style
have clouded the important role of maintenance, training, incremental improvement, and
standardization in creating a stable structure for a creative industry to flourish. As such,
this project focuses on those technologies on which strategies for collaboration were built,
including the shifts to incandescent lighting and panchromatic film and the improvement of
existing tools such as cameras and set materials after the introduction of sound.
This dissertation argues that the American motion picture industry was stabilized
and able to dominate the field for decades through collaboration over technologies over
everyday use. Hollywood’s relationship to its essential technology was fundamentally one
of interdependence and cooperation—with manufacturers, trade organizations, and the
competing studios. The fact that those in charge of the producing companies had little
understanding of the technology that made their industry work forced them to rely on the
expertise of their technicians and of outside engineers. Through collaboration over
technology, the Hollywood studios and their supporting institutions created collective
standards facilitated and reinforced by the sharing of technical knowledge. As such,
Hollywood could be defined as an industry by participation in a closed system of technical
collaboration that allowed a select group of producers and manufacturers to dominate the
motion picture business for decades.

1
INTRODUCTION

I am sometimes asked: ‘What is a motion picture engineer?’ and perhaps I can best
describe him by pointing out that after the author has written the story, and the
director has passed on the script, and the star and the beautiful heroine and all the
extras are arranged, and it looks as if everything was getting along swimmingly,
somebody comes along and places restrictions on the wishes of the author.
That is likely to be the engineer.
1

- Willard Cook, President, Society of Motion Picture Engineers

It is said that the scientific man seldom achieves the height of fame accorded the
glittering personalities of the artists. It may be that the men who have developed this art
for us may not pass down in the halls of consequence, but I feel that while some of us
here present have momentary flashing significance, in a few years we shall be lost, but
the contributions of these men, even if their names are not know, will represent a
permanence far superior to the effervescent fame that some of us possess.

- Milton Sills, actor, founding member of the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

In November 1928, Hollywood cinematographer Joseph Dubray found himself in
front of an audience of over one thousand students and faculty at the University of
Minnesota. Before journeying on the rails eastward across the Rockies, Dubray had
gathered reels from across the motion picture studios of Los Angeles including Paramount,
Universal, Fox, and both Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. While one might expect a
lecture by a denizen of the movie colony would focus on the glamour of Hollywood
moviemaking, the assembled had instead come to learn about such marvels as the Dunning

1
Willard Cook and Milton Sills, “Speeches Presented at the Banquet Given by the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Honor of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers” (Hollywood,
California, April 9-14, 1928), Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 12, no. 33: 16,
24. (Hereafter cited as TSMPE.)

2
process, double exposure, and miniatures, all, according to Dubray, “demonstrating the
Engineering processes involved in motion picture making.”
2

The university invited Dubray to discuss the technical progress made in
cinematography in the last two decades, addressing the student body as well as the
Minnesota branches of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American
Institute of Electrical Engineers, and the Society for the Promotion of Engineering
Education. Dubray showed his audience early films, such as Melies’ 1903 “Trip to the Sun”
(obviously a mislabeled Trip to the Moon) and 1912’s The New York Hat, and contrasted
them with the modern spectacles of The Iron Mask (UA, 1929) and Hangman’s House (Fox,
1928). As he only showed clips from the films still in production, the comparison had little
to do with the progress made in storytelling or performance in the intervening decades.
Rather the advances in the science of the cinema had gathered the masses in Minnesota.
Dubray explained how the filmmakers in Hollywood utilized the products of
research conducted in the “various research laboratories through the country, nay through
the world.”
3
Those in Hollywood “actually engaged in the making of motion pictures” then
collected this information from the research laboratories and applied it “to actual practice.”
He exaggerated the fixedness of this industrial procedure and the research infrastructure of
Hollywood, which was really only just beginning to take shape at the time. Nonetheless, the
increased value of in-studio research and the trade infrastructure of industry-wide
institutions such as the Association of Motion Picture Producers, the American Society of

2
Joseph Dubray, Report to the Honorable Board of Governors of the American Society of
Cinematographers on the Lectures visit to the University of Minnesota,” November 22, 1928. Joseph
Dubray File, American Society of Cinematographers’ Collection, Margaret Herrick Library.
3
Joseph A. Dubray, Stenographic Record of an Extemporaneous Lecture Delivered to the Faculty and
Advanced Student Body of the University of Minnesota (November 22, 1928), Joseph Dubray File.

3
Cinematographers, the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, and most recently, the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were giving shape to a system around the
control of technologically innovation and standardization the likes of which no creative
field had yet seen. If Dubray saw the industry as further along in its pursuit of scientific
legitimacy than it actually was, it was only because he knew how far they had already
come.
4

In the early-1910s, motion pictures had become a major source of mass
entertainment in America, but its producers were still practicing artisanal methods—using
borrowed technology and self-trained workers—that had largely been abandoned by other
major U.S. industries. In this era of rising corporate capitalism and scientific management,
the motion picture producers ventured into territory unmapped by any previous
entertainment business, taking cues from industrial giants such as Ford and DuPont in
their attempt to bring the factory system to their new home in California. Yet, the image of
a “dream factory,” that the producers themselves perpetuated and historians subsequently
took up, in which every aspect of production was contained within the towering walls of
the Los Angeles studios, ignores the work of hundreds of engineers and companies that

4
Dubray began as a cameraman in the earlier years of motion picture production in France. He
moved to the United States with Pathé in 1909 and, like many in the industry, to Los Angeles after
World War I. He joined the American Society of Cinematographers in its founding year (1919) and
was active in the intellectual life of the elite cameramen’s institution from its inception. As
technology became more and more central to the work and rhetoric of Hollywood, Dubray stayed at
the center of it all, becoming the technical editor of American Cinematographer and playing a central
role in the Mazda tests, Hollywood’s first “scientific” endeavor, the formation of the Pacific Coast
section of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, and the early work of the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences. His move from creative worker to technical expert was complete in 1929,
when left cinematography to run the technical department of the Bell & Howell camera company,
eventually having a film perforation named in his honor. As such, Dubray’s career is interwoven
into the history of Hollywood’s relationship to technology as it developed from an artisanal
industry to one managed by professionalized trade organizations and entwined with major
technological manufacturers.

4
produced and processed the most essential aspects of motion picture production—film
stock, cameras, lights, lens, and other important, if unglamorous, dimensions of the
business.
In order to reorient our understanding of the motion picture industry as one
fundamentally built on the sharing of technological knowledge, this dissertation examines
the industrial control of technology during the formation of the Hollywood studio system. It
asks what it meant for a creative business to industrialize in a period well before the
invention of the seemingly contradictory notion of “creative industries.”
5
By studying the
often-ignored technical aspects of motion picture production, from cameras to developer
solutions, along with their inventors, manufacturers, and practitioners, this project creates
a new understanding of the industrial system that emerged in Hollywood. By focusing on
technology’s role, we see a new map of the studio system beyond the standard account of
the backlots of Los Angeles and the front offices in New York. In this study, the industrial
cluster known as Hollywood includes the labs of industrial manufacturers, the sales routes
of independent firms, the garages of tinkerers, and the clubhouses of technicians’ societies.
This dissertation argues that the American industry stabilized and dominated the
motion picture field for decades through its efforts at collaboration over the mundane
technologies of everyday use. Hollywood’s relationship to its essential technology was
fundamentally one of interdependence and cooperation—with manufacturers, trade
organizations, and the competing studios. The fact that those in charge of the producing
companies had little understanding of the technology that made their industry work forced

5
Recent scholarship on “creative industries” has largely focused on contemporary businesses such
as video games and the software industry. See John Hartley, ed. Creative Industries (Wiley-
Blackwell, 2005).

5
them to rely on the expertise of outside engineers and their own technicians. Through
collaboration over basic technology, the Hollywood studios and their supporting
institutions created collective standards facilitated and reinforced by the sharing of
technical knowledge. As such, participation in this closed system of technical collaboration
served to define Hollywood, allowing a select group of producers and manufacturers to
dominate the motion picture business for decades.
While the early years of Hollywood are usually seen in light of legendary figures
such as Aldoph Zukor, Thomas Ince, and Mary Pickford, it is figures like Joseph Dubray,
unknown and unheralded in history, that are the stars of this project. The engineers,
technicians, and bureaucrats who supported a system which made wealthy stars of
producers, directors, and actors here take the lead roles, as Dubray did for a brief moment
with his trip to Minnesota. These figures were responsible for every frame Hollywood
produced—from the emulsion on which the image formed, the camera that shot it, the
chemical baths that developed it, the lighting and color effects that gave life to it, and the
projectors allowing audiences to see it. Cameramen, electricians, radio engineers, chemists,
physicists, garage tinkerers, and laboratory superintendents were as responsible for
making Hollywood what it was as the stars they photographed and the executives who
signed their checks with little understanding of how their underlings did their jobs.
Yet these people are nearly invisible in our understanding and image of
Hollywood—only occasionally spied in the background of a snap behind the camera, fixing
cable hunched behind a star, hovering over a high powered lamp, or ponderously looking at
a film strip in a darkened room, most often anonymously. They are also the forgotten
administrators posing in photographs among famed executives, and the corporate

6
engineers who never stepped foot into a motion picture studio. Their names were almost
never seen projected on the screen—a privilege they would have to fight for decades to
achieve. Their anonymity to us has allowed them to disappear in plain site, as we often fail
to recognize figures like Dubray that we are likely to encounter across many decades,
organizations, and events. While directors, producers, and stars are often given the auteur
treatment in which we recognize their contributions over large swaths of time, technicians
and bureaucrats often reside in our footnotes completely decontextualized from their
longer careers, generic names with no life behind them. While a single dissertation cannot
revive every important figure standing behind the scenes of Hollywood, I hope to bring
many figures like Dubray to life as a way of enriching our understanding that the work
behind motion picture making was as much about the maintenance and improvement of a
functioning industry as it was about its end product.
At the 1928 convention of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, Douglas
Fairbanks stood before the assembled scientists and technicians and acknowledged though
they sometimes forget “the debt we owe you,” those with their names in lights knew that
the work of those assembled had allowed them to “leave the one night stands, the barber
chairs, and the fur business” for their much more lucrative lives as Hollywood movie stars.
6

While clearly pandering to a likely star struck audience of chemists and electrical
engineers, Fairbanks’ very presence at the event shows a dimension of Hollywood that we
rarely see; one in which the stars were compelled to do work to maintain these more
mundane aspects of the system for which they were the public faces. Likewise, when Louis

6
Douglas Fairbanks, “Speeches Presented at the Banquet Given by the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences in Honor of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers,” (Hollywood, California, April
9-14, 1928) TSMPE 8, no. 33 (1928): 16.

7
B. Mayer and the other studio chiefs created the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences in 1927 as a means of managing both the image and the labor of the business, they
knew that not only the artists but also the technicians and their control of the science of
production were essential to the livelihood of the motion picture industry.
Figure 1: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Banquet for the Society
of Motion Picture Engineers, Roosevelt Hotel, Hollywood, California, April 11, 1928
7

While the vertical structure of the system, in which a few corporations controlled
most of the production, distribution, and exhibition of Hollywood’s output, has been key to
our understanding of the studio system, here I look at its horizontal structures. The
movement of engineers and technicians between studios and manufacturers, the
relationships between studio-based and manufacturer-based personnel, and the trade
organizations which created relationships, collaborations, networks, and information flows

7
Photo accompanying “Editorial—The Voice of the A. S. C.,” American Cinematographer IX, no. 2
(May 1928): 6.

8
between the various companies involved in the business of making movies worked to
create a unified system built around largely standardized technology. Contrary to our
understanding of their competitive relationship, during the period in which the studio
system took shape, the production executives came to recognize the value of cooperation
for the creation of basic standards of quality derived from the technologies of everyday use.
While the marvels which form our understanding of Hollywood’s engagement with
technology—from 3D to synchronized sound—were largely competitive and proprietary,
the tools which allowed production to happen at its most essential level, including lights,
lenses, film stock, building materials, and developer chemicals functioned as catalysts for
creating a unified industry sustained be collaborative research and knowledge sharing.
Beginning with the earliest meetings of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (1916) and
the American Society of Cinematographers (1919) a new approach to the technology of the
industry began to take shape—one which was concerned with the maintenance of an
important American industrial sector and not just individual corporate profits. While these
cooperative endeavors began on the level of the engineer and the studio technician they
would eventually move up the ranks of the industry to the production executives and the
organizations they controlled, the Association of Motion Picture Producers and the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
This project centers on the larger systems and infrastructures for dealing with
technology in this creative industry, rather than the technical improvements in any
particular motion picture tool. Many histories of the development of individual
technologies—from cameras to color systems—can be found in existing works and the one
hundred years of publications of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers. Instead I am

9
concerned with understanding the individuals who used the technology, made the
technology, and organized around it, so we can answer larger questions about the ways in
which Hollywood as an industry regulated and created a discourse around its scientific
base. In this way, we can move beyond an exceptional view of the motion picture industry
and see it for the ways it modeled other industries that bring creative practice and
technology into close connection for their operation.
This project offers a portrait of the Hollywood studio system as a technology-based
industry interlocked with other major U.S. industries. It recognizes the difference between
a creative industry based around technology and science-based industries which are
focused on the production of technology itself. The later primary technology industries,
including electronics and chemical companies, looked on Hollywood as an ancillary market
for their existing products. Their raw materials were metal, chemicals, and fibers, while
lights, cameras, and lens were their products. For Hollywood, a secondary technology
industry, the studios largely consumed technology products in their pursuit of ever more
polished, innovative, and professional creative products. Their creative pursuits led them
to use tools in innovative ways, often counter to their intended purposes. Additionally, in
the absence of tools to fit their specific needs in the studios, Hollywood technicians often
became inventors and tinkerers themselves.
This focus on the application of technology in the Hollywood studios is what
distinguishes it as a pioneer of creative industries. This fundamental relationship to
technology, harnessed to creative needs, is the core of what made Hollywood work. This
relationship also contributed to the central importance of trade organizations to the
industry, as the studios used these groups to outsource the development of basic

10
technological infrastructure to an industry-wide collaborative body. In this arena, the
technology itself was not proprietary, though its application often was.
The agency of those building, innovating, using, and regulating the technology of
production is central to this project. As such, my analysis mobilizes archival research into
the myriad individuals, companies, and organizations that engaged with the technologies of
productions, both in Los Angeles and on the East Coast. I consulted both public and private
papers of companies such as Eastman Kodak, Technicolor, Akeley Camera, Mole-
Richardson lighting, Warner Bros. Pictures, Pathe Exchange, and the Bausch & Lomb
Optical Co. I utilized the papers of several industry pioneers such as producers Thomas
Ince and George Kleine, inventors Frederic and Herbert Ives and Thomas Kimmwood
Peters, and businessman Herbert Kalmus, founder of Technicolor, as well as the extensive
member files of the American Society of Cinematographers and the internal archives for the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences housed at the latter’s Margaret Herrick
Library. To this archival research, I added extensive use of trade literature from the period
including American Cinematographer, the Transactions and Journal of the Society of Motion
Picture Engineers, International Photographer, and Kodak Monthly Abstract Bulletin as well
as the mass of industry trades made available through the Media History Digital Library.
To take this new view of the development of the Hollywood system, I engage with
the existing history of the studio system as well as fields not often thought of as germane to
motion picture history, including the history of technology, engineering, and trade
associations. In this way, the mechanisms by which the system emerged, flourished, and
sustained itself for decades can be seen not just for their effects on Hollywood movies but
also for their roles as precedents for similar creative industries. By utilizing these

11
paradigms, I de-center the products that Hollywood manufactured (namely, fictional
motion pictures) and instead think of the studios and their personnel as consumers,
innovators, and purveyors of technologies.

Hollywood’s Factory Dream
While the spectacle of motion picture technology was key to the “cinema of
attractions,” as narrative took hold of the medium, we are told that technology was
subsumed into an increasingly “invisible” style. The fascination with the increasingly
complex technology of the medium never really died and showed a marked increase in the
mid-1910s, just at the moment when the studio system began to take shape.
8
In 1913, trade
columnist Louis Reeves Harrison could claim that, “Mechanical details are little considered
by mixed audiences all over the country, because no conception of their importance can
exist except among those engaged in the work or among the few insiders accorded a view
of inside operations.”
9
Only a year later, articles explaining the technical details of
complicated special effects and lab production facilities had become a regular feature of
both industry and popular publications.
10
The producers were eager to promote their
recent investment in cutting-edge facilities, not only to assure exhibitors of their

8
Previous to this date, behind-the-scenes rhetoric equated motion picture production to the
theater, such as in the regular Moving Picture World column “Studio Saunterings” by Louis Reeves
Harrison. See for example: Louis Reeves Harrison, “Studio Saunterings.” Moving Picture World 11,
No. 6 (February 10, 1912): 465; Moving Picture World 11, No. 7 (February 17, 1912): 557. Moving
Picture World 12, No. 2 (April 13, 1912): 127.
9
Louis Reeves Harrison, “Studio Saunterings” Moving Picture World 11, no. 12 (March 30, 1913):
1143. Not surprisingly, after “Studio Saunterings” ended in early 1913, Harrison moved to a column
focused on quality scenario writing, a practice he often did himself.
10
See for example: Monte M. Katterjohn, “Producing Novel Effects in the Silent Drama” Movie
Pictorial 1, no. 19 (September 12, 1914): 30. Dick Melbourne, “Inceville,” Movie Pictorial 2, no. 3
(September 1915): 11. “Enlarging Edison Studio,” Moving Picture World 20 no. 9 (May 23, 1914):
1270. Thackeray P. Leslie, “Lubin of Lubinville: From Optician to Millionaire Picture Manufacturer,”
Movie Pictorial 1, No. 9 (July 4, 1914): 12.

12
commitment to regularized production, but also to show audiences how much they cared
about the quality of their products. The innovative technology, quality materials, and
perfectly controlled environments they boasted about did not come cheaply, but they did
project a notion of permanence and stability heretofore unheard of in the fly by night days
of early film production.
This rhetorical shift, echoing the rapid expansion of the industry and occurred at the
same time that the majority of production moved west, heralded an extended period of
technological professionalization for the world’s first major creative industry. These
behind-the-scenes discourses on motion picture production in the U.S. in the 1910s
demonstrated the move away from an artisanal view of motion pictures, equated with
theatrical production, toward a discourse of systematic efficiency and investment in the
manufacturing of realism. By doing so, the motion picture producers embraced the
technological base of the medium and revived a focus on the unique abilities of the
apparatus, all while equating their practices with industrial production and the factory
rather than artisanal craftsmanship and the studio.
The motion picture industry conceived itself within its publicity using terms of
scientific management and assembly line production despite the clear differences between
its operations and that of a manufacturing plant. In doing so, the producers were
positioning themselves within the prevailing business rhetoric of the day. It was in 1913
that Henry Ford installed the first moving assembly belts in his plants, and his production
innovations were widely publicized throughout the period.
11
Only two years earlier in

11
See: David E. Nye, America’s Assembly Line (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2015). It is also notable
that Ford opened a factory in downtown Los Angeles in 1913, “Ford Factory Now Nears
Completion,” Los Angeles Times, November 2, 1913, VII5.

13
1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor had published The Principles of Scientific Management, in
which he applied the scientific study of motion and time to increasing efficiency in
manufacturing and production. According to Siegfried Giedion, Taylor’s ideas and Ford’s
practices dominated discourses on industrial production in the 1910s.
12
Likewise, industry
and fan publications described the leaders of the motion picture industry in much the same
way the mainstream press discussed Ford, as innovators of cutting-edge production
practices.
13

The reality was that in the mid-1910s the motion picture studios were still largely
using artisanal methods and self-trained craftsmen. It was only through the
professionalization of the technical side of the industry in the late-1910s and the 1920s
that motion picture production truly took its industrialized form. Though much rhetoric
has emphasized the notion of Hollywood as a “dream factory” with parallels to Fordist
factory production, this was little more than studio publicity designed to ensure investors
that the business was stable and modern. Rather than assembly line mass industrial
production, when it came to the technology and technique of creative production,
Hollywood more frequently borrowed elements from corporate capitalism, such as
scientific management, corporate research and development, standardization, and the
increasing importance of engineers and formal technical education.
14

12
Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (Oxford
University Press, 1948), 31.
13
See for example: Thackeray P. Leslie, “Lubin of Lubinville: From Optician to Millionaire Picture
Manufacturer,” Movie Pictorial 1, No. 9 (July 4, 1914): 12; Monte M. Katterjohn, “J. Stuart Blackton:
The Belasco of the Motion Picture Play,” Movie Pictorial 1, no. 10 (July 11, 1914): 10; F.H.
Richardson, “The Home of Vitagraph,” Moving Picture World 19, no. 4 (January 24, 1914): 401.
14
For the definition of corporate capitalism used here, see: David F. Noble, America by Design:
Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism. (Oxford University Press, 1977).

14
While David Bordwell and Janet Staiger peg 1930 as the moment when the motion
picture industry began to promote “mechanical marvels as assiduously as it has publicized
stars, properties, and genres,” I argue that this is instead an end point at which time the
industry had developed a consistent approach to technological management and control.
15

Given the status of Hollywood and particularly its classical period (described by Richard B.
Jewell as 1929-1945) in the field of film history, it is surprising how little we understand
about how its institutional structures came into being during its earliest years as a center of
motion picture production.
16
The plethora of scholarship on the earlier transitional era
(1907-1915) offers a model of motion picture history that is institutionally focused and
archivally-based, looking at larger trends within production and consumption practices
rather than specific stars, directors, or studios.
17

This draws attention to the need for similar work on the last era of silent cinema,
the feature period (1915-1928), during which Hollywood established much of its
institutional framework.
18
Richard Koszarski’s An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the

15
David Bordwell and Janet Staiger, “Technology, Style, and Mode of Production,” The Classical
Hollywood Cinema, 243.
16
See: Richard B. Jewell, The Golden Age of Cinema: Hollywood, 1929-1945 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007).
17
For the development of narrative see: Tom Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American
Narrative Film (University of Illinois Press, 1993); Charles Kiel, Early American Cinema in
Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907-1913 (University of Wisconsin, 2002); For censorship
see: Lee Grieveson, Policing the Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth Century America
(University of California Press, 2004); For cultural trends see: Richard Abel, The Red Rooster Scare:
Making Cinema American, 1900-1910 (University of California Press, 1999) and Americanizing the
Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910-1914 (University of California, 2006); For the star system
see: Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America
(University of Illinois, 2001); For gender and spectatorship: Shelley Stamp, Movie Struck Girls
(Princeton University Press, 2000); For race and spectatorship: Jacqueline Stewart, Migrating to the
Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (University of California, 2005).
18
There is little recent work focusing primarily on American silent cinema after 1915, with the
exception of important works focused on gender in early Hollywood. See: Mark Garrett Cooper,
Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood (Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 2010); Dennis McKenna, “The City that Made the Pictures Move” (PhD Diss., New York

15
Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1928, a valuable overview of the period, describes the move
from the more artisanal transitional era to the regularization of efficient feature
production, systemized rental distribution, and picture palace exhibition.
19
Koszarski
organizes his discussion of the management side of production into a series of corporate
biographies, working his way through the major players of the period and emphasizing the
moves toward consolidation and the increasing dependence on outside financial
investment. He concludes that technological development during the silent-feature era was
largely incremental, leaving room for inquiries into how technology developed and why
particular innovations were privileged over others.
While volumes focusing on the Hollywood studio system generally give
acknowledgement to its development in the silent feature era, they seldom delve into this
foundational period. The development of the studio system is often attributed to a singular
figure, which changes depending on the focus of the history. Those studying corporate
management focus on the innovations in vertical integration and the exploitation of the
star system of Paramount’s Adolph Zukor, while those focused on the efficient production
practices of the period credit Thomas Ince and the director-unit system.
20
Carl Laemmle
and his Universal City serve as the model for innovations in motion picture plant design
and management. In most cases, the development of the complex studio system is

University, 2008); Shelley Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2015) and Hilary Hallett, Go West, Young Women! The Rise of Early Hollywood (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2013).
19
Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915 – 1928.
(University of California Press, 1990).
20
See Douglas Gomery’s The Hollywood Studio System—A History (BFI, 2005); Thomas Schatz’s The
Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (University of Minnesota Press, 2010);
Janet Staiger, “Dividing Labor for Production Control: Thomas Ince and the Rise of the Studio
System,” Cinema Journal 18, no. 2 (Spring 1979): 16-25.

16
simplified into a few key innovations by individual pioneers within the studios themselves,
rather than a complex set of practices affected by financial motivations, trade
organizations, local politics, geography, infrastructure, transportation, audiences, and
technology. In order to fully define the industrial apparatus that created classical cinema
and helped to define how creativity could be harnessed for large-scale commerce, the
system beyond the studios themselves needs a deeper history.

The Paradigmatic Creative Industry
The ascendant field of creative industry studies gives us an effective framework for
looking at the formation of the Hollywood studio system in new ways. In John Hartley’s
edited volume, Creative Industries, scholars acknowledge the importance of the Hollywood
entertainment industry as “the prototype” for more recent network-based creative
enterprises.
21
Most of these scholars have adopted Richard E. Caves’ definition of creative
industries as those that produce “experience goods” that are “the manifestation of the
creative or artistic abilities of an individual or a team.”
22
They also share particularly
unique qualities such as taste driven consumption, non-pecuniary benefits for participants
(such as artistic fulfillment), a wide range of abilities and skills among producers, and
durable products that often reap economic rents for years to come.
While Hollywood, and particularly the studio system, is rarely the subject of studies
of creative industries, it is taken to be such a prototypical model that it is frequently

21
See Jeremy Rifkin, “When Markets Give Way to Networks… Everything is a Service,” Creative
Industries, John Hartley, ed. (Blackwell, 2005): 361-374.
22
Richard E. Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2000), 1.

17
invoked as an easily understood example when explaining generic paradigms. For example,
media studies scholar Stuart Cunningham argues for the rising importance of creative
enterprises by pointing to the fact that the entertainment industry has a larger sector of the
Southern California economy than defense and aerospace. Likewise, business historians
Walter A. Friedman and Geoffrey Jones use a comparison between independent films and
Hollywood blockbusters to show the range of artistic and commercial products a single
industry can produce.
23

With Hollywood’s status as a paradigmatic creative industry well established,
Jeremy Rifkin then uses its history to model a broader argument for the modern capitalist
system shifting from Fordist manufacturing principles to networked systems of
production.
24
According to Rifkin (and the dominant narrative), with the breakdown of the
studio system in the late-1940s, production in Hollywood became more “networked” in
which “every film production brings together a team of specialized companies and
independent contractors, each with its own expertise” in order to find “the right
combination of skills needed to make the specific film project a success.”
25
Contrary to this
notion, even when the studio system was in place, networked models existed in production
as each film brought together a unique combination of talents, even if they were all
contracted at the same studio. Indeed, the East Coast engineers, often coming from a truly
Fordist manufacturing environment, were perplexed at the practices of assembling a new

23
Stuart Cunningham, “Creative Enterprises,” in Creative Industries, John Hartley, ed. (Blackwell,
2005): 282-298. Walter A. Friedman and Geoffrey Jones, “Creative Industries in History” Business
History Review 85 (Summer 2011): 237-244.
24
Rifkin, “When Markets Give Way to Networks…,” 361.
25
Ibid., 363.

18
combination of director, cameraman, and other key personnel for each film.
26
Additionally,
when it came to technology, the studios relied on a large external network of engineers,
service firms, and manufacturers to bring together just the right combination of tools for
their creative production.
While the qualities of Hollywood have been taken for granted as paradigmatic of
creative industries of the present, I seek to turn the critical eye these scholars have given to
contemporary industries back onto the formation of the studio system. By focusing on
established industries, rather than emerging ones, the field has missed an opportunity to
properly historicize the phenomenon, something Friedman and Jones point out in their
introduction to Business History Review’s 2011 special issue on the subject. In looking
historically at 19
th
century models for the industrialization of creative enterprise such as
perfume and textiles, they recognize the importance of “managerial infrastructure” as a
means of mediating between creativity and consumption.
27
That same infrastructure was
key to the important relationship between creativity and technology.
While the role of technology has been essential to our understanding of processes of
industrialization, the role of the creative has overwhelmed our study of these culture
industries. Cunningham points out entertainment’s role as the driver of “new technology
take-up” and Hartley acknowledges technology’s “leading role” in the new information
economy. Yet they use these assertions only to emphasize the importance of creative
industries because of their relationship to technology, rather than examining the role of
technology in their very operation. This project takes these claims further, making them
lines of inquiry, so we can understand how technology fuels industrialized creativity.

26
See chapter four’s discussion of the SMPE Hollywood meeting for more.
27
Friedman and Jones, 241.

19
If creativity and taste are the drivers of creative industries, technology is the vehicle
that allows them to move. If we are to understand the role of technology in creating
networked economies and managerial infrastructures that allow these industries to thrive,
than we have to understand how the paradigmatic industry itself managed and
incorporated its tools. Thus this project engages with both the existing history of motion
picture technology and the field of the history of technology as ways of thinking about how
we can move technology more to the center of our understanding of the Hollywood studio
system as a creative industry. Looking at the formation of the Hollywood system as an
industrial “cluster” removes the isolated and exceptional narrative often utilized and
instead positions it as a pivotal example within a more persistent phenomenon of creative
industries. Rather than assuming the producers to be the most important figures in the
development of the Hollywood industrial model, I argue that the innovators and managers
of technology are central to the structures put in place.

Understanding Motion Picture Technology
Technology in the history of early Hollywood, has fallen victim to the star in its
midst, reducing it to one revolutionary shift with the coming of sound and largely ignoring
the greater industrial system. The history of film technology has generally been told
through the enumeration and description of various inventions and innovations used in the
production of motion pictures and the effects of these technologies on film aesthetics.
28
In

28
Works such as Barry Salt’s Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, 3
rd
Edition (Starwood,
2009) and H. Mario Raimondo-Souto’s Motion Picture Photography: A History, 1891-1960 (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland and Company, 2007) are typical examples of this tendency.

20
scholarship that takes film technology as its primary subject, technological determinism is
too often invoked in the progression to ever more realistic motion pictures with
innovations simply “appearing.” The business and development histories of technologies
themselves are not explored as historical phenomena in these works, but rather technology
serves as context for aesthetic analysis of film form. Scholarship that is not specifically
focused on technology, but discusses technology as part of a larger discourse, also tends
toward this “aesthetics effects” approach. In these histories the motivations and industrial
contexts that led to the development of cinema technologies are rarely considered, but
rather seem to appear at the moment of their aesthetic or financial necessity.
Exceptional film historians such as David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Donald
Crafton have incorporated (or made gestures to) the social and economic contexts for the
development of film technology beyond the moment of invention. Donald Crafton’s The
Talkies provides a valuable model for incorporating social and cultural conceptions of
technology into a history of motion pictures. Crafton builds on the work of Douglas Gomery
and others in contextualizing the introduction of the new technology of synchronized
sound within the history of the film industry, but he also focuses on the broader context of
a “new era in electrical entertainment.”
29
This context not only historicizes sound within
the larger American culture of technology, but it also brings in contingencies from

29
In The Talkies Donald Crafton points out that the climate at the time of the introduction to sound,
which is the same one that Mumford and Giedion were writing in response to, was deeply
deterministic. Writers of the time, Crafton claims, positioned talkies as a teleological certainty,
“Most popular writers, trying to understand the new mode of film, recast it as an industrial
revolution—something new, yet determined by what had come before.” The historical perception of
the introduction was formed by the contemporary rhetoric about its certainty. Crafton argues that
the studios and technological corporations had created a “climate of acceptance” for sound film.
Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999): 27.

21
technological manufacturers, the film studios, trade organizations, and audiences. As
Crafton points out, the technologies that allowed for synchronized sound were developed
in the laboratories of General Electric (RCA) and AT&T (Western Electric/ERPI) in the
1920s for many purposes and were only adapted to the motion picture studio once they
recognized a market. This project builds on this kind contextual thinking, but it extends it
to the industry and its horizontal infrastructure when it came to more sustained efforts
around technology and not just moments of profound rupture. In this way, we can ask how
the studio system looked like (and differed from) industries such as those from which GE
and AT&T were coming.
Likewise, in their seminal study of the Classical Hollywood Cinema, David Bordwell,
Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger invoke the contemporary development of corporate
research in their description of technological progress during the period. They emphasize
the importance of institutions such as the Society of Motion Picture Engineers and the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in “systemized and guided technological
research and development,” and assert that a lack of these institutions led innovation in the
earlier years of the American film industry to be “sporadic, casual, and impelled by
individual inquiry.”
30
For the authors, the increased reliance on outside corporate research
for the development of technology was the key element that made Hollywood filmmaking a
modern industry.
31

Significantly, Bordwell et al. are mapping out systematic practices as opposed to a
clear moment of change, as Crafton is. While most survey histories of American cinema

30
David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film
History and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 251.
31
Bordwell, et al., 251.

22
seem to have a technological gap between the invention of motion pictures in the late 19
th

century and the introduction of sound in the late-1920s, the authors do much to develop a
history of standardized industrial practices in the silent feature period. In their attempt to
pinpoint technological innovation as a standard process, they usefully describe three basic
causes that can “explain” technological change: production efficiency, product
differentiation, and adherence to standards of quality set by the discourse around the
medium. While product differentiation—which explains marketable innovations such as
color, 3D, and visual effects—has dominated our thinking about the relationship between
cinema and technology, here I focus on the two more mundane motivators of technological
change. An inquiry at the heart of this project is questioning the very discourse around the
medium itself and finding out who claimed the legitimacy to determine efficiency,
formulate standards, and turn them into regulations and practices.
While Bordwell, et al. recognize important phenomena such as the developing
reliance on outside technological research and manufacturing and the foundation of
industrial interest groups, this is all discussed with an eye toward its effect on the style of
Classical Hollywood Cinema, their primary interest. Likewise, their recognition of the
dependence of the studios on outside research, innovation, and manufacturing of
technology does little to help us understand how these relationships actually operated and
contributed to the system. This is due to their essential focus on film style and to their
reliance on industry and mainstream publications. While many of the areas Bordwell,
Thompson, and Staiger discuss in their field defining volume have been reassessed in the
intervening decades, their insightful work on the development of technology as an aspect of
the industrial system in silent Hollywood cinema has yet to be matched or surpassed. In

23
order to reorient our understanding of Hollywood through the lens of technology—not as a
context or singular aspect, but as the central catalyst of the industry’s formation—we must
then turn to another body of literature outside of media studies, and ask where motion
pictures fit into the history of technology as a whole.

The American Technological Character

The earliest historians of technology fought against the technologically
deterministic view, in which technology was an outside force that interceded and changed
society, still at play in many invocations of cinema’s tools. In the 1930s, historian and
sociologist Lewis Mumford argued for the consideration of technology as culture, an
expression of human subjectivity, not an imposition on it.
32
Writing a decade and a half
later, historian and art critic Sigfried Giedion pioneered what he termed “anonymous
history” in Mechanization Takes Command, which, like Mumford, argued for a change in
worldview that preceded a change in technology.
33
For him, mechanized industry was the
result of a mechanized view of the world. Mumford and Giedion are proponents of a social
history of technology, which focuses on the conditions and contexts for innovation and
reception.
While Mumford and Giedion were writing in reaction to the heavily deterministic
worldview that was pervasive from the 1920s, later historians of technology were able to
be more nuanced without falling into the traps of teleology or determinism. More recent
historians such as Carroll Pursell and David Nye have used social history to describe the

32
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1934), 4.
33
Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (Oxford
University Press, 1948).

24
particularly strong relationship to technology in the history of the Unites States. Pursell
describes the physical environment of America as particularly reliant on technology for its
very development.
34
He argues for a relationship between American independence,
growing population, the harnessing of natural resources, and the use of technology to
facilitate it all. This close association between America’s resources, values, and
technological development contributed to a phenomenon Nye terms the “American
technological sublime.” According to Nye, the sublime is “an essentially religious feeling,
aroused by the confrontation with impressive objects,” and since the early 19
th
century, he
argues, the technological sublime has been “one of America’s central ‘ideas about itself’—a
defining ideal, helping to bind together a multicultural society.”
35
In Nye’s view this leads
Americans to both innovate and absorb technology in a different mode than was previously
seen in Europe.
36
Nye implies that technological determinism itself is an aspect of the
national character, the experience of new technology being welcomed and awe-inspiring.
37

This concept is particularly relevant to thinking about the ways in which the American
motion picture industry built up a robust technological infrastructure beyond what had
other national industries had accomplished.
Like Mumford, Giedion, and Pursell, Nye sees technology as part of the social and
cultural world, and yet, cinema is surprisingly absent from these surveys of technological

34
Carroll Pursell, The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology, 2nd Edition (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 36.
35
David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994), xiii, xiv.
36
Ibid., 282.
37
His assertion of the pleasure of dislocations and disorientations has obvious resonances with the
cinema, in ways that proponents of the modernity thesis have acknowledged. See Ben Singer,
Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2001), Kristen Whissel, Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and the
Silent Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), and Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz,
Eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

25
history.
38
Despite these historians’ dismissals of the cinema industry (and the hundreds of
patentable technologies created through it), they do the work of describing the larger
environment in which the industry developed. Pursell refers to the period of focus for this
project as the “golden period of High Modernism and the machine aesthetic.”
39
He
describes a widespread acceptance of a basic relationship between science, on the one
hand, and the public, on the other that was verging on formulaic—“scientific research
discovered laws of nature that were then converted into technologies that were consumed
by the nation’s citizens.” The tendencies of the previous century to put technology and
science at the service of commerce hit their peak during this period. There is no greater
culmination of this trajectory than the slogan for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, “Science
Finds—Industry Applies—Man Conforms.”

38
Giedion was dismissive of motion picture production in his time, but Mumford, writing at the
height of the Hollywood studio system, gave it more consideration. While he dismisses most of the
output of Hollywood as a misuse of the medium, he saw more potential in the technology itself to
capture our perception of time and space. As Mumford expressed it, “The motion picture
symbolizes and expresses, better than do any of the traditional arts, our modern world picture and
the essential conceptions of time and space which are already part of the unformulated experience
of millions of people” (Mumford, 342). Like Mumford, Pursell addresses cinema primarily as an
invention and an experience, not as a developing industry consistently innovating and
incorporating new technologies. He, like many film scholars, invokes cinema for its depiction of the
perils of new technology as a response to modernity. See particularly Jennifer Bean, “Technologies
of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body,” in A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, Jennifer Bean,
Diane Negra, eds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) and Kristen Whissel, Picturing American
Modernity. His two paragraphs on motion pictures focus on the experience of spectators, asserting,
“It was a totalizing mechanical experience that shaped the way patrons thought about and lived
their lives” (Pursell, 247). In Nye’s work on the cultural and artistic responses to electrification,
there is no mention made of cinema, despite his intense focus on the illumination of downtown
signage and storefronts. In his concern for the display of technology and the invention of the “great
white way,” the nickelodeon’s marquee becomes more important than the technological marvel
inside the theater. David Nye, Electrifing America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990).
39
Pursell, 229-231.

26
The ascendancy of scientific progressivism (and its progeny, technological
determinism) matched the rise of corporate research and development—an endeavor that
Hollywood would attempt to emulate. Research came to be an end in its own right as each
major corporation set up its own laboratories, hired scientists, and collected patents. As
historian David F. Noble has described, in the early twentieth century, major companies
began building research and development departments, attempting to transform “what
heretofore had been the result of random discovery and ingenious invention into the
routine product of a carefully managed process.”
40

The chemical and electrical industries were the first to move into research and
development, though it penetrated into others by the 1920s. Smaller companies could
scarcely afford such an expensive endeavor, especially when they were unlikely to recoup
the costs of setting them up for several years, if at all. Hollywood and its constituent
companies would struggle with this question of who exactly would perform the
technological research necessary for their continued prosperity throughout this period.
Answering this question of how to implement industry-wide scientific research in an
industry primarily concerned with creative output is perhaps the most central task of this
project. To continue to reorient Hollywood as a technology industry, then, we need to
better understand the two pillars of corporate capitalism which the motion picture
industry most embraced as it systematized its technology—the engineer and the trade
association.

40
David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism
(Oxford University Press, 1977), 118.

27
The Engineer in America
Though Bordwell et al. and Crafton recognize the rise of corporate research as a
determination on the development of motion picture technology, the engineer, the central
figure in technology historians’ work on this period, is absent from our understanding of
Hollywood. As Pursell explains, engineers with an education were more adept at applying
the new concepts of scientific possibility than the lone inventor: “By the end of the century,
a growing cadre of young engineers, increasingly trained in both science and business,
were forming a social stratum between the mechanic and the entrepreneur.”
41
I argue that
the emerging presence of engineers in American life gave studio technicians such as the
cinematographers a language and ideal for how to position themselves to have a voice in
the emerging system. Then with the incorporation of sound, trained engineers actually
came into the studio to profound effect on every level of studio practice.
As David Noble suggests in America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of
Corporate Capitalism, the infiltration of college-trained engineers into research,
management, and even the White House by the end of the 1920s was fundamental to the
rise of the most important aspects of corporate capitalism—scientific management,
corporate research and development, standardization, patent reform, and technical
education—all elements which the Hollywood studios would adopt in some form or
another. As Noble explains, the engineer was “the legitimate child of the epochal wedding
of science to the useful arts, was the human medium through which it would work its
profound social transformation.”
42
Since the introduction of the job title to labor on large

41
Pursell, 101.
42
Noble, 33.

28
public works in mid-19
th
century America, the profession had grown to number over one
hundred thousand and constitute several different specialties.
Though defining what characteristics make someone an engineer is difficult and the
subject of debate, Edwin Layton, in his pioneering text The Revolt of the Engineers, focuses
on the centrality of professionalism. The particular brand of professionalism that engineers
cultivated was tied to “a slow incorporation of scientific methods and theory into
technology and the accumulation of an esoteric body of technical knowledge.”
43
According
to Layton, the arrival of scientifically trained, professional engineers in various industries
often follows a familiar pattern of occurring at the point of transition from small to large
organization. As he explains,
Where large investments are at stake, the engineer can serve a useful
function in eliminating guesswork and minimizing risks… The larger the
project, the more likely it is that such difficulties will transcend the
capabilities of artisans and businessmen.
44

Essentially, the engineer served as an assurance of professionalism and reliability as an
industry grew larger, constituted a larger financial investment, and therefore became more
risk adverse. This is not to say that the engineer was in fact more professional and reliable
(or even knowledgeable) than the artisan, but that the perception was such.

43
Edwin T. Layton Jr., The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American
Engineering Profession (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971): 3. According to
technology historian Antoine Picon, engineers emerged as early as the Renaissance and saw their
first organization as military corps engineers in the late-17
th
century, “thus paving the way for the
emergence of a profession.” In the U. S., it was the mid-19
th
century public works projects, such as
the Erie Canal, that introduced civil engineering and developed on-the-job hierarchies of
management and regular procedures for recruitment and training. Even so, it was not until the 20
th

century that a college degree became the standard means of admission into the ranks of engineers.
Antoine Picon, “Engineers and Engineering History: Problems and Perspectives” History and
Technology 20, no. 4 (December 2004): 426.
44
Layton, 2.

29
Technology historian Antoine Picon notes that engineering history is often more
tied to political and social history than to that of technology, as the early stages of industrial
development are reliant on inventors and entrepreneurs, rather than engineers.
45

Engineers then are associated with later movements toward rationalization of decision-
making and their “mobilization of scientific and technological knowledge” toward practical
ends. The social values of efficiency and rationality must become prevalent before the
engineer is seen as a necessity. If we graft this model onto the motion picture industry,
which did indeed rely on independent inventors and entrepreneurs throughout its early
history, we can see how the formalization of the role of technicians would be desired as the
industry grew. It is only with the introduction of industrial terminology and ideals into the
business in the mid-1910s that the need for motion picture engineers could develop.
46

The move toward formalizing engineering training through college education was
an outgrowth of the value of professionalism, which derived from esoteric knowledge. The
content varied greatly between specializations since professionalism was not based on any
set curriculum but on “the mere possession” of knowledge. Rather than being rational, the
value of this knowledge was in its “incomprehensibility to laymen.”
47
With their employers
generally lacking in technical know-how, the professionalism of the engineering class was
designed to “prevent engineers from becoming mere cogs in a cast industrial machine.”
48

This resistant, bolstered by trade solidarity, gave them special status within the industrial
structure, an effort mirrored in the activities of cinematographers in the late-1920s.

45
Picon, 427.
46
Indeed, the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, composed of engineers and businessmen from
technology manufacturers, formed in 1915 and created a Hollywood branch in 1928.
47
Layton, 4.
48
Ibid., 7.

30
Through trade organizations such as the American Society of Cinematographers the
professional classes of the motion picture industry could create a unified identity and
bolster their status in the system. Likewise, the producers would use these horizontally
structured organizations to create power between (and not just in) the studios for the
preservation of the industry in Hollywood. As such, understanding trade organizations is
key to this project.

Understanding Industrial Solidarity
The argument presented in this project is largely about the increased recognition of
the importance of collaboration in what was perceived to be a competitive aspect of the
motion picture industry. The willingness of the competing studios and manufacturers to
cooperate and share knowledge about technology significantly contributed to the success
and stability of the Hollywood studio system for several decades. While we can look back
and recognize the success of the collective endeavors of the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences and the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, this does not help us
understand how and why the contemporary figures determined it was in their interest to
do so. Hollywood was not alone among major industries in deciding on a collaborative
approach to maintaining the relevance of its industry as a whole.
Trade organizations and their horizontal power across competing interests in
unified industries are ubiquitous throughout American industry, despite their
incompatibility with the ideal of the self-interested pursuit of profit. Trade organizations
have been understudied and under-theorized, according to sociologist Lyn Spillman, at
least in part because of their incompatibility with Marxian and Smithian notions of

31
competitive capitalism.
49
If modern business enterprises are interested only in their own
profits, then why would they be interested in collaboration and sharing knowledge with
their competition, as is one of the main functions of trade associations? In Spillman’s
comprehensive study of trade associations in America, she argues for their important
function as “cultural producers for economic action,” providing a means of solidary to
structure the discursive field of business, alongside the more competitive function of
strategy. In essence, applying Durkheim to a Weberian world, Spillman argues that pure
self-interest is unsustainable and therefore relationships within industries always combine
the associational and the communal.
50

While trade associations are an essential aspect of more communally based business
cultures such as those in Germany and Japan, they have been dismissed as powerless
dinner clubs since the days of antitrust in America. Indeed, while American associations are
uniquely voluntary and weakly organized, they are also well established (with over 4000,
hundreds of which date back a century or more) and multifunctional.
51
Spillman argues
particularly strongly for the importance in American trade groups of “intraindustry
associational goals” such as providing training, sharing information, and conducting
research. Such activities are all based on knowledge sharing and are particularly strong in
industries facing technological and problematic changes—much like the motion picture
industry in the late-1920s. Indeed, in the case of Hollywood, such activities would derive
from an understanding of their collective business interests. Returning to creative

49
Lyn Spillman, Solidarity in Strategy: Making Business Meaningful in American Trade Associations
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012): 1.
50
Ibid., 25-32.
51
Ibid., 19.

32
industries studies and the emphasis on taste-based markets, the studios were not just
interested in consumers’ taste for their products, but also for the vitality of motion pictures
as an entertainment medium all together. Maintaining the public’s interest in motion
pictures as a leisure activity was in the collective self-interest of the entire industry.
Thus Spillman’s work on trade associations, though focused on present conditions,
helps us see Hollywood and its intraindustry organizational activities as part of broader
patterns in American industry, rather than uniquely their own innovations. Indeed,
Hollywood associations, from the Association to Motion Picture Producers to the Society of
Motion Picture Engineers, are shockingly average in her definitions of such organizations,
both in terms of their structures and their activities down to the management by middle-
aged male career bureaucrats. Nothing these organizations did—from collective research
to journal publication to industry-wide training initiatives (all seen in the impending
chapters)—was unique even in their day, as Spillman shows in her use of a late-1930s
government survey of trade associations.
52
Like all such institutions, the motion picture
trade associations were concerned with information exchange, education,
professionalization, and camaraderie—though always to varying degrees from group to
group.
As in earlier industries, the first major trade organization in Hollywood was a trust
(the infamous Motion Picture Patents Company) designed to pool patents and fix prices.
53

Like other industries, when the trust was busted, the industry developed trade associations

52
The government survey showed 1,505 national and regional associations, most with a staff of an
executive secretary (a middle aged white male with a background in business) and 1 or 2
stenographers. Spillman, 53.
53
Robert Anderson, “The Motion Picture Patents Company: A Reevaluation,” The American Film
Industry, Tino Balio, Ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976, revised 1985): 141.

33
focused on other purposes, namely, to begin with, public relations and fighting
censorship.
54
As such, the motion picture industry showed an early awareness of the need
for intraindustrial solidarity for self-preservation. Even given that, there was resistance to
the knowledge sharing around technology that emerged as an imperative in these
organizations in the 1920s. The strength and structure of the trade groups, and the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in particular, would prove key to uniting the
motion picture studios around shared knowledge of the basic technology of production. As
such, much of this narrative takes place outside of the studio space and in these
intraindustrial structures, connecting the backlots of Hollywood through the flow of
technical information.

A Complete Technological System
With technologically innovative motion picture plants a reality in Los Angeles by the
mid-1910s, the formation of the Hollywood studio system could begin in earnest.
55
This
common shorthand for the mainstream American motion picture industry emphasizes
these spaces and their controlling companies—mainly, the big five and little three—
virtually to the exclusion of all other aspects of the system. But the studio was only a small
part of a much larger industrial apparatus, even beyond the production, distribution, and
exhibition processes emphasized in most histories of American cinema. Tools needed to be
in place in order for production to begin.

54
The National Board of Review, the Film Board of Trade, the National Association of the Motion
Picture Industry, and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association all focused on
public relations and censorship in one way or another.
55
See Brian Jacobson, Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of
Cinematic Space (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

34
The innovative application and adaptation of standard tools is at the heart of
Hollywood’s scientific activity. This raises questions about how those tools got to the
studio—Who built them? Who decided which ones would be used? What factors
determined which new tools would be developed? And who used these tools? In the pages
that follow, I present a range of technological practices that would come to be consciously
united through industry-wide trade associations formed to regulate innovation and control
technology through standardization. In this way, a stable technological base formed that
allowed for the success of the paradigmatic creative industry, lasting well into the mid-20
th

century and resonating in Hollywood today.
The dissertation’s first three chapters each focus on the development of specific
elements of the system as they relate to the control of the technology of motion picture
production in the late-silent era—technology manufacturers, independent service firms,
and studio technicians. The last two chapters follow the major events of the late 1920s that
united these elements, allowing trade organizations to establish an infrastructure for
managing the technology of the industry. When seen together, these chapters build a
portrait of the studio system very different from that trained on the stars and mega-
producers that dominate existing narratives.
Chapter 1 focuses on large east coast manufacturers such as Kodak, GE, DuPont, and
Bausch and Lomb, who produced materials such as lights, film stock, and lenses for motion
picture production. I argue that the manufacturing side of the business was
professionalized and unified by the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, formed in 1916,
while continuing to isolate itself from the production side of the industry. The SMPE
emphasized standardization across companies in the manufacturing of motion picture

35
tools, creating a stable industry and a community for knowledge sharing that had little
contact with the production center in the west. The chapter likewise explores how the
corporate manufacturers, including competing interests such as Kodak and DuPont, dealt
with their Hollywood costumers while ignoring their input into the technology itself and, at
the same time, using them as an advertising tool for their larger consumer markets.
Chapter 2 centers on the specialized technology companies and service firms that
formed around the motion picture producers in Los Angeles, creating an industrial
“cluster” in the region. Using contemporary scholarship on creative industrial
agglomerations as a model, I show how the movement of independent technology
distributors, inventors, and laboratories to Southern California to cater exclusively to the
needs of the motion picture producers was essential to the growth and stability of
Hollywood. These service companies helped maintain the status of the community of
Hollywood as the center of the motion picture industry, even as the studios themselves
moved further afield. These companies, unlike their corporate brethren in the East, were
eager to adapt their technical training to the creative needs of the studio, thus forming the
earliest engineering community around the production studios.
Chapter 3 shifts focus to the use and management of technology within the studios
themselves, through the work of film technicians in Hollywood motion picture production.
Here I explain how the technical work of motion picture production was understood,
managed, and promoted within the new “factory” system of Hollywood. I do so by focusing
closely on cameramen, who used their organization, the American Society of
Cinematographers and its publication, American Cinematographer, to establish their status
as the chief technicians in motion picture production in the late silent period often by

36
resisting unionization and by touting their special knowledge of the tools of the trade. I
argue that at a key moment the cinematographers positioned themselves as “engineers”
within the studio, a position that the incursion of trained sound engineers into Hollywood
challenged.
Chapter 4 explores the key events of 1927-1928 in which the motion picture
industry brought together companies and workers from the east and west around strategic
technological shifts. With the formation of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and
Sciences in 1927, the studios united behind a single organization designed to standardize
both labor and technology practices across all the major studios. In the spring of 1928, the
Mazda Tests united the studio technicians, manufacturers, independent labs, and trade
organizations to standardize lighting and film stock technology across the field. I argue that
this first ‘scientific endeavor’ of Hollywood, followed immediately by the first SMPE
convention in the area, created a model for the institutionalization of technological
management and innovation in the industry.
Chapter 5 continues this narrative about establishing institutional structures for
technical training and regulation through the end of the decade. While the events of the
spring of 1928 set the precedent, the activities of the next two years would establish the
structure of the studio system that would dominate the motion picture industry’s
technology sector for decades to come, in particular the dominance of the AMPAS and its
Technical Bureau. Important to this was the Academy led “school” in which technicians
from across the studios and manufacturers shared technical knowledge about the new
sound systems. Additionally, several new journals and publications for the dissemination of
technical knowledge were established, including the International Photographer, The

37
Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, and the Academy Technical Digest
determining who had control over technical knowledge. These activities established the
hierarchy of the major technical organizations, such as the SMPE, ASC, and AMPAS and
their relationships to each other and the studios. Ultimately, I argue that the Academy was
able to establish itself as the authority over everyday technology in Hollywood through
their Producers-Technicians Committee and Technical Bureau. This structure would
remain stable throughout the golden age of Hollywood, making the AMPAS both the
clearinghouse and the gatekeeper that determined what the basic standards for technology
would be and who would have access to this knowledge.
Taken together, the chapters propose that the formation of the system can be seen
not only as the work of pioneering executives such as Zukor and Mayer, as it is generally
characterized, but also as the product of skilled individuals and groups working toward
practical solutions to the unprecedented challenges of large-scale creative production. The
image of a “dream factory,” which the producers themselves perpetuated and historians
subsequently took up, in which every aspect of production was contained within the
towering walls of the Los Angeles studios, obscures the work of hundreds of engineers and
companies that produced and processed the most essential aspects of motion picture
production—film stock, cameras, lights, lens, and other important, if unglamorous,
dimensions of the business. Likewise, the metaphor of the “dream factory” exaggerates the
equivalency between the studio system and the factory assembly line and industrial
capitalism. But when we look at it from the perspective of the management of technology,
we see that the system that emerged borrowed much more from corporate capitalism,
including the rise in importance of engineers, organized scientific research, and the

38
centrality of trade organizations and publications. These deliberate shifts were key to
creating a stable creative industrial system in Hollywood.
By focusing on these less glamorous, but unquestionably essential aspects of motion
picture production, Engineering Hollywood presents a new history of Hollywood that
recognizes it as a fundamentally technological industry as well as a manufacturer of art and
entertainment. The ramifications of the decisions made by the pioneers of Hollywood go
far beyond the studio gates. By looking at Hollywood motion picture production as a
technology business, rather than being seen as an isolated case of a world apart, the studio
system takes its place within its proper historical context of the American economy and
culture as a whole.

39
CHAPTER 1

Engineering a Society Apart: Cooperation and Competition Among
East Coast Motion Picture Technology Manufacturers

At the first meeting of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers in July 1916,
president C. Francis Jenkins presided over a room of ten men, mostly working on the
fringes of the rapidly growing entertainment industry. Among them were Donald Bell of
Bell & Howell Cameras, W. Burton Westcott of the newly formed Technicolor Motion
Picture Corporation, independent producer C. A. Willat, and Jenkins, himself a renaissance
man of the industrial age, inventing everything from color projection to mechanical
television over his long career. Other than a review of the constitution and by laws, the only
paper documented in that first Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers is a
speech by Henry D. Hubbard, secretary of the U. S. National Bureau of Standards calling
motion pictures a “splendid” field for the new industrial obsession with standardization.
1
It
was a dry, inauspicious start to an organization that holds a pivotal role in one of the
United State’s most important industries even one hundred years later.
2

Despite the support of the Bureau of Standards, in its first few years of existence the
Society of Motion Picture Engineers (hereafter SMPE) was little more than a one-man
operation. Jenkins, an independent inventor based in Washington D. C., controlled the
Society from its founding in 1916, holding the presidency and giving most of the papers at
its meetings in its first two years. In reviewing the society’s short history in his farewell
speech in 1918, Jenkins recounted previously joining the standards committees of both the

1
Henry D. Hubbard, “Standardization” (Washington D. C., July 24, 1916), Transactions of the Society
of Motion Picture Engineers no. 1 (1916). (Hereafter cited as TSMPE.)
2
In 1950, the organization changed its name to the Society of Motion Picture and Television
Engineers. This dissertation will use the then contemporary name throughout.

40
Motion Picture Board of Trade and the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry
only to have them go “Blewey” due to lack of participation.
3
The fact that anyone showed
up to the first meeting of the SMPE allowed them to continue to exist, but it might have
faded away after a few more small gatherings had some major players not come aboard.
But for the SMPE, the major players of the motion picture industry were not Louis B. Mayer
or Cecil B. DeMille or even Mary Pickford, but rather engineers such as C. E. K. Mees of
Eastman Kodak, W. B. Rayton of Bausch & Lomb, and L. C. Porter of Edison Lamp Works.
When Jenkins relinquished the presidency, it was not to one of the nine men who joined
him at that first meeting, but to an engineer from Westinghouse. A representative of a
major industrial manufacturer would hold the presidency of the organization from that
point forward.
As this brief introduction indicates, the SMPE represented a center of power in the
motion picture industry isolated from both the backlots of Hollywood and the boardrooms
of New York City. The organization represented a motion picture industry in which
cameras, film stock, lens, and projectors were the products and the Hollywood production
studios were the primary customers. Throughout the late-1910s and the 1920s, the
activities of the SMPE facilitated both the collaborative efforts at standardization and the
creation of a forum for competitive innovation. While the SMPE grew in size and stature in
its first decade, eventually gaining the endorsement of all the major manufacturers of the
trade, the industry-wide communication it facilitated largely left out one branch of the
motion picture business—the actual producers of motion pictures who had settled out
west in California.

3
C. Francis Jenkins, “President’s Address” (Cleveland, November 18-20, 1918), TSMPE no. 7 (1919).

41
This chapter focuses on that portion of the motion picture industry represented by
the SMPE in its first decade, namely the East Coast technology manufacturers, their
engineers, and the community they formed through competition and collaboration in the
decade after 1915. Together these companies and individuals began working together in
the mid-1910s to create a unified industry built around technological standardization and
knowledge sharing. As this community formed, new competition in the industry arose from
large industrial manufacturers looking to sell their products to the increasingly prominent
motion picture production industry. This competition forced those who had been in the
field since its inception to rethink their products and their relationship to their customers
in Hollywood.
This chapter offers a portrait of the formation of a complex manufacturing sector in
which dozens of companies competed and collaborated in their pursuit of their specialized
customers—the motion picture producers. Like so many industries before them, the
motion picture industry had reached a point where its engineers and producers felt it was
incumbent upon them to cooperate with their competition in order to advance “the theory
and practice of motion picture engineering” and create industry-wide standards for
mechanisms and practices.
4
In this regard, motion pictures were following in the footsteps
of the “science-based” industries in which corporate reformers had abandoned a purely
competitive ethos in order to maximize efficiency and large-scale, continuous production.
As technology historian David Nobel has explained, the implementation of standardization

4
The Society of Motion Picture Engineers, Its Aims and Accomplishments Synopses of Papers
Published Author and Subject Indexes Officers and Committees, July 1916-June 1930 (New York:
Society of Motion Picture Engineers, 1930).

42
was no easy feat, requiring the formation of industrial institutions to test, establish, and
promote them.
5

Pivotal changes to the industry in the late-1920s, including new market competition
and the growing power of trade organizations such as the SMPE, had profound
ramifications on both the technology of the medium and the relationship between
manufacturers and producers. The new structure and status of the production side of the
industry would make ignoring Hollywood, while simultaneously using its glamorous image
for promotion, an impossible state of affairs. In this chapter, I argue that while
collaboration through the SMPE allowed the manufacturers and engineers to control
motion picture technology without the input of the producers, increased competition from
major corporations would make listening to these distant customers imperative by the end
of the 1920s.
The SMPE in its earliest years represented technologies such as cameras, lighting,
film stock, and lenses, as well as projectors and their accessories and more experimental
work, such as color and television. Rather than attempt to address all the types of engineers
and companies which constituted the organization, this chapter focuses on the ones that
came to dominate its membership, leadership, and committees by the mid-1920s—namely,
those major companies with interests in several different markets outside of professional
motion picture production. These companies focused their energies on manufacturing
three primary types of motion picture production technology—lighting, film stock, and

5
David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 76.

43
lenses—all derived from technologies with wide application.
6
These companies all had
established businesses in other fields—from still photography to household appliances to
eyeglasses—and came into motion pictures in order to profit from this new industry with
their existing technologies (or slight modifications of them). While Eastman Kodak, the
most important large manufacturer in motion pictures, was one of the founding technology
companies of the business, the others came into or increased their presence in the business
during this period.
7

The chapter begins with a brief history of the motion picture technology industry up
to the mid-1910s, in which photographic specialists, European companies, and individual
technicians manufactured most of their tools on an individual basis. I then explore the
growth of the industry to the point that an organization such as the SMPE became
necessary for implementing standardization and regulations. With the loss of European
manufacturers, a market emerged that major manufacturers in other industries, such as GE
and DuPont, sought to cease. These outsiders, in their eagerness to create relationships
with their new customers, helped bridge the divide between East coast manufacturing and
West coast production. The contrasting approaches to research and development and
customer relations between photographic specialists and outside industrial manufacturers

6
While film stock and lights were purchased by the studios, cameras were the purview of the
cameramen who purchased and maintained their own equipment. Lenses would have been
purchased by cameramen, but the companies who made them have more in common with the film
stock and lighting manufacturers, being involved primarily in the larger optical industry. Up until
the creation of the amateur motion picture camera market in the mid-1920s, cameras were
predominantly for professional shooters, therefore they constituted a small market. George
Eastman himself was adamant that his company would never join the business of making
professional motion picture cameras, though they were well positioned to do so. Because of the
specialized nature and small number of cameras needed for the industry, these tools were never
taken up by large manufacturers.
7
While Kodak enjoyed a near monopoly over the film stock business, the company itself only
gained a small part of its revenues from this business. Its still cameras and film for professionals
and amateurs were a much larger business.

44
is seen through the example of film stock and the market competition between Eastman
Kodak and DuPont Photo Products in the 1920s. As the SMPE increasingly recognized the
need to appeal to Hollywood, the chapter ends as the organization and its members began
to look west.

Motion Picture Technology Before the War
At a December 1915 meeting of the Illuminating Engineering Society, an engineer
giving a paper on industrial uses of mercury-vapor lamps concluded by discussing motion
picture studios. Artificial lighting was a relatively new form of technology in the motion
picture industry, which had relied primarily on natural light in the first two decades of its
existence. According to the report, about fifty U.S. motion picture studios were using
artificial lighting by this time. Of this particular form of industry, he questioned whether
studios were actually industrial plants but conceded that “it is in the studio that the first
operation in the manufacture of the film is performed,” and seeing that mercury-vapor
lamps were extensively used for the work concluded that, “data regarding them may be of
interest.”
8

This passage is indicative of the way major industries viewed the growth of the
motion picture business at the time. Film technicians incorporated existing technologies,
such as mercury-vapor lamps, into the production process before they were explicitly
designed for such purposes, and the companies that were manufacturing the tools were
sometimes slow to recognize the new market. The technicians, such as cameramen and
electricians, did any adaptation necessary for the studio themselves, and contact between

8
William A. D. Evans, Illuminating Engineering Society Transactions X, no. 9 (December 30, 1915),
900.

45
the manufacturers and their customers was general and usually facilitated by sales
distributors. The studios were just another costumer to whom the technology companies
might sell their products.
Many of the earliest motion picture producers, both in Europe and the United States,
including Lumiere, Pathé, Vitagraph, and Edison, had been both technology manufacturers
and motion picture producers. Indeed, the first attempt at organizing the industry in 1908,
the Edison-led Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), was a patent pool. The MPPC
attempted to restrict those outside the organization from producing motion pictures by
having an exclusive contract with Kodak for film stock and by arguing that the European or
self-made motion picture cameras with which most independents operated violated the
patents of the major producers. As Robert Anderson has argued, the MPPC was patterned
on the efforts of other industries such as electronics in which companies such as GE
“merged with numerous small firms in order to control their patents and prevent
competition.”
9
The organization was limited in its success at stopping independents from
producing and the government disbanded it in an antitrust case in 1915. But the MPPC and
its General Film Company had begun the process of standardizing and classifying the tools
and techniques of the industry, mostly with regards to the distribution and exhibition ends
of the business. Little had been accomplished on the production side, which remained
largely artisanal in its practices.
Even with Eastman Kodak’s exclusive contract to sell film stock to MPPC members,
competition was always present in the technology sector as companies perpetually sought

9
Robert Anderson, “The Motion Picture Patents Company: A Reevaluation,” in The American Film
Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976, revised 1985), 141.

46
both better tools and cost cutting measures. For MPPC members, the exclusive contract
with Kodak could be a burden, as when producer/distributor George Kleine began secretly
buying cheaper film stock from Germany’s Agfa.
10
On the other side of things, when the
MPPC agreement was amended in 1911 to allow Kodak to sell to outside companies (with
the MPPC members retaining a price advantage), independents such as Carl Laemmle
fought to match the MPPC prices and then for further discounts.
11
As such, though the
MPPC was an attempt to consolidate and standardize the industry, even as it functioned,
individual companies sought out their own advantages over the competition.
In the early-1910s, American motion picture technology manufacturers were both
in partnership and in competition with more established European suppliers and
manufacturers such as Brifco and Pathé. For example, Bausch & Lomb first entered the
photographic lens business in the 1890s through a partnership with Germany’s Carl Zeiss
Jena company. Bausch & Lomb company literature contended that Zeiss approached them,
“Recognizing our position in the industry, and desiring to enter the American market.”
12

They began as a licensee and became a corporate partner in January 1908 creating the “free
interchange of ideas and of methods” that the later described as “an advantage to each
center of progress.” This union between the companies meant that each made their “every
invention or improvement” available to each other. This type of partnership was notable, if

10
Notes in Box 13—Eastman Kodak, George Kleine Papers, Library of Congress Manuscripts
Division, Washington, DC.
11
J. E. Brulatour to George Eastman, October 12, 1915 and November 9, 1916, Eastman Legacy
Collection, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. (Hereafter cited as Eastman Legacy
Collection).
12
Bausch & Lomb Optical Company, Photographic Lenses (undated, mid-1910s), 6, National
Museum of American History Trade Literature Collection, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC.
(Hereafter cited as NMAH Trade Literature Collection).

47
not unique, across technology industries. Likewise, Kodak was reliant on German chemical
companies for its film stock sensitizing materials and sought out partnerships similar to the
one between Bausch & Lomb and Zeiss with European film companies such as Pathé.
13

The advent of the war meant that obtaining raw materials and finished products
from across the Atlantic became difficult and alternatives needed to be found.
14
Great
Britain quickly restricted the exportation of film stock and the price of stock chemicals
skyrocketed due to their use in high explosives.
15
By the end of the decade, Bausch & Lomb
catalogues no longer made any mention of a relationship with the German optical company.
Instead, the newly revised introduction to the company boasted that in regards to optical
glass, “we now control our own supply of this basic raw material.”
16
Similarly, Kodak
turned to American chemical companies, DuPont most notably, for its processing
chemicals, seemingly unaware that the later company already had plans in place to begin
making their own film stock once the war ended.
While these companies were happy to work with suppliers of raw materials and
their European counterparts in foreign markets, the U.S. market was another story. Part of
Kodak motion picture stock distributor Jules E. Brulatour’s duties included tracking any
incursions of foreign companies into Kodak’s stateside motion picture market.
17
While the

13
Richard Abel, The Cine Goes to Town: French Cinema 1896-1914, Updated and Expanded Edition
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 45.
14
Brulatour to Eastman, October 31, 1916, Eastman Legacy Collection. “Most of my customers seem
to be worried not about the increased price, but about the possibility of not being able to get film
because of the difficulty, as I have explained to them, of getting raw materials from the other side.”
15
Carl Louis Gregory, “Motion Picture Photography,” The Moving Picture World 26, no. 8 (November
13, 1915), 1310.
16
Bausch & Lomb Optical Company, Photographic Lenses, (stamped June 21, 1920), NMAH Trade
Literature Collection, 5.
17
Eastman to Brulatour, January 22, 1915, inquiring about Lumiere Co. selling Gaveart film;
February 18, 1915, asking about changes in imported stock, year to year; October 22, 1917,

48
war had made it more difficult for producers to circumvent Kodak, after the armistice,
European companies such as Goerz returned to the market, much to Eastman’s chagrin.
Brulatour assured Eastman that such incursions were insignificant, explaining that Fox and
Universal were only using Goerz’s film because of “the saving effected without sacrificing
much of the quality of their releases because of their imperfect laboratory work.”
18

Brulatour used Eastman’s skepticism about the technical knowledge and abilities of the
Hollywood producers to assuage his fears about competition. These fears also likely
contributed to the ongoing, if leisurely, development of improvements in Kodak’s motion
picture products.
The break up of the MPPC in the 1915 antitrust case, along with the increased
sophistication of the technology utilized, contributed to the growing separation between
those producing technology and those producing motion pictures. Those American and
European companies who had built their businesses by making both tools and
entertainment were receding to the background of the motion picture business.
19
Also by
1915, Hollywood was the center of most motion picture production, though it was still
largely operating in makeshift facilities staffed by self-trained workers.
20
It was a “factory
town” in the most informal sense. As historians such as Richard Koszarski and Thomas
Schatz have emphasized, Hollywood was physically isolated from the New York offices that

regarding doubled imports over last year; January 2, 1918, about Pathe’s profits and increased
imports. Eastman Legacy Collection.
18
Brulatour to Eastman, July 26, 1923, Eastman Legacy Collection. At the time, Fox was using
600,000 feet and Universal 800,000 feet of Goerz film each week.
19
For more of the fall of Pathé from the U.S market see Richard Abel, Americanizing the Movies and
“Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). For the decline
of Edison see Charles Musser Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing
Company. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
20
See Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915-
1928 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 100.

49
controlled its finances by a five-day rail journey. But just as importantly, it was equally far
from the factories that churned out the tools that were so essential to their work. Cameras
and lenses came from companies such as Bell & Howell (Chicago) and Bausch & Lomb
(Rochester), and Eastman Kodak dominated the film stock market from their perch in
Rochester. Lighting companies such as GE, Westinghouse, and National Carbon
manufactured their wares in Schenectady, New York; Bloomfield, New Jersey; and
Cleveland, Ohio, respectively.
The loss of European suppliers and partners meant that the American motion
picture technology business was now in the hands of these photographic, electrical, and
optical companies and a few smaller interests catering to the industry. While Richard Abel
has shown that European companies and organizations set about standardizing motion
picture technology there in the early years of the business, the Patents’ Company had
served as the only regulatory body for technology in the U.S. to the mid-1910s. With both of
these infrastructures absent or waning in the American context by 1915, there was space
for a new organization to be established.

A Standard for Standardization
Looking back in 1930, the SMPE leadership attempted to take a historical
perspective on the particular moment of the organization’s founding. As they explained,
In 1916, at the height of the World Crisis, the confusion arising at home and
abroad through want of cooperation and standardization prompted C.
Francis Jenkins, inventor and scientist, to enlist the sympathy of a dozen
manufacturers and their technicians’ to found [the] society.
21

21
The Society of Motion Picture Engineers, Its Aims and Accomplishments, iv.

50
The conflation of the world crisis of the war and the need for standardization was a stretch,
but the industry’s dependence on European manufacturers at the time gives this context.
The shift to domestic production, both for raw materials and finished motion picture
technologies, created the conditions for a potentially more unified industry.
Standardization, implemented through a permanent Standards Committee, was the avowed
first purpose of the SMPE with “personal cooperation” coming in second. It would be this
personal interaction and communication between representatives of various motion
picture technology companies that would constitute the major contribution of the society
in its early years.
C. Francis Jenkins, an independent inventor based in Washington D. C., controlled
the Society of Motion Picture Engineers for the first two years, holding the presidency and
giving most of the papers at its meetings. These early meetings saw little participation from
any major corporations interested in the motion picture business.
22
That smaller
manufacturers were the first to join is in keeping with David Noble’s assertion that
standardization helped them more, as they were dependent upon the larger manufacturers
for parts.
23
For example, a boutique firm such as Technicolor, which bought its film stock
and cameras from several different companies, would benefit from having tools
standardized across all manufacturers—making it easier for them to shop around for the
best price or the highest quality. But a large company such as Eastman Kodak, who held a
majority of the market for their product, could set their own standards, locking customers
into using their line of products, and therefore had less incentive to compromise.

22
The earliest issues of the Transactions publication do not include a full list of members, so
participation is defined here by committee memberships and papers presented.
23
Noble, American by Design, 79.

51
In establishing the SMPE, the motion picture industry was buying into the perceived
value of standardization, which had become a key component of American corporate
capitalism. Though Congress established the Office of Weights and Measures in 1836, it
wasn’t until the turn-of-the-century that the movement toward standardization gained
wide support. Congress approved the Bureau of Standards in 1902 lending “legal and moral
authority” to the scientific categorization of measures and standards.
24
Standardization in
science soon bled into industry, and by 1916, when the Bureau helped to found the SMPE, it
had firmly established itself as the link between government and industry. The difficultly of
creating standards amongst competitors led to the proliferation of industrial institutions
like the SMPE to do the job, and ultimately, let to the American Engineering Standards
Committee in 1918 (later renamed the American Standards Association or ASA), who
argued for the efficiency and safety of establishing standards in all industries.
Engineers and company executives joined the SMPE with a recognition of the
importance of standardization, but that did not mean that they immediately recognized the
authority of the organization. In the early years of the society’s existence it was unclear
how to go about implementing standards and rules which would be followed by the vast
network of manufacturers, producers, distributors, and exhibitors that made up the
industry. At the first several meetings of the Society there was much debate about what to
standardize and how to go about it. In April 1917, President Jenkins opined that, “The way
to standardize is to standardize,” emphasizing that those urging him in this endeavor cared
not what the standards were, “being ready to accept any standard so far as they can be

24
Ibid., 75.

52
assured that it is the consensus of opinion of the engineers of this Society.”
25
As Noble
describes, this type of stalemate was common across such organizations which often saw a
divide between shop-culture engineers, who though that industry leaders should
determine standards, and school-culture engineers, who believed in the authority of a
centralized government body.
26
Industries, such as electrical engineering, that a few large
corporations dominated, had an easier time standardizing than those without significant
corporation consolidation. With the motion picture industry involving several different
engineering and scientific disciplines, including electrical, chemical, and mechanical,
cooperation was all the more challenging.
For corporate executives such as George Eastman, the manufacturers themselves
still carried the burden of standardization, a position which they both resented and
coveted. As an example of this, the mid-1910s saw an increase in concerns about storing
and using nitrate film stock, which was highly flammable. Projection booth fires had
created bad publicity for the industry, and Kodak, being the primary manufacturer of
nitrate stock, had a vested interest in restoring the industry’s reputation in this regard.
27
In
the absence of effective industry-wide institutions for dealing with the problem, Kodak
themselves set about creating safety standards to be regulated by the National Board of
Fire Underwriters. The SMPE attempted to take on this issue when president Jenkins
dedicated his April 1918 address to the topic, but Eastman instead chose to work with the

25
C. Francis Jenkins, “President’s Address” (Atlantic City, April 6-7, 1917) in TSMPE no. 3 (1917).
26
Noble, America by Design, 76.
27
Kozsarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: 17.

53
National Association of the Motion Picture Industry (NAMPI), a New York-based trade
organization.
28

Eastman chose the NAMPI despite the fact that the SMPE had established a Safety
Committee that very same year, indicating that the organization had yet to fix itself as the
body responsible for setting standards for the industry. Yet even with this lack of support
from major industrialists, a year into the life of the SMPE, it began establishing standards
including for film speed, frame lines, film perforations, and projection lenses.
29
Jenkins
himself acknowledged the work that was still needed to gain credibility for the
organization. His rhetoric was indicative of the aspirations both for the society and for its
ability to elevate the standing of the industry as a whole. He admitted to finding it
“embarrassing” to see strangers react to the business he worked in and dreamt of a day
when “confidence in our integrity of purpose and accomplishments is entertained by the
big men in our industry.”
30
Jenkins’s address did not clarify who these “big men” were, but
the trajectory of the society in the next few years makes it clear that he was referring to the
likes of Eastman and other major industrialists and not the newly prominent movie
producers. It was more likely that the producers were the primary source of the
“embarrassment” of the industry rather than a road to respectability.
On top of this, there was controversy from the publication of the SMPE’s very first
standards. The society may have been established through a perceived desire and need
within the industry, but this hardly meant that the standards arrived at would please

28
C. Francis Jenkins, “President’s Address” (Rochester, New York, April 8-9, 1918), in TSMPE no. 6
(1918); George Eastman to J. E. Brulatour, March 25, 1917, Eastman Legacy Collection.
29
“Motion Picture Standards” (Chicago, July 16-17, 1917), TSMPE no. 4 (1917).
30
Jenkins, “President’s Address,” (Chicago, July 16-17, 1917).

54
everyone. At the next meeting after the first standards were published, Jenkins was
compelled to quell fears of a draconian body that would force compliance with its rules. He
reassured his audience to emphasizing the communicative function of standards, by which
engineers could view the SMPE recommendations in relation to their own practices. Using
the example of the speed at which film is projected, Jenkins assured them that, “Anyone
may run his apparatus faster or slower than this standard, but because it is a standard the
inquirer has something to use as a basis for intelligent discussion of the subject.”
31

The establishment of a standard language, the major function of the Nomenclature
committee (established in 1920 and combined with Standards in 1923), could be as
important as technology standards themselves, as it allowed for the very functioning of the
society as a body. As an industry working in several areas of rapidly changing technology—
from film stock to incandescent lighting and optical sound systems—the setting of standard
terminology for the various interests of the industry emerged as an important function of
the SMPE in its earliest years. When stepping down from the presidency after two years,
Jenkins declared that the sharing of knowledge at the meetings had turned out to be a more
valuable function of the society than the original first purpose of setting standards.
32
In
fact, he described the attempts at mandatory standards for both cameras and projecting
machines as “two errors of personal judgment.” He attributed both failures to the inability
to find agreement among the manufacturers and engineers tasked with setting the
standards. Jenkins took an optimistic view, offering that these mistakes helped to establish
what the SMPE was not designed or able to do—“settle controversies between conflicting
interests.” Instead, the avowed focus of the organization would be the facilitation of

31
Jenkins, “President’s Address” (New York, October 8-9 1917) TSMPE, no. 5 (1918).
32
Jenkins, “President’s Address” (Cleveland, November 18-20, 1918) TSMPE no. 7 (1919).

55
communication between the various manufacturers and branches of the industry, both
through the meetings and the Transactions publication, at least for the time being. In order
to gain any real power to regulate the industry, the major interests that dominated the
technology side of the business would need to take a more active role.

The “Big Men” Enter
The SMPE could hardly have claimed to embody the important technology of the
motion picture industry had it not been for the participation of corporate engineers.
Innovation and research, the fuel for technology and, ultimately, its standardization, were
moving away from the lone inventor model that C. Francis Jenkins had embraced in his long
career and more and more toward the research laboratories of big corporations with deep
pockets. These large companies began to dominate the SMPE meetings, largely because
they were increasingly controlling the means of generating new ideas and they had the
means to allocate funds toward intraindustrial activities. It was at the fifth meeting of the
SMPE, hosted in New York City in October 1917, that representatives of major corporations
began presenting papers. It was not the film stock or lens companies that first joined in, but
the lighting companies—General Electric Lamp Works, Nicholas Power Company, and
Westinghouse Lamp Co. With artificial lighting a cutting edge technology both in the studio
and the movie theater, representatives of these companies began to take center stage at the
meetings. Even Eastman Kodak, who would eventually come to dominate the organization,
only sent one employee to give a paper before the dawn of the 1920s. On the other hand,
the lighting engineers came from an industry with a history of such trade endeavors,
including the Illuminating Engineering Society (founded in 1906), so they recognized the

56
SMPE as a way to quickly join the motion picture community. Likewise, no one company
dominated the studio lighting market, giving the various companies a need to compete.
As indicated in the society’s Transactions publication, the influence over the society,
and therefore the technology of the industry, shifted over time. Companies such as General
Electric, Bausch & Lomb, and Eastman Kodak, who were slow to join at first, came to
embrace and then control the organization. This was key to the sustainability of the society
where previous organizations had fallen apart. The SMPE actively courted the participation
of these “big men” of the industry through strategies such as holding meetings in Rochester,
New York, the home of the optical industry, including both Eastman Kodak and Bausch &
Lomb in 1918 and 1922. Likewise, employees of companies such as GE and Kodak were
increasingly given leadership positions on the committees that did most of the work of
establishing standards for the industry. The network of individuals and companies who
exerted influence over the society grew smaller in the 1920s, even as the organization itself
grew larger.
An analysis of the topics presented at the SMPE meetings reveals an increasingly
diverse set of tools that came under the umbrella of the industry and a commensurate
consolidation of their representation in several large corporations.
33
Using the SMPE
Transactions publication to create a database of papers and their authors, I identified
almost 250 different authors that presented more the 450 papers at the society’s meetings
from 1916-1929. The vast majority of those authors, some members and some from

33
Using the The Society of Motion Picture Engineers Paper Index, Its Aims and Accomplishments….
1916-1930, I identified 465 papers given by identified authors (as opposed to committees) from
1916-1929 which I documented according to topic, author, and the affiliated company of the
author. 1929 serves as a convenient end point, being both the end of the decade and the end of the
Transactions publication, which was replaced by a monthly Journal beginning in 1930.

57
outside organizations including government agencies and motion picture studios,
presented only once. I was able to identify ninety affiliated companies for 377 of the
papers. More than half of these again only presented one paper, while only ten companies
had employees present eight or more papers during this period. Four of these were small
companies with one or two particularly active members in the society (including Jenkins),
but the other six were major corporations who sent several employees to the biannual
meetings.
34
Bell Telephone Laboratories and Western Electric/Electrical Research Products
Inc. gained prominence with the advent of synchronized sound, Bausch & Lomb was the
most influential lens company of the period, and Westinghouse and General Electric
dominated the lighting and electricity fields.
35
But Eastman Kodak was the most prominent
company in the SMPE in the 1920s, by far. Kodak’s employees presented one-fifth of all
papers at the meetings that decade, giving a majority of the papers on several technologies
including film stock, laboratory work, and color.
Likewise, these corporations increasingly dominated the various standing
committees of the SMPE. Early in the society’s history, committees were designed to cover
particular types of technology, including cameras, perforations, projection machines, film
stock, and electrical devices, with members composed of those working in such fields. Each
committee would focus on standards and nomenclature for their slice of the motion picture
technology field. But in a rapidly advancing and expanding industry, such a structure was

34
Two of these were the small companies of independent inventors C. Francis Jenkins (23) and
William D.V. Kelley (8), who were the sole presenters from their businesses. Another prolific
presenter was projectionist Frank Richardson (19) of the exhibitor publication Moving Picture
World, while educational film company Bray Pictures presented on nine occasions.
35
The number of identified employee presentations at the SMPE from 1916-1929 for each
company: Bell, 8; Western Electric/ERPI, 8; Bausch & Lomb, 12; Westinghouse, 17; General Electric,
37; Eastman Kodak, 88.

58
untenable. The multiplication of committees peaked in 1922, in which there were twenty-
five committees on everything from advertising and safety to emulsions and patents. This
was culled down to six relatively stable committees by 1926, abandoning the previous
structure in favor of one that separated duties rather than fields of technology.
In this conception of the society, the Nomenclature and Standards (combined in
1923) and Progress committees gained all the power the organization had over industrial
standardization and innovation. While the former would set standards and terms that the
whole industry would reference, including film stock size and perforation shape, the latter
wrote reports which compiled all of the important advancements in the industry over the
last year. The progress committee decided how far the industry had come, which
contributions were worth noting, and where it would be going in the near future. This
setting of the rhetoric around the technology of the field was increasingly important as the
membership of the organization grew.
Kodak’s influence, as seen through both paper presentations and committee and
board memberships, grew throughout the decade, reaching a high point in 1927, when
more than a third of all papers came from Kodak, and employees held the presidency, three
of seven committee chairmanships, and three of eight governors positions. While Kodak did
have a larger membership in the society than any other company, with twenty-two
members out of a 300-person organization, their interests were still clearly over-
represented. The other five corporations I found to have large influences in the society had
a consistent presence in the committees and presentations in their respective fields, but
none dominated any field the way Kodak did in multiple arenas.

59
The prominence of Kodak and its corporate brethren can be traced not only to their
financial status but also to their ability to focus efforts on the newly valued enterprise of
research and development. General Electric established the first formal research laboratory
in America in 1900, followed by DuPont in 1902, Westinghouse in 1903, and Eastman
Kodak and Bell Telephone Labs in 1912.
36
As David Noble describes it, smaller companies
could scarcely afford such an expensive endeavor, especially when the costs of setting them
up would be unlikely to be recouped for several years, if at all. Instead they relied on the
knowledge brought them by “trade associations, government bureaus, private consulting
companies, and the universities.”
37

The SMPE benefited the smaller manufacturers in this way, allowing them to gain
insight into the research works of the larger companies. At the same time, for the
employees of the Kodak, GE, or Bausch & Lomb research labs, the publication and
presentation of their work at the meetings acted as a form of recognition for their
individual accomplishments in lieu of actual ownership or compensation.
38
For example, C.
E. K. Mees ran the Kodak Research Laboratory independently of the commercial side of the
company, and encouraged his engineers to present at major conferences. As he expressed it
in a private letter, “Generally only a small portion of the work of the laboratory concerns
such secret processes and consequently cooperation is possible on all but a very few

36
Several of these companies, include Edison (the basis for GE) had research facilities prior to this,
but incorporated separate laboratories for ‘pure’ research in these years. Noble, America By Design,
113.
37
Noble, America By Design, 111.
38
Ibid., 120.

60
sections of the work.”
39
The benefits of collaboration across companies and disciplines in
this diverse industry were evident by the end of the first decade of the SMPE; however,
cooperation still seldom extended to those who would actually purchase and use these
technological marvels.

Looking West
Why do we want to keep in touch with the Coast? The answer is because we
provide the raw materials of picture making: because our livelihood, our right
to live (to use a fashionable phrase), depends on our ability to fill the movie
man’s needs in an ever-expanding degree.
40

John Allison presented the first paper focused on motion picture studios before the
SMPE at the November 1918 meeting, entitling it “Standardization of the Motion Picture
Industry, and the Ideal Studio.” The authority on which Allison presented such a paper was
not as a producer or a cinematographer, but as the owner of a New York photographic
supply company, Allison and Hadaway. In fact he offered that he knew “nothing” about the
stage-craft side of the industry at all.
41
He acknowledged the expertise of the producers and
their employees in making dramatic amusements, but asserted that they required “a new
class of help” with the standardization of the photographic department. Giving no room for
the expertise of the technicians working in production, he proposed a new set up for studio
space that would create a guarantee of “perfect” exposure. This obtuse understanding of

39
C. E. K. Mees to E. P. Hedley of Birkenhead, Eng, February 5, 1918, File Cabinet 1, Drawer 2—
19181, Kodak Research Laboratories Collection, University of Rochester Special Collections,
Rochester, NY. (Hereafter cited as Kodak Research Labs.)
40
K. C. D. Hickman, Research Chemist, Kodak Research Laboratory, “Hollywood and the Motion
Picture Engineers” (Norfolk, Virgina, April 25-28, 1927) TSMPE XI, no. 30 (1927): 36.
41
John W. Allison, “Standardization of the Motion Picture Industry, and the Ideal Studio” (Cleveland,
November 18-20, 1918), TSMPE no. 7 (1919): 9.

61
the craft of motion picture photography went unquestioned in the ensuing discussion,
which focused on the specific lights and filters that he had mentioned.
Similar businessmen and engineers gave most of the papers on studio conditions in
the early years of the SMPE. The only “cinematographer” to present in the first five years of
the SMPE was Carl Louis Gregory who had been a pioneer in the industry, but had since left
the business to become a writer and an instructor at the New York Institute of
Photography. Cecil B. DeMille cameraman Alvin Wyckoff was the first Hollywood technician
to present before the society in 1922 pleading for a more constant replacement for the
unreliable arc lights, rather than presenting an innovation of his own.
42
When filmmakers
did attend the meetings in the early and mid-1920s, it was more likely to be a
documentarian like Robert Flaherty or an East Coast employee of Famous Players-Lasky.
The weeklong journey across the country for a weekend conference was likely prohibitive
for the busy cinematographers, electricians, lab workers and directors of Hollywood.
The engineers who were working so hard in the SMPE to create terms and networks
for communication with each other demonstrated little interest in increasing their
presence in Los Angeles, even when they acknowledged the growth of the industry there.
Most of the tools of the trade moved from the manufacturers’ factories to New York area
distributors, such as Jules Brulatour, Allison and Hadaway, and G. Gennert Camera, from
which the Los Angeles technicians and producers had them shipped across the country. By
the end of the 1910s, there was a clear physical separation between the technology and
production sides of the American motion picture business, with tools being manufactured

42
Alvin Wyckoff, “Studio Lighting from the Standpoint of the Photographic Director” (Boston,
Massachusetts, May 1-4, 1922), TSMPE no. 14 (1922): 157.

62
in the factories of the East and Midwest and motion pictures being shot mostly in the Los
Angeles area.
By 1923, the SMPE had grown to two hundred members, but only eight of them
lived and worked in Hollywood. In L.C. Porter’s presidential address at the society meeting
that May, he discussed the Hollywood members’ eagerness to organize a Pacific Coast
section, “in order that they may take a more active part in our work than is at present
possible.”
43
Porter insisted that they were not recognizing any special status for Southern
California, but rather expanding the organization’s reach and influence, as it would serve as
a “forerunner of several Sections in various parts of the country.”
44
But the next few years
would make it clear that the SMPE needed to be more aggressive in its pursuit of
Hollywood participation, especially when a new organization, the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences, emerged as a threat to its authority.
The physical distance between tool manufacturers and users was coupled with a
lack of communication between the two sides. For all the work the SMPE had done to
legitimize itself with the corporations and engineering societies of the East, few in
Hollywood had even heard of the organization that was supposed to represent their
industry. Those that had knowledge of the organization were more likely to be technicians
who would read re-printings of SMPE technical papers in the pages of American
Cinematographer. Joseph Ball of Technicolor took the initiative and attempted to begin a
Pacific Coast Branch of the organization, announced by President Porter at the October

43
L. C. Porter, “President’s Address” (Atlantic City, New Jersey, May 7-10, 1923), TSMPE no. 16
(1923): 19.
44
L. C. Porter, “President’s Address” (Ottawa, Canada, October 1-4, 1923), TSMPE no. 17 (1924): 18.

63
1923 meeting.
45
Ball had been in Hollywood less than a year, having worked out of
Technicolor’s Boston facilities since graduating from MIT, making him a dubious choice for
rallying the denizens of Hollywood toward a faraway cause.
The attempted establishment of a Pacific Coast branch did little to actually bridge
the gap. Despite the membership of a few engineers working in Los Angeles, the long train
trip between the two coasts meant that they rarely attended the SMPE meetings, generally
held in the industrial cities of the East, from Chicago to Schenectady. At the May 1924
meeting in Atlantic City, Ball himself presented a paper on the “Theory of Mechanical
Miniatures in Cinematography,” but the discussion of his paper makes it clear that Ball did
not attend, but rather sent his paper in to be read. With questions about the paper left
unanswered in the discussion, it occurred to Porter as a revelation that “all the information
is not on the East Coast.”
46

The engineers’ discussions of motion picture terminology likewise showed their
muddy understanding of the structure of the industry on the coast. As the society worked
to create official definitions of motion picture vocabulary, the engineers were stumped by
the term ‘scene.’ One suggested that the word could be better defined by “the Camera Men’s
Society” or “the Studio Directors’ Association,” but “unfortunately we have not enough of
these men in the eastern branch” of the Society.
47
Another jumped in to assert that these
organizations “do not formulate definitions,” clarifying that it was the job of the “Engineers

45
Even at this early junction, they recognized the importance of creating a dialogue with the
existing trade organizations of Hollywood. A meeting was held that summer jointly with the Motion
Picture Directors Association, but little seems to have come of it.
46
J. A. Ball, “Theory of Mechanical Miniatures in Cinematography” (Roscoe, New York, May 19-22,
1924) TSMPE no. 18 (1924): 125.
47
Manheimer, Discussion after “Report of Standards and Nomenclature Committee,” TSMPE no. 18
(1924): 58.

64
Society” to formulate and define, thus making a distinction between the status of their
society, which created policy and standards, and other trade societies which were labor
unions or dinner clubs. A third engineer jumped in to suggest that they solicit a definition
from “a publication on the Pacific Coast called ‘The American Cinematographer.’” The
engineers passed the motion without any acknowledgement that the publication was
written and produced by the same “Camera Men’s Society” that they so summarily
dismissed minutes before.
Both the physical and intellectual distances between the coasts were, as of yet,
insurmountable. The early-1920s push to greater involvement and connection to
Hollywood fizzled with hardly a ripple. Lester Cuffe of DeMille Studios contended that
Ball’s attempt at a Coast Section had failed after one meeting because “there was no person
behind the wheel to push it.”
48
While the physical distance would be an issue for the
foreseeable future, changes in priorities and ideas about the functions of the society would
be quicker to evolve.
By late 1926, Kodak chemist K. C. D. Hickman presented an organization in crisis.
49

He asserted that the “fundamental” work of the organization in creating standard
descriptions and specifications for motion picture machinery had been accomplished in the
first four years of the organization’s life. In the subsequent years, the society’s activities had
become “more technical and less fundamental.” The papers now focused on such “highly
specialized” issues of “local importance” as slicing, scratches, static and washing. Hickman
advocated widening the Society’s interests by creating greater personal contact with “the

48
Lester Cuffe, Discussion after “Report of Membership Committee” (Lake Placid, New York,
September 26-29, 1927) TSMPE XI, no. 32 (1928): 765.
49
K. C. D. Hickman, “The Future Policy of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers” (Briarcliff, New
York October 4-7, 1926) TSMPE X, no. 28 (1927): 311.

65
directorate, the players, and those who legislate and frame policy.”
50
He was adamant that
this could not be accomplished by continuing the current policy of inviting one or two
prominent figures from Hollywood to attend each of their meetings.
Hickman instead offered a re-conception of the structure of the industry. Rather
than viewing Hollywood as a production outpost—one of many in which the society hoped
to form a branch—he insisted on recognizing commercial motion picture production as
their “parent industry.” The work of the engineers was a “part” of a “whole,” in which they
needed to take an increased interest; but his understanding of the work and organization of
Hollywood left little room for the actual engineering work happening in the studios and
their vicinities. While he advocated extending membership into the studios, he conceded
that they would be admitting “men who are not primarily engineers.” Hickman’s re-
conception of the Society met with opposition in the ensuing discussion, with his own boss,
C. E. K. Mees favoring continued focus on their particular part of the field, rather than
taking responsibility for the whole.
51
Likewise, many voiced objections to his proposal to
drop the word “engineers” from their title so as not to “frighten” people away. Henry
Phelps Gage of Corning Glass Works spoke in favor of a West Coast meeting, even if it
meant smaller attendance and larger personal expense. He viewed it as the only way to give
“those people” the idea that “this Society is very important—in fact, essential—to maintain
their livelihood.”
52

The lively discussion in 1926 was mainly that—a recognition of a problem without
any agreed upon solution. The Membership Committee anticipated that renewed efforts by

50
Ibid, 313.
51
C. E. K. Mees, Discussion after “The Future Policy of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers,” 325.
52
H. P. Gage, Ibid, 323.

66
J. Arthur Ball, who was now a more seasoned Hollywood resident, would create an increase
in West Coast membership. While there were obvious intellectual and political reasons for
wanting increased membership, not to be ignored were the Society’s quest for financial
stability and its excessive reliance on the patronage of major corporations such as Kodak
and GE. At the next meeting, Hickman once again presented his case for greater contact
with the coast, this time armed with first hand knowledge of Hollywood, having recently
returned from a “holiday” there, alongside his Kodak colleague, John Crabtree.

“The isolation of Hollywood is legendary,” Hickman proclaimed, presenting the
uphill, but increasingly necessarily, battle before them.
53
He portrayed the SMPE members
as the only people in the world not knocking down the gates of the studios, looking for a
piece of the wealth, glamour, and prestige of the industry. Thus, he explained, the isolation
existed not out of willful ignorance, but as a reasonable protection against “every stunt,
wheeze, or charlatanry relevant or irrelevant to the industry.”
54
Hickman concluded that
seeking out seclusion for the sake of productivity had caused the lack of knowledge sharing
and proper technical assessment that, according to the engineers, plagued the studios. The
excess of skilled labor and the “finite demand” for it meant the technicians of Hollywood
had needed to value “personal safety, silence, and a certain measure of secretiveness” to
secure their own employment. Likewise, according to Hickman, the rivalries between
studios hampered the sharing of knowledge. While the stuntmen and charlatans stormed
the gates of Hollywood, he lamented that those with something real to share, namely the
members of the SMPE, “are entirely out of touch with the people who consume the physical

53
K. C. D. Hickman, “Hollywood and the Motion Picture Engineers” (Norfolk, Virginia, April 25-28,
1927) TSMPE XI, no. 29 (1927): 37.
54
Ibid, 34.

67
products of your brains.” Only the salesmen had any contact, which was insufficient.
Sharing knowledge with the producers was a “commercial act” not a generosity, in his
estimation.
Thus Hickman attempted to rationalize the culture of the Hollywood studios for the
assembled engineers, arguing that they were more alike than they imagined. His
assessment of the work of those in the studios had undergone a profound change since
February. Rather than suggesting that the organization drop “engineers” from its name in
order to create a more inclusive society, as he had done previously, Hickman redefined
what it meant to be a motion picture engineer. “The real motion picture engineers may be
seen in and around the studios and laboratories in Hollywood,” he claimed. Rather than
giving over the title full stop, Hickman proposed a conception of the industry in which the
technicians of Hollywood were the “primary engineers” while the room of chemists and
inventors in front of him were “secondary engineers.”
55
The pressing work of the Society
was to bring these two sides of the industry under one umbrella—the SMPE.
The urgency of inducing an effort to make this unification a reality came through in
the discussion. Crabtree presented the threat of another organization emerging to take its
place among these Hollywood engineers. Such a concern was hardly theoretical in the
spring of 1927, as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) was rapidly
coming to fruition in Hollywood. Crabtree warned the assembled engineers, “Once that
society is established, I don’t know where the Society of Motion Picture Engineers will

55
In his attempt to persuade, Hickman I think exaggerates the centrality of the technicians in the
studios—at least in terms of their role in the engineering side of the industry. I myself would be
more inclined to reverse the primary and secondary designations, in keeping with my view of
Hollywood as a secondary technology industry.

68
fit.”
56
Others seemed more willing to cede the production side of the industry to AMPAS,
such as projectionist F. H. Richardson who mocked the self-centered nature of Hollywood
people who considered themselves “as about nine-tenths of the whole entire thing” while
they in the East were the “plumbers.”
57
He imagined leaving them to their own devices to
fail and realize the error of their ways. As he explained, “but for the plumbers in real life we
would pretty much all die.”
While leaving the plumbing metaphor to Richardson, Crabtree admitted to having
the same “preconceived notions” of narcissistic Hollywood, but countered that the
technical men he met while there dispelled this belief.
58
His claims of their modesty,
appreciativeness, and “much higher order” of intelligence than he anticipated were
generously condescension. While the East continued to have a corner on fundamental
research, Crabtree urged them not to underestimate the “mental stimulation” of a visit to
Hollywood. Porter (now SMPE Secretary) likewise took a pragmatic view of the motion
picture field as a whole, noting the decreased importance of the type of work that had been
the staple of the Society in its earliest years. As he saw it, the industry had reached a level
of standardization and sophistication in its basic technology that any further advancement
in its tools would depend more on the “artistic end” than on the “mechanical means.”
Porter was coming to the same view that the technological service firms of
Hollywood had already achieved, that the progress of motion picture technology would be
catering to the creative needs of the studio. No other engineers took up Richardson’s
dismissive view, as the perspective that there would be no negative consequences to

56
John Crabtree, Discussion after “Hollywood and the Motion Picture Engineers,” 39.
57
F. H. Richardson, Ibid, 40.
58
John Crabtree, Ibid, 40.

69
ignoring Hollywood had clearly died in the SMPE. The rest of the debate centered more on
what the future bi-coastal structure of the organization would look like, rather than the
question of involving the West at all. The immediate tasks would be to increase the West
Coast membership of the Society and arrange for a conference to take place there. They
would begin the former task by sending out hundreds of invitations to recruit members,
imagining that these modest, intelligent technicians would jump at the chance to join their
prestigious society. But by September 1927, the Hollywood membership of the SMPE had
risen only to 16, constituting less than 7% of the society. While more than half of the
Hollywood members worked in studios, they came entirely from the DeMille and
Paramount Famous-Lasky companies, indicating that much of the industry had yet to take
any notice of the Society. In the membership committee report, they lamented that out of
450 recruitment letters sent, including to all the cameramen in Hollywood, only eight
members were acquired. The attempt to open the ranks of the Society to those “primary
engineers” had been largely in vain. Anonymous letters in the mail had done little to excite
those in Hollywood about the Society of Motion Picture Engineers.

A Small Market of Big Customers
The reluctance to look west was seen not just in the SMPE, but also in the individual
manufacturing corporations. Several industries had the motion picture producers buying
their products, even if the market, consisting of a few dozen companies, was too small to
justify catering (and marketing) to them. The technology manufacturers instead sold to the
New York area distributors, such as Jules E. Brulatour, Allison and Hadaway, and G. Gennert
Camera, and the Los Angeles technicians and producers dealt only with them. Though

70
Bausch & Lomb began making a motion picture camera lens around 1913, they maintained
their only West coast distribution office in San Francisco at least until the 1930s.
Eventually, several other lens companies recognized this faraway, specialized
market for modified, fast lenses for motion picture cameras. While Bausch & Lomb
developed lenses for motion picture cameras in the 1910s, other lens producers, including
Graf Optical of South Bend and Gundlach-Manhattan of Rochester began making motion
picture lenses in the 1920s. Their interest in developing the products was likely connected
to the introduction of amateur home movie cameras in the mid-1920s, as there were
probably only around 300 cameramen with their own cameras working in Hollywood at
the time. These were modifications of existing technologies, making them a rather small
investment for the companies. Given the small number of cameras used in Hollywood, as
compared to the still and projection market, it seems incongruous to use research and
manufacturing facilities for such a niche product. Additionally, none of these lens
companies saw it as necessary to cultivate a close enough relationship with their customers
in Hollywood as to set up sales or manufacturing facilities in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, all
these lens manufacturers found value in using their connection to the glamour of
Hollywood as a means of appealing to the masses for their other products.
If manufacturers showed little interest in extending the collaborative spirit brought
to the SMPE to their partners in the motion picture studios, they certainly saw their value
as endorsers of their brands. A mid-1920s catalogue for Graf lenses used the company’s
connection to Hollywood as a marketing ploy, despite being primarily focused on selling
still camera lenses. As the foreword explains, “The Motion Picture Industry, always quick
to appreciate a better tool, has adapted the Graf Variable… The Super Stars prefer the

71
image of the Variable. Many will have none other.”
59
Similarly, a 1921 Gundlach-Manhattan
catalogue boasted of the precision of the Ultrastigmat f1.9 lens for motion picture cameras
as “it must be perfect to give the critical definition required in cinephotography.”
60
This is
despite the fact that the catalogue did not actually list the motion picture lens for sale, only
boasting of it as an accomplishment in the introduction.
Figure 2. The cover of Bausch & Lomb Magazine, May 1930.

59
The Graf Optical Company, Graf, for Better Pictures (South Bend, Indiana), Graf Optical Co. File,
NMAH Trade Literature Collection.
60
Gundlach-Manhattan Optical Company, Photographic Lenses and Korona Cameras: Prisom
Binoculars and other Optical Products Catalog No. 22, (Rochester, 2/22/1921 (handwritten date)),
NMAH Trade Literature Collection.

72

Not to be outdone in this regard, Bausch & Lomb dedicated several articles in its
various publications to touting their contributions to the silver screen. Not only did the
optical company manufacture motion picture lenses, but they also were deeply involved in
many technological changes of the late-1920s. The switch to lower powered incandescent
lighting created a new market for their reflectors, and a Bausch & Lomb-developed optical
reading system was used in the development of sound on film. In Bausch & Lomb Magazine
they boasted that they were “proud of the intimate identification they have had with the
development of this newest wonder,” one that they argued “enlarges tremendously the
vision of man.”
61
This publication was intended for optometrists and other retailers of
eyeglasses, yet the company felt that its work in Hollywood could be of some benefit to
them with these consumers. Similarly, in The Reflector, the company’s internal employee
magazine, their West Coast representative sent in reports from the set of Universal’s
Broadway, which used almost 600 lamps with Bausch & Lomb reflectors (and over 200
with those from other manufacturers).
62

This boasting of Hollywood’s endorsement gave the impression of a closer
connection between these technology manufacturers and the studios than actually existed.
This was a common practice across many of the manufacturers, even as they did little to
cultivate relationships with the actual motion picture producers and workers themselves.
Where the development of tools for Hollywood may not have been profitable on its own,
the use of the connection to and even endorsement of Hollywood luminaries could help to

61
“The ‘Movie’ Becomes the Talkie,” The Bausch & Lomb Magazine VII, no. 7 (May 1930): 13. Bausch
& Lomb Corporate Collection, Rochester, NY.
62
George Rhode, “Our Producers in Hollywood,” The Reflector VII, no. 1 (March 1929), 10. Bausch &
Lomb Corporate Collection, Rochester, NY.

73
sell products to the larger markets outside of Los Angeles. As Hollywood grew, the
association between the manufacturers and the studios would need more reality than
rhetoric.
The physical separation between tool manufacturers and users was coupled with a
lack of communication between the sides. This was shown vividly in the correspondence
between the producers and technicians and their biggest technology partner, Eastman
Kodak, who according to Richard Abel, enjoyed a 90% share of the worldwide film stock
market at the time.
63
By the dawn of the 1920s, George Eastman had conceded the need to
make distribution of his film stock to the West Coast easier, but he was reluctant to move
any technical control over his products out of his reach. In June 1920, when the majority of
motion picture production had been based in California for half a decade, Eastman offered
not an endorsement but “no objection” to Jules Brulatour’s idea of setting up a distribution
office in Los Angeles.
64
But he stressed that any manager hired should be a “bookkeeper”
rather than a technician. Only a few months earlier, Eastman had brushed off the Los
Angeles Chamber of Commerce’s bid to build a branch factory for film stock production in
the city, arguing that the transportation of stock was far less expensive than the freight on
raw materials for making it.
65

All professional Kodak film sales were handled through Brulatour, at times to the
chagrin of the producers who thought they could save money by cutting out the

63
Richard Abel, The Cine Goes to Town, 45.
64
George Eastman to J. E. Brulatour, June 7, 1920, Eastman Legacy Collection.
65
George Eastman to A. C. Arnoll, Manager Industrial Department, Los Angeles Chamber of
Commerce, November 17, 1919, Eastman Legacy Collection.

74
middleman.
66
This structure gave the producers almost no room for negotiation or cost
cutting of one of the most essential and significant expenses on their business. Attempts to
go around Brulatour were shot down from the pen of George Eastman himself under the
name of fairness. Eastman’s unwavering loyalty to Brulatour showed that he preferred
having this single conduit for all of his dealings with the motion picture industry, as he had
little faith in their understanding of his side of the business. This lack of consideration for
the expertise of their customers pervaded the Kodak company ethos in the 1910s. Indeed,
when Kleine cameramen complained of fogged film, which they promptly returned, Kodak’s
sales manager George Blair dismissed the customer’s claims by “referring again to our
Laboratory reports” and finding “nothing to influence our former decision.”
67
The claims of
cameramen did not even warrant a reevaluation of the product. Instead, they asserted the
problem was likely in the camera or in perforating, an aspect of film stock production they
had yet to begin performing in house.
Eastman Kodak, as one of the founding technology companies of the motion picture
business, dominated the film stock market throughout the silent period (and for most of its
century-long revelance).
68
Though other companies tried to compete with Kodak, they
could only pick up single digit percentages of the market through underbidding and deals
for bulk buys, hardly making a dent in Kodak’s sales. In 1918, Variety bluntly referred to
Kodak as enjoying a “monopoly” in the field, stating that, “the several enterprises which

66
George Eastman to Carl Laemmle, June 3, 1915 and October 12, 1915, Eastman Legacy Collection.
67
George Blair to Frank S. Phelps, December 4, 1916, and Phelps to Blair, November 28, 1916, Box
13—Eastman Kodak, George Kleine Papers, Library of Congress Manuscripts Division, Washington
DC.
68
For more on Kodak’s role on the development of the motion pictures, see Paul C. Spehr, “1890-
1895 – Movies and the Kinetoscope,” American Cinema 1890-1909, Themes and Variations, ed.
Andre Gaudreault. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009): 22-44.

75
have attempted to compete have met disaster.”
69
The lack of significant competition meant
Kodak felt little obligation to cater to their customers. With a 90% market share and a
distribution partner to handle dealings with the customer, Kodak, like many other
technology manufacturers, saw little need to change its approach to the producers—that is
until they encountered significant competition from a company completely new to the
industry.
When DuPont decided to manufacture film stock, it was entering an entirely new
industry, as with Bausch & Lomb and General Electric before it. DuPont’s approach to
research, manufacturing, and its Hollywood customers had profound effects on Kodak’s
business model at a time when virtually every aspect of motion picture technology was
changing. The competition between Kodak and DuPont demonstrates the ways in which
the prevailing business practices of photographic specialists were fundamentally altered
when corporate giants entered the motion picture market. By looking at the competition
between the two companies, we can see how these technological manufacturers changed
their relationship with their costumers in Hollywood as the studio system matured.

DuPont’s Challenge to Kodak
E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company began as a gunpowder mill in 1802 and grew
to dominate that industry over the next hundred years.
70
. At the turn-of-the-century Pierre
DuPont reorganized his family’s company using concepts from scientific management.
Among them was the new Development Department, which the company saw as their

69
“Duponts May Rival Eastman Manufacturing of Raw Stock,” Variety L, no. 6 (April 5, 1918): 50.
70
For more on DuPont’s entry into the motion picture film stock business see Luci Marzola, “Better
Pictures through Chemistry: DuPont and the Fight for the Hollywood Film Stock Market” The Velvet
Light Trap 76 (Fall 2015): 3-18.

76
“strategic planning office”—keeping track of competitors, monitoring supplies of raw and
semi-finished products, watching organizational matters, and carrying on “a constant
search to improve the company’s products and the processes involved in producing
them.”
71
This structure meant that, unlike Mees’s independent research laboratories at
Kodak, research and development decisions would originate from the executive level.
Pierre’s goal was to transform the explosives company into a chemical giant, finding new
uses for its guncotton (or nitrocellulose) beyond its fruitful wartime market as smokeless
gunpowder.
Research into motion picture film as a use for DuPont’s gunpowder factories began
in 1913 and continued on a small scale throughout the war, focusing on the manufacture of
film base, the aspect of stock that uses nitrocellulose.
72
But well into the 1920s, DuPont
attempted to remain discreet in their attempts to move into the motion picture film stock
market. Knowing they would need experts in the field to convert their gunpowder factories
to film, they set about acquiring staff from existing companies. DuPont used their status as
a chemical manufacturer to their advantage as long as possible, but continued the practice
of poaching talent and using their knowledge competitively long after they entered the
market. These types of business practices left ill will among the other motion picture
technology manufacturers, who had formed an increasingly collegial community since the
foundation of the SMPE. As Technicolor engineer Leonard Troland expressed it, “I have no
faith in DuPont morality, and am inclined to believe that their negotiations with us were a

71
Alfred D. Chandler and Stephen Salsbury, Pierre S. Du Pont and the Making of the Modern
Corporation (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1971): 142.
72
Historical Highlights, Parlin Plant, Du Pont Photo Products Department, 1912-1968, Second
Edition, (February 1968) Copy No. 11, Original edition August 1965: 2. DuPont Collection, NMAH
Trade Literature Collection.

77
put-up job for getting as much inside information as possible regarding our process.”
73
At
least Troland thought such underhanded competitive actions were not fitting in the motion
picture industry as it had evolved in recent years.
DuPont’s secrecy about their development of motion picture film stock likely
contributed to the lack of trust, a marked contrast to Kodak’s view of the scientific
community. While suspicions rose over the years, in 1919, Kodak seemed to think little of
using their research labs, and their top motion picture chemist John Crabtree, to work on
“developer formulae” on DuPont’s behalf.
74
Mees held the view that confidentiality in
scientific research was basically impossible, and he showed little concern about it. In that
spirit, Mees encouraged his staff to present at conventions of national scientific societies
such as the SMPE, generally having the company pay for the expense of attending. As a
small caveat, Mees himself reviewed and approved all such papers, along with the Kodak
General Manager.
75
But such an open position suggests the privilege of having little direct
competition in one’s industry.
By the end of 1921, DuPont could hardly hide their intentions, as their top engineers
began joining the SMPE and attending the meetings as Associate (not Active) Members,
allowing them to keep up with and gain entry into the industry.
76
They broke ground on a
plant for manufacturing positive film stock, which The Film Daily reported as arising “only

73
Leonard Troland to Herbert Kalmus, April 12, 1928, Troland’s Correspondence and Memoes, Box
M0006, Folder 4, Technicolor Collection, George Eastman House.
74
“Developer Formulae for DuPont (215),” Problem Logs, 1919-1921, File Cabinet 5 Drawer 3,
Kodak Research Labs.
75
“General Information for Members of the Research Laboratory” (pamphlet): 9, File Cabinet 1
Drawer 3 19215, Kodak Research Labs.
76
“Membership List, 1921-1922,” TSMPE no. 13 (1922). An Associate Member was defined as “a
person who is interested in or connected with the study of motion picture technical problems or the
application of the same.”

78
after several years of intensive experimental work conducted by a large staff of research
chemists in conjunction with experts from the trade.”
77
Then in 1924, DuPont negotiated
the merger of their film works with Pathé Exchange to form the new company, the DuPont-
Pathé Film Manufacturing Corporation, 51% of which DuPont retained. Importantly, the
deal included “an arrangement for exchange of technical information” with the Pathé film
plant in France, much like the pre-war relationship between Bausch & Lomb and Zeiss.
78

Another advantage here was that DuPont was in effect preventing Pathé from setting up a
competing business in the U. S. market. The trade press viewed the announcement of the
merger as the “definite entrance of the DuPont interests into the raw stock field.”
79

The connection to Pathé Exchange gave DuPont a major consumer for positive film
stock for release prints as it entered the field. This was not an insignificant blow to Kodak,
as Pathé had been buying 100,000 feet of positive film per week from Brulatour the year
before.
80
Additionally, as DuPont saw it, the connection to Pathé meant “improvements in
the film could be expedited because its use in a commercial laboratory could be
observed.”
81
This constituted a significant advantage over Kodak, who rarely had any direct
dealings with producers, their laboratories, or distributors, having yet to even set up
anything in Hollywood beyond Brulatour’s small distribution office. DuPont achieved
volume production of its positive stock within a year, and began manufacturing negative
film by the end of 1925.

77
“Reported Raw Stock Venture Soon to Be Started After Many Experiments,” The Film Daily XXI,
no. 67 (Thursday, September 7, 1922): 1.
78
Historical Highlights,1.
79
“DuPont and Pathé in Joint Deal,” Film Daily XXX no. 27 (October 31, 1924): 1; “DuPont- Pathé to
Manufacture Film,” Exhibitors Trade Review (November 15, 1924): 11. Pathé Exchange was an
American film distributor with connection to but separate ownership from the French Pathé Freres.
80
J. E. Brulatour to George Eastman, May 4, 1923, Eastman Legacy Collection.
81
Historical Highlights, 4.

79
The relationship with Pathé Exchange eased DuPont’s entrance into the positive
stock market, but getting into the negative market presented new challenges, as they now
had to cater to filmmakers rather than distributors—customers who did not see
themselves as businessmen, but as artists (or at least craftsmen). DuPont’s motion picture
research director Dr. Virgil B. Sease voiced his frustrations at his earliest encounters with
motion picture producers, as recounted in the internal division history.
One of my early experiences was to go to a newsreel office in New York City
and have the manager demonstrate that this new Du Pont negative was
decidedly ‘soft’ and unsuitable for news work. It was obvious that our film
had not been developed long enough… He went into a rage, informing me…
that the three extra minutes would be fatal.… The afternoon of the same
day I called on a customer in Long Island City who was quite upset because
he was unable to develop the same film for 40 minutes without getting a
stained image.”
82

Like George Eastman before him, Sease seemed entirely skeptical of the technical know-
how and training of the motion picture professionals, but those making strategic decisions
at DuPont were under no illusions about the necessity of catering to them. In order to fully
penetrate the negative stock market, they would need to venture across the country to the
production center, a move in which they would precede the competition. In late 1925,
DuPont-Pathé announced the establishment of a sales office in Los Angeles, and in
February 1926, it was opened with Wesley Smith and Simeon Aller, “well known” Los
Angeles laboratory experts, at the helm, just before DuPont negative stock hit the market.
83

It was important for DuPont to ingratiate itself with the established industry as
much as possible, since they would inevitably be regarded as outsiders. The hiring of Smith
and Aller was a strategic move in this regard. Likewise, advertising in American

82
Historical Highlights, 4.
83
“Dupont Raw Film Branch,” Variety LXXXI, no. 2 (November 25, 1925): 28; “Smith and Aller to
Handle Dupont- Pathé Film on Coast,” American Cinematographer VI, no. 11 (February 1926): 8.

80
Figure 3. Ad for DuPont-Pathe Film Manufacturing Corp,
American Cinematographer, March 1926.

Cinematographer, the publication of the elite, Los Angeles-based American Society of
Cinematographers, began with full page, inside cover ads in February 1926. The
cinematographers had worked over the last decade to position themselves as the chief
technicians in motion picture production, and manufacturers were learning to cater to
these men and not just the executives signing the checks, who knew little about the

81
technical aspects of their business.
84
Ads touted the company’s century of “quality” and
“perfection,” using the decade it took to develop their product as a selling point. While
Kodak had an established brand in the business and could focus on their reputation in their
advertising, DuPont had to assert the superior qualities of their product and their history
as a successful, respected company. DuPont may have been new to the film stock trade, but
they were not new to the technology business, they claimed. By July 1926, Film Daily
pegged the capacity of the DuPont works at 400,000,000 feet of raw stock per year,
exceeding the Pathé Exchange demand four fold, indicating that they had deeply cut into
Kodak’s business.
85

Kodak clearly saw this is a serious threat, as they moved to set up a more robust
West Coast distributor, W. J. German, Inc., in mid-1926 under Brulatour’s auspices and
Edward Blackburn’s management.
86
According to Blackburn’s own history of the business,
the “first serious competitive threat” to Brulatour and Kodak came with the introduction of
DuPont’s negative to the Hollywood market in 1926.
87
Seeing the advantage that DuPont
had in its association with Pathé, as well as Smith and Aller, Blackburn hired “two
experienced and highly qualified laboratory experts” to back up sales campaigns and feed
Rochester “vital technical information from the cameramen and from the laboratory
operations in the Hollywood area.”
88

84
See chapter three for more on the role of the cinematographers and American Cinematographer.
85
“Du Pont- Pathé Active,” The Film Daily XXXVII, no. 11 (July 14, 1926): 1.
86
“Eastman Kodak Stores Open Los Angeles Kodak Building,” American Cinematographer VII, no. 3
(June 1926): 26.
87
Edward O. Blackburn, “History and Background, W. J. German, Inc., Agents for the Sale and
Distribution, Eastman Professional Motion Picture Films, Hollywood,” (unpublished manuscript,
1956), Edward T. Howell Collection, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY.
88
Blackburn, 3.

82
Where Kodak had ignored the input of the cinematographers and technicians
before, competition made pleasing them vital to retaining their business. At the exact
moment that DuPont entered Hollywood, Kodak began heavily advertising the sale of a
product it had held at arms length from Hollywood for more than a decade—panchromatic
negative.
89
Kodak Research Labs developed panchromatic motion picture film as early as
1913; however, according the Kodak’s internal history of its research activities, “It created
production problems in practically every phase of our operation.”
90
Most notably,
panchromatic’s sensitivity to red light, which made shooting in natural light easier, also
made processing in traditional dark room conditions problematic. The tide in the industry
was turning toward the increased acceptance of the usefulness of panchromatic film, but
Kodak still largely sat on this technology, continuing to discourage its use outside of
specialty projects, even in the face of growing demand from the studio technicians. But the
threat of DuPont meant that the introduction of panchromatic to regular use in Hollywood
could give Kodak an advantage over their new rival who had no panchromatic film stock to
sell.
Kodak began an advertising campaign for panchromatic in January 1926 that served
also as an educational one—the unique requirements of the technology being one of the
reasons they had held off for so long. The ads in American Cinematographer changed
monthly throughout the year, discussing the unique color rendering qualities of the film

89
Their first advertisement for panchromatic negative appeared in the January 1926 American
Cinematographer, only one issue before the first DuPont ad.
90
L. A. Babbitt, Kodak Park Activities, 1921-1940: A Preliminary Report, W.J. Cullen, Box 97, Folder 6,
Series VI, Kodak Historical Collection.

83
and urging cameramen to write for a copy of their informational booklet.
91
It was only after
this push began that Warner Bros. cinematographer Edwin DuPar found that the use of
incandescent lighting and panchromatic film worked better together as he shot the first
Vitaphone sound shorts.
92
Incandescent lights were quieter than the standard carbon arcs,
but they gave off light stronger in the red side of the spectrum, making orthochromatic film,
which did not pick up red well, a bad fit. Any conversion to incandescents would therefore
have to be paired with a switch to panchromatic. By late 1926, demand for the film was
escalating and Kodak brought the price down, equalizing it with orthochromatic.
93

With DuPont’s orthochromatic stock routinely praised for its superior “fine grain
size” and “high sensitivity,” the company saw Kodak’s push for conversion to panchromatic
as a countermove to their incursions in the market.
94
Seeing as DuPont had taken nearly a
decade to develop its orthochromatic negative and had yet to do any work in panchromatic,
Kodak likely thought they would have the market to themselves for some time. If that was
the case, they greatly underestimated the growth and agility of the DuPont works, as they
were able to panchromatize their film within the year and “without fanfare” send 400-foot
samples of the new film to Hollywood cameramen in April 1927.
95
The speed of their

91
Ads for Eastman Kodak, American Cinematographer (January-September 1926).
92
Edwin DuPar to Foster Goss, September 22, 1926, Edwin Dupar file, f.130, American Society of
Cinematographers Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, CA. (Hereafter cited as ASC
Collection.)
93
Ad for Eastman Kodak Company, American Cinematographer VII, no. 8 (November 1926): 13.
94
Historical Highlights: 4.
95
Ibid: 5.

84
conversion can no doubt be attributed to their acquisition of engineers from other motion
picture companies experienced in panchromatic work.
96

It was at this point that DuPont claimed to have seized “half of the Hollywood
business,” though reliable figures on market share are difficult to find and to verify.
97
It is
clear that Kodak and DuPont-Pathé were largely seen as equals in terms of quality and
stature, well above the other major competitors—Zeiss-Ikon, Agfa, and Gaevert—and only
two years after DuPont’s first introduction into Hollywood. Even if the DuPont film were
objectively superior at the moment, the Hollywood technical men expressed skepticism
toward the new game in town and were not ready to dismiss Kodak, whose product they
had used their entire careers. Kodak President William Stuber admitted to
cinematographer Joseph Dubray that the “Hollywood situation has done great harm to the
Eastman Co,”—a situation which they assured him they were already working to remedy.
98

When Dubray, as a representative of the American Society of Cinematographers, visited
DuPont a few days later, he used the competition between the companies to his advantage,
warning Dr. Sease that the cinematographers expected, “to see this quality not only
maintained but increased and kept in pace with the progress of the times.”
99

As well as getting to work on a superior panchromatic film, Kodak reduced the price
of its regular stock in June 1928, a move which Agfa followed but which DuPont saw no

96
The Technicolor process required the use and manipulation of panchromatic film, which they
acquired from manufacturers like Kodak, Agfa, and DuPont—thus their experience with the
product, despite never having manufactured it.
97
Historical Highlights: 5.
98
Joseph Dubray, Report on the Contact Trip conducted by Joseph A Dubray, March 8
th
-April 8
th
, 1928
(unpublished manuscript), Joseph Dubray file, f.128, ASC Collection.
99
Ibid.

85
need to mimic, such was its confidence in its position.
100
Instead they continued to expand
their facilities, adding a warehouse, shipping building, and fourth nitrate casting unit in
1929. Of course DuPont was also working to produce a superior panchromatic film, even
going so far to as to send out survey letters to top ASC cameramen asking for feedback for
improvements to their film stock, ensuring that Hollywood at least felt that they had
something to contribute to the development of their tools.
101
Visits to the DuPont facilities
became a regular activity for Hollywood technicians who would be escorted by Dr. Sease
and his engineers through the works. As Arthur Reeves put it in his account of his visit,
“There seem to be no deep secrets… and one is impressed with the readiness that questions
are answered and processes or machines explained.”
102
The openness of the company to
the Hollywood technicians clearly surprised them after years of condescension from Kodak.
In the end, Kodak was not to be outdone in its pursuit of Hollywood goodwill. In
early 1931, the company would open the Eastman Kodak Service Building in Hollywood in
cooperation with Brulatour. A brochure, aimed at the producers, directors, and
cameramen, boasted of the amenities,
It is yours, in all its branches, for the Asking [sic]. Here at your command is a
completely equipped laboratory and a scientific staff to aid in solving your
daily problems in the field of sound and color pictures. This greater Eastman
service is offered as an accrued dividend upon your investment of faith and
goodwill.
103

100
“E-K Positive Price Cut Becomes Effective Today,” Film Daily XLIV no. 69 (June 20, 1928): 1.
101
Dr. V. B. Sease, DuPont, to Ross Fisher, February 15, 1929, Ross Fisher file, f.157, ASC Collection.
102
Arthur Reeves, “Peeping in on Parlin,” The International Photographer I, no. 11 (December
1929): 38; and “The Sound Track” The International Photographer II, no. 3 (March 1930): 47,
reports Jackson Rose visiting Parlin.
103
Motion Picture Division, Eastman Kodak Company, An Eastman Service (undated brochure,
1930/31), Edward T. Howell Collection.

86
Figure 4. Advertisement for Eastman Service Building,
American Cinematographer, January 1931.

This brand of customer service, which the company had assiduously avoided up to this
point, underscores the impact of market competition on Kodak’s approach to their
Hollywood customers. By that time, George Eastman, who had been so reluctant to set up
any kind of facility in Los Angeles, was retired from running the company. So it is unlikely

87
that he was privy to the decision to send several of their best engineers out of the Kodak
Research Labs in Rochester and into the Service Building in Hollywood. Kodak finally
realized that it could not ignore its customers and retain a monopoly over the market.
Throughout the early-1930s, the two companies continued to release improved film stock
every couple of years, always maintaining a competitive product on the market. Though
DuPont retained a significant share of the market for several decades, Kodak remained the
industry leader.
This history of the first several years of DuPont’s venture into the film stock
business shows that the introduction of a significant competitor into the market led to
fundamental changes in Kodak’s approach to their elite customers in Hollywood. Kodak
could no longer ignore its customers in Los Angeles, but instead would have to increasingly
cater to their partners in the West. The intense competition between the two companies
led to a period of rapid innovation and increased quality that benefited the producers and
technicians of Hollywood immensely. Market competition would continue to be a fuel for
technological innovation, but at the same time cooperative endeavors would become
increasingly essential to the maturation of the industry.

Conclusion
By looking at these manufacturers as a center of power in the motion picture
industry, the networks of commerce and knowledge that supported the Hollywood studio
system can be thought of as part of the larger American economy and history. These
manufacturers created their own version of a united industry while at the same time
isolating themselves from the other half of the business, both geographically and

88
intellectually. As a result, we can see a clearly defined industrial culture for the period
before the late-1920s, when events such as new corporate competition, described here, and
the SMPE Hollywood meeting and the Mazda tests (both discussed in chapter four) would
bring the two sides into closer contact.
With the rising power of Hollywood and its increasing use of sophisticated
technology, the distances between the manufacturers and the studios would have to be
traversed rather than used as a justification for lack of consideration. But before any
collaboration could happen, the next chapter explores another group of engineers and
businessmen who would serve as the earliest conduit between technology manufacturers
and motion picture producers. Rather than working as cogs in the machinery of major
corporations, these individuals set up shop mostly in the vicinity of the new studios and
made tools only Hollywood could buy, including motion picture cameras, color systems,
pivoting tripods, and editing machines. These small service firms were often built on the
institutional and scientific knowledge of the universities and corporations of the East, but
unlike their large brethren, they had an intimate relationship with their customers, as the
studios were their only market. In this way, they served to make Hollywood impossible to
ignore, transforming it from a manufacturing outpost to an industrial cluster.

89
CHAPTER 2

“Maintained Solely for Your Benefit”:
Technological Service Firms and the Hollywood Industrial Cluster

Figure 5. Mole-Richardson studio lamp plant, Hollywood, undated,
Mole-Richardson Company Archive.

In the memoranda books of Herbert Kalmus, one of the founders of the Technicolor
Motion Picture Corporation, the businessman/engineer accounted for his daily activities as
he went about establishing his company’s interests in the motion picture industry.
1
He and
his partners, all recently minted PhDs from MIT, had established their laboratories in

1
Memoranda (diary) books, March 1916 – December 1928, Box 1, Herbert Kalmus Papers, Library
of Congress, Manuscripts Division, Washington, DC. (Hereafter cited as Kalmus Papers.)

90
Boston, which in 1916 seemed as good a place as any for developing color motion pictures.
With the major motion picture producers as their only customers, within a few years of the
company’s founding, Kalmus found himself travelling to New York monthly to meet with
various producers and suppliers. At the time, the majority of physical motion picture
production had already moved west to California, but the power centers, especially those
for making financial decisions, remained largely on the East Coast.
Most people in the business saw Hollywood as little more than a manufacturing
outpost—one of many possible locations for motion picture production. Like the
production companies themselves, Kalmus envisioned a model for his business in which
only a small part, the actual taking of the negative, might be performed out of his reach,
while print production and processing would stay centered in his home base in the East.
But unlike major corporations such as Kodak and DuPont who made motion picture
technology as a part of a larger catalogue of goods, Technicolor was a small business with a
singular product to market, so their relationship to their customers could not be
underestimated. When Hollywood filmmakers began to show interest in the company’s
two-strip color process, the physical distance between the service firm and the customer
became untenable. In 1922, Kalmus sent a few engineers to Los Angeles, and two years
later he took the week-long train journey west himself to establish offices near the studios
and meet with the filmmakers who he hoped would see the necessity of shooting their
pictures in color.
2
Within two years he was in Boston so rarely he noted it in his diaries

2
Memoranda Book (1924), Memoranda (diary) books, March 1916-December 1928, Box 1, Kalmus
Papers.

91
along with his other travels, including a European tour with the Fairbanks’.
3
Kalmus had no
doubt come under the thrall of Hollywood, but he also recognized that the only way to
cultivate this market, the only significant one for his business, was to exist in it.
By the time the company shifted its focus to its now famous three-strip color
process in the early-1930s, it had not only moved much of its processing and print
production, but also its laboratory experiments to its Hollywood facilities. The relocation of
research and top engineers to Los Angeles signaled a new orientation in which technology
companies such as Technicolor, who relied primarily on this small market for their
business, would need to develop and manufacture in Hollywood, not just sell to it. Relying
on contact only with the New York financial interests of the studios would not allow them
to adapt to the needs and desires of those using their tools in the studios, which was
essential to maintaining a competitive edge.
As motion picture production became reliant on complex, specialized technology
such as that which Technicolor provided, being easily accessible to the producers and
technicians in the studios, and answering to their sometimes-esoteric needs, became
increasingly important. As such, this chapter centers on the establishment of technology
service firms in the vicinity of Hollywood as an important development in the formation of
the studio system. From the early 1920s, Los Angeles was the home of a growing sector of
film processing labs, mobile generator companies, lighting suppliers, and special process
innovators such as Technicolor and Dunning. The development of this technological service
sector designed specifically to cater to the needs of the studios was instrumental in

3
Memoranda Book (1926), Box 1, Kalmus Papers. Kalmus travelled with Doug and Mary, as well as
Doug’s brother Robert throughout April and May 1926. This was a few months after Fairbanks shot
The Black Pirate, the first Technicolor feature.

92
transforming Hollywood from a manufacturing outpost into an integrated economic,
industrial zone.
4
In this way, Hollywood can be considered a prototype for what business
scholars have termed creative industrial “clusters.” Michael Porter effectively defines
clusters as “geographic concentrations of interconnected companies, specialized suppliers,
firms in related industries, and associated institutions.”
5
Importantly, companies and
institutions that made up an industrial cluster “compete but also cooperate,” as they search
for “strategic differences.”
6
In this way, geographic clustering encouraged the same types of
collaborative behaviors that trade associations facilitated with the East Coast engineers.
The customer service ethos that the major manufacturers were slow to adopt was
essential to the successful operation of smaller service firms. As we saw in the previous
chapter, large corporations who took an interest in motion pictures as an ancillary market
manufactured film stock, lenses, and light bulbs. But in 1920, there was no mass market for
35mm motion picture cameras, film stock processing, or massive spot light equipment
adapted to a studio space. These were technologies that needed expert development and
manufacturing on a relatively small scale. The companies that were able to fill this market
became even more indispensible to the studios later in the decade as technology became
increasingly important to maintaining a competitive edge.
With the studios and their staffs as their only customers, it was essential for them to
produce products that would cater to the specific needs of studio production and be
quickly and widely adopted as standard. Smaller technology companies that established

4
Less technologically centered service firms such as prop and costume houses are an important
part of turning Los Angeles into an industrial cluster. Nevertheless, it is the technology firms that
allow Hollywood to become a location for innovative practices.
5
Michael Porter, “Local Clusters in a Global Economy,” in Creative Industries, ed. John Hartley
(Blackwell, 2005), 264.
6
Porter, 263.

93
facilities around the studios were quick to adapt to the needs of the studio technicians and
artists, even when they went against more typical industrial concerns with objective
“quality.” These companies were more effective in creating mutually beneficial
relationships with the studio technicians than their larger, East Coast brethren. In this way,
they were instrumental in establishing a motion picture engineering community in Los
Angeles and paving the way for greater connection between the studios and the technology
industry as a whole.
In this chapter, the specialized technology service firms take center stage in the
formation of the studio system. It is through these small companies that trained engineers
first came into the motion picture studio, as several took their training in East Coast
universities and major industrial interests out West in order to establish their own firms
making specialized tools. Through these intermediary figures, Hollywood became a source
of technological innovation and a creative production center whose influence and power
within the American economy became undeniable. In this way, these companies were
instrumental in transforming Hollywood from a production outpost into an industrial
cluster.
Industrial clusters thrive on innovation, fueled by competition, which is facilitated
by the close proximity of suppliers. This useful paradigm for considering the wider
network of businesses that constitute “Hollywood” as a cluster has primarily been used to
study recent phenomena such as Silicon Valley or even contemporary Hollywood.
7
In
contrast, Maryann Feldman and Pontus Braunerhjelm, in their pivotal volume, Cluster
Genesis: Technology-Base Industrial Development, emphasize the beginnings of clusters in

7
See Allen J. Scott, On Hollywood: The Place, the Industry (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2005).

94
defining social relationships and shared visions of an industry’s activities. Dismissing a
teleological view of clusters in which the participants are “far-sighted”—a common
approach to the Hollywood studio system—Feldman and Braunerhjelm assert that
“entrepreneurial activity is by necessity messy, complex, and adaptive.”
8
Their evolution is
the result of the co-development of technology, business models, and local supporting
institutions. In this way, solutions that work are diffused across companies, repeated, fine-
tuned, made routine, then instituted as “operating procedures” by the governing
institutions.
Moving away from a teleological view of these developments means focusing on the
then contemporary problems of producers and filmmakers in Hollywood to which these
service firms were responding. As such, this chapter begins with a portrait of Hollywood in
the mid-1910s and the technological and creative limitations of operating as a production
outpost. Enterprising “lone inventors,” both local entrepreneurs and those who traveled
west like the producers, saw a market in supplying specialized tools to these producers,
who were isolated from their established economic community back East. The chapter
explores the first significant sector of technological service firms that recognized a market
catering to alleviating these frustrations—the independent film processing laboratories. I
then focus in on a few key companies whose histories show the varying ways in which
firms experienced and cultivated their relationships to their customers in the studios.
Technicolor is an example of a high-tech company that started in the East and was
compelled to shift its focus to the West in order to facilitate better exchange between its

8
Maryann Feldman and Pontus Braunerhjlem, “The Genesis of Industrial Clusters,” in Cluster
Genesis: Technology-Based Industrial Development, ed. Braunerhjelm and Feldman (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006): 2.

95
laboratories and the studios. Two important camera companies present contrasting
trajectories—Bell & Howell remained based in Chicago even as the power of Hollywood
rose, while Mitchell was a native Los Angeles enterprise. These companies offer a
particularly dramatic demonstration of the customer service ethos, as they manufactured a
highly specialized, very expensive technology that studio technicians directly purchased
themselves.
Once these businesses established Hollywood facilities, they shifted their marketing
and service to their consumers, courting the studio technicians. An analysis of advertising
and discourse on the relationship between cinematographers and laboratories
demonstrates this changing landscape that many other specialized brands of service firms,
including lighting and camera companies, soon adopted as well. The efforts of these small
technology service companies facilitated Hollywood’s transformation from a filming
destination into an industrial center that still controls the motion picture business and
several other creative enterprises to this day.
9

A New Customer in Town
As production companies put down more permanent roots in Los Angeles, building
massive motion picture plants designed to facilitate multiple steps of the filmmaking
process, the requirement of obtaining technological supplies and services from across the
country became an increasing problem. The studios had increasingly been built (and
marketed) as complete factories, in which “the entire process of the making of moving

9
As Scott Allen argues in On Hollywood, even as physical production has been largely outsourced
through “runaway” production to Canada and other parts of the U.S. the service firms—from special
effects houses to studio lighting manufacturers—are still largely based in Los Angeles.

96
pictures” could be seen, because, for the first time, it all took place in one location.
10

Contrary to this narrative, which the producers perpetuated themselves, the studios were
not entirely self-sufficient facilities. Unlike the motion picture plants back East, very few of
the new studios in Los Angeles had laboratories for processing negatives.
11
Additionally,
though sets, props, and costumes were often manufactured in studio-based workshops;
cameras, lights, film stock, and other highly complex tools had to be bought. But early on
the firms that made these tools struggled to find ways to sell themselves directly to the
studio workers, the foreboding walls and gates were keeping them separated from their
customers.
In October 1921, less than a year into the run of American Cinematographer, the
editors began soliciting advertisers from among those “manufacturing or selling anything
or engaged in any line of service appertaining to motion pictures.”
12
Despite its admittedly
meager circulation, the editors in their call boasted that the “special clientele” that had
access to the publication would give them a “selling power six to one greater” than a less
specialized one. The AC editors were likely comparing themselves to the industry trades,
such as Moving Picture World and Daily Variety in which many of these manufacturers,
including Eastman Kodak and Bell & Howell, were already advertising their tools. In AC,
they could advertise directly to the technicians making the decisions about what tools

10
F.H. Richardson, “The Home of Vitagraph,” Moving Picture World 19, no. 4 (January 24, 1914):
401. See Brian R. Jacobson, Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence
of Cinematic Space (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015) for more on the Hollywood studio
facilities.
11
Universal was the major exception. “Building Universal City,” Moving Picture World 22, no. 1
(October 3, 1914): 49.
12
Advertisement, American Cinematographer 2, no. 19 (October 15, 1921): 1. The data in this
section comes from an analysis of the ads in American Cinematographer for the entirety of the
1920s. Each issue’s advertisements, including company, product, size, location, and primary copy
content were recorded and analyzed.

97
would be used in the studio, and at a presumably lower cost. The tactic clearly had merit as
advertising in the pages of AC jumped from around two total ad pages in that issue, to
regularly selling around nine pages each issue only a few short months later.
While businesses around Los Angeles had aimed their services at the motion picture
producers since their arrival over a decade earlier, this was their first opportunity to
advertise their tools directly and specifically to those who would actually use them. Two
issues later, AC published a letter from the president of the fledgling, Los Angeles-based
Mitchell Camera Company, which had taken up the call to advertise in the magazine.
President Henry Boeger boasted that, “It has overshadowed by far any other channel of
advertising.”
13
Importantly, he emphasized that the inquiries derived from AC were actual
“prospective purchasers” and not just the curious, concluding that the magazine “reaches
the very heart of the profession,” and taking out the back cover continuously for the next
two decades.
14
This essentially local publication, which gave service firms a direct line to
advertise to those purchasing and using the tools of motion picture production, provides a
valuable resource for understanding how the market for motion picture technology in Los
Angeles developed.
While large companies, such as Eastman Kodak and Cooper Hewitt Electric bought
ads in AC from an early date, they did so on an inconsistent basis. With little to no facilities
in Los Angeles, they could do little more in these ads than direct the Hollywood men to call
their distributors in New York (Gotham distributors such as G. Gennert were also early
advertisers). Instead, the majority of the ads came from small companies operating highly

13
Advertisement, American Cinematographer 2, no. 20 (November 1, 1921): 1.
14
Mitchell’s last back cover was the December 1941 issue. Starting in January 1942, Bell & Howell
took possession of the back of the American Cinematographer.

98
specialized businesses within the geographic vicinity of the studios. These included the
likes of the California Camera Hospital, Mitchell Camera Company, the Cinema Studio
Supply Co., and K. M. Thalhammer, maker of the Thalhammer Special Model A Tripod. It is
these smaller companies who most readily adapted to the needs and desires of the
technicians in the studios, so dependent were they on this niche market.
There is no distinct pattern for how these entrepreneurs came into the motion
picture service industry. Some of them were former employees of the movie studios who,
after the creation of some innovative tool, left their employ to strike out on their own as
independent entrepreneurs catering to their former colleagues. Others left their positions
at major technology companies to pursue an interest in motion pictures. And a third
contingent pre-dated motion pictures’ ascendency in Los Angeles and seized on the new
market in their native home. One such innovator was Karl Thalhammer, the Austrian
inventor, who, according to a 1921 “who’s who”-style publication, had brought his Vienna
education in “electro-technique” to New York in 1904 “with twenty-five cents in his
pocket.”
15
After getting into the phonograph business and working his way through Toledo
and San Francisco, Thalhammer, likely apocryphally, then rode away from that earthquake-
ravaged city in 1906 “on a bicycle with a couple of dollars in his pocket.” He once again
rebuilt his phonograph empire in his new home of Los Angeles, opening a manufacturing
business downtown in 1908 and inventing, among other things, a telephone signal
recorder, a self-stop device for phonographs, and a self-photo apparatus.

15
John Steven McGroarty, “Karl W. Thalhammer,” Los Angeles from the Mountains to the Sea: With
Selected Biography of Actors and Witnesses to the Per, Vol. 2, (American Historical Society, Chicago
and New York, 1921): 334. This publication focused mainly on the pre-Hollywood establishment of
Los Angeles—lawyers, clergy, bankers, and those who made their fortunes in oil, minerals, real
estate, and railroads. Hollywood is a minor presence in this world, making Thalhammer’s inclusion
an interesting choice.

99

Figure 6. Advertisement for the Thalhammer tripod,
American Cinematographer, December, 1921.

By 1913, the motion picture industry was making a significant impact in the area
and Thalhammer “applied his inventive genius” to the new industry in town. Thalhammer’s
first success in the motion picture industry was in inventing and manufacturing a
“Vigneting Iris” which, by 1921, was known and used widely by all the cameramen of
Hollywood.
16
It was around that time that Thalhammer began advertising his tripod in the
pages of AC and other industry trades, boasting of sturdy leg clamps and a special range

16
“Pans and Tilts: As Time Goes On,” American Cinematographer 2, no. 22 (Dec. 1, 1921): 8.

100
head that allowed for shooting straight up or down. Thalhammer applied for five patents
for innovations to the tripod and motion picture camera between 1919 and 1920, and
continued to innovate in the industry well into the 1950s.
17

The type of specific refinements of the cameraman’s tools that Thalhammer
manufactured could only be accomplished through close and regular contact with his
customers and an intimate knowledge of their needs. The ability to tilt a camera 180
degrees is not a matter of perfection of an instrument so much as it is an accommodation to
the creative desires of the industry professionals. As an American Cinematographer article
explained,
Suppose it were desired to take a picture of a man looking through a hole in
the ceiling—the same view as that of a person looking straight up at this
man. Of course, this could be faked, but would it not be better to get the
natural picture?
18

Note this in contrast to the engineers at the 1918 Society of Motion Picture Engineers
meeting suggesting a lighting method and studio staging which would allow cameramen to
obtain “perfect” exposure, as if this were the goal of motion picture photography.
19

Working in the shadow of the studios allowed firms such as Thalhammer’s to
understand that technology needed to serve creative ends. Like Thalhammer and his
tripod, many of these small businesses had something close to a corner on their sliver of
the market. For example, Harvey’s Motion Picture Exposure Meter was unrivaled and

17
USPTO Patent Full-Text and Image Database, http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-
adv.htm&r=0&f=S&l=50&d=PALL&OS=IN%2Fthalhammer&RS=IN%2Fthalhammer&Query=IN%2F
thalhammer&TD=67&Srch1=thalhammer.INNM.&NextList2=Final+17+Hits
18
“Pans and Tilts: As Time Goes On,” 8. Thalhammer later adapted his tools for the amateur market
as it grew in the late-1920s, making his tripod adaptable into a projector stand and opening offices
in Chicago and NY, “Thalhammer Openings,” Movie Makers IV, no. 5 (May 1929): 336.
19
John W. Allison, “Standardization of the Motion Picture Industry, and the Ideal Studio,”
(Cleveland, Ohio, November 18-20, 1918) TSMPE no. 7 (1919): 9.

101
Cinema Studio Supply was the only game in the wind machine market. But one area had
already clearly become competitive by this time—the independent film processing labs.
Before the end of 1921, no fewer than five different laboratories advertised their services
in the pages of American Cinematographer while several more would join them in the
coming years.
20
Laboratories served essential functions in the filmmaking process, but had
been largely left out of the elevation of motion picture labor to the status of art or even
sophisticated craftsmanship. Like Thalhammer, the independent labs would create a
market for themselves by catering to the specific, creative needs of the filmmakers
themselves.

Laboratories at Your Service
Laboratory work was an unavoidably necessary aspect of motion picture
production. It was laborious, hazardous, and difficult to do well. Exposed negatives were
developed and duplicated by hand well into the 1920s. As late as 1927, in their Tinting and
Toning guide, Eastman Kodak advocated the “rack and tank” method, in which film was
wrapped around large wooden frames, dipped by hand into tanks of chemicals, and then
wound around drums for drying.
21
Automatic developing machines were made available to
the industry by 1921, however, the cinematographers in particular resisted their use for
negative development—limiting them to the duplication of positive prints for

20
Clune, William Horsley, Crouse-Davidge, Kosmos, and Rothacker-Aller.
21
Eastman Kodak Company Research Laboratories, Tinting and Toning of Eastman Positive Motion
Picture Film (Rochester: Eastman Kodak Company, 1916 first edition, 1927 Edition).

102
distribution.
22
Kristen Thompson has noted the evident desire on the part of
cinematographers in the 1910s and early 1920s to “control” the developing phase as well
as a deepening knowledge of this aspect of filmmaking on their part.
23
The increasing
presence of independent laboratories in trade publications offers a glimpse into the
cultural climate that facilitated this change of priorities.
The earliest motion picture literature makes very little mention of laboratory work,
only occasionally appearing as an additional feature of rental motion picture studios, such
as that of Miles Bros. in 1907.
24
Rhetoric around this aspect of production first became
consistent in the mid-1910s, when the producers began building “complete” motion picture
plants and, at the same time, concerns about film safety came to the fore. The new motion
picture factories of the East and the Midwest offered a vision of completely self-sufficient
production unheard of until this time. Trade stories about these plants enumerated their
technologically advanced facilities, such as Lubinville which included two studios; various
machine shops; carpentry, upholstering, and cabinet-making shops; costuming; scenery;
properties; film laboratories; editorial and publicity departments; and a negative vault.
25

The discourse that positioned the motion picture plant as an industrial factory
received noteworthy attention in the exhibitor publications. Exhibitors were particularly

22
Kristin Thompson, “Major Technological Changes of the 1920s,” in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger,
and Kristen Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1985): 286.
23
Kristin Thompson, “Initial Standardization of the Basic Technology,” The Classical Hollywood
Cinema, 279-280.
24
Ad for Miles Bros. Moving Picture World 1, No. 23 (August 10, 1907): 400. “We are now in a better
position to cater to our clientele. We have the entire six floors devoted to the M. P. business,
covering an area of 57,000 sq. ft. We have the most complete and up-to-date laboratory… Studio,
laboratory and machine shop are under the personal supervision of the most skillful operators,
chemists and machinists we can secure the wide world o’er.”
25
Thackeray P. Leslie, “Lubin of Lubinville: From Optician to Millionaire Picture Manufacturer,”
Movie Pictorial 1, no. 9 (July 4, 1914): 12.

103
concerned with film print production, as the manufacturers’ ability to deliver new prints on
time determined their theaters’ competitiveness in a market where programs were
changed multiple times per week. A profile of David Horsley’s Centaur Film Company plant
in Moving Picture World not only focused on the various facilities, but also on the cutting
edge technology found within. Printers, perforators, winding, developing, washing, tinting,
and toning machines, vacuum cleaners for keeping dust out of the air, water filters, and
boilers were all features of his plant.
26
One 1914 article about a visit to the Willat Studios
focused an inordinate amount of space on describing a new washing technique able to
wash one hundred racks of film at a time, “uniformly and quickly,” and with a capacity of
1.5 million feet of film per week.
27
Later the same month exhibitors were told that the Bon
Ray printers could be “speeded up to a capacity of one hundred thousand feet an hour if
necessary” with perfect results.
28

Though this discourse around laboratory facilities was one of efficiency, as we can
see, it was not one of frugality. Rather the motion picture companies often touted their
extraordinary investment in their facilities. Cutting edge technology, quality materials, and
perfectly controlled environments did not come cheaply. Instead, they project a notion of
permanence and stability heretofore unheard of in the fly-by-night days of early film
production. As another profile of Centaur put it, the new efficient plant “lacks no single
device, little or big, that might be required for absolute completeness.”
29

26
“Centaur’s New Building Well Equipped,” Moving Picture World 19, no. 10 (March 7, 1914): 1239.
Horsley would move into the independent lab business when he moved to Los Angeles.
27
“Film Men Visit Willat Studios,” Moving Picture World 21, no. 7 (August 15, 1914): 967.
28
“Bon Ray Film Plant,” Moving Picture World 21, no. 9 (August 29, 1914): 1218.
29
“Centaur Activities,” Moving Picture World 22, no. 2 (October 10, 1914): 144.

104
At the same time that many plants were incorporating film processing into the
production studio space, independent labs began advertising their services. Companies
peppered throughout the northeastern United States, from Boston to Chicago, boasted in
the pages of Moving Picture World of their safety, promptness, and low cost—five cents a
foot, proclaimed Philadelphia’s Brilliant Film Manufacturing Company.
30
There was a
consistent narrative of “perfect” development in these ads. Advertisements from 1915 for
the newly build American Film Laboratories boasted of “quality,” “up-to-date, fire-proof
printing,” and a million feet per week capacity.
31
There was no discussion of creativity and
customer needs (or desires); instead, lab work was a necessary aspect of production that in
its best form did nothing to alter or degrade the picture taken in the studio.
With all of these “up-to-date” massive capacity facilities built in New York and
elsewhere in the East throughout the 1910s, those with production outposts in Los Angeles
saw little need to build labs in the hinterlands. As George Eastman argued in his rebuff
against the idea of building a Kodak film stock plant in the West, it was likely seen as cost
prohibitive to ship development equipment and chemicals on the long train journey across
the country. Sending the undeveloped negatives back to New York via train for processing,
editing, and printing was the standard process in these early years. This had the added
bonus of allowing the financial side of the business, and not the creative workers, to control
the final product shipped to theaters around the world.

30
Ads for New York Film Laboratories, Modern Film Laboratories, Industrial Moving Picture
Company, Standard Motion Picture Company, and Brilliant Film Manufacturing Co. from Moving
Picture World 26, no. 9, November 20, 1915: 1544, 1548, 1558, 1574.
31
American Film Laboratories ad, Moving Picture World 23, no. 11 (March 13, 1915): 1667; Motion
Picture News 11, no. 15 (April 17, 1915): 132. Louis B. Jennings and Edwin S. Porter of Famous-
Players ran the laboratory. After their previous studio burnt to the ground, Famous-Players found it
wiser to separate out their laboratory business from their new studio.

105
Even as studio-based and independent labs began popping up in Los Angeles in the
mid-1910s, it was clear that the producers still clung to the idea of laboratory work as best
accomplished back East.
32
While in April 1916, the Lasky studio added “the most modern
and best equipped” film laboratories in the country to its Hollywood studio, they continued
to have a much larger facility on the East Coast.
33
Even Carl Laemmle, the entrepreneur
behind the first motion picture “city” in Hollywood with full laboratories, invested another
half a million dollars into his New Jersey laboratory facilities in 1916, a year after the grand
opening of Universal City.
34
Their Hollywood labs mostly provided the filmmakers with
necessary dailies and toning samples, while printing and distribution were handled back
East; but changing concerns about the quality of laboratory work opened the door to a new
type of laboratory with a different relationship to the producers.
When war broke out in Europe, producers became concerned about basic printing
quality due to the inability to get chemicals across the Atlantic. According to a 1916 article
in Variety, the price of chemicals generally obtained from Germany, such as methanol and
potassium, had seen a two thousand percent increase since the beginning of the war,
leading some labs to use them over, past the point of acceptable quality.
35
These concerns
were soon addressed in laboratory ads, as with Craftsmen’s boast of “no substitute

32
The first mention of a laboratory being established in Los Angeles appeared in mid-1915, when
Fred J. Balshofer, who had come to the area in 1909 with the first Bison crew, proposed to build F.
B. Film Laboratories next to his Quality Pictures Corporation at Sunset and Gower. His “up-to-date,”
“dust-proof” developing, printing, tinting, and toning facilities would be “on a par with the best
establishments of the East.” It is unclear if this announcement became a reality. “Quality Pictures
Corporation: New Metro Ally with Fred Balshofer at the Helm,” The Moving Picture World 25, no. 2
(July 10, 1915): 240.
33
“$150,000 Addition to Lasky Studio,” Motography XV, no. 15 (April 8, 1916): 807.
34
“Cold Facts” Universal Ad by Carl Laemmle, The Moving Picture World 27, no. 6 (February 12,
1916): 872. While Universal City did have laboratories, he made it clear that he was not moving a
significant portion of the lab work west.
35
“Chemicals Growing Scarcer,” Variety XLII, no. 4 (March 24, 1916): 23.

106
chemicals” and Republic’s assuaging fears of “the substitution of cheaper and usually
inferior raw materials.”
36
Republic went on to assure its customers that they only used
Eastman Kodak stock and Mallinchrodt chemicals—both American companies.
The rhetoric of “perfection” shifted in this environment into one centered on science
and innovation, and finally, by the end of the decade, service. Trying to get a leg up on the
competition, Craftsmen boasted of “individual projection rooms for directors to cut their
pictures,” offering a level of service “that has so long been conspicuous by its absence.”
37

Whether or not attention to customer service had indeed been lacking, several other
laboratories upped their rhetorical game. Perhaps no one took the service ethos further
than Watterson Rothacker of Chicago, who garnered publicity for journeying to New York
to spend two days viewing Tarzan of the Apes (First National, 1918) “taking careful notes”
so as to decide on the appropriate methods of toning and printing.
38
Rather than shooting
for some objective notion of perfection, Rothacker sought to “utilize those particular tints
and duo-tones that will intensify the emotional and aesthetic effects aimed at.” Rothacker
and Craftsman were changing their pitch from one directed to the financial interests of the
industry to one aimed at the creative talents, a strategy that would be expanded on in the
labs of Hollywood.
From their very first advertisements in the trades in 1916, the independent
laboratories of Los Angeles boasted of their obvious advantage in being in the vicinity of
the studios. “Have your printing done where the producers can supervise each print,”

36
“Craftsmen Film Laboratories Open,” The Moving Picture World 33, no. 1 (July 7, 1917): 112; Ad
for Republic Laboratories, Inc., Wid’s Daily XI, no. 45 (February 15, 1920): 20.
37
“Craftsmen Film Laboratories Open.”
38
“Rothacker Film Co. Gets Record Order for “Tarzan” Prints,” Exhibitors Herald VI, no. 13 (March
23, 1918): 18.

107
urged Pacific Film Labs, while William Horsley’s new laboratory was “conveniently located
in the heart of the studio section of Hollywood.”
39
With distribution still operating out of
the East, their main market was in quickly turning around toning samples and daily rushes
for the studio producers, directors and cameramen to peruse. This type of work was not
nearly as lucrative as running off dozens of release prints, so Horsley suggested, “Why not
have your release prints made… where the finished product can be approved by [those]
who are responsible for the picture.” Likewise, Bloom Film Labs invited producers to “Have
your release prints made where you make the picture.”
40
Through these types of business
maneuvers, Hollywood was slowly moving from the periphery of the industry to its center.
Having laboratory work performed in Los Angeles looked all the more appealing
when the New York laboratory workers went on strike in 1920, and the labs engaged in a
public conflict with Eastman Kodak and its distributor Jules Brulatour in 1921.
41
Several
lab owners had become suspicious that Brulatour was planning to open his own lab and
thereby create unfair competition due to his position as intermediary on all Kodak motion
picture film stock sales. These events served to further diminish the dominance of the New
York area labs, who then banded together to form the Allied Film Laboratories Association,
with Horsley in Los Angeles and Burton Holmes in Chicago as the only members outside of
the New York area. The members began advertising as a coalition, boasting of their long
history of reliability and quality. Their assertion that, “We don’t need to boost stars,
directors, and producers with costly publicity,” was a pointed critique of the service

39
Advertisement, Motion Picture News 14, no. 3 (July 22, 1916): 491; Advertisement, Wid’s Daily X,
no. 51 (November 23, 1919): 26.
40
Ad for Bloom Film Laboratories, Wid’s Daily X, no. 58 (November 30, 1919): 11.
41
“Laboratory Workers Continue the Strike in New York,” Motion Picture News XXII, no. 7 (August 7,
1920): 1097; “Laboratory Men Stirred Up, Organize; Fear Eastman—Brulatour Control” Wid’s Daily
XVI, no. 60 (May 31, 1921): 1.

108
orientation of Rothacker and the Los Angeles labs.
42
Rothacker himself had recently
expanded his operations into Los Angeles, with plans for new labs in New York and
London, but he was not found on the roster of the Association.
43
The ethos he had initiated
in Chicago would serve him well among the ‘artists’ and ‘craftsmen’ of Hollywood, but was
clearly at odds with the established New York industry.
From the advent of American Cinematographer, the cameramen showed a keen
awareness of the fact that their work was completely dependent on the laboratory. But
Rothacker’s idea of the laboratory as a place where creativity could dictate scientific
technique remained contested. In a 1921 American Cinematographer article, William
Foster, Lois Weber’s cameraman, stated that “the function of the laboratory is not a
creative one” but one that held great power over the final product of the “well planned and
executed ideas of those higher up.”
44
Somewhat self-interestedly, Foster asserted that “few
producers have any personal knowledge of the laboratory or of chemistry” while “the
cameraman is probably the one who most appreciates competent and conscientious work.”
A representative of Filmcraft Labs pick up this rhetoric around the potential for a closer
relationship between cameramen and labs. Using an apt metaphor, he lamented that the
man in the dark room is often “in the dark” as to the expectations of the cameraman for his
negative and advocated closer cooperation.
45

Through these editorials in American Cinematographer, the cameramen asserted
their interest in greater involvement in laboratory decision-making. They, as well as the

42
Ad for Allied Film Laboratories Association, Exhibitors Trade Review 11, no. 1 (December 3,
1921): 14.
43
“Rothacker Plant in West Ready in April,” Exhibitors Herald XII, no. 10 (March 5, 1921): 68.
44
William C. Foster, “The Laboratory,” American Cinematographer II, no. 5 (March 1, 1921): 1.
45
Frank V. Biggy, “The Value of the Laboratory as Applied to the Cameraman and His Work,”
American Cinematographer II, no. 7 (April 1, 1921): 2.

109
directors, had much to gain, in terms of power over their work, by moving laboratory work
to their backyard. For the cinematographers, it was not just a matter of improving upon
their work in the studio, but also of mitigating carelessness or incompetence that might
detrimentally effect their reputations. As Foster claimed, the finished product “is thought of
as the work of the cameraman, when in reality one of the three processes is his
responsibility [the taking of the negative], the other two [developing and printing] are the
product of the laboratory.”
46
This conception of the work of the cinematographer was
widespread at the time, as in a later editorial, in which cameraman John Leezer defined
photography as both the work of the photographer and “the laboratory force as well.”
47

With few Hollywood studios incorporating their own full laboratories, this desire on the
part of the cinematographers created the potential for a significant market.
The Los Angeles laboratories quickly picked up the rhetoric from the
cinematographers’ editorials, with a 1921 ad for Kosmos Labs claiming,
Pride in the perfection of your photography needs the support of perfection
in the laboratory. No matter what genius you display in photography, your
negative will be only as good as the laboratory makes it.
48

Clune Labs took the motto “Quality and Individual Service,” Crouse and Davidge boasted of
their “system of thorough co-operation,” and Standard strove to bring out “all the artistry
of your work.”
49
Perfection, as Kosmos would define it, was now an aspect of individual
genius rather than an objectively clear picture. In stark contrast with the rhetoric of low

46
Foster, 1.
47
John Leezer, “Photography and Motion Pictures,” American Cinematographer II, no. 15 (July 22,
1921): 1.
48
Ad for Kosmos Film Labs, American Cinematographer II, no. 22 (December 1, 1921): 7.
49
Ad for Clune Film Laboratories, American Cinematographer II, No. 23 (December 15, 1921): 13;
“The Finishing Touch,” American Cinematographer II, no. 24 (January 1, 1922): 4; Ad for Standard
Film Labs, American Cinematographer III, no. 8 (November 1922): 18.

110
cost, efficiency, and technical perfection of the East Coast labs of the 1910s, Standard titled
their 1923 ads in American Cinematographer, “What You Want,” “Protect Your Creation,”
“Protect Your Art,” “What the Public Sees,” and “Harmony,” followed by descriptions of the
ways in which their business catered to the cinematographers’ creative desires.
Yet Standard was savvy enough about their customers to cater their marketing to
different publications. Their ads in the exhibitor trades used titles such as “Emergencies,”
“Centralized Buying,” and “Responsibility.”
50
These ads were designed to assure the
exhibitors of the quality of the prints they would receive. Even in Hollywood, the labs
existed between the production and exhibition branches of the industry and needed to
acknowledge the needs of both. If Standard was going to cut into the release print business,
it would have to appeal to the financial concerns of producers and exhibitors. But the Los
Angeles labs, outnumbered by the New York labs two to one, clearly had a larger stake in
wooing the creative side of the business and even used their relationship to “every
producer in Southern California” as a selling point with the exhibitors much like
manufacturers did for the masses.
51

The trade press picked up this discourse around a close relationship between the
independent labs and the cinematographers. In an attempt to lend some of the glamour of
Hollywood to this highly technical aspect of motion picture production, a 1922 article in
Photodramatist described the “romance” between the cameraman and the laboratory

50
Ads for Standard Film Laboratories, Motion Picture News XXVII, no. 4 (January 27, 1923): 380;
Motion Picture News XXVII, no. 5 (February 3, 1923): 502; Motion Picture News XXII, no. 8 (February
24, 1923): 872.
51
Ibid. The Exhibitors Trade Review in December 1922 lists forty-one labs in its index, including 19
in the New York/New Jersey area, ten in Los Angeles, five in Chicago, and the rest peppered
throughout the Northeast and Midwest. Exhibitors Trade Review 13, no. 5 (December 1922).

111
man.
52
The article asserted that the camera and laboratory departments were so close,
“That it is difficult to dis-associate them.” The ideal configuration was not to have them
“under one head” but, as “modern business methods demand,” outside specialists such as
Standard should maintain the laboratory. The labs’ strategy of close alignment with the
technicians in the studio had succeeded in cultivating business, as well as elevating lab
work to something worthy of trade press attention.
The business strategy of customer service had particular appeal to those working in
Hollywood, who were more likely to be concerned with quality in addition to financial gain.
Customer service became a delineating factor between studio-based laboratories and
independent laboratories, as cinematographer and ASC President James Van Trees argued,
that only the later “depends on the ability to satisfy customers.”
53
Van Trees described the
“ideals” of the two classes of laboratories, showing a clear preference for the independent
ethos. While the independents sought to make the cameramen happy, the studio labs were
primarily concerned with following “set rules of policy,” which Van Trees only found
acceptable “if we have reached the point where we don’t care to have individuality in our
photography.”
54

The cinematographers and producers generally agreed that the increased
competition from the Hollywood labs (and independent labs, in general) fueled great
improvements in the quality of laboratory work in the early-1920s. As an unintended
consequence of the increased attention to and financial investment in the field, the

52
G. Harrison Wiley, “Silent Works of the Films,” Photodramatist (September 1922): 21.
53
James Van Trees, “Co-Operation Between Cinematographer and Laboratory,” American
Cinematographer IV, no. 9 (December 1923): 6.
54
But he also warned against the extremes of the customer service mentality in which the
cinematographer was never to blame for faulty photography.

112
structure of the industry altered in ways that diminished the multiplicity of the
independent laboratory field, both by the studios’ expanding and improving their internal
laboratory work and the consolidation of the independent laboratories. In mid-1924 the
merger of New York’s Craftsman, Erbograph, Republic, and Commercial Traders into
Consolidated Film Industries was announced, along with the new company’s intent of
moving into the Los Angeles market. Several months later they bought out Los Angeles
leader Standard and made it their western branch. Rather than preserving the existing bi-
coastal model, which limited west coast labs to producing dailies and samples,
Consolidated used its influential position in both markets to institute a move to producing
release prints in Los Angeles. With no competition between Standard and the four major
labs of New York, their new parent, Consolidated, could force the issue whose
“consummation will fulfill the desires of many,” including the cinematographers.
55

When Consolidated consumed its last major competitor, Rothacker, American
Cinematographer editor Foster Goss, who had cheered the “consummation” of Standard
and Consolidated, expressed his concern for the ramifications of the elimination of
competition. Goss conceded that consolidation could cut down overhead and “enlarge
facilities for research and general progress” but it also diminished competition, which had
served as a fuel for innovation and increased attention to the needs of the cameramen of
the previous half-decade.
56
As Van Trees had emphasized at their height, the independent
labs in Hollywood had greatly increased the power of the cinematographers over another
aspect of production. The moves toward consolidation and incorporation into the vertically

55
Foster Goss, “The Editors’ Lens,” American Cinematographer V, no. 6 (September 1924): 10-11.
56
Foster Goss, “The Editors’ Lens: Laboratory Consolidation,” American Cinematographer VII, no. 2
(May 1926): 8-9.

113
integrated studios could only diminish this power, with the laboratory accountable to the
studio management rather than a paying customer.
Upon the “passing” of Standard Film Labs, John M. Nickolaus, so recently the
standard bearer of the independent lab, chose not to join Consolidated but rather to
assume charge of the laboratory of the newly consolidated movie studio Metro-Goldwyn-
Mayer.
57
By the late 1920s the major studios all had significant laboratory facilities, with
Paramount having the “most advanced” machine developing, Universal having “perfected”
developer, and Fox boasting of their scientifically advanced facilities.
58
In a promotional
film produced in 1925, MGM showed all the facilities that made up the enormous new plant
for the mega-studio. Among them was a laboratory that handled “more than 40,000,000
feet of stock” annually.
59
The film showed Nickolaus himself walking into one of the secure
“fire-proof” vaults to examine film for the camera. The prominent appearance of Nickolaus,
which would have little meaning outside of the industry, served as a signal to those in the
business that the studio was investing in the best even in the less visible aspects of the
motion picture industry.
The addition of state-of-the-art laboratories to the Hollywood studios put them on
par with the motion picture plants of the East, while at the same time, the consolidation of
the independent laboratories put these companies in a position to compete with this in-
house processing. With significant competition between independents all but eliminated,
the new dynamic pitted the studios’ in-house processing against that of the few customer

57
“With Them a Moment In Front of the Camera,” American Cinematographer V, no. 9 (December
1924): 25.
58
“Developer Perfected,” American Cinematographer VIII, no. 11 (February 1928): 17; “Fox’s New
Laboratory,” American Cinematographer IX, no. 5 (August 1928): 8.
59
MGM Studio Tour, 35mm, 1925, Library of Congress Motion Picture Archive.

114
service-oriented independents. Nevertheless, there would always be production houses too
small to manage their own processing facilities. The same trend toward consolidation that
enabled the “big five” studios to dominate the next several decades of motion picture
production also allowed independent labs to remain relevant, while the existence of
smaller production houses kept them in business. Independent competition ensured that
even in-house technology facilities would need to continue to improve and innovate, as
with Fox’s labs, which in 1928 were proclaimed the “last word in the scientific evolution of
the photographic art.”
60
While Fox would have liked to think that their laboratory was the
last word, shutting out the need for further improvement to keep up with the competition,
it is unlikely that this was indeed true.
Though the studios wrested back much of the business from the independent labs,
the latter’s move into Hollywood had been key to the movement of lab work to Los Angeles.
Had they not seized the clear market for catering to the creative desires of filmmakers, that
aspect of the industry might have stayed in the East, thus keeping Hollywood on the
periphery of the industry. By creating a viable laboratory infrastructure in the area, the
mass production required of the distribution end of the business could be shifted in part to
the purview of the production studios in Hollywood rather than the financial offices in New
York. Likewise, the independent laboratories were a significant sector in the larger
community of technological service firms as they began to cluster geographically around
the studios. Their independence allowed them to be aligned with this larger technology
community as they all sought the patronage of the customers from the studios.

60
“Fox’s New Laboratory,” American Cinematographer IX No. 5 (August 1928): 8.

115
Hollywood Service Corridor
Figure 7. Santa Monica Blvd and Gower St., 1922.
61

Like the laboratories, the other service firms saw increased competition from the in-
house operations of the major Hollywood studios.
62
MGM and the other studios were
incorporating technology service into their facilities, including mobile generators and
camera repair, but they could never become fully independent from outside service since
their needs for such equipment and services constantly fluctuated based on the varied need
of productions and could sometimes exceed their in-house capabilities. And though the big
five—Paramount, MGM, Fox, RKO, and Warner Bros.—dominate our perceptions of the
Hollywood Studio System, they were hardly the only producers in town. The little three

61
Edward Estabrook, “Streetcar on Santa Monica Blvd,” (1922) Security Pacific National Bank
Collection, Los Angeles Public Library Images. http://jpg2.lapl.org/pics03/00011236.jpg.
62
Consolidation hit some other technology service fields as when Cinema Studio Supply absorbed
Winfield-Kerner Light Agency. “Cinema Studio Supply Takes Over Winfield-Kerner Light Agency,”
American Cinematographer IV, no. 6 (September 1923): 22.

116
(Universal, Columbia, and United Artists) and myriad smaller concerns, soon lumped
together under the name Poverty Row, would always need the services of independent
technology firms.

Figure 8. The Hollywood Technology Service Corridor, 1929.
63

The service firms positioned themselves within easy distance of these studios. In the
early 1920s, they could be found peppered throughout Hollywood, often falling within the
boundaries of the Hollywood motion picture districting areas that had been established in
1919 to keep production out of residential areas.
64
By the end of the decade, the technology
service firms had formed a district of their own, lining Santa Monica Blvd and its immediate
side streets between La Brea Avenue and Gower Street (home to many Poverty Row
studios), in the heart of Hollywood. Along this mile and a half stretch, framed on the West

63
I created this map by identifying the addresses of technology service firms derived from
advertisements in American Cinematographer on a model Google map of Hollywood. The dark pink
box indicates my understanding of the parameters of the service corridor, while the larger faint
outline is the modern border for the city of Hollywood.
64
“Moving Picture Zones,” Holly Leaves (February 15, 1919): 42. Addresses for businesses were
gathered from advertisements in American Cinematograph.

117
by United Artists’ Pickford-Fairbanks Studios and on the East by the massive Paramount
Famous-Lasky lot, a wandering cameraman could rent his lights at Mole-Richardson, Creco,
Inc., or the Cinema Equipment Co. and supervise his negatives at the labs of Roy Davidge,
Tremont, or Consolidated.
65
The lab superintendents themselves could buy and repair their
developing and printing machines at Barsam-Tollar Mechanical Works or purchase film
stock at the Eastman Service Building, Smith & Aller (DuPont dealers), or the Commercial
Raw Stock Co. Likewise, the Hollywood-Pioneer Lumber Co., Wholesale Supply Co.
(purveyor of paints, dyes, and fireworks), and the Cinema Prop Co. all catered their
businesses to the studios. The Bell & Howell Camera Co. situated their local sales office in
the corridor, while longtime resident Mitchell Camera moved out of the crowded area in
1928 after a decade and built its massive new factory a few miles away in West
Hollywood.
66

Though production would become increasingly dispersed, with several studios
moving to spacious Culver City or San Fernando Valley to build their new soundstages
beginning in 1928, Hollywood remains the central hub for technology service firms to this
day.
67
In On Hollywood, Geographer Allen J. Scott describes several advantages to this type

65
Other studios in walking distance included Warner Bros. (until 1928, now Capital Studios), Fox
Studios (until 1928 when they moved to West Los Angeles), Metro Pictures (later Desilu, now Red
Studios), RKO Studios (now part of Paramount), the Clune Studios (now Raleigh), Columbia Pictures
(now Sunset Gower Studios), Charlie Chaplin Studios (now Henson), General Service Studios (now
Hollywood Center Studios), and Mascot Pictures, to name a few.
66
Others, such as the Dunning Process Co. and Max Factor up north on Hollywood Blvd and
Vitacolor downtown, chose to be outliers.
67
Exact numbers are difficult to find, but a simple google maps search of the area for key terms
‘production’ and ‘studio’ yields well over a hundred service firms including Studio Depot (Mole-
Richardson), Bell Sound Studios, Out of Frame Production Rentals, SonicPool Post Production,
Camera Crew Los Angeles, Digital Jungle, The Post Group, Runway Post, Master Key Visual Effects,
Anytime Production Rental, Advanced Digital Services Ind, Quixote Production Supplies, Outpost
Sound Mixing, Film Technology Co Inc, and Mixers Hollywood, to name a few.

118
of clustering of similar businesses including “spatially concentrated labor markets” and the
ability to tap into “information flows and innovative potentials.”
68
This was true not only
for the studios, but also for the service firms. Unlike Feldman and Braunerhjelm’s focus on
the genesis of clusters, Scott privileges the “blooming of the organism” which is seen
through the structured growth of the local economic system.
69
Such a focus leaves
unanalyzed the unique qualities of Los Angeles in the 1910s and 1920s that allowed for
such a cluster to emerge the way that it did.
Figure 9. The Hollywood service corridor and the major motion picture studios.

Unlike agglomerations forming in existing cities such as New York or London, in
Hollywood, producers and firms were able to cluster tightly and easily due to the ample
availability of unused, cheap land and resources. Hollywood in the 1910s and Culver City

68
Scott, On Hollywood, 7.
69
Scott, On Hollywood, 14.
Warner Bros.
Universal
Columbia
RKO
MGM
Fox
Paramount
United Artists

119
and the San Fernando Valley in the 1920s were suburban or even rural areas undergoing
rapid development.
70
The density of the industry was not a result of a densely-designed
city, but rather the competition for convenience to the customer. Once the corridor was
established, even as many customers dispersed north or west, service firms stayed in the
area where producers and technicians had become accustomed to shopping for their
technology needs. Moving close to Warner Bros. new studio in Burbank or MGM’s lot in
Culver City would make them no closer to Universal or Fox. In other words, since the new
studios with their extensive backlots were not built in easy proximity to each other;
Hollywood, with its smattering of smaller studios and its strategic position between Culver
City and the Valley, remained the most geographically desirable location. The motion
picture industrial cluster transformed from a walkable cluster to one in which motor
vehicles shepherded workers between districts and studios.

Engineers on the Move
While the physical distances between the various motion picture operations in the
city became larger, the movement of labor between the independent firms of Hollywood
and in-house operations of major studios remained common. As with John Nickolaus
moving from Standard to MGM, technicians who began in independent firms often
managed the in-house technology departments, and the movement of labor went both
ways. Nickolaus himself had moved west with William Horsley in 1914 to oversee the
building of the labs in the new Universal City, the first significant in-house labs in Los

70
Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1990): 72-76.

120
Angeles.
71
After several years of supervising both the Universal City and larger New Jersey
facilities, in 1918 Nickolaus left for the Triangle Film Corp., before then announcing the
establishment of Standard in 1920.
72

As an early pioneer in the film business, Nickolaus built his career on his extensive
experience, but those coming into the technology side of this newly prominent industry in
the late 1910s and 1920s would often tout their formal training. For example, Peter Mole
moved to Los Angeles in 1923, leaving his job at General Electric in Schenectady to work in
Hollywood. Having no experience in motion pictures to that point, he carried two letters of
introduction with him—one from the Bryant & Stratton College certifying that he had
“completed the requirements of our Department of Engineering,” and another from a GE
supervisor explaining his work in the “Searchlight Engineering Dept.” for the previous five
years.
73
After college, he had begun his engineering career developing high intensity arc
searchlights for the military during the war.
74
His subsequent work at GE on projection
lamps, along with his engineering training, got him employment first at Goldwyn Pictures
as a juicer and then at Creco lighting company, where he was brought in as head of the new
“high intensity equipment department.”
75
The announcement of his appointment focused
on his East coast engineering pedigree rather than his short time at Goldwyn, which was
described as serving only to familiarize him with motion pictures.

71
“John M. Nickolaus Goes to Coast,” The Moving Picture World 19, no. 7 (February 14, 1914): 799.
72
John M. Nickolaus, “Photography—The Mile-a-Minute Art,” Photoplay XIV, no. 6 (November
1918): 34. “Big Laboratory Planned,” Wid’s Daily XIII, no. 57 (August 27, 1920): 2.
73
R. W. Bryant to Whom It May Concern (June 18, 1915) and Henry Ritchie, GE to Major John W.
Wallis of Hollywood (March 13, 1923), Mole-Richardson Company Archive. Hollywood, CA.
74
Keva Marcus, 20 Yeaars of Starlighting, Reprinted from International Photographer (December
1947), Mole-Richardson Company Archive.
75
“Peter Mole, Jr. Heads New Creco, Inc. Department,” American Cinematographer IV, no. 8
(November 1923): 9.

121
The tension between the values of experience and training were especially relevant
in Hollywood, a place built on the former but increasingly in need of the later. When
Nickolaus and his partner S. M. Tompkins promoted their work at Standard in
Photodramatist, the extensive article boasted of their “deep study and wide experience” but
seemed to particularly value their “actual” (as opposite to theoretical) knowledge of the
“proper” handling of motion picture film stock.
76
At that point, experts in the industry had
been the pioneers of a new field in which it would have been impossible to have formal
training—motion picture photography didn’t exist before they came into it.
The machinery and the science behind motion picture production were becoming
ever more complex, while at the same time, cultural shifts in American business
increasingly valued formal scientific training. As scholars of the history of technology have
shown, engineers were increasingly prominent not only in the growing research
laboratories of corporate America, but also in management and politics.
77
The introduction
of engineers into the studio space with the coming of sound challenged the hierarchy of
technicians established throughout the formation of the studio system in the silent era (as
will be the focus of the next chapter). The studio technicians showed rather less hostility to
the movement of professional engineers into the service sector of the business.
Engineers working in the service firms and in-house laboratories of Hollywood
often took advantage of their connections to their East coast colleagues. Peter Mole
sustained a close relationship with Henry Ritchie of General Electric, collaborating on the

76
G. Harrison Wiley, “Silent Workers of the Films,” Photodramatist (September 1922): 22.
77
See David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) and Edwin T. Layton Jr., The Revolt of the Engineers:
Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Cleveland: Press of Case Western
Reserve University, 1971).

122
designs of studio lights (using GE bulbs) as he worked for Creco. Mole shared his work with
Ritchie and in turn gave feedback on GE lamp designs from the perspective of the studio
needs.
78
Mole first came to the decision to try incandescent lights for the productions of
Maud Adams through Ritchie’s suggestion. Ritchie had shared a GE report on the
comparative screen illumination of “Mazda and low and high intensity lamps,” but drew a
line at sending him photographs of their lamp models. In 1924 Ritchie informed Mole of the
greater efficiency of incandescents as well as their compatibility with panchromatic film.
79

This predates his founding of Mole-Richardson as an incandescent lighting company by
three years and his central role in the Mazda Tests by four. Mole’s history and relationship
with GE benefited his employer Creco and later his own company Mole-Richardson. In
1925, Ritchie used his position to assure Mole that they would not be threatened by GE’s
relationship with Cooper Hewitt, who also sold studio lamps but would not extent their
business “beyond New York City.”
80
Here Mole’s relationship to the corporate
manufacturer helped him hold on to the Hollywood territory.
Businessmen-engineers such as Mole benefited from their background and
connections in the East at the same time that they were in a strong position to cater to the
needs of the studio technicians. As we saw in the previous chapter, the large manufacturers
would eventually come to realize the importance of acknowledging the desires of the
producers and technicians in Hollywood by the late-1920s. But smaller motion picture
technology manufacturers didn’t have the luxury of waiting so long. Mole’s only clients
were in the Hollywood studios, as were those of the independent laboratories and

78
Henry Ritchie, GE Searchlight Engineering Dept. to Peter Mole, Creco, May 1, 1924, Mole-
Richardson Company Collection.
79
Ritchie to Mole, May 1, 1924.
80
Henry Ritchie to Peter Mole, June 10, 1925, Mole Richardson Company Archive.

123
technology innovators such as Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation. Their entire
business (and often personal) fortunes rested on satisfying these customers that straddled
the lines between the creative and the technological. The history of Technicolor’s first
decade and a half vividly demonstrates the shift in technological innovation for the motion
picture industry from the traditional industrial centers of the East Coast to Los Angeles.

Technicolor Moves West
As a small company, focused entirely on the Hollywood market, Technicolor was
quick to adopt the creative costumer service ethos that eventually defined the technology
sector of the motion picture industry. The technology they invented for creating color
motion pictures was not feasible on a large, mass-market scale given its use of specially
modified cameras and lighting and elaborate in-house processing.
81
As such, even when the
amateur motion picture market emerged in the mid-1920s, unlike other technology
companies, Technicolor continued to concern itself only with making products for the
Hollywood market.
Once the company established a presence in Hollywood in the mid-1920s, their
work was predominantly for the major studios, which, according to a company history,
“were willing to risk the huge investment required in an attempt to obtain the added
exhibition advantages which might be derived from color.”
82
On his first trip to Los Angeles,

81
For more on the specific history of Technicolor’s technology see James Layton and David Pierce,
The Dawn of Technicolor: 1915-1935 (Rochester: George Eastman House, 2015) and for the
development of film style around the technology see Scott Higgins, Harnessing the Technicolor
Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s (University of Texas Press, 2007).
82
“Technicolor Motion Picture Corp. and Eastman Kodak Co. Agreed Statement of Facts Circa 1948,”
Box M0004, Technicolor Historical Records, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY. (hereafter cited
as Technicolor Historical Records.) Technicolor’s earliest productions were their own creations,

124
Herbert Kalmus had meetings at Goldwyn and Universal Studios and with directors King
Vidor, Victor Seastrom, and Marshall Neilan.
83
Meeting with directors became imperative
for Kalmus, as the decision to shoot a motion picture in color was an artistic one as well as
a financial one. A studio was unlikely to push for the extra expense of color photography if
the director didn’t support it.
From the company’s beginnings, Daniel Comstock instituted a strategy of
development which built technology in a series of steps—each one a saleable product on its
own and utilizing all the tools of the previous step.
84
Until he left the company in 1925,
Comstock had charge of the laboratory along with fellow founder W. Burton Westcott and
several of Comstock’s former MIT students, including Leonard Troland, Joseph A. Ball, and
E. A. Weaver. Upon Comstock’s departure, engineering operations were split between Ball
in Hollywood focusing on the camera technology being used in the studios, and Troland,
who had charge of the processing labs in Boston. Herbert Kalmus, always more focused on
business than technology, also moved to Hollywood, often serving as the liaison between
the filmmakers in Hollywood and the engineers in Boston.
By 1927, the discrepancy between how those in Boston wanted their technology
used and how Hollywood filmmakers wanted to use it had become apparent. Kalmus wrote
to Troland that “it is impossible to interest anyone in Hollywood in making a picture

made in collaboration with New York producer C. A. Willat. Willat took their mobile Pullman car
laboratory down to St. Petersburg, Florida to shoot The Gulf Between in 1917. “Willat Making
Colored Productions,” Motography XVII, no. 1 (January 6, 1917): 26.
83
Memoranda Books, Box 1 - March 1916-December 1928, Herbert Kalmus Papers. Kalmus was in
Los Angeles January 5 – March 20, 1924.
84
Daniel Comstock, “An Outline of the History of the Beginning of the Technicolor Development in
Boston,” (Comstock & Westcott, Inc., 1961), Box M0005, Folder 18, Technicolor Historical Records.

125
entirely in color in the key which you and others in Boston like.”
85
He attributed this to a
difference of point of view with the Eastern engineers viewing motion pictures as “things in
themselves” and the Hollywood workers seeing pictures as “a means of conveying dramatic
expression.” He argued to Troland that this discrepancy was so pervasive that it could not
be ignored. Two historical shorts Technicolor was producing at the time, “Czarina’s Secret”
and “The Lady of Victories” (both 1928), vividly embodied this conflict. The coasts
disagreed as to which film looked better. Troland declared the two films “not in the same
class at all,” heralding “The Lady of Victories” for its “ample exposure,” “good overall
contrast,” and “superior definition.”
86
He lamented the use of “extreme shadows” in
“Czarina” which allowed for no detail in black objects such as the titular character’s hat.
Kalmus replied to his Boston men that they would try and light the shadows more, but
asserted that they “cannot go so far as to keep away from dark scenes and shadows which,
you will see when this negative reaches you, are quite necessary to some parts of the
story.”
87

As interest in a three-color process increased, Troland attempted to work on the
processing side in Boston while Ball developed the camera in Hollywood. In an effort to
maintain communication through this bicoastal structure, Troland requested that Ball
“write out his ideas in detail,” and send them to him so that he might reply with questions

85
Herbert Kalmus to Leonard Troland, July 13, 1927, Folder 6—Leonard Troland’s Correspondence
and Memos, Box M0004, Technicolor Historical Records,
86
Leonard Troland to Herbert Kalmus, March 15, 1928, Folder 6—History of Technicolor , Box
M0004, Technicolor Historical Records.
87
Kalmus to Troland, Oates, and S. M. Corekin, March 24, 1928, Folder 6—History of Technicolor,
Box M0004, Technicolor Historical Records.

126
on points which he didn’t understand.
88
The development process experienced a setback
when Ball left the company for an unsuccessful career at the newly formed Technical
Bureau of the Motion Picture Producers’ Association (see chapter four), but he soon
returned in the position of Director of the California Research Department. Rather than
diminishing his role in the company, upon Ball’s return, Kalmus shifted the bulk of research
to the Los Angeles facilities. Kalmus explained to Troland that his position as research
director in the East “will obviously to some extent overlap with Ball’s work.”
89
He therefore
proposed a divide as seen in the early days of Hollywood labs—between negative and
positive prints.
Such distinctions went beyond the politics of balancing engineers’ egos, as where
prints were made would have effects on their aesthetics. With this in mind, the Boston lab
asked Troland to compare the actual physical differences between prints made from
Boston and California water.
90
In the end, Kalmus decided that bicoastal research was
untenable, so the company moved the entirety of three-color research, along with Troland
himself, to Hollywood in 1931.
91
By this time, Technicolor was well integrated into the local
motion picture economy. Along with their relationships with most of the major studios,
they bought much of the equipment in their ever expanding laboratory from local service
firms, including foggers, varnish machines, projectors, perforators, and arc lights—all

88
Troland to Kalmus, August 17, 1929, Ibid.
89
Kalmus to Troland, March 22, 1929, Ibid.
90
J. F. Kienninger to Troland, March 3, 1930, Ibid.
91
Troland to Kalmus, February 11, 1931. Unfortunately, Troland would not live to see three-color
come to fruition as he died in an accident on Mt. Wilson taking advantage of the great Los Angeles
outdoors.

127
manufactured locally.
92
The bicoastal structure had served them through the late-1920s,
when Troland was able to frequently attend demonstrations and conferences by sound
pioneers such as Fox-Case and ERPI, which were predominately working in New York.
93

Once the industry had fully incorporated sound and the company had moved to a three-
strip technology whose development was dependent on the input of Hollywood, the
efficacy of a divided research operation was questionable.
The case of Technicolor shows that by 1930, Hollywood had the technological
infrastructure to support a major scientific research laboratory such as was necessary for
the company’s purposes. Around this same time Kodak reversed its consistent policy of
offering nothing but a sales and distribution office in Hollywood by opening the Eastman
Service Building. For the first time, the company sent engineers from its research
laboratory to Hollywood permanently. Located in the heart of the Hollywood service
corridor, the company offered a “completely equipped laboratory and a scientific staff” to
cater to the needs of the directors, cameramen, and studio executives of Los Angeles.
94
This
was in part a response to competition from DuPont in the film stock market, but this also fit
into the larger picture of a creatively-responsive technological service aimed at the studio
personnel. Kodak was one of many technology companies based in the East who greatly
expanded their facilities in Hollywood around 1930; another was the Bell & Howell Camera
Company of Chicago.

92
Kalmus to Troland, Oates, and S. M. Corekin, March 24, 1928.
93
Troland frequently went to New York in 1928 for meetings and demonstrations. See: Troland
Diaries, 1926-1932 and Troland to Kalmus (August 17, 1929). Technicolor Historical Records.
94
“An Eastman Service,” (undated brochure), Edward T. Howell Collection, George Eastman House.

128
The Professional Standard
Perhaps no group of service firms had to take the customer service ethos as
seriously as those manufacturing motion picture cameras. During the early years of motion
picture production, companies manufactured or purchased their own studio cameras, but
by the mid-1910s an experienced cameraman was expected to maintain his own
professional kit. The complex 35mm motion picture cameras used in Hollywood
productions and purchased by the cameramen themselves during this period cost between
one and three thousand dollars at a time when the average income was just over five
thousand dollars a year.
95
While the cinematographers had some sway over the types of
lights used and the laboratories the film would be sent too, these were ultimately decisions
controlled by the financial interests of the studios. But these technicians had much more
control over the cameras used on the set, as they were their own personal property. Until
the late 1920s, studio contracts specified that cameramen would provide their own
cameras and equipment “without any cost to the Producer whatsoever.”
96
As such, camera
companies were catering to a highly knowledgeable and invested customer whose
livelihood depended on the quality of his tools.
While several companies manufactured motion picture cameras, only two were
deemed worthy by the cinematographers (and therefore the producers) of the major
productions of Hollywood—Chicago-based Bell & Howell and Los Angeles-based Mitchell.
As Carl Louis Gregory explained in his 1927 Motion Picture Photography, while there were
several companies providing equipment for the news reporter or the hobbyist (including

95
Statistics of Income for 1927, Treasury Department, Bureau of Internal Revenue (Washington:
United States Government Printing Office, 1929) http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/27soirepar.pdf.
96
Contract of Tony Gaudio, Cameraman, January 24, 1929, Box 2820B, Warner Bros Archive,
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California.

129
his own Institute Standard), in the Unites States only Bell & Howell and Mitchell were “fully
acknowledged as studio cameras.”
97
The geographic orientation of these two companies
had profound effects as they competed for the attention and hard earned dollars of the
Hollywood shooters. With a standard professional motion picture camera costing as much
as a first cameraman’s monthly salary (or the annual salary for an assistant), these
purchases were not taken lightly.
Bell & Howell was the older, more established of the two companies, beginning in
1907 as a manufacturer of perforators and printers. Two years later, they added a motion
picture camera to their line, as they put it, “in response to a demand” for a camera of the
same high caliber.
98
At a time when perforations had yet to be standardized, being in both
businesses allowed them to standardize across their own tools in a way that made their use
together a necessity. By the mid-1910s, when the majority of production had moved West,
Bell & Howell had firmly established itself as the leader in the industry. A 1915 pamphlet
with the self-explanatory title As to the Best Means of Taking Motion Pictures: Opinions of
Users of the Bell & Howell Camera Concerning the Efficiency of that Instrument, What Others
Say About What We Do, set the tone for how cameras would be marketed to those using
them for the coming decade. It consisted of personal testimonies from representatives of
the American Film Manufacturing Company, Essanay Film Company, New York Motion
Picture Corporation, and Education Film Company as well as filmmakers Hobart Bosworth

97
Carl Louis Gregory, Motion Picture Photography, 2
nd
edition (Falk Publishing Co., 1927): 346. The
other camera commonly used in Hollywood was the Akeley, which was a specialty camera used for
aerial and stunt work. The Akeley has a very interesting history, which I plan to discuss in a
forthcoming article.
98
Bell & Howell Company, Standard Cinemachinery: Film Perforators, Continuous Feed Film Printers,
Step Feed Film Printers, Cinematograph Cameras, Cameras, (Chicago: Bell & Howell Co., stamped
May 5, 1917, likely 1909-1916), NMAH Trade Literature Collection.

130
and Robert Flaherty.
99
They represented companies in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles
fairly equitably.
That cameras were purchased on an individual basis meant that the personal
endorsement of individual filmmakers and cameramen would be an important aspect of
their advertising. In the mid-1910s, even personal endorsements addressed the
contemporary importance of efficiency and standardization. President S. S. Hutchinson of
American emphasized their efforts to “perfect our processes” by “standardizing our
business as far as camera work, perforating and printing are concerned.” Bosworth insisted
that his cameraman George Hill had shot over 200,000 feet of negative in “all altitudes,
humidities, and thermometric changes” and experienced not “a foot of static.” In an essay
on the back of the pamphlet titled “Inefficiency vs. Economy” the company boasted that the
quick focusing on the Bell & Howell camera saved an hour of production time each day,
adding up to a very specific savings of $6,195 a year.
This rhetoric of efficiency was intended to make the $1080 price tag for the camera
seem like a bargain.
100
For comparison, around the same time, G. Gennert advertised new
professional motion picture cameras for around $250.
101
This argument for the cost benefit
of using Bell & Howell’s pricy camera was aimed at the producers who would be the
beneficiaries of more efficient production schedules that cut down on wasteful use of light
and power. But, unlike printers and perforators, the producers no longer purchased
cameras. Rather, by standardizing their tools and making a camera like the Bell & Howell

99
Bell & Howell Co., As to the Best Means of Taking Motion Pictures: Opinions of Users of The Bell &
Howell Camera Concerning the Efficiency of that Instrument, What Others Say About What We Do,
(Chicago: Bell & Howell Co., stamped May 5, 1917), NMAH Trade Literature Collection. The quotes
are dated and the latest one is March 24, 1915, so it is more likely this pamphlet is from 1915.
100
According to dollartime.com’s inflation calculator, this equates to more than $25,000 in 2016.
101
G. Gennert advertisement, Moving Picture World 30, no. 1 (October 7, 1916): 151.

131
the industry standard, companies such as American were putting a significant burden on
their cameramen to purchase such an expensive tool. The ownership of an expensive, top-
of-the-line motion picture camera became the entrance fee for anyone aspiring to move
beyond the level of assistant cameraman.
Figure 10. Advertisement for Bell & Howell Camera Company, 1923.
102

By 1922, Bell & Howell claimed that 95% of American feature films were shot on
their cameras, including original models more than a decade old and still in operation.
103

But this was the peak of their market share, as another company had recently joined them

102
Bell & Howell Advertisement, American Cinematographer IV, no. 8 (November 1923): 18.
103
Bell & Howell ad, American Cinematographer 2, no. 26 (February 1, 1922): 12.

132
in this elite space. Established in 1919, the Mitchell Camera Company sought to compete
directly with Bell & Howell by making a top-of-the-line product at a prohibitively expensive
price. The company’s factory sat less than five blocks from Bell & Howell’s Hollywood sales
office in the heart of the service corridor throughout most of the 1920s. Starting in the
camera repair business in Los Angeles in the late-1910s, George A. Mitchell had purchased
J. E. Leonard’s design and patents for what would be called “the first perfect motion picture
camera” in the pages of American Cinematographer.
104

From the company’s inception, Mitchell’s geographic location in Hollywood and the
design by Leonard, an experienced cameraman, were major selling points. First covered in
American Cinematographer in late 1921, the Mitchell was described as the first motion
picture camera “offered to the public” by a Los Angeles manufacturer.
105
The article
proposed that this development would lead to Los Angeles not only being the picture
producing capital of the world, but also “the great American center for photographic
engineering.” Mitchell directly appealed to the desires of the studio technicians to have
their technology manufactured on their doorstep and with their input. In the eyes of the
cinematographers running AC, the establishment of a professional camera company in Los
Angeles was a step toward creating a technology industry around and for the studios.
Note the clear distinction between how the Hollywood technicians viewed this
introduction of a competitor to Bell & Howell and their caution in accepting a competitor to
Kodak film in DuPont. While DuPont was a major technology company from the East like
Kodak, Mitchell was a homegrown enterprise in Hollywood. Rather than being viewed as

104
“A Camera Out of the West: George A. Mitchell Perfects a Motion Camera That is a Wonder of
Efficiency,” American Cinematographer 2, no. 18 (October 1, 1921): 13.
105
Ibid.

133
an outsider in comparison to the long established leader, Bell & Howell, Mitchell was
positioning itself as the insider, built specifically to cater to the needs of Hollywood’s
cameramen. In the next issue of AC, James Van Trees endorsed the camera, calling himself
the “proud possessor of a complete new Mitchell” which he was using to film what would
become William Desmond Taylor’s final film The Top of New York (1922).
106

By 1923, Mitchell boasted of thirty cameras in use in the Los Angeles studios with
orders keeping the factory working at full capacity 72 hours a week.
107
Wooing thirty major
cameramen to purchase their cameras was no easy task, as any given cameraman would
likely only buy a new camera every decade or so. Mitchell would be more likely to win over
those who still worked with older, less favored brands such as Debrie or Universal than
convincing someone who’d just spent a significant portion of his salary on a Bell & Howell
to buy another camera. In other words, given the high price tags and the equipment
longevity, a mass exodus of cameramen from Bell & Howell to Mitchell was unlikely. But it
is telling that at the same time Mitchell emerged, cameramen began taking out their own
classified ads in AC selling off old cameras, including Bell & Howells.
As part of its campaign to sway cameramen to its brand, Mitchell invested heavily in
advertising in American Cinematographer. From the time the publication began soliciting
advertisement in late 1921 through the next two decades, Mitchell would claim the back
cover of the magazine. Like the earlier Bell & Howell pamphlet, Mitchell’s campaign would
rely heavily on endorsement from prominent individuals in the industry. This manifested
itself primarily in a series of ads composed of reprints of letters from producers, directors,

106
Philip H. Whitman, “Pans and Tilts: Van Trees Buys a Mitchell” American Cinematographer 2, No.
19 (October 15, 1921): 8. The film starring May McAvoy is referred to as “Baby Doll” in the article.
107
“Mitchell Increases Production Program; to Built New Plant,” American Cinematographer 4 no. 3
(June 1923): 22.

134
and cameramen extolling the virtues of the cameras as they performed on recent
productions.

Figure 11. Mitchell Camera Ad, American Cinematographer (December 1925).

135
The Mitchell correspondence campaign began in April 1922 with a letter from well-
known cinematographer Gaetano “Tony” Gaudio. Subsequent ads over the next five years
featured the positive appraisals of Herford T. Cowling, Billy Bitzer, King Vidor, Charles
Rosher, John Ford, and James Wong Howe. A photograph of the cameraman and his
Mitchell on set usually accompanied the letter, often depicting them standing next to a star
or star director as with Rosher and his frequent subject Mary Pickford. Rosher was so
impressed with the camera that he not only shot all of Miss Pickford’s pictures with it, but
he would also take it with him to Berlin to shoot at UFA.
108
Thus a Hollywood-developed
technology would be introduced to motion picture industries in Europe, reversing the
trajectory of technology from a decade earlier.
The success of Mitchell could be seen in the contracts cameramen signed with the
studios. Their contracts contained clauses in which the employee agreed to furnish his own
camera. Warner Bros. contracts from the 1920s indicate not just that they provide their
own equipment, but also specified the brand. Bell & Howell was the preference in the early
1920s, but in 1923, Charles Van Enger’s contract with the studio showed the words “or
Mitchell” scribbled in by hand.
109
By 1929, Bell & Howell had disappeared from the Warner
Bros. contract for Tony Gaudio and others, replaced by Mitchell.
110
Bell & Howell had to
find ways to compete as Mitchell honed in on the professional motion picture camera
market. In late-1924 they released a new model of their camera with improvements
designed both to compete with Mitchell, such as a direct focusing system, and to appeal to

108
Mitchell Camera Co. ad, American Cinematographer VI, no. 8,9 (December 1925): 26.
109
Employment Contract for Charles Van Enger, Cameraman, September 21, 1923, Box 2729B,
Warner Bros. Archive.
110
Contract between Warner Bros. Pictures Inc. and Tony Guadio, Cameraman (January 24, 1929),
Box 2820B, Warner Bros. Archive.

136
specialists even within this specialized market.
111
A June 1925 ad appeared as a direct
response to Mitchell’s successful campaign, presenting a letter, not from a cinematographer
or a director but from special process pioneer Frank Williams. In the letter, Williams
thanked Bell & Howell for the Pilot Register feature that created “perfect” registration thus
making his double-print process shots possible.
112

Bell & Howell also diversified its camera line into areas that Mitchell did not touch.
First, they released the Filmo 16mm automatic camera for the amateur market in 1923.
Two years later, the Eyemo, a 35mm automatic camera, followed. Seeing as there was no
way to blow 16mm film up to 35mm yet, the Filmo could only appeal to those in Hollywood
in the same ways it did for everyone—for home movies. But Bell & Howell marketed the
Eyemo directly to them as a supplement to the standard professional camera. The
literature the company produced on the Eyemo emphasized its use in Hollywood in
circumstances “where portability is a prime requisite.”
113
They also described its use by
explorers, newsreel photographers, theatre owners, industrial and educational filmmakers,
and commercial photographers. A widely used picture of Cecil B. DeMille wielding his
Eyemo on the set of King of Kings was used to demonstrate its use in Hollywood. DeMille
holds the camera at chest level, looking out over to where his outstretched hand points. It is
unclear whether this photograph was in fact taken on set, as he is given an abstract
background. Likewise, the image for the standard professional camera in the same
pamphlet portrays Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and Mary Pickford huddled around

111
“New Bell & Howell Professional Model Out,” American Cinematographer 5, no. 8 (November
1924): 25.
112
Bell & Howell ad, American Cinematographer 6, no. 3 (June 1925): 26.
113
Bell & Howell Co., The Bell & Howell Eyemo Automatic Motion Picture Camera (1927): 3. Bell &
Howell Company file, NHAM Trade Literature Collection.

137
an open Bell & Howell camera that could not possibly be in use. These images would hardly
impress a Hollywood cinematographer, evidently not the primary target of Bell & Howell’s
advertising. Rather, by the mid-1920s the company was more concerned with using its
association with Hollywood to market their wares to the much larger amateur market.
Figure 12. Image from the Bell & Howell Automatic Motion Picture Camera pamphlet, 1927.

Though the market for cameras had shifted from the producer to the
cinematographer over a decade earlier, Bell & Howell had done little to change its
marketing strategies. An April 1927 full-page ad in American Cinematographer described
the “tremendous responsibility” and “fabulous expenditures” of the producer.
114
The
tagline “The World’s Leading Producers Standardize with Bell & Howell Cameras,” looms

114
Ad for Bell & Howell Camera Co. American Cinematographer 8, no. 1 (April 1927): 14.

138
over a page-high picture of Mack Sennett turning the crank of a Bell & Howell camera. This
is essentially the same rhetoric found in the 1916 pamphlet emphasizing efficiency through
standardization of tools. Like the image of Sennett, these ads do little to appeal to the
cameramen reading the magazine.
The two companies differed greatly in their skill at marketed to the Hollywood
audience, as seen in one issue of American Cinematograph from June 1927. Bell & Howell’s
ad utilized the same, clearly staged image of DeMille and his Eyemo, along with the tagline
“The Hits Are Made with Bell & Howell Cameras.”
115
The back page of the very same
magazine bore a letter from the cinematographer of King of Kings, J. Peverell Marley, to the
Mitchell Camera Co. On Cecil B. DeMille Pictures Corporation letterhead, Marley extolled
the “perfection” of the machine responsible for his “success as Mr. DeMille’s chief
cinematographer.”
116
The accompanying photograph, clearly taken on the set with dressed
extras in the background, showed Marley holding the tripod while DeMille myself peered
through the viewfinder of a fully equipped Mitchell camera.
Mitchell’s geographic position in Hollywood and interest only in that market made
their efforts to woo the cinematographer more directed and obviously effective. As if Bell &
Howell executives recognized the snafu of the previous month, the next issue found an
entirely new two-page spread featuring Bert Glennon, ASC member and cinematographer
on DeMille’s 1923 production of The Ten Commandments.
117
The use of Glennon, and his
work on a four-year-old film, makes it clear that this was a response the previous issue.

115
Ad for Bell & Howell Camera Co., American Cinematographer VIII, no. 3 (June 1927): 14.
116
Ad for Mitchell Camera Co., American Cinematographer VIII, no. 3 (June 1927): 28.
117
Ad for Bell & Howell Camera Co., American Cinematographer VIII, no. 4 (July 1927): 14-15.

139
Mitchell’s ad had more effectively argued that the cinematographers themselves chose
Mitchell, even on DeMille’s films.

Figures 13 & 14. Advertisements from American Cinematographer, June 1927.

While Mitchell began construction on its new massive factory off the service
corridor in West Hollywood, both companies began focusing more on technical
advancement in their ads and less on personal endorsements. The escalating climate of
technological change in 1928 meant that boasting of a new “friction tilthead” or “triple
exposures” became de rigeur. With cameramen working to keep up with the times, Bell &
Howell offered a $1000 attachment for superspeed movement, while Mitchell developed a
motor drive to match its competitor. But the need to develop “silenced” cameras soon

140
overwhelmed any other consideration. Both companies scrambled to find ways to quiet the
mechanisms of the cameras in order to free them from their boxy prisons on sounds
pictures.
While silencing cameras was an obvious need for any company wishing to remain in
the motion picture business, Bell & Howell began to question the financial advantage of
continuing to use its engineering facilities to develop technological advancements for
Hollywood. When cinematographer Joseph Dubray visited Chicago as a representative of
the ASC in early 1928, President MacNabb “acknowledged the fact that they are less
interested in the professional field than they were years ago.”
118
The loss of interest was
not due to a drop in the market that was still “quite large,” but because of the phenomenal
growth of the amateur market that “attracts their main interest at the present time.” In
contrast, in 1929, Mitchell presented the opening of its new factory as a proud moment for
Hollywood as a community, not just the company itself. While Bell & Howell was
questioning its efforts to bend over backwards for the professional motion picture
industry, Mitchell was doubling down on its commitment to Hollywood and its personnel.
As the article in International Photographer explained, “Hollywood can well be proud of
this plant as it will be the largest factory in the world manufacturing exclusively standard
professional motion picture cameras.”
119
The emphasis on exclusivity was a clear challenge
to its primary competition.
Bell & Howell was moving from an exclusive focus on the professional motion
picture industry to viewing it as a small, ancillary market (as the other East Coast

118
Joseph Dubray, “Report on the Contact Trip conducted by Joseph A. Dubray, March 8
th
-April 8
th
,
1928,” Dubray file, American Society of Cinematographers Collection, Herrick Library.
119
“Modern Camera Factory,” International Photographer I, no. 3 (April 1929): 4.

141
technology manufacturers did). In a private meeting, MacNabb and a representative of the
Cooke Lens company asked Dubray why they should continue to cater their experimental
research and factory works to tools which “will prove of little commercial value due to the
limited field of sales.” In his narrative of events, Dubray answered by invoking an idea that
Bell & Howell had long emphasized in their advertising—that the amateur would use Bell &
Howell cameras with Cooke lenses if the Hollywood cinematographer did. As he put it in his
report, “I point out to him the influence which Cinematography has on the photographers
in general throughout the World, and on the amateur Cinematographer as well.” Dubray
was persuasive enough in his pleas that Bell & Howell hired him to run their motion picture
camera division, dividing his time between Los Angeles and Chicago. By hiring Dubray, the
company recognized the continued importance of Hollywood to the image of the company
even if their financial interests lay primarily in the amateur market. As such, advertising in
American Cinematographer continued, and Bell & Howell established larger facilities in
Hollywood, much in the model of the Kodak Service Building, also in 1931.
120

The silencing of the camera had major ramifications on the business model that had
existed throughout the Hollywood silent era, moving the camera out of the realm of
personal equipment and into the studio’s purview. The already expensive equipment
became even more costly. According to a Bell & Howell catalogue from 1931, a silenced
regular standard cinematograph camera with “minimum operating equipment” of tripod,
tilt head, finder, magazines, lenses, and case would cost $3197.
121
At the time, the highest
paid cameramen at Warner Bros. and Paramount were making $450-500 per week, a good

120
“Bell & Howell Builds in Hollywood,” American Cinematographer XII, no. 8 (December 1931): 30.
121
Bell & Howell Co., Standard Cinemachinery and Accessories: Prices and Codes (January 1, 1931),
NMAH Trade Literature Collection.

142
sum but hardly one to put them in the market for such a camera. Contracts from this period
also lack the clauses requiring that cameramen provide their own equipment, indicating
that this stipulation had become untenable. Indeed, in his renegotiations of his Warner
Bros. contact in 1929, cameraman William Rees refused to sign, specifying that he wanted
paragraph twenty removed which required him to “furnish his own camera, all camera
equipment and all replacements for his own camera and equipment.”
122
A memo about
Rees’s contract dispute agreed to the elimination adding, “Be sure and eliminate this clause
in all cameraman’s contracts in the future.”
123

With all cameramen using one of two types of cameras for the vast majority of
studio work, the studios could easily afford to maintain such equipment themselves, but
the camera companies continued to advertise their products to the cameramen who would
be the actual users of their equipment. But with this shift in ownership, the camera
companies became more like the rest of the technology service sector of Hollywood,
cultivating a relationship and interest in the technician in the studio, but ultimately
answerable to the financial interests.

Conclusion
With the establishment of a technological service sector catering to the needs of the
motion picture industry, the studios were becoming less and less dependent on the
innovations of East Coast manufacturers and the financial decisions of their executive
offices. By the late-1920s the technological (and creative) agency of Hollywood could no

122
Contract of June 17, 1929, William Rees, Box 2822A, Warner Bros. Archive.
123
Memo from William Koenig to Mr. Chase re: Rees’s new contract, June 15, 1929, William Rees
file, Box 2822A, Warner Bros. Archive.

143
longer be ignored. Through this narrative of problem-solving and adaptation, we can see
that the establishment of companies that required both advanced scientific training and a
clear acknowledgement of the needs of studio technicians served to connect Hollywood to
the networks of professional engineers and to the larger community of motion picture
technology companies throughout the country. Like the forces of competition and
collaboration described in chapter one, the efforts of these companies served to create an
expanded motion picture industry based around the sharing of technical knowledge. The
existence of competent technical service within the geographic region forced an increased
presence from those operating at a distance and aided the establishment of a permanent
technology and production community.
With the power of Hollywood ascendant, the East Coast motion picture technology
industry and its technical trade organization, the Society of Motion Picture Eengineers,
would need to do more to connect with the growing cluster. With more and more of the
technological needs of the studios being fulfilled right in their backyard, the total reliance
on the authority of these East Coast corporations and trade organizations was waning. The
establishment of their own trade organization, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, which sought to represent the technical as well as the artistic aspects of motion
picture production, would be seen as a direct threat to the livelihood of the SMPE. As we
shall see in chapter four, the stage was now set for the distance between the two branches
of the industry to be closed. But key to understanding how these forces came together is
the story of how the technicians in Hollywood gained a seat at the table. Unwilling to allow
their own executives or the technology companies on either coast dictate their realm of the

144
industry, the technicians fought for a slice of power that even their creative collaborators
could not obtain.

145
CHAPTER 3

Between the Lines: The Engineer in the Movie Studio

Figure 15. Cover of American Cinematographer, November 1922.

The Motion Picture industry is a pretty big structure. The foundation of the
business, however, is photography, and we figure that no matter how big the
building is it can’t be much stronger than what it rests on…
1

1
John Leezer, “To Be or Not to Be?” American Cinematographer II, no. 10 (May 12, 1921): 2.

146
By 1929 it was clear to everyone involved that the presence of sound engineers in
the movie studios was not universally welcome. In the pages of their chief publication,
American Cinematographer, the cameramen of Hollywood railed against the chaos brought
to their world in articles with dramatic titles such as “To Hell with Photography! What
About Sound?” and “The War of the Talkies.”
2
In private correspondence with their
brethren in New York and Europe inquiring about the sound situation, they were even less
generous. AC editor Hal Hall wrote to a member in France that, “The cinematographer is
not being pushed in the background,” despite the “so-called” engineers “striving to take the
camera men’s position in the spotlight.”
3
After all, the cinematographers had worked
tirelessly over the last decade to establish their place as the chief technicians in the studio.
These new engineers, with their college pedigrees and sensitive equipment to which every
apparatus in the studio needed to be adapted, did more than restrain the creative abilities
of the cameramen. Just as importantly, they challenged the hierarchy of the studio space
and the status of the cinematographer at the top of the technical food chain.
From its inception in 1920, American Cinematographer and the organization that it
represented, the American Society of Cinematographers (founded the year before), had
sought to legitimize their profession in the same way the producers had sought to gain
respectability for the medium as a whole—by championing its artistic merits.
4
As the

2
See: “To Hell with Photography! What About Sound?” American Cinematographer (December
1928) and “The War of the Talkies” American Cinematographer (April 1929).
3
Hal Hall to George Benoit (April 5, 1928), George Benoit File, American Society of
Cinematographers’ Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles, California. (Hereafter, ASC
Collection.)
4
For more on early attempts to position cinema as art see: William Urrichio and Roberta Pearson,
Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1993) and Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth Century
America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). For an excellent analysis of the

147
decade wore on, the cameramen of Hollywood increasingly fought for an elevated status as
the chief technicians on the motion picture set, in no small part due to their self-reflexive
advocacy work in the pages of the Cinematographer. Their skill and knowledge gave them a
status with which even the actors and directors could not compete, as it gave them control
over an aspect of the medium essential to its very existence.
The cinematographers’ position gained a seat at the table with the producers and
celebrities at the top of the Hollywood food chain through their knowledge and
management of the technology of the cinema. Trained cinematographers managed both the
lighting and camera staff on the set and would be the earliest practitioners of the field of
visual effects, thereby controlling several of the technology departments of the studios.
Most importantly, cinematographers quite literally controlled the primary technology of
production, as they provided and maintained their own cameras until the advent of sound.
The introduction of sound not only challenged the supremacy of the image in cinema, it
challenged the supremacy of the cameraman and his authority over the medium’s tools.
The cinematographers fought this challenge, maintaining much (though not all) of their
privileged status among the technicians of Hollywood.
Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, the Hollywood studios established permanent
facilities and increasingly subdivided the labor happening behind the scenes into more and
more specialized professions. As Mark Garrett Cooper has shown, unstructured mobility
was common among the creative classes of motion picture production during the 1910s.
5

Likewise mobility among the various technical professions was ubiquitous, but as the

cinematographers’ efforts to position themselves as artists see Patrick Keating, Hollywood Lighting:
From the Silent Era to Film Noir (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
5
Mark Garrett Cooper, Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010).

148
structure of the system solidified by the late 1920s, mobility mostly ossified in specific
directions. Unionization and other forms of organization, which began to take shape in the
1920s, created significant barriers for entry into and mobility between these professions.
The increase in organization, both in terms of representation and employment, meant
mobility was often contained both by representational distinctions and by long-term
contracts where it had previously bounded across the industry, between the different
aspects of the production process, and to the laboratories of the technology manufacturers
themselves. Thus we can see that the studio technicians who established their careers
before the introduction of sound differed greatly from those that followed, and therefore
constitute a unique group for study.
Technical labor, like that of the cinematographers, as well as editors, lighting
technicians, and laboratory workers, formed the backbone of the studio system in
Hollywood. These workers made motion pictures possible on the most fundamental level.
Unlike their notorious interference in the work of the creative laborers at the top of the
system, the producers were happy to leave the technical side of production to these
workers. The producers’ concession of this aspect of production to these employees served
to bolster their status when technology came to the fore of the industry in the late 1920s.
The structures put in place for organizing this technical labor and their tools had effects
throughout the system, from hiring and contracting practices to management and training
procedures. The balancing of skilled and creative labor was unprecedented in any large-
scale industry of the time and therefore set a new model for creative industries to come.
These craftsmen, who performed tasks that lacked major precedent in existing
industries, distinguished themselves both by emphasizing the unique “scientific”

149
knowledge and practices they innovated and by adopting the image and professional
practices of the “creative” professions of the business, such as actors, directors, and writers.
Both tendencies were advanced through the establishment of professional organizations
such as the American Society of Cinematographers and the Electrical Illuminating
Engineers Society (both 1919), publications such as American Cinematographer, and
resistance to unionization. The rhetoric around the cinematographer, in particular, pulled
from the ideals of the engineer, which dominated thinking about technology and industry
at the time. Not only was much of the work in the studio technical in nature, but it was also
often on the bleeding edge of technological innovation, rapidly and radically developing
from year to year and affected by myriad industries, from electricity to aviation. Keeping up
with and even pioneering these innovations became a central aspect in asserting the
importance of these workers. Their advanced knowledge and complete control over the
most important piece of technology on the set, the camera, allowed them to create this
hierarchy, which was subsequently thrown into chaos with the introduction of trained
sound engineers, who came out of a more tradition engineering culture back East, to the
studio space in the late-1920s.
In this chapter, I ask what it meant for the cinematographers to position themselves
as engineers within the production space and how the resulting hierarchy was challenged
by the incursion of sound engineers. In order to do this, this chapter centers on the
changing status of these skilled technicians in the years up through the incorporation of
sound. Beginning with the the development of a division of technical work among different
studio employees and departments and the attempts at unionizing cinematographers, I
then explore the ways in which the cinematographers emulated the ideals of engineers

150
through their organization and publications. The cinematographers’ efforts of the last
decade are then challenged with the introduction of formally trained engineers into the
studio with the coming of sound.

The Hands of Hollywood
When an industry has reached such a magnitude that many people are
employed in its work—some employes [sic] will develop greater ability in some
lines than in others, and the lines of activity become so divergent that they are
best cared for separately.
6

In 1911, David Hulfish saw the division of the labor happening in the bustling
motion picture studios of America. In his two-volume tome aimed at enlightening laymen
as to how exactly motion pictures were made, he observed the separation of Motion-Picture
Work into four distinct professions—the author, the producer, the salesman, and the
photographer. The photographer, seemingly the sole technician in charge of all the various
technologies of motion pictures, had his duties simply defined as carrying the camera
wherever the producer desires, recording the scenes, developing the negatives, and
printing “as many finished pictures as the salesman may require.”
7
The reader might have
realized that the photographer was hardly working alone when Hulfish went on to describe
him as more suitably titled a “factory superintendent.” He was entirely in charge of the
industrial production of “a credible photographic film picture” at the command of his
superiors.

6
David S. Hulfish, Motion-Picture Work, 2
nd
Edition, Original edition, 1911 (American School of
Correspondence, 1913): 76.
7
Hulfish, 1913: 76. Hulfish focused entirely on commercial motion picture production, as
educational, home, and industrial filmmaking would only develop in the next decade.

151
This mechanical take on the increasingly complex labor of motion picture
production would become ever more divided as the structures and rules of the burgeoning
industrial system emerged. The development of systematic labor division over the first two
decades of motion pictures has been helpfully defined by Janet Staiger, in the seminal The
Classical Hollywood Cinema. Staiger argues that motion picture production developed from
a social division of labor in the “cameraman system” in early cinema (1896-1907) to a
detailed division of labor with the “director system” starting in 1907. The early system saw
the cameraman as a craftsman/artist who “knew the entire work process, and conception
and execution of the product were unified.”
8
With the director system, production followed
the precedent of theater, dividing the artistic and technical sides of production between a
director and a cameraman just as Hulfish described it at the time. With this shift, says
Staiger, “the knowledge of this technology was outside the province of the director.”
9
This
is an important distinction, for as the labor became more divided, the cameramen would
position themselves as the workers who straddled the line between technical and creative
labor.
As concept and execution became separate, the detailed division of labor meant the
creation of more specialized craft positions and “a hierarchy of management.” Within a
couple of years, this would evolve into the “director-unit system,” which operated within
the newly permanent infrastructure of the motion picture plant. According to Staiger, this
allowed a few workers, such as writers, directors, and actors to supply the variation needed
between products, “while most of the others followed standard production design and

8
Janet Staiger, “The Hollywood mode of production to 1930,” The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film
Style of Mode of Production to 1960, ed. David Bordwell, Kristen Thompson, Janet Staiger (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985): 116.
9
Staiger, 118.

152
practices.”
10
By 1914, Staiger re-terms this the “central producer system,” in which all of
the structures of the classical style and efficient feature production were in place.
While most of the institutional structures and technical organizations of the studio
system had indeed been introduced by the mid-1910s, these concepts and practices were
worked through, debated, and altered for more than a decade before the system reached
full maturation in the late-1920s. Likewise, the work and positions of several technical
professionals were much more flexible and adaptable than this structure indicates. In the
end, it would take the massive technological upheavals of the mid- to late-1920s to bring
together the various aspects of technological production and to force the more rigid
structures and procedures that would dominate motion picture production for several
decades after.
Another common paradigm for dividing motion picture labor is found in
contemporary production studies, adopted from Hollywood’s own budgeting practices—
“the line,” which creates a divide between creative and technical costs and, as Miranda
Banks defines it, establishes “a hierarchy that stratifies levels of creative and craft labor.”
11

Above-the-line labor consists of those who negotiate their own salaries on a project-by-
project basis, such as actors, writers, and directors. Below-the-line workers have their
salaries determined by industry standards often set by representative bodies such as
unions. Any residuals they would receive go to union health and pension funds, any
creative compensation being the sense of “fulfillment” they get from using their acquired

10
Staiger, 123.
11
Miranda J. Banks, “Gender Below-the-line: Defining Feminist Production Studies,” Production
Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, eds. Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks, John Thornton
Caldwell (New York: Routledge, 2009): 89.

153
skills and talents.
12
This claim of the innate satisfaction of work in creative industries is
hardly new. Author Mary McCarthy had made similar claims as far back as 1929, asserting
that the studio workers received not only money, but also “the satisfaction of seeing their
dreams come true, their ideas become useful realities.”
13
Though it must be noted that
McCarthy’s assertion is presented with rather more sincerity than her modern
counterparts.
Many of the problems with this vision of Hollywood’s labor structures are evident
from an exploration of studio budgeting. Thomas Ince was considered the pioneer of the
central producer system, beginning the process by dividing his staff into units and
departments as early as 1913.
14
Production files for films such as The Marriage Cheat
(1924), one of Ince’s last films before his untimely death, show that even a decade later the
division of labor was still uneven. The various departments working on each production
were each considered as a unit, while the entire staff, with the exclusion of actors, were
lumped together, constituting 15% of the production budget.
15
For example, the camera
departments consisted of a couple of repairmen and their shop and equipment. The actual
cameramen, who were still hired on a short term or project basis and generally provided
their own equipment, were considered separately as part of the staff.

12
Matt Stahl, “Privilege and Distinction in Production Worlds: Copyright, Collective Bargaining, and
Working Conditions in Media Making,” Production Studies: 62.
13
Mary Eunice McCarthy, The Hands of Hollywood (Hollywood, Photoplay Research Bureau: 1929):
17.
14
Janet Staiger, “Dividing Labor for Production Control: Thomas Ince and the Rise of the Studio
System,” Cinema Journal 18, no. 2 (Spring 1979): 16-25.
15
Estimated Budget, Production Files for The Marriage Cheat (1924), Box 1, Thomas Ince Papers,
Library of Congress Manuscripts Division, Washington DC.

154
The distinctions that Ince’s company had made were designed to separate
production staff from full-time, year-round employees, rather than separating creative
from skilled or defining specific professions. Having set up his business practices in the
earliest years of the burgeoning studio system, Ince’s structure shows that the full
departmentalization of the studio has not yet taken place. Further along in this period, the
budgeting for Pathé Exchange productions from the late 1920s reveals a much more
systematic division of labor including separate budgeting for production staff, cameramen
and assistants, stock company, outside actors, extras, wardrobe, properties, set
construction, special effects, electrical, laboratory, and even animals.
16
By 1930, financial
statements show further categorization of the studio’s twenty-three departments into
different payrolls—Payroll no. 1 being executives, no. 2 production, and no. 3 the studio
staff.
17
Like Ince’s accounting practices, these payrolls separated those hired for individual
productions from year-round employees. Production staff, which included actors,
cameramen, cutters, and sound services would generally be assigned to a particular motion
picture whether they had long-term contracts or not; while studio staff, such as grips,
electricians and machinists might work on several productions in a given day or week.
These distinctions between production and studio workers were particularly salient
when it came to union organization. The more regular, steady work of the studio staff,

16
Cecil B. DeMille Pictures Corp, King of Kings weekly cost statement Dec. 31, 1927; Hold ‘Em Yale
weekly cost statement Dec. 31, 1927. Folder 6, Financial Matters 1925-1928, Pathé Exchange
Collection, Margaret Herrick Library. Pathé Exchange was a separate studio from its French parent,
owned by Merrill Lynch since 1921. In 1927, Joseph P. Kennedy purchased the studio and merged it
with Keith-Albee-Orpheum theaters, Cecil B. DeMille Productions, and RCA, renaming it RKO
Pictures, one of the five major studios of the Golden Age.
17
Studio Operating Statements, Payroll 1930; Folder 22, Weekly Cost Statements. Pathé Exchange
Collection.

155
which often bore easy equivalence to work outside the motion picture studio, was
relatively easy to incorporate into existing unions, such as the International Brotherhood of
Electrical Workers (IBEW) and the American Federation of Labor (AFL). But the project-
oriented and ever-changing duties of the production workers, many of whom managed the
technology and tools of production and whose work had less precedent in existing
professions, would prove more challenging.
As the division of motion picture labor became increasingly formalized, the
technical departments present in studio accounting were described in informational
publications for laymen. The growth of the industry meant a growth in interest not only in
how movies were made, but also in how one could enter the business. While several
scholars have addressed the glut of aspiring actors who flooded Hollywood and created the
“extras” problem, there were also those who showed interest in the less glamorous aspects
of the glamour industry.
18
Books such as The Hands of Hollywood (1929) by screenwriter
Mary Eunice McCarthy and The Truth about Hollywood (1924), compiled from dozens of
industry luminaries, served as guides (and warnings) for these aspirants. They can also
offer a glimpse at how contemporaneous insiders defined their work and the various roles
in the production process.
McCarthy’s The Hands of Hollywood was not the first attempt to systematically
define the professions and processes of the studios, but it was perhaps the most thorough
to date and was offered in a matter of fact, practical way that only an “insider” would
provide. Rather than assuming it to be an accurate portrayal of the reality of day-to-day

18
See Hillary Hallet, Go West, Young Women: The Rise of Early Hollywood (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2013); Denise McKenna, “The City That Made the Pictures Move,” PhD Diss., New
York University, 2008; Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after
the Nickelodeon (Princeton University Press: 2000).

156
operations, the book provides a glimpse into the production culture of the moment,
showing how those in the system perceived each profession. Unlike previous works in the
field, McCarthy was not concerned with pumping up the antipathy between the technical
and creative sides of the industry, as in Carl Louis Gregory’s Motion Picture Photography
(1920). Her portrait of the system has more in common with the mid-1920s, post-scandal
volumes which trump up the difficult work and advanced skill required of those toiling in
the studios, as in Laurence A. Hughes’ The Truth About the Movies by the Stars, though
without the latter’s obsessive focus on respectability. All of these works go far beyond the
technical focus and vague definitions of the 1910s works, such as Hulfish’s, which were
more interested in explaining how motion pictures themselves worked as a technology. It
seemed that by now, the public knew how the pictures worked, but what they wanted to
know was how Hollywood did.
Importantly, McCarthy portrayed a “system”—one that was consistent in its
operations, hierarchy, and division of labor across presumably every company in the
industry. This was motion picture making as industrialized production, not only on the film
processing side, as was seen in Hulfish’s day, but the entire process.
19
McCarthy offered
matter-of-fact descriptions of the individuals who made the dream factory run. Rather than
giving an inside view of a particular production or company and portraying its unique
qualities and personalities, her descriptions are consistently generic, as with her narrative
of the lighting of the sets which runs like a set of instructions.

19
McCarthy herself wrestles with this conception of the industrialized production of creative works
in her introduction. She offers that it is “an art and an industry” and “a romance and a business.”
The hands of Hollywood are “the beauty-loving artist” and “the cash-loving merchant.” McCarthy,
13.

157
…The cameraman and the company electrician go over the set completely.
The cameraman tells the electrician just what kind of lights and how many of
each type he will need, and where he wishes them placed…. The electrician
then makes out a requisition for the lights and this is given to the electrical
supply department. Next, a crew of electricians is put to work, running
cables and placing the lights where the cameraman has ordered them.
20

In describing each department, McCarthy laid out a hierarchy with set qualifications and
salaries. The electrical department, responsible for said lighting, consisted of the
Superintendent of the Electrical Department ($100-200/week), Chief Electrician or Gaffer
($9/day), and the lesser Electricians or Juicers, Sun Arc Operators, Electrical Shopmen,
Electrical Construction Engineers, Construction Electricians, and Grips, each making
around $6 per day.
21
McCarthy used the same type of generic description and definition for
each department of the production studio—both creative and technical—including Story,
Camera, Sets, Wardrobe, Casting, Direction, Locations, the Laboratory, and the newest
department, Sound.
The departments were portrayed as a series of interconnected, but independent
organisms each taking their part as the film worked its way from raw materials into
finished product. With an eye toward aiding those that might be interested in a given
profession, McCarthy described the qualifications for each field. An electrical department
superintendent must have “special knowledge” of electricity, a cameraman has a “long and
tedious apprenticeship,” and a sound engineer is “highly trained.”
22
Such vague
descriptions of the paths to these professions were hardly encouraging, offering a gate
rather than an opening.

20
McCarthy, 59.
21
As titles such as “gaffer” and “juicer” make clear, the use of industry specific slang is important to
maintaining the insularity of the system. The hanging of lights itself is referred to as “dragging iron.”
22
McCarthy, 61, 65, 95.

158
This type of gatekeeping is likewise seen throughout the essays in The Truth About
the Movies, not only by stars and directors, but also by cinematographers and editors.
Cameramen L. Guy Wilky, Norbert Brodin, and Arthur Edeson described the “thorough
technical knowledge” of the “master craftsman,” implying the extreme difficultly of the
work, while Bennie Reynolds directly addressed the hopeless aspirant in “Chances for a
Beginner in the Camera End of Pictures.”
23
Reynolds compared the chances of getting into
cinematography to that of any other branch of the industry, adding that, in addition to
being difficult to get into, it was also the most difficult to do.
Like the cinematographers, the film editors contributing essays to the volume were
invested in building up the importance and difficulty of their position, while at the same
time discouraging those who would enter into it lightly, thereby flooding the job market
with excess competition. Editors became “doctors” and cinematographers “chemists” and
“physicists” in the quest to elevate these forms of work. Notably, the lab workers were
given no space to tell their story. In a volume dedicated to explaining the work of
Hollywood in ways both aggrandizing and pedestrian, such purely rote, technical work had
little place. Likewise, McCarthy gave less space to such professions. According to her book,
the developing, printing and tinting of film was often done by outside “private enterprises.”
While the editors, or “cutters,” were “unsung heroes,” the patchers working under them,
“usually girls,” required no “experience or special qualifications, because the patching
machines are very easy to operate.”
24

23
L. Guy Wilky, “The Cameraman,” Norbert F. Brodin, “Something About the Cameraman” Bennie
Reynolds, “Chances for a Beginning in the Camera End of Pictures,” The Truth About the Movies by
the Stars, Laurence A. Hughes, ed. (Hollywood: Hollywood Publishers, Inc., 1924).
24
McCarthy, 88-89. That dismissal aside, McCarthy does offer more for the female aspirant than any
other volume on the subject. As a woman in Hollywood herself, she was likely more cognizant of the

159
McCarthy portrayed a Hollywood which distinguished between those jobs which
were aspirational and those which were mere labor—often in seemingly arbitrary ways.
The gender divide between patchers and their immediate superiors, the cutters, reveals a
system without a simple trajectory for upward mobility. While editors and cameramen
were working in skilled crafts, unlike the professions that existed outside of the studios,
such as electricians, there was perceived to be a greater element of creativity to the work.
Creativity changed the nature of traditional apprenticeship and promotion to a more
subjective, merit-based system. This subjective nature to being seen as skilled in the
profession is one of the many reasons that the unions struggled to organize such workers
along traditional lines. This split between the various classes of technical workers and the
uneven mobility within and between professions further complicates the concept of “the
line” and the idea of Hollywood as a system with set rules.

Apprenticeship and Mobility
Even with the perceived creativity of a profession such as cinematography, an
informal system of apprenticeship persisted, with the assistant and second cameraman
positions that most cinematographers had to work through on their way up the ladder. The
system for training in technical fields was different than in a purely “creative” position such

few opportunities available to women in the industry. As such, she offered a short note toward the
end of the book, with a list of the of “professions and trades for women” as well as those held by
both men and women.

With the exception of patchers, all of those listed are in writing, costuming,
and office work. Patchers, the rare one of which might be elevated to the profession of cutter, were
the only skilled technical profession open to women. This assertion by McCarthy seemed to have
held true throughout the business, as records of women among the professional classes in
Hollywood are virtually non-existent. As such, technical work in Hollywood that was perceived as
difficult and/or simultaneously creative was largely defined as masculine work, and the women
who could do it with competence were portrayed as the exception.

160
as that of directors, who could come from other professions, such as directing theater or
writing, and move immediately into the director post without ever working as an assistant
director.
25
There being little in the way of particular skills required for the actor, writer, or
director, a large portion of those that reached the top of these professions gained
prominence in adjacent industries first, be they theater, journalism, modeling, music, or
literature to name a few. In contrast, the cameramen were expected to have a thorough
knowledge of photography, chemistry, lighting, and the particular mechanics of the motion
picture camera. These skills were largely acquired “on the job,” with the established figures
showing a skepticism toward new forms of institutional training which emerged due to the
general interest in the industry. Advocating an apprentice-style training program allowed
the elite of the profession to maintain control over those who entered the profession,
thereby holding a means of control over the production process away from both the
studios and the unions.
Almost all cameramen began as assistants, an apprentice position which involved
more carrying of equipment than looking through the lens of a viewfinder. The major
exceptions to this were those that got into the field before 1915, as many of them began as
photographers who then became one-man operations making actualities.
26
Unlike many
union-operated apprentice systems, not all assistants would become second cameramen,
and not all seconds would become first cameramen (or Directors of Photography, as they
later became known). Some chose to specialize in aerial or effects camera work, and others

25
This is true to this day, where the assistant director positions work more like cameramen,
moving from trainee to second-second assistant, etc. with first assistant director being the pinnacle
of the career trajectory. It is extremely rare for a first assistant director to become a director.
26
This is evidenced through studying over one hundred ASC applications. ASC Collection, Margaret
Herrick Library.

161
oscillated between positions from job to job. For example, several first cameramen worked
under the cinematographer Percy Hilburn on Ben Hur (1925), including such luminaries as
Karl Struss, who filmed Murnau’s Sunrise only two years later. Likewise, Struss shared first
cameraman status (and the first Academy Award for cinematography) on that film with
Charles Rosher. Large productions such as these frequently employed several first
cameramen.
The path to apprenticeship as a Hollywood cameraman was not open to the
uninitiated, despite it being a profession with less publicity and glamour than those “above
the line.” The American Society of Cinematographers was an elite organization more
interested in keeping aspirants out of their profession than bringing new blood into their
ranks. Their loyalty was to their members, potential new members among the established
cameramen of the motion picture industry, their fellow technicians in adjacent professions,
and the companies for whom they worked. As a vocal presence within the Hollywood
community, especially as the reach of American Cinematographer grew, the ASC had to
manage inquiries from aspiring cinematographers. While this certainly did not present the
large scale crisis that the myriad young men and women moving to Hollywood to be stars
did, it was substantial enough to need to be addressed. By 1926, the ASC secretary had
developed a form letter discouraging aspirants from pursuing the profession or moving to
Los Angeles.
27

A particular target of the ASC’s ire in the early 1920s were the emerging trade
school and college courses in motion picture photography, which were seen as generally
unfit for training potential cinematographers. These courses were debated (somewhat one-

27
Charles Clark file, f.585, ASC Collection.

162
sidedly) in the pages of AC throughout 1923. In Daniel Clark’s editorial, “Can
Cinematography Be Taught in Schools?” he argues that “the greatest school of the
profession is the profession itself” being as much about an eye and instinct as it was about
practical knowledge.
28
John Seitz gave a nearly identical assessment of the value of school
programs the very next month in “Can a School Teach Cinematography?” adding an
emphasis on the varied skills of different specialties which could only be learned through
experience. Yet no alternative was given by either, other than to say that the assistant
cameraman was the student getting the proper education to be a cinematographer.
The fact that they offered no insight as to how one would become an assistant
presents the profession as a closed system, open only to those already possessed of some
special entrance or connection—a view of Hollywood that has hardly changed. The ASC
member files are rife with letters from aspiring assistant cameramen, most seemingly
unanswered, others written discouraging replies. There are clearly protectionist
motivations behind this rhetoric, as American Cinematographer editor Foster Goss
presented the problem of aspiring cinematographers as being one of a lack of sufficient
jobs even for the existing, experienced candidates.
29
The idea of Hollywood as an isolated
enclave, impenetrable from the outside was a cultivated ideal down the ranks, designed to
keep those already in the system employed and to keep excessive competition away. An
informal apprenticeship system could not be sustained with a glut of school-trained
cameramen infiltrating their ranks, likely unwilling to serve their time as poorly paid
assistants to the established professionals. Additionally, a move to formal education as the

28
Dan Clark A. S. C., “Can Cinematography Be Taught in Schools,” American Cinematographer 4, no. 3
(June 1923) 13, 21.
29
Goss, Foster, “The Editors’ Corner,” American Cinematographer 4, no. 8 (Nov. 1923) 10-11.

163
qualification for entrance into the profession could shift gatekeeping power away from the
established cinematographers and diminish their status.
This system of apprenticeship and mobility within the profession offers a model
somewhere in the middle of “the line” structure as presented by Matt Stahl. In this mode,
above-the-line compensation starts with a low wage to encourage employers to try new
talent, moves to individual contracts, and then residuals, while below-the-line
compensation, which is largely set by union rules, “denies them official recognition of their
creative work.”
30
The cinematographers, throughout the silent and studio-eras, largely
negotiated their own individual contracts, which varied widely in their wages, and resisted
the establishment of union scales. Warner Bros. contracts show wages from $50 to $500
per week in the late 1920s and early 1930s, showing the great disparity both between the
ranks of cameramen and those with more prestigious resumes.
31
The struggle of the
cinematographers against the unions was particularly salient in creating rhetoric about
how the “cameramasters” wanted to be seen by their employers, peers, and the public,
however, this conflict needs to be seen in light of the larger history of these organizations
as they attempted to represent the technical workers in motion pictures.

Organizing the ‘Elite’ Technicians
A thorough technical knowledge of the medium and its possibilities and
limitations is assumed in the case of any expert and in the cameraman this
includes many requirements that the public never think of.
32

30
Matt Stahl, “Privilege and Distinction in Production Worlds,” 61.
31
Personnel Files, Box 2729, Warner Bros Archive.
32
Wilky, “The Cameraman,” The Truth About the Movies by the Stars, 325.

164
In the early 1940s Murray Ross set out to write the first history of labor in the
American motion picture industry to explain how this glamorous center of cultural
production had become a union stronghold.
33
Most subsequent labor histories of
Hollywood would follow his lead, offering a chronological description of the
accomplishments and setbacks of the various organizations that set their sights on the
motion picture industry. Los Angeles labor historians Louis and Richard Perry argue that
the unions coveted the studio workers, as they would contribute to organized labor’s
“prestige” due to the economic importance of the film industry in southern California,
which the open shop movement dominated.
34
Ross, Perry, and film historian Michael
Nielson all agree that the producers used the jurisdictional battles between various unions
to pit organizations against each other and stem the tide of unionization within the
company ranks.
35
The executives fears had less to do with the demands of these low level
workers than with the threat of creative labor organization, a much more dire prospect
given their relative power, worth, and salaries.
As a result of such ongoing conflict, at the 1921 AFL convention, the largest union in
the nation divvied up craft labor in the studios between International Alliance of Theatrical

33
Murray Ross. Stars and Strikes; Unionization of Hollywood (New York: AMS Press: 1967).
34
Louis B. Perry and Richard S. Perry, A History of the Los Labor Movement, 1911-1941 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1963): 318. Grace Heilman Stimson’s 1955 Rise of the Labor
Movement in Los Angeles identifies several key historical factors for the lack of a strong labor
movement and the ascendance of the open-shop mentality in Los Angeles: an agricultural economy,
tardy industrialization, economic depressions, physical and psychological isolation, a lack of help
from the AFL and other national unions, rapid growth of a transient population, poor local
leadership, instable labor bodies, and the persistent opposition of Harrison Gray Otis’s Los Angeles
Times. Grace Heilman Stimson, Rise of the Labor Movement in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1955), 193.
35
Michael Charles Nielson, “Motion Picture Craft Workers and Craft Unions in Hollywood: The
Studio Era, 1912-1948,” PhD Diss., University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (1985). Nielson used
the work of Ross, Perry and Perry and additional archival research to create a history that focused
on craft workers and their unions.

165
Stage Employees (hereafter IATSE) and various other AFL unions such as the Electricians
(IBEW), Carpenters, Plasterers, Painters, and Plumbers. Nielson focuses on the strife this
turn of events caused between the various unions and workers, however, it is equally
valuable for showing the ways in which they were attempting to define various forms of
labor. IATSE was ostensibly meant to represent stagecraft, something very different than
the more “practical” work of a carpenter or plumber. The AFL drew a new line in the way it
divided the work being done in the studios—IBEW members installed cable, while IATSE
members operated lights and cameras; the Carpenters’ Union built sets, but IATSE retained
the prop men. The distinctions separated the labor that workers might perform in the “real
world” from that which was exclusive to the theater and the motion picture industry.
In 1925, the studios made an aggressive move against the unions, attempting to
bypass them by setting up their own Mutual Alliance of Studio Employees to manage the
hiring of craft and technical workers.
36
This full throttled movement to open shop
representation finally served to unite IATSE and the AFL unions. In 1926, all the unions
threatened strike, including the projectionists. The exhibitors convinced the producers to
capitulate and sign the Studio Basic Agreement (SBA) on November 26, 1926. As Perry,
Ross, and Nielson all make clear, the SBA did not make Hollywood a closed shop, but its
recognition of the unions helped to further organize the industry.
With an eye towards keeping unionization out of the creative fields of the industry,
the producers formed a new trade organization, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Science (AMPAS) in early 1927, discussed at length in the next chapter. AMPAS was not
only made up of elite producers, directors, writers, and actors but also a fifth branch of

36
Nielson, 107.

166
technicians. Early members of the technicians’ branch included cinematographers, special
effects engineers, and art directors—all workers who should have been represented by
IATSE. The Academy attempted to create a distinction between different types of craft
workers within the motion picture industry. The professions they courted to join the
Technicians’ Branch inevitably fell somewhere between the creative ranks at the top of the
Hollywood hierarchy and the AFL workers at the bottom. AMPAS would further distinguish
their efforts from that of pure labor with the ‘technical’ and ‘scientific’ awards they began
presenting.
The activities of the AMPAS serve to demonstrate how these creative technicians
were much harder to place on one side or the other of a line. It is these skilled workers that
set the motion picture industry apart from any existing industries and entertainment fields.
As such, traditional approaches both by unions and by corporations proved insufficient for
managing this labor. As hard as they tried, the unions struggled to organize the types of
highly skilled technical workers that were unique to motion picture production, such as
cinematography, editing, and lab work. They were much more successful in organizing the
labor that bore easy equivalence to work in the theater or the existing craft unions of the
AFL. At the same time, the studios were primarily concerned with the most expensive (and
least consistent or skilled) labor they managed—actors, writers, and directors. The forms
of labor that fell between these two groups—that of cinematographers, special effects
wizards, animators, editors, and the like—differentiated the organization and structure of
Hollywood from most other major industries. These were professions performing work
with little precedent before the advent of the motion picture industry and with little desire

167
to be seen as mere cogs in an industrial system. The prominence of these workers that
distinguished creative industries from other modern business enterprises.
In 1921, while divvying up the various professions, the AFL had granted jurisdiction
over cinematographers to the Los Angeles IATSE local, but this had quickly proved to be
problematic. According to Nielson, the cinematographers’ status at “the top of the chain of
employment in the craft sector” positioned them as “decision-making technicians” whose
inclusion was necessary for the job security of all IATSE members.
37
But the
cinematographers had formed the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), an
honorary professional association, less than two years earlier. The choice between the
“honor” of the ASC and the potential for stability and improved working conditions with
IATSE was difficult for many.
The cinematographers, perhaps more than any group of workers in Hollywood,
embodied the meeting of technician and artist in the making of motion pictures.
Cinematographic work was a highly skilled and often-creative form of labor unique to the
motion picture industry with no easy equivalency to the work of any of the existing AFL
affiliated unions. This placed cinematographers in a unique position to either accept the
representation and status offered by the IATSE union or to define their work as they saw
fit—a decision with which they frequently battled. The formation of the American Society
of Cinematographers in 1919 and its publication, the American Cinematographer, the next
year, were parts of an attempt to create an image and a community for the “elite”
technicians of Hollywood, even beyond the “first cameramen” at its heart. The ASC, and to a
lesser extent, fellow organizations such as the Electrical Illuminating Engineers’ Society

37
Nielson, “Motion Picture Craft Workers,” 138.

168
(EIES), created a community for technicians, beyond what they believed the unions could
provide.
38
As such, an exploration of the origins and early work of the ASC helps us to
understand the place that these technicians saw for themselves within the industry.
The American Society of Cinematographers grew out of the Cinema Camera Club of
New York and the Static Club of Los Angeles, both founded in 1913.
39
The purposes of these
organizations were largely in unison, as the Cinema Camera Club put it: “to maintain and
uphold the honor and dignity of the art of cinematography, to cultivate the usefulness of its
members, and to create loyalty to their employers.”
40
The two coastal groups merged under
the name of the East Coast organization in 1917, even as more and more prominent
cameramen moved west. Membership waned, as the vast majority of prominent
filmmakers and their crews had migrated to work in the motion picture plants of Los
Angeles, and the East Coast orientation of the Cinema Camera Club and its publication,
Cinema News, no longer served. On December 21, 1918, President Philip E. Rosen held a
meeting in Los Angeles of select members in order to dissolve and re-organize the club.
41

Rosen, the last president of the Cinema Camera Club, became the first president of
the American Society of Cinematographers. A 1924 editorial specifically (and circularly)
points to this as the moment when cinematography became a profession.
The first struggling attempt of the cameramen to form a “club” may be
theoretically regarded as the initial milestone in the establishment of
cinematography as such. In other words, the calling had never theretofore

38
The EIES is frequently referenced in AC as a similar organization for lighting technicians, but I’ve
found little archival evidence of its activities. Editors organized the ‘Film Editors’ association in the
1920s, but little seems to have come of it. Editors and sound engineers did not organize effectively
until well into the 1930s.
39
H. Lyman Broening, “How It All Happened: A Brief Review of the Beginnings of the American
Society of Cinematographers,” American Cinematographer 2, no. 19, (October 15, 1921): 13.
40
“Goodbye ‘Static’ Club,” Cinema News, (November 1917): 10.
41
Broening, “How It All Happened,” 13.

169
been appraised as of sufficient stability as to merit it the name of a
profession.
42

In other words, the profession had to have some sense of stability to warrant a professional
society, and the existence of a professional society indicated how stable the profession had
become. But the ASC and the ‘cinematographer’ title represented a wider swath of motion
picture workers than just the men turning the cranks of Hollywood feature productions.
The membership files of the ASC from the 1920s reveal a diverse group of craftsmen, all
skilled in the technical side of motion picture production, including newsreel and
travelogue producers, aerial specialists, trick and process photographers, and studio
laboratory superintendents. Autobiographies produced for the handwritten ASC
application show a diversity of backgrounds that often included lab work, portrait
photography, and various forms of studio and travel apprenticeship.
43

By the time of the inauguration of their publication, American Cinematographer, in
November 1920 there were seventy members of the ASC. From the beginning, their ranks
included most of the top cameramen in the business, which could be seen through the
filmmakers and stars for whom they worked. David Abel worked for Norma Talmadge,
Tony Guadio shot for Allan Dwan, Fred Jackman and J. R. Lockwood were Mack Sennett’s
cameramen, Charles Rosher shot all of Mary Pickford’s films, and Arthur Edeson was
Douglas Fairbanks’ trusted cranker. Many more members moved from studio to studio
with regularity, as long-term employment with one unit or company was a rarified position
in the teens and twenties. A membership application from the 1920s might show a

42
“A. S. C. Occupies New Offices,” American Cinematographer 5, no. 7 (October 1924): 5.
43
Information comes from a study of 117 ASC member and administration files for cameramen who
joined the organization before 1930. Files largely contained applications, dues collection letters,
and various correspondences with and through the society. ASC Collection.

170
filmography with up to a dozen different studios. For instance, Jackman had moved through
Essanay, Pathé, Keystone, Triangle, Harold Lloyd, and Hal Roach before his more steady
employment with Sennett.
44
Even more impressive, Abel shot for Fine Arts, American,
Goldwyn, Paramount-Artcraft, Select, First National, Ward Lascelle, Fox, Mission, Warner
Bros., DeMille, and Pathé all before 1930.
45

At the same time, some of the most prominent members of the organization never
stepped foot on a Hollywood lot or shot a piece of staged action. Burton Holmes’ travelogue
cranker Herford Tynes Cowling was an early member, while John Dored represented the
organization in Latvia as a Pathé newsman for the Baltic states.
46
The ASC coveted having
members throughout the international motion picture field in its early years. They served
to advertise the organization throughout the world, while the ASC in turn provided contact
with the center of the industry from its cozy clubhouse in Hollywood.
Professional diversity also existed in the membership within Hollywood itself. Roy
Pomeroy (1926) was a trick cameraman who ran the effects department at Famous
Players, while George Schneiderman (1923), longtime ASC treasurer, became the lab
superintendent at Fox. Fred Jackman would leave comedy photography to become a
director and then a visual effects pioneer. These technicians are nearly invisible in the
existing history of Hollywood, as they were considered employees of the studios and were
rarely credited on film prints.
47
But they all retained their memberships and involvement

44
ASC Application Form, February 23, 1923. Fred W. Jackman file, f.250, ASC Collection.
45
ASC Application Form, February 23, 1921. David Abel file, f.2, ASC Collection.
46
Herford Tynes Cowling and John Dored Member Files, ASC Collection.
47
Individual credit on film prints for cinematographers was a major lobbying issue of the ASC
throughout the 1920s.

171
with the organization, even using their unique positions to further the influence of the
cinematographers into these realms.
48

By 1924, the ASC had gained enough stability, both in terms of membership and in
finances, to purchase offices in the newly built Guaranty Building in Hollywood, home to
several important professional organizations of the industry including the Motion Picture
Producers and Distributors of America and the Screen Writers’ Guild.
49
The next year, the
Assistant Cameramen formed their own associated club with twenty-five members and
Arthur Edeson’s assistant Gregg Toland as its president.
50
Like the ASC itself, membership
was open only to established professionals, offering “a point of centralization where
experienced assistants are available to cinematographers and producers,” rather than a
point of entry for outsiders.
51

Throughout 1926, as the battles that would result in the SBA were waged, the ASC
stood firmly against the unionization of the cinematographers, going so far as to render
union members ineligible for membership in their organization.
52
In “An Open Letter” in
American Cinematographer, president Daniel B. Clark explained that the cinematographers
were not against unions “as a matter of policy or principle,” as they had proved “the
salvation of the calling of the projectionists.”
53
Nevertheless, the cinematographers did not
want to be considered among the ranks of such workers, as he regarded the cameraman’s

48
The ASC would not have a female member until Brianne Murphy in 1980. She was also the first
female member of the IATSE Local in 1973. As of 2012, only eight of the 333 ASC members were
women. John Anderson, “The ‘Invisible Art’: A Woman’s Touch Behind the Scenes,” New York Times
(May 25, 2012): AR10.
49
The building still stands, though it is now the home of the Church of Scientology.
50
“Assistant Cameraman’s Club Is Founded; New Members Sought,” American Cinematographer 6,
no. 3 (June 1925): 22.
51
“Assistants’ Club Honors A.S.C. Members,” American Cinematographer 6, no. 4 (July 1925): 12.
52
Foster Goss to Edwin DuPar, August 7
th
, 1926, Edwin DuPar Member File, ASC Collection.
53
Daniel B. Clark, ASC, “An Open Letter,” American Cinematographer 7, no. 5 (August 1926): 8.

172
work “as individual and distinctive to such a degree that it cannot be stereotyped into a set
basis for a wage scale.” He made it clear that the work of the ASC in promoting the stature
and importance of the cinematographer as an artist and technical expert far more
important to the profession than anything a union could accomplish.
This rhetoric from the cinematographers acted as a resistance to a direct correlation
to factory production. The idea that the work of the chief technician is “individual” and
“distinctive” is contradictory to the concept of systematic production. They rejected any
correlation to the skilled, but anonymous and uncreative, workers who toiled under them.
They carved out a position that was not one with the “creative” professions either, as their
special knowledge and skill with the tools of the trade in many ways made them even more
valuable to the operations of the production studio and less replaceable on an individual
basis.
Clark and his organization continued in their resistance even after the studios
signed the SBA, expanding the ASC to include the wide swath of camera workers between
the first cinematographers and the assistant cameramen. In August 1927 the ASC opened
its ranks to 130 new members, creating categories for special process cinematographers,
Akeley specialists, news cameramen, still photographers, and second cameramen, thereby
swelling membership to almost 300. While the editorial line presented in AC focused on the
unification of the “Cameramasters” of Hollywood, the fact that this occurred in the wake of
SBA and on the cusp of the formation of the cameramen’s local implies a political nature to
the move.
54
The ASC was protecting its status as the representative body for the

54
Snyder, Silas Edgar, “Editorial—The Voice of the A.S.C.,” American Cinematographer 8, no. 6
(September 1927): 5.

173
cameramen so as not to be passed over in the important decision-making regarding its
members.
In the wake of the SBA, new IATSE locals were set up exclusively for representing
cameramen in the three major production cities—New York Local 664 in 1926, Los Angeles
Local 659 in 1928, and Chicago Local 666 in 1929.
55
The AMPAS negotiated a contract with
the expanded ASC in 1928, clearly preferring to work with a selective honorary association
run out of Hollywood rather than a local with ties to the largest labor union in the nation.
The argument put forward by the ASC, the AMPP and the Academy, which elevated the
cameramen’s status closer to the creative “above-the-line” labor of the industry, was
persuasive, but the membership in and influence of IATSE Local 659 only grew, leading the
next administration of the ASC to step away from “politics,” and by December 1928, the
ASC administration was ready to disavow its interventions into labor representation.

In a
private letter, Joseph Dubray clarified that the Local and the ASC were completely
unaffiliated, though all members of the latter were also members of the former (but not
vice versa). As he asserted, the aims of the two societies were completely separate, the
union handling the “physical welfare” of the cameramen, and the ASC “remaining the
academic and educational society which it has always been.”
56
His language implied that
the very recent attempts to thwart the unions and negotiate on behalf of its members were
to be forgotten.
Lack of payment of steep ASC dues and the success of Local 659, dubbed the
International Photographers’ Union despite its jurisdiction only in Southern California,

55
These locals would constantly be pitted against each other by the studios until they were united
into Local 600, the International Cinematographers Guild, in 1996.
56
Joseph Dubray to Edwin Dyer (December 12, 1928), Edwin Dyer Member Files, ASC Collection.

174
slowly brought the ASC membership back down by almost half. New president John Boyle
in 1928 moved the ASC away from political ground, clarifying in a letter to the longtime AC
editor Silas E. Snyder that the ASC no longer engaged work for its members, that being the
duty of the International Photographers. As he emphasized,
The principle and in fact the only function of the A.S.C. now is the publication
of the magazine, and, in accordance with your instruction I am trying to solve
this problem so that the book may either be taken over by other interests
that will develop and protect it. Failing in this I would recommend that it be
taken over by the I.P.
57

Rather than take on AC, Local 659 would instead create a competing (and nearly identical)
publication, International Photographer, the very next year, even going so far as to poach
Snyder as its editor. That same year, the next ASC president, John Seitz, would wipe out the
class barriers in membership, which would now be limited for the first time to 150 active,
resident members. Seitz reasserted the ASC’s elite status and independence from any other
organizations, emphasizing its focus on advancing the prestige and technique of
cinematography.
58
Ultimately, it would take the national crisis of the Depression and
government intervention to complete the unionization of Hollywood as it did in most of Los
Angeles, raising the question of whether the motion picture industry would have become
the union stronghold it has been had it developed at any other time.

57
John W. Boyle to Silas E. Snyder (September 14, 1928), John W. Boyle President File, f.582, ASC
Collection, Herrick Library.
58
“A. S. C. Plans Announced,” American Cinematographer 10 no. 3 (June 1929): 6. This period of
retrenchment would last until the massive labor upheavals of 1933, when a recording engineer
strike turned into a general IATSE strike, once again angering the cinematographers by lumping
them in with other “lesser” professions and leading 120 top cameramen to abandon the union for
“five-year personal contracts negotiated with the AMPP companies by the ASC.” Nielson, “Motion
Picture Craft Workers,” 161. Once again, the ASC membership swelled to 400 with a Junior Division
for seconds, assistants, and stills men. William Stull to George Benoit, (February 22, 1934), George
Benoit File, ASC Collection. The matter would be settled in 1936, with the vast majority of
cameramen returning to the IATSE local. John Boyle to Frederick Kley, (March 10, 1936), John Boyle
President file, ASC Collection.

175
The ASC, as an honorary association, succeeded in ways that IATSE failed, not by
offering better conditions or wages, but through its elevation of the status of these
technicians. In fact, the repeated misstep of IATSE (to be replicated by the Academy years
later) was in lumping all studio technicians together, a categorization of which many
cinematographers wanted no part. Despite the eventual ascendency of IATSE and other
unions in Hollywood, the place for honorary associations within the structure of Hollywood
had become set, as evidenced by the enduring influence and importance of these
organizations to this day.
59

The ways in which the ASC built up the cinematographers as artists were important
for creating public awareness and respect within the industry; but it was their equal
trumpeting of the technical knowledge and expertise of the cameramen that allowed them
to hold a seat at the table when the industry moved toward massive technological
upheaval. The cinematographers’ control of the technology of the industry made them
invaluable to the executives who had little understanding of the mechanics of filmmaking.
As much as they asserted their authority in the studio, their setting of the terms for the
entire industry for technical training and standardization bolstered their status. In essence,
the cinematographers were positioning themselves as engineers—figures who had gained
significant status in recent decades, culminating in engineer Herbert Hoover winning the
U. S. presidency in 1928. Engineers represented the elevation of the mechanic through an
association with education, science and progress—associations which the
cinematographers of Hollywood were eager to claim for themselves. They would use these

59
Not only are the AMPAS and ASC still important honorary associations, but many other groups of
workers in Hollywood, such as sound editors (MPSE, founded 1953), have similar invitation-only,
elite organization. Others, such as the Motion Picture Editors’ Guild (founded 1937), began as such
before being incorporated into an IATSE local.

176
same ideals as they conceived of their role in the studio through their organization and
publications.

Industrial Reflexivity and the American Society of Cinematographers
In cinematography there are no apprentices, so-called, but the training is
nevertheless strenuous and thorough. An assistant cannot take his place at the
camera as a cinematographer until he knows his camera and its uses like an
engineer knows his locomotive, or like a scientist knows his laboratory
apparatus.
60

When representatives of the East Coast manufacturers banded together in 1916 to
form their own society, despite numbering many businessmen, managers, and independent
inventors among their ranks, they chose to call themselves the Society of Motion Picture
Engineers, choosing the profession that had come to symbolize the unification of science
and business. Both the actions of the SMPE and the history of engineers in American up to
the early 20
th
century reveal the predominant cultural values that the cinematographers
picked up in their own quest for professional recognition. In many ways, the
professionalization work of the cinematographers up to the late-1920s, mirrors the early
development of the engineering profession in America. Thus, despite their lack of formal,
institutionalized training, the cinematographers in Hollywood likewise began to tout their
esoteric knowledge of the tools of the motion picture trade. They found a powerful vehicle
for this self-reflexive work in the publication of a monthly magazine that would serve to
unite and define their work behind the cameras of Hollywood.
American Cinematograph began in November 1920 as a bimonthly bulletin of the
recently formed American Society of Cinematographers with lists of recently shot films,

60
“Classification,” American Cinematographer 9, no. 4 (July 1928): 5.

177
new work assignments, poetry, editorials aimed at bettering the industry as a whole, and
the occasional technical article. Through the course of the 1920s, the Cinematographer
became a monthly magazine and professionalized more and more with each passing year.
The poetry and spiritualism of earlier editorial filler were replaced by re-publications from
the Transactions of the meetings of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers and in depth
articles by members about proper etiquette for the job or the difficulties and pleasures of
shooting in places like Mexico and Africa. Through its pages, American Cinematographer
formed an ideal image of the professional cinematographer as both an artist and an
engineer. While the former claim brought them prestige and standing among the “creative”
ranks above the line, their status as “engineers,” controlling and even creating the tools of
the trade, gave them power in the emerging Hollywood system.
John Caldwell has explored the contemporary landscape of what he terms
“industrial reflexivity” in his book-length study of Hollywood production culture.
61

Caldwell analyzes various trade publications, public relations efforts, and other reflexive
materials produced by media makers both for their community and for the public. Though
he sees many practices as being derived from or escalated due to the current climate of
heavy competition, digital culture, and outsourcing, most of the modes of reflexivity he
explains were present or being developed in early Hollywood. Therefore, Caldwell’s work
provides a useful vocabulary for analyzing such reflexive practices from earlier times.
Public relations and image creation have always been essential elements of industrialized
motion picture production, and Caldwell himself asserts that the ASC is the “prototype of

61
John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and
Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

178
the kinds of critical industrial theory” on which he focuses.
62
Likewise, Caldwell largely
attributes the elite status that the cinematographers have been able to maintain for almost
a century to these efforts, saying,
Any area that wishes to remain vital—in the face of endless new
technologies, increased competition, and changes in production—must
constantly work, through symbolic means, to underscore the
distinctiveness and importance of their artistic specialization.

The “symbolic” work accomplished by the ASC is seen throughout the pages of American
Cinematographer, as well as in their private advocacy work on behalf of their membership.
From its inception, the American Cinematographer editors seemed intent on
combating the idea of single authorship of a motion picture. While “auteur” theory would
not gain notoriety until the 1950s, the idea of the director as the “author” or primary artist
voice of a motion picture had been established by figures like D. W. Griffith and through
film marketing. In a 1927 ASC policy statement, AC editor Foster Goss ruminated that if the
cinematographers had been as on top of publicity as the directors in the 1910s, “it is quite
within the realm of imagination that the cinematographer would today be the commander
on the set instead of the director!”
63
Along these lines, a 1922 editorial by Goss compared
motion picture production to a football team, where a star quarterback (actor) or a coach
(director) may make it seem like a “one-man affair” in the press, but in actuality, the entire
team was essential to success.
64
Goss went on to combat the notion of the cinematographer
as someone who merely “grinds a crank,” emphasizing both his artistry and his “scientific
knowledge.” Another Goss editorial from 1923 again assured the reader that the

62
Caldwell, 116.
63
Foster Goss, ASC Policy Draft (August 12, 1927) Daniel Clark, f.584 President 1925-28 File, ASC
Collection.
64
Foster Goss, “The Editors’ Corner,” American Cinematographer 3, no. 8 (November 1922): 10.

179
cinematographer should never be “considered as mechanic” just because he worked with a
machine.
65
He made an important distinction between a “mere” mechanical process and
scientific knowledge. Mechanics was the purview of working class toilers, while science was
the realm of the engineer.
Artistry had always been considered one of the distinguishing characteristics of the
cameramen that set them apart from the technical workers beneath them, but by the mid-
1920s prominent figures in the ASC realized that their sophisticated knowledge of the
mechanical side of the business was an even more distinctive advantage. As Goss put it in a
private policy statement, “Our greatest and most effective publicity will come through
inventions, improvements, new ideas, betterment of processes, etc., as a result of
researches of our members.”
66
At this time they realized it was to their advantage to
position themselves as engineers within the system, even more so than as artists.
Being artists might give the cinematographers more respect in the public and even
in the studio, but being engineers made them irreplaceable and modern. This gave them a
bargaining chip in salary negotiations with which the executives could hardly argue. While
the ASC stood against the need for union-determined base pay rates, salary cuts were an
ongoing concern. Throughout several battles against austerity measures, the ASC presented
a consistent argument of the value of the experienced, knowledgeable cameraman. As
George Schneiderman asserted in 1924, “The entire cost of an efficient cinematographer at
a “good” salary is a small item in comparison to other costs, considering what he has to do,

65
Foster Goss, “The Editors’ Corner,” American Cinematographer 3, no. 10 (January 1923): 11.
66
Foster Goss, ASC Policy Draft.

180
his responsibility, results expected and obtained.”
67
His argument, which would be taken
up in later disputes, ran that less skilled individuals would lead to extra costs from waste
and loss of time, factors which had little to do with artistry. In a 1927 letter to secretary
Fred Beetson of the Association of Motion Picture Producers, ASC president Daniel Clark
took the argument even further stating that cinematographers’ salaries should in fact be
raised at a time when austerity measures were being considered.
We feel that, for some time past, the representative cinematographer, in
proportion to what he gives in the creation of a motion picture, has been
underpaid. Aside from this, we know that properly kept statistics would
show that the progress, which the cinematographer has brought about even
in the last year, results in the saving of the amount of his salary—through
production costs which he has eliminated—in the course of the ordinary
production.
68

Clark went on to discuss the unique contribution of the cinematographer to the
craft, which would warrant such an increase in a time of falling attendance. The elevation of
the cameraman as an artist did not make him monetarily valuable to the studios, but his
esoteric knowledge of the tools of production did. Importantly, Clark emphasized that the
cameramen developed new and improved techniques and technology for the studios out of
their own pockets and out of a love of the craft with little to no support from the studios,
who were in turn the primary financial beneficiaries of this effort.
We cannot emphasize too forcibly that if we were concerned only in our
workaday jobs, we would not be spending out leisure time, in meetings and by
individual effort, in endeavoring to find improved methods of
cinematography—methods that eliminate important cost factors in
production… It seems that the producer has learned to accept, as a matter of
fact, the benefits of our leisure hour experimentations, little realizing how
stunted the growth of the industry would be if we should suddenly halt our

67
George Schneiderman, “The Cost of Cinematographers,” American Cinematographer 4, no. 10
(January 1924): 4.
68
Daniel Clark to Fred Beetson, AMPP Secretary, June 27, 1927, Daniel Clark President File, f.584,
ASC Collection.

181
efforts at progress and how great would be the expense to the producer if he
were obliged to pay for these many things which we have evolved in a spirit of
professional endeavor.
69

Without corporate research and development within the studios, the burden of such
activities fell on the technicians themselves—a fact that they now hoped to use to their
advantage. In the midst of the conversion to sound the cinematographers’ realized that
their professional experiments could serve as a bargaining chip with the studios. While
advances in technique and technology had always benefited the bottom line, this was a
minor blip in the larger picture of the studios up to this point. Technology—not just sound,
but in every aspect of production—was moving more and more to the center of
Hollywood’s concerns. With increased rapidity, the cinematographers’ deep knowledge and
ability with the tools of his trade became a more and more significant asset.
The ASC was always quick to highlight the technical innovations and inventions of
its members, emphasizing the value that such intellectual work brought to their employers.
In the earliest years of the ASC, the magazine praised member Jackson Rose for his
invention of the “cinema film tester,” Tony Gaudio invented the telescopic viewfinder and
techniques for shooting at night, and Gilbert Warrenton created devices for easier shooting
at sea.
70
Around 1926, when innovations in technology became increasingly important to
the industry, such coverage of cinematographic invention escalated. In times of austerity,

69
Dan Clark to Fred Beetson, June 27, 1927, Dan Clark President File, f.584, ASC Collection.
70
“Metro Cameraman’s Device Makes Possible Big Development in Pictures,” American
Cinematographer 2, no. 1 (January 1, 1921): 2; “Gaudio Developed New Attachment for Camera;
Collaborates with Mitchell Staff and Opticians,” American Cinematographer 3, no. 11 (February
1923): 15; “New Device for Production of Sea Motion,” American Cinematographer 3, no. 12 (March
1923), 12, 22; “Gaudio Inventor of Epoch-making Device” American Cinematographer 4, no. 8
(November 1923): 5.

182
which were frequent in the volatile entertainment market, the efficiency of the innovations,
along with the aforementioned value of expertise, were emphasized.
71

The studios began to recognize the value of the inventive technological work being
done on the cameraman’s dime, thus in late-1926 studios such as Warner Bros. began
implementing “invention clauses” in their contracts with top technicians. These contract
stipulations made any “invention, novel process of photography, ‘stunt’ or trick” created by
the employee “the sole and exclusive property” of the studio.
72
Paramount contracts
likewise assigned “to the Corporation all inventions, developments, improvements, etc.,
conceived by him during his employment.”
73
While cameramen had often been hired on a
job-by-job basis until this time, these technological developments gave the studios
incentives to hire them for long-term contracts, as they did with creative talent.
Cameramen could and would often be loaned out to other studios when not in use, but the
contracting studio would always retain the rights to any inventive work. The cameramen
seemed to find the loss of ownership (which they had rarely profited from anyway)
worthwhile in exchange for greater job security.
Through the articles and editorials in the magazine, the cinematographers had
asserted their position as the chief technicians in motion picture production, and as such
gained recognition for their technical expertise from their employers and the community.
With no formally trained engineers working in the studio, the cinematographers could lay

71
See for example: “Cinematographer as Economy Unit in Production, “ American Cinematographer
7, no. 3 (June 1926): 7; and “Camera Experiments Bring Film Economy,” American Cinematographer
8, no. 4 (July 1927): 6.
72
Contract from December 13, 1926, Friend F. Baker file, Box 2729, Personnel Files, Warner Bros
Archive. The standard “invention clause” remained the same until it was further expanded in 1933.
73
Farciot Edouart, Contract from July 26, 1933, Paramount Pictures Contract Summaries, f. 714,
Herrick Library. 1933 is the earliest year in which contracts have been preserved.

183
claim to expertise through their years of experience and technological innovations. By the
time of the coming of sound, a hierarchy was firmly in place that put the cinematographer
at the top of the technology food chain. They would be central to several decisions about
what technologies would and would not be used in Hollywood. As such, their trade journal,
American Cinematographer, increasingly became a forum for the sharing of their esoteric
technical knowledge.
From its very beginning, one of the primary purposes of the American Society of
Cinematographers was the sharing of technical knowledge and innovation, and this only
intensified with time. As they asserted in their very first issue of American
Cinematographer, “The man who works the camera must necessarily be a student,
otherwise he will fall into a rut, and then—oblivion.”
74
The pages of AC were
increasingly filled with histories of the development of various technologies, from
lighting to lenses, descriptions of the techniques of various specialties, and reprintings
of papers from the Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers’ meetings.
75

Likewise, yearly reviews of the progress made on various devices and inventions would
often be generated by cinematographers for industry-wide publications, such as Film
Daily or Exhibitors’ Herald and reprinted in AC.
76
These articles not only served to
inform the readership, but they also suggested that the cinematographers were in the
privileged position to share this knowledge.

74
“The Cameraman,” American Cinematographer 1, no. 1 (November 1, 1920), 1.
75
Examples: L. Guy Wilky, “Artificial Lighting and Equipment of Studios: A History of the
Progression of Studio Technique,” American Cinematographer 1, no. 3 (December 1, 1920): 1; Carl
Louis Gregory, “Trick Photography Methods Summarized,” American Cinematographer 7, no. 3 (June
1926): 8-9, 16-17, 20-22.
76
Example: Daniel B. Clarke, “A Mid-Year Cinematographic Review,” American Cinematographer 7,
no. 3 (June 1926): 12.

184
The building of collective knowledge moved beyond the pages of the
Cinematographer into the professional and even personal interactions between the
members. ASC meetings were regularly the site of demonstrations and exhibits of new
techniques and technology both from members and from visiting engineers and
executives from companies such as Kodak and GE. These demonstrations served not
only to increase member attendance, but also to supply those who were privileged with
inclusion with special knowledge unavailable to those on the outside, thus adding to
their elite status. Likewise, members who worked and resided outside of Hollywood
used their connection to the organization in order to keep abreast with such advances.
John Dored, an ASC member living in Latvia and covering news for companies such as
Pathé and Universal, often sent in inquiries about technology, having the ASC
administration write to research labs and technology companies on his behalf.
77

As the changes in technology increased in the mid- to late-1920s these
communications became all the more essential to individuals maintaining their status
within the system. Warner Bros. sent cameraman Edwin Dupar to New York from
Hollywood in mid-1926 and maintained constant correspondence with the leadership of
the ASC as he worked through the problems of sound cinematography on the earliest
Vitaphone shorts.
78
Joseph Dubray, as chairman of the Educational and Research
Committee of the ASC, solicited details from Dupar throughout his tenure in New York,
emphasizing that upon the technical knowledge of the cinematographer depended “the
welfare of the industry,” though he was quick to add that the ASC Board “does not desire

77
Silas Snyder to John Dored, April 16, 1928, John Dored file, ASC Collection.
78
Edwin Dupar member file, f.130, ASC Collection.

185
that you betray any of the details which your organization may desire to keep secret.”
79

Despite the emphasis on sharing knowledge across the profession, they also acknowledged
that there was a point at which the proprietary nature of technology prevailed in the
corporate environment.
In his handwritten letters, Dupar explained in detail how they approached the
challenges of the new technology.
At present am going over the apparatus with the engineers from The Bell
Telephone Co., General Electric and Edison Co., in fact I am going to school
with these fellows for a week or so till I find out what it is all about, then I
will start to photographing, but first I will have to work out a new system of
lighting as the lights have to be noiseless, the recording instrument is so
delicate and sensitive that it picks up the flicker of an arc light. [sic]
80

He shared the details of how the work was progressing, as well as explaining the
technical difficulties. It is evident from the correspondence that the membership saw it
as incumbent upon them to anticipate the potential needs of their employers should the
technique prove popular. Not ones to be taken by surprise, and therefore left behind,
they sought to remain a step ahead of any innovation that might be thrust upon them
from the powers above. Several of Dupar’s correspondences were used in AC articles,
though much of the information seems to have circulated through the clubhouse and at
the meetings in a more informal discourse.
81
Dupar communicated his conclusions that
the use of panchromatic film and Mazda incandescent lamps, neither of which was in
popular use, would be essential for sound filmmaking as early as September 1926, a

79
Joseph Dubray to Edwin Dupar (September 4, 1928), Joseph Dubray file, ASC Collection.
80
Edwin DuPar to Foster Goss (July 17, 1926), Edwin Dupar file, f.130, ASC Collection.
81
“E. B. Dupar, A. S. C. Works on Vitaphone,” American Cinematographer 7, no. 5 (August 1926): 26.

186
year and a half before the industry would officially adopt these technologies as
standard.
82

The moves made by the cinematographers of the ASC to position themselves as
engineers both in the pages of AC and in professional interactions acted as forms of
collective self-preservation, in the face of technological and organizational change. The
ASC members used their networks of communication to protect the importance and
status of their profession through the active sharing of technical knowledge. Likewise,
the emphasis on the esoteric knowledge they had acquired served to demonstrate their
value to the studios at a time of salary cuts and budgetary restraint. Seen together,
these moves positioned the cinematographers as engineers, a position which would be
challenged by the sound engineers that would soon move into the studio space.

The Engineer in the Studio
You ask me about the role of the Cinematographer in connection with the talkies. It
would take a book to give full and complete reply to this, but I can say that the
Cinematographer is not being pushed in the background because of the talkies even
though a lot of so-called sound engineers, who are the reality nothing more than
former telephone operators, are striving to take the camera man’s position in the
spotlight.
83

Given the emergence of the ideals of corporate capitalism, the cinematographers
saw a clear advantage in portraying themselves as a type of engineer in the motion picture
studio. The engineer was the marriage of science and mechanics, elevated above the
common laborer by his esoteric knowledge and his application of theoretic science in his
innovations. Given the informal education and largely working class backgrounds of most

82
Edwin DuPar to Foster Goss, September 22, 1926, Edwin Dupar file, f.130, ASC Collection.
83
Hal Hall to George Benoit, April 5, 1928, Hal Hall Presidential File, ASC Collection.

187
cinematographers, their supremacy was challenged when sound engineers came to
Hollywood. These college and industrially-trained engineers moved in rapidly as all the
studios rushed to convert to sound. As technical experts they clashed with the cameramen
both in terms of on-set hierarchy and in terms of the importance of each particular aspect
of production—sound and image.
The maintenance of the cinematographer’s position was reliant on the continued
supremacy of the visual in motion picture making, which was difficult given the limitations
that the new technology presented. Several cinematographers worked tirelessly to
eliminate these limitations, both for the benefit of production and for the return of the
dominant camera. Much of 1928 presented a period of crisis, in which the cameramen
scrambled to maintain their position of authority over the technical side of the production.
As Donald Crafton has shown, the tumult was resolved within a couple of years with
“traditional Hollywood cinema” reaffirmed and sound subservient to narrative and stars.
84

The cameramen would do their part in reaffirming the systemic structure they had helped
to form through a series of educational programs first on their own and later with the
cooperation of the Academy, but the new structure meant that the cinematographer could
no longer claim to have authority over the entire technical field of Hollywood.
When George Benoit wrote from France to AC editor Hal Hall asking about the
situation in Hollywood, Hall was frank and relayed the general feelings of resentment
toward the sound engineers. His reference to the soundmen as “so-called” engineers and
former “telephone operators” dripped with distain and resentment. Hall called into
question their status as engineers, despite most of them having formal education and

84
Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999), 177.

188
extensive experience in radio or telephony. Hall, both in his correspondence and in the
pages of American Cinematographer, emphasized the ramifications of sound on the visual
realm of motion pictures. The limitations of the equipment presented a challenge to the
cinematographers’ realm, but also offered an opportunity for the cameramen to once again
tout their innovative prowess. Several cinematographers invented their own soundproof
cameras and the large-scale endeavor that became known as the Mazda Tests, discussed
further in Chapter 4, affirmed their position in making decisions regarding technological
innovation.
The activities and rhetoric of the ASC and its mouthpiece oscillated between touting
the long experience of its members (obviously, in contrast to these “new” interlopers) and
their adaptability. The cinematographers took it upon themselves to set up “a school of
instruction” in late 1928, at which a series of lectures by experts from GE, Western Electric,
RCA, and ATT would inform the membership about the workings of the new technology.
The organization consciously presented this action as a move for self-preservation, not
wanting to be “caught flat-footed in the presence of a new duty.”
85
In light of “new”
innovations in the industry, the announcement in AC emphasized the value of experience,
mentioning both the ten years of the ASC and the twenty-five years of work of many of its
members. The ASC presented the endeavor as reflecting their “tradition” of “progress,”
combining the old and the new, making sure to cover every base. Likewise, the
cinematographers were “grand old artists” but “still young in years.” The society’s interest
in “seeking always to do things in the better way” was intended to demonstrate their

85
“A School of Instruction, Editorial—The Voice of the A. S. C.” American Cinematographer 9, no. 6
(September 1928), 4.

189
willingness to take the initiative and maintain their position at the front edge of the
technical field of the industry.
Yet, this rhetoric also revealed a threatened status, the cinematographers were
hedging every assertion and constantly showing awareness of their own precarious
position. In private, the ASC board beseeched members with experience with the new
technology to help their fellow cameramen. Dubray “earnestly requested” that members
Edwin Dupar and Douglas Shearer (who moved from special process camera work to
running the MGM sound and research departments for decades) share “all information and
suggestions dictated by your experience” as part of the educational campaign.
86
Publicly,
they continued to tout their “earned” position at the top of the technical hierarchy. One
editorial painted a heroic portrait of the “unassuming artist-technician” serving for years
“uncomplaining,” “unheralded,” and “cheerful,” who was now deserving of “a seat in the
councils of the industry on equal terms with the representatives of the other departments
of motion picture production.”
87

The rhetoric found in AC in 1928 implies that, at least as these technicians saw it, the
studio executives felt there was little to be gained by educating the cinematographers, or
anyone else in the studio, about the new technology in their midst. In a scathing “open
letter” in October, with liberal use of caps, Snyder posed a series of questions to the
producers about their obstruction of the cinematographers’ learning. As he pointedly put it,
Has it ever occurred to you that the cinematographer can help you bring
sound pictures to the success they deserve, BUT THAT HE CANNOT DO THIS

86
Joseph Dubray to Douglas Shearer, September 4, 1928, Douglas Shearer File, f.465; Joseph Dubray
to Edwin DuPar, September 4, 1928, Edwin DuPar File, ASC Collection.
87
Foster Goss, “The Editors’ Lens,” American Cinematographer 8, no. 5 (August 1927): 5.

190
RAPIDLY IF YOU BAN HIM FROM ACQUIRING THE NECESSARY KNOWLEDGE
OF SOUND by erecting absurd “trade secrets” barriers?
88

They blamed the producers’ new found interest in proprietary technology for the present
acrimony and lack of shared knowledge between “both technicians” on set—evidently
referring to the cinematographer and the sound engineer. Snyder argued that shared
knowledge would allow for cooperation and more rapidly assimilate the sound engineer to
“the intricacies of first class modern cinematography.” Importantly, he asserted that the
soundmen needed to adapt to the existing production process as much as the
cinematographers needed to adapt to the coming of sound. Appealing to the bottom line, he
threatened that a failure to act would “cost you a pretty penny” and maybe even “the good
will of the public” when they tire of “inferior product.”
Clearly, a lack of cooperation from the producers thwarted the ASC’s attempt to
manage their own education, which they saw as emanating not so much from the sound
engineers themselves as from the powers above. The frustrations of the cinematographers
were voiced at the end of that volatile year in an editorial titled “To Hell with Photography!
What About Sound?” supposedly the proclamation of a frustrated soundman at “a certain
large Hollywood studio.”
89
According to the editorial, the cinematographer on that
particular set took the higher ground and did not come back “with a reversal of this
phrase.” Clearly, communication was at a low point with neither side willing to give an inch
to the other. A January 1929 information meeting organized by the Bell Labs, the AMPAS,
the SMPE, and the ASC ended in an hour long “heated” debate between the
cinematographers and sound engineers over the technique of using multiple cameras at

88
“An Open Letter,” American Cinematographer 9, no. 7 (October 1928): 4, 23.
89
“To Hell With Photography! What About Sound?” American Cinematographer 9, no. 9 (December
1928): 4.

191
once, which benefited the sound engineer but hampered the cameraman’s ability to control
coverage.
90
In a March 1929 letter from Silas Snyder to travelling cameraman Jack Smith,
Snyder admitted that they still “don’t know just exactly where we are yet” but assured him
optimistically that “order will come out of chaos, as it usually does.”
91

In the middle of 1929 both sides finally saw the benefit of thawing relations. A short
editorial by United Artists’ soundman Howard E. Campbell entitled “Let Us Have Peace”
asked for “mutual understanding” and “modification of technique,”—not sacrifice, he
emphasized—on both sides.
92
As such, in June 1929 the sound engineers accepted an
invitation to the open meeting of the ASC, a small victory for the cameramen.
93
While this
suggests some thawing of tensions between the two sides, nothing could really be
accomplished until those with authority over both sides intervened, as the Academy did the
next month. It was only once the cinematographers and sound engineers demonstrated this
willingness to cooperate and listen to each other that the producers felt the imperative to
take control of the situation. While they seemed content to stand by while they squabbled,
they could not remain silent while their workers created solutions to the problems without
their input.
94
However reluctant the studios seemed to be to share their “trade secrets,” the
Academy recognized the basic imperative for the industry to have the studio workers be

90
Paul H. Allen, “Sound Engineers Confer with M. P. Technicians,” American Cinematographer 9, no.
11 (February 1929): 13.
91
Silas Snyder to Jack Smith, March 15, 1929, John (Jack) Clifford Smith File, ASC Collection.
92
Howard E. Campbell, “Let Us Have Peace,” American Cinematographer 10, no. 1 (April 1929): 9.
93
Arthur Miller to John Seitz, June 21, 1929, John Seitz President file, f.614, ASC Collection.
94
Some progress had come in the very least from their willingness to cooperate, but not to the
extent that the cinematographers would be willing to go along with the sound engineers’ strike in
1933. That action brings to light the likely reason for the producers’ reluctance to smooth over
relations between the two groups. When employees direct their ire at each other, rather than
working together for their mutual benefit, the powers that be have an easier time maintaining the
status quo.

192
more knowledgeable about the new processes, if only to quell the tensions and frustrations
that were hindering production.
The sound engineers, being new in the industry, had yet to form any kind of
equivalent society. As such, they were represented collectively only by their IATSE local,
which gave them the appearance of “mere” technicians rather than artist/technicians (or
even elite engineers). While motion picture sound can be said to be just as constructed as
the image, especially when one considers such innovations as ADR, voiceover, foley effects,
and underscoring, there was little rhetorical work to forward this idea. The emphasis was
placed on the technical nature of the work—the difficulty of capturing reality clearly. This
was a marked contrast to the rhetoric seen around the cinematographers, who had worked
tirelessly for over a decade to ensure that they were viewed as more than “crank turners”
who merely recorded reality. As such, they were able to establish a role as the chief
technicians on the film set, straddling the technical and creative sides of the industry and
holding a status second only to the director.
The cinematographers had to make room for a technical department over which
they had no power. So, even when the cameramen regained their creative abilities and
control, their role as the chief technicians on the set had suffered a blow. Despite this, the
sound engineer merely became one of many technicians on the set. While the “Best Sound”
category was added to the Academy Awards with its third year, it wasn’t until the fourth
such award, in 1933, that individual sound engineers were recognized, rather than studio
departments. This diminishment of the sound technicians’ importance can be seen to this
day when prominent cinematographers are lionized among dedicated film fans and rarely a
soundman is known at all outside of Hollywood.

193

Conclusion
As the narrative of the cameramen’s attempts to organize and control their status
and reputations makes clear, the late-silent and early sound era in Hollywood was a period
in which the technical work that happened in the studio was defined and categorized.
While the late-1910s and early 1920s saw the producers create the various departments of
the studio, it was the technicians themselves, through their self-promotion and advocacy,
who most influenced who would control the tools of the trade. Self-presentation and the
ability of various workers to position themselves as both engineers and artists largely
determined the hierarchy of technicians. The “irreplaceability” of any given profession was
created through esoteric knowledge of advanced technological tools and the management
of such knowledge by those within the trade. Literature generated for public consumption
emphasized the difficulty of the work and of obtaining such knowledge, which acted as a
means of gatekeeping and self-preservation for those already in the studios. As such, a
system was created for gated entry and promotion not by any executive or efficiency expert
but by those in each profession. Given the unreliable nature of employment in the industry,
this self-regulation worked to keep the labor pool manageable and professionalized.
The esoteric technical knowledge of not only the cinematographers and sound
engineers but also the lighting electricians (or illuminating engineers, as they sometimes
called themselves) and special process workers helped to bolster their status as the studios
grappled with unprecedented technological changes in the late 1920s. Their conflicts with
each other and their willingness to cede individual accomplishments to their studios
prevented them from gaining ground in the upheaval. Events such as the Mazda Tests, the

194
1928 SMPE convention in Hollywood, and the AMPAS Sound School served to further
define the place of such technicians within the larger system and not just the studio. While
they tended to sacrifice ownership over their work and innovations, their advanced
knowledge of the tools that were so essential to keeping the producers in business gave
them an important position at the table. In the next two chapters, I explore these events
that served to bring together the manufacturers of the east and the service firms and
technical workers of Hollywood to created a united motion picture industry with almost
complete control over what tools would and would not be allowed to create the dreams of
audiences across America.
195
CHAPTER 4

Bridging the Divide:
Trade Collaboration and the First Scientific Endeavor in Hollywood

Figure 16. Still from The Wind (MGM, 1928)

While on location in the Mohave Desert shooting Victor Seastrom’s Lillian Gish
vehicle, The Wind (1928), cinematographer John Arnold shot the movie’s spectacular
exteriors with the newly available panchromatic film stock. The film was ideal for outdoor
shooting, as the straight, orthochromatic film used in the Hollywood studios failed to pick
up red spectrum light making it difficult to look natural. In May 1927, Motion Picture News
felt it worthy of reporting that he had also decided to use the pan film for the movie’s
196
interiors, forcing him to switch to using incandescent lighting in the studio.
1
The usual
carbon arc lights let out a bluish hue, so the warm incandescents were a better fit for
panchromatic film. Arnold told the trade paper that the incandescent lights gave better
photographic results with less electrical consumption, increased steadiness and
controllability, and reduced the occurrence of Klieg eyes among the actors and crew.
2

Figure 17. Still of interior shooting from The Wind (MGM, 1928)

The story went on to report that, “Several companies have tried it on a single production,
and there is reason to believe that it will ultimately become an important factor in studio
operation.” Likely picking up the same story, Film Daily reported the same month on “the

1
“Incandescent Lighting Being Used at M-G-M on All Interiors of Gish Films,” Motion Picture News
XXXV, no. 19 (May 13, 1927): 1836.
2
“Klieg eyes” was the colloquial term for irritation of the eyes and skin that resulted from the high
intensity arc light usually used in production to that point.
197
increasing use of incandescent lamps in studio lighting.”
3
Around the same time, Edwin
Dupar, in private correspondence with American Cinematographer editor Foster Goss,
reported that he had been using incandescent lighting and panchromatic film on the
Vitaphone shorts.
4
He likewise claimed better values, no noise, and an assertion from his
electrician that “it cuts the cost of the electrical end about 60 percent.”
Whether they were referred to as incandescents, Mazdas (General Electric’s term),
tungstens, or just “soft” lights, the new lights were making a big showing throughout the
Hollywood studios. MPPDA head Will Hays wrote to his Los Angeles office that Kodak was
sending a lighting expert to consult with the studio executives about the economics “which
may be effected in their lighting plans.”
5
Kodak would pay the engineer’s expenses while he
was entirely at the disposal of the studios. They were not the only company to send
representatives to Hollywood to help the technicians in the studios work with the new
technologies. As the primary manufacturer of high-powered incandescent lights, GE was
equally invested in making sure their tools were being used in the studios.
6

American Cinematographer was ready to declare “A New Era in Lighting,” one in
which the “cinematographer has scored as a pioneer.”
7
The article listed several
cinematographers who had, like John Arnold, been working on their “own initiative” to
improve the work in the studio. The cinematographers were understandably eager to take

3
“S. M. P. E. Observes Technical Advance: Illuminants and Lighting Effects,” Film Daily XL, no. 44
(May 22, 1927): 11.
4
Edwin DuPar to Foster Goss, June 12, 1927, DuPar File, f.130., American Society of
Cinematographers Collection, Margaret Herrick Library. (Hereafter cited as ASC Collection.)
5
Will H. Hays to Fred Beetson, July 19, 1927, Charles Clark Secretary file, f.585, ASC Collection.
6
A New Era in Lighting,” American Cinematographer 8, no. 5 (August 1927): 22. In August, American
Cinematographer reported that GE engineers were in Hollywood to confer with Arnold and MGM’s
chief electrician on incandescent lighting.
7
Ibid.
198
the initiative (and the credit) for a technological innovation that they could claim both
improved the creative output of the studio and lowered costs. In light of the growth of
sound production—a technological change that diminished the cinematographers’
standing—the attention to changing lighting and film stock, clearly in the wheelhouse of
the cameramen, could serve as an effective reminder of their importance.
Following the sentiment that a revolution was happening in the way Hollywood lit
its sets, the newly formed Academy of Motion Picture Art and Sciences (AMPAS) made the
systematic testing of the lights its first major project. The endeavor stretched over several
months involving the labor, equipment, and funding of several studios and service firms
and dozens of cinematographers, actors, and technicians. Even more importantly, the
Academy enlisted the involvement of the existing trade organizations of Hollywood—the
American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) and the Association of Motion Picture
Producers (AMPP)—as well as one new to Los Angeles, the Society of Motion Picture
Engineers (SMPE). The Mazda Tests, as they became know, would bring these
organizations together for the first time and work to create a unified motion picture
technology industry.
Along with American Cinematographer’s assertion of a new epoch in Hollywood, the
Academy claimed it was impossible to “overestimate the great value” of their research into
the new technology.
8
Hollywood’s mass conversion to incandescent lighting was inevitable
with studios disposing of thousands of dollars of electrical and housing equipment to be
replaced by the new Mole-Richardson “Inkies.” Despite the grand rhetoric, when the
Hollywood technicians proudly presented their “scientific” findings to the engineers of the

8
“Academy Week,” Academy Bulletin 9 (April 2, 1928): 3. Academy History Archive, Herrick Library
Digital Collection. (Hereafter Academy History Archive.)
199
SMPE, they pointed out that the improvements the new lights made in color rendering and
electrical efficiency actually were very minor indeed.
9
Far from being an absolute necessity,
the introduction of the new lights never fully eliminated the use of carbon arcs, whose
manufacturers quickly resolved many of the problems that made them difficult to use in
sound production.
10

Given how minor the technological shift really was, why did the Academy and the
rest of the motion picture industry focus so much energy, so many resources, and so much
publicity in touting their research into what was ultimately just a new tool option for
everyday use? The conversion to panchromatic stock, which had gone from virtually zero
to over 90% of the market over the previous year, had happened with little fanfare. In
Classical Hollywood Cinema, David Bordwell has argued that the tests were in reality more
of a chance for technicians to gain experience with the new equipment than a systematic,
scientific comparison of the new lights to the old arcs.
11
Likewise, he convincingly explains
that the long effect of the Mazda tests lay in forging links between the Academy, service
firms, and the SMPE. But questions about this endeavor, how it came to play out the way it
did and what purpose it served, remain.
First, why was this pivotal collaboration not built around the one major
technological shift that dominates all narratives of Hollywood in this period—synchronized

9
Discussion after Research Committee of the ASC, “Incandescent Tungsten Lighting in
Cinematography,” (Hollywood, California, April 9-14, 1928) in Transactions of the SMPE XII, no. 34 :
453.
10
E. A. Williford, “Long Life Photographic Carbons and the Panchromatic Light Transformer”
(Hollywood, California, April 9-14, 1928) in Transactions of the SMPE XII, no. 34 (1928): 560. The
National Carbon Company presented the improvements in their lights at the SMPE conference.
They introduced National Panchromatic Photographic carbons at the Hollywood meeting.
11
David Bordwell, “The Mazda Tests of 1928,” in Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger’s Classical
Hollywood Cinema: Film Style of Mode of Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985):
294.
200
sound? Bordwell acknowledges that these endeavors ran alongside the adoption of sound,
rather than being precipitated them, thus upending the narrative that panchromatic film
and incandescent lighting were adopted because of their suitability to sound work.
12
I
argue that this choice not only reveals the flaws in the old narrative, but also creates a new
narrative. This time of experimentation with “scientific endeavors” and industry-wide
collaboration was deliberately built around a low-stakes technology. The general
consensus about lighting made it a relatively painless test case for “scientific” and
organizational collaboration between the major power centers of the industry. Once these
procedures and institutions became established protocols, they could be applied to the
standardization of the more difficult technological shift of sound. The trade associations of
Hollywood were making a calculated move that demonstrated that they were more
interested in creating networks for collaboration than in making tough decisions about
technological standardization. The fact that the Academy gave no official recommendations
in its 80-page report confirms this approach.
Second, how did the links created between the organizations and service firms
change the way they operated? For the SMPE, coming into Hollywood ultimately meant
changing the very conception of the work of their organization and what it meant to be a
motion picture engineer. In debates in the years leading up to their first convention in
Hollywood, the organization negotiated an approach to the motion picture producers that
would have resonances throughout this first collaboration. In coordinating their
convention with the AMPAS, they were in essence giving legitimacy to the new

12
Subsequent work by scholars in the last thirty year, such as Donald Crafton and Douglas Gomery,
likewise reflects this rewriting of the narrative. See Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s
Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) and Gomery, The
Coming of Sound (New York: Routledge, 2004).
201
organization’s scientific ambitions. The SMPE leadership appeared to view this as the price
for continued relevance in light of a growing Hollywood. In contrast, the ASC approached
both organizations as threats from either side and worked diligently to maintain a position
of influence using their well-established rhetoric as the bridge between the artistic and
technical sides of the industry. While these established organizations sought to stave off
losses to their standing, the AMPAS had the most to gain. Ultimately, by securing the
cooperation of the studios, service firms, and existing trade organizations, the AMPAS was
able to serve the studio executives’ desires to establish authority over this most
complicated aspect of their industry.
Lastly, rather than looking at the Mazda Tests as an isolated event, here I
contextualize them within the institutional histories of the various trade organizations
involved and particularly with the SMPE conference that happened in its midst. By doing
this, rather than attributing the Mazda Tests alone with the end results of instituting
collaboration as an industrial imperative, they can be seen as part of a more sustained
effort from many forces to bridge the divides between the various interests in the motion
picture industry. Far from establishing an end point, the demonstrations and the SMPE
convention in early 1928 would be followed in the next two years by the introduction of
new technician oriented publications such as International Photographer, The Journal of the
SMPE, and The Academy Technical Digest and industry changing enterprises such as the
Academy Sound School and the Technicians’ Bureau. These endeavors, chronicled in the
next chapter, built on and challenged the promises of these early events.
To answer these important questions, this chapter explores the pivotal year
beginning in late-spring 1927, during which time the AMPAS established itself and
202
negotiated its relationship with the existing institutions in the technology side of the
industry. As the chapter narrates, this year would see the formation of the AMPAS, the
establishment of a Pacific Coast Branch of the SMPE, the Mazda Tests, and the first SMPE
convention in Hollywood. Together these events set precedents and created relationships
that would define how technology would be dealt with in Hollywood for decades to come.
Through analysis of the planning, execution, and reception of these events, I show how
each organization was able to find a place of importance for itself in the system through the
medium of low-stakes technological change. In this chapter, I show how endeavors built
around technologies of everyday use in the studio were key to establishing the SMPE, the
AMPAS, and the ASC as the three major technology organizations of the motion picture
industry and gave shape to the place of each within the burgeoning studio system.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: The Reasons Why
There is no firmer foundation than science. There is no industry more
dependent than we are today, upon science. There is no industry more
dependent upon unity than we are today, and there is no more perfect
means of acquiring that unity than the realization of Mr. Mayer’s dream,
the Academy.
13

–Cecil B. DeMille

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (hereafter AMPAS or the
Academy) was the first motion picture industry organization to use the lofty title of
“Academy.” The title invoked abstract ideals such as achievement, progress, and education.
While recent scholarship has brought to light its status in its early years as a “company

13
Cecil B. DeMille, “Speeches Presented at the Banquet Given by the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences in Honor of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers,” (Hollywood, California, April
9-14, 1928) in Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 8, no. 33 (1928): 20.
203
union” dealing with labor disputes, it was conceived of as much more than an association
concerned with the collective representation and physical welfare of its members.
14
An
Academy meant something altogether different—an aspiration to a higher status for the
industry. Importantly, from its very name, this status would not be obtained solely from
elevating the status of motion pictures to an art form, a tactic that already had a long
history, but also from recognizing its accomplishments in science. While the Academy
would remove itself from any association with labor representation by the late-1930s, its
involvement in motion picture science and technology persists to this day in the form of the
Science and Technology Council and the annual Sci-Tech Awards.
However important the sciences of motion pictures were to the legitimization of
both the Academy and the industry, in the 1927 pamphlet, The Reasons Why, in which the
founders laid out their case for the new organization, it was presented as a movement of
the creative class taking their interests into their own hands.
15
Their appeal to the
“creative” workers in the studios was somewhat misleading, as the primary forces behind
the organization were production executives and administrators.
16
Indeed, while the

14
The “company union” title used in press coverage and subsequently picked up by recent scholars
such as Douglas Gomery and Peter Decherney was something the Academy itself balked at.
However, much of its early activity did indeed focus on resolving disputes between the creatives of
the motion picture industry. See Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System: A History (BFI, 2005) and
Peter Decherney, Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2006).
15
As they explained to potential members, “we of the creative forces in this industry… have done
nothing effective either to harmonize or correct conditions within our own ranks or to cooperate
for the welfare of the industry as a whole.” The Reasons Why (Pamphlet), Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences (1927), Academy History Archive.
16
Producers included Louis B. Mayer (MGM), M. C. Levee (WB), and Joseph Schenck (UA).
Prominent administrators included Frank Woods (AMPAS secretary) and Fred Beetson
(MPPDA/AMPP executive secretary and Central Casting president). While these were the producers
making ultimately creative decisions on the studio lots and not the primarily financial executives
back east, they did, nonetheless, have authority over those in the other four branches of the
Academy—directors, writers, actors, and technicians.
204
literature produced by the Ac around its organization emphasized the “harmony and
solidarity” of the branches, the producers’ branch would, in practice, exert authority over
the activities of the other branches and even the executive board itself.
17

The language of the Constitution and By-Laws acknowledged that there was a larger
industry beyond the AMPAS’s concern with and representation of the production side. It
laid out the purposes of the Academy, one of which was dealing with the Motion Picture
Producers and Distributors of American (MPPDA) or “any other organization or association
whose objective is the betterment of the motion picture industry as a whole.”
18
As such,
they acknowledged existing institutions set up to represent various interests, even beyond
the explicitly named MPPDA, whose focus was increasing concentrated on censorship.
Indeed, in another brochure produced after incorporation, they were at pains to express
that the Academy’s functions “are not meant to duplicate, interfere with or usurp those of
any other existing organization.”
19
Rather the Academy sought to carve out a place for itself
among and, more significantly, above the existing institutions of the industry.
The structure laid out in The Reason Why and reiterated in the organization’s bylaws
institutionalized the concept of five branches of the industry (Producers, Actors, Directors,
Writers, and Technicians), each with three members on the Board of Directors and their
own executive committee of five. These were often referred to as the “creative” branches of

17
While there is much yet to be said about how this outsized power manifested itself in the
Academy’s function in conflict resolution in the early years of its operation, this activity rarely
involved the technicians’ side of the industry. Instead, the focus in this project is on the producers’
involvement in the “scientific” endeavors of the Academy.
18
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Constitution and By-Laws (1927): 1-2. Academy
History Archive. The other four were cooperation between the branches “to aid and encourage the
development of the production branches of the motion picture industry,” the establishment of an
industry welfare system, the ability to buy or lease property and to contract with others.
19
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, brochure (June 20, 1927): 5. Academy History
Archive.
205
the industry, as a means of distinguishing them from the laborers working in and around
the studios. This designation meant that when they created a Technicians’ Branch, it was
not open to all technical workers in Hollywood, but only to certain classes whose work was
deemed suitably creative.
The Academy’s definition of who constituted a creative technician was both
expansive and highly concentrated at the time.
20
While we might be tempted to imagine a
structure in which the members of the Academy’s current branches, such as
cinematographers, production designers, makeup artists, and editors, are all lumped
together, the representation in 1927 was not equivalent to what we see today. Rather, the
vast majority of the members were cameramen and art directors—professions with an
obvious (and, in the former case, hard fought) status as artists. Art directors had the
advantage of doing work that bore obvious similarities to established arts and that was
highly visible in the final product. Of the nineteen members of the Technicians’ Branch
considered cinematographers (a more expansive term in the silent era), five were primarily
effects artists and one was an engineer turned color cameraman. The rest were prominent
first cameramen (who soon began calling themselves directors of photography), most of
whom were members of the ASC.
The early advocacy work of the cinematographers and their organization had
elevated them so that an organization such as the AMPAS, which sought to selectively
represent the best technicians of Hollywood, recruited heavily from their ranks. In contrast,
film editors, who had yet to organize or self-reflectively advocate for the elevation of their

20
The analysis of Academy members in the next two paragraphs derives from The Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences brochure published on June 20, 1927. The professions of the
members of the technicians branch were determined through searches of trade publications
through the Media History Digital Library’s Lantern search engine.
206
work, had no representation in the Academy at its founding. After the fourteen art
directors, the remaining members of the branch each essentially represented a different
profession, including laboratory superintendents, electrical engineers, production
managers, and sound engineers.
21
But the inclusion of a casting director was most
revealing of the branches’ status as a catch-all category for anyone who did work other
than writing, directing, and acting in motion picture production and was deemed worthy of
inclusion in this elite organization.
Despite the uneven representation of the various professions in the Technicians’
Branch as a whole, the branch membership attempted to evenly represent their interests in
their leadership. At the meeting in which the branch elected its Executive Committee, the
members chose to equally apportion the positions among the classes of workers in their
ranks, which they described as “art, photographic, electrical, and laboratory.”
22
This
disconnect between the Academy’s estimation of who was worthy of membership and the
technicians’ view of their field would lead to near constant change in the structure of the
Academy’s technical branch(es). The overall structure of the Academy, in which all elite
motion picture workers could be fit into five tidy categories, would be increasingly
complicated as the Academy grew in size and influence. But the Academy resisted the

21
John Nickolaus was the laboratory man, Louis Kolb and H. H. Barter were the only electrical
engineers, J. J. Cohn was the sole production manager, and Nathan Levinson was the only
representative of the newest department—sound. Perhaps the most interesting member was L. H.
Tolhurst, maker of microscopic scientific films. The casting director was Robert McIntyre.
22
“The Technicians’ Branch holds the record for attendance,” Academy Bulletin 2 (June 17, 1927): 2.
Academy History Archive. Indeed, the committee included art director Wilfred Buckland (as
chairman) and cinematographer Al Gilks, along with the only laboratory man (Nickolaus) and one
of the two electricians (Kolb). Perhaps anticipating the future of the industry, the secretary was the
sound engineer J. T. Reed, who had only recently joined the organization.
207
fragmentation of the Technicians’ Branch, keeping them limited in their representation in
the organization’s leadership through the 1940s.
While the Academy in its first months had yet to acknowledge the existence of the
faraway SMPE, it was quick to make dealings with the major technicians’ society in their
backyard—the American Society of Cinematographers. The ASC represented much more
than just cameramen, as visual effects artists, laboratory superintendents, and newsreel
men were well represented in the organization. Additionally, the service firms,
laboratories, electricians, editors, and manufacturers had learned to cater to the
cinematographers and rely on their publication, American Cinematographer, as a source of
technical information, community, and directed advertising. As such, both the Academy and
the newly interested SMPE would have to contend with the needs and desires of this group
of elite workers in order to bolster their status in the system.

The ASC Responds: Loyalty, Progress, Art
In August 1927, as the AMPAS was finding its footing and the SMPE was searching
for the road to Hollywood, American Cinematographer editor Foster Goss, who had
overseen the expansion of the publication over the last six years, wrote his last editorial.
Goss announced that the cinematographer had “served his apprenticeship” and was ready
to take his place at “a seat in the councils of the industry on equal terms with the
representatives of the other departments of motion picture production.”
23
Goss retired
having done his work of elevating the cinematographer to equal status with the director,
writer, and star. A note of bitterness entered his description of the recent technological

23
Foster Goss, “The Editors’ Lens,” American Cinematographer 8, no. 5 (August 1927): 5.
208
focus in Hollywood as the “chemicalization” of the industry. He returned the publication to
his predecessor Silas Snyder, whose ambitions for the magazine were in sync with
Hollywood’s newfound lust for technological innovation. Snyder and the leadership of the
ASC would steer an ambitious campaign to make sure the cinematographers had an
important place in the new institutional structure of Hollywood.
At the same time that the Academy was establishing itself with the inhabitants of the
Hollywood studios, the ASC was going through its own identity crisis. Snyder’s first
editorial upon returning to American Cinematographer announced the doubling of the
ASC’s roster to claim the loyalty of all the “cameramasters” of Hollywood as part of the
ongoing labor disputes.
24
Along with the new AC editor and 150 new members, came a new
pyramid structure for the ASC that added several committees devoted to the tenets of the
society’s motto—loyalty, progress, and art. Near the top of the pyramid, just under the
Board of Directors, sat the Research Committee, filled with prominent cinematographers,
but also somewhat presumptuously naming Eastman Kodak Laboratories and Thomas
Edison among its members. This committee would be important to asserting the ASC’s
place in the events of the coming months, giving the organization an established,
authoritative structure for practical implementation of often idealistic, abstract plans.
In light of the flux in Hollywood’s institutional structure in late 1927, ASC president
Daniel Clark presented a front for the cameramen that asserted their elite status both as
artists and as technicians. In a November editorial in AC, Clark first asserted the
“independence and self-government” of his organization from any labor union and

24
Silas Edgar Snyder, “Editorial—The Voice of the A. S. C.,” American Cinematographer 8, no. 6
(September 1927): 5. While the expansion of the organization was largely precipitated by the
previous years’ Studio Basic Agreement allowing labor unions into the studios, it is equally notable
that it happened within months of the foundation of the AMPAS. See Chapter 3 for more.
209
specifically the AFL.
25
Clark went on to explain that the ASC was “respected by all
departments of the industry,” as both “the strongest organization of artists in the picture
industry” and “the leading technical group.” These assertions clearly conflicted with the
desires and claims of the AMPAS on the one hand and the SMPE on the other. Clark
presented a counterargument to the increasingly obvious reality that the ASC would have
to accept second place status in both arenas or risk losing any status at all.
Despite American Cinematographer running reprints of SMPE Transactions papers
beginning in 1922, their membership had little contact with the organization up to this
time. As the sole member of both organizations, Herford Tynes Cowling of Eastman Kodak’s
Teaching Films Department became their primary contact with the East Coast society at
this pivotal moment.
26
As the ASC’s most active contact both with Kodak and the SMPE,
Cowling maintained regular correspondence with the cinematographers from his offices in
Rochester. Seeing the importance of increasing their contact, the ASC appointed Cowling to
their publicity committee in 1927, around the same time he was appointed to the SMPE
membership committee. Being an ASC member with little experience in Hollywood,
Cowling likely appreciated being a privileged conduit to the motion picture production
center.

25
Daniel Clark, “The A. S. C. and the A. F. L.,” American Cinematographer 8, no. 8 (November 1927):
11.
26
Cowling had joined the ASC in 1921 when he worked for Burton Holmes’ travelogue company,
and he became a member of the SMPE on his move to Kodak in 1927. He attended the April SMPE
meeting (at which the future of the industry was so hotly debated) as the ASC’s official
representative. Discussion after Hickman, “Hollywood and the Motion Picture Engineers,” (Norfolk,
Virginia, April 25-28, 1927) in TSMPE IX, no. 29: 43. Cowling attending the March 1926 SMPE
meeting while still working at Burton Holmes, as he made comments on the paper on “Educational
Value of Motion Pictures.” The SMPE added him to the Membership committee that same year,
perhaps hoping his connection to the West Coast organization would be fruitful in filling their
rosters. “Committees (1927-1928),” (Lake Placid, New York, September 26-29, 1928) in TSMPE XI,
no. 31 (1928): 422.
210
The relationship proved valuable to the ASC, as shortly after Snyder’s return to AC
as editor, he asked Cowling to give him the scoop on “the situation” in regards to the
SMPE.
27
The papers American Cinematographer had received from the SMPE in the past had
come through “one or two members who occasionally send me some good material.”
Snyder’s goal was to turn AC into “the technical organ of the motion picture industry” and
he urged Cowling to get SMPE members to “broadcast their stuff” through the
Cinematographer. The SMPE had at least a dim awareness of AC going back to 1924, as the
cinematographers were perpetually in a quest to boost circulation and influence. Yet the
organization was not circulating the Transactions publication much outside of the SMPE’s
membership, and reprints in other trade publications were haphazard at best. Cowling
addressed the lack of wide circulation for the SMPE publication, whose goal was to keep its
own membership, rather than a wider audience, informed. He encouraged Snyder,
suggesting that the SMPE was favorably disposed to AC being the official publication of the
SMPE.
28

The proposal of a merger between American Cinematographer with the Transactions
of the SMPE at this moment reflected the desires of the two organizations to gain entry into
each other’s worlds. While the ASC saw the SMPE’s work as a means for bolstering its
influence and ability to operate as the clearinghouse for technical information and
innovation in the industry, the SMPE likely saw value in the ASC’s deep membership within
the studios as well as AC’s status as an established magazine with global reach. The back
and forth about the potential merger went on for another two years, until the SMPE

27
Silas Snyder to Herford Tynes Cowling, September 29, 1927, Herford Tynes Cowling File, ASC
Collection.
28
Cowling to Snyder, October 17, 1927, Herford Tynes Cowling File, ASC Collection. This subject is
discussed at length in chapter five.
211
launched its own journal, much to Snyder’s chagrin. For the moment, both parties decided
to table the suggestion in favor of smaller attempts at collaboration.
In addition to transforming American Cinematographer into a more technical
publication, the ASC modeled other practices that would align them with established
engineering societies such as the SMPE. In Foster Goss’ Policy Draft for the ASC before his
retirement, he urged the society to continue making tests on cinematographic subjects,
have all new equipment tested under their guidance, push for the establishment of a
research laboratory in Hollywood, and make the ASC meetings more educational and
informative.
29
These were all endeavors designed to reinforce the cinematographers’ status
as the technicians in charge of selecting tools for the studio. In these areas, the ASC would
have to contend with the new organization in its own backyard, the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences.
Several editorials in American Cinematographer in mid-1927 focused on the value
and status of the cinematographers within the Hollywood economy, an implicit
counterargument to the threat of the AMPAS to the ASC’s stature.
30
Despite a strong ASC
showing in the early membership rolls of the AMPAS, AC took little note of the new
organization in its editorials and articles. The first direct address revealed the ambivalence
about the organization from some of the less powerful creative professions of Hollywood.
In an article by Screen Writers’ Guild President Grant Carpenter titled “The Art of Getting
Together,” Carpenter lamented the lack of cooperation between the various branches in an

29
Foster Goss, “ASC Policy Draft” (August 12, 1927), Daniel Clark President (1926-28) File, f.584,
ASC Collection.
30
Examples: Foster Goss, “Efforts at Economy,” and “Camera Experiments Bring Film Economy”
American Cinematographer 8, no. 4 (July 1927): 5, 6. Foster Goss and Silas Snyder’s editorials
throughout the later half of the year heavily focus on the status and importance of the
cinematographer within the industry as a whole.
212
industry that, in his estimation, developed a division of labor too rapidly. In particular he
criticized top down attempts at collaboration since the producers, “with no skill in any of
the arts or crafts involved,” could not understand, much less solve, “the complex problems
that arise with each attempt to combine them.”
31
Instead, Carpenter proposed a system in
which the producers provided only aid and encouragement to the artists and craftsmen
who each managed their own field. He acknowledged the possibility of the AMPAS
accomplishing this but doubted they would take the necessary steps, advocating instead for
the continued importance of professional associations such as the ASC and his own Screen
Writers’ Guild.
32

Carpenter’s skeptical article and the many AC editorials reasserting the importance
of the ASC suggested that many in Hollywood were dubious about the Academy’s ability to
be run in any kind of egalitarian manner. The AMPAS was indeed managed by producers
and professional administrators who were closely involved in other producer-run
organizations such as the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors’ of America (MPPDA)
and the Association of Motion Picture Producers (AMPP). There was actually little daylight
between these organizations, as the AMPP had become, in essence, the West Coast office of

31
Grant Carpenter, “The Art of Getting Together,” American Cinematographer 8, no. 8 (November
1927): 21.
32
Carpenter’s dubious feelings about the Academy were much more blatant in personal
communication than in this published text. Carpenter had initially come into contact with the ASC
through a conversation with Joseph Dubray in which he predicted the “natural death” of the AMPAS
due to its “non-democratic principles.” Rather than the vague hopefulness presented in his editorial,
according to Dubray, Carpenter revealed a complete lack of trust in any of the three organizations
managed by the producers. As Dubray recounted to Dan Clark in a letter, Carpenter claimed that the
MPPDA, AMPP, and AMPAS “are three entities each one of which will constantly disavow whatever
agreements are entered into by any of the others.” Instead, Carpenter expressed his deep
admiration for the ASC and his hopes for greater unity between the “three creative entities” in the
industry—the writers, the directors, and the cinematographers. Dubray presented this information
to Clark matter-of-factly and without question. Clearly, the AMPAS would have to work to gain the
trust and participation of these branches of the industry. Joseph Dubray to Dan Clark, October 10,
1927, Dan Clark File, f. 584, ASC Collection.
213
the MPPDA, representing the input of the Hollywood executives in that larger, New York-
based organization.
33
Fred Beetson, the executive secretary of the AMPP (and therefore the
MPPDA) beginning in 1924 and Central Casting in 1925, was one of the 36 founding
members of the Academy, despite never having worked in any of the creative professions
of the industry. Notably, Beetson was consistently put on AMPAS special committees
dealing with specific policies and events of importance, especially with regards to
technology. He often served a watchdog function on behalf of the producers, monitoring
finances and securing vendors and permits.
Though the AMPAS was a new type of organization, supposedly run by the creative
professions, in practice, it merely reinforced the existing power structure of Hollywood. For
example, when the ASC assembled a “code of ethics” for employment conditions for
cinematographers, they submitted their proposal to the Technicians’ Branch at a regular
meeting.
34
It was then referred to a special committee of two cinematographers from the
Technicians’ Branch, one director, and two members of the Producers’ Branch, one of
which was Beetson.
35
This was after meeting with the MPPDA about these same
cinematographers’ concerns that also included Beetson as that organization’s
representative.
36
Thus, despite having this new body in which all groups were represented
equally, the procedures put in place would always give final approval to the same

33
The AMPP was actually established in 1916 as the Motion Picture Producers Association (MPPA).
But when the MPPDA came along in 1923, the two were merged and the former slightly altered its
name. It later became the AMPTP – Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, while the
MPPDA transformed into todays Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
34
“Cinematographers’ Code,” Academy Bulletin 7 (February 1, 1928): 1-2. Academy History Archive.
35
Tony Gaudio, Karl Struss, Fred Beetson, J. J. Gain, and Victor Fleming.
36
“Attention A. S. C.” American Cinematographer 8, no. 6 (September 1927): 26.
214
production executives and administrators who ran all of the other organizations and/or
signed their paychecks.
Ultimately, in its earliest days, the Academy most effectively served as a centralizing
body to create procedure and structure around disputes and petitions between various
professions. Nevertheless, providing a forum for the ‘lesser’ creative professions, such as
technicians, to bring their concerns to the producers is not to be dismissed as an important
accomplishment of the AMPAS. If the Academy was going to gain any sort of power in the
scientific areas of the industry, it would have to listen to the technicians in the studios and
find ways to communicate with their corporate suppliers. As such, the ‘engineers’ in their
midst, and their loyalty to their employers (namely, the studios) would be a crucial
component of legitimizing the Academy’s attempts to be a standard bearer for
technological innovation and standardization. It would also be incumbent upon the ASC to
shepherd through priorities that focused on technologies on which the cinematographers
could claim authority. The makeup of the Academy Technicians’ Branch, with the
cinematographers well represented, and the outsized status of the ASC compared to other
technicians’ organizations (as much as they exited at all) are important factors to
understanding the moves the AMPAS made into the technology sector, particularly their
decision to focus these endeavors on the technologies of studio lighting.

Inventing the Mazda Tests
A time must come when the American industry as a whole must take steps to
maintain its world monopoly, and at that time there must be a great growth
and unification of research.
37

37
K. C. D. Hickman, “The Future Policy of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers,” 315.
215

In its first months of existence, the Academy focused its efforts on establishing a
concrete, executable agenda that would further its stated purposes. When it came to the
scientific side of the organization, the Academy’s leaders appeared to be searching for some
way to exert authority while engendering the cooperation of, rather than competition with,
existing organizations. The ASC was eager to participate in the activities of the Technicians’
Branch, despite any lingering questions about the organization’s legitimacy. By actively
encouraging not just those who were AMPAS members but all members of the ASC to
attend its meetings, as well as to take on key elements of its agenda, the Academy quickly
gained a group of active participants for its endeavors, however bothered they were at
being lumped in as mere ‘technicians.’ The Academy’s first attempt at establishing a
scientific agenda in August 1927 was an announcement of plans for “a research and
technical library and an experimental laboratory,” thereby adopting a long-term goal of the
ASC.
38
As the Academy narrowed in on something to accomplish in an expedient manner,
an experimental laboratory for the general use of Academy technicians was quickly put on
the backburner, along with other early ideas such as a museum. At the same time, the
AMPAS sought to find ground for themselves not already thoroughly covered by either the
MPPDA or the SMPE.
As the Academy focused most of its energy throughout the rest of 1927 on labor
disputes and establishing protocols for its myriad meetings, the rest of the industry was
trying to figure out how to handle the rising use of incandescent lighting and panchromatic
film in the studios. While most studios treated synchronized sound like color and other
experimental, novel technologies—carefully managing them on a few isolated productions

38
Academy Bulletin 4 (August 10, 1927): 2. Academy History Archive.
216
and facilities—the new lighting and film stock were quickly being brought into regular
studio production. The quick rise of these technologies would give the Academy an
opportunity to flex its organizational mettle and scientific authority.
Rather than taking on the industry-altering technology that was sound, in lighting,
the AMPAS saw a relatively painless means of establishing its institutional authority. Many
companies had become invested in Hollywood’s conversion to incandescent lighting and
panchromatic film, however, they were not all entirely enthusiastic about it. Eastman
Kodak had discouraged the use of panchromatic film for a decade and a half due to its
creation of “problems in practically every phase of our operation.”
39
But with increased
competition from DuPont and the beginnings of increased demand for use in sound work,
they reluctantly began marketing this product to the studios.
40
The need was heavily tied to
the use of incandescent lights, which were quieter and therefore more suited to sound
production. But even on silent productions, many cinematographers and directors were
discovering a preference for working with these ‘new’ technologies. Frequently, one was
adopted without the other, as the vast majority of productions were using panchromatic
film well before incandescent lights took hold of Hollywood.
41

While this shows the loose, improvisatory approach to technologies of every day use
in motion picture production at the time, it also reflects the infrastructural reality of the
two changes. Film stock was a resource that had to be made and purchased anew for each

39
L. A. Babbitt, “Kodak Park Activities, 1921-1940: A Preliminary Report,” W. J. Cullen, Folder 6, Box
97, Series VI, Kodak Historical Collection, University of Rochester Special Collections.
40
See chapter one for more.
41
See “Questionnaire Results,” Academy Report No. 1 on Incandescent Illumination (Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1928), Academy History Archive, which shows charts in which
the vast majority of films were being shot on panchromatic film, whether they used incandescent or
arc lighting.
217
production. Likewise, panchromatic film could be used in the same cameras and developed
in the same labs as orthochromatic film. All of this meant that it made little difference from
the executive perspective if the cinematographer chose one stock or the other, particularly
once Kodak brought down the price of pan to match standard orthochromatic. On the other
hand, incandescent lighting utilized completely different housing lamps and electrical
requirements. This meant that conversion would necessitate the replacement of thousands
of dollars worth of permanent studio equipment. While this was hardly the same radical
financial (or creative) investment as sound, it certainly made the conversion of greater
interest to the executive class.
Fred Beetson, ever concerned with ways in which he could make the industry more
modern and efficient, sent out a survey to all of the studios on behalf of the AMPP in August
1927 to make “a critical study of the brightness and brightness distribution in typical
motion picture studio scenes.”
42
He asked for samples to be sent in to represent the
average quality of negative produced by the various cameramen and studios. He solicited
each member studio to send six to ten sample negatives “from as many different
cameramen as possible” with information on the cameraman who shot it and what film,
lenses, lens apertures, camera shutters, and lighting he used. It is unclear what type of
response Beetson received, but it cannot have been great, given that the Mazda tests
(which did essentially the same work) were soon viewed as a necessity.
43

The experimentation in Hollywood gained the attention of the SMPE engineers
when Peter Mole, of the Mole-Richardson Lighting Company of Hollywood, sent a paper to

42
Fred W. Beetson to “All Members,” August 4, 1927, Daniel Clark President File, f.584, ASC
Collection.
43
The AMPAS would send out two more surveys in January and March 1928 that would gain a
healthy response and be included in the Academy Report No. 1 on Incandescent Illumination.
218
be read at the SMPE meeting in Lake Placid. Mole and his partner had recently left Creco
(another Hollywood lighting company) to start their own company. Using Mole’s
connections to his former employer, GE, the new company became the largest source of
incandescent lighting equipment for the studios. As such Mole was the obvious person to
present to the engineers, “The Tungsten Lamp Situation in the Studio.”
44
The paper
described the use of panchromatic film by this time as “general,” necessitating the change
in lighting systems. According to Mole, the use of incandescents with panchromatic began
with commercially available, low wattage lights used for close ups. With “satisfactory”
results, the cinematographers desired a source of light for illuminating “their entire set.”
Since there were no commercial products available, studio electricians came to Mole to
make 24-inch housings and mirrors for 10k lights. Cecil B. DeMille then used these lamps
for a location shoot at West Point, as they were lighter and easier to transport, since
mirrors could be used to focus and amplify the light. When several other studios began
purchasing the equipment from Mole-Richardson, Mole gained the cooperation of
cinematographers, officials, and chief electricians to continue “running tests and making
demonstrations.”
As Mole’s history of what he estimated as the first nine months of use of
incandescent lighting in the Hollywood studios shows, trial and error testing of the
technology was already happening. With Beetson’s attempt to survey the work already
occurring in the studio, there was a sense that the technology was being worked through
by general use and a somewhat anecdotal sharing of knowledge among technicians, as had

44
Peter Mole, “The Tungsten Lamp Situation in the Studio,” (Lake Placid, New York, September 26-
29, 1928) in TSMPE XI, no. 31 (1928): 582. The discussion afterward makes it apparent that it was
read by Farnham. Mazda was the GE name for incandescent lights. Tungsten was another name, and
Mole-Richardons developed the nickname “Inkies.”
219
been the custom up to this point in the industry. In the subsequent questions after Ralph
Farnham of GE presented Mole’s paper, he answered questions about heat and makeup,
common concerns about studio lighting that he described as slightly improved. Farnham
was in a privileged position to answer any questions about the technology, as GE provided
the high wattage lights used in Mole-Richardson’s housings. However, any information he
could provide about how they functioned in the studio was received secondhand through
Mole and the GE Los Angeles representatives. Essentially, the SMPE was receiving all
secondhand knowledge.
Mole was heavily invested in Hollywood’s conversion to the new lighting system,
having left his position at Creco because his employer had lost faith in the development of
the technology.
45
His new company focused all their efforts (and fortunes) on what they
saw as the future of the industry. Mole’s continued relationship with his former colleagues
at GE gave him an advantage in working with the high-powered lamps they produced. Mole
likewise knew that a close relationship with the cinematographers would be key to gaining
acceptance and new adherents within the studios. Mole wrote to American
Cinematographer editor Silas Snyder thanking the members of the ASC for their help and
cooperation in developing incandescent equipment for studio lighting.
46
He recognized that
the cinematographers were influencing key decisions about the tools used in the studios,
and without their support no amount of lobbying or innovation would matter.
With assertions from engineers, technicians, and the trade press all touting the
aesthetic, health, and economic benefits of the lights, it was beginning to look like a forgone

45
Keva Marcus, 20 Years of Starlighting, (Pamphlet), Reprinted from International Photographer
(December 1947): 3. Mole-Richardson Company Archive, Hollywood.
46
Peter Mole to S. E. Snyder, December 15, 1927, Box 8, GC 1905 Motion Picture Collection, Earl
Theisen Motion Picture Collection, Seaver Center for Western Historical Research, Los Angeles.
220
conclusion that the studios would convert en masse. In October, Film Daily referred to the
work going on in the studios as “preliminary tests” of the new technology that were
proving “successful,” giving an air of formality to the haphazard conversion.
47
At the
Academy Technicians’ Branch meeting on November 16
th
, members expressed concerns
with this accelerating change. In the Academy Bulletin report on the meeting, the new
lighting “variously known as tungsten, mazda, incandescent and soft” was discussed “at
some length.”
48
Though everyone agreed that the process would be “universal” in the Los
Angeles studios within the year, “not over six or seven cinematographers out of three
hundred” were “sufficiently familiar” with the method. Therefore, the branch
recommended that they, along with the Producers’ Branch, and the ASC hold a series of
formal demonstrations at one of the studios.
The Academy presented the purpose of the demonstrations as familiarizing the
cinematographers and other technicians with both incandescent lighting and panchromatic
film in order that the process would be “practically possible when its installation becomes
more general.”
49
Nothing in the report of the meeting suggested that their goal was a
comparison of the two lighting and film stock systems in order to determine how to
proceed. Rather the demonstrations focused on making sure that the established
technicians of Hollywood could keep up with the rapidly progressing technology. The
AMPAS executive board enthusiastically took up the idea, approving the measure and the

47
“Incandescent Lighting Being Tested,” The Film Daily XLII, no. 7 (October 9, 1927): 10.
48
“Technicians Hold Important Meeting,” Academy Bulletin 5 (November 25, 1927): 2. Academy
History Archive.
49
“Technicians Hold Important Meeting,” 3.
221
formation of a committee of AMPAS members, representatives of the ASC, and “other
influential interested persons,” such as Mole.
50

At last, the Academy had found an activity on which to stake its “scientific” claim.
Important to its conception and execution, however, were the donated labor and resources
of the ASC and the technicians at Warner Bros., who agreed to host the demonstrations.
Likewise, the technology companies, including Kodak, DuPont, Agfa, GE, Max Factor, Keese
Engineering, and Mole-Richardson, donated the equipment.
51
In addition to Warner Bros.
providing the primary location, other studios such as First National, Goldwyn, and De Mille
Studios donated facilities and equipment. In the conception of the endeavor, the Academy
leadership took advantage of the ASC’s desire to maintain a leadership position in technical
matters of the studio. The Academy’s actual role was limited to approving the idea,
appointing committees, and later publishing the results. Even the funding of the few
expenses incurred came from the AMPP, managed through Fred Beetson. In reality, the
Mazda tests were virtually completely accomplished through the labor, organization, and
coordination of the American Society of Cinematographers and its many close associates
among the suppliers.
What little the Academy would lose in the ability to claim the scientific endeavor as
purely its own, it gained in outsourcing the massive coordination involved to the ASC.
Likewise, they ingratiated the chief technicians of Hollywood to their organization by
entrusting the project to their care. As such, the Academy’s rhetoric around the endeavor in

50
“Mazda Lighting,” Academy Bulletin 6 (January 1, 1928): 2. Academy History Archive.
51
Keese Engineering Company contributed an experimental Cooper-Hewitt red lamp. “Secretary’s
Report, February 2, 1928,” Academy Report No. 1 Incandescent Illumination: 9. In his final report,
Dubray says that the lights could be promising but they did not have enough to fully experiment
with them. Academy Report No. 1, 60.
222
the years to come would always mention the involvement of the ASC, as well as the AMPP.
While members of the Producers’ Branch were tasked “to supervise expenditures,” the
picture behind the scenes revealed ASC leadership working under the close eye of Fred
Beetson representing all three producers’ organizations—the MPPDA, AMPP, and AMPAS.
52

The ASC established its own research committee comprised of five cinematographers from
their standing Research Committee along with the chief electrician and laboratory
superintendent from Warner Bros.
53

The ASC took the organizing initiative as well as running the actual demonstrations
themselves.
54
The Academy Bulletin reported in February that demonstrations were
running “in charge of an experienced cinematographer” daily from 9am to 4pm and every
Wednesday and Friday night.
55
Most were shot in front of a standard set of a domestic
space and presented generic scenarios. While the AMPAS report assured its members that
they were all “welcome” they were directed to “make reservations through the American
Society of Cinematographer” in order to participate. Players could arrange “for personal
tests,” while directors and art directors could attend in order to become familiar with the
method, and executives were “of course, deeply interested” and should attend. In their own
reporting, the cinematographers emphasized the gratitude directed at them for taking this

52
The producers committee was M. C. Levee, William Rothacker, and Jack Warner. Prominent
cinematographers involved included ASC president Daniel Clark, Gaetano (Tony) Gaudio, and AC
technical editor Joseph Dubray.
53
“Demonstration Committee Meeting, January 19, 1928,” Academy Report No. 1, 8. Frank Murphy
and Fred Gage. Murphy was also the chair of the Academy’s Demonstration Committee, which had
twenty-two members, twelve of whom were cinematographers. It seems as though most of the rest
were electricians.
54
Daniel Clark to F. M. Murphy and Fred Gage, WB, January 10, 1928, Daniel Clark President File,
f.584, ASC Collection, Herrick Library. In this letter, ASC president Daniel Clark thanked Murphy
and Gage for agreeing to host the tests on behalf of the Board of Governors of the ASC.
55
“Mazda Lighting,” Academy Bulletin 7 (February 1, 1928): 1. Academy History Archive.
223
leadership role. The February AC article on “A Mazda Marathon” included a reprinting of a
letter from Beetson, thanking the ASC members for donating their time and supplies “in
order to make themselves of greater value to the industry.”
56
The cinematographers were
at pains to make it clear to as wide an audience as possible that they were running the
show.

Figure 18. The Warner Bros. domestic set for the Mazda Tests.
57

56
“A Mazda Marathon,” American Cinematographer 8, no. 11 (February 1928): 24.
57
American Cinematographer 8, no. 12 (March 1928): 19.
224
In allowing the cinematographers to run the set on the demonstrations, the
Academy essentially eliminated the director from the production process. As can be seen
from the published photographs, everything about the demonstrations replicated the
process of shooting a scene from a motion picture on a controlled studio set. Professional
actors sat in costumes and makeup (provided gratis by Max Factor) in fully dressed sets
that were, of course, lit and filmed on professional equipment, but there appeared to be
little in the way of a scenario. The artistic aspects of motion picture production had been
reduced to their most standardized form and as such much of the labor of the director, the
writer, and even the actors was eliminated from the proceedings.

Figure 19. The Mazda Tests, American Cinematographer, February 1928.

225
Even as the events were unfolding, an interested observer saw that the undertaking
was more about building relationships in the community than generating scientific results.
Lewis Physioc, a cameraman who eventually moved into visual effects, wrote an extended
editorial in American Cinematographer about the evident “earnestness” of the endeavored
collaboration between the AMPAS and the ASC.
58
He was encouraged by the sincerity of all
involved in the Mazda tests from the “lowliest among the craft” on up. Importantly, Physioc
emphasized that what was important about the endeavor was the relationships being built.
He was rather dismissive of the actual scientific accomplishment stating dismissively that it
“must be right since all seem to agree that it is necessary.”
59
Rather, the endeavor
established an organized community around the technology of the industry in Hollywood
for the first time.
Membership in this community came at a cost, whether in donated labor or
equipment and facilities. In Frank Woods’ “Secretary’s Report” from early February, in the
midst of the test, he likewise opened with praise for the “spirit of co-operation and genuine
interest” which had overtaken the studios.
60
Among the contributions mentioned, are GE’s
$4,500 worth of lamps along with the labor of four electrical illumination engineers, Max
Factor’s materials and artists (present and in use at every demonstration), Mole-
Richardson and their entire stock of equipment, Eastman, Agfa, and DuPont film stock,
Jacobsmeyer Co.’s titling, the AMPP’s funding for labor and extras, and the ASC’s
management. As a quick perusal of the myriad service firms in Hollywood should make

58
Lewis Physioc, “Economy of Production: Evidences of Earnestness Seen in the Co-operation of the
Academy and the A. S. C. in the Lighting Tests at Warner Brothers,” American Cinematographer 8,
no. 12 (March 1928): 9.
59
Physioc, 10.
60
“Secretary’s Report,” Academy Report No. 1, 9.
226
clear, this was an exclusive list. While service firms and manufacturers were indeed taking
their place in performing research for the studios, it was not all service firms, but merely a
select few who had managed to put themselves in the right place and had the financial
capacity to give away free materials for the studios’ experimentation. Their willingness and
ability to donate significant equipment and/or labor allowed them to be a part of this
project and its outcomes.

Figure 20. ASC President Daniel Clark, Victor Milner, ASC, MPPDA’s Will Hays, AMPAS’s
Fred Beetson, and WB’s Frank Murphy at the Mazda Tests, Spring 1928.
61

Like the execution of the demonstrations, the management of the shot footage
would be left to the technical expertise of the cinematographers—not directors or even
editors. By the end of February there had been nine demonstrations at Warner Bros. and
one in the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel (home of the Academy rooms) along with daily tests

61
American Cinematographer IX, no. 1 (April 1928): 32.
227
by cameramen who signed up for time.
62
The Academy reported that 90,000 feet of
negative stock had been used, though later reports would put the number closer to
72,000.
63
The ASC reported that 36 cinematographers oversaw 85 set ups and hundreds of
other technicians, directors, and executives observed.
64
At a meeting of the Technicians’
Branch, the ASC presented its recommendations as how to go about editing such a massive
output.
The April American Cinematographer referred to the ASC Special Incandescent Light
Research Committee as the “grief” committee because of the large and onerous task they
had of picking, examining, breaking down, cutting, editing, and projecting the 72,400 feet of
film.
65
The job was particularly so because of the meticulousness required of a “scientific”
endeavor so that that the results might be “absolutely impartial.” The plan put together had
Fred Beetson acquiring a cutting room from a Paramount-Famous-Lasky executive, who
also furnished “an expert girl cutter whom he recommends” to do the work, to be paid by
the AMPP.
66
This flippant remark in a private letter was the only mention of an actual
editor involved in the process of cutting the tens of thousands of feet of film into an
evening’s worth of footage, and it is noteworthy that unlike the cinematographers and
engineers, she was not asked to donate her labor. While those technicians were receiving
training on new equipment important to the future of their careers, the editing was rote
labor that necessitated monetary compensation.

62
“Mazda Lighting,” Academy Bulletin 8 (March 1, 1928): 1. Academy History Archive.
63
Depending on the frame rate used, this much film would run 13-18 hours.
64
“The Mazda Tests,” American Cinematographer 9, no. 1 (April 1928): 30-31.
65
Ibid., 31.
66
Silas Snyder to Daniel Clark, March 9, 1928, Daniel Clark, President 1926-1928 File, f.584, ASC
Collection.
228
Even as editing was well underway, the Academy announced to its members that
the date marking the end of the demonstrations had been extended. The reason for the
extension was so that there could be greater participation by the Society of Motion Picture
Engineers, a group whose attention Hollywood had finally received. The SMPE was
bringing their semi-annual meeting to Hollywood for the first time, and the Academy would
do everything they could to lure them into their scientific endeavor. This would include
adding an additional “test” almost two months after the conclusion of the “marathon” so
that the visiting engineers could directly observe, as well as planning their own meeting in
the days directly after the SMPE meeting hoping to entice them to “stay over.”
67
The SMPE
involvement would be crucial to the claims for legitimacy in the technical endeavors of the
Academy.
For an organization dedicated to uniting the creative classes of the motion picture
industry, the Academy’s first endeavor revealed another set of ambitions. In seeking to
imitate the scientific process, the tests were the Hollywood industry’s attempt to apply
objective measures of quality and standardization to their processes. But when they
brought the professional engineers of the SMPE to look at their results, the “science” of the
endeavor was unclear to them. Rather the Hollywood technicians were really operating
with subjective notions of aesthetic quality, as would be seen when the two sides actually
began to speak to each other.

67
“Mazda Lighting,” Academy Bulletin 8 (March 1, 1928): 2. Academy History Archive.

229
Making Contact

The coming of the Engineers to the theater of production will constitute an
event memorable in the annals of the S. M. P. E., the A. S. C., and the industry in
general for it will bring these element into close contact for the first time in the
history of the industry in California and is bound to eventuate in a closer co-
operation and better understanding to the great advantage of every individual
who attends and to every department of motion pictures.
68

At the same November 16, 1927 meeting of the Academy’s Technicians’ Branch at
which the incandescent lighting demonstrations were proposed, “at the conclusion of the
meeting” the branch voted to request that the executive board invite the Society of Motion
Picture Engineers to hold its next meeting in Hollywood and to offer its rooms as a venue.
69

Keeping a jump on the Academy, ASC President Dan Clark had already sent an invitation to
the SMPE the previous day.
70
The two invitations fell into very eager hands. They accepted
almost immediately and the SMPE board approved the decision to hold the April 1928
meeting in Hollywood at the Academy’s Roosevelt Hotel meeting rooms.
71
American
Cinematographer editor Silas Snyder wrote to his contacts with the SMPE with his high
hopes for the Hollywood gathering, declaring, “We believe that a visit to the Coast studios
would do you all a lot of good.”
72

The Academy hoped to take advantage of the increased presence of representatives
of the major manufacturers to help legitimize the Mazda proceedings. They knew that they
would have difficultly enticing the engineers across the country twice in one season, so

68
Silas Snyder, “Welcome S. M. P. E.,” American Cinematographer 8, no. 10 (January 1928): 5.
69
“Technicians Hold Important Meeting,” Academy Bulletin 5 (November 25, 1927): 3.
70
Dan Clark to Herford Tynes Cowling, November 15, 1927, Daniel Clark, President 1926-1928 File,
f.584, ASC Collection.
71
L. C. Porter to Silas E. Snyder, November 30, 1927, Charles Clark Secretary File, ASC Collection.
72
Silas Snyder to L. C. Porter, December 6, 1927, Daniel Clark, President 1926-1928 File, f.584, ASC
Collection.
230
they decided that they would hold their own “convention” for the presentation of the
results of the tests in the days directly following the SMPE convention.
73
They thought they
would be able to convince engineers who had not planned to attend to extend their trip
once they were already in Los Angeles. The AMPAS encouraged its own members to attend
the sessions of the Engineers’ convention as well as the Academy dinner hosted on their
behalf in order to “make it a notable occasion in honor of the Academy’s guests and for the
credit of the Academy and the industry.”
74
Their strong presence could also compel the
engineers to return the favor.
With the Academy claiming hosting duties for the SMPE and their convention, the
ASC was at pains to assert their own interest in building a relationship with the engineers.
As with the Academy, the ASC was keenly aware of the potential to either bolster or
diminish their status with the arrival of the SMPE. As such, they would do everything in
their power to ensure strong participation in the event. With the AMPAS as the official
hosts of the convention, the ASC took it upon themselves to hasten their introduction to
their guests. Rather than waiting for the engineers to arrive in April, with two weeks to go,
they sent American Cinematographer technical editor (and ASC cinematographer) Joseph
Dubray on a “contact tour” of the manufacturers.
75
The ASC leadership decided that Dubray

73
“Climax in April,” Academy Bulletin 7 (February 1, 1928): 1. Academy History Archive. Initially,
they proposed holding the “climatic” demonstrations of the Mazda test just before the SMPE
convention.
74
“Academy Dinner,” Academy Bulletin 9 (April 2, 1928): 3. Academy History Archive.
75
Rare among Hollywood cameramen, Dubray had received formal schooling in chemistry. He
began his career in scenic films and for Pathe, moving to the U.S. with that company in 1909. He was
promoted to supervising the photographic department before the war sent him into the French
army as a translator for four years. He returned and moved west in 1919 working for various
independent companies. Most prominently, he made several films for Robertson-Cole and for
Tiffany Productions. Dubray joined the ASC in its founding year and was active in the intellectual
life of the institution from its inception. In the earliest years of AC, he wrote articles focused on the
elevation of the cameraman’s status to that of an artist, (well described by Patrick Keating in
231
would frame a trip to the Photographers’ Association of America convention within a larger
journey to the facilities of a dozen major motion picture technology manufacturers.
76
These
companies all manufactured film stock, lighting, lenses, and cameras utilized in Hollywood.
While the companies Dubray visited differed greatly in scale and products, his goals
remained consistent as he visited each—to make sure they understood that the
cinematographers, not the directors nor the executives, should be their contacts in
Hollywood.
77
As Dubray himself put it in his fifty-page summary of his trip, presented to
the ASC, his purpose on all fronts was to “prepare the ground for the S.M.P.E. Hollywood
Convention.”
78
He went on to boast that after his visits, “All [the] Engineers present at the
convention will know of the A.S.C. and of their aims and scopes. They will be prepared to
give weight to our remarks and suggestions.” Since these engineers would mostly be
travelling to Los Angeles for the first time, the ASC was invested in making sure that any
familiar face they found among the bright lights of Hollywood was one of theirs.
Dubray’s account of his interactions with the various engineering departments
demonstrated the intense desire for better communication between the two sides of the

Hollywood Lighting: From the Silent Era to Film Noir (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009))
but by the mid-1920s he was using his technical expertise to enlighten the readers about the
‘scientific’ side of the profession.
76
National Carbon, General Electric, Eastman Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, Cooper-Hewitt, Akeley
Camera, Westinghouse, DuPont, Bell & Howell, Cooke Lenses, DeVry, and Benjamin Electric
77
Joseph A. Dubray to Daniel B. Clark, January 4, 1928, Daniel Clark, f.584, President 1926-1928,
President Files, ASC Collection. The seeds of Dubray’s East Coast tour were planted when
representatives of the National Carbon Company visited the ASC offices and invited them to send a
delegation to the Photographers’ Association of America (PAA) meeting in Louisville in late March.
ASC leadership decided that Dubray and Charles Rosher (who had recently shot Murnau’s Sunrise)
would attend the PAA convention as the organization’s representatives, funded in part through
National Carbon. While the ASC was certainly interested in closer association with the organization
for professional photographers, sending these prominent members to Louisville presumably had
more to do with ingratiating themselves to the powers at National Carbon and other such industrial
interests who would be in attendance.
78
Joseph Dubray, “Report on the Contact Trip conducted by Joseph Dubray, March 8
th
-April 8
th
,
1928,” (unpublished manuscript): 47. Joseph Dubray File, ASC Collection.
232
industry. At GE’s engineering department in Cleveland, engineer Matthew Luckiesh
revealed that he had already discussed with MPPDA head Will Hays the idea of the
producers sending regular emissaries to the manufacturers while their experts journeyed
to Hollywood with more regularity. While such contact was the desire of Dubray and his
organization, it seemed to him that Luckiesh was misguided about who such emissaries
should be. As he put it,
Dr. Luckiesh was still under the impression that the DIRECTOR and not the
Cinematographer was in charge of the lighting of a set. After my protests and
my description of the REAL role of the Cinematographer, he expressed his
regret of not having been sufficiently well informed on this subject and
assured me of his sympathy and willingness to co-operate with us...
79

This clarification of who was really in charge of the technology of motion picture
production would recur on several of Dubray’s visits.
To emphasize the technical knowledge and influence of the cinematographer,
Dubray communicated the ASC’s desire to see innovation moved to a central location closer
to the production hub. He repeatedly pitched the establishment of a research laboratory in
Hollywood, arguing that it would increase dialogue and cooperation and help create
common standards. As he discussed with the engineers at Cooper-Hewitt, the purpose of
such a facility would be to “better centralize problems and solutions,” a trajectory for the
industry which the Mazda tests was setting them on even if the laboratory itself would
remain a dream. But Dubray discussed this endeavor with representatives of the
technology manufacturers rather than the representatives of the studios that he had access
to through the Academy. Clearly, the cinematographers were not ready to put all of their
hopes for this endeavor into the AMPAS.

79
Joseph Dubray, “Report on the Contact Trip.”
233
The lighting companies, keenly aware of the upheaval happening in Hollywood,
were eager to know what they could do to increase their market share. Unlike with film
stock, no one company was dominant and the adoption of incandescent lighting created a
flux in the market. While GE had secured a clear advantage by their early development of
large incandescent bulbs and their involvement in the Mazda tests, the fate of the industry
was hardly set in stone. Dubray attempted to both secure the cooperation of the National
Carbon Company (who made carbon arcs) in supporting the status of the cinematographer
and, at the same time, encouraged GE and Westinghouse engineers to make Mazdas more
efficient so they could be used more widely. In an exchange that would presage many of the
coming discussions in Hollywood, Dubray told National Carbon that the decisions made on
set regarding lighting were not purely physical, but rather “depend[ed] upon other factors,
artistic and psychological.” Again, he emphasized that the cinematographers made such
decisions, being the primary figures in motion pictures who dealt with both technical and
artistic matters.
Though Dubray and Rosher’s presentation at the PAA conference received a large
spread in the pages of American Cinematographer, the former’s contact tour of the
manufacturers remained in the backrooms of the ASC as a fifty page report presumably
presented at meetings or passed around at the organization’s clubhouse. The ASC never
publicized the contact tour or used it as a tool to demonstrate the importance of the
cinematographer in the business of motion picture technology. It was a backroom
maneuver to gain status among the technology companies before the bright stars of Los
Angeles could woo them. A letter from Herford T. Cowling at Kodak to the ASC indicated
that at least in Rochester sending Dubray as “a good-will envoy” had made a “fine
234
impression” on the engineers.
80
Dubray’s own claim of his tour being, “the greatest step
taken by the American Society of Cinematographers since their inception,” may have been
hyperbolic, but it showed the intention with which the organization positioned itself in the
ongoing changes in the industry. Dubray ended his report on the tour on a assuring note,
saying, “Undoubtedly the ASC has increased manifold the respect due them, have created
new friends and tightened the bonds of the old ones.” With the stage set, and everyone’s
interest in the success of the next two weeks clear, the Society of Motion Picture Engineers
finally came to Hollywood.

The Engineers Come to Hollywood

Those of us who get our names in electric lights are inclined to forget the debt
we owe you. It is by such means as you have provided that the film was
discovered and enabled many of us to leave the one night stands, the barber
chairs, and the fur business, and amass a fortune sufficient to allow us to take
our yearly trips to Europe. And so we bow our heads and pay homage.
81

- Douglas Fairbanks

The motion picture trades, who’d become accustomed to running a brief overview
of the program for each impending SMPE conference, reported the Hollywood meeting with
rather more excitement. Along with touting the opportunity for the “most interesting and
constructive” convention yet, Motion Picture News reported rumors of 400 attendants,
addresses by Douglas Fairbanks, Jeanie McPherson, and Cecil B. DeMille, Will Rogers as

80
Herford T. Cowling to Silas Snyder, March 19, 1928, Cowling File, ASC Collection.
81
Douglas Fairbanks, “Speeches Presented at the Banquet Given by the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences in Honor of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers,” (Hollywood, California, April
9-14, 1928) in TSMPE 8, no. 33 (1928): 16.
235
Figure 21. Cartoon from SMPE Convention issue of
American Cinematographer, April 1928.

toastmaster, and even a skit by Charlie Chaplin “in person.”
82
Attendance was indeed
impressive, and the addresses by Fairbanks and DeMille came to fruition, but the
tremendous anticipation of the collaboration between the two sides of the industry was
evident in this excessive speculation.
Despite the exciting, new location, the engineers’ presentations were typical, giving
papers on their current research into various technologies and techniques of all aspects of
motion picture production and projection. But the SMPE had also solicited papers from

82
“Society of Engineers Issues Program,” Motion Picture News XXXVII, no. 12 (March 24, 1928): 952.
236
Hollywood folks. Representatives of each of the major professions—directors, producers,
art directors, actors, writers, cinematographers, special process, and laboratory workers—
endeavored to present their slice of the production process to the engineers.
83
While the
engineers did little to make their work more comprehensible to the Hollywood attendees,
these production workers sought to explain their work in ways that these men of science
and industry could understand.
The line of questioning from the engineers after these presentations indicated their
confusion about many of the procedures that the studios had established. John Crabtree, a
prominent chemist from Kodak, was particularly vocal, peppering several presenters with
questions about apparent inefficiencies in the system. He asked about the strange habit of
assembling a new combination of actors, cameramen, and directors for each film, imagining
it would take “considerable time” for a director and cameraman to become acquainted, so
“there would be greater efficiency in continuing the team for two or three pictures.”
84
After
repeated attempts to answer the baffled engineer, the Hollywood representative under the
spotlight ultimately attributed it to a “lack of system” in production management, quite
contrary to the perception of Hollywood as a systematic production factory.
Crabtree, clearly trying to gain a better picture of the industry in Hollywood, sat
through every paper and likewise questioned the efficiency of the studio laboratory

83
Leigh Griffith of Paramount Famous Lasky and C. Roy Hunter of Universal presented on the film
labs, Irvin Willat and Cecil B. DeMille described the work of the director, Karl Struss lectured on
dramatic cinematography in Sunrise (which he shot along side Rosher), while Harry Perry
illuminated his aerial photography techniques from Wings (1927).
84
John Crabtree, Discussion after Frank Woods, “The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,”
(Hollywood, California, April 9-14, 1928) in TSMPE 8, no. 33 (1928): 30.
237
procedures and even more radically, the star system itself.
85
While Crabtree’s confusion
about the efficiency of using stars was met with amusement, the chemist’s concerns about
the establishment of objective standards for laboratory work were more indicative of the
differing values in technology between Hollywood technicians and industrial engineers.
Paramount’s lab superintendent Leigh Griffith gave a paper explaining the many parts of
the filmmaking process which came under the charge of the lab, from the “highly artistic
and specialized requirements” of negative developing and light reading to the “routine
manufacturing operations” such as the assemblage and shipment of release copies.
86

Among the many challenges facing the laboratory—including the progress in sound, color,
and stereoscopic cinema—Griffith focused particularly on the “lack of a definite and
universally recognized measure for quality,” which when combined with the director’s
desire for “varying artistic effects” made the burden on the laboratory great.
87
Crabtree had
particularly pressing questions in this regard, asking for clarification as to the laboratory’s
responsibility in producing “the quality which the customer requires.”
88

Griffith surmised that the issue as one of “the personal psychological factor involved
in considering the quality” which required the laboratory superintendent to interpret “a
hazy sort of mental picture” and “control something which we are unable to measure.”
89

Kodak’s research director, C. E. K. Mees objected to the idea that any chemical process

85
The very amusing interchange about the star system came in the Woods discussion. Crabtree
wondered why, if the stars were being used as an appeal in advertising, they did not play
themselves. From an engineer’s perspective, it seemed inefficient to hire expensive stars to play
characters that could be played by any number of cheaper actors just as well.
86
Leigh M. Griffith, Development Engineer, Paramount Famous Lasky, “The Technical Status of the
Film Laboratory,” (Hollywood, California, April 9-14, 1928) in TSMPE 8 no. 33 (1928): 173.
87
Griffith, 182.
88
John Crabtree, Discussion after Griffith, “The Technical Status of the Film Laboratory,”: 186.
89
Griffith, Ibid., 189
238
could be unquantifiable. Griffith and other Hollywood laboratory men present explained
that they were at the behest of the artistic desires of the cameramen and the directors for
different “sorts” of quality, which made it so that in his estimation they could not make the
process “any more mechanical” than it already was.
90
Crabtree then offered as a solution
the complete standardization of lab work, putting all of the burden of variation into the
camera and lighting. This radical solution, which he thought solved the problem, once again
demonstrated the engineers’ misunderstanding of the work being done in Hollywood.
While Crabtree thought the standardization of lab work was a means of efficiency
and of reducing the number of points at which variation was introduced in the production
process, for the laboratory workers of Hollywood this was a means of taking away from
their creative contribution to the product.
91
Griffith politely dismissed Crabtree’s
suggestion. He concluded that the misunderstanding about the “conception of the term
‘quality’” was “based entirely upon a mutual lack of understanding of the objectives of the
other side.”
92
As a means of politely brushing past the clearly mistaken suggestions of the
engineers to his problems, Griffith suggested such differences could be reconciled “by a
mutual diffusion of knowledge,” being of course the primary object of the SMPE. Rather
than continue the contentious debate between the Hollywood technicians and SMPE
engineers, Griffith focuses on the positive—that the dialogue had begun and they could no
doubt resolve their differences as long as they continued it.

90
Griffith, Ibid., 191.
91
In the discussion after C. Roy Hunter’s talk on negative developing machines, cinematographer
Joseph Dubray actually stated a preference for lab standardization, so the lab could not interfere
with the cameraman’s image. While he certainly did not represent all cinematographers in this
view, he demonstrated the perspective that this could be beneficial to the cameramen. Joseph
Dubray, Discussion after C. Roy Hunter, “A Negative Developing Machine,” (Hollywood, California,
April 9-14, 1928) in TSMPE 8 no. 33 (1928): 202.
92
Griffith, Discussion after Griffith, “The Technical Status of the Film Laboratory,”: 194.
239
Figures 22/23. Dubray’s color charts showing the color rendering of various film stock
and lighting combinations.
93

As this exchange on the work of Hollywood laboratories shows, the engineers who
came from a corporate research environment had difficulty grasping the realities of
technology harnessed toward artistic ends.
94
To the cinematographers’ surprise, when they
presented some preliminary results of the Mazda tests at the meeting the engineers were
unconvinced of their scientific merit. As Joseph Dubray presented on behalf of the ASC
Research Committee, he displayed a series of charts that were intended to objectively,
scientifically show the color rendering qualities of the various lighting systems. Each color

93
Joseph Dubray, “Incandescent Lighting” TSMPE XII no. 34 (1928), 454, 456.
94
Sound would mean ultimately replacing the hand methods still in practice at the time with
machines, however, the manipulation of the image in post-production would remain an essential
aspect of Hollywood production, even if in a more limited capacity.
240
was shot next to a gray that was intended to represent accurate gray rendering for that
color. While many of the other lighting set ups showed great variation between the gray
and colors such as red, orange and purple (as in figures 5 and 8), the incandescent lamps
(figure 10) showed close rendition of every color.
This color rendering improvement was presented as the primary motivation behind
the desire to convert to incandescent lights, but in the discussion the engineers questioned
the very methodology utilized, asking how the various shades of gray used for comparison
were determined.
95
Along with asserting that it was clear that the grays did not match and
were likely shot under different brightness, Kodak’s Lloyd Jones mentioned that the
panchromatic film and incandescent lighting together had over-corrected the red, and
under-corrected the violet.
96
Rather than offering objective proof of any superiority of the
new lighting choice of Hollywood, the evidence presented merely offered a subjective
comparison. Yet, as with the debate over objective measures of laboratory quality, the
participants chose to brush past the disagreement. Jones followed his polite rejection of the
scientific evidence created in the Mazda tests with congratulations to Mr. Dubray on his
excellent presentation.
Likewise, the conspicuous absence from the conference of the one type of motion
picture technology that was firmly in the minds of the American public—synchronized
sound—suggests a desire to avoid contentious issues. At that moment, Warner Bros. had
just announced that The Jazz Singer was playing in 235 theaters, and the other studios’

95
Discussion after “Incandescent Tungsten Lighting in Cinematography,” (Hollywood, California,
April 9-14, 1928) in TSMPE 8 no. 33 (1928): 462.
96
Ibid, 462.
241
were on the verge of deciding to adopt the Western Electric system.
97
Yet, in the midst of
this, at the first meeting of the scientific minds of the manufacturers with the denizens of
Hollywood, only two papers were given on sound motion pictures—one by a German
engineer on the acoustical properties of rooms and the other on GE’s sound-on-film system.
This was on par with the number at the last few meetings, despite the increased interest in
and use of synchronized sound and the fact that the Hollywood convention saw nearly as
many papers presented as the two 1927 meetings together. In contrast, with seven
different presentations, the subject of studio lighting was greatly represented.
98

This suggests strategic reasons for this notable absence. It certainly was not for lack
of interest, as the lively and extensive discussion after the GE paper attests. Rather, the
SMPE, like the Academy, was interested in establishing a solid foundation for intellectual
exchange before diving into deep technical waters that had the potential to rattle
Hollywood’s cages. In lighting, they had a topic that the studio technicians were already
interested in developing and the studios already interested in investing in. Sound was a
marketable technology that the studios would have been reluctant to discuss openly with
their competition. Instead, it would be the dominant topic at the very next conference that
September in faraway Lake Placid, New York constituting more than half of the papers.
99

97
Donald Crafton, The Talkies, 111.
98
Prominent Mazda participants Peter Mole, Joseph Dubray, and R. E. Farnham presented on “The
Use of Incandescent Equipment in Motion Picture Photography,” “Incandescent Tungsten Lighting
in Cinematography,” and “The Effective Application of Incandescent Lamps for Motion Picture
Photography,” respectively. The topic was so on the fore of everyone’s minds that even when
representatives of the National Carbon Co. presented on flame arc lamps, the conversation centered
mostly on incandescent lighting and the possibilities of mixed use. D. B. Joy, A. C. Downes,
“Characteristics of Flame Arcs for Studio Lighting,” (Hollywood, California, April 9-14, 1928) in
TSMPE 8, no. 33 (1928): 502-520.
99
26 papers out of 46 were on sound. SMPE Papers Index, 1916-1930.
242
In more ways than just geographic, the SMPE was bringing themselves to
Hollywood’s door before asking them to come to theirs. With so many of the papers
functioning as introductions to unfamiliar fields and work practices, much of the work of
the convention was also evident in the speeches at the AMPAS banquet on the fourth day of
the conference, as well as in the “open forum” which closed the event. At these two
assemblies, the SMPE members and their Hollywood hosts discussed the state of the
industry and the place of collaboration between the two sides going forward. Many of the
prepared speeches at the banquet sought merely to define who they were to each other.
SMPE President Willard Cook endeavored to give definition to the very idea of a “motion
picture engineer,” while Cecil B. DeMille, ostensibly there as the president of the AMPP,
instead apologized for never having heard of the SMPE before and used his time to
advocate for the “realization of Mr. Mayer’s dream, the Academy.”
100

As DeMille’s speech indicates, most of the speakers were in reality more concerned
with pushing the agenda and awareness of the organizations that served their interests
than in speaking to others. DeMille went on to claim the night itself as the proof of the
necessity and vitality of the Academy. Fred Beetson used the occasion to announce that the
AMPP would be the organization to finally bring to fruition a research bureau in
Hollywood. Beetson’s grand announcement was ultimately tempered as he had yet to
secure the head of the proposed laboratory (later announced to be Technicolor’s Joseph
Ball).
101
As such, the reaction was measured at best. Next, ASC president Dan Clark used his
time to enlighten the assembled executives and engineers about the origins of the
cinematographers’ organization and their prescient recognition of the necessity of

100
Cecil B. DeMille, “Speeches…” 21.
101
Fred Beetson, “Speeches…” 22. J. Arthur Ball of Technicolor would ultimately take the job.
243
research. He made sure to highlight the cinematographers’ prominent role in the Mazda
tests and their efforts to make them as scientifically sound as possible.
102

Those presenting from the “other” side of the motion picture industry spoke from
the assumption, discussed at their previous meetings, of the Hollywood studios’ reluctance
to share their innovations and technique with each other. Kodak’s C. E. K. Mees
underscored the peculiar arrangement of the motion picture industry—a “purely technical”
one in which the science has been entirely developed by “the manufacturers of its
apparatus and materials.” Mees boldly declared that the time had come for the industry to
“develop its own methods and problems,” and, at the same time, become more aware of the
knowledge already available to them from the manufacturers’ side.
103
On a similar note, a
representative of GE discussed the National Research Council and the importance of
research and sharing to the progress of the American economy. He assert that, “Industry
has nothing to fear from the advance of research,” and pointed to the success of
manufacturing companies who have research departments, indicating that the Hollywood
sector could likewise prosper from such scientific endeavors. The engineers were in fact
prophetic in anticipating the problems that would plague Hollywood’s progress in technical
research over the next couple of years.
While each representative sought to emphasize the contribution and importance of
their own trade organizations, the goals to which they were contributing were ultimately in
line with each other. Everyone at the gathering agreed that it was time for Hollywood to
take a greater interest and role in the scientific aspects of its industry. Even Louis B. Mayer,

102
Daniel Clark, “Speeches..” 23. Clark continually uses “we” in describing the tests and discusses
the objectivity with which they edited and chose the footage to be exhibited.
103
C. E. K. Mees, “Speeches..” 18.
244
along with actors Milton Sills and Douglas Fairbanks, paid their tribute to the scientific men
in their remarks. Mayer in particular took himself and his fellow executives to task for their
ignorance of this side of the business. As he put it, in his colorful way, they had not “put
their shoulder to the wheel as they should,” and for that he called them “the slackers.” He
ended his speech with the dramatic admonition, “I am ashamed.”
The banquet served its purpose of giving those in the room the space to extol their
commitment to progress and co-operation, and throughout the proceedings there was a
genuine attempt from both sides to communicate with each other.
104
In the “Open Forum”
that closed the convention, the participants spoke of the “important step” of establishing
the Pacific Coast SMPE and the future hopes of the Research Bureau which Beetson had
announced.
105
Likewise, the convention was spoken of as a beginning part of a larger
movement. As one Hollywood technician put it, “I cannot help but feel that this convention
marks the opening of a new era for the technical man in the industry.” President Cook
reasserted the engineers’ desire to “assist in the closer co-operation in the producing field,”
while John Crabtree, as fit his intense inquiry throughout the meeting, presented his
revelation of “the necessity of every member knowing all he can of every branch.”
106

104
However, there were moments of tension, as in the paper of F. H. Richardson, which he took
(perhaps unsurprisingly, given his earlier objections to the meeting and West Coast branch) as an
opportunity to excoriate the producers for their lack of interest in projection. As there is no
discussion after the paper, it seems unlikely that Richardson attending the meeting himself, but it is
unclear whether the paper was read, or simply included in the Transactions. However, the very fact
of its inclusion points to areas of contention between the two sides. F. H. Richardson, “The
Importance of Good Projection to the Producer,” (Hollywood, California, April 9-14, 1928) in TSMPE
8 no. 33 (1928): 355.
105
Leigh M. Griffith, laboratory superintendent at Paramount, discussion in “Open Forum”
(Hollywood, California, April 9-14, 1928) in TSMPE 8 no. 33 (1928): 542.
106
Ibid, 542.
245
Where the previous year’s efforts at gaining West Coast membership in the SMPE
through mass mailings had yielded only eight new members, the membership committee
reported 51 new members in the lead up to the Hollywood convention and another 29
applications during the week they were in Hollywood.
107
Contrary to the concerns
presented over the years about poor attendance, the Hollywood convention was the biggest
the SMPE had ever seen. The excitement over this first meeting of the East and West would
only be fruitful if the active exchange could be maintained. As was cautioned at the open
forum, the success of the West Coast section of the SMPE would depend on the
participation of a highly active core group. The producers would have to be convinced “that
it is good business” to send representatives to the East Coast meetings, share their
technical advances, and host the SMPE again. The longer repercussions of the SMPE
Hollywood meeting were yet to be seen.

The Mazda Climax
There is one other result of equal importance that cannot be measured on a cost
or quality basis, and that is the effect on the morale of the profession as
demonstrated by the fine spirit of co-operation and harmony with which various
organizations, corporations and individuals joined together in striving for a
common object.
108

While many of the engineers departed after the five-day convention, several stayed
on for the Mazda demonstrations. The Academy encouraged its members to attend the
“Academy Week” of night sessions “closing the program of demonstrations, tests, and
experiments in regard to incandescent illumination” and asked them to “invite their

107
“Report of Membership Committee,” (Hollywood, California, April 9-14, 1928) in TSMPE 8 no. 33
(1928): 553.
108
Introduction to Academy Report No. 1, 4. Likely written by Frank Woods.
246
friends.”
109
The evening sessions would allow for maximum attendance from studio
employees engaged during the day. The events began Monday with the final filming session
of “green foliage,” followed by the edited demonstration of all the film the next night.
Wednesday would offer papers focused on color values and make up (presented by Max
Factor and Lon Chaney), while Thursday would see Bausch & Lomb, the ASC, and National
Carbon give technical presentations. The week would wrap up Friday on a general meeting
of the Academy with a “special invitation” to the ASC to attend.
Though many individuals and groups were participating and interested in the
events, cinematographers dominated the committees in charge of each night’s execution, as
they had with the demonstrations.
110
Even the committee on make-up was chaired by
Joseph Dubray, as the ASC was at pains to maintain their control of the proceedings. In
discussing who would shoot the final tests, which would be attended by members of the
SMPE, AMPAS, ASC and other interested parties, Dubray mentioned and dismissed several
names. They desired one particular member of both the ASC and AMPAS Mazda
committees but he was “out of town on location.”
111
Two other cinematographers, they
judged, had already had too much publicity from the tests and Dubray thought it fair to “let
some other one have a crack at it.” Another was a member of the AMPAS committee as well,

109
“Academy Week,” Academy Bulletin 9 (April 2, 1928): 3. Academy History Archive.
110
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences “Final Demonstration Week on Incandescent
Illumination, April 16-20, 1928,” (memo), Daniel Clark President File, f.584, ASC Collection. Frank
Woods to Daniel Clark, April 9, 1928, Daniel Clark President File, f.584, ASC Collection. The ASC
coordinated the final filming demonstration, including the choice of cinematographer, along with
Peter Mole tasked with setting up the equipment. Mole worked with MGM’s chief electrician Louis
Kolb.
111
George Barnes, Tony Gaudio, and John Arnold, respectively. Dubray to Clark, April 12, 1938,
Daniel Clark President File, f.584, ASC Collection.
247
but Dubray vetoed this choice, as he was not a member of the ASC.
112
Therefore, in
Dubray’s estimation, he “would not consider it fair to give him charge of this work.” In the
end, the duty was shared between Daniel Clark, ASC President himself, along with two
other ASC members in good standing.
113
This politicking served the ASC’s purpose of
making sure that there was no question of their collective responsibility for the events. Not
wanting to give too strong a spotlight to any one member or, god forbid, to a
cinematographer who had not yet joined their group helped to maintain the organization’s
status at the forefront of those in attendance and in the published accounting. While,
according to the Academy, the tests at Warner Bros. had attracted an average of around
150 observers and 500 witnessed the outdoor demonstration at the Roosevelt, these
demonstrations, in front of an apartment building on Hollywood Boulevard, reportedly
attracted a crowd of 2,000.
114

While the papers presented throughout the week had significant crossover in terms
of subject matter with those seen the previous week, the tenor and discussion were
decidedly more practical. Most of the presentations actually came from engineers, many of
whom had presented similar material at the SMPE convention. Lloyd Jones’ highly technical
paper on color values was seemingly met by confused silence, as the first comment in the
discussion was a production manager assuring the audience that even he (with an
engineering background) had a hard time understanding the Kodak chemist. He assured

112
Lee Garmes had filmed an earlier test on January 20
th
, but that was clearly not as high stakes a
venue as this last one. He would eventually become an ASC member sometime in the late 1930s.
American Cinematographer had stopped published lists of members by then, so it is unclear when,
but by 1940 he had the A. S. C. initials after his name.
113
John Boyle and Frank Good. “Tests and Demonstrations,” Academy Report No. 1: 18.
114
“Tests and Demonstrations,” Academy Reports No. 1: 18. Academy History Archive.
248
them, “do not be frightened by Mr. Jones’ mysterious words and curves, for he can tell it so
even I can understand, and will, I know, be pleased to answer any questions.”
115

The lack of more than basic understanding of the technology at hand made it
difficult for many creative workers to participate in the conversation. A Westinghouse
demonstration on the peculiarities of the Mazda equipment was followed by a question
from director Tod Browning clarifying the difference between Mazda filament and tungsten
filament, which the presenter explained were the same thing.
116
Browning then sought out
further clarification as to the elemental nature of tungsten itself and how it was used in the
lamp. Subsequently, a GE engineer added a comment about the relationship between
voltage and filament length, while, in contrast, cinematographer John Arnold asks about the
possibility of eliminating heat. The conversations were occurring on different wavelengths.
While certain engineers clearly were having a difficult time sharing their
information in a way that was both useful and comprehensible to the assembled
technicians and artists, others were more successful. In that same conversation, engineers
J. Arthur Ball (Technicolor) and W. B. Rayton (Bausch & Lomb) were able to communicate
more effectively. These men had spent more time in Hollywood and thus were better able
to apply their theoretical knowledge to the practicalities of the studio. For example, while
the GE engineer addressed Arnold’s question with an extended explanation of the science
of infrared radiation, explained as “waves length longer than 7000 Angstrom units,” Rayton
discussed understandable concepts such as “heat absorbing filters” placed in front of the
lamps to solve the problem, a far more useful response.

115
George Volck, “Discussion on Mr. Jones’ Paper,” Academy Reports No. 1: 38.
116
“Discussions on Mr. Beggs’ Paper,” Academy Reports No. 1: 40.
249
Rayton understood something the GE representative did not, that studio technicians
did not need to know all of the science behind why they were having the problem, they just
needed to know how to solve it. After the next paper, another highly technical presentation
on arc lights by the National Carbon Company, J. Arthur Ball, who had by this time been in
Hollywood for half a decade, began the discussion by urging everyone present “to tend
toward a discussion of the practical use” of the lamps in the studios, clearly attempting to
steer the conversation away from theoretical science.
117
When it came time for Rayton to
present on “Lenses for Cinematography,” his paper was remarkably free of numbers and
charts.
118

The two sides’ ability to speak across their different fields progressed over the
course of the week. It concluded with an open meeting of the Academy at which
representatives of each of the major participating organizations gave concluding remarks.
While all praised the “practical” results obtained through the tests, everyone gave more
weight to the spirit of co-operation generated from the months-long endeavor, as well as
the conventions of the previous two weeks. While it was ostensibly a meeting of the
Academy, the speeches were repeatedly aimed directly at the visiting engineers in the
room, often more so than the speeches at the Academy’s banquet for the SMPE. Joseph
Dubray was speaking to the “gentlemen of the SMPE” when he waxed on about the
“momentous feeling of friendship” that had been established.
119
Engineers from Edison

117
“Discussion on Mr. Downs’ Paper,” Academy Reports No. 1: 47.
118
The same exact paper appears in the Transactions of the SMPE conference, however, it is not on
the program and does not have any discussion following it, so it was likely only presented at the
Mazda conference.
119
Joseph Dubray, “A. S. C. Report” Academy Report No. 1: 59.
250
Lamp Works and Kodak likewise spoke of the new bonds of friendship and their further
understanding of the needs of the practical men.
However, most were at pains to give the Academy its due for bringing about the
connection that was so long desired on both sides. ASC President Clark credited the
Academy with giving the cinematographers the opportunity to have what they had always
wanted—a chance to show both the producers and scientific men “what the men who are
responsible for the practical end needed.”
120
A. George Volck summed up the good feelings
of everyone in the room when he spoke of the “fraternity and co-opertation” that had “so
closely knitted” the three organizations—the AMPAS, the SMPE, and the ASC—that it was
going to be “very difficult to say where one stops and the other begins.”
121
Certainly, they
had successfully worked together in a way that meant they could not carry on as if the
other did not exist. All future endeavors that concerned the other organizations would have
to be brought through and negotiated, often to their chagrin. This ease with which the
organizations collaborated on this endeavor would be challenged in the coming years.

Conclusion
The Mazda Tests and the SMPE Hollywood meeting set precedents and created
dynamics that would profoundly effect how technology would be dealt with in Hollywood
for decades to come. Through these events, each organization attempted to position itself
within the system. The SMPE successfully established a West Coast presence and increased
the studios’ awareness of their existence (and importance). The ASC was able to advocate
for its significance in bridging the creative and technical sides of the industry, establishing

120
Discussion, Academy Reports No. 1: 65.
121
A. George Volck, “Report of the Academy Committee,” Academy Report No. 1: 65.
251
a central role for the cinematographers in scientific endeavors. But ultimately the AMPAS
had the most to gain. By putting the events under their umbrella—including the location,
publication, and funding—despite their leaders’ lack of technical expertise, they positioned
themselves to determine which technologies would be the focus of industry-wide research.
In lighting, they chose a technology whose change was already in progress, and they would
then use the position they had established through it to implement a systematic,
conservative approach to technological change. Not to be left out, the AMPP (and its parent
MPPDA) set a place for themselves at the table by taking the lead in the establishment of a
Hollywood research laboratory. While the ASC and AMPP worked diligently to gain a lead
position in these early endeavors, they would struggle to maintain their status as the
Academy and SMPE further staked their territory in technical endeavors.
As much as the participants in the SMPE convention and the Mazda tests wanted to
trump up the importance of what they were doing, there assertions had to be hedged with
reference to the future. After all, the scientific conclusions and even practical endeavors
accomplished were miniscule compared to what was coming. These events would only
matter if there continued to be an effort to work across the geographic, corporate, and
intellectual barriers that separated the two sides and the various competitive interests of
the industry. Not only that, but as Kodak chief C. E. K. Mees and other engineers had
asserted throughout the events, the Hollywood side had to increase their efforts in this area
on their own behalf, and not just in relation to the East. The events likely left everyone
overwhelmed with the possibilities and potential missteps in their path. This would be
particularly true as the studios and technicians turned their focus to the pressing matter of
sound. The question remained as to whether the dialogue and cooperation that the
252
organizations and individuals had cultivated around the largely agreed upon (or passively
tolerated) conversion in lighting, could be applied to the more contentious issue of sound.

253
CHAPTER 5

Cooperative Intelligence:
Hollywood Trade Organizations and the Building of the Studio System

After the fanfare of the Mazda tests and the SMPE visit, the Academy and its
associated groups seemed at a lost for what to do next. As the engineers returned to their
research labs back East, the Academy and everyone else in Hollywood (and beyond) knew
that the pressing issue in the studio was the introduction of sound. But unlike lighting, or
film stock, the problems of adding sound to motion pictures permeated virtually every
form of technology (and artistry) associated with production—from the cameras and lights
that needed to be silenced to the sets whose materials now needed to be examined for their
sound absorbing qualities. Areas such as camera speed, lens apertures, and laboratory
processing that had previously been handled in an artisan, individualized mode now
needed to be standardized. And who would determine these standards?
Several organizations now claimed authority to regulate various aspects of the
cinema, and there was a growing desire for structural stability. Hollywood had grown into
a major industry with expectations of a steady output of quality productions shipped to
every corner of the country (and the world) on a regular schedule. As the industry grew
and continued to professionalize to fill that need, the various trade organizations that had
come into the technical side of motion pictures all sought to claim their authority over the
tools of the medium. This manifested itself primarily through the establishment of
competing publications and the efforts to create ever more specific industry wide
standards and practices. The control and circulation of technical knowledge became as
important to maintaining the structure of the industry as anything else.
254
From contributions to technical publications to collaborative research and
standardization, the endeavors around the technology of the medium increasing
determined who was and was not a part of the system. The new publications and efforts at
standardization were part of a significant movement toward pooling knowledge among the
major studios and manufacturers through trade organizations. The primary motivation
behind knowledge pooling became the maintenance of standards of quality for professional
production. The technical proficiency of the products of the Hollywood studios became
recognized as a collective benefit to motion pictures as a medium of mass entertainment. In
other words, no matter how good an MGM talkies was, if audiences were burnt by a poorly
produced Columbia picture, the concept claimed that patrons might remove movie-going
from their regular lives all together. In key arenas, namely mundane technologies of
everyday use, these concerns about the health of the industry as a whole began to
overwhelm concerns about the competitive advantages of propriety knowledge.
Since sound was a technology that offered a clear competitive financial advantage
(unlike lighting), where would be the benefit of industry-wide collaboration? Other
exploitable technologies, such as color and stereoscopy, had always been seen as
competitive and proprietary, so what made sound any different? In fact, despite
collaboration in the top echelons of the studios about which sound systems they would
adopt and when, the use and implementation of sound technology remained entirely
competitive well beyond the point at which the entire industry was making a majority of
their productions with soundtracks.
It was only once the novelty of the technology had fully worn off that an interest in
collaboration emerged, particularly in areas where there was no competitive advantage to
255
be gained from independent investment in research. While the merits of pooling
knowledge about lighting systems were almost immediately seen by the studio technicians
and executives in the Mazda Tests, when it came to sound, issues of competition, secrecy,
and knowledge production were debated for over a year. The Academy, as the only
organization that penetrated every facet of studio production, was able to take the driver
seat in these endeavors, where it had only been the paying passenger in the Mazda Tests.
Through months of meetings, committee appointments, surveys, and cultivating its
relationship with organizations like the SMPE, the Academy brought shape to a series of
endeavors that defined the types of knowledge that the studios were able to share with
each other.
Knowledge sharing then had the consequence of increasing the divide between
those who were part of the system (as conceived by the Academy and its powerful
members) and those who were not. The activities of knowledge pooling, including
committee appointments, private meetings, and confidential information circulation,
increased the knowledge base of those within the organization’s structure while leaving
those on the outside ever more behind. This structure not only reinforced the dominance of
a handful of key studios, I argue, it helped create it. Through its cultivated membership,
committee appointments, and private mailing lists, the Academy decided who would share
in the collective knowledge of the industry and who would not.
In the last two years of the decade, the cameramen and their organization, the ASC,
would see their standing fade to being one of many technical organizations of Hollywood,
while the AMPAS and the SMPE emerged as the major forces of standardization, finding
ways to collaborate and identifying areas which they were willing to cede to each other.
256
The specialization of the ASC, which had been such an asset in the Mazda tests, became a
liability as the standardization efforts often focused on areas outside of their particular
expertise. Instead, the cinematographers would often find themselves on the other side of
things, becoming students of the sound engineers with whom they competed for status.
While the cinematographers had claimed the American Cinematographer as the authority in
technical matters of the industry, this status was contested as publications from the SMPE,
the AMPAS, and even the cinematographers’ own union came into the market.
By tracing the activities of the AMPAS, the SMPE, and other key trade organizations
from the end of the Mazda tests in 1928 through mid-1930, this chapter shows how these
actors became the clearinghouses and gatekeepers of the industry. By analyzing both their
publications and their behind-the-scenes meetings and correspondences, we can see
individuals negotiating a new ethos for the industry that saw horizontal collaboration
across the various organizations and companies of the industry as key to their success and
survival. Producers and administrators gave technicians and engineers the authority to
decide what knowledge would be shared and with whom, creating an increasingly large
barrier to entry into the industry. As the technology of the industry became ever more
complex and specialized, access to the knowledge of professional production became as
important to maintaining the power of those within the system as the vertical integration
often cited as the key to their success. The polished, professional aesthetic attained by the
major studios was not only a ‘style,’ it was a marker of inclusion within the technical
knowledge system of Hollywood.

257
The Chaos of Sound
While the Mazda events had set a clear precedent for how to approach issues of
technological change and standardization, there was a lack of consensus as to how to
proceed that lead to a stall in progress for the next year. Throughout the summer of 1928,
the Academy’s activities were tied up in the resolution of grievances and employment
relations that they took on as part of their open shop efforts. Despite a lack of any concrete
plans for furthering its scientific agenda, the AMPAS member bulletin published stories
about the success of the Report No. 1 publication from the Mazda tests and boasted of
“More Progress” to come.
1
What that progress would be was still unclear.
There were lingering questions about what exactly the purpose of the Academy was.
At a directors’ branch meeting in October 1928, D. W. Griffith was dubious of the “high
sounding name” as well as both the artistic and scientific claims on which the Academy was
hinging itself. He argued that art and science were subservient to “commercialism” in the
Hollywood motion picture industry.
2
The article about the incident put out by the Academy
assured its membership that the industry pioneer was speaking in a “facetious vein,” but
Griffith’s point was nonetheless a relevant concern. While the artistic aspirations of the
organization were coalescing arounf the proposed annual awards of merit, the Mazda tests
were beginning to look more like a one-off success, mostly executed by other, more
established organizations, rather than the overture of a sustained program of scientific
inquiry by the Academy.

1
“More Progress,” Academy Bulletin 11 (June 4, 1928): 1. Academy History Archive, Herrick Library
Digital Collection. (Hereafter cited as Academy History Archive.)
2
“Mr. Griffith,” Academy Bulletin 15 (October 18, 1928): 2. Academy History Archive.
258
Without a plan, the various branches of the AMPAS began holding evening meetings
on topics related to sound, often with little agenda other than to share their experiences.
3

By mid-July there had been eight such meetings with the branches “dealing with phases of
the problem peculiar to each.”
4
The technicians, being so broadly defined as a branch, had
myriad problems to discuss. The assembled soundmen, laboratory superintendents, art
directors, and cinematographers discussed the merits and practical problems they were
encountering with the technologies. As an early meeting wound down, AMPAS secretary
Frank Woods inquired to the assembled technicians whether they had finished with the
topic of sound and should “take up some other subject” at their next meeting.
5
The
sentiment in the room was that not only should they continue the subject, but that they
needed to go beyond talk and into the more practical realms of demonstration and
instruction. The point at which talking could solve their problems, if it ever existed, had
long passed. Taking on the challenge, Winfield Sheehan extended an invitation to up to 100
members of the Academy to the Fox lot for a demonstration of the Movietone system. Not
to be left out, Warner Bros. and Paramount Famous-Lasky representatives likewise jumped
at the chance to show off their equipment to their peers.
This eagerness to demonstrate their systems to their competitors showed the
willingness from the middle ranks (department heads and production managers) of the
studios to share their knowledge and experience with their colleagues. While the
executives were still viewing their sound equipment as proprietary, those physically

3
“More Progress,” Academy Bulletin 11 (June 4, 1928): 1. Academy History Archive.
4
“Voice and Sound Meetings,” Academy Bulletin 12 (July 16, 1928): 3. Academy History Archive.
5
“Notes Taken at a Meeting of the Technicians Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts &
Sciences, Wednesday, May 9, 1928,” 25. Technicians Branch – Meeting 5-9-28, Folder B.5, Academy
Archives, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (Hereafter cited
as Academy Archives.)
259
running the studios as well as those working with the equipment had no qualms with
expressing their frustrations and sharing their experiences with each other. The
collaborative spirit that the Academy hoped to foster throughout the industry was seeing
practical application in the meetings and endeavors of the Technicians’ Branch, while at the
same time the very idea of getting the Producers’ Branch to even hold a meeting was
greeted with laughter by those assembled in the Academy’s rooms.
6

While that May meeting acted as little more than a brainstorming session, at the
next meeting of the Technicians’ Branch, the question of what the branch, and the Academy
as a whole, could do to “contribute to the industry” was explicitly put forward.
7
Branch
chairman Fred Pelton offered the concept of the Academy as a “clearing house” as a direct
response to the fact that “all the studios are floundering in the same problems regarding
sound.” The ensuing debate centered on concerns about the willingness to share
techniques and knowledge that were the result of “individual effort” and “thousands of
dollars” worth of work.
8
When speakers made the assumption of secrecy within the
industry, long one of the prevailing images of Hollywood (as we saw from the SMPE),
Woods and Pelton asked point blank about the reality of it. When the two men inquired if
the technicians had been explicitly instructed not to divulge their technical knowledge with
those outside of the studio, only one sound engineer from Warner Bros. spoke up to say
that they had open demonstrations several times a day and talked openly.
Though no one was willing to admit that they had been instructed so, the sense that
they were expected to protect their company’s technical knowledge permeated the

6
“Notes Taken… May 9, 1928,” 28.
7
Pelton, “Notes Taken at a Meeting of the Technicians’ Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences,” Technicians July 11, 1928 Folder, Academy Archive.
8
“Notes Taken…July 11, 1928,” 16.
260
discussions of the Technicians’ Branch. Through several anecdotes it became apparent that
the idea of technique being held on secrecy was more of a trade culture than an official
policy of any studio. Joseph Dubray expressed his exasperation at the long waits in getting
information from men in his role in the ASC research department. Likewise John Nicholaus,
lab superintendent of MGM, noted his feeling of guilt when asking his friends at Lasky a
question. He put the conundrum in personal terms saying,
If Carl [sic] Struss came to me, I would feel obligated to answer his question. I
know he would do the same for me. He is at liberty to ask me, but I do not
know whether I am at liberty to go down and ask technicians some fine
points of the question. I do not know that his boss has told him that he should
not answer.
9

The uncertainty that the technicians felt about what they could and could not share
hindered the progress of the conversation. Woods, however, saw the problem as
surmountable, paralleling the issues happening with sound to the Mazda tests, in which the
producers had gladly contributed money, equipment, and cooperated “in every way.”
While the technician agreed that they should proceed cooperatively, even making a
formal resolution that emphasized the sharing of all information “for the benefit of the
entire industry,” everyone knew it would take more than feelings of goodwill to get the
producers on board. Several people pointed out the irony that knowledge was already
being shared informally as staff moved regularly between the studios, and perhaps more
formally as they all worked with the same engineers from sound equipment manufacturer
Electric Research Products, Inc. (hereafter ERPI). Nevertheless, these were not arguments
they could take to the producers to convince them to increase their formal knowledge
sharing. Rather it was the point that Woods arrived at by the end of the meeting that would

9
“Notes Taken…July 11, 1928,” 18.
261
be utilized to sell collaboration to the producers, as it threatened the viability of the
industry as a whole. As Woods stated it,
It is shortsighted business because they are not going to be able to make all
the sound and talking pictures in the world. Those that are made badly are
going to kill the business. They do not expect to make bad ones but they
will.
10

The concept Woods was honing in on was that if audiences were soured by poor quality
sound films, they may stop going to the movies altogether. The industry had built up its
audience over the last two decades while slowly building up its technical and artistic
standards and therefore the audience’s expectations. The introduction to sound was
threatening these standards almost overnight, the argument went. Once the novelty wore
off, Woods came to argue, audiences would not stick around if the technical standards,
which by all accounts had suffered, did not come back to a uniformly high standard.
Through these casual and candid conversations with all of the Academy branches,
Woods was able to form an agenda and an ethos for his organization. As the only person
present at all of the branch meetings, where each group focused on its own concerns and
interests, he conceived a road map for the organization as a whole. In particular, through
listening to the diverse group of technicians, several assumptions emerged which would
form the basis for the organization’s scientific agenda. The first was that there were certain
technologies and technical knowledges that did not contribute to creating a competitive
financial advantage for the individual producers. The second was that everyone in the
industry had a vested interest in a basic standard for technical quality for profession
motion pictures in order to maintain their prominence as a mass entertainment. And

10
Notes Taken…July 11, 1928,” 24.
262
thirdly, there was a benefit to the individual studios and the industry as a whole in
educating their employees about the arts and sciences of the motion pictures.
Through these meetings and activities, Woods and, increasingly, his assistant
secretary Lester Cowan, developed the Academy’s scientific agenda around these assumed
values about the sharing of basic technological information. While the focus of the
Academy’s “arts” agenda would be about singling out and awarding the exceptional, the
scientific agenda was about the mundane, sustaining nature of technology. The technicians
would obviously benefit from this agenda, resting as it did on keeping them informed and
educated, but it would take more effort to convince the producers of these assumptions.
While those that were behind in the conversion to sound would clearly profit from pooling
knowledge, what reason would companies like Warner Bros. and Fox have for giving away
their trade secrets?
With sound, the Academy was attempting to intervene in a situation that had been
developing for several years already and had to be cognizant of the structures and issues
already at play. Synchronized sound had begun very much as a competitive endeavor, with
Warner Bros. and Fox particularly experimenting with different systems primarily in their
East Coast studios. Donald Crafton has shown how the remaining studios cooperated as
early as 1927 in deciding with which companies and technologies they would proceed.
11

They formed a Five-Cornered agreement in which they collectively agreed to wait a year to
begin producing sound pictures. Delaying actions such as this actually allowed standards to
be determined more by the marketplace than by the active input of the studios. The
hedging continued as they all chose to work with ERPI who produced both sound on disc

11
Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999): 127-148.
263
and sound on film systems, rather than RCA Photophone which only had the later. Crafton
credits these moves for the studios losing control “as the technology multiplied beyond the
oversight of any one company” but ultimately helping to “unify the industry and
standardize the product.”
12

The ways in which the studios collaborated through cautious “hedging” on the
technology of sound recording itself in 1926-27 are not the same as the efforts that the
Academy would instigate around more banal technologies of everyday use. The
collaborative decisions Crafton describes were really only executed from the financial
perspective. As Crafton himself says, “The decision to go to sound was made in the upper
echelons of the Hollywood organizations.”
13
It was only once sound had fully penetrated
the studio space that Hollywood personnel began to share knowledge and expertise in the
use of technologies that had more potential to cause production problems than to create
marketable financial advantage.
When the difficulties of adding sound to the existing production structure created
systemic problems throughout the industry, solutions could not be generated from the top.
An executive could decide that a film should be a talkie, but he could not silence a camera
or a stage or figure out how to mask a soundtrack when a sound-on-film production was
shown in a theater. These problems required solutions from across the ranks of the studios.
Therefore it fell to trade organizations, such as the Academy, the ASC, and the SMPE, who
pooled their membership horizontally from across the producing and manufacturing
organizations, to find effective solutions.

12
Crafton, 164.
13
Ibid., 167.
264
While Academy secretary Woods and the technicians were forming an ethos for
collaborative research and knowledge pooling, the producers were instead putting their
approval behind their own Technical Bureau, as run through their Association of Motion
Picture Producers (hereafter AMPP). AMPP executive Fred Beetson had announced the
Bureau at the SMPE meeting in April, but it had been rather anti-climatic seeing as he had
no details and had yet to secure a director. It was not until the August meeting of the
AMPAS Technicians’ Branch that Beetson finally announced that Technicolor’s J. Arthur
Ball, long a connective figure between the East Coast manufacturers and the studios, as the
Bureau’s director.
14

The AMPP’s attempt to coordinate technical research activities under the Bureau
would slow down the progress the Academy was making as they ceded territory to the new
organization, but it would also serve to clarify the priorities of a successful Hollywood-
based research program, primarily for the ways in which it failed. It was an apt portend of
the Technical Bureau’s life at the AMPP when Ball walked into the Technicians’ Branch
meeting only at the end of Beetson’s announcement, having no prepared speech or any
sense of an agenda for the organization that he would run. Ball’s highly technical, rambling
speech revealed a scientific mind that was perhaps unsuited to the type of administrative
work that the position required. Variety’s reporting of the announcement focused as much
on Beetson’s difficultly in finding a director as it did on the work that would be done and
erroneously referred to it as the technical department of the Academy.
15
The

14
“Technicians’ Branch Meeting August 8, 1928,” File 6.5, Academy Archives. See Chapter 1 for
more on Ball’s role in the earliest attempts at a West Coast branch of the SMPE.
15
“A. J. Ball Heads New Tech Dept. of Academy,” Variety (August 15, 1928): 7. The confusion about
the Technical Bureau’s parent organization continued into scholarship well up to the present.
265
misunderstanding about the management of the Bureau was understandable given the high
level of collaboration and similar leadership of the AMPP and the AMPAS.
Ball’s long, improvised speech said more about what the Bureau would not be—a
research laboratory or a manufacturer of equipment—than what it was. He was even at
pains to express what the Hollywood industry’s (as opposed to the East Coast
manufacturers) interest in research was at all. As he put it, in his uniquely stream of
conscious style,
Other concerns – Eastman, Dupont, General Electric – they are the ones that
are engaged in manufacturing physical means by the way the entertainment
which Hollywood furnishes the world. It is vitally concerned in the
equipment but it is not concerned in the actual construction. It is interested
in the development of it because – well for example – in the sound field –
rather hard to express… but it is obvious that the industry is vitally
concerned in the development of the thing – but not in the same way that the
manufacturers are.
16

There was little discussion after Ball spoke, other than Woods clarifying that the Bureau
did in fact have an agenda item, which was to get in contact with the research labs of the
manufacturers to form a survey of the situation.
It is difficult to parse what the Technical Bureau was able to accomplish during its
16-month tenure at the AMPP. Any endeavors that received publicity were done jointly
with the Academy, such as the sound survey that came together in the summer of 1929.
17

In March 1929, only seven months after leaving Technicolor, Ball was welcomed back as
director of their California research department.
18
When the Bureau was transferred to the

16
“Technicians’ Branch Meeting, August 8, 1928,” 4.
17
“Academy’s Sound Survey,” Hollywood Filmograph 9, no. 25 (June 22, 1929): 19; “Academy to
Make Survey,” American Cinematographer X, no. 4 (July 1929): 26.
18
Herbert Kalmus to Leonard Troland, March 22, 1929, an earlier letter from Kalmus to Troland,
March 1, 1929, had indicated Ball’s unhappiness with his new job. Troland’s Correspondence and
266
Academy at the beginning of 1930, the report Ball and his successor Gerald Rackett
assembled of pending projects were all either completed or obsolete with the exception of
an investigation into graphite shoes for projectors, which seemed to excite little interest.
19

The Technical Bureau did corner one area of focus in investigating patents for
equipment used in the studio, such as sound and optical effects inventions including the
matte composite process developed by Frank D. Williams. This left room for the Academy’s
Technicians’ Branch to concern itself less with technology equipment itself and more with
the technological crisis in their midst—namely, the lack of training on the new sound
equipment by those working in the studio. Everyone from directors to electricians seemed
at a lost for how to adapt to the changes to the medium and all seemed to fear they would
be left behind. At the same time, the sound engineers from ERPI as well as those hired from
radio, telephone, and phonograph companies were clueless as to the motion picture
production process, creating a detrimental culture clash in the studio. The quick adaptation
of the industry, technically and creatively, would require a better understanding of the
technology than many of those in the studio had ever had of lights, cameras, and film stock.

The Fundamental School of Sound
Before the technicians and producers in Hollywood could even begin to think about
how to improve the basic technical standards of the tools being used in the studio, they
needed people who could use them. There were varying ideas about how to incorporate the
technology into the production culture with some believing that engineers “had to be

Memos, Box M0006, Folder 5, Technicolor Collection, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York.
See Chapter 2 for more on Ball and Technicolor.
19
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, “Producer-Technicians Committee, Meeting of
April 15, 1930,” Meeting 4/15/30 File, Academy Archives.
267
taught the picture business” and others taking the view that motion picture technicians
could learn the sound phase of the business (and still others advocating a combination of
the two).
20
In late 1928, while sound stages and recording rooms were being erected in Los
Angeles, the training and production was still mostly happening on the East Coast. There,
ERPI, the motion picture sound subsidiary of Bell Labs and Western Electric, had its
engineers educating the motion picture personnel. When AMPAS Technicians’ Branch
chairman Fred Pelton visited Bell Labs, he was dubious of the effectiveness of this
educational effort as the instructor “has to talk the language of nine or ten different
branches of this profession” including projectionists, cameramen, executives, laboratory
men, and those coming in from radio broadcasting.
21
To add to the problem, there was very
little equipment reserved for educational purposes, as the demand for installations in
studios far exceeded supply.
22

The ASC attempted to take matters into their own hands by setting up a “school of
instruction” in late 1928, born out of their frustration with the situation and its threat to
the cinematographers’ status as the chief technician in Hollywood.
23
Like the ERPI training,
the ASC school consisted of lectures from engineers from GE, Western Electric, RCA, and
ATT telling them about the new technologies in their midst. This proactive move for self-
preservation clearly was insufficient, as the leadership of the organization continued to

20
Quoting Fred Pelton in “Minutes of Meeting of the Technicians’ Branch of the Academy,
Wednesday, September 12, 1928,” Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Academy
Archives.
21
Pelton, “Minutes… September 12, 1928,“ 3.
22
Pelton mentions this in the Minutes from the September meeting, but it is also well covered by
Donald Crafton. He attributed ERPI’s inability to keep up with demand for the fact that most studios
eventually converted to RCA. The Talkies, 151.
23
A School of Instruction, Editorial—The Voice of the A. S. C.” American Cinematographer 9, no. 6
(September 1928), 4. See Chapter 3 for more.
268
beseech its members with experience to share their knowledge with their brethren; but the
prevailing attitude of secrecy and the paucity of members with significant experience
contributed to continued frustration. The October 1928 open letter to the executives in the
pages of American Cinematographer shouted at the producers, via caps, that the
cinematographer could not make the sound pictures successful, “IF YOU BAN HIM FROM
ACQUIRING THE NECESSARY KNOWLEDGE OF SOUND” under the guise of claims to trade
secrets.
24
The obstruction from the top created animosity on the ground, with the
Cinematographer running editorials titled “To Hell with Photography! What About Sound?”
and “The War of the Talkies,” largely in an attempt to capture their attention.
25

With the executives unwilling to individually take the initiative, the Academy
management began to lay the groundwork for taking on the problem of industry-wide
technical education in its monthly member bulletin in late summer 1928. As a body
designed to represent the whole of the industry both vertically through the various
professions and horizontally across all of the studios, the Academy was situated to appeal
to everyone’s desires for solutions without the clear taint of favoring one profession or
studio. Without suggesting any firm initiative, in an article titled “What is the Academy
Doing?” they trumpeted the productivity of the ongoing branch meetings which were
exclusively focused on sound issues by this time, not just the Technicians’ but also the
actors and directors.
26
The article, aiming itself directly at the Bulletin’s elite readership,
suggested that the unique ability of the Academy to represent all the branches of the

24
“An Open Letter,” American Cinematographer 9, no. 7 (October 1928): 4, 23.
25
“To Hell With Photography! What About Sound?” American Cinematographer 9, no. 9 (December
1928): 4; “The War of the Talkies,” American Cinematographer 9, no. 12 (March 1929).
26
“What Is the Academy Doing?” Academy Bulletin 14 (September 18, 1928): 1. Academy History
Archive.
269
industry created a responsibility in the organization. The Academy’s structure, it claimed,
made it the “the only central clearing house for this essential process of self education on
sound synchronization.” Explicitly placing this duty above the work on employment
relations, public relations, awards, and periodicals, the responsibility is hyperbolically
claimed as the greatest ever rested on any organization. As if to ensure compliance with
their peers, the editors (likely Frank Woods and Lester Cowan) assured their readership
that “the membership is responding splendidly to this emergency.” A later article in the
issue reporting on the Technicians’ Branch meeting recounted Pelton’s comments about
the lack of equipment for training purposes back east. The article used that problem to put
forward the notion that, “Education must be conducted where equipments are being
installed in studios [sic].”
27

While the branches continued to meet in discussion (reaching thirteen meeting by
October), the Technicians’ Branch attempted to push a sound school through the
Academy’s College Affairs committee, which to that point had established the general
course on motion pictures at University of Southern California and other universities.
28
USC
physics professor Dr. A. W. Nye assembled a highly scientific proposal for the course for
studio technicians that would cover the physics of sound and instruments of voice
recording and reproduction. Though the Bulletin trumpeted this move as inevitable and
already in progress, 1929 dawned with the project fizzled out. The lack of cooperation from

27
“Mr. Pelton’s Report,” Academy Bulletin 14 (September 18, 1928): 3. Academy History Archive. In
this same issue they reported on the ASC’s sound education program.
28
Milton Sills, chairman, “Extracts from Memorandum Submitted to Committee on College Affairs to
Executive Committee of Technicians Branch,” (November 14, 1928), Producers-Technicians Joint
Committee-Sound, Box 45, Academy Archives. It was reported in “Course on Sound,” Academy
Bulletin 16 (November 22, 1928): 6. See chapter four of Dana Polan’s Scenes of Instruction: The
Beginnings of the U. S. Study of Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007) for a thorough
exploration of the USC course.
270
the producers meant that the project could not gain ground. Instead, the very active branch
meetings continued unabated, now, at the behest of Secretary Woods, often including
invitations to the Pacific Coast SMPE and ASC members.
29
If the Academy could not bring
all of its branches into consensus about the need to solve problems, perhaps a coalition of
all the technicians in town could get the attention of those in power.
With the management of the Academy’s affairs in the hands of Woods and Cowan,
two full time administrators, the organization formed an identity separate from its
powerful founders, particularly in the realm of technology. Of course, as could be seen in
the extended amount of time it took to get the sound school and other technology focused
endeavors off the ground, no agenda could come to fruition without the consent and
support of the executives of the Producers’ Branch and the Executive Board. But rather
than them dictating the terms of the conversation, the conversation formed in these branch
meetings and then was filtered through the secretaries in order to appeal to the
leadership’s interests. One particular file in the Academy Archive contains dozens of
undated pages, seemingly written by Cowan, formulating his pitch to persuade the
producers of the value of collaborative research.
30

When the Technicians’ Branch invited the Pacific Coast SMPE to their January 1929
meeting, they opened with a warning that this was to be a forum for complaints in which
“we will put our problems” to the manufacturers who “will be able to take them back to

29
See: “Technicians Branch,” Academy Bulletin 17 (December 22, 1928); “Minutes of
Meeting of the Technicians’ branch together with the Pacific Coast Section of the Society of
Motion Picture Enginners” (January 23, 1929); “Minutes of Meeting of Representatives of
the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (Hollywood Branch), the American Society of
Cinematographers, the American Projectionists’ Society, and the Technicians’ Branch of the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ (July 17, 1929). Box 15, Academy Archive.
30
Producers-Technicians Joint Committee-General File, Box 45, Academy Archives.
271
their research laboratories in the east.”
31
While the Academy branch was still most
representative of the established professions working in the studio, the SMPE had
significant representation from the sound manufacturers. As such this was the first meeting
where the two sides had something close to equal representations. Demonstrating the poor
state of communication at that point, the representative of Western Electric defensively
attempted to explain ERPI’s technological limitations and progress and assured the
technicians that they wanted “to play fair with you” and give honest answers to their
questions. The meeting took on an even more heightened tone when director William
deMille interrupted, having departed his own dinner party to be there, and presented the
impasse from his lofty perspective as one where “both sides at present are demanding the
impossible.”
32
As deMille asserted, with the novelty of the talkies wearing off, “No audience
will pay any money to see a scientific triumph.”
DeMille’s dramatic entrance into the conversation was indicative that the debates
around the incorporation of sound technology and technique into motion picture
production were moving up the ranks of Hollywood, beyond the shouted complaints of the
cinematographers in the pages of American Cinematographer. The existing structure and
efforts of the Academy were proving insufficient for solving industry-wide problems,
particularly at the point where the participation of the producers was needed. The
technicians had successfully initiated a dialogue across their various professions, but it had
been clear for months that this horizontal conversation alone was not going to solve their
problems.

31
“Minutes of Meeting of the Technicians’ Branch together with the Pacific Coast Section of the
Society of Motion Picture Engineers,” (January 23, 192), Technicians Meeting, January 23, 1929 File,
Box 19, Academy Archives.
32
“Minutes,” (January 23, 1929): 13. The WE engineer was named Lyng.
272
They needed the producers’ consent and mobilization if they were going to create
any kind of effective technical program. It was finally in July 1929, with deMille now
president of the AMPAS, that they were able to coordinate a meeting between the
Producers’ Branch, with representatives of eleven major studios, and forty sound
engineers. In the program for the July 31 meeting, chairman B. P. Schulberg (Paramount)
addressed the producers’ uncertainty about cooperative endeavors, saying that though the
purpose for the meeting was considering the Academy as a medium for addressing the
problems of sound, “We are, of course, in a competitive business which means that many
subjects are necessarily taboo.”
33
As an example of the type of mundane endeavors on
which they could collaborate, Schulberg mentioned the particularly boring issue of
standardizing theatre apertures, a project the technicians were already working on in
cooperation with the SMPE, ASC, and APS (American Projectionist Society). The agenda for
the meeting was entirely focused on issues of education, both the education of studio
personnel in the “fundamentals of sound” and the need for the new sound personnel to
“appreciate the art of the motion pictures.” The Academy sought to get the producers on
board one step at a time.
Two endeavors which would come to define the Academy’s intervention in matters
of science and technology in the motion picture industry arose from that meeting – the
School in Sound Fundamentals and the Joint Producers-Technicians Committee. While the
joint committee would take a few months before figuring out the contours of its structure
and purpose, the school was put on the fast track, it being seen as serving a triage function

33
“Meeting of Producers’ Branch of Academy with Sound Engineers,” Program (July 31, 1929)
Producers-Technicians Joint Committee – Sound, Box 45, Academy Archives. See Chapter 3 in which
the ASC got the sound engineers to one of their meetings the previous month.
273
in the studios. The school was a solution to the most pressing problem in front of them,
while the committee would serve to manage the problems of the future. The meeting and
its conclusions were seen as so monumental (and urgent) that rather than wait to
announce them in their next monthly Academy Bulletin, AMPAS issued a special Progress
Report a week after the branch meeting, explaining the new “Sound Education Program”
they were embarking on.
34

Though the AMPAS secretaries, Technicians Branch, the College Affairs Committee,
and the ASC had all been trying to create a sound education program for the studio
technicians for over a year, with the producers serving only to obstruct, through the
structure of the Academy the executives could save face and take credit for the initiative.
Presenting the proposal as a recommendation of the Producers’ Branch “in conference with
the sound engineers,” the report emphasized the representation from eleven major studios
at the meeting, rather than the efforts it had taken for the technicians to gain an audience
with them. The description of the school itself laid out its necessity as deriving from the
interdependent nature of studio production, making it “desirable” that all crafts have “at
least a general understanding” of the new tools.
35
The “desire” for their education was not
their own, but that of the producers, who sought more efficient and productive employees.
While this rhetoric served the continuing purpose of getting the producers on board with
the project, it also reinforced the Academy’s reproduction of the economic structure of the
studios that gave ultimate authority to the executive class over the creative and technical
ones. In fact, the phrasing in the Bulletin had come directly from an earlier memo from

34
“Academy Asked to Sponsor Sound Education Program,” Progress Report, Supplement to August
Bulletin, (August 6, 1929): 1. Academy History Archive.
35
“Sound School for Studios Planned,” Progress Report, Supplement to August Bulletin, (August 6,
1929): 1. Academy History Archive.
274
Lester Cowan to his boss, Frank Woods, on how to pitch the course to the Board of
Directors.
36

With so much preparation work done over the previous year, the sound school came
together remarkably quickly once the Producers Branch and Board of Directors came on
board. On August 12
th
, the AMPAS board approved a four-fold program to deal with the
problems of sound that included the new joint committee, work on projection already
being done by the Technicians’ Branch, the sound school for studio employees, and a series
of informal lectures for “the artistic and non-technical branches of the industry.”
37
Before
the end of the month, AMPAS issued another bulletin supplement announcing the details of
the 10-week course that would begin on September 17
th
. The sessions would meet every
Tuesday evening for two hours, so as not to interfere with regular studio production hours
or the professors’ morning classes.
Having worked through ideas over the last year, as well as executed the motion
picture course at USC, Lester Cowan had a clear sense of what the school should actually
look like. The first four-week section of the course on “preliminaries” would be taught by
USC’s Dr. Nye on sound and UCLA’s Dr. Vern Knudsen on acoustics, each having two weeks
on his respective campus. At the producers’ meeting, one member had warned against
having the sound engineers run the program “for the reason that education is a
profession.”
38
As many in Hollywood had experienced first hand, both through their

36
Lester Cowan to Frank Woods “Memorandum to Secretary: Describing Contemplated Course for
Studio Employees in Fundamentals of Sound Recording and Reproduction” (August 5, 1929),
Producers-Technicians Joint Committee – Sound, Box 45, Academy Archives.
37
“Sound Development Programs,” Academy Bulletin 24 (August 15, 1929): 1. Academy History
Archive.
38
“Criticism by Gerald F. Rackett,” Manager of Technical Bureau of the AMPP, Producers-
Technicians Joint Committee – Sound, Box 45, Academy Archives.
275
interactions with the SMPE and through the training they had already had from ERPI,
having the engineers explain the science behind their tools was often an exercise in
confusion. So having professional teachers, namely college physics professors, teach them
the fundamental science behind the technology was key. This also took away the feeling
that the cinematographers, art directors, and directors were being lectured at by their
peers (or even subordinates).
The subsequent weeks of the course would give them instruction in each of the
three main systems—ERPI, Fox Case, and RCA—followed by sessions on particular issues
of practical application that would affect them in the studio. Those sessions would have to
involve instruction from sound engineers, but they operated under the direction of the two
professors. While the sound equipment manufacturers were happy to provide their
engineers for the job, wrangling studio engineers for the last weeks proved more difficult.
Dr. Nye wrote to Cowan that, “the personnel situation changes so rapidly in Hollywood,
that I do not know where men are lined up.”
39
Likewise, despite the approval of the
centralized body that was the Academy, Nye found that “there is so much politics and too
many jealousies and personal and trade feelings, that I do not feel that I can get much
action.” Even when Hollywood was at its most cooperative, it was still a difficult fish to fry.
The system of application to the school ensured that this knowledge-sharing
endeavor would benefit only those with an established position in the system—both on the
studio level and the personnel level. The bulletin announced that, “Applications will be

39
Dr. A. W. Nye, USC to Lester Cowan, AMPAS, August 10, 1929, Producers-Technicians Joint
Committee – Sound, Box 45, Academy Archives.
276
open to men in all department of motion picture production.”
40
The course was designed
to accommodate 100 workers who could apply with a recommendation from any Academy
member and a $10 fee. Applications were made available at the offices of the AMPAS and
from executives of twelve studios and required the signature of an Academy member,
meaning only those with an established career with connections to a major studio could
participate.
41
If more than 100 applied, the AMPAS planned to institute a department based
quota system with preference given to Academy members. They were clearly unprepared
for the reality of 500 applications all with their $10 fees and Academy member signatures
when they hit their desks.
Once the executives had agreed to the school, they recognized that they would be at
a disadvantage should their employees not receive the education that those from all the
other studios would be getting. Clearly not anticipating this, Cowan and Woods had focused
their energy on getting the producers on board with ideas such as letting employees leave
early to attend class and incentivizing them to attend and do well on the final exam by
making it a condition for raises and promotions. But they now had to deal with the reality
of managing the producers’ desires to give their own employees an advantage, such as one
studio that tried to enroll 200 of their employees in the 100-person course.
42
The AMPAS

40
“10-Weeks Course in Sound Will Begin September 17” Progress Report, Supplement to August
Bulletin (August 20, 1929). It is unclear if this was just gender essentialist language or if female
studio employees were actually barred from enrolling in the course. I have yet to find an actually
list of enrollees, but several professions which women worked in, including writing, publicity,
accounting, and cutting were represented.
41
The applications were at the offices of Sistrom at Pathe, Rapf at MGM, Schulberg at Paramount-
Famous-Lasky, Wurtzel at Fox Hollywood, H. Keith Weeks at Fox Hills, Koenig at Warner Bros.,
LeBaron at RKO, Stern at Universal, Allen at Educational, Wallis at First National, Stahl and Tiffany-
Stahl, and Considine at United Artists.
42
“School in Sound Fundamentals,” Academy Bulletin 25 (September 25, 1929): 1. Academy History
Archive.
277
tasked each studio with culling its own list of employees before instituting the department
quota system to get down to an expanded enrollment of two sections of 125 students each.
Another two sections began before the first were done, getting 500 studio employees
through the course before the end of 1929.
While they could have easily filled the 500 spots with sound workers, the class was
divided to give a broad education across the studio personnel. Among those enrolled in the
first four sections, just over 200 worked directly with sound.
43
There were almost 200
more working in the other professions represented in the Technicians’ Branch—camera,
electrical, laboratory, art direction, and projection. It is obvious why forty directors would
want to know more about the way their medium was changing, but some of the other
professions that were represented—such as maintenance, publicity, accounting, and
legal—show that there was a general feeling that permeated the studios of the value of
understanding the products they were producing. When one chose to be a lawyer or an
accountant or a publicist at a motion picture studio—as opposed to in a non-creative
industry—there was a fundamental interest in the products of creative endeavors that
entered the picture. Likewise, the studios, who paid most of the tuition fees for their
employees, had reasons for selecting these people from among their personnel for this
education. As the Academy Bulletin boasted, “The Academy school is stimulating among the
studio employees a sincere desire for practical information and is spreading its effect far
more than the enrollment in the classes indicates.”
44

43
“School of Sound Fundaments,” 2.
44
“Academy Sound School a Success,” Academy Bulletin 26 (October 30, 1929): 2. Academy History
Archive.
278
Figure 24. Cartoon by cinematographer Glenn R. Kershner portraying the
cinematographers as students going back to school at the Academy’s sound school.

The ASC, often skeptical of the AMPAS motives, declared the school “another step in
the right direction by the Academy” and congratulated “whoever conceived the idea,”
perhaps seeing an echo of their own earlier attempt at a sound education program.
45

Another AC article titled “The Little, Old, Red Schoolhouse” was accompanied by a cartoon
showing the technicians pouring out of the eleven major studios and playing jacks and leap
frog on their way into a schoolhouse labeled “USC” with an “Academy” flag raised high
above it. The article itself focused on the industry’s dawning realization of the value of

45
“As the Editor Sees It, Sound School,” American Cinematographer X, no. 7 (October 1929): 10.
279
“universal cooperation.”
46
In it, the author pointed out the unique qualities that made the
motion picture industry particularly in need of this type of effort.
For the motion picture is unique alike among the world’s Arts and among its
great industries. It is the one Art to achieve the complex status of modern Big
Business, and the one major industry to be entirely dependent upon an Art
for its success. Thus it has the complexity of Big Business, but it yet
dependent upon many of the fundamental rules governing successful Art.
Chief among these is that, if the Art be one which is dependent upon the
efforts of more than a single individual, there must exist between the various
collaborators a complete understanding and spirit of cooperation, if the
product is to be successful.

One thing that is left unstated here is that the “complete understanding” and “spirit of
cooperation” of this creative business are centered on the technology of the industry that
made the art and the business possible. Even more than that, the technology around which
collaboration was possible (and even necessary) was that which facilitated basic standards
of quality that the entire industry needed to maintain for sustainability.
The Academy eagerly trumpeted the success of the sound school, an endeavor that
dwarfed the level of cooperation of the previous year’s Mazda tests in terms of both size
and scope. Even more importantly, unlike the incandescent demonstrations, the Academy
accomplished it without the help of any other trade organization—even their usual
financial source, the AMPP.
47
While individual instructors and participants were associated
with the SMPE, the ASC, local universities, and all of the major studios, the Academy alone
could take the credit for spearheading the endeavor. As with the Mazda tests, the AMPAS
sought to legitimize the endeavor through publication. Established as “an extension of the
service of the Academy Sound School,” the Technical Digest began as the sound school

46
“The Little, Old, Red Schoolhouse,” American Cinematographer X, no. 7 (October 1929): 13.
47
Financial documents for 1930 show that the school actually made a profit for the Academy, as the
$10/student tuition brought in more money than it took to put on the course. “Cost of Activities of
Technical Bureau—1930” (December 12, 1930), Academy Archive, Herrick Library.
280
lectures turned into a series of booklets free for the Academy membership and offered at a
cost to others.
48
Much more so than the stand alone Report No. 1 on Incandescent
Illumination, this ongoing endeavor launched the Academy into the increasingly large
market for technical motion picture publications, putting them into competition with the
existing trade organizations of the business.

Circulating Knowledge
In valuing the discursive and prestige work of publication, the Academy was
entering territory in which the SMPE and the ASC had long lived. Yet, at the same time, both
of those organizations were changing their orientation toward their published material.
While the SMPE sought to expand their reach by transforming their bi-annual Transactions
into a monthly journal, the ASC vacillated between its interests in a wider, more popular
audience and in continuing its path toward legitimacy as a technical organization. The new
competition from its fellow trade organizations would make this maneuvering all the more
fraught and consequential. By the middle of 1930, the motion picture technical publication
field that the American Cinematograph had dominated for the last decade would become
crowded with two new monthly magazines, a regular series of Technical Digests from the
Academy, and several forays into book publishing from the Hollywood trade organizations.
With all of these publications, technical knowledge became increasingly circulated, but also
constituted a competitive field as each sought out authorship over the finite material that
would allow them to portray their organization as an authority over the industry.

48
“Academy Sound School a Success,” Academy Bulletin 26 (October 30, 1929): 3. Academy History
Archive.
281
While the American Cinematographer continued to flourish, it was increasingly
evident that it could not function in ways that would satisfy all audiences. In late 1928, the
ASC celebrated their publication’s eighth anniversary boasting of its assent to being an
“International magazine” and “the only established periodical owned and published by a
group or organization which is an integral department of the motion picture industry.”
49
At
the same time, editor Silas Snyder reassured its expanded readership that they were a
benevolent force within the industry, seeking allies rather than competition. With an eye
toward its east coast subscribers, the magazine boasted that it had “never wielded its
influence in any destructive manner against either individuals or organizations. It has no
axes to grind and no politics to play.”
With the Mazda tests and the SMPE convention behind them, Snyder took the
opportunity to renew his appeals to Kodak’s Herford Tynes Cowling to advocate for the
magazine to become the official organ of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers. Knowing
that the SMPE had long been the greatest challenge to the ASC’s status as the keepers of
motion picture technology meant that it was imperative to keep them as an ally (and a
source of technical articles). As the conduit between the two organizations, Cowling was in
a position to advocate for the continued (and increased) use of the Cinematographer for
publishing SMPE material. Snyder repeatedly tasked Cowling with corralling “first-hand
articles” from the latter’s research laboratory colleagues, even going so far as to suggest
that he, “Tell them not to save everything for the SMPE.”
50
Snyder had “thrown the columns

49
“Our Eight Bow, Editorial—The Voice of the A.S.C.” American Cinematographer IX, no. 8
(November 1928): 4.
50
Silas Snyder to Herford Tynes Cowling, July 19, 1928, Herford Tynes Cowling File, f.94, American
Society of Cinematographers Collection, Margaret Herrick Library. (Hereafter cited as ASC
Collection.)
282
of The Cinematographer open to the SMPE” but to no avail, but when Cowling was elected
to the SMPE board (with West Coast support) they saw their best chance yet to gain a
foothold in the organization.
51

While Snyder and the ASC looked on the election of Cowling as a good sign of the
possible increased connection between their organization and the SMPE, other signs
portended the ASC’s secondary status among the trade institutions of Hollywood. Snyder
beseeched Cowling to make arrangements for the SMPE Transactions to get into his
magazine “as promptly as possible after they are read.”
52
But a month after the Lake Placid
meeting, they had only received one paper while the Academy was in possession of “a
complete set.” Even as Cowling assured Snyder that he would “fight hard to protect the
interests” of the Cinematographer, it was becoming clear that the SMPE leadership was
much more interested in establishing a publication of its own. Cowling could succeed only
in tabling the matter of an SMPE journal temporarily, delaying the inevitable.
53
Snyder
complained that it would be hard “sledding” for the Cinematographer should they face
competition from an SMPE Journal, as not only would they be competing for a limited
audience, but also they would lose a valuable source for material. Snyder persisted past the
point of hope, putting all of his ambitions for the magazine on a closer relationship with the
SMPE. His ever diminishing prospects reduced to offering proposals for a bi-annual SMPE

51
Snyder to Cowling, August 7, 1928, Cowling File, ASC Collection. Snyder told Cowling that having
“such men as you on the Board” might help the SMPE reverse their previous decision to turn down
the proposal.” Snyder to Cowling, August 21, 1928, Cowling File.
52
Snyder to Cowling, October 23, 1928, Cowling File, ASC Collection.
53
Telegram: Herford Tynes Cowling to John Boyle, December 7, 1928, Cowling File, ASC Collection.
283
special of the AC and even a merger of printing operations, but it fell on deaf ears.
54
But
with the SMPE setting up a Journal Committee in spring 1929, it was only a matter of time.
At the same time that it became clear that the SMPE would not be merging its
publication interests with that of the ASC, the Cinematographer gained a new competitor in
its own backyard with the launch of the International Photographer (1929-). IP was the
monthly magazine of the International Photographer’s union (IATSE Local 659). With a
membership that subsumed that of the ASC and dwarfed it in size (then 700 members), the
hearty welcome in the pages of American Cinematographer likely masked a sense of dread
over the competition for a small market (and even more limited list of advertisers).
55
Even
more disheartening was the announcement the next month, that Snyder, the editor so
responsible for transforming the Cinematographer into a technical publication, was
jumping ship to take over the editorial position of International Photographer. Under
Snyder’s direction the IP became a near carbon copy of the Cinematographer, with the same
mix of technical articles, personal set stories, cartoons, and editorials only there with
gestures toward the importance of unions, rather than elite organizations. Perhaps the
saving grace for both publications was that the manufacturers found it worthwhile to run
ads (often identical) in both publications.
The advantage that American Cinematographer had over IP was not in Hollywood,
but in the reach it had achieved over the last decade nationally and internationally. The
new editor Hal Hall sought to cater to this wider audience beyond those working in

54
Snyder to Cowling, January 15, 1929, Cowling File, ASC Collection. Snyder made his last forceful
pitch to Cowling, appealing to the practical side of things in that the ASC had a going concern, while
the SMPE magazine was still “only a dream.”

He even proposed that the engineers could rename the
magazine in their image, while retaining the sub-title of “The American Cinematographer.”
55
“Welcome to Rainbow Road,” American Cinematographer IX, no. 11 (February 1929): 27.
284
commercial motion picture production. He spoke of feature articles “of a decidedly human
value” that should interest “everyone” and increase circulation and appeal among the
amateur market.
56
While Cowling continued to correspond with Hall after his “long
interesting” introductory letter, and even accepted a position on the Board of Editors in late
1929, their correspondence was sparse and cold.
57
Hall would ask him generically for
“something of a quite technical nature,” adding, somewhat dismissively that “I will leave
the subject up to you, also the selection of whoever is to give it to us.”
58
By the end of the
year, even before the launch of their journal, the SMPE had cut off papers to the
Cinematographer.
59
With credit being the only compensation the organization got for the
re-publication of the works AC had solicited from its membership, the SMPE was clearly
ready to change the dynamics so they might better profit from their intellectual capital.
Even with considerations of collaborating with the ASC seemingly out of the picture,
the SMPE membership was not of one mind about the value of establishing its own journal.
The Society formed a Journal Committee who reported at the May 1929 meeting that they
could not submit a report since some on the committee were “enthusiastically in favor,”
while others (likely those picked by Cowling) were “violently opposed.”
60
The main
concern with the idea was that the cost and scope of such an endeavor was out of
proportion with the Society’s existing activities. But the format of the Transactions had

56
Hal Hall to Cowling, April 5, 1929, Cowling File, ASC Collection.
57
Cowling to Hall, April 24, 1929, Cowling File, ASC Collection. The next letters between them come
in November 1929; Hall invited Cowling to the board in a November 12, 1929 letter.
58
Hall to Cowling, November 12, 1929, Cowling File, ASC Collection.
59
Hall to Cowling, November 19, 1929, Cowling File, ASC Collection. Several letters focused on
whether or not the AC was properly attributing articles to the SMPE, a clear indication of their
changing attitude toward the AC Letter; Cowling to Hall, April 24, 1929.
60
“Report of the Journal Committee,” (New York, NY, May 6-9, 1929) TSMPE XIII, no. 37 (1929):
111.
285
become untenable for the growing organization, having already been divided into two
volumes from each conference, and ballooning from 240 pages in 1920 to 1200 in 1928.
61

The size had meant more difficultly in getting the publication out in a timely manner,
especially problematic at a time of such rapid technological change. Likewise, the society’s
dependence on the uncompensated labor of its members was beginning to wear thin.
Lloyd Jones (Kodak) as chairman made it clear that those opposed to the journal
were a vocal minority and that the committee’s vision was very different from the sort of
publication American Cinematographer represented. Jones “very strongly” felt that it must
be “a strictly technical engineering and scientific journal” without “the character of
anything resembling a trade paper.”
62
While the ASC had certainly made strides in
professionalizing the Cinematographer, striping out many of the lighter articles of personal
and amateur interest of the past, the plethora of advertisements placed by the
manufacturers and aimed at the studio technicians revealed its status as a trade
publication. The editorial tenure of Hal Hall only increased this perception.
The rapid expansion of the membership of the organization, due to the successful
establishment of the Pacific Coast branch and the entrance of sound engineers into their
ranks, gave the SMPE the financial means for establishing a monthly publication.
63
The
Journal launched in January 1930, parsing out the papers and proceedings of the last
meeting of the previous decade in its first several issues. The attitude behind the effort
equally trumpeted its “strictly scientific or technical” content with its avoidance of “any

61
John Crabtree, “A Milestone,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers VIV, no. 1 (January
1930): 3. (Hereafter cited as JSMPE.)
62
“Report of the Journal Committee,” 112.
63
“Our Monthly Journal,” JSMPE XIV, no. 1 (January 1930): 7.
286
taint of commercialism” such as popular, trade, or advertising material.
64
The journal
would be more than just the Transactions spread over several months. In addition, foreign
papers, abstracts from scientific literature, book reviews, and patent notes would
supplement the presented papers and committee reports from the biannual conferences.
65

Through the first several issues of the Journal, the editors explained the policies of
their new publication format, which would prioritize getting new developments and
“things of vital interest” published quickly.
66
The publication of tutorials and papers that
gave general overviews of the state of some technology would sit farther down the pipeline.
To clarify their new position on American Cinematographer and other publications that had
generously appropriated SMPE material in the past, the Board resolved on the
confidentiality of all papers presented at their conferences for six months after or until
publication in the journal.
67
So, while the SMPE was at pains to emphasis their avoidance of
all things commercial, at least in this sense, there was an eye toward exploiting their
members’ efforts toward the betterment of the organization as a whole.
As the new decade dawned and American Cinematographer fought for space and
material with the Journal and International Photographer, the field became even more
crowded as they began expanding into the field of textbooks—an even greater indication of
the mature professionalization of the industry. Editor Hal Hall had turned directly to the

64
Ibid, 8-10. Of course, they would reconsider their stance on advertising, soliciting purchase from
its member organizations two years later. Letter from SMPE to Herbert Kalmus, Technicolor, June 1,
1932, SMPE Material, Box 81, Herbert Kalmus Papers, Library of Congress Manuscripts Division.
65
This supplemental material was likely inspired by and culled from the Kodak Monthly Abstract
Bulletin, which had been published out the Kodak Research Laboratories since 1917.
66
“Information for Authors Concerning Publication in the Journal-Order of Publication,” JSMPE XIV,
no. 4 (April 1930): 472.
67
This was mentioned in the Society Notes of several issues, JSMPE VIX, no. 2 (February 1930): 267;
XIV, no. 4 (April 1930): 472.
287
manufacturers, such as Kodak, for technical papers when the SMPE cut off their supply.
This proved difficult, as it was more prestigious to present for the engineering society and
have the company foot the bill for a trip to the convention than to have their work
published in a trade magazine aimed mostly at one segment of the industry.
68
On top of
that, Hall was soliciting the best technical articles not for American Cinematographer, which
he moved increasingly toward human interest stories, but for another publication that had
long been an ambition for the ASC, The Cinematographic Annual.
According to Hall’s preface, The Cinematographic Annual emerged out of the desire
“among the technical men” of the industry to put out a volume “of a highly technical
nature.”
69
Through nearly 600 pages, the Annual presented technical papers from SMPE
men from Kodak, DuPont, Bausch & Lomb and the like, along with articles on the art and
technique of the studio from ASC members and other Hollywood technicians and
filmmakers.
70
While the preface positioned the tome as a “textbook,” it contained almost
eighty advertisements, both from service firms and manufacturers and from
cinematographers themselves, in the style of a trade yearbook. Likewise, a section at the
back of the book titled “What They Use in Hollywood” pitched itself directly at laymen
outside of the industry. In a series of behind-the-scenes photographs, cameramen,
technicians, and filmmakers were shown working amidst the equipment of the day. The
captions gave limited information, instead allowing the pictures to paint a portrait of
Hollywood labor rather than serving any purpose in providing technical information. While

68
Hall to Cowling, January 4, 1930, Cowling File, ASC Collection.
69
“Preface,” Hal Hall, Ed. The Cinematographic Annual, Vol. 1 (Hollywood: Hartwell Publishing Corp.,
1930): 3.
70
Most interesting may be the essay on “Cinematics” by experimental filmmaker/montage pioneer
Slavko Vorkapich.
288
the Annual may have sold well, it failed in its expressed ambition to serve as a technical
textbook of industrial practice, at least as the two ascendant technical trade organizations,
the SMPE and the AMPAS, saw it. As we saw with the Journal launch, the SMPE conceived of
legitimate technical publications through the lens of academic publishing—free of
advertising and fluff. Similarly, the Academy would take up the same philosophy of
educational-style publication.
First with the Technical Digest series of informational pamphlets and then with their
first book, Recording Sound for Motion Pictures (1931), the Academy sought the good favor
of the engineering and scientific community with its publishing endeavors. The Foreword
and Acknowledgements paid deference to the complex science of sound and cinema, while
carving out AMPAS’s own sphere in the practical application of these scientific principles to
the art of motion picture production.
71
This made obvious many of the chapters’ origins as
the lectures of the Academy’s sound school (and as pamphlets in the Technical Digest
series). But it also gave the book a sense of comprehensiveness and coherence, which the
Cinematographic Annual’s mix of tones and levels of technical depth lacked. In fact some of
the same essays appear in both books, such as John O. Aalberg’s “Reproduction in the
Theatre by R-C-A Photophone System” in the Annual, which is slightly reworded as
“Theatre Reproduction by RCA Photophone System,” in Recording Sound. Given the
sometimes-identical content, the AMPAS’ book lack of advertisements and its publication
by textbook editor McGraw-Hill were important to legitimacy in this realm.
After what was seen as a successful launch, volume two of the Annual appeared the
next year. It was two hundred pages shorter, despite the fact that it contained a dozen more

71
Lester Cowan, Ed. Recording Sound for Motion Pictures (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company,
1931).
289
advertisers than the last, and greatly expanded the pictorial and “What They Use in
Hollywood” sections.
72
While in a financial sense the publications for the organization were
at least moderately successful, they were clearly not competing in the field as legitimate
technical endeavors. Indeed, the Annual was discontinued after 1931, as was Hall’s
employment at the Cinematographer.
73
During his three-year tenure, he had moved the
cinematographers’ publication into a different space, no longer competing to be the
technical journal of the industry. Instead the magazine sat alongside several specialized
publications such as Projection Engineering (1929-), International Photographer (1929-),
and Radio Industries, each with its own specialized, but overlapping, audience. Only the
Academy and the SMPE now spoke across the various branches of the industry. While the
American Cinematographer had survived the tumult and continued to be an important and
widely read publication in the industry, it never met Snyder’s ambitions for it to be the
publication of record for the motion picture technology field. Instead, the field of technical
publication would be divided in much the same way, and by the same groups, as the
regulation of the technology itself.

The Society and the Academy
The SMPE’s attitude toward the American Cinematographer was indicative of their
continued trepidation about connecting too closely with the Hollywood side of the
industry. After the successful Hollywood conference in spring 1928, they would not hold a
Society meeting there until 1931, despite repeated pleas from the Academy and others to

72
Hall Hall, Ed. The Cinematographer Annual Vol. 2 (Hollywood: Hartwell Publishing, 1931).
73
George Schneiderman to Hall Hall, September 3, 1932, George Schneiderman, Treasurer 1924-
File, f.613, ASC Collection.
290
return. Instead, their next meeting, focused on the sound situation, was held in Lake Placid,
New York, with subsequent meetings New York City, Toronto, Washington DC, and again in
New York. The leadership continued to draw heavily from the personnel of the major East
Coast manufacturers, with only a few spots on the Board of Directors reserved for West
Coast members. The last two years of the decade constituted a period of rapid expansion of
the organization, both naturally, through the entrance of sound engineers into their
numbers, and forcefully, through a massive membership drive with a goal of attaining 1000
members by 1930. They fell short of that goal, but managed to reach 756 members, more
than tripling their membership since they first proposed increasing their connection with
Hollywood less than three years earlier. But this huge increase in the size of the
organization served to once again diminish the significance of the faraway Pacific Coast
membership, which despite numbering around 80, once again constituted a small fraction
of the total society.
The Pacific Coast section acted very much as a connective body—between the
greater SMPE and Hollywood, between the studio technicians and the manufacturers, and
between all of these groups and the Academy. While the section included many studio
employees, local representatives of East Coast manufacturers and engineer/executives
from the Hollywood technology service firms dominated its leadership. In their first report
back to the parent organization, Elmer Richardson (of lighting firm Mole-Richardson)
relayed the difficulty of assembling the members, since many worked long days in the
studios. Richardson somewhat flippantly noted that, “We have never yet been able to get
the boys to be dignified at the meetings, which partake more of the nature of a round-table,
291
dealing with the matter in hand.”
74
By late 1929, they had been incorporated into many
endeavors of the AMPAS and, under Peter Mole’s leadership, had begun holding their
meetings at locations such as the Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics and the Mitchell
Camera factory, where formal papers and demonstrations would take place.
75
So the
section’s activities became that of a technical dinner club rather than a trade organization,
focused on the intellectual development and camaraderie of the membership rather than
developing solutions to pressing professional issues.
Despite the distance, the Academy prioritized maintaining contact with the SMPE
and sending representatives to their conferences.
76
As at the Hollywood meeting, the SMPE
had a representative of the AMPAS give a paper at each meeting on the current projects of
the Hollywood organization, along with a few other papers written by Pacific Coast
members. The papers written by several different authors obfuscate the fact that they were
most often all read by one or two Hollywood attendees, who would be there as
representatives of the AMPAS, the Pacific Coast SMPE, and perhaps even the ASC, as well as
their own studio or manufacturing employers. It was Peter Mole who read AMPAS
secretary Frank Woods’ paper on “The Sound Motion Picture Situation in Hollywood” at the
Lake Placid conference.
In the paper he sent, Woods reiterated the difference between his organization and
the SMPE as being their additional concern for “artistry” and “attractiveness” of the product

74
“Elmer Richardson, “The West Coast Section,” (New York, NY, May 6-9, 1929) in TSMPE XIII, no.
37 (!929): 130.
75
“Society Notes—The Pacific Coast Section,” JSMPE XIV, no. 2 (February 1930): 269; and “Society
Notes—Pacific Coast Section,” JSMPE XIV, no. 4 (April 1930): 464.
76
SMPE conferences were always on the agenda for Technicians Branch and Producers-Technicians
Committee meetings. Academy Archives.
292
and their relationship to the film-going public.
77
While his update on the Academy in early
1929 reflected the lack of a clear direction at the time, the fall 1929 presentation showed
the newfound agenda for the organization in its title touting the AMPAS and “Its Service as
a Forum for the Industry.”
78
While he went into detail about the sound school, which was
well underway at that time, the report mentions only the decision to form the Producers’-
Technicians’ Committee (PTC) and the fact that it would differ from the AMPP Technical
Bureau. The full scope of the Academy’s activities only became clear at the May 1930
meeting in Washington, when the AMPAS paper specifically addressed the “Technical
Activities” of the Academy and was attributed to Producers-Technicians Committee
chairman Irving G. Thalberg. In it Thalberg extolled the accomplishment of the sound
school, which by then had served 900 studio workers in six sections and “sold the whole
industry on the vital principle of cooperative industrial education.”
79

The continued effort by the Academy to present themselves and their technical
activities to the SMPE suggests that they valued the organization as a legitimizing force.
While Thalberg’s paper gave details of the work of the Producers’-Technicians’ Committee

77
Frank Woods, “The Sound Motion Picture Situation in Hollywood,” (Lake Placid, New York,
September 24-28, 1929) in TSMPE XII, no. 35 (1928): 625. In the ensuing questions, President
Crabtree indicated that he had learned to keep in touch with the situation in Hollywood by reading
the Academy Bulletin.
78
The spring 1929 presentation was called only ‘The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,”
and discussed four things—the USC course, the first Academy Awards, the installation of ERPI
sound equipment in the Academy’s rooms, and the erection of a Muybridge memorial at Stanford.
Frank Woods, “The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,” (New York, New York, May 6-9,
1929) in TSMPE XIII, no. 38 (1929): 470. The paper presented at the October 1929, Toronto
meeting was: Frank Woods, “The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and Its Service as a
Forum for the Industry,” JSMPE XIV, no. 4 (April 1930): 436-439.
79
Irving G. Thalberg, “Technical Activities of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,”
JSMPE XV, no. 1 (July 1930): 3-15. Thalberg’s paper was probably written (at least the first draft) by
Lester Cowan, as I’ve found drafts of many of his statements and letters as the PTC chair written by
Cowan in the Academy Archives. It was read at the DC convention by an AMPAS member Ralph
Townsend, a cinematographer.
293
(discussed later), it particularly addressed the potentials for the relationship between the
Academy and the SMPE. The communicative function of their relationship was given
precedent over any actual collaboration of efforts. As Thalberg expressed it, contact with
the Society would “serve excellently in interpreting the needs of the producing industry to
the manufacturers, and in acquainting the studios with manufacturing developments.”
80
In
the discussion regarding this paper, John Crabtree expressed concern that the Committee’s
activities were beginning to encroach into the realms of standardization and nomenclature,
long the purview of the SMPE. The Society president implied that the Academy had perhaps
grown in stature and ambition too quickly when he asserted that they had only succeeded
due to having paid employees where the SMPE had to rely on volunteers. The only way
forward, according to Crabtree was for there to be “the closest cooperation” so as to avoid
the “ridiculous” scenario of competing nomenclature.
81

The SMPE’s commitment to remaining removed from their West Coast counterparts,
the “primary engineers” as they had earlier coined them, became engrained when the
organization finally established permanent offices on 42
nd
Street in New York City. This
accompanied the appointment of a paid editor and staff, for the first time in the
organization’s 15-year history, thus matching what many saw as the advantages the AMPAS
enjoyed. This was made possible, like the Journal, by the greatly increased membership
from outside of the manufacturing centers of the East Coast.
82
The establishment of New
York offices was portrayed within the SMPE not as a rejection of the production side of the

80
Thalberg, 15.
81
Discussion after “Technical Activites of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,” JSMPE
XV, no. 1 (July 1930): 16.
82
“Society Notes—Another Milestone,” JSMPE XVI, no. 1 (January 1931): 125. While the Pacific
Coast Section continued to grow and flourish and a Chicago section was established, the London
section opted to divorce itself from the parent organization and form its own society.
294
industry, but as an embrace. The decision to hold meetings in the city in both 1929 and
1930 was presented as being in the same spirit as the Hollywood meeting. As President
Crabtree put it, they were in the Radio City with “the deliberate object in view of effecting a
closer relationship between ourselves and those who are producing motion pictures.”
83

Still viewing the trip across the country as a major burden, investing in collaboration with
New York area production gave the organization an easy out.
But in the same breath, Crabtree revealed the reality of the new dynamic, which was
in giving over technical endeavors of “practical application” to the Academy. He laid out a
structure that was beginning to settle into place with the Pacific Coast section of the SMPE
acting as their contact with the Academy, and through them the studios. With the Academy
“coordinating technical effort in Hollywood, disseminating technical knowledge by
publication, and standardizing practices,” what was left for the SMPE was to “insure a
minimum duplication of effort.”
84
As a culmination of the Academy’s ascendency to being
the perceived authority on technical matters within Hollywood, the Board of Governors of
the SMPE approved a special section of the Journal for the technical activities of the
Academy as well as authorizing Crabtree to discuss with the Academy “ways and means of
effecting further collaboration.”
Through the Academy, the SMPE was able to centralize its contact with Hollywood
production and shift it to an institutional, rather than individual, level. They would remain
centered in the East Coast for the foreseeable future, with trips west for conventions every
couple of years. This institution-level contact was in direct contrast to the way the ASC had

83
“Banquet Speeches, Presented at the Semi-Annual Banquet of the Society Held at the Hotel
Pennsylvania, New York, NY, October 22, 1930,” JSMPE XVI, no. 2 (February 1931): 223.
84
“Banquet Speeches,” 227.
295
attempted to connect with the SMPE, which was very much dependent upon key personal
relationships, such as that between Silas Snyder and Herford Cowling, which dissolved
once Snyder left the organization. The rapid ascendency of the well-funded and organized
Academy left questions about authority over the definition of the industry—particularly
the realms of standardization and nomenclature. In these regards the work of the
Producers’-Technicians’ Committee would serve to define what types of technology would
be taken up by the Academy and what would be left for the SMPE.

Whose Academy?
The July 1929 meeting of the Producers Branch with the sound engineers, at which
the sound school and Producers-Technicians Committee were approved, was the first proof
that the key to creating an effective technical agenda would be outside of the scope of the
Technicians Branch itself. The technicians could create a dialogue and make
recommendations, but it would go nowhere without the consent of those in charge. This
fundamentally altered the role of Hollywood technicians in the control of technology in the
motion picture business. Whereas organizations such as the ASC and the SMPE gave the
technical side of the industry the ability to self-govern and set their own agendas, there was
little chance of actually producing large-scale change in the studios. The AMPAS
compartmentalized the technicians and put them under the leadership of the executives,
the board, and the more populous branches of the business, but by doing so, also gave them
direct access to the executives and therefore a potential means for enacting their goals. As
such, the Academy created a release valve for the technicians of Hollywood, providing a
controlled system for the addressing of grievances.
296
By corralling all of the various technical professions of the business into one branch,
the Academy reinforced the Hollywood structure that saw a few financial and “creative”
professions as fundamentally more important than the great mass of personnel working
under them. Nevertheless, the Academy’s insistent that the “science” of the industry was an
important element in legitimization and institutional organization gave the technicians a
chance to be heard by the leaders of the industry on a scale not yet seen. Going well beyond
issues of labor management, the Academy’s role in the professionalization of the technical
side of the industry was a key factor in the full realization of the studio system. This began
at the level of admittance into the organization—both in terms of professions and where
they worked—and extended into the activities of the various technical committee
established in the early years. To explore the work of the technicians and their committees
in the AMPAS, we first need to understand the changing composition of the Technicians’
Branch itself.
If the Cinematographer no longer spoke across the various technical fields of the
motion picture industry, the cinematographer also no longer stood as the prototypical
studio technician. The diminished status of the American Cinematographer as a technical
journal was just a reflection of the cinematographers’ changing status as one of many
important technicians in Hollywood. Though they were still seen as the primary force
connecting technology and art, their input on the collective technical endeavors of
Hollywood never again reached the heights it did with their near complete control over the
Mazda tests. The Hollywood technicians most likely to hold places of prominence on
AMPAS and SMPE committees were just (if not more) likely to be sound engineers, art
directors, or production managers. Where in the Mazda tests, cinematographers controlled
297
committees even outside their specialties, such as on makeup and sets, with the Academy’s
activities, they would mostly be relegated to committees that dealt specifically with
problems of cameras, lens, and lighting—their undeniable areas of expertise.
The diffusion of duties into specific sub-committees served to fragment the
technicians into their various corners, despite being lumped together in the Technicians’
Branch. But at the same time, the Academy resisted the fragmentation of the branch itself.
As new members joined the organization, the branch’s flexible boundaries proved
insufficient. When Peter Mole and George Mitchell, two engineers who manufactured tools
(lights and cameras, respectively) for use in motion picture studios, were invited to join, it
was unclear where they fit in the established structure.
85
While they were clearly not
writers, directors, actors, or producers, the Academy seemed to conceive of technicians as
working in the studio producing motion pictures—not producing technology itself. As such,
Mole and Mitchell, important figures in Hollywood who were not to be left out, were
ultimately slotted into a new category of ‘Special Membership.’
Even as the Academy added the special membership category, which also included
such technology focused Hollywood workers as Kodak distributor Edward O. Blackburn
and DuPont distributor Wesley Smith, the Technicians’ Branch continued to be a catch all
for those working in the studio in various below-the-line capacities. While membership of
art directors remained relatively static over the first three years, the sound membership
quickly came to equal that of camera and effects together. Professions such as editing,
laboratory work, and electrical remained marginally represented, while others, such as
makeup artists, studio managers, and casting directors, would hardly have considered

85
Academy Bulletin 13 (August 11, 1928): 1. Academy History Archive.
298
themselves technicians. The division between special membership and the Technicians’
Branch was largely along the lines of employment within the studios, though there were
exceptions, such as Joseph Dubray, formerly cameraman, but who now worked for Bell &
Howell Cameras. It was not until the 1940s that the leadership would begin to allow
various professions to create their own branches.
While the perception of who could be considered a “technician” expanded (much
like the SMPE’s definition of an engineer had), the places from which these members could
come narrowed. While the number varied anywhere from 11 to 18, the sense that there
were “major” studios and production companies from which all prominent personnel must
come became an increasing aspect of the rhetoric around the Academy and its activities.
While the Academy always favored technicians (and all members) who worked in the
major studios, with the projects of the Producers’-Technicians’ Committee (hereafter PTC)
this became explicit. The rhetoric around the number of studios participating in Academy
activities was initially utilized to boast about the high level of industry enthusiasm and
acceptance for their activities, but it came to reinforce an exclusionary structure that
determined the number of “major studios” which existed in Hollywood and prevented
those outside that list from participating. This explicitly worked to the detriment of those
that would most benefit from outsourcing research to a trade body—namely, smaller
companies who could not afford to take on research themselves (as we saw in chapter one
with the SMPE).
When the Producers-Technicians Committee was announced in August 1929, it had
eight members, four producers and four technicians, as well as AMPAS secretary Frank
Woods, ex officio. Along with chairman Irving Thalberg (MGM), the other producers were
299
Sol Wurtzel (Fox), M. C. Levee (Paramount), and Fred Beetson (AMPP/Central Casting). The
four technicians included the current and former Technical Bureau directors Gerald
Rackett and J. A. Ball (Technicolor) along with the current and former Technicians’ Branch
chairs, sound engineer J. T. Reed (United Artists) and art director Fred Pelton (MGM). As
the committee embarked on the first sustained program of cooperative research in the
motion picture industry, despite its boasting of collaboration throughout the industry and
the sharing of responsibility, there were clear delineations about who could participate and
receive the knowledge acquired.
For their semi-confidential progress reports, the PTC maintained mailing lists that
were organized by company and technical organization, ensuring that the latest technical
information was circulated to the important companies of the industry.
86
The alphabetical
list of seventeen production companies was followed by the names of the head executive
and head sound technicians who would receive copies of the recent work for the
committees, well before any formal publication. Likewise, the Academy maintained a list of
committee representation listed by studio, with the same seventeen companies as well as
Technicolor, ERPI, RCA Photophone, and the AMPP represented. To reinforce this set
constituency of the Academy, the 1930 Annual Report boasted that the 900 people who had
taken the sound course by that time had all come from seventeen studios.
87
Without

86
“Producers-Technicians Joint Committee—Mailing Lists” (December 13, 1929), Academy
Archives. The studios are: Columbia, Carmour, Educational, First National, Fox Hollywood (and Fox
Hills), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Metropolitan, Paramount, Pathe, Hal Roach, RKO, Mack Sennett, Tec-
Art, Tiffany, United Artists, Universal, and Warner Bros. Technicolor was also handwritten into the
list.
87
“Technical Education,” Annual Report for the Year Ending December 31, 1930, (Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences, 1930): 21. Academy History Archive.
300
naming who those seventeen are, they can generally be assumed to be the same group of
major studios and producers.
The concentration of participation among the major studios constituted an elite
network of information sharing that benefited those already established within the system,
both on the company and the individual technician level. It is relevant to note that all of the
studios that came to dominate Hollywood, often referred to as the big five (Fox, MGM,
Paramount, RKO, Warner Bros.) and the little three (Columbia, United Artists, and
Universal), were not only on the PTC mailing lists but their employees constituted the
majority of members of the PTC and the executive committees of both the Producers’ and
the Technicians’ Branch.
88
This meant that any company working outside of this network
would face extreme difficulty in duplicating the basic standards of quality that the PTC’s
work was creating. Limiting access to the Academy’s activities and their results thereby
was key to the success of the oligarchic structure that prevailed in Hollywood at this time.
With this understanding of who exactly was benefiting from the PTC’s work, we can now
turn to the committee itself to see how this endeavor at collaborative research became a
means by which the system reinforced its exclusionary structure.

The Evolution of the Producers-Technicians Committee
The announcement of the formation of the Producers-Technicians Committee was
heralded as the final realization of the dream of industry-wide, Hollywood-based technical
research with a practical approach to “preparing for developments in the motion picture

88
Of the rest of the studios, about half were incorporated into the major studios, such as Pathé and
independent producers like Hal Roach, and half died off within a couple of years, such as Tiffany
and Metropolitan. Only one, Darmour, survived as a successful Poverty Row studio.
301
industry during the next two to five years.”
89
Of course, the Technical Bureau had promised
to be that only a year earlier, and its two directors would make up a quarter of this new
committee. So the grand pronouncement of the PTC had to be hedged with the uncertainty
of how they could differentiate themselves from the AMPP’s bureau. Along with
proclamations of the “general advantage” to the industry, quotations in the announcement
from Producers’ Branch chairman B. P. Schulberg (Paramount), a pioneer of motion picture
publicity, portrayed this endeavor as an attempt to avoid future chaos like that brought by
sound. Schulberg argued that cooperative research would make for “evolution in place of
revolution,” knowing that those in Hollywood would appreciate the implied financial
advantage of gradual infrastructural shifts, rather than large-scale upheavals.
While the committee was announced in August 1929, it did not meet until
November as Cowan, Woods, and chairman Irving Thalberg sought to solidify an agenda
before going into that first gathering. Cowan, as the secretary of the PTC, took on much of
the work of the committee with his myriad notes and drafts in the Academy Archives
indicating he formed the argument for its usefulness and wrote many of Thalberg’s letters
and speeches. Rather than allowing the committee itself to spend time hashing out an
agenda, Cowan wrote to Thalberg that it would be better to delay holding a committee
meeting until “its functions have been more definitely outlined and specific projects for its
consideration conceived.”
90

89
Office of Secretary Frank Woods “Announcement of Joint Standing Committee of Producers and
Technicians,” Press Release, Academy Archives. The committee was sometimes called the Joint
Standing Committee of Producers and Technicians or the Producers-Technicians Joint Committee. I
standardize the title to the Producers-Technicians Committee (or the acronym PTC) for clarity,
unless in quotation.
90
Lester Cowan to Irving Thalberg (undated), Producers-Technicians Joint Committee—General,
Box 45, Academy Archives.
302
The AMPAS set up a structure in which projects were brought to the PTC for
approval and supervision rather than originating in their meetings. As such, it functioned
as a complement to the freeform conversations of the Technicians’ Branch, bringing the
technicians’ concerns into concrete solution form and practical application. But it also
meant that the permanent bureaucratic structure of the Academy, namely the secretaries
Woods and Cowan, filtered flows between the two groups, determining which projects fit
into their conception of the organization’s priorities. The three research projects that the
Technicians’ Branch were already working on in collaboration with organizations such as
the ASC, the American Projectionist Society, and the Pacific Coast SMPE—setting an
aperture standard across production and exhibition, creating a release print standard, and
investigating theatrical screen illumination—were placed under the PTC umbrella.
91

Cowan spent the intervening months building up his case for a particular kind of
work that mimicked much of the structure of the Mazda tests. He drafted several
statements of purpose and solicited from Rackett suggestions on projects that could be
“handled most efficiently by cooperation” based on the Technical Bureau’s year of analysis
into the technical situation of the industry.
92
Additionally, he used the concerns he had
heard from the technicians through their branch meetings to conceive of projects for the
committee. In the statement he prepared for the first PTC meeting, along with elaborate
hypothetical scenarios demonstrating the potential efficacy of collaborative research, he
laid out three criteria by which they should measure the suitability of a cooperative
research project. First, cooperation should be logical while competitive relations were

91
“Academy Technical Activities,” Academy Bulletin 26 (October 30, 1929): 4. Academy History
Archive.
92
Lester Cowan to Gerald Rackett, AMPP, Direct of Technical Bureau (undated), Producers-
Technicians Joint Committee—General, Box 45, Academy Archives.
303
respected. Second, there should already exist a willingness to cooperate on that project, as
“The time is not always ripe for presenting a project.”
93
And third, the management of the
project must be “of the highest order” lest “suspicion, jealousy etc. will crop up and prevent
any achievement.”
Cowan presented a cautious and conservative approach to research that was
reflected in the three projects taken to the PTC and approved—silencing arc lights,
measuring sound absorption of set materials, and silencing camera noise. The caution with
which they approached their projects was evident in the decision to only research camera
silencing devices developed in the studios (such as blankets and blimps) rather than
cameras themselves, so as not to step on the toes of the camera manufacturers
themselves.
94
Indeed, all of the projects involved technologies primarily developed
independently in the studios rather than through major manufacturers or service firms.
Thus they represented areas for research unlikely to be duplicated by the SMPE or any
other organization.
In its scientific endeavors, the Academy set its sights not toward the exceptional, as
it did on the arts side of the organization, but rather on the mundane and invisible. As it
was summarized in the first annual report of the AMPAS for 1929, the PTC was focused on
problems of “immediate practical significance” and would deliberately avoid “broad
industry problems” which were “not within the control of local studios and involving many

93
Lester Cowan, “Report by Assistant Secretary,” (1929), Producers-Technicians Joint Committee—
General, Box 45, Academy Archives.
94
“Minutes of Meeting of Joint Producers-Technicians Committee” (Tuesday, November 12, 1929),
Minutes of Prod. Tech. Joint Committee—November 12, 1929 Folder, Box 45, Academy Archives.
304
complications.”
95
In this regard, Cowan particularly named wide film as a technical issue
that they would not be addressing. Wide film, like color or stereoscopy, was a highly
marketable technology on which the studios thought they could gain a competitive
advantage over their rivals, and thus would be a poor choice for collaboration and
standardization.
96

The execution of the research projects, as determined from that first meeting, would
follow the precedent set by the Mazda tests. By the time of the Annual Report for 1930, the
process for collaborative research projects had been systematized into a defined, seven
step process: 1. Appointing the subcommittee; 2. Appointing representatives from each
studio to assist in the work; 3. Survey of existing methods for dealing with the problem; 4.
Progress report sent to executives; 5. Quantitative testing; 6. Formulating
recommendations; 7. Generating the final report.
97
This procedure created a system in
which information was gathered from the bottom of the studio, filtered up to the top,
evaluated, and sent back down for implementation.
With the sound school in full swing and the PTC setting the agenda for industry-
wide technological research, by the end of 1929 the Academy had harnessed the crisis of
sound to its benefit. The September 1929 Bulletin which repeatedly touted the school as
the most “popular project” in Hollywood tried to take the reverse view, saying that it was
not the Academy’s luck that the sound crisis hit Hollywood, but that “it has been especially

95
“Technical Administration,” Annual Report 1929 (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,
1929): 49.
96
But wide film, unlike those other technologies would eventually come to interfere with basic
operations of the industry, in that it disrupted technological standardization of projection and
laboratory equipment. Thus, after many years of resistance, the Academy would eventually find
itself forced to intervene. However, during the period looked at here, they were at pains to avoid
dealing with it.
97
“Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,” Annual Report… 1930, 16.
305
fortunate for the industry that there is the Academy to perform the service.”
98
Throughout
its own stellar assessment of the success of its projects, the Academy emphasized the
practicality of its results and solid place it had found itself within the industry. In the 500-
word essay extolling the successes of the organization in its first two years, the clear
emphasis was on its technical activities, while all other projects, including conciliation, the
USC course, and the first merit awards (only four months earlier), were given a single
sentence together.
The defined parameters and philosophical coherence with which the Producers’-
Technicians’ Committee launched was in direct contrast with the mystery and uncertainty
at the origin of the Technical Bureau a year earlier. Given the effort with which Cowan and
his organization had gotten the producers on board with the PTC, it came as no surprise
that the AMPP jumped at the chance to transfer the control of the Technical Bureau over to
the Academy. President William deMille announced the move on the eighth day of the new
decade, before the PTC had even had a second meeting. The failure of the AMPP’s Technical
Bureau was evident in the small effect the merger had on the PTC, which continued to
operate as it had, only adding a few projects. It was decided that the Bureau would retain
its name with the PTC acting as its Board of Directors, thus the Technical Bureau became
the title under which the PTC’s activities were branded.
99
The one major project which the
Technical Bureau had taken on which they seemed at a loss to deal with was patents. The
Bureau had acted as a clearinghouse for inventors with various devices to be used in the

98
Academy Bulletin 25 (September 25, 1929): 1. Academy History Archive.
99
“Notes on Thalberg Introduction,” Minutes of April 15 Meeting, Producers-Technicians Joint
Committee, Academy Archives. The Technical Bureau was renamed the Research Council in 1932,
but retained the same operating agenda and structure until it was transferred back to the AMPP in
1947.
306
studios. With the announcement of the transfer to the Academy, Cowan’s office was
inundated with inquiries from small manufacturers and garage tinkerers pitching their
wares to the studios. With the Academy’s conservatism in play, the committee largely
shoved this function to the side offering no structured solution to the problem.
As the Producers-Technicians’ Committee’s initial projects began wrapping up, the
question of what to do with the recommendations of the various sub-committees came to
the fore. While the creation of standards had been the primary work of the SMPE since its
inception, the Academy had created no infrastructure for such endeavors, even going so far
as to avoid generating recommendations in the Mazda tests. Standardization was an issue
about which the administration of the Academy had previously been trepidatious. When
the importance of standardization had been broached at earlier meetings of the
Technicians’ Branch, AMPAS secretary Frank Woods had suggested that they might emerge
naturally “through force of circumstances” as they had with film stock itself in the first
decade or two of the business.
100
The technicians present quickly clarified that the situation
was not the same anymore. Woods needed to understand that the motion picture industry
of 1929 was not that of 1900 or even 1915, and things could not be worked through
circumstantially over time. The size and scope of the industry meant that the time for
allowing standardization issues to resolve themselves naturally through the market had
passed. Decisions needed to be made quickly and forcefully so they might be adopted
across all the companies at once, thus avoiding any interruption in the flow of content to
the exhibitors.

100
“Notes Taken at a Meeting of the Technicians Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts &
Sciences, Wednesday, May 9, 1928,” Technicians Branch – Meeting 5-9-28, Folder B.5, Academy
Archives.
307
By conceiving its scientific activities as collaborative endeavors, designed to pool
resources and knowledge for the benefit of both the individual studios and the industry as
a whole, the AMPAS had poorly positioned itself to actually impose standards and rules on
its constituents. Rather, when sub-committees such as that on aperture developed
recommendations, they presented them to the SMPE for the endorsement of their
Standards Committee.
101
Thus they positioned themselves more as a research body than an
engineering association that could create and enforce standards and nomenclature. When
the Academy published a terminology guide for technicians, it chiefly used the SMPE
nomenclature committee definitions (as well as those of radio and electrical societies) over
the last decade.
102
By setting publication of the full report as the end point of its research
projects, the AMPAS made the dissemination of knowledge throughout the industry its
ultimate goal, above and beyond standardization of industrial practice. Of course,
standardizing knowledge created a leveling effect on practice that served the larger goal of
creating basic standards of quality that all studios had to maintain in order to survive.
By mid-1930, the various activities under the umbrella of the PTC involved more
than 100 studio technicians and had generated 1200 copies of the reports in the Technical
Digest.
103
In April, at the point when the initial six projects of the committee were complete
and ready for publication, the PTC hosted a joint meeting of the Producers’ and
Technicians’ branches to reassure the larger Academy membership of their involvement

101
“SMPE Endorsement,” Academy Bulletin 28 (January 29, 1930): 6. Academy History Archive.
102
Academy Technical Bureau, A Selected Glossary for the Motion Picture Technician, Academy
Technician Digest No. 23 (Hollywood: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1930). The
introduction to the glossary states that “Liberal use has also been made of the glossaries and
definitions published by the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, the Institute of Radio Engineers,
the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and other technical glossaries and encyclopedias.” (1)
103
“Producers-Technicians Committee, Meeting of April 15, 1930,” Minutes of April 15, Meeting,
Academy Archives.
308
and consent in the committee’s projects. By this time, they had clearly defined the functions
of the PTC (and Technical Bureau) which would be sustained throughout the studio era—to
act as a clearinghouse for technical information, to conduct surveys and investigations, to
perform quantitative testing, to set specifications for the “minimum standards of quality,”
to coordinate and contact with the manufacturers, labs, exchanges, and theatres, to report
and publish its findings, and to provide a reference library.
At the joint meeting, Thalberg laid out the conservative principles behind the PTC
as, like all things in the Academy, being as much about what it did not do as what it did. He
assured all that they were “not attempting to offer any definite recommendation but rather
to lay before each studio a survey of what is being practiced” along with “the scientific
experience of what each practice leads to,” emphasizing the usefulness of such endeavors
in and of themselves.
104
He stressed the “glorious result” of collaboration itself, apart from
any concrete innovations and marked this in contrast to the past’s “individual attempts,
spasmodic, undirected, and mostly inefficient.” Inefficiency was indeed the most heinous of
concepts in 1930 business.
The May 1930 meeting was more than just an update on the affairs of the committee
to its parent branches; it was the industry’s chance to accept and legitimize the trajectory
of the Academy and its control over collective technical endeavors in Hollywood for the
foreseeable future. Cowan not only invited the members of the branches, but also send
guest cards to the executives and department heads to distribute among the “associate
producers and technicians on your lot who are not members of the Academy but whom you

104
“Joint meeting Producers’ and Techncians’ Branch,” Prod-Tech Joint Comm. – Thalberg Talk
5/14/30, Box 45, Academy Archives.
309
think ought to be present.”
105
Representatives of larger studios and firms, such as Fox,
Paramount, and ERPI were given ten guests, while small studios such as Tec-Art and Hal
Roach were given two. As with all endeavors of the Academy, the invitations were not
extended outside of the studios and their major partners. The press release sent out the
next day reported 150 “principal producers and heads of technical department in the
Hollywood studios were present” at the meeting.
106

The activities of the Producers-Technicians Committee’s first year set the standard
for the Technical Bureau that would remain relatively stable until it returned to the AMPP’s
oversight in 1947, as the studio system began to crumble and technological innovation
once again came to the fore. Thus it stood as a major industrial institution throughout the
golden age of Hollywood. By the end of 1930, all of the initial projects that arose from the
conversion to sound had been wrapped up, and Thalberg sought out new problems for the
committee to take on. Wide film—the major concern that had come up at every meeting of
the PTC and the Technicians’ Branch for over a year was once again broached at the final
meeting of 1930. But once again the PTC deferred, seeing this as exactly the kind of
competitive technical issue that the Academy wished to avoid. They instead determined
that the problem “seems to be working itself out” and so decided “to take no action.”
107

105
Lester Cowan to E. H. Allen, Educational Pictures, May 12, 1930, Meeting of Producers’ and
Technicians’ Branches of the Academy, Academy Archives.
106
“Meeting of the Producers’ and Technicians’ Branches of the Academy – Publicity, May 14, 1930,”
Press Release, Academy Archives.
107
“Minutes of Meeting of Producers-Technicians Committee” Producers-Technicians Committee –
Minutes of 12/10/30 Meeting, Academy Archives.
310
Instead the Academy’s technical activities would continue to center on problems of “basic
standards of quality” such as film processing and overused developer solution.
108

Conclusion
With the Academy’s Technical Bureau and the parameters of its activities firmly
established by mid-1930, Hollywood had finally established a sustainable relationship to
scientific research. The dream of an industry-wide, Los Angeles based research laboratory
died and in its place sat a closed network of trade organizations, reaching horizontally
across the studios and manufacturers and determining what was in the best interest of
maintaining the status quo. This conservative, cautious approach to technology and
innovation, focused on stability and standardization, was a major marker of the mature
Hollywood studio system. It is no surprise then that this structure for technological
management fell apart as the larger system did in the late-1940s.
Rather than seeing this stable infrastructure as a result of the established system,
the activities in the last years of the 1920s show how the management of technology
actually contributed to creating a stable system. The sharing of basic knowledge about the
tools of the trade was key to establishing a minimum standard of technical quality in the
Hollywood industry and in creating ties across competitive interests. Had the studios not
bought into the Academy’s pitch about the necessity of pooling knowledge, it seems
unlikely that the system would have stabilized to the extent that it did. As such, the
establishment of industry-wide endeavors for the management of technology must be seen

108
“Minutes of Meeting of Producers-Technicians Committee” Thursday, April 16, 1931, Academy
Archives.
311
as a central tenet of the studio system alongside such established concepts as the central
producer system, vertical integration, and the star system.
312

CONCLUSION

The technicians have now become engineers. I think the word itself has an
impressive sound to the producers. Engineers are now recognized by the
producers as a class of people on whom they have to depend and to whom
they cannot dictate, because as a rule they do not know what the engineer
is talking about.
1

When the engineers returned to Hollywood in May 1931, there was little of the
pomp and circumstance that met them three years earlier. Stars like Douglas Fairbanks and
Milton Sills (who died suddenly the year before) were not at the banquet, as the leadership
of the Technical Bureau and AMPAS Technicians’ Branch could stand in their place to
represent Hollywood. While questions about the place of technology within the system
were unanswered and salient in 1928, by 1931 there was a sense of order to the
proceedings. SMPE President Crabtree continued to delineate the division between his
organization and the Academy, but it was only that—a continuation of a conversation that
was already determined. There was a well-defined understanding of the divide between
the Academy’s focus on “the application to the motion picture of the tools which the
engineer has devised” and the SMPE’s concern with “fundamental scientific principles” and
the actual “devising and making of the tools.”
2
This theoretically clean separation of course
would be challenged and negotiated, but it established an amicable working relationship
between the primary and secondary technology sectors of the motion picture industry.

1
Frank Woods, “Banquet Speeches” (Hollywood, California, May 25, 1931), JSMPE XVI, no. 3
(September 1931): 425.
2
John Crabtree, “Banquet Speeches” (Hollywood, California, May 25, 1931), JSMPE XVII, no. 3
(September 1931): 417.
313
With a clear recognition of the new structure and status of the industry, the
speeches at the SMPE banquet in Hollywood looked back at how far they had come. Frank
Woods remembered a time when the “engineer was unknown” to the picture business,
acknowledging that the time that had passed since the early days of the industry were not
long in number (twenty-three or twenty-four, by his estimation) but rather “very long in
things that have been accomplished.”
3
While it was reported that the Hollywood
convention “went off with perfect precision” there was little sense (or rhetoric) about it as
a significant event in the industry.
4
Rather, Crabtree asserted that even with the 3000 miles
distance and the ongoing economic depression, a Hollywood meeting should be a regular
occurrence every other year, which it did become. The efforts of the last few years had
solidified the relationship between the manufacturers and the studios, so that is could
already begin to be taken for granted.
The bureaucratic structure established in the last years of the 1920s for managing
motion picture technology was used during the next two decades, the golden age of the
Hollywood studios, to reinforce stability and efficiency. During this period, the major
technological changes were “improvements,” as in panchromatic film stock and silent
cameras, while technologies that might significantly change the industry, such as wide film,
were determined to be too costly and disruptive to the system. Thus the stability of the
industry during the golden age was ensured by the smooth technical operations that
undergirded production practices. Everything was harnessed toward the goal of
maintaining high technical standards, which by now were virtually impossible to replicate
outside the system.

3
Frank Woods, “Banquet Speeches” (May 25, 1931): 425.
4
“The Hollywood Convention,” JSMPE XVII, no. 3 (September 1931): 475.
314
The work of the manufacturers, service firms, engineers, and technicians over the
first two decades of Hollywood created a structure for the industry that would last for
decades and persist into the present. The trade associations they formed to do this work—
namely the SMPE and the AMPAS, but also the increasingly significant trade groups, which
throughout the 1930s joined the ASC in representing specific professions—created
relationships and controlled the flow of information across the industry, but stayed locked
inside of it. By outsourcing the management of basic technical standards to these invested
groups of engineers and technicians, the producers maintained oversight while giving
themselves the ability to focus resources in more profitable directions. The studios’ interest
in maintaining this controlled structure was seen in their resistance to allowing the
Technicians’ Branch to splinter. The art directors, cinematographers, sound engineers, and
film editors would not go their separate ways until 1947, just as other such stable
structures began to break down.
5

However, the narrative of stability during the studio era equally needs to be
questioned. While this project has shown the establishment of the infrastructural
foundations of the system, it leaves questions about how individuals operated within a
defined (as opposed to forming) system. Many of the same actors, from Dubray to Cowan to
Mees, continued to operate in the various facets of the motion picture industry well into the
1940s and even past the point when the system was once again thrust into massive
infrastructural realignment. So, I leave their stories only at one pivotal point in time, to be
picked up in another project.

5
“New By-Laws Drafted,” For Your Information 3, no. 1 (January 1947): 4. Academy History Archive,
Herrick Library Digital Collections.
315
By focusing on this foundational period, I questioned our assumptions about the
fixedness of infrastructure and the motivations behind its establishment. While financial
interests often guide our thinking about business, the role of engineers and technicians and
the activities of trade associations upend the purely self-interested ideal of Hollywood. This
project offers a picture of a community of Hollywood laborers with a sense of solidarity not
only around the value of its productions, but around the quality of its operations. By
foregrounding these forgotten voices and looking at their careers and industrial activities,
we can see beyond the glitz and glamour and understand the light stands and tripods that
create it. There is no cinema without the camera and there is no Hollywood without the
engineer.

316
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archival Sources

Academy Archives, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Academy History Archive, Herrick Library Digital Collection
Carl Akeley Papers, University of Rochester Special Collections, Rochester, NY
American Society of Cinematographers Collection, Margaret Herrick Library
E. H. Amet Papers, Seaver Center for Western Historical Research, Los Angeles, CA
Bausch & Lomb Corporate Collection, Rochester, New York.
Lee DeForest Scrapbooks, 1919-1924, Seaver Center for Western Historical Research
Elmer Dyer Collection, Margaret Herrick Library
Eastman Legacy Collection, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York
George Eastman Papers, University of Rochester Special Collections, Rochester, NY
Cedric Gibbons Collection, Margaret Herrick Library
Edward T. Howell Collection, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York
Thomas Ince Papers, Library of Congress Manuscripts Division, Washington, DC
Frederic Eugene Ives and Herbert Eugene Ives Papers, Library of Congress Manuscripts
Division
Herbert Kalmus Papers, Library of Congress Manuscripts Division, Washington DC
George Kleine Papers, Library of Congress Manuscripts Division, Washington DC
Kodak Historical Collection, University of Rochester Special Collections, Rochester, New
York
Kodak Research Laboratories Collection, University of Rochester Special Collections,
Rochester, New York
LeRoy Motion Picture Patents Collection, Seaver Center for Western Historical Research
MGM Art Department Records, Margaret Herrick LIbrary
Mole-Richardson Company Archive, Hollywood, California
National Museum of American History Photographic Collection, Smithsonian Institute
Paramount Pictures Contract Summaries, Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, California
Pathe Exchange Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, California
Thomas Kimmwood Peters Papers, Library of Congress Manuscripts Division
Earl Theisen Motion Picture Collection, Seaver Center for Western Historical Research, Los
Angeles, California
Technicolor Collection, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York
Technicolor Historical Records, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York
Trade Literature Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institute
Special Collections, Washington DC
Warner Bros. Archive, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California

317

Trade Publications and Periodicals

Academy Bulletin
American Cinematographer
The Bausch & Lomb Magazine
Cinema News
Exhibitors Herald
Exhibitors Trade Review
The Film Daily
Hollywood Filmograph
Illuminating Engineering Society Transactions
The International Photographer
Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers
Los Angeles Times
Motion Picture News
Motography
Movie Maker
Movie Pictorial
The Moving Picture World
New York Times
Photodramatist
The Reflector (Bausch & Lomb)
Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers
Variety
Wid’s Daily

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322

Appendix A: Acronyms

AC American Cinematographer
AMPP Association of Motion Picture Producers
AMPAS Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
ASC American Society of Cinematographers
IATSE International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees
IBEW International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
IP International Photographer
JSMPE Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers
MPPA Motion Picture Producers Association (later AMPP)
MPPDA Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America
NAMPI National Association of the Motion Picture Industry
SMPE Society of Motion Picture Engineers (later SMPTE)
TSMPE Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers

Abstract (if available)

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