"Useful Cinema," of What Use?: Assessing the Role of Motion Pictures in the Largest Public Relations Campaign of the 1920s
Using testimony and subpoenaed exhibits published in the seventy-two-volume record of a Federal Trade Commission investigation, this article traces the role of motion pictures in the private utility industry’s public relations campaign against municipal ownership and federal regulation in the 1920s. This article reconstructs the utility companies’ decision to employ films in its campaign; the production, distribution, and exhibition strategies for its motion pictures; and the relationship of producers to sponsoring organizations. Ultimately, the article argues that the use of film in this campaign was experimental and, relative to other media, limited, but by investigating such experiments with film, we can identify institutional agents struggling to find a “use” for cinema, thereby enabling media historians both to identify what determinants might cause an organization to find cinema more or less useful at different historical moments and to better assess cinema’s changing cultural status and social functions.
Film and Business History: The Development of an American Mass Entertainment Industry
Increasingly, historians employ feature films in their studies of political, social, and cultural change. Most often, American historians rely on the products of Hollywood to tender clues to broad trends in mass tastes and desires. Since the American film industry has long used an assembly-like process of production to fashion products for mass consumption, Hollywood features ought to be intimately interwoven with the fundamental ideas and beliefs of the average American. Recent work in film and history has recognized that there exist significant methodological pitfalls in this type of analysis, principally the necessity to specify how films have created meaning, how films have been treated by social and political forces, and how films have been received by audiences. But for Hollywood in particular, the historian first needs to understand how film-making as an institution has functioned. Hollywood exists as an industry, a collection of corporations seeking profits. Paul Smith expressed this dimension of the study of film and history in the following terms:
Brainstem Influences on the Cephalic Circulation: Experimental Data From Cat and Monkey of Relevance to the Mechanism of Migraine
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