The Golden Age of Hollywood could not last forever. A number of outside forces were conspiring to make it impossible for the studio system to continue for more than a few decades in the post-war era. This led to the fall of the Studio System in the landmark Supreme Court case decision of the United States vs. Paramount Pictures. The ripple effects of the case changed the landscape of The Golden Age of Hollywood forever.
The moment that is often considered to be the beginning of the end for the studio system, and the end of Hollywood's Golden Age, is the 1948 Supreme Court decision United States v. Paramount Pictures. While this decision saw precedent in a 1938 anti-trust case by Attorney General Thurman Arnold that restricted the practice of block booking by the "Big Five" studios: Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, and RKO Radio Pictures. The powerhouse movie houses owned their own…show more content… Hollywood's "Little Three" studios Universal, Columbia Pictures, and United Artists (which didn't own any theaters), thought that it didn't go nearly far enough. United States v. Paramount, however, not only prohibited block booking altogether, it also forced the Big Five to basically sell their theater chains. The result of this was that studios, no longer were able to dump a whole year's worth of movies into theaters. This forced movie houses to be far more selective in what they did produce. The decision also prohibited price fixing and favoring certain movie houses exclusivity access to big studio films. This led to an increase in the production values and budgets of Hollywood's motion pictures, and a decrease in in productions. This also gave more freedom to independent filmmakers and smaller studios. It made the smaller houses very successful in the wake of the Supreme court decision as they could distribute their product with much less interference by the
