History of the Hal Roach Studios

Labeled the "lot that laugher built," the Hal Roach Studios launched the comedic careers of such screen icons as Harold Lloyd, Our Gang, and Laurel and Hardy. With this stable of stars, the Roach enterprise operated for forty-six years on the fringes of the Hollywood studio system during a golden age of cinema. Many of its productions are better remembered today than those by its larger contemporaries. In A History of the Hal Roach Studios, Richard Lewis Ward meticulously follows the timeline of the company's existence from its humble inception in 1914 to its close in 1960 and, through both its obscure and famous productions, traces its resilience to larger trends in the entertainment business. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the motion picture industry was controlled by an elite handful of powerful firms that allowed very little room for new competition. The few independents that garnered some measure of success usually did so by specializing in underserved niche markets. Ward chronicles how the Roach Studios, at the mercy of exclusive distribution practices, managed to repeatedly redefine itself in order to survive for nearly a half-century in a cutthroat environment. Hal Roach's tactic was to nurture talent rather than exhaust it, and his star players spent the prime of their careers on his lot. Even during periods of decline, the Roach Studios turned out genuinely original material, such as the screwball classic Topper (1937), the brutally frank Of Mice and Men (1940), and the silent experiment One Million B.C. (1940). The volume also looks to the early days of television when the prolific Roach Studios embraced the new medium to become, for a time, the premier telefilm producer. Aided by a comprehensive filmography and production synopses, A History of the Hal Roach Studios recounts an overlooked chapter in American cinema.

Richard Lewis Ward is an associate professor at the University of South Alabama where he teaches courses in film and television. His essays on Hollywood's studio era and the golden age of television have been published in Media History, Studies in Popular Culture, and Feedback