The Series Western 

 The   special   appeal   of  Westerns   to   a   certain   segment   of  the   audience undoubtedly helps explain the bifurcation in production between so-called A-Westerns and B-Westerns. The phenomenon of the series and later of the B-Western deserves more attention than most serious critics have given it.

Just as, so far as we can tell, its audience was fairly specific, children and men in the more rural areas being heavy consumers, so too it constituted, up to a point, a self-contained entity within the world of Hollywood film production. Until the early 1930s we cannot really speak of A- and B-features. Before then all Westerns had to make their own way in the market on equal terms with other productions, and all films of feature length would play on their own, accompanied only by one or more shorts. It was the effect of the Depression, with a dramatic decline in box-office receipts, which led in the mid-1950s to the introduction of the double-feature as a novel attraction. This opened an opportunity for the production of films, many produced by small independent companies, which were expressly designed for the bottom or 'B' half of a double bill. Something of a boom in B-Westerns followed, with production by independents leaping from 26 in 1933 to 59 in 1934 and 106 in 1935 (see Table 4, Appendix). A great many of these B-Westerns were made according to a series format. Westerns were not the only kinds of films made in series, but they were easily the most numerous. In the series Western Hollywood got as close as it could to the production methods of Detroit. The films were, in so far as the necessity for a minimum of novelty permitted, virtually identical. Each one was conceived as part of a package of films, all with the same star and with uniform production values, story-lines, running times and so on. A knowledgeable audience would know exactly what to expect. Narrative expectations were standardized: there would be a fistfight within the first few minutes, a chase soon after and, inevitably, a shoot-out at the end. Plots were usually motivated by some straightforward villainy which could be exposed and decisively defeated by the hero. Even such novelty as the films did possess was sometimes only relative to the audience's ability to recall previous films, for not only did the series Western endlessly recycle plots in a succession of remakes of past successes; it was also common for footage to be reused. Costly scenes of Indian attacks or stampedes would re-appear, more or less happily satisfying the demands of continuity, in subsequent productions. Series Westerns were planned for production on an assembly-line basis in groups of half a dozen or more, and marketed accordingly in an arrangement known as block-booking. That is, exhibitors were expected to buy not a selected Ken Maynard or Hoot Gibson film, but the whole season's output. An indication of how standardized and predictable the business end had become was that films at the bottom half of a double bill were usually booked not on the basis of a percentage of box-office receipts, as A-features were, but on a flat rate of perhaps $25 or $30 dollars per play-off. If the product was uniform, then so must be the return, and buyer and seller could agree on a fixed price before the film was shown. Most of the pictures produced by the small independent studios were sold on the states' rights system. Instead of running their own costly nationwide network of distribution exchanges, as the major studios did, the independents sold their product off to regional distributors who would act for several small producers at once. The stars adapted to the system and became more highly specialized. True, Broncho Billy Anderson and William S. Hart had made very few films which were not Westerns. But Tom Mix scarcely ever ventured outside the genre; when he did, with Dick Turpin, the film was unpopular with his fans. So closely were the stars identified with their screen persona that by the time of Gene Autry all pretence was abandoned of any distinction between the man and the role. On screen Autry played a character whose name was simply 'Gene Autry'. This may have taken a tendency to an extreme, but from the 1930s it became a common practice to identify an actor with a role and build a series round him. Thus William Boyd began appearing as Hopalong Cassidy in 1935 and thenceforth never played anyone else. Similarly Charles Starrett's series as the Durango Kid, beginning in 1945, continued with half a dozen or more pictures every year until 1952. A further indication of how the series Western was to an extent a self-contained domain within Hollywood is the fact that from 1936 on, the trade journal Motion Picture Herald listed Western stars separately in its annual Top Ten Money-Making Stars poll, in which exhibitors were asked to list the actors whose pictures were the biggest box-office draws. (Buck Jones topped the first poll, but from 1937 it was Gene Autry every year until he was succeeded by Roy Rogers in 1943. Rogers stayed at the top until 1954, by which time series Westerns were no longer being made.) Studios also specialized. Some designated their Westerns under brand-name titles; thus Universal in the 1920s had its 'Blue Streak Westerns'. We have already seen how Bison, by investing in the Miller 101 Ranch, became overnight the major producer of Westerns in the early 1910s. In the 1920s Universal had its own ranch in the San Fernando Valley in California, which included bunkhouses for the cowboys and an Indian village complete with genuine inhabitants. At that time Universal, with stars like Harry Carey, Jack Hoxie, Art Acord and Hoot Gibson, and Fox with Tom Mix and Buck Jones, were overwhelmingly the biggest producers of Westerns among the Hollywood majors. In the 1930s Universal cut back considerably and, after Tom Mix had moved on, Fox's production declined too. Columbia on the other hand stepped up production, and so did Paramount when they launched Hopalong Cassidy in 1935. (See Table 2, Appendix.) By contrast Warner Bros, were never whole?hearted about Westerns. Their big stars of the 30s and 40s, such as James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart or Bette Davis, were never at home on the range. mgm, after their brief Tim McCoy series in the late 1920s, produced no other series Westerns at all; doubtless the hick associations of the Western ran counter to the studio's sophisticated, metropolitan image. Though, as Table 2 shows, for a time in the 20s over half of Universal's films were Westerns, the major studios did not normally rely on a single genre to this extent. The so-called 'independent' studios, on the other hand, were all overwhelmingly dependent on the Western. As Table 3 (Appendix) shows, during the five years 1941-5 (despite the war, a not untypical period for Hollywood) the independents produced a total of 645 feature films, of which 313 were Westerns. During this same period, though the eight major studios were supplying between a half and a third of all Westerns made, this level of production represented at most 15 per cent of their total feature output. As Table 4 (Appendix) demonstrates, the proportion of Westerns within the total production of feature films in Hollywood did not change substantially between the mid-1920s and the late 1950s, apart from a brief hiccup in the early 30s as a result of the introduction of sound and the disruptions caused in the industry by the Depression. Although the majors were not so heavily committed as the independents, Westerns continued for over forty years to comprise between a fifth and a quarter of all films made in Hollywood (and it will be remembered that the proportion was similar even as far back as 1910, though exact calculations are difficult for the period before 1920). This is an astonishingly high proportion for one kind of film. What we have to remember,  though, is that all but a few of these Westerns were small-scale productions. Indeed, as Table 5 (Appendix) reveals, big-budget or so-called A-feature Westerns, the kind which might star Gary Cooper or Tyrone Power and which were a monopoly of the major studios, were a rarity. Of the 1,336 Westerns made by all producers between 1930 and 1941, only 66, or a mere 5 per cent, could be classified as A-features.