In the past movies were produced pretty fast. For example Charlie Chaplin made about 5-10 movies a year, often being actor, director and producer in one person.
Today a movie often takes many months until completion.
Why were movies in the past produced at a faster pace and why does modern film production of a movie seem to be so much slower in comparison?
Original Answer: I'd imagine there are a lot more things that need to be done to complete a modern movie. In the 1920's you didn't have to deal with lawyers to fight for rights to use different intellectual properties. Deal with executives who want to change the view of a director. Deal with expensive and tough to work with actors. Not to mention the amount of editing and refining that are done in movies now. It would also help that movies from the 1920's where silent, and didn't often last for longer then an hour. High budget films that are 2-3 hours with 500+ people working on it take time.
After looking further, while there appears to be this perception that older movies where quicker to produce this may not be the case. See Charlie Chaplin and "The Gold Rush", which was an
elaborate production, costing almost $1 million, included location shooting in the Truckee mountains with 600 extras, extravagant sets, and special effects. The last scene was not shot until May 1925, after 15 months of filming.
Meanwhile a more modern movie like Interstellar started filming on
August 6, 2013, in the province of Alberta.
and
Filming concluded in December 2013
meaning it only took about 4-5 months to shoot. So with this evidence it might be a misconception that older movies were quicker to produce. It might come down to the overall scope of the film, as well as the difficulties within the film's production.
There was no television in the silent era, but audiences had a voracious appetite for films, so most studios tried to pump out movies as quickly as possible. However, depending on the year and the studio, films still might be produced quicker or slower than average. For instance, Laurel & Hardy spent about a month working on their silent films, although these were only two-reel (20 minute) comedies.
When Charlie Chaplin got into features, he spent three years each on his The Gold Rush, The Circus and City Lights. He was a perfectionist, and filmed scenes over and over. He scrapped whole scenes that he didn't like after spending days filming them. He also took vacations and put the films on hiatus when he couldn't find comic inspiration.
However, when he worked at Keystone in 1914, he might appear in 2-3 short comedies a month. These were filmed quickly, with barely a scenario and a lot of improvisation. Chaplin was happy when he worked at Mutual in 1916-1917, and he could devote a month or two to a two-reel comedy.
Most of the special effects in silent films (there could be quite a few), were actually done in-camera. The post-production part of filmmaking was editing, tinting (sometimes), preparing alternate negatives for foreign releases, and possibly preparing a score for the film. Only major films had an official music score, and only a few theaters actually used them.
If you look at the end credits of a modern movie, you will notice that there are all kinds of jobs credited like caterers, accountants, lawyers, hairdressers, animators and so on. While these jobs existed in the silent era, modern films and studios have a lot more bureaucracy that takes a lot more time. Also, modern studios are not geared up to produce as many films as quickly as possible these days. That does happen for episodic television though.
