Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover
By Denise Mann
University of Minnesota Press, 344 pp., $25

In 1946, Hollywood had its best year yet at the box office, its films grossing a record $1.7 billion. The war was over, the industry was released from its wartime pledge to make patriotic, uplifting films, and the future looked bright. A few short years later, and the rosy picture had faded into nocturnal gloom. The Supreme Court had broken up the studios' monopolies, whereby MGM, Paramount, and the other big-screen corporations could own both the studios that made the films and the theaters that screened them.

The death of vertical integration and the rise of television left the studios a ghost town: where 742 actors had been under contract to one of the studios in 1947, only 229 were in 1957, and where only 40 producers had possessed studio deals in 1947, 165 had one 10 years later. The power had drained from the centralized factory production of the studios, and toward individual producers and directors with the skill, and the financial wherewithal, to make their own films. But what to make, and how to make it?

UCLA professor Denise Mann's "Hollywood Independents" takes a fresh look at this intermediate era, the valley between classic Hollywood and the New Wave's peaks, and finds an industry simultaneously in turmoil and in the midst of impressive artistic ferment. Redirecting the historical attention away from the last wave of studio blockbusters toward the changing economic and creative structure of the industry, Mann captures an image of the movie business on the brink of reinventing itself.

If the studios were the big losers in the transition from the sound era to the TV era, the big winners were twofold: the MCA talent agency and the new wave of independent producer-directors like Billy Wilder, Elia Kazan, and Burt Lancaster. MCA had hit the jackpot when Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan had granted it a waiver from conflict-of-interest rules then on the books preventing corporations from simultaneously representing talent and producing films and television series. In one fell swoop, MCA boss Lew Wasserman became the most powerful man in Hollywood, and MCA the unchallenged kingmaker of the industry.

Meanwhile, studios were discovering, to their detriment, that independent productions could often be more artistically rigorous, and more profitable, than studio product. After the remarkable success of "Marty," which won best picture and turned a healthy profit, every producer in town began looking for the next "Marty" - the next movie that could pad both their artistic egos and their bank accounts. Studios were anxious to get involved in the prestige business, but never entirely understood what they were shooting for.

As Mann says of director-producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz ("A Letter to Three Wives," "All About Eve"), "Fox's willingness to bankroll Mankiewicz . . . speaks less to the politics or courage of the executives in charge than to the studio's dependence on talented and independent-minded filmmakers for their economic survival at a time of plummeting box-office returns." Mankiewicz and other budding auteurs ended up doing their best work for the studios; granted the complete freedom of independent production, they were at a loss. Torn between art and commerce, the movies of the late 1950s immersed themselves in self-referentiality, making their creators' struggles the stuff of their own dramatic conflicts. In films like Kazan's "A Face in the Crowd" and Lancaster's "Sweet Smell of Success" (both studied in great detail here), the lures of mass culture were deadly, the path to hell paved with $50 bills and private dinner tables at 21.

Independent filmmakers pegged themselves as the consciences of the studios, but even the most liberal of artists found themselves worrying about money matters once they struck out on their own. With great success comes great (fiscal) responsibility, and even high-minded types like Lancaster adopted a "one for them, one for me" mentality. Wilder may have explicitly critiqued MCA and its business-first culture in "The Apartment," but he was a savvy enough businessman to maintain his seat at Wasserman's weekly gin rummy game.

"Hollywood Independents" operates on two tracks simultaneously, documenting the business and artistic changes that came to the film industry in the late 1950s, and illustrating how the two were inseparable. MCA's talent packaging and Wilder's independent production were all the same phenomenon, whereby actors and directors, freed from the serfdom of the studios, were gaining leverage over their own careers. At the same time, their efforts were crowning Hollywood's new kingmakers - those who would replace the old studio bosses as the town's power brokers. Mann is more adept with the business end of her story, spinning her wheels fruitlessly when closely studying specific films, but her book captures the desperation, and the enthusiasm, of an industry reinventing itself.

Saul Austerlitz is a frequent contributor to the Globe.