Bakker on Haupert, _The Entertainment Industry_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (April 2007)

Michael Haupert, _The Entertainment Industry_. Westport, CT: 
Greenwood Press, 2006. xxi + 271 pp. $65 (cloth), ISBN: 0-313-32173-6.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Gerben Bakker, Department of Economic History, 
London School of Economics.


This book gives a concise overview of the economic history of 
entertainment in the United States. It has selected a few businesses 
whose histories together give an impression of the industry's 
evolution.

A chapter on vaudeville relates the emergence of the genre in the 
1880s, the emergence of circuits, the domination of the business by a 
few major organizations, and the eventual decline, coincident with 
the arrival of talking pictures. The subsequent two chapters tell the 
history of the film and music industries. The next chapter, on radio, 
devotes substantial attention to the technical aspects -- the 
inventors, their patents and their exploitation. A chapter on 
television relates how it continued the vaudeville tradition after 
the last vaudeville theater had closed. The last chapter contains 
brief biographic sketches of some personalities that played a key 
role in the industry's history. The rather wide scope -- six 
different businesses over more than a century -- means that the book 
does not always go into great depth. Nevertheless, some chapters give 
a fascinating insight into the details of the business. This is 
especially so for the part on vaudeville, whose history is less well 
known than that of theater, opera, film or music.

Aimed at a wide audience, the book is written in an admirably 
accessible way. The chapters provide a broad narrative synthesis of 
some of the secondary literature. Generally they are structured 
thematically, which means that they often jump backwards and forwards 
through time. The book does do not contain figures and tables, but 
quotes many useful anecdotal figures. It may be handy as a 
rough-and-ready point of first entry for those unfamiliar with the 
industry. This also means, however, that there is no clear research 
question or hypothesis driving each chapter and the book as a whole 
forward. An over-arching model of the entertainment industry would 
have been useful to organize the text.

The book is U.S.-centered, although this is not explicitly signaled 
in the title. It does not discuss the history of non-U.S. 
entertainment industries or make comparisons with other entertainment 
markets. It thus misses out on some important historical turning 
points. The reader remains unaware, for example, that in the 
mid-1900s, over half of films shown in the U.S. were made in Europe 
[Bakker 2005]. The book also restricts itself to market 
entertainment, while the twentieth century saw a sharp rise in 
'non-market' or publicly provided entertainment, with ever more 
people visiting national parks, joining sports clubs, associations, 
going on hunting and fishing trips, or enjoying other outdoor 
recreation.

Over the past decade, substantial economic history research on 
entertainment has appeared. A large chunk of this is not quoted in 
the bibliography, and little is critically discussed in the text. The 
book also contains several small omissions, inconsistencies and 
inaccuracies, which is probably inevitable given its broad range. The 
first substantive chapter, for example, notes how talking pictures 
led to vaudeville's demise, while a later chapter notes that "it was 
television which sent vaudeville revues to their grave." Likewise, 
the book notes that during World War II Hollywood's overseas business 
shifted to Latin America, "which had been largely unexploited," while 
most histories put Hollywood's Latin expansion far earlier. By 1927, 
19 percent of foreign income came from Latin America, versus 27 
percent from non-UK Europe [Vasey 1997:85]. The Motion Pictures 
Patent Company, dominant between 1908 and 1912, is mentioned as a 
horizontal cartel, yet the Supreme Court did not find it guilty of 
'horizontal' collusion in pooling members' patents, but of using the 
resulting legal monopoly to monopolize an adjacent business -- film 
distribution. The lack of annotation or even a chapter-specific 
bibliography makes it hard to verify statements or get leads for 
further reading.

The book could also have included more historical insights that help 
understand the industry. It does not mention the geographic dimension 
of the interwar Hollywood cartel, which rested on reciprocity ("if 
you show my pictures on the East Coast, I'll show yours on the 
West"). It does not discuss Hollywood's subsequent failure to enter 
television (that they had just been found guilty of collusion by the 
Supreme Court did not help their applications for TV licenses). 
Likewise, the book puts the creation of a mass market for the 
phonograph in the 1900s and 1910s. This could have been slightly more 
nuanced, as it remained a bit of an elite product for a limited 
audience, compared to cinema and later radio. Only a third of 
households had a record player by 1920, and from then on this 
fraction declined until 1945. Only during the fifties and sixties did 
music become a true mass product.

Despite these quibbles, however, this book provides a readable 
introduction into the history of the US entertainment industry. It 
may certainly be useful to academics, when consulted alongside other 
works. For the non-academic reader unfamiliar with the topic this 
will be an entertaining read.


Gerben Bakker is assistant professor in Economic History and 
Management at the London School of Economics. He received his Ph.D. 
from the European University Institute in Florence and was awarded 
the Herman E. Krooss dissertation prize (2003). Recent publications 
include: "The Decline and Fall of the European Film Industry: Sunk 
Costs, Market Size and Market Structure, 1895-1926," _Economic 
History Review_ (May 2005); "The Making of a Rights-Based 
Multinational: PolyGram and the International Music Industry, 
1945-1998," _Business History Review_ (Spring 2006); and "The 
Evolution of Entertainment Consumption and the Emergence of Cinema, 
1890-1940," _Advances in Austrian Economics_ (2007).

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