Studio system

The arrangement in which a small number of companies make films continuously, on their own premises, with permanent staff and a route to release they control. Films become a production line rather than a series of separate ventures.

In the Philippines this meant the Big Four: LVN, Sampaguita, Premiere and Lebran, each with its own specialisation, running from the late 1940s until the early 1960s. LVN had a lot in Cubao with a gate.

The important thing about a studio system is not the glamour and not the films. It is that it makes a film worker into an employee, which changes what training, safety, continuity and refusal cost and who pays for them. When the Philippine studio system ended, that is the part that went and did not come back.

Source: The dated account is compiled from Golden Age of Philippine cinema, Wikipedia and LVN Pictures, Wikipedia, used here for the spine of dates and names rather than for interpretation, and cross-read against the NCCA’s own history of Philippine cinema. The specialist print treatment sits in the CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art, Vol. VIII, Philippine Film, 1994, which is free to borrow on the Internet Archive and subscription-only online. The reading of the studio system as primarily an employment structure is this course’s own.

First used in: 3.3 · The one time a film worker had an employer