One of the enduring myths of Hollywood is that the town is an eternal battleground between art and commerce -- between studio executives who only care about money and filmmakers who only care about art.
The truth is that movies have been, almost since the moment they were invented, a popular art form. They attracted, for the most part, popular artists -- which is to say, artists who wanted to reach large audiences. Long before there was an established studio system run by corporate functionaries, filmmakers courted a mass audience and reached it. The financial returns that followed created the industry that corporations at once set about dominating and controlling.
The art of cinema was created by the same people who created the mass market for films -- Griffith, Chaplin, Pickford, Keaton, Lloyd. Because they were popular artists, commerce was an intimate aspect of their endeavor. The corporate executives who took over the industry these artists created were by no means more interested in the box office than the artists had been -- they were interested in power and turning the art form into a more predictable revenue source . . . interests which often conflicted with maximum box-office potential.
When executives and filmmakers clashed over the content of films, it was not a battle between art and commerce -- it was a battle between popular artists who actually knew how to make popular films and bean-counters who thought they knew better. Since the bean-counters quickly gained a virtual monopoly over the distribution of films, they had the last word, and also the ability to insure that this word could never be challenged, since the overruled filmmakers had no practical way of getting films before the public without the bean-counters' consent.
John Ford fought constantly with studio executives and, by his account, never won a single battle with them -- but does anyone seriously believe that Ford, one of the most consistently successful popular artists since Dickens, was fighting for some private, noncommercial artistic vision? Ford did make a few films, like The Fugitive, which he may have known in advance would not be wildly commercial, but for the most part he wanted to address a mass audience as effectively as possible. For a genuine popular artist like Ford -- or Dickens, or Shakespeare, for that matter -- there is no conflict between art and commerce.
Ford was fighting against executives who could not have created a popular work of art if their lives depended on it, executives who only managed and bullied and second-guessed those who could create such works. The real issue was not art or commerce -- it was power. Without their corporate control of the means of film distribution, these executives would have remained in the realm of exhibition, from which most of them emerged and where they belonged.
Hollywood in truth has been a battleground between monopoly and a free market, between corporate standardization and homogenization and entrepreneurial innovation. The conflict between art and commerce has been nothing more than a smokescreen.