Film Theory Goes to the Movies

Cultural Analysis of Contemporary Film

Jim Collins, Ava Preacher Collins, Hilary Radner, Jim Collins, Ava Preacher Collins, Hilary Radner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135216450
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

Film Theory Goes to the Movies fills the gap in film theory literature which has failed to analyze high-grossing blockbusters. The contributors in this volume, however, discuss such popular films as The Silence of the Lambs, Dances With Wolves, Terminator II, Pretty Woman, Truth or Dare, Mystery Train, and Jungle Fever.They employ a variety of critical approaches, from industry analysis to reception study, to close readings informed by feminist, deconstructive and postmodernist theory, as well as recent developments in African American and gay and lesbian criticism. An important introduction to contemporary Hollywood, this anthology will be of interest to those involved in the fields of film theory, literary theory, popular culture, and women's studies.

1

The New Hollywood

Thomas Schatz

Among the more curious and confounding terms in media studies is “the New Hollywood.” In its broadest historical sense the term applies to the American cinema after World War II, when Hollywood’s entrenched “studio system” collapsed and commercial television began to sweep the newly suburbanized national landscape. That marked the end of Hollywood’s “classical” era of the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s, when movies were mass produced by a cartel of studios for a virtually guaranteed market. All that changed in the postwar decade, as motion pictures came to be produced and sold on a film-by-film basis and as “watching TV” rapidly replaced “going to the movies” as America’s preferred ritual of habituated, mass-mediated narrative entertainment.¹

Ensuing pronouncements of the “death of Hollywood” proved to be greatly exaggerated, however; the industry not only survived but flourished in a changing media marketplace. Among the more remarkable developments in recent media history, in fact, is the staying power of the major studios (Paramount, MGM, Warners, et al.) and of the movie itself—that is, the theatrically released feature film—in an increasingly vast and complex “entertainment industry.” This is no small feat, considering the changes Hollywood has faced since the late 1940s. The industry adjusted to those changes, and in the process its ways of doing business and of making movies changed as well—and thus the difficulty in defining the New Hollywood, which has meant something different from one period of adjustment to another.

The key to Hollywood’s survival and the one abiding aspect of its postwar transformation has been the steady rise of the movie blockbuster. In terms of budgets, production values, and market strategy, Hollywood has been increasingly hit-driven since the early 1950s. This marks a significant departure from the classical era, when the studios turned out a few “prestige” pictures each year and relished the occasional runaway box-office hit, but relied primarily on routine A-class features to generate revenues. The exceptional became the rule in postwar Hollywood, as the occasional hit gave way to the calculated blockbuster.

The most obvious measure of this blockbuster syndrome is box-office revenues, which have indeed surged over the past forty years.² In 1983, Variety commissioned a study of the industry’s all-time commercial hits in “constant dollars”—that is, in figures adjusted for inflation—which placed only two films made before 1950, Gone With the Wind (1939) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), in the top 75.³ In other words, of the 7,000 or so Hollywood features released before 1950, only two enjoyed the kind of success that has become routine since then—and particularly in the past two decades. According to Variety’s most recent (January, 1992) update of the all-time “film rental champs,” 90 of the top 100 hits have been produced since 1970, and all of the top 20 since Jaws in 1975.⁴

The blockbuster syndrome went into high gear in the mid-1970s, despite (and in some ways because of) the concurrent emergence of competing media technologies and new delivery systems, notably pay-cable TV and home video (VCRs). This was the first period of sustained economic vitality and industry stability since the classical era. Thus this post-1975 era best warrants the term “the New Hollywood,” and for essentially the same reasons associated the “classical” era. Both terms connote not only specific historical periods, but also characteristic qualities of the movie industry at the time—particularly its economic and institutional structure, its mode of production, and its system of narrative conventions.

This is not to say that the New Hollywood is as stable or well integrated as the classical Hollywood, however. As we will see, the government’s postwar dismantling of the “vertically integrated” studio system ensured a more competitive movie marketplace, and a more fundamentally disintegrated industry as well. The marketplace became even more fragmented and uncertain with the emergence of TV and other media industries, and with the massive changes in lifestyle accompanying suburban migration and the related family/housing/baby boom. In one sense the mid-1970s ascent of the New Hollywood marks the studios’ eventual coming-to-terms with an increasingly fragmented entertainment industry—with its demographics and target audiences, its diversified “multimedia” conglomerates, its global(ized) markets and new delivery systems. And equally fragmented, perhaps, are the movies themselves, especially the high-cost, high-tech, high-stakes blockbusters, those multi-purpose entertainment machines that breed music videos and soundtrack albums, TV series and videocassettes, video games and theme park rides, novelizations and comic books.

Hollywood’s mid-1970s restabilization came after some thirty years of uncertainty and disarray. I would suggest, in fact, that the movie industry underwent three fairly distinct decade-long phases after the War—from 1946 to 1955, from 1956 to 1965, and from 1966 to 1975. These phases were distinguished by various developments both inside and outside the industry, and four in particular: the shift to independent motion picture production, the changing role of the studios, the emergence of commercial TV, and changes in American lifestyle and patterns of media consumption. The key markers in these phases were huge hits like The Ten Commandments in 1956, The Sound of Music in 1965, and Jaws in 1975 which redefined the nature, scope, and profit potential of the blockbuster movie, and which lay the foundation for the films and filmmaking practices of the New Hollywood.

To understand the New Hollywood, we need to chart these postwar phases and the concurrent emergence of the blockbuster syndrome in American filmmaking. Our ultimate focus, though, will be on the post- 1975 New Hollywood and its complex interplay of economic, aesthetic, and technological forces. If recent studies of classical Hollywood have taught us anything, it is that we cannot consider either the filmmaking process or films themselves in isolation from their economic, technological, and industrial context. As we will see, this interplay of forces is in many ways even more complex in the New Hollywood, especially when blockbusters are involved. In today’s media marketplace, it has become virtually impossible to identify or isolate the “text” itself, or to distinguish a film’s aesthetic or narrative quality from its commercial imperatives. As Eileen Meehan suggests in a perceptive study of Batman, to analyze contemporary movies “we must be able to understand them as always and simultaneously text and commodity, intertext and product line.”⁵

The goal of this essay is to situate that “understanding” historically, tracing the emergence and the complex workings of the New Hollywood. The emphasis throughout will be on the high-cost, high-tech, high-stakes productions that have driven the postwar movie industry—and that now drive the global multimedia marketplace at large. While one crucial dimension of the New Hollywood is the “space” that has been opened for independent and alternative cinema, the fact is that these mainstream hits are where stars, genres, and cinematic innovations invariably are established, where the “grammar” of cinema is most likely to be refined, and where the essential qualities of the medium—its popular and commercial character—are most evident. These blockbuster hits are, for better or worse, what the New Hollywood is about, and thus are the necessary starting point for any analysis of contemporary American cinema.

Hollywood in Transition

The year 1946 marked the culmination of a five-year “war boom” for Hollywood, with record revenues of over $1.5 billion and weekly ticket sales of 90 to 100 million.⁶ The two biggest hits in 1946 were “major independent” productions: Sam Goldwyn’s The Best Years of Our Lives and David O. Selznick’s Duel in the Sun. Both returned $11.3 million in rentals, a huge sum at the time, and signaled important changes in the industry—though Selznick’s Duel was the more telling of the two.⁷ Like his Gone With the Wind, it was a prototype New Hollywood blockbuster: a “pre-sold” spectacle (based on a popular historical novel) with top stars, an excessive budget, a sprawling story, and state-of-the-art production values. Selznick himself termed Duel “an exercise in making a big-grossing film,” gambling on a nationwide promotion-and-release campaign after weak sneak previews.⁸ When the gamble paid off, he proclaimed it a “tremendous milestone in motion picture merchandising and exhibition.”⁹

That proved to be prophetic, given Hollywood’s wholesale postwar transformation, which was actually well under way in 1946. The Justice Department’s pursuit of Hollywood’s major powers for antitrust practices began to show results in the courts that year, and culminated in the Supreme Court’s May 1948 Paramount decree, which forced the major studios to divest their theater chains and to cease various tactics which had enabled them to control the market. Without the cash flow from their theaters and a guaranteed outlet for their product, the established studio system was effectively finished. The studios gradually fired their contract personnel and phased out active production, and began leasing their facilities for independent projects, generally providing co-financing and distribution as well. This shift to “one-film deals” also affected the established relations of power, with top talent (and their agents and attorneys) gaining more authority over production.¹⁰

The studios’ new role as financing-and-distribution entities also jibed with other industry developments. The war boom had ended rather suddenly in 1947 as the economy slumped and, more importantly, as millions of couples married, settled down, and started families—many of them moving to the suburbs and away from urban centers, where movie business thrived. Declining attendance at home was complemented by a decline in international trade in 1947–1948, notably in the newly reopened European markets where “protectionist” policies were initiated to foster domestic production and to restrict the revenues that could be taken out of the country. This encouraged the studios to enter into co-financing and coproduction deals overseas, which complemented the changing strategy at home and fueled the general postwar rise in motion picture imports as well as independent production.

Another crucial factor on the domestic front was, of course, television. Early on, the major studios had met the competition head on with efforts to differentiate movies from TV programs. There was a marked increase in historical spectacles, Westerns, and biblical epics, invariably designed for a global market and shot on location with international casts. These were enhanced by the increased use of Technicolor and by innovations in technology, notably widescreen formats and 3-D. These efforts soon began paying off despite TV’s continued growth, as Fortune’s Freeman Lincoln pointed out in a 1955 piece aptly titled, “The Comeback of the Movies.” Lincoln noted that, traditionally, “any picture that topped $5 million worldwide was a smash hit,” and he estimated that only about 100 Hollywood releases had ever reached that total. “In September, 1953, 20th Century-Fox released The Robe, which has since grossed better than $20 million around the world and is expected to surpass $30 million,” wrote Lincoln, and pointed out that “in the 17 months since The Robe was turned loose nearly 30 pictures have grossed more than the previously magic $5 million.”¹¹

As Hollywood’s blockbuster mentality took hold in 1955, the majors finally ventured into television. MGM, Warners, and Fox, taking a cue from Disney and the lesser Hollywood powers already involved in “telefilm” series production, began producing filmed series of their own in the Fall of 1955.¹² And late that year the majors also began to sell or lease their pre-1948 features to TV syndicators. In 1956 alone, some 3,000 feature films went into syndication; by 1958, all of the majors had unloaded hundreds of pre-1948 films.¹³ In 1960, the studios and talent guilds agreed on residual payments for post-1948 films, leading to another wave of movie syndication and to Hollywood movies being scheduled in regular prime-time. Telefilm production was also on the rise in the late 1950s, as the studios relied increasingly on TV series to keep their facilities in constant operation, since more and more feature films were shot on location. The studios also had begun realizing sizable profits from the syndication of hit TV series, both as reruns in the U.S. and as first-run series abroad. As the studios upgraded series production and as the preferred programming format shifted from live video to telefilm—despite the introduction of videotape in 1957—the networks steadily shifted their production operations from New York to Los Angeles. By 1960 virtually all prime-time fictional series were produced on film in Hollywood, with the traditional studio powers dominating this trend.

Meanwhile the blockbuster mentality intensified. Lincoln had suggested in his 1955 Fortune piece, “The beauty of the big picture nowadays is, of course, that there seems to be no limit to what the box office return may be.”¹⁴ The ensuing decade bore this out with a vengeance, bracketed by two colossal hits: The Ten Commandments in 1956, with domestic rentals of $43 million (versus The Robe’s $17.5 million), and The Sound of Music in 1965, with rentals of $79.9 million. Other top hits from the decade included similarly “big” all-star projects, most of them shot on location for an international market:

Around the World in 80 Days (1956; $23 million in rentals)

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957; $17.2 million)

South Pacific (1958; $17.5 million)

Ben-Hur (1959; $36.5 million)

Lawrence of Arabia (1962; $17.7 million)

The Longest Day (1962; $17.6 million)

Cleopatra (1963; $26 million)

Goldfinger (1964; $23 million)

Thunderball (1965; $28.5 million)

Dr. Zhivago (1965; $46.5 million)

While these mega-hits dominated the high end of Hollywood’s output, the studios looked for ways beyond TV series production to diversify their media interests. Besides the need to hedge their bets on high-stakes blockbusters, this impulse to diversify was a response to the postwar boom in entertainment and leisure activities, the increasing segmentation of media audiences in a period of general prosperity and population growth, and the sophisticated new advertising and marketing strategies used to measure and attract those audiences. MCA was the clear industry leader in terms of diversification, having expanded from a music booking and talent agency in the 1930s and 1940s into telefilm production and syndication in the 1950s, eventually buying Decca Records and then Universal Pictures in the early 1960s.

The 1950s and 1960s also saw diversified, segmented moviegoing trends, most of them keyed to the immense, emergent “youth market.” With the baby boom generation reaching active consumer status and developing distinctive interests and tastes, there was a marked surge in drive-in moviegoing, itself a phenomenon directed associated with postwar suburbanization and the family boom. With the emergent youth market, drive-in viewing fare turned increasingly to low-budget “teen-pics” and “exploitation” films. The “art cinema” and foreign film movements also took off in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as neighborhood movie houses and campus film societies screened alternatives to mainstream Hollywood and as film courses beg...