Was This Hollywood’s Worst Year Ever?

A favorite parlor game for film buffs is to pick Hollywood’s greatest year and then argue. The obvious answer — 1939, the certified Golden Year — always gets the most votes, but a few eccentrics make the case for a dark horse. 1928 was Peter Bogdanovich’s choice, the year that saw the apotheosis of silent film aesthetics before synchronized sound ruined everything. 1974 — Chinatown, Godfather II, The Conversation, et al — draws a lot of ballots. Media critic Brian Raftery emphatically declared 1999 “the Best. Movie. Year. Ever.” in a book with the same title and punctuation. Nothing much past 1999 gets a mandate outside of the more outré precincts of the internet.   

But what about Hollywood’s worst year — its annus horribilis maximus? And what are the criteria to measure the depths of badness? The dismal quality of the films? The profit margins of the studios? The level of contempt hurled at Hollywood for being, in turn, the Sodom on the Pacific, Moscow West, or Wokester Central?  

The question is prompted by end-of-the-year mutterings that 2023 may be in the running. The double strike of screenwriters (148 days) and actors (118 days) shut down production and left the kind of bitter aftertaste that makes it hard to kiss and make up. Gold chip stocks like MCU and Disney — come to think of it, that’s actually the same stock — were left tarnished and dented after a string of would-be blockbusters went bust. Warner Bros. seemed more interested in tax write offs than releasing films. Of course, the most worrisome visitation was AI, a threat to the very personhood of the talent that may well warrant the most apocalyptic of alarums.

On the other hand (and this is a game of at least two hands), 2023 has been a great year for Hollywood cinema. Moviegoers flocked to the flashy fem-centric magic of Barbie and Taylor Swift. National treasure Martin Scorsese delivered quality work on screen canvases big (Killers of the Flower Moon) and small (TikTok). A cycle of intelligent biopics — Oppenheimer, Priscilla, Ferrari, Napoleon, and Maestro — offered a high-nutrition alternative to a slate of by-the-numbers remakes and sequels. No year in which a three-hour film about Cold War security clearances rakes in a billion dollars in global box office can be written off as a total failure. (By the way, it’s pronounced bi-o-pic not bi-op-ic, so please stop.)

The folks happy to see 2023 in the rearview mirror join a long line of Hollywood doomsayers who have taken a perverse satisfaction in forecasts of imminent catastrophe. The end, it seems, is ever nigh for the motion picture industry. So, the nominees for Worst. Movie. Year. Ever. are numerous and the competition fierce.  Sometimes producers didn’t know how good they had it; sometimes they were whistling past the graveyard.

1921 was the first year Hollywood really found itself in a political-cultural buzzsaw. Just as the gears of the machine of the classical studio system began turning, the industry was hit by a series of scandals that appalled Victorian-bred moral guardians — divorces, drug overdoses, murder (in 1922, of the director William Desmond Taylor, shot in the heart, said the tabloids, by a “vindictive woman”), and, above all, the three sensational trials (1921-22) of famed comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, accused of manslaughter and rape in the death of actress Virginia Rappe during a weekend bacchanalia in San Francisco. Churchmen and women’s groups hyperventilated about the parasites who had “infested the film colony in Hollywood” and called for a purge of the “undesirable men and women.” By 1921, thirty-six states were either passing or considering statewide censor laws to “eliminate suggestiveness and immorality from the screen.” “Drive out the rotters” and “weed out the scum,” demanded Billboard, and that advice came from a friendly source.

By way of damage control, the moguls formed a cartel, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, and appointed a front man and flak catcher, the politically astute Presbyterian Church elder Will H. Hays, formerly Postmaster General for President Warren G. Harding. On July 5, 1922, in one of his first official acts, Hays went before 5,000 members of the not-to-be-messed-with General Federation of Women’s Clubs and assured the ladies he would raise “the moral and artistic standards” in both the city of Hollywood and its films. He set up a list of “don’ts and be carefuls” to guide film content (ultimately formalized and expanded under the Production Code Administration in 1934) and tried to shut down the after-hours raves with the insertion of morality clauses into actors’ contracts. (“The actor [actress] agrees to conduct himself [herself] with due regard to public conventions and morals and agrees that he [she] will not commit anything tending to degrade him [her] in society or bring him [her] into public hatred, contempt, scorn, or ridicule.” It goes on.) For the next twenty-three years, Hays held the political censors at bay and studio fixers kept the scandals out of the headlines. 

That one-two shuffle — wherein the motion picture industry gets rocked by a shock to the system, followed by an adaptation that not only meets the challenge but turns it to advantage — set a pattern for Hollywood’s crisis management forever after.  

In any year-end wrap up of industry blues, however, the bottom line for a bad year is always the bottom line — the profit margin as measured in weekly attendance figures and box office gross. No surprise then that the early years of the Great Depression — any one of them — were ranked within the industry as the worst year ever, until the next one. “1931 holds the distinction of being the worst year (financially) in the history of the motion picture industry,” declared film critic and future screenwriter Robert Sherwood in the New York Evening Post, a superlative soon surpassed by 1932 (“the industry’s sickest year”) and 1933 (“a good year to forget”). Even Will Hays was hit hard, having to swallow a 60 percent salary cut from $600,000 to $240,000 per year. Things turned around in 1934, but the memory of the cascade of worst years put the disappointments of future years in perspective for the first generation of moguls.    

In looking back at 1931, Sherwood hedged his bets and noted that the year also gave birth to the wisecracking gangster film (Little Caesar and Public Enemy), the fast-talking newspaper film (The Front Page and Five Star Final), and the defiantly talk-less City Lights, from the only person who could get away with it, Charles Chaplin. As Orson Welles reminds Joseph Cotten in The Third Man (1949), unsettling times can nurture artistic renaissances while serene prosperity yields only the cuckoo clock.

Money aside, certain years just find Hollywood in a temperamental funk. Catherine Jurca’s ironically titled Hollywood 1938: Motion Pictures’ Greatest Year, published in 2012, chronicles what at the time seemed like an awful year, 1937, so awful that the business  orchestrated a massive makeover in 1938 to get its grove back.  The industry felt it “had lost touch with is audience,” writes Jurca, and an “irate, disgusted public was staying away from the movies.” That is, staying away by 1937 standards: attendance was a robust 12,000,000 per day or 83,000,000 per week in 1937.

To rekindle the romance with the lost audience, all the major studios collaborated in an unprecedented campaign to make movies must-see again. Under the slogan “Motion Pictures’ Greatest Year,” it banked on a series of “superspecial” productions that turned out to be not so special, like the turgid costume dramas Marie Antoinette and The Great Waltz (for the latter, MGM launched a “bring back the waltz” ad campaign that failed to resonant with Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington fans). “By fiat, it had declared a middling year its best ever, but neither press nor the public had finally been persuaded,” notes Jurca. If only the industry hadn’t jumped the gun, the slogan would have been truth in advertising in 1939.  

The war years were so spectacularly good that not even the most pessimistic prognosticator could see a dark cloud. For Hollywood, the most murderous passage in the twentieth century meant boom times. “You can open a can of sardines nowadays, and there’s a line waiting to get in,” crowed Variety in 1943.

The upbeat mood did not last long. In 1946, the year he produced The Best Years of Our Lives, Sam Goldwyn lamented that Hollywood “has run dry of ideas.” Actually, the ideas were there, but the audience was being siphoned off by a living room rival that, year by year, caused the weekly attendance graph to spike ever downward.

Sometimes even money won’t make a year look good. 1967 was “a year of spectacular recovery,” said the New York Times, but a shift in the role of Hollywood in American life left veteran moviemakers with a vertiginous sense that the film business was now a young man’s game. In Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, Mark Harris registered the seismic upheavals of 1967.  “Youngbloods v. moguls” read the headlines, with the outcome of the fight card a foregone conclusion once Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate hit screens. “The rule book seemed to have been tossed out,” Harris wrote. “Warren Beatty, who looked like a movie star, had become a producer. Dustin Hoffman, who looked like a producer, had become a movie star.” 

The years since have generated their share of transformative tumult in Hollywood (VHS, DVD, cable, etc.), but the hysteria tamps down the minute the industry figures out how to exploit the menacing competition as a new revenue stream. The major exception, of course, came not from the introduction of a rival entertainment platform but from the quite literal plague that shut down theaters and hobbled production in 2020. Anyone who thinks 2023 was a bad year has a very short memory.    

Since you ask, my own candidate for Hollywood’s annus horribilis maximus is 1948, a year that smacked the industry senseless with three roundhouse blows — technological,  economic, and political. The first intimations of dislocation came on Tuesday nights when exhibitors in the New York area began noticing a statistically terrifying correlation between empty theaters and NBC’s Texaco Star Theatre, a variety show featuring a heretofore no-billed vaudeville clown named Milton Berle. “If we have a good picture to show our customers on Tuesday nights, we don’t even know that Berle is alive,” scoffed exhibitor Walter Reade Jr., in nothing-to-see-here mode. He was not prophetic.

The news got worse. On May 3, 1948, a long-postponed reckoning came due when the Supreme Court issued the Paramount Decree, which ruled that the vertically integrated system whereby the same studio entity owned the means of production, distribution, and exhibition, was a monopoly in restraint of trade. (The DOJ first filed the case in 1938, another reason it was not Motion Pictures’ Greatest Year.) Former Supreme Court Justice James F. Byrnes had pled the case for the studios, arguing that the motion picture industry had “its back to the wall and is fighting for its life.” Unmoved, the courts and the DOJ ordered the “divorcement” of production from exhibition.

At The Hollywood Reporter, editor-publisher Billy Wilkerson issued a mark-my-words warning that turned out to be prescient. “Theater divorcement will change every department of the motion pictures,” he said. “It will cause an entire business revolution within our industry.” The vaunted “genius of the system” — what the French called the quality control of the factory that was classical Hollywood cinema — could not exist without the economic structure that sustained it. (In 2020, having second thoughts, the DOJ terminated the Paramount Decree.)

Finally, 1948 was also the first full year of the enforcement of the Hollywood blacklist, mandated by the studio heads after the House Un-American Activities Committee held hearings into alleged communist subversion in Hollywood in October 1947. In 1922, the “undesirable men and women” in Hollywood had to sign contracts with morality clauses; in 1948, they had to sign loyalty oaths.

Cumulatively, the onslaughts from TV, the DOJ, and HUAC created a misery index high enough to rank it on any list of the Worst Movie Year Ever. On the other hand, pace Orson Welles, 1948 was also the dateline for John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Howard Hawks’s Red River, and, getting in just under the anti-communist gun, Abraham Polansky’s Force of Evil.

Taking the long view then, 2023, is, at best, a so-so candidate in the superlative badness sweepstakes.  Of course, 2024 could be worse, but, in the spirit of the time of year, it seems more appropriate to wish that — in Hollywood and elsewhere — the next year is the annus optimus.