Back to Asian Americans on Celluloid Timeline
The Studio Era
The “Studio Era,” sometimes called the Golden Age of Hollywood, refers to the period from the 1920s to the 1950s during which Hollywood was dominated by a small number of large studios (the Big Five and the Little Three), which signed talent to long-term contracts. The first two decades of the Studio Era were characterized by vertical integration. This means that the studios controlled not just film production, but also distribution and exhibition. In this environment, independent filmmaking was very difficult. The Studio Era began to decline in 1948, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Paramount Decision that the studios’ distribution and exhibition practices broke federal antitrust regulations. In response to the ruling and to the emergence of television, the big studios tried to attract audiences and to maintain their profits through creating larger-than-life experiences. This means focusing on genres with stunning set pieces, such as musicals and historical epics, and on technical innovations, such as widescreen, 3-D, stereo sound, and Cinemascope. Flower Drum Song (1961), the first major Hollywood feature to have a preliminary Asian cast, was a product of the late Studio Era.
The Studio Era coincided largely with the Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the Hays Code. Hays was the President of Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America from 1922 to 1945. The Code was a set of guidelines that spelled out what was, and was not, morally acceptable in American movies. It was created largely in response to the threat of federal regulation. Initially adopted in 1930, the Hays Code was rigidly enforced from 1934 through the 1950s. Enforcement became more lax in the 1960s, and was abandoned in 1968, when the MPAA film rating system that we still use was introduced. The Hays Code had a disastrous effect for Asian American actors, as it explicitly prohibited miscegenation. Since no Hollywood studio would approve a movie with two Asian American leads, this essentially meant that no Asian American could have been a lead actor during the studio era.
Despite these severe restrictions, a number of Asian Americans established major careers in Hollywood during the Studio Era. I will introduce six here. Please also look at the guide for Golden Gate Girls, a documentary about Esther Eng, a pioneering queer woman independent director in this period. Philip Ahn (1905-78) was a Korean American actor and activist who played over 270 character roles over his four-decade career. His first film was A Scream in the Night (1935), and he appeared in dozens of World War II films (usually as a Japanese villain) and Korean War films. Later in his career, Ahn played “Master Kan” on the television series Kung Fu, and guest starred in many major TV shows, including Hawaii Five-O, Crossroads, Bonanza and M*A*S*H. On the right, Ralph Ahn discusses his brother Philip Ahn at various points, particularly starting around 32:30.
James Wong Howe (1899-1976) was a Chinese American cinematographer with over 130 credits. He was known particularly for “low-key” lighting techniques and use of deep shadows—an aesthetic that came to be associated particularly with film noir. He helped to develop and popularize “deep focus,” a technique involving narrows the camera lens’ aperture and using very bright lights. This allows the foreground, middle-ground and background to be in focus at the same time. Howe also created a early version of a crab dolly, and was one of the first cinematographers to use helicopter shots and a hand-held camera. He began his career as a camera assistant for Cecil B. DeMille, and started working as a cinematographer in 1923. By the early 1930s, he had established himself as an innovator who is at the top of his field. Between 1938 and 1943, Howe received five Academy Award nominations. During the HUAC hearings, Howe was named as a sympathizer. This fact, along with the fact that his wife Sanora Babb was a Communist Party member, led Howe to be gray-listed. After 1950, Howe’s career took off once again. He received five additional Academy Award nominations, winning two. The International Cinematographers Guild named Howe one of the ten most influential cinematographers in history.
Born in Bombay, Merle Oberon (1911-79) was the daughter of a White British father and a mother of mixed European, South Asian and Māori heritage. After beginning her career in Britain, Oberon came to the United States in 1935. She received a “Best Leading Actress” nomination for her first Hollywood film, The Dark Angel. In the remainder of her four-decade career, Oberon starred in films on both sides of the Atlantic, and was especially known for her glamor and her period dramas. Oberon’s most notable films include Wuthering Heights (1939), the Jack-the-Ripper-inspired mystery The Lodger (1944), the Chopin biopic A Song to Remember (1945), and the Napoleon biopic Désirée. To hide her multiracial ancestry, which would have made her run afoul of the Hays Code, she claimed to be from Tasmania and of Irish, Dutch and French lineage. She also said that her birth records were destroyed in a fire.
Born in Taishan, China in the waning days of the Qing Dynasty, artist Tyrus Wong (1910-2016) came to the United States as a paper son in 1919. After graduating from the Otis Art Institute, he landed a job as a sketch artist at Disney in 1938. He worked his way up quickly, and served as the lead artist for Bambi. His background design for this film was inspired largely by the atmospheric backgrounds of Song Dynasty landscape paintings, which use a small number of strokes to suggest vast spaces. In the aftermath of the 1941 Disney animators’ strike, Wong was fired soon after he finished his work for Bambi. He soon landed a position at Warner Bros., where he worked for 26 years as a set designer and storyboard artist. His credits include Mildred Pierce (1945), Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), The Music Man (1962), and The Wild Bunch (1969). Upon his retirement from film, Wong designed greeting cards for Hallmark, and began designing kites. Wong is the subject of Pamela Tom’s 2015 documentary Tyrus.
Japanese American singer/actress Miyoshi Umeki (1929-2007) began her career as a nightclub singer in Japan, and landed a recording contract with RCA Victor Japan in 1950. She recorded American jazz standards, singing in both English and Japanese. Shortly after moving to the United States in 1955, Umeki landed a regular spot on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts. This led to a recording contract with Mercury Records and a supporting role in the Marlon Brando vehicle Sayonara. This highly acclaimed performance led Umeki to become the first actor of Asian descent to win an Academy Award. In 1958, she premiered the role of Mei-Li in the stage version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song, and received a Golden Globe nomination for her reprisal of this role in the film version of the musical. After 1962, Umeki focused her attention on television. For three seasons (1969-72), she played the housekeeper Mrs. Livingston on the sitcom The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination in 1970. Umeki retired from acting after the cancellation of this series, and ran a business that rented film editing equipment to studios and universities for three decades
Japanese American art director Albert Nozaki (1912-2003) immigrated to the United States at the age of three, and studied architecture at the University of Southern California and architectural engineering at the University of Illinois. Upon receiving his master’s degree in 1934, he landed a job as a draftsman at Paramount. Shortly after the United States entered World War II, Nozaki was suddenly fired. A few months later, he and his wife Lorna were rounded up and sent to Manzanar. After the war, Nozaki was rehired at Paramount. He received an Oscar nomination for his contribution to Cecil B. DeMille’s epic The Ten Commandments (1956), but he always considered The War of the Worlds (1953) to be his masterpiece. According to special effects designer Robert Skotak, Nozaki “story-boarded the entire movie himself, meaning he drew every camera angle, including what’s in the shots. He also designed all the technology—the war machines, the meteor, the Martians—all the special things that are in the movie that don’t exist.” In one particularly memorable scene, a Martian bomber shoots fire rays that disintegrates Los Angeles’ City Hall.