Ford / Taylor

MODULE: Standardized production allows manufacturers to be more efficient. A production process can be divided in multiple ways; its simplicity saves time because its workers need only be trained a little and can be replaced easily.

1. Standardized mass production began with the military need for interchangeable weapons. After nearly losing the War of 1812, the American military institutionalized production processes developed by Frenchman Jean Baptiste Gribeauval. These processes standardized weapons production to create weapons with “perfectly interchangeable parts” (de Landa 31). These techniques depended upon a shortened chain of command that gave direct control to the upper echelons of military authority. Thus, when the non-military industries of the mid- and late-nineteenth century adopted rationalized production practices, they were also adopting a military structure of command (31-2).

2. As the cinema industry emerged in the 1920s and early 1930s, its most powerful proprietors adopted Ford and Taylor’s production practices:

Indeed, as Thomas Schatz has described, the Hollywood studios set the tone by explicitly imitating the organizational system developed in large-scale manufacturing. Mass production, standardized designs, concentration of the whole production cycle in a single place, a radical division of labor, the routinizing of workers’ tasks, even the after-hours surveillance of employees—all of these Fordist practices became Hollywood’s own. (Ray How 2)

In other words, American industry’s rationalized labor shaped Hollywood production habits and policies. Schatz and Ray even suggest that MGM’s Louis B. Mayer sought out the “scientific rational” process of aesthetics—the science of art.

3. Given rationalized labor’s origin in the need for interchangeable parts, Hollywood could hardly avoid developing formulae for its productions. Creature from the Black Lagoon thus begins to resemble a production-line product. It has the science-fiction/horror genre elements (scientist hero, monstrous creature villain, screaming woman) as well as some extras such as “Beauty and the Beast.” The formulae for Creature’s genre serve as modules for Hollywood’s filmmakers: they incorporate a variety into a script, run it along the assembly line, and turn out a film.

4. This integration of rationalized labor into both the process and the narrative of Hollywood films illustrates the success with which the theory had integrated itself into American culture. Martha Banta describes that Ford's idea "webs everything together," including the worker's "personal happiness, earning power, social worth, consumer access, and what one has 'been taught to enjoy'"(26). While Banta's book focuses mostly on narratives that evoke or discuss rationalized labor, this article suggests a counter-point: that rationalized production strategies infiltrated the process of narrative production, not just its content.

5. Manovich suggests that modern electronic media, made of multiple “discrete levels,” reflects the early American interest in Taylorism; the assembly line’s two major principles were standardization of parts and division of labor (29). Creature’s production could be seen as the use of a variety of standard parts by a divided group of workers including Jack Arnold, Harry Essex, the composers, and others. [Grammatology] [Media Tech]