Paul Merton writes, directs and fronts this three-part BBC Two chronicle of how American film clawed power from Edison’s trust and planted itself in Hollywood between 1908 and 1933. Episode one tracks the Motion Picture Patents Company’s stranglehold, Mary Pickford’s elevation from Biograph girl to co-founder of United Artists, and the westward exodus from New York to California’s cheap land and year-round sun. Merton shoots on the lots where citrus orchards once stood and leafs through the contracts that turned actors into property.
The second hour stays with the scandals that handed the censors their excuse. Merton details how Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s 1921 manslaughter trial—later acquitted—became the rallying cry for church groups, the Hays Office and the first morality clauses written into stars’ contracts. He splices lobbyist pamphlets with clipped Arbuckle comedies to show how quickly the clown was erased from screens. Parallel threads trace Cecil B. DeMille’s biblical epics, the arrival of prohibition and the box-office bounce that followed every tabloid outrage.
The final instalment pivots to 1930s factory filmmaking and Irving Thalberg’s model at MGM: producers, not directors, held final cut, and stars were kept on salary with their images relentlessly focus-grouped. Merton visits the Thalberg building, still the administrative heart of Sony Pictures, and contrasts the mogul’s anonymity with the billboard-size faces of Crawford, Gable and Garbo that sold the dream. The series closes on the paradox Thalberg embodied: the invisible man who decided what the world would watch.
Production Details
BBC Two / 1 Season / 3 Episodes / 2011
Created by: Paul Merton
Writer(s): Paul Merton
Producer(s): Kate Broome
Main Cast
Paul Merton as
