“SOCIAL SEQUENCE THEORY” AND THE NEED FOR MEMORABLE EXAMPLES

“Remember,” Amherst College professor Theodore Baird once cheerfully confided to a colleague, “education doesn’t work.”¹ Baird reached that conclusion by teaching English for over forty years at one of America’s best colleges, but his remark has wider implications for learning and thinking, activities that require a continual negotiation between specific details and general concepts. In effect, Baird proposed the classroom as a lab where experiments in learning and thinking take place, and any teacher can tell stories about how students will surprise you, and not always in a good way. Recently, while grading an exam question about Italian scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini’s analogy for Neorealism, I kept encountering the baffling phrase, social sequence theory. The light dawned when I realized that the class and I had been engaged in a version of Chinese Whispers, the old parlor game where a message initiated at one end of the table comes back unrecognizable after making the rounds of the guests. In a discussion about Neorealism, I had suggested that Zavattini had modeled his ideas on social science; one student seems to have written this phrase down as social sequence theory, and the others who borrowed his notes simply fell in line, accepting it without question.

The mistake is instructive: it indicates that (1) in certain situations, most of us will readily—indeed eagerly—offer as “an answer” something that we ourselves don’t understand; and (2) we remember details far better than ideas, especially, even almost exclusively, ones singled out for notice. All but the best students have trouble defining the general issue posed by a leading question. Even the least industrious, however, can supply detailed descriptions of the particular scenes considered in class. In effect, many students, and indeed, most people, resemble the elderly Thomas Hardy, who once admitted that he had “no philosophy—merely a confused heap of impressions, like those of a bewildered child at a conjuring show.”²

Is this situation really so surprising? Nearly a century ago, Proust began showing us how our memories organize themselves around concrete sensations—tastes, smells, sounds. T. S. Eliot noticed the same thing:

Why, for all of us, out of all that we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird, the leap of one fish, at a particular place and time, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction where there was a water-mill: such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer.³

Eliot’s memories resemble striking film scenes; Wittgenstein would deploy such scenes for philosophy, in an activity he called “assembling reminders for a particular purpose.”⁴ Denying that he had any “philosophical theses” to offer, Wittgenstein insisted that “What I invent are new similes,”⁵ which took shape as concrete images: a safe that needs unlocking, a hair on the tongue that eludes your grasp, a man imprisoned in a room. “We now demonstrate a method, by examples,” Wittgenstein remarked, “and the series of examples can be broken off.”⁶

In a similar vein, Stanley Cavell has drawn attention to the philosopher J. L. Austin’s reliance on stories and examples, whose role, Cavell suggests, “is a topic of inexaggeratable importance.”⁷ Elaborating on the value of such examples, Cavell has described his own particular fondness for a story of Austin’s that distinguishes between doing something “by mistake” and doing something “by accident”:⁸

You have a donkey, so have I, and they graze in the same field. The day comes when I conceive a dislike for mine. I go to shoot it, draw a bead on it, fire: the donkey falls in its tracks. I inspect the victim, and find to my horror that it is your donkey . . . [for Cavell, a mistake] Then again, I go to shoot my donkey as before, draw a bead on it, fire—but as I do so, the beast moves, and to my horror yours falls. [for Cavell, an accident]⁹

Here is a proposition: learning proceeds most effectively by examples. If the examples are vivid and well-chosen, they will embody and demonstrate the larger, more abstract concerns. Indeed, those general concerns will be embedded in the specific instance held up for study: in the case of the movies—a scene, a gesture, an object, an arrangement of people and light. These examples will amount to the intellectual equivalent of T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative”: “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular” idea (rather than “that particular emotion,” as Eliot originally had it), “such that when the external facts . . . are given, [the idea] is immediately evoked.”¹⁰ Although we have not yet learned how, in Cavell’s words, to “compose a useful set of directions” for isolating such intellectual “objective correlatives,” we can, following Cavell, learn to get “the hang” of doing so by analyzing two of them at work.

 

SCHMIDT AND “THINK OF NOTHING”

Despite all that we think we know about the movies, certain aspects essential to their working remain deeply mysterious. How do we assign responsibility for any particular shot or scene? How do we account for a film’s atmosphere, its equivalent of musical timbre? If Irving Thalberg was correct that “the difference between something good and something bad is great, but the difference between something good and something superior is very small,”¹¹ what filmmaking decisions make a movie “superior”?

Of all the enigmas presented by the cinema in this regard, the phenomenon we call “movie-star performance” remains the greatest. Hollywood understood the problem and tried to solve it with organization. As Ronald L. Davis has detailed, MGM, the most successful studio, installed a system designed specifically to discover and develop stars:¹²

1. Talent Department scouts regularly kept their eyes on Broadway, regional theaters, universities, beauty pageants, nightclubs, and even local newspaper photographs of provincial debutantes, inviting those who interested them to a preliminary interview. Although locals had a better chance of being discovered (as Lana Turner was in a Hollywood lingerie shop), some (like Greta Garbo) came from overseas.

2. At its peak, MGM would interview a thousand people a month.

3.  Of that group, at the most, five hundred would read for Lillian Burns, the studio’s drama coach, who reported to Benny Thau and Mayer himself.

4. At the most, a hundred and fifty people would get called back for a second reading.

5. Of that group, MGM would screen-test roughly five, a silent test first, followed by a sound test, on a set with a professional cameraman, second-unit director, and other contract actors. “At one point,” talent scout Al Trescony recalled, “we tested at least one unknown a week at MGM.”

6. The studio might sign one of the screen-tested group, offering the standard seven-year contract, with options allowing the studio to drop the actor after each six-month period.

7. Lillian Burns would then instruct the newcomer, not only about acting, but also about such things as grooming and manners. As Burns explained, “Many of these youngsters had not come from the background Kate Hepburn did.”

8. Potential stars would begin in B-movies or with small parts in big pictures, eventually graduating, if they proved appealing to the public, to lead roles in major films.
Like nearly all of its competitors, MGM was attempting to rationalize the mysteries of stardom. And yet, despite the studio’s exhaustive efforts, that element, so absolutely central to the enterprise of commercial filmmaking, remained resistant to planning. George Cukor put his finger on the problem:

Lewis Milestone used to tell this story. Gary Cooper was playing with Emil Jannings in a silent picture, and Milestone, who was directing it, said to his assistant one day, “Shoot fifty feet of Gary just sitting there.” As a matter of fact, Gary wasn’t just sitting there, he was asleep, so they shot the footage without waking him up. Then Milestone said loudly, “Wake up!” and Gary did, and they shot this, too. Later Milestone cut Gary waking up into the picture, and when Jannings saw it, he said, “That young man should play Hamlet.”¹³

Faced with this kind of thing, what’s a businessman to do? Irving Thalberg at least got the message: “In pictures,” he wrote, “the actor, even more than the play is the thing. . . . more than the author, even more than the director . . .”¹⁴ With a different kind of filmmaking, the lesson still obtains: Truffaut recalled that “It was Jean Renoir himself who taught me that the actor playing a character is more important than the character . . . you always have to sacrifice the abstract for the concrete.”¹⁵

Fair enough, but if filmmaking’s best minds haven’t been able to decipher movie stardom, how can we possibly go about teaching that concept to anyone? Here’s one way. We know that as a technologically based, capital-intensive medium, the commercial cinema quickly developed into an industry keenly attracted by Taylorist-Fordist models of rationalized production. Indeed, if all new ventures operate on what Gregory Ulmer has called a CATTt ¹⁶ model, Hollywood had its own:

Contrast : cottage-industry production controlled by directors
Analogy : industrial mass-production
Theory : Taylorism and Fordism
Target : The mass audience, especially the middle-class
tale : “the Hollywood movie,” a ninety-minute, large-budget fiction film with named stars

Thus, as Thomas Schatz has explained in detail,¹⁷ the studios explicitly imitated the organizational system developed in large-scale manufacturing and perfected by Frederick Taylor, whose Principles of Scientific Management, first published in 1911, became the new industry Bible. Mass-production, standardized designs, concentration of the whole production cycle in a single place, a radical division of labor, the routinizing of workers’ tasks, even the after-hours surveillance of employees—all these Taylorist-Fordist practices became Hollywood’s own. And the result? At the peak of its early-1930s power, MGM could produce one feature film per week.

Taylor was a hyper-rationalist who insisted that there was always “one best way” to do any job. That way could be discovered by breaking down a task into its smallest components, which experts could analyze, refine, and then teach to those workers best suited to its demands. Lifting pig-iron demanded phlegmatic strong men; for sorting ball-bearings, Taylor preferred unimaginative girls.¹⁸ He laid out the steps involved in insuring maximum efficiency in the process of production: Discovering “the one best way” to do a job. Matching workers to the job. Teaching the worker “the one best way.” Convinced that he had unlocked the secret to modern life, Taylor asserted that “the same principles can be applied with equal force to all social activities,” including not only business but also farms, churches, charities, universities, government, and even homes. As proof of his claim, Taylor offered a series of examples, the most famous of which became the case of a pig-iron handler he named Schmidt.

In 1899, the Bethlehem Steel Company faced a problem. The Spanish-American War, which had just ended, had suddenly driven up the price of pig iron, of which the company had eighty thousand tons sitting in an open field. Bethlehem had no trouble finding buyers for this newly valuable commodity, but shipping it to them meant loading all of the individual pigs onto boxcars. The company installed inclined planks going up to the boxcars and brought in a team of pig-iron handlers, who set about carrying, one-by-one, the individual “pigs,” each weighing ninety-two pounds. The average man was loading twelve and a half tons a day, but Taylor argued that with an ideal worker, taught “the one best way” to lift pig iron, that number would become forty-five tons per day. Proceeding according to his own rules, he set about “scientifically selecting” the workmen best suited to this task, unashamedly laying out the relevant criteria:

Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. The man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character.

Knowing what he wanted for this job, Taylor settled on one man, a Dutch immigrant he called Schmidt, unusually strong and reliable, but also, at least in Taylor’s eyes, “so stupid that he was unfitted to do most kinds of laboring work.” He was certainly, as Taylor put it, “too stupid properly to train himself,” much less to discover “the one best way” to lift pig iron. Having convinced Schmidt to submit to whatever orders he would issue, in return for a higher wage, Taylor set about training his model laborer according to his “scientific” analysis of the task of pig-iron handling, a calculation that involved precise alternation of work and rest. The first day, according to Taylor, Schmidt loaded over forty-five tons of pig iron onto Bethlehem’s boxcars, and he continued to do so.

Taylor summed up his lesson: (1) for even a rudimentary task like pig-iron handling, there is “one best way”; (2) analysis will discover that way; (3) although physically well-suited to the job, Schmidt was far too stupid ever to figure it out for himself; (4) but he can be taught that best way and perform according to its rules as long as he remains under the close supervision of management; (5) once in place, this process results in increased production for the company and more money for Schmidt.

Everyone wins, right? Well, not exactly. A worker with his own ideas about a job will run into trouble. Admitting that his system required “enforced standardization of methods,” Taylor laid down the new law: “All of those who, after proper teaching, either will not or cannot work in accordance with the new methods and at the higher speed must be discharged by the management.” For convenience, we will call this last dictum the Von Stroheim Rule. To see why, we will have to look at early Hollywood.

Because it came to define for the whole world what counts as “a movie,” the Hollywood studio system remains the single most important filmmaking enterprise in history. More perhaps than anything else, that system’s consolidation involved the formulation of “the one best way” to make a movie. George Mitchell has shown that as late as 1916, no agreement existed among cottage-industry filmmakers about four basic questions:¹⁹ (1) Should the standard movie be short or feature-length? (2) Should the standard movie be a documentary or fiction? (3) Should the standard movie use anonymous players or named stars? (4) Should a company spread its expenditures over a large number of low-budget films or concentrate on a few big-budget ones?

By the early 1920s at the latest, a consensus had emerged: henceforth, someone going out to the cinema would expect to see a feature-length fiction film, organized around stars, and enabled by a large budget. Any one of these requirements would have made things increasingly difficult for small, independent operators; collectively, they became the barriers-to-entry that ultimately brought the cottage filmmaking industry to an end.

With the playing field cleared of small competitors, the rapidly organizing studios had to learn how to manage an increasingly capital-intensive business. The enormous fixed costs—the physical plant; the elaborate sets and equipment; the salaries for actors, writers, directors, and technicians—all of these inescapable expenses made urgent the need for rationalization. For the film business to become reliably profitable, it would need to have an effective management system. The first signal of what the source of that system might be occurred in 1918, when Universal, opening its first major stage, chose as the person to cut the ribbon not anyone connected with the movies, but Taylor’s most famous practitioner, Henry Ford.²⁰

In The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (1988), Thomas Schatz has detailed how quickly the industry adopted Taylor’s “scientific management.” Although filmmaking remained a collaborative enterprise, with its success determined by what André Bazin called “the genius of the system,” Hollywood’s version of that enterprise involved relocating the site of control upwards, from director to producer. MGM, the most financially successful studio, maintained a stark division of labor, with actors, writers, and even directors having little control over such matters as casting and editing. The producers ran the show, and when director Erich von Stroheim turned in a twelve-hour-long Greed, thereby violating one of the crucial rules of “the one best way” to make a movie, MGM’s head of production, Irving Thalberg, simply locked him out of the studio and cut the picture down to standard length. When von Stroheim caused more trouble with his next picture, The Merry Window, Thalberg let him finish it and then fired him.²¹ Von Stroheim had begun his career during the cottage-industry era, when directors controlled production. Taylor had announced the new dispensation: “In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first,” and if the man “either will not or cannot work in accordance with the new methods . . . [he] must be discharged by the management.”

 

Taylorism and its role in the consolidation of the Hollywood studio system are complex historical ideas, and the story doesn’t get any easier when we come to the role that movie stars played in this overall undertaking. Can we locate a concrete example that will embody these issues and enable us to understand them? To suggest the significance of what quickly became the dominant model of movie production, I often begin a course on the history of film from 1930 to 1965 with MGM’s Grand Hotel (1932), about which Pauline Kael once said, “if you want to see what screen glamour used to be, and what, originally, ‘stars’ were, this is perhaps the best example of all time.”²² My students these days are intrigued and puzzled by Greta Garbo, the movie’s principal star (despite appearing in only twenty-six of the film’s 110 minutes, and not at all during its first twenty). Her acting now seems noticeably mannered and unrealistic, and to viewers used to Lindsay Lohan, she appears far older than twenty-six, her age at the time of filming. If Garbo represents Classical Hollywood stardom, how can we begin to understand what that occupation involves?

The year after Grand Hotel, Garbo starred in Queen Christina (1934), whose final shot of her walking slowly towards the prow of her ship as a slow zoom settled on a medium close-up of her inscrutable, expressionless face, depended on director Rouben Mamoulian’s famous instruction to the actress: “Think of nothing.” Having shown this scene to my students, I can get us talking by asking a question: David Thomson observes that “it is often preferable to have a movie actor who moves well than one who ‘understands’ the part. A director ought to be able to explain a part, but very view men or women can move well in front of a camera.”²³ In the case of Garbo’s way of acting, does Thomson’s observation accord with or contradict Frederick Taylor’s industrial management system?

In effect, this question asks whether “moving well” constitutes a perfectible skill or a generic trait (something akin to foot speed).

Taylor assumed that a job’s most important requirements can be taught. Thus, if you define “moving well” as a skill, you will worry if it cannot be taught, and you will argue that Thomson’s remark represents a challenge to Taylorism. Even if you regard film acting as a de-skilled task, controlled by directors (as in Queen Christina’s “Think of nothing” scene), you will soon have to admit that some people who “think of nothing” look better on screen than others, whether they are moving or not doing much at all. We have a name for those people—stars. Thus, although film stardom seems like the kind of de-skilled job Taylor liked, and for which he could find “the one best way,” the fit is not exact.

If, on the other hand, you define “moving well” as a trait, a kind of accidental charisma not entirely in control of those who have it, you will argue that it cannot be taught. But you might use Taylor to argue that, like Schmidt’s uncommon strength, “moving well” is an aptitude that can be “scientifically selected” and exploited. Indeed, screen tests seem part of the mechanism for doing so. Thus, you might argue that Thomson’s remark is in accord with Taylorism. But almost certainly, Taylor would have been unhappy if forced to work with movie stars, even ones who did exactly what he told them to do. Their selected trait (charisma? photogénie?) remains more complex—and harder to recognize and select for—than Schmidt’s simple strength.

Responding to Thomson’s comment takes us some way towards understanding the relationship of Taylorism to film stardom. Another question raises more complex issues: To what extent is Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel merely a version of Frederick Taylor’s “Schmidt,” another unskilled worker performing a routinized task?

This second question breaks down into two issues: Does Taylorism apply to the task we call “movie-star performance”? If it doesn’t, what does that mismatch tell us about “movie-star performance”?

We can begin with the issue of skill. Taylor wanted to simplify tasks (by breaking them down into their components) in order to make their accomplishment less a matter of skill. This process of de-skilling would make tasks automatic and workers replaceable: Turner’s ideal was “the ready-made man.” Taylor, in other words, saw “skill” as an impediment to industrial efficiency. While he acknowledged the existence of jobs that require a lot of skill (surgery, for example), those jobs didn’t fall within his purview. He would have argued, however, that a complex task like cardiac surgery can still be broken down into steps, and those steps made regular by protocols.

Taylor recognized that even a primitive job like pig-iron handling involves some skill, but he thought it more important to match such jobs with workers selected for the necessary trait, like physical strength. Taylor’s breakdown of jobs into their simpler components rested on a key assumption: people innately suited to a simple task would be easier to find than those suited to a complex one. In other words, there are likely to be more “Schmidts” than Irving Thalbergs available.

The Queen Christina example seems to portray movie-star performance as a simple, unskilled job like pig-iron handling. If Schmidt couldn’t think, at least according to Taylor, Garbo didn’t have to—indeed, she was ordered not to. Like Schmidt, Garbo was chosen by MGM for her innate qualities, her appearance, her movement, her voice, her charisma—all the equivalents of Schmidt’s brute strength. Like Schmidt, Garbo merely took orders, even somewhat demeaning ones like Mamoulian’s. Indeed, Studio-Era Hollywood, with its Taylorist-inspired commitment to a strict division of labor, consciously tried to de-skill film acting, especially movie-star performance. It wanted even its most famous actors simply to take orders. While some stars (Bette Davis, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson) bridled at this regime, others accepted it as willingly as Taylor’s “ready-made man,” trading autonomy for higher wages. In words that evoke Taylor’s Schmidt and Mamoulian’s instructions, Clark Gable openly acknowledged the rules of the game:

My advice has never been asked about a picture. I have never been consulted about what I’d like to play. I just work here . . . the company has an investment in me. It’s my business to work, not to think. . . .²⁴

Taylor de-skilled tasks by breaking even the simplest of them down into their constituent parts. Walter Benjamin noticed the same process transforming traditional acting. Citing Rudolf Arnheim’s observation that in the cinema, “the greatest effects are almost always obtained by ‘acting’ as little as possible,” Benjamin pointed to the film actor’s loss of control over his own performance: “His creation is by no means all of a piece; it is composed of many separate performances . . . a series of mountable episodes.”²⁵

For Taylor, de-skilling had two goals: the standardization of the task in question and the conversion of a formerly autonomous worker into an easily replaceable part. De-skilled labor, in other words, became replicable and fungible. But as MGM discovered when she walked out during a salary dispute, Greta Garbo could not be replaced by anyone in the world. Although the studio regime had managed to separate screen acting from anything like what a theater performer would call skill, neither MGM nor any other studio could ever develop a “one true science” capable of teaching someone to become a star, much less to become “Garbo.” Hollywood tried to replicate “Garbo” with Anna Sten and Hedy Lamarr. Both failed. Thus, although the definition of “skill” that informs the Schmidt case seems applicable to Garbo—and by extension, to all movie-star performance—Garbo’s irreplaceability suggests that something is wrong with the analogy.

What, therefore, does the close, but inexact, comparison of Garbo to Schmidt tell us about the nature of movie stardom? First, unlike those employed in the jobs Taylor analyzed, a movie star is simultaneously a laborer and the product that attracts an audience. Bethlehem Steel’s customers paid for pig-iron, but they didn’t need to see Schmidt lift it. Hollywood quickly discovered that it could make money showing us certain people “moving well” in front of a camera—even thinking of nothing—and those people became stars.

The second conclusion concerns the applicability of “skill” to movie stardom. As Stanley Cavell reminds us,²⁶ we have imported the word “actor,” and our ideas about what that job involves, from the theater, where “acting” typically demands skilled impersonation of different characters. Movie-star performance, on the other hand, replaces learned skill with accidental charisma, and impersonation with personification (Clint Eastwood is Dirty Harry).²⁷ Thus, movie-star performance has less to do with the kind of skill Taylorism assumes than with something else entirely.

One of the best glimpses of that “something else” appears in a story that anyone interested in movie stardom should know. When Garbo was contemplating a comeback, cameraman James Wong Howe was hired to do a screen test. When the actress arrived for the session, he was disappointed by how ordinary she looked, and surprised that she had brought with her neither make-up man nor hairdresser. “I had never photographed her,” Howe recalled, “I was frightened. This great lady!” What followed amounts to the crucial lesson:

When the camera started to turn…she listened to the grinding sound and her face changed, her expression, her whole emotional mood came to life and transformed her completely. It was incredible, wonderful…. She was like a horse on a track: nothing, and then the bell goes, and something happens. When the shot was over, she said simply, “Have you got enough?” And I said “Yes,” and very matter-of-factly she remarked, “Okay, I go home.” She did. And she was nothing again.²⁸

Precisely because movie-star performance does not involve Taylor’s notion of skill, it cannot be standardized, and its “workers” cannot be easily replaced. Movie stardom amounts to a highly unusual task, unimagined by Taylor and unlike almost any other job in the world. Even one of its closest equivalents, professional athletics, fails as an analogy: while requiring certain God-given traits, sports also demand carefully trained physical skills. But no one can train to become Greta Garbo. Movie-star performance, in other words, is one of the few relatively low-skilled jobs for which the number of suitable people is very small. Taylor assumed that for every unskilled task, the ideal type would always be in plentiful supply. He was wrong. As a result, stardom represented the greatest impediment to the Taylorist rationalization of the movie industry.

Taylorism, stardom, Classical Hollywood’s consolidation—each of these historical concepts involves a complex history. That rich history and its odd contradictions might be evoked by reflecting on the two examples I’ve described, Taylor’s Schmidt and Queen Christina’s final shot. Together, they function as memory theaters, which we can use to bring to mind the far-reaching narratives of which they form a central part.

 

ENDNOTES

1. William H. Pritchard, English Papers: A Teaching Life (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1995), p. xiv.
2. D. Kramer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 39.
3. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), p. 148.
4. Anthony Kenny, The Wittgenstein Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 59.
5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 19.
6. Kenny, p. 59.
7. Stanley Cavell, “Austin at Criticism,” in K. T. Fann, ed. Symposium on J. L. Austin (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 65, n. 1.
8. Stanley Cavell and A. Klevan, “What Becomes of Thinking on Film,” in R. Read and J. Goodenough, eds., Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema After Wittgenstein and Cavell (New York: Palgrave, 2005), p. 171.
9. J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 185, n. 1.
10. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1932), p. 124-125.
11. Mark A. Vieira, Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), p. 63.
12. Ronald L. Davis, The Glamour Factory: Inside Hollywood’s Big Studio System (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1993), p. 80-92. Quotations in the subsequent numbered list are taken from these pages.
13. Gavin Lambert, On Cukor (New York: Rizzoli, 2000), p. 57.
14. Vieira, p. 243.
15. Francois Truffaut, Truffaut by Truffaut (New York: Abrams, 1987), p. 65.
16. Gregory L. Ulmer, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 8–11.
17. Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York: Pantheon, 1988).
18. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Norton, 1967) p. 130, n. 1. All subsequent quotations from Taylor are taken from this edition.
19. George Mitchell “The Consolidation of the American Film Industry 1915-1920,” Cine-Tracts, Vol. 2, no. 2 (Spring 1979), pp. 28-36; and Vol. 2, nos. 3-4 (Summer/Fall 1979), pp. 63–70.
20. Michael Storper, “The Transition to Flexible Specialization in the U.S. Film Industry: External Economies, the Division of Labour and the Crossing of Industrial Divides,” in Ash Amin, ed., Post-Fordism: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 195–226.
21. Schatz,  pp. 34-35.
22. Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), p. 299.
23. David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (New York: Knopf, 2010), pp. 40–41.
24. Barry King, “Stardom as an Occupation,” in Paul Kerr, The Hollywood Film Industry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 174.
25. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 230
26. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 25–29.
27. Barry King, “Articulating Stardom,” in Christine Gledhill, ed., Stardom: Industry of Desire (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 168.
28. Charles Higham, Hollywood Cameramen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), p. 92.

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