The Materialism in Hollywood Golden Age

When talking about United States’ film, the first thing come to our mind is the Hollywood Studio. Since the establishment of Hollywood, it has come through many ages. For this paper, I am only focusing on the golden age of Hollywood, which is the 1932-1946. During these years, many films were being made. Among these films, three films were chose for analysis for these paper, which are Citizen Kane (1941), Directed by Orson Welles; Gone with the Wind (1939), Directed by Victor Fleming and Casablanca (1942), Directed by Michael Curtiz. The reasons of choosing these three films are that they are on the top of AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies, which show that these three movies can be the represent movie of all movies produced during the Hollywood Golden Age.

The materialism is referring to the cost of making a movie, but not the influence of materialism made by these movies. In the following, I will discuss about how costly these movies are and the reason behind. Also, I will discuss on how other film styles or famous people on film history influenced this style of production.

The style of Hollywood movie, no matters now or then, are all in high cost and mainly made in the studio. The have many characters, beautiful stage setting, great costumes and gorgeous make up. Unlike the movie from Italian neo-realism, everything is real and small number of character. Take Gone With the Wind as an example, the budget of making this movie is 3.85 million USD, which is about 500 million HKD nowadays. The plot that Scarlett finding the doctor in a square full of injured soldiers have more than a hundred actors acting in the studio. Although these movies only have a few main characters, but there were extremely large numbers of extra characters. Moreover, nearly every scene was built in the studio so the cost is very high. Also, there was no computer so every effect and props need to be made on-site but not add it by a few buttons on the keyboard. The plane, the explosion and...