Mission Valley Shopping Center opened 1961, from SDHS

Hollywood's postwar problems

• 1946 peak year - 90m weekly - $1.7B
  
• 1948 Paramount case - must sell off theaters (in 1986, studios again allowed to own theaters)
  
• 1949 MGM layoffs - studio expenses too high
  
• rise of drive-ins, sports, shopping centers
• threat of television

Solutions:

1. Control television
   • Hollywood studios bought TV stations, hired TV executives, sold and licensed film libraries, produced TV movies, hired independent producers and directors, gave residual rights to actors, sold props and property, offered tours of back lots, created theme parks
2. Cut costs
   • Barney Balaban sold off Paramount's theaters
   • Howard Hughes sold off RKO
   • James Aubrey sold MGM props and lots, made low-budget films

   1953 film in 3D, from Fifties

3. Color film
   • 1-strip Agfacolor from Germany 1945
   • Eastmancolor replaced expensive 3-strip Technicolor
4. 3D
   • Bwana Devil 1952, House of Wax 1953
5. Widescreen
   • Cinerama with 3 screens, 7 soundtracks used briefly, from This Is Cinerama (1952) to How the West Was Won (1962)
   • Cinemascope - S. Skouras used Chretien lens for The Robe 1953 by Darryl Zanuck
     
   • VistaVision by Paramount with horizontal film transport forWhite Christmas 1954 with Bing Crosby
     
   • Panavision with adjustable lens, 65-70mm film froRaintree County 1957 by MGM
     
6. Special Effects
   • single-frame animation of Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen used for Mighty Joe Young 1949, Godzilla 1956
   • Theremin electronic music used by Bernard Hermann in Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) - see review for the documentary film Theremin, An Electronic Odyssey (1995)

   CD-ROM history coming soon!

7. Exhibition moved to the suburbs
   • independent exhibition chains built new theaters
   • Stanley H. Durwood became the father of the multiplex movie theater in 1963 when he opened two side-by-side theaters with 700 seats at Ward Parkway Center in Kansas City
8. Production code revised 1956
   • Miracle case 1952 - 1st amendment protection for movies
     
   • Moon Is Blue 1953 by Otto Preminger
     
   • And God Created Woman (UA, 1957) with Bridget Bardot
     
9. Epic films
   • Ten Commandments 1956 by C.B. DeMille
     
   • Ben-Hur (MGM, 1959) with Charleton Heston
     
   • Spartacus (Universal 1960) in Super Technirama 70 with Kirk Douglas
     
10. Genre films
    • science fiction formula used by Them! and The Day the Earth Stood Still
    • teenpics appealed to growing youth culture

Sources:

• Biskind, Peter. Seeing is Believing: how Hollywood taught us to stop worrying and love the fifties. New York : Pantheon Books, 1983. 371 p.
• Doherty, Thomas. Teenagers & Teenpics: the Juvenilazation of American Movies in the 1950s. Winchester MA: Unwin Hyman, 1988. 275 p.
• Harmetz, Aljean. "Samuel Z. Arkoff, Maker of Drive-In Thrillers, Dies at 83" New York Times, September 19, 2001
• Lyman, Rick. "Horrors! From Bug Movies to Bioterrorism," New York Times, October 23, 2001
• Peebles, Curtis. Watch the Skies!: a chronicle of the flying saucer myth. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994. 342 p.
• shopping center history
• television history
• Weintraub, Bernard. "Crawling Soon to a Theater Too Near You," New York Times, June 24, 1997.