During the 1920s in the United States, motion-picture production, distribution, and exhibition became a major national industry and movies perhaps the major national obsession. The salaries of stars reached monumental proportions; filmmaking practices and narrative formulas were standardized to accommodate mass production; and Wall Street began to invest heavily in every branch of the business. The growing industry was organized according to the studio system that, in many respects, the producer Thomas Harper Ince had developed between 1914 and 1918 at Inceville, his studio in the Santa Ynez Canyon near Hollywood. Ince functioned as the central authority over multiple production units, each headed by a director who was required to shoot an assigned film according to a detailed continuity script. Every project was carefully budgeted and tightly scheduled, and Ince himself supervised the final cut. This central producer system was the prototype for the studio system of the 1920s, and, with some modification, it prevailed as the dominant mode of Hollywood production for the next 40 years.

Virtually all the major film genres evolved and were codified during the 1920s, but none was more characteristic of the period than the slapstick comedy. This form was originated by Mack Sennett, who, at his Keystone Studios, produced countless one- and two-reel shorts and features (Tillie’s Punctured Romance, 1914; The Surf Girl, 1916; Teddy at the Throttle, 1917) whose narrative logic was subordinated to fantastic, purely visual humor. An anarchic mixture of circus, vaudeville, burlesque, pantomime, and the chase, Sennett’s Keystone comedies created a world of inspired madness and mayhem, and they employed the talents of such future stars as Charlie Chaplin, Harry Langdon, Roscoe (“Fatty”) Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, and Harold Lloyd. When these performers achieved fame, many of them left Keystone, often to form their own production companies, a practice still possible in the early 1920s.

Chaplin, for example, who had developed the persona of the “Little Tramp” at Keystone, went on to direct and star in a series of shorts produced by Essanay in 1915 (The Tramp, A Night in the Show) and Mutual between 1916 and 1917 (The Vagabond, One A.M., The Rink, Easy Street). In 1917 he was offered an eight-film contract with First National that enabled him to establish his own studio. He directed his first feature there, the semiautobiographical The Kid (1921), but most of his First National films were two-reelers. In 1919 Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, the four most popular and powerful film artists of the time, jointly formed the United Artists Corporation in order to produce and distribute—and thereby retain artistic and financial control over—their own films. Chaplin directed three silent features for United Artists: A Woman of Paris (1923), his great comic epic The Gold Rush (1925), and The Circus (1928), which was released after the introduction of sound into motion pictures. He later made several sound films, but the two most successful—his first two, City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936)—were essentially silent films with musical scores.

Buster Keaton possessed a kind of comic talent very different from Chaplin’s, but both men were wonderfully subtle actors with a keen sense of the tragic often contained within the comic, and both were major directors of their period. Keaton, like Chaplin, was born into a theatrical family and began performing in vaudeville skits at a young age. Intrigued by the new film medium, he left the stage and worked for two years as a supporting comedian for Arbuckle’s production company. In 1919 Keaton formed his own production company, where over the next four years he made 20 shorts (including One Week, 1920; The Boat, 1921; Cops, 1922; and The Balloonatic, 1923) that represent, with Chaplin’s Mutual films, the acme of American slapstick comedy. A Keaton trademark was the “trajectory gag,” in which perfect timing of acting, directing, and editing propels his film character through a geometric progression of complicated sight gags that seem impossibly dangerous but are still dramatically logical. Such routines inform all of Keaton’s major features—Our Hospitality (1923), Sherlock, Jr. (1924), The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances (1925), and his masterpieces The General (1927) and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). Keaton’s greatest films, all made before his company was absorbed by MGM, have a reflexive quality that indicates his fascination with film as a medium. Although some of his MGM films were financially successful, the factory-like studio system stifled Keaton’s creativity, and he was reduced to playing bit parts after the early 1930s.

Important but lesser silent comics were Lloyd, the team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Langdon, and Arbuckle. Working at the Hal Roach Studios, Lloyd cultivated the persona of an earnest, sweet-tempered boy-next-door. He specialized in a variant of Keystone mayhem known as the “comedy of thrills,” in which—as in Lloyd’s most famous features, Safety Last! (1923) and The Freshman (1925)—an innocent protagonist finds himself placed in physical danger. Laurel and Hardy also worked for Roach. They made 27 silent two-reelers, including Putting Pants on Philip (1927) and Liberty (1929), and became even more popular in the 1930s in such sound films as Another Fine Mess (1930) and Sons of the Desert (1933). Their comic characters were basically grown-up children whose relationship was sometimes disturbingly sadomasochistic. Langdon also traded on a childlike, even babylike, image in such popular features as The Strong Man (1926) and Long Pants (1927), both directed by Frank Capra. Arbuckle, however, in his few years of stardom, created the character of a leering, sensual adult. Arbuckle’s talent was limited, but his persona affected the course of American film history in a quite unexpected way.

Arbuckle was at the center of the most damaging scandal to affect American motion pictures during the silent era. In September 1921 the comedian and several friends hosted a weekend party in a San Francisco hotel. During the party a young actress named Virginia Rappe became ill, and she later died in a hospital of peritonitis. Press reports of the event as a drunken orgy inflamed public opinion. Amid the volatile social transformations of the post-World War I era, with issues such as immigration restriction and the national prohibition of alcoholic beverages deeply dividing the country, many had come to regard movies as a disturbing instigator of social change and its high-living stars as threats to moral order and values. The Arbuckle scandal seemed to encapsulate these fears, and prosecutors responded by accusing the actor of rape and murder. Eventually indicted for manslaughter, he was tried three times; the first two trials ended in hung juries, and in the third the jury deliberated for six minutes and voted for acquittal. But Arbuckle’s career as an actor was in ruins, and he was banned from the screen for more than a decade. Other sensational deaths involving Hollywood personalities, through murder or suicide or drug overdose, fueled the public furor.

To stave off increasing efforts by state and local governments to censor films, the Hollywood studios formed a new, stronger trade association, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA; later renamed the Motion Picture Association of America). They also hired a conservative politician, U.S. Postmaster General Will H. Hays, as its head. The Hays Office, as the association became popularly known, advocated industry self-regulation as an alternative to governmental interference, and it succeeded in preventing the expansion of censorship efforts. Hays promulgated a series of documents that attempted to regulate various forms of criminal and immoral behavior depicted in movies. A principle such as “compensating values,” for example, recognized that popular entertainment had always told stories of lawbreaking and social transgression, but it held that law and morality should always triumph in a film.

The leading practitioner of the compensating values formula was the flamboyant director Cecil B. DeMille. He first became famous after World War I for a series of sophisticated comedies of manners that were aimed at Hollywood’s new middle-class audience (Old Wives for New, 1918; Forbidden Fruit, 1921). When the Hays Office was established, DeMille turned to the sex- and violence-drenched religious spectacles that made him an international figure, notably The Ten Commandments (1923; remade 1956). DeMille’s chief rival in the production of stylish sex comedies was the German émigré Ernst Lubitsch. An early master of the UFA Kostümfilm, Lubitsch excelled at sexual innuendo and understatement in such urbane essays as The Marriage Circle (1924). Also popular during the 1920s were the swashbuckling exploits of Douglas Fairbanks, whose lavish adventure spectacles, including Robin Hood (1922) and The Thief of Bagdad (1924), thrilled a generation, and the narrative documentaries of Robert Flaherty, whose Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana (1926) were unexpectedly successful with the public and with critics.

The most enigmatic and unconventional figure working in Hollywood at the time, however, was without a doubt the Viennese émigré Erich von Stroheim. Stroheim, who also acted, learned directing as an assistant to Griffith on Intolerance and Hearts of the World. His first three films—Blind Husbands (1918), The Devil’s Passkey (1919), and Foolish Wives (1922)—constitute an obsessive trilogy of adultery; each features a sexual triangle in which an American wife is seduced by a Prussian army officer. Even though all three films were enormously popular, the great sums Stroheim was spending on the extravagant production design and costuming of his next project brought him into conflict with his Universal producers, and he was replaced.

Stroheim then signed a contract with Goldwyn Pictures and began work on a long-cherished project—an adaptation of Frank Norris’s grim naturalistic novel McTeague. Shot entirely on location in the streets and rooming houses of San Francisco, in Death Valley, and in the California hills, the film was conceived as a sentence-by-sentence translation of its source. Stroheim’s original version ran approximately 10 hours. Realizing that the film was too long to be exhibited, he cut almost half the footage. The film was still deemed too long, so Stroheim, with the help of director Rex Ingram, edited it down into a four-hour version that could be shown in two parts. By that time, however, Goldwyn Pictures had merged with Metro Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Pictures to become MGM. MGM took the negative from Stroheim and cut another two hours, destroying the excised footage in the process. Released as Greed (1924), the film had enormous gaps in continuity, but it was still recognized as a work of genius in its rich psychological characterization and in its creation of a naturalistic analogue for the novel.

Stroheim made one more film for MGM, a darkly satiric adaptation of the Franz Lehár operetta The Merry Widow (1925). He then went to Celebrity Pictures, where he directed The Wedding March (1928), a two-part spectacle set in imperial Vienna, but his work was taken from him and recut into a single film when Celebrity was absorbed by Paramount. Stroheim’s last directorial duties were on the botched Queen Kelly (1929) and Walking down Broadway (1932), although he was removed from both films for various reasons. He made his living thereafter by writing screenplays and acting.

Although many of Stroheim’s troubles with Hollywood were personal, he was also a casualty of the American film industry’s transformation during the 1920s from a speculative entrepreneurial enterprise into a vertically and horizontally integrated oligopoly that had no tolerance for creative difference. His situation was not unique; many singular artists, including Griffith, Sennett, Chaplin, and Keaton, found it difficult to survive as filmmakers under the rigidly standardized studio system that had been established by the end of the decade. The industry’s conversion to sound at that time reinforced its big-business tendencies and further discouraged independent filmmakers. The studios, which had borrowed huge sums of money on the very brink of the Great Depression in order to finance the conversion, were determined to reduce production costs and increase efficiency. They therefore became less and less willing to tolerate artistic innovation or eccentricity.