Popular Cinema Seminar Summaries

Week 2: Sullivan’s Travels (1941)

Sullivan’s Travels is an adventurous comedic drama about an ambitious director who disguises as a hobo to give himself an insight about life and along the way falls in love and has a rude awakening. The film released during the early forties encapsulates a time in Hollywood cinema where there were significant advances in film technologies such as lighting, special effects, sound recording, the use of colour and cinematography. During this time the Hollywood Studio system was established whereby five major companies owned everything in the studios from production to directors and everything else in the studios, they also determined who they employed. There were seven-year contracts for actors and because major studios were producing 40-50 films a year the actors were making a considerable amount of films. Every person was contracted to the studios, the editors, producers, directors, set designers, scriptwriters, screenplay writers, actors, editors, cinematographers were all contracted to a specific studio for years.

In the seminars there was the discussion of the economic industrial process whereby studios produced the films meaning directors didn’t nurture the films after completion and didn’t wait for the final edit as they would instantaneously move along to the next contracted film. This meant the full responsibility was on the editor to finish the film. This process is not common in modern films as the directors will nurture a film for decades and have a huge say in post-production of that particular film.

Michael Serpell