Entrepreneurship and Management in Early American and French Cinemas. Comparative Study

Abstract

The article is a research on the question of why American film entrepreneurship had a much higher success rate than even the birthplace of cinema, France. The financial investment and the production work, regardless under what name and to what extent was done, gave birth on the one hand to the star system, the studio system and the box office, while the country that gave us the forerunner of the documentary film – Lumière, and the first fictional director of the film world – Méliès, remained, for a while, behind. The industry had to deliver a salable product – the film, a product that, in turn, had to develop a prosperous industry under the seal of a judicious relationship between profitability and profit. The paper aims to present why alliances made in the US (between major producers, with major American industries, with major banks of the time) led – in economic terms – to much more than what happened in France, a country whose film industry seemed, less than thirty years after its birth, already worn out. The results of the undertaken documentation and research are presented in this article.