The Big Screen by David Thomson

before—or not had them so widely exposed to the public.
    Of course, those personal downfalls, so easily illustrated, helped mask another type of scandal that was habitual in the film business: the misreporting of financial returns, the steady use of business malpractice, including a defiance of antitrust statutes in a trade so new the lawyers were laboring along behind the bosses’ cunning. Remember, in the 1920s, when so much money was made, agents hardly existed. The young talent had to deal with the studios on their own, or through parents, husbands, and ill-prepared lawyers.
    Ahead of agents, there was another form of life feared and mistrusted by the system: unions. In November 1926 the producers signed the Studio Basic Agreement with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Technicians (known as IATSE), a union that covered laborers, stage hands, carpenters, painters, electricians, and even projectionists, but not the talent credited on movies. This was bad enough, but it threatened the organization of actors, writers, and directors.
    No one was more concerned over this than Louis B. Mayer, horrified at the mania for collectivization that had swept his old country. So it was Mr. Mayer who called the dinner party to inaugurate the idea of the Academy. He was also eager to tame the atmosphere of bad behavior that he feared was demeaning the movies. So he saw the Academy as a bland uber-union, a forum where grievances could be aired and settled, and the companies would act as benign arbiters. But he loved the other notion, that an academy should identify excellence. If there could be something like a “Best Picture,” then by implication movies were striving to be good, wholesome, and enriching for the public.
    The Academy merely delayed the forming of unions, the Screen Actors Guild (established in 1933) and the Writers Guild (older but only really active from 1933), which would stir up trouble in the 1930s and ’40s, so that they were often thought to be “Red.” The Directors Guild came into being in 1936. But the Academy was a set of rose-colored spectacles that substantially fooled the audience. To this day, the hope persists (just) that our movies must be worthy because of that silly statuette, and the show that marks its offering—it was called Oscar, probably, because Margaret Herrick, the first librarian of the Academy, looked at the sketch made by Cedric Gibbons (the top designer at M-G-M) and said it looked like her Uncle Oscar.
    The first Oscars were announced on February 18, 1929, to cover films released between August 1927 and July 1928. There were special awards to Chaplin for The Circus and to Warner Brothers for The Jazz Singer —hardly good but certainly the future. Rochus Gliese on Sunrise lost for “Interior Decoration” to William Cameron Menzies for his work on two films. Charles Rosher and Karl Struss won the first cinematography Oscar, for Sunrise . Janet Gaynor took the Best Actress Oscar, but for her work on three films: Sunrise , 7th Heaven (1927), and Street Angel (1928) (all Fox productions). There was no single Best Picture that first year. Instead, there was one award for Best Production—it went to Wings , a Paramount picture, directed by William Wellman, a spectacular account of air combat during the Great War. And an award for “Artistic Quality Production” went to Sunrise . In fact, the board of judges had at first voted King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928) the winner in that category. No matter that The Crowd was one of his own studio’s films, Louis B. Mayer argued all night with the board that the award should go to Sunrise . He got his way. But that was the only year in which the Academy tolerated a split in its soul and acknowledged that art was not business. Thereafter, no such rift was permitted. The Best Picture would be the best picture. So Sunrise stands alone for both the