Movie Blockbusters

289 Pages·2003·6.731 MB·English

by  Julian Stringer

MOVIE BLOCKBUSTERS
Big-budget, spectacular films designed to appeal to a mass audience: is this what – or
all – blockbusters are? Movie Blockbusters brings together leading film scholars to
consider this most high-profile and culturally significant genre. Drawing on a range
of critical perspectives, the book traces how and why the “event movie” has played
such a large role in the popular imagination, tracing a path from the spectacles of the
silent era to the effects-laden mega-hits of the digital age.
The contributors explain what the rise of the blockbuster says about the
Hollywood film industry, address the work of notable blockbuster auteurs such as
Steven Spielberg and James Cameron, discuss key movies such as Jaws, The Jazz
Singer, The Ten Commandments, Terminator 2, and Titanic, and consider the various
contexts in which blockbusters are produced, distributed, marketed, and con-
sumed. In addition, the book considers the movie scene outside Hollywood,
discussing blockbusters made in Bollywood, China, South Korea, New Zealand,
and Argentina.
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M O V I E
B L O C K B U S T E R S
Edited by
Julian Stringer
FOR STEVE
First published 2003
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Reprinted 2006, 2008
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© 2003 Editorial material: Julian Stringer; chapters: the contributors
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
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ISBN 978-0-415-25608-7 (hbk)
ISBN 978-0-415-25609-4 (pbk)
CONTENTS
List of figures viii
List of contributors ix
Introduction 1
JULIAN STRINGER
The New Hollywood 15
THOMAS SCHATZ
PART I
Industry matters 45
1 Hollywood blockbusters: historical dimensions 47
STEVE NEALE
2 Following the money in America’s sunniest company
town: some notes on the political economy of the
Hollywood blockbuster 61
JON LEWIS
3 The Hollywood blockbuster: industrial analysis and
practice 72
DOUGLAS GOMERY
4 The role of the auteur in the age of the blockbuster:
Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks 84
WARREN BUCKLAND
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CONTENTS
PART II
Exploring spectacle 99
5 Talking about a revolution: the blockbuster as
industrial advertisement 101
MICHAEL ALLEN
6 Spectacle, narrative, and the spectacular Hollywood
blockbuster 114
GEOFF KING
7 “Want to take a ride?”: reflections on the blockbuster
experience in Contact (1997) 128
PETER KRÄ MER
8 Blockbusting sound: the case of The Fugitive 141
GIANLUCA SERGI
PART III
Establishing cultural status 153
9 Circulations of taste: Titanic, the Oscars, and the
middlebrow 155
GILLIAN ROBERTS
10 Sex, controversy, box-office: from blockbuster to
bonkbuster 167
REBECCA FEASEY
11 Star Wars in fandom, film theory, and the museum:
the cultural status of the cult blockbuster 178
MATT HILLS
12 The best place to see a film: the blockbuster, the
multiplex, and the contexts of consumption 190
MARK JANCOVICH AND LUCY FAIRE
13 Neither one thing nor the other: blockbusters at film
festivals 202
JULIAN STRINGER
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CONTENTS
PART IV
The blockbuster in the international frame 215
14 “What’s big about the big film?”: “de-Westernizing” the
blockbuster in Korea and China 217
CHRIS BERRY
15 Once Were Warriors: New Zealand’s first indigenous
blockbuster 230
KIRSTEN MOANA THOMPSON
16 Television for the big screen: how Comodines became
Argentina’s first blockbuster phenomenon 242
TAMARA L. FALICOV
17 Locating Bollywood: notes on the Hindi blockbuster,
1975 to the present 255
ANDREW WILLIS
Index 269
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FIGURES
0.1 The bigness of Ben-Hur (1925) 4
0.2 The most fantastic Bond set ever . . . until the next one: You Only
Live Twice (1967) 6
0.3 The Ten Commandments (1956): the parting of the Red Sea 20
1.1 A box-office blockbuster: Quo Vadis (1951) 49
1.2 The spectacle of destruction: Earthquake (1974) 53
2.1 Follow the money: Batman (1989) 62
3.1 Jaws (1975) 73
4.1 The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) 91
4.2 Recirculating E.T., Manhattan, New York, March 2002 93
5.1 Advertising the event: The Jazz Singer (1927) 110
6.1 Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) 120
7.1 Contact (1997): Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) prepares for the ride
of her life 129
9.1 Do they think they’re making a film . . . or a movie?: James Cameron
(right) directs Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio on the set of
Titanic (1997) 159
10.1 Bonking big time: Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone go at it in
Basic Instinct (1992) 170
11.1 Star Wars (1977) 179
12.1 The Showcase multiplex, Nottingham, England 193
13.1 Anna May Wong and Douglas Fairbanks senior in The Thief of Bagdad
(1924), one of the Thames Silent Classics showcased at the London
Film Festival 210
14.1 Made in China: The Opium War (1997) 221
14.2 Made in Korea: Shiri (1999) 225
15.1 Once Were Warriors (1994) 231
16.1 Comodines (1997) 247
17.1 A¯soka (2001) 256
17.2 Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan 261
viii
CONTRIBUTORS
Michael Allen teaches film, television, and new media at Birkbeck College,
London. He is author of Family Secrets: The Feature Films of D.W. Griffith (British
Film Institute, 2000), has contributed to The Cinema Book (BFI, 1999) and
Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (Routledge, 1998), and has just completed a book
on contemporary American cinema for McLean Press and Pearson International.
He also designs multimedia materials for film and television studies use.
Chris Berry teaches in the Film Studies Program and Department of Theater,
Dance and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is
author of numerous articles on Chinese cinema, and editor of Perspectives on
Chinese Cinema (British Film Institute, 1991). His current project is a book on
Chinese cinema and the national (co-written with Mary Farquhar) for
Cambridge University Press.
Warren Buckland is Associate Professor in Film Studies at Chapman University,
California. He is editor of The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind (Amsterdam
University Press, 1995), author of Teach Yourself Film Studies (Hodder &
Stoughton/NTC Press, 1998) and The Cognitive Semiotics of Film (Cambridge
University Press, 2000), and co-author (with Thomas Elsaesser) of Studying
Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis (Arnold, 2002).
Lucy Faire is a Research Associate in the Department of Geography at Lough-
borough University, working on the project “Modernizing the City: Experiences
of Urban Change in Post-War Britain.” She is co-author of The Place of the
Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption (British Film Institute, 2003).
Tamara L. Falicov is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Film and Latin American
Studies at the University of Kansas. She has been the recipient of a Fulbright
Fellowship to Argentina and a Rockefeller Humanities Visiting Fellowship at the
University of the Republic, Uruguay. She has published in Media, Culture and
Society, Southern Quarterly, and Studies in Latin American Popular Culture. She is
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