Hollywood
From the beginning of the Hollywood studio system, Germans were among those who shaped the film industry. At the turn of the century, independent filmmakers moved to California, as conditions, like weather and land, were more favorable than in the East.
The German-born Carl Laemmle opened one of the first studios: Universal City in 1915. The movie industry expanded quickly. Many German or German-speaking directors responded to Hollywood’s call, among them Ernst Lu- bitsch from Berlin, who introduced the screwball comedy to the screen. Some, like producer Erich Pommer, stayed only a few years and returned to Germany. Another director, Josef von Sternberg, brought his star actress along with him, who made a brilliant career in Hollywood: Marlene Dietrich. When Adolf Hitler came to power, a wave of German and Austrian exile filmmakers fled from repression. While a director like Billy Wilder became famous for his comedies, other directors like Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak, and Edgar G. Ulmer contributed essentially to film noir with their experience in German expressionist cinema. Although every now and then Germans went to Hollywood after 1945 as actors, technicians, or directors, it was not until the 1980s and 1990s that Germans and Austrians contributed to Hollywood’s film industry substantially. Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, as well as cameraman Michael Ballhaus and directors Wolfgang Petersen and Lothar Emmerich, starred in, directed, or filmed box office hits.With the invention of the kinetoscope “moving view” by Thomas A. Edison in 1888, the era of the moving image began. The first commercially viable motion picture projector in the United States was known as “Edison’s vitascope.” On November 26, 1905, John Harris and Harry Davis opened the first theater in Pittsburgh exclusively created for the showing of motion pictures.
Their first attraction was The Great Train Robbery by Edwin S. Porter. Admission was a nickel. The nickelodeons (five cents + [mel]odeon, or music hall) were located in large urban centers and offered programs between ten minutes to one hour in length. The era of the nickelodeons lasted less than ten years.German-born Carl Laemmle (1867— 1939), who had immigrated to America in 1884, was soon fascinated by this new invention and bought his own first nickelodeon in 1906. Soon he had his own film-distribution business in addition to his chain of nickelodeons. When Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company attempted to put him out of business, Laemmle, like a few others, moved as far away from the East as possible to a new location that was perfect for filmmaking: Hollywood. In 1912 he founded the Universal Film Production Company. By 1915 the new company had established Universal City, a 240-acre film complex and community in the San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles. Universal City, Hollywood’s largest studio, was the first to promote the star system.
Another founder of one of Hollywood’s most important film studios was William Fox (1879-1952). Born Wilhelm Fried to German Jewish parents in Austria- Hungary, he came to the United States as a young child and worked first in the textile industry. In 1904 he established the Greater New York Film Rental Company. After a name change to Fox Film Company, the company, which produced four films a year, had its own studios in New York by 1915. Four years later, the company moved to thirteen acres in Hollywood. Finally, in 1923 the Fox Film Corporation began to build on the hundred acres of the famed Fox Hills Studios (the present site of Century City, home of Twentieth Century-Fox, the studio of Shirley Temple and Star Wars). William Fox purchased the rights to the Case- Sponible sound system and dubbed it Movietone. By combining his mobile sound-film recording system with amplification equipment developed by Western Electric, Fox was an early industry leader in sound films, especially in the production of the famous Movietone Newsreels (the precursor of today’s network newscasts).
In 1935 the young Darryl F. Zanuck took over the nearly bankrupt company and named it Twentieth Century-Fox.In the following decades, many professionals from the German film industry responded to Hollywood’s call. Ernst Lu- bitsch (1892—1947), for instance, was asked to come by actress Mary Pickford in 1922. His unique directing style became famous as “the Lubitsch touch.” In 1947 he received a special Oscar for his twenty- five-year contribution to motion pictures. While Lubitsch received acclaim for his comedies, Paul Leni (1885—1929) was a pioneer for Universal’s series of horror films in the 1930s, after having accepted an invitation by Carl Laemmle in 1925. Another German director, known for his fluid, ex- pressionistic use of the camera to depict states of mind, was Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1889—1931). He came to Hollywood in 1927 at the invitation of William Fox. Murnau had gained fame with his movies Nosferatu (1922, the first Dracula movie), Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924), and Faust (1926). In the United States his best movies were Sunrise (1927), Our Daily Bread (1930), and Tabu (1931).
Other German-born directors who had considerable influence on Hollywood, mainly during the era of silent movies, were Erich von Stroheim and Josef von Sternberg. Stroheim (1885-1957) came to the United States in 1909. He arrived in Hollywood in 1914, and his first appearance as an actor was in Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. In 1918 he wrote, directed, and acted in his first film, Blind Husband, and in 1923 his masterpiece Greed, a landmark in film realism, brought him acclaim. As a director, his attention to minute detail soon earned him a reputation as a spendthrift. His stubborn refusal to make films the way studios wanted forced him to give up directing (he never directed a sound film) and draw on his acting talent. Especially noted for his portrayals of Prussian officers, he is perhaps best remembered for Grand Illusion (1937). His last film role in the United States was in Sunset Boulevard (1950).
Sternberg (1894-1969) came to the United States in 1909 with his family. He started working in the film industry in 1911, moved to Hollywood in 1923, and directed his first movie The Salvation Hunters in 1924. His movie Underworld (1927) established the gangster film genre. For his movie The Last Command, Sternberg hired the German actor Emil Jannings (1884-1950). Jannings had attained international stardom with movies like Quo Vadis (1924), Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924)—one of his most masterly performances—Tartiff (1925), Variete (1925), and finally Faust (1926). Because of the huge success of his last movies, he got a three-year contract with Paramount. In the United States he shot, among others, the movies The Way of All Flesh (1927), The Last Command (1927), The Patriot (1928), and Betrayal (1929). For his performance in The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command he achieved the first Oscar in film history. When the sound film rang in a new era, Jannings feared that, because of his poor English, he would not do justice to the artistic aspects of English sound films and went back to Germany a wealthy man. His director of The Last Command, Sternberg, went to Germany in 1929 to produce a movie for the Universum-Film AG (UFA): Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel). He discovered a then-unknown actress, Marlene Dietrich, and made her a star. In 1931 she went to the United States with him and produced many highly successful movies.
Jannings is not only outstanding in the history of Hollywood because he, as a German, was the first to receive an Oscar. He is also a prominent example for all those non-English-speaking actors who faced severe problems when sound was introduced in the movies. For many, it was the end of their careers. Only a few with rather heavy accents were accepted. A fine example of those is Peter Lorre (1904—1964). In 1933 he fled from Nazi Germany. His bulging eyes, round face, and nasal voice became familiar to millions of American moviegoers in a film career that spanned thirty- three years and ranged from classics like the two great film noir works The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Casablanca (1942), to Disney’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1954), to the respectable if bizarre Mr.
Moto series (1937—1939), in which Lorre played a Japanese detective.Directors naturally did not have these language problems. Quite a few famous ones migrated to Hollywood after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Among the most noted German and Austrian ones were Billy Wilder (1906-2002), Edgar G. Ulmer (1900-1972), Fred Zinnemann (1907-1997), William Dieterle (18931972), Fritz Lang (1890-1976), Otto Preminger (1906-1986), Robert Siodmak (1900-1973), and Douglas Sirk (19001987). While some of the German actresses and actors became well known to audiences—such as Marlene Dietrich, Peter Lorre, Paul Henreid, and Paul Muni—German directors influenced and helped to shape quite a few movie genres such as the film noir, the gangster film, and comedies. They had been part of the successful and internationally acclaimed German movie industry, which existed prior to World War II, and brought elements of German expressionism to American movies. They were part of an artistic acculturation process that affected the art of filmmaking in Hollywood considerably.
German directors and producers were not the only ones who had a considerable impact on the style of Hollywood movies, however. Composers like Frederick Hollander (1896-1976), Frederick Loewe (1901-1988), Ernest Gold (1921-1999), Erich W Korngold (1897-1957), and Andre Previn (b. 1929) wrote unforgettable scores for the screen. Oscar-winning cinematographers like Karl Freund (1890-1969) and Eugen Schufftan (18931977) brought the German light to Hollywood movies.
After World War II, there was no longer a German film industry. For many Germans with interest in a professional movie career, Hollywood became the definite destination. Many actors tried their luck in Hollywood, but only a few of them stayed. Ursula Andress (b. 1936) became successful as the first “Bond girl” in Dr. No (1962). Curt Jurgens (1915-1982) was often cast as the tough guy or even the tough German. Hardy Kruger (b. 1928) became known for his adventure movies.
Probably the only one who had a deeper impact on Hollywood films was the Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger (b. 1947) who became a superstar. Cameramen like Jost Vacano and Dietrich Lohmann shot notable movies in Hollywood. Directors like Wolfgang Petersen (b. 1941) and Roland Emmerich (b. 1955) became famous in the United States for movies like In the Line of Fire (1993) and Air Force One (1997), both by Petersen,and Independence Day (1996) by Emmerich. However, the success of these directors is based only on their ability to assimilate. They did not contribute anything German to the American screen, but became well known because of their ability to adapt themselves to the style of American movies. They assimilated into the existing Hollywood mainstream. The only German contributing something special to U.S. movies after 1945 is the cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (b. 1935). In the early 1980s Ballhaus emigrated to the United States, where he quickly established himself as a highly regarded cameraman. His first American film was John Sayles’s Baby, It's You (1982) and he has frequently collaborated with a number of major directors, including Mike Nichols, Martin Scorsese, and James L. Brooks. Ballhaus’s style could be described as eclectic. One specialty in particular catapulted Ballhaus to fame and became his trademark: the 360-degree tracking shot around the actors. The scene in The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), in which the camera encircles Michelle Pfeiffer lolling on the piano, may well have been his crowning achievement, and earned him an Oscar nomination. Germans and Austrians in Hollywood have always played an important part in the movie industry. But only those arriving before World War II contributed something very special and typically German to the world of U.S. motion pictures.
Andreas Reichstein
See also Dieterle, William; Dietrich, Marlene Magdalene; Jannings, Emil; Korngold, Erich Wolfgang; Lang, Fritz; Leni, Paul; Lorre, Peter; Lubitsche, Ernst; Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm; Preminger, Otto Ludwig; Schwarzenegger, Arnold; Sternberg, Josef von; Stroheim, Erich von; Wilder, Billy
References and Further Reading
Everson, William K. American Silent Film. New York: Oxford University, 1978.
Flippo, Hyde. The German Way: Aspects of Behavior, Attitudes, and Customs in the German-Speaking World. New York: McGraw-Hill/Contemporary, 1996.
Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2004.
Sklar, Robert. Movie-Made America,: A Cultural History of American Movies. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Taylor, John Russel. Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Emigres 1933—1950. London: Faber and Faber, 1983.