The tone of film noir that emphasizes the darker aspects                 
of the human condition is       

Film Noir usually takes place in locales that are

The women in film noir are sexually provocative, somewhat classy and

Major images in film noir include

Film Noir was extremely influenced by three writers: James Cain, Raymond Chandler &

Dashiell Hammett       

Many feel the strong censorship of the 40s and 50s helped the film noir creators be

more inventive

Film Noir’s use of “light and dark shadows” helped create atmosphere
  as well as to 

hide the cheap sets

A German cinematic influence of film noir was its

One American film that had a strong influence on film noir was

The “fear & paranoia” of film noir can be justified by the growing

            American fascination with

psychiatry

“Film Noir” is a term coined by the French film magazine
            Cahiers du Cinema and means

DETOUR broke the rules for its time because

the hero didn’t die at the end

In film noir, the lead in jeopardy asks, “Why me? Why me?” and
            the answer is

One-quarter of the leads in “film noir” films are

The rising acceptance of psychiatry in the middle class was a
            perfect way to justify

the fear and paranoia that was inherent in film noir

The private detective worked as a lead in the center of a film noir because

a private detective could go anywhere, including the best & the seediest parts of a city

An essential part of James Cain’s formula for a film noir story was

the eternal triangle  -  a man and a married woman who wants her husband dead

In film noir, in order to make women seem more powerful,
            the camera shot them

from way below

The use of “light and shadow” lighting in film noir was a big part in

giving expression to the “good vs. evil” elements of plot and characters

In post WWII (1946+), the “new technological discoveries” allowed
film noir to shoot

on real streets at night instead of studio back lots and sound stages

One of the reasons “film noir” became less popular in the 1950s is

One of the great screwball comedies of the 1930s was

MY MAN GODFREY

Frank Capra’s IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT started a fad in                                                          Hollywood to produce           

Films, where everything was a juxtaposition, “nuts, illogical,
            impossible, hilarious,” were called

Major directors of screwball comedies include

Major stars of screwball comedies included

Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard

Screwball comedy rounded out their casts with

1^st rate character actors

Major examples of screwball comedies include

MY MAN GODFREY,  HIS GIRL FRIDAY,  IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT

The Three Stooges might hit each other over the head with sledgehammers,

            but in a screwball comedy, they would use

chafing dishes

In screwball comedies, two people fell in love but did not simply
            surrender to that, they

formally dated until they were married

Screwball comedy often had a basis in 

reverse class snobbery

One hallmark of MGM films was the predominately visual style of

opulent production design and high key (bright) lighting

20^th Century Fox specialized in American period nostalgia, musicals and

social issue dramas

MGM’s main movie genres were women’s films, prestigious literary adaptations and

Opulent Musicals

The star of THE JAZZ SINGER was            

The “boy genius” producer at MGM who was considered its real arbiter of taste and was married to one of MGM’s biggest stars, Norma Shearer, was

Irving Thalberg

The audion tube became essential to the technology of all sound systems requiring

William Fox lost his studio and his personal fortune when

His attempt to dominate film sound systems with his Movietone process failed

     20^th Century Fox’s careful budgeting & production control led to films that had a

hard, glossy surface

What studio focused their 1st sound films on interviews with world leaders & personalities?

Early success with their talking film interviews led this studio to then produce

the first weekly newsreel, Movietone News

Although “talking pictures” made many artistic advancements in film, the Hollywood studios were really driven by

economics

Fox’s star director during the 1930s and 1940s was

John Ford

Frank Capra’s IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT started a fad in Hollywood to produce

screwball comedies

United Artists was founded in 1919 as a studio so that its films could be                controlled by their creators, meaning its founding members

Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, D. W. Griffith

Pre-Code era films, sexier & racier than before, purity was out,  were lightning rods for 

all of the previous

The Big Five Agreement was the agreement of

Several studios:  Loew (MGM); Famous Players-Lasky (Paramount); First National (WB); Universal; and Producers Distributing Corp. (PDC) to use the same sound-on-film system

RKO formed out of a merger between FBO (Film Booking Office), Pathé,                          Keith-Orpheum theatres and

RKO was formed out of RCA’s desire to

to use its Photophone sound system

Independent producers like Samuel Goldwyn & David O. Selznick often released their films through 

The founder and head of Universal Studios until 1936 was

Carl Laemmle

In addition to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, RKO’s major contract star was

Katharine Hepburn

The most “European” of the Hollywood studios was

Paramount

The 5 major Hollywood studios owned 16% of the nations movie theatres that generated

75% of the revenue

The film studios were reluctant to make a conversion to “talking pictures” because

The expense of converting the studios to sound would be astronomical AND the expense of equipping all the theatres they owned for sound film projection even more so

Although often called “the first talking picture”, THE JAZZ SINGER (1927) actually was 

the first “all singing” film

The founder of Paramount Studios was

Adolph Zukor

The first “100% All Talking” picture was

THE LIGHTS OF NEW YORK

In Pre-Code films, the actress who was  “the ingénue who became sophisticated” was 

Norma Shearer

Paramount’s director of epic films, with them since they began with THE SQUAW MAN was

Cecil B. DeMille

            The first successful use of Vitaphone for Warner Brothers was on a                                     major bill of film they opened in New York City and then toured to other cities, comprising of:

DON JUAN with its Vitaphone score paired with the shorts of NYC Philharmonic and Opera

The best example of a “fantasy notorious woman” was

Marlene Dietrich

Warner’s system pleased Wall Street because it controlled film production by placing

the producer in charge

Warner Brothers Studio was

the studio of the working class

The “Pivotal” film of the Pre-Code era is

THE DIVORCÉE       

Synchronization problems led inventors to explore putting sound on the same strip of film.  This involved exploring the recording of sound photographically, or optically, by converting sound waves into

Patterns of light and shade

The “star director” at Columbia Pictures, who lifted them from Poverty Row, was 

Frank Capra

The biggest, most prosperous and most prolific American studio in the 1930s was

Which Hollywood director was the main studio director at Fox/20^th Century Fox?

The German sound process, Tri-Ergon, which literally means
“the work of three” – meaning the 3 German inventors, eventually sold its American rights to

William Fox, of Fox Films Corporation, later 20^th Century Fox

The V.P. in charge of Production that ran MGM, who placed naughty stars in low-budget films at Poverty Row studios as a punishment, was

Universal Studios were best known for making westerns, a few quality films & 

fantasy/horror

In Pre-Code films, a good example of the “fantasy prostitute” is

Jean Harlow

One genre started in the Pre-Code days featured strong women who

had careers and began to go head-to-head with men in the business world

The first “notion” of sound films wasn’t to make “talking pictures” but to

a.     focus on the “technology” of film rather than on the “creative” elements

The film studio that grew out of RCA’s desire to use its Photophone process was

RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum)

MGM’s contract stars included

Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo

The smallest of the Big 5 major Hollywood studios was

The major star of 20^th Century Fox in the mid-to-late 1930s was 

Shirley Temple

In the 1930s, the most volatile and risk-taking of all studios in that era was

In Pre-Code films, TORCH SINGER, MARY STEVENS-MD & FRISCO JENNIE all built stories around women that were

In Pre-Code days, the actress who made “the vamp” a three-dimensional character was

Greta Garbo

Edward G. Robinson shot to fame at Warner Brothers in the hit film

Will Hays oversaw the writing of the Production Code, but the enforcer of it was

Joseph Breen

Vitaphone was a sound system 

that was a sophisticated sound-on-disc system employing multiple 33 1/3 rpm discs

The only director to also be head of production for a major studio, was Paramount’s

Ernst Lubitsch

In Deep Focus Photography the foreground and the background are shown with

the background and the foreground are equally clear

Another Pre-Code film genre focused their stories on women who

were “molls” – i.e., female criminals

Warner Brothers was well-known for backstage musicals and

The studio that responded best to creating rules to please Wall Street was

Warner Brothers

Although the films produced were considered the driving force, they only consumed

5% of the studios’ assets

Western Electric’s new sound-on-film process similar to the process of Pedersen and Pulsen

The studio that had produced more Technicolor films than any other by 1949 was

20^th Century Fox

Warner Brothers Studio was the studio with

a working class heart

The 5 “sexy, funfilled years” of filmmaking in pre-Code Hollywood were

1929-1934

RKO’s most extraordinary production of the 1930s was

The use of stop-motion photography in KING KONG

The total price for all studios to convert to sound was slightly in excess of

50 million