Film as Social Practice

Graeme Turner, Michael F. Duckham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415375146
• eBook ISBN: 9781136784910
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

This fourth edition of our bestselling text has been comprehensively updated and revised to include contemporary film analysis and recent films.With a focus on contemporary popular cinema and examples from Classical Hollywood, Graeme Turner examines the social and cultural aspects of film from audiences and ideologies to exhibit

Chapter 1

The feature film industry

The feature film today

The establishment of the feature film

American domination of the feature film industry

New competitors, new strategies, ‘new Hollywood’

Spectacle versus narrative

Suggestions for further work

The feature film today

The cultural prominence of the feature film within Western cultures may have peaked in the 1930s, but it remains pervasive today. Indeed, in a reversal of the trend over the preceding thirty years, the 1990s witnessed a steady growth in the size of film audiences as the number of screens in use multiplied dramatically. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, audiences seem to have stabilized largely around the late 1990s’ levels, although they do fluctuate significantly from year to year in ways that more or less reflect the popular appeal of the films on release at the time. As I write this, in 2005, audience figures are down. Popular cinema in 2005, however, is very different from what it was in the 1930s. Now, popular film is rarely presented to its public as a single product, event or commodity. Rather, it is a kind of composite commodity, linked to ‘The Making of …’ DVD, the computer or video game, the range of action figures, or the theme park ride – all aimed at extending the purchase of film beyond the cinema walls. More fundamentally, the change in the nature of film as a cultural commodity reflects the hard industrial fact that film is no longer the product of a self-contained industry; today, it is most often merely one of a range of cultural commodities produced by large multinational conglomerates whose main interest is more likely to be electronics or petroleum or theme parks than the construction of magical narratives for audiences to enjoy on the screen.

Despite its specificity as a cultural experience, the contemporary feature film has had to respond to a great deal of competition from other media, and from other sources of entertainment. Over the last few decades, the growth of cable TV, the development of the VCR and the DVD, the adaptation of the computer to home leisure use, and the expansion of the attractions available via the Internet have exposed the feature film to a highly competitive multimedia marketplace. As film producers have competed for what was for some years a shrinking market, many changes in industry practices have occurred. First, the industry has concentrated its resources on the ‘blockbuster’ – the aggressively promoted big-budget movie with high production values, big stars, massive simultaneous release patterns and, increasingly, expensive special effects (Stringer 2003; Lewis 2003: 61). The amount of money invested in these productions is now massive, and this significantly increases the risk to their producers. As a result, the international industry – primarily Hollywood – has made fewer films and is thus increasingly cautious about which films to make. It is unfortunately the case that most of the blockbusters of today tend to be narratively conservative, featuring spectacular special effects and a limited group of established stars, and most often dependent on those elements for which an audience has already been established – the Tolkein novels for The Lord of the Rings series, or the previous Star Wars movies for Revenge of the Sith (2005). Jon Lewis (2003) actually talks of the distinction between ‘marketable’ and ‘playable’ movies: roughly, those which can be successfully promoted through their ‘high concept’ narrative or special effects, and those which audiences will actually enjoy and talk about afterwards. Even though the 1990s saw a number of quite modest productions succeed at the box office – these would include Hollywood productions such as My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997) as well as non-American independent productions such as The Full Monty (which cost $US2.5 million to make and returned more than $US250 million at the box office in 1997) – this has happened less often in recent years. The success enjoyed by Sideways in 2005, for instance, is rare. At the same time, the amount of money invested in the chosen few major releases has continued to climb. Titanic set an industry record in 1997 by costing a monstrous $200 million, and the average production cost per film for Hollywood studios has risen from $US26.8 million in 1990 to $US55 million in 2000 – to which can be added another $27 million in average marketing costs (Wasko 2003: 22). Little wonder that it has become more and more difficult for independent producers to interest a major company in backing their film.

Of course, even this level of expenditure does not guarantee that a movie is a hit. Recent high profile (and expensive) flops include Batman Begins (2005, cost $135 million), Troy (2004, $190 million), Sahara (2004, $130 million), as well as slightly cheaper but heavily marketed features such as Bewitched (2005, $85 million). One of the effects of the increase in production expenditure and the consequent importance of marketing has been a change in the pattern of release for the big-budget blockbusters, which are now increasingly given a saturation release over their first weekend of exhibition in order to maximize the effect of their marketing budget. (Previously, it would have been more common to employ a ‘platform’ release, opening in a smaller number of major metropolitan sites before expanding into other markets.) It has become very important for films to perform on their first weekend, and Lewis has noted how the media’s reporting on the cinema industry is now almost totally confined to the reporting of box office performance rather than anything to do with the content or narrative of the films themselves (Lewis 2003: 63). While such a release pattern maximizes the likely effect of advertising and other marketing activities, it also maximizes the costs; opening on as many as 500 screens simultaneously in the US alone raises the costs of supplying prints (Wasko (2003: 122–3) puts the cost of prints at around $3 million per film) and saturation releases demand saturation advertising (some industry estimates put the Batman Begins marketing budget at $100 million).

The high public profile generated for the blockbuster release has certainly ensured that going to see a film is still a major popular cultural event, the nature of which will be discussed in Chapter 5. But it is no longer a discrete event. Indeed, what were once ancillary markets for film – video, DVDs, and computer games – have in some cases become more important than cinema exhibition. In the US, home video is now a more lucrative source of income for the industry than cinema exhibition: in 2001, home video generated $118.7 billion in revenue (Wasko 2003: 125). When the DVD of Spider Man was released in 2002, it sold 7 million copies in one day; more than $125 million was spent on buying or renting the title on DVD or video on the opening day alone (Wasko 2003: 134). There are new ways, too, through which cinema is embedding itself in our daily lives. An example of this is the growing practice of ‘product placement’ – of contracting to insert a partner’s products into an appropriate context on screen as a means of offsetting production costs. Toby Miller tells us that the 1997 James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies ‘broke new ground in product placement: Smirnoff, Heineken, Avis, Ericsson, Gateway, BMW, Brioni, Omega and Visa were all party to payments that meant the film recouped its $100 million budget without selling a ticket, video rental, or an actual item of merchandise’ (2001: 307). This has created something of a tradition as the Bond films have become a favourite location for product placement; Janet Wasko reports that the 2002 Bond film Die Another Day featured over twenty branded products onscreen: including Aston Martin, Jaguar, Thunderbird and Range Rover vehicles, Finlandia vodka, Bollinger champagne, and Norelco shavers. The product manufacturers also spent ‘$120 million on advertising that featured the film as well as their products in a campaign that included global television, print, radio and outdoor advertising, plus sweepstakes and other promotions’ (Wasko 2003: 155).

The desire to watch a popular film is related to a whole range of other desires – for fashion, for the new, for the possession of icons or signs that are highly valued by one’s peers. One of the ways in which such desires are satisfied is through the massive increase in merchandising – in the amount of products now licensed to individual films. The modern development of this revenue stream is usually seen to have begun with the marketing of the 1975 film, Jaws; merchandise connected with Jaws included a soundtrack album, T-shirts, plastic tumblers, a book about the making of the movie, the book the movie was based on, beach towels, blankets, shark costumes, toy sharks, hobby kits, iron-on transfers, games, posters, shark-tooth necklaces, sleepwear, water pistols, and many more. We have gone well beyond that today. The website for The Lord of the Rings movies lists the following categories of merchandise available on line: action figures, axes, audiobooks, battle games, board games, bobble heads, books, bows, bracelets, brooches, buttons and pins, calendars, caps and hats, card games, CD cards, chess sets, coins, clothing, costumes, DVD/VHS, earrings, figures, games, glasses, helmets, headdresses, jewellery, keychains, letter openers, lifesize standups, lighters, maps, masks, medallions, miniswords, mithril, movies, mousepads, mugs and cups, music, navel rings, necklaces, ornaments, party supplies, pendants, pewters, pewter figures, pipes, posters, puzzles, The One Ring, Rings of Power, other Rings, Secret Boxes, site products, statues/busts, stamps, sweaters, swords, tin boxes, tongue rings, toys, T-shirts, video-games, waterglobes, weapons, and weapon sets. Significantly, these are not only directed towards the traditional market for such merchandising: children. Adults are offered ‘prestige’ collectables such as highly detailed figurines, stone chess sets, elaborate jewellery, and even bridal gowns. Finally, taking us well beyond this, the tourism development strategy of a whole country – New Zealand – has attached itself to the merchandising around The Lord of the Rings as a way of cashing in on the fact that it was a primary source for the films’ locations.

The growth in the movies’ advertising budgets reflects not only the change in industry practice addressing concerns raised by the early 1990s’ fall in audiences, but also the change in the nature of the audience’s use of the cinema. At the peak of the feature film’s popularity, audiences attended their favourite cinema as a regular night out – often more than once a week – and effectively regardless of what was showing. Going to the movies was the event, not going to this particular movie. That situation has now reversed itself as home-based competitors for the entertainment dollar have appeared – cable TV, VCRs, DVDs, video games, stereos, home computers – and as the increased mobility of the population – a result of the spread of private vehicle ownership – has multiplied the leisure-time choices available to any one individual. A film has to attract its own audience if it is to be successful. Hence the advent of what Justin Wyatt calls ‘high concept’ or what others have seen as the development of the spectacular nature of the cinema experience as a means of competing with the ‘home theatre’ or computer games. The resulting focus upon exploiting the magical appeal of special effects has also been a crucial factor in the spiralling cost of feature film production over the last decade.

As costs have risen, as big budgets for production and for promotion have become the norm, American domination of feature film production and distribution in the English-speaking world has become further entrenched – despite the recent trend towards so-called ‘runaway’ productions (that is, productions which have moved from an American base to cheaper production locations such as Canada and Australia). Only major companies can now afford current production and promotion costs. America is still the biggest single market for feature films and it is one of the very few countries where locally produced films can recoup their costs without relying on foreign sales. Even Britain’s population cannot support anything more than the most modest locally produced film. It does, however, provide a juicy market where an American film which has already covered its costs at home can be distributed cheaply in order to generate profits. The integration between the production and the distribution arms of the film industry in America means that foreignmade films find it very hard to reap similar benefits from the lucrative American market. For a foreign film to achieve mainstream distribution in the US it would need to be supported by a major distributor whose own films are the main competitors to any foreign product. It is clearly not often in the major’s interests to support its competitors.

1 The sequel – a sign of a cautious industry: Spiderman 2

The film industry has been undergoing significant change for most of the last two decades. Where once it may have been a small-scale business run by enthusiastic entrepreneurs, it quickly became an oligopoly run by Hollywood studios. During the 1980s and the 1990s, they, too, had to sell out to other interests – in communications and electronics, mainly – as film became another victim of the large multinational media conglomerates’ need to diversity. While the activities on the sound stages and the locations remain those of the craftsperson, the economic practices of the industry have become categorically those of big business. In order to better understand the changes I am referring to, we need to gain some idea of what the industry has been and how it reached its present set of practices, conditions, and objectives.

The establishment of the feature film

The feature film was not firmly established as the main attraction in the cinema until the introduction of optical sound with The Jazz Singer in 1927. Until then, the larger cinemas supported the features with an orchestra, vaudeville, or some other kind of live musical entertainment. A significant portion of the theatre-owner’s costs went on providing such performances. After the establishment of the talking picture the practice of hiring supporting entertainment gradually disappeared from the industry.

2 The Hollywood blockbuster and its limitations: Troy

Although it is tempting to see the development of sound and its application to the film industry as a natural, inevitable development, it is a temptation we should resist. First, the technology to produce sound was in existence well before it was applied. So we need to ask ‘Why then?’ Second, technological innovation does not produce a momentum all of its own. As Ed Buscombe (1977: 83) points out ‘no new technology can be introduced unless the economic system requires it’, and even then it will not be successful ‘unless it fulfils some kind of need’. By ‘need’ he means some cultural, aesthetic, or political need, not just a perceived economic need. Changes in technology may be produced by individual inventors but their large-scale adoption depends on a wide range of other enabling cultural conditions. While the history of the feature film has often been written as a history of technological development, we need to be aware that even the term ‘development’ implies that by going from silent film to sound film we have made an advance. This implication, as we shall see shortly, depends upon debatable assumptions about what a film should be, including the assumption that it should be as ‘realistic’ as possible. There has been a great deal of argument over the industrial reasons for the introduction of sound. One view has it that the Hollywood majors were in financial trouble: audiences were declining and the mid-1920s expansion into the extravagant ‘picture palaces’ had saddled the industry with a string of venues which could return a profit only from the most popular of movies. Warner Bros, the first to use optical sound in a series of shorts and then in the musical The Jazz Singer, is claimed to have been facing bankruptcy anyway, and clinging to the hope of the talking picture like a drowning man (Sklar 1975). Douglas Gomery (1976) denies this view, saying that the studio was not bankrupt at all. He sees its achievement in the introduction of sound as a prescient business decision. At the time, Wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The feature film industry
• 2 From seventh art to social practice – a history of film studies
• 3 Film languages
• 4 Film narrative
• 5 Film audiences
• 6 Film, culture, and ideology
• 7 Applications
• References
• Index