vertigal intergration in film

The term studio system refers to the practice of large motion picture studios

1. producing movies primarily on their own film making lots with creative personnel under often long-term contract and

2. pursuing vertical integration through ownership or effective control of distributors and movie theaters, guaranteeing additional sales of films through manipulative booking techniques.

The Little Three studios (Universal, Columbia and United Artists) also made pictures, but each lacked one of the crucial elements of vertical integration.The Big Five tryed to achieve vertical integration through the late 1940s, owning vast real estate on which to construct elaborate sets. In addition, these studios set the exact terms of films release dates and patterns, and operated the best movie palaces in the nation. 

Warner Bros, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Loew's (MGM) and RKO. Together these eight companies operated as a big monoploly controlling the entire market.

They also controlled the terms under which you could see their films. Prestige or A-level films used studio stars and lavish production values, and then could only be seen initially in studio-owned, first-run theaters. When the studios released these films to theaters they didn't own, they forced those owners to buy A-pictures in combination with a number of often awfull, B-movies (no stars,crappy genre pictures) and shorts, a practice called "block booking." also, the studios often made the exhibitors buy the films blind, not allowing them to see what they were getting before they got it. 

  On May 4, 1948, in a federal antitrust suit known as the Paramount case brought against the entire Big Five, the U.S. Supreme Court specifically outlawed block booking. Holding that the conglomerates were in violation of antitrust, the justices refrained from making a final decision as to how that fault should be remedied, but the case was sent back to the lower court from which it had come with language that suggested divorcement which ment the complete separation of exhibition interests from producer-distributor operations—was the answer.

Actors and actresses were contract players bound up in seven-year contracts to a single studio because the studio system also hinges on the treatment of stars, who were made and exploited to suit a studio's image and schedule. The studio generally held all the options. Stars could be loaned out to other production companies at any time. Studios could also force bad roles on actors, and control the minutiae of stars' images with their mammoth in-house publicity departments.

Paramounts history

Paramounts history


1912 - Adolph Zukor bought the American distribution rights to Sarah Bernhardt's four-reel film, QUEEN ELIZABETH. The film opened on July 12, 1912, as the first full length drama shown in the United States. Zukor then founded the Famous Players Film Company. They then began to produce movies in New York, beginning with The Prisoner Of Zena and The Count Of Monte Cristo. One year on, Zukor bought Paramount Pictures.

1926 - with the merger of the Jesse L. Lasky Company and Famous Players, Lasky supervised the construction of a new Hollywood studio on a 26-acre lot.  Located on Marathon Street, the original buildings contained four large sound stages and cost $1 million.

1927 - the studios new release Wings, won the very first academy award for best picture

In the mid-thirties as the American economy was coming out of the Great Depression, Paramount maintained its business with memorable Bing Crosby musicals, Cecil DeMille spectacles and the comedies of Mae West.

1940's - post war, paramount concentrated on escapist films and started to reel in the big bucks and by 1946 it peeked to a massive $39 million, the biggest profit ever registered by a film company

1944 - Paramount won its second Best Picture Academy Award for Leo McCarey’s Going My Way.  The next year, Billy Wilder’s The Lost Week end took the top prize.

1950's - Paramount Pictures crowded the Academy Award nominee lists with enduring classics including:

The Heiress
Sunset Boulevard 
A Place In The Sun
The Greatest Show On Earth - 1952 Academy Winner
Roman Holiday
Shane
The Country Girl
The Rose Tattoo
The Ten Commandments

1966 - Gulf+Western Industries, Inc. acquired control of Paramount on March 24. The corporation turned its interest toward the new entertainment division.


During these years, Paramount created some of the most iconic movies in American cinematic history includinb:

Romio and Juliet - 1968 won two Academy Award
True Grit - 1969 which starred John Wayne 

The Godfather - 1972 won three Academy Awards and is considered the film that elevated the gangster drama genre
China town - 1974

 
1989 - G+W was renamed Paramount Communications, Inc.

1980's -

Star Trek 1979, 1982, 1984, 1986,1989
Airplane! 1980, 1982
Friday the 13th 1980, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1989
Raiders of the lost ark / Indiana Jones 1981, 1984 
Beverly Hills cop 1984, 1987

1994 - Paramount merged with Viacom Inc


Westerns

I cant remember much of Unforgiven & Stage Coach but I will attempt to compare them.
Whereas Stage Coach is a typical western, for example galloping across huge planes of desert with the cavalry and killing native Americans, unforgiven shows us the dark, realistic side of the wild west and with none other then king squinty himself Clint Eastwood is the perfect guy to do so. 
The American Film Institute defines western films as those "set in the American West that embody the spirit, the struggle and the demise of the new frontier." Most of the characteristics of Western films were part of 19th century popular Western literature and were firmly in place before film became a popular art form. Western films commonly feature as their protagonists stock characters such as cowboys, gunslingers, and bounty hunters, often depicted as semi-nomadic wanderers who wear Stetson hats, bandannas, spurs, and buckskins, use revolvers or rifles as everyday tools of survival, and ride between dusty towns and cattle ranches on faithful steeds.

Sci Fi

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with the impact of imagined innovations in science or technology, often in a futuristic setting. It differs from fantasy in that, within the context of the story, its imaginary elements are largely possible within scientifically established or scientifically postulated laws of nature (though some elements in a story might still be pure imaginative speculation). Exploring the consequences of such differences is the traditional purpose of science fiction, making it a "literature of ideas". Science fiction is largely based on writing rationally about alternative possibilities. The settings for science fiction are often contrary to known reality, but the majority of science fiction relies on a considerable degree of suspension of belief provided by potential scientific explanations to various fictional elements.