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For their part, Americans wanted only to be entertained, or perhaps cooled on a hot summer's night. Until well after World War II, movie theaters and department stores were about the only places that could boast air conditioning. There were, by today's standards, relatively few public diversions; television was still a new invention. Sometime during the week, an estimated 85 million people, about two-thirds of the U.S. population, paid an average 25 cents to go to the movies, which included a cartoon and newsreel as well as the standard double feature. A double feature usually meant a big picture with big stars and a B picture with little stars, like Charlie Chan in Reno and Mr. Moto in Danger Island, to name only two from 1939. To satisfy the insatiable public, the studios released 388 movies that year (compared with 349 in 1988), 378 in traditional black-and-white and ten, including Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, in that relatively new process called Technicolor.
To the studios, movies were products. To audiences, they were cheap entertainment. To actors, directors and producers, they were a paycheck. Why, then, were so many of the movies of 1939 so good? Clearly, something had gone wrong -- or wondrously right -- on the Hollywood assembly line: the studios were not merely churning out moneymaking products, as they thought they were, but a magic that endures to this day.
There is no formula for magic, and what happened then is something of a mystery even today. Part of the explanation may be that the studio system, which had been born 20 years or so earlier, had come of age; it had reached its maturity but was still full of zest. The bosses may have been crude and often tyrannical, but they loved their business, they knew what they were doing, and they had created huge organizations whose only purpose was to send new pictures to thousands of theaters, most of which, in the U.S., were owned by the studios themselves. At the same time, moviemaking had reached a level of technical perfection that would have seemed miraculous even five years before. That technology has long since been surpassed, but a film from 1939 still looks modern, whereas one from 1933 looks like an antique.
Other explanations for the magic of 1939 lie more in the realm of metaphysics than economics or technology. Hollywood in those days really was Hollywood, which is to say it was the place where movies, as well as deals, were made. Very few pictures were shot on location, and inventive scouts either found or contrived every scene they wanted within a few miles of Hollywood and Vine. The Yorkshire moors of Wuthering Heights were so faithfully recreated in nearby Chatsworth that director Wyler bragged that his field of heather looked more authentic than a real field of heather.