J D Connor

The Studios After the Studios

Neoclassical Hollywood (1970-2010)

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

J.D. Connor is Assistant Professor in History of Art and Film Studies at Yale University.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 376
• Erscheinungstermin: 8. April 2015
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 261mm x 184mm x 27mm
• Gewicht: 842g
• ISBN-13: 9780804790772
• ISBN-10: 0804790779
• Artikelnr.: 41753703

Autorenporträt

J.D. Connor is Assistant Professor in History of Art and Film Studies at Yale University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction
chapter abstract
Every movie is "on some level about the business," according to Academy
Award winner Robert Towne. The introduction examines that claim in light of
Towne's film Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, and finds
it to be true.
1Logorrhea, or, How to Watch a Hollywood Movie
chapter abstract
This opening chapter shows the reader how to approach a Hollywood film. The
key is the studio logo at the beginning. In dozens of cases, those logos
bleed into the story world of the film. The Paramount mountain turns into
the landscape of Raiders of the Lost Ark; the X in "Fox" glows at the
beginning of X-Men; and the ice cap on the Universal globe melts at the
beginning of Waterworld. In these evanescent images, studios are tying
their stories to their corporate identities, encouraging us to see these
movies as studio stories. The remainder of the chapter discusses various
reasons why scholars believe that studios don't matter and shows why that
kind of thinking is wrong. Alternative theories include those of Horkheimer
and Adorno, Jerome Christensen, and John Thornton Caldwell.
2The Literal and the Littoral: Jaws
chapter abstract
Everyone knows Jaws invented the blockbuster. Because of marketing? The
story? Some connection to our primal fears? Half of the audience saw Jaws
as a knowing throwback to the cheesy monster movies of old; the other half
just saw it as a monster movie. That split audience-one sophisticated, one
not-would be the key to the studio renaissance. Jaws isn't yet the story of
its studio, but it is the story that teaches the audience how to look out
for what lies beneath.
3Paramount I: From the Director's Company to High Concept
chapter abstract
The seventies were supposed to be the glory days of the director, the
auteur era. Yet even when the studios were at their weakest, directors such
as George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and Roman Polanski were terrified of
them. Paramount did all that it could to turn auteurism into a business
plan, but the paranoid auteurs would have none of it. Everyone, from studio
chief Robert Evans to Coppola, was trapped in a fantasy of the 1930s. This
nostalgia for the classical era gave rise to some of the studio's greatest
hits-Rosemary's Baby, The Godfather, The Conversation-but it was only when
they put the thirties aside and turned to the present that the studio found
a way out of the cul-de-sac. The solution was Saturday Night Fever.
4Our Man in Armani: The Ovitz Interregnum
chapter abstract
The most important new player in Hollywood in the eighties was Mike Ovitz's
CAA. A relentless packager of films, CAA preyed on weak studios, turning
movies like
5Paramount II: The Residue of Design
chapter abstract
Unable to make auteurism into a model, Paramount turned away from directors
and complex narratives toward production designers and clean, hyperlegible
images. "High-concept" style conquered substance, but it was a style that
stayed true to the studio's history of extreme production design. The
studio capitalized on the success of Saturday Night Fever by making a
series of "popsicals" like Flashdance and Footloose and by turning Eddie
Murphy into a movie star. But as Gulf + Western remade itself as Paramount
Communications, the studio was under tremendous pressure to justify its
role. Barry Diller argued that the movies were the heart of the new,
synergistic conglomerate. Still, the changes at Paramount chased away the
inventors of high concept. Left behind were Don Simpson and Jerry
Bruckheimer, and their next film, Top Gun, showed how the paranoid gaze of
the seventies could meld with the high finish of the eighties.
6Let's Make the Weather: Chaos Comes to Hollywood
chapter abstract
The Hollywood mantra is "Nobody Knows Anything." Faced with a bottomless
pit of risk, studios are always looking for insurance policies-hot writers,
stars, genres; complex financing deals; accounting scams. In the nineties,
one of the most comforting visions of risk management was "chaos theory,"
and the key idea was the "butterfly effect," the belief that the slightest
change could make all the difference. Nothing was more reassuring to
assemblers of talent than the notion that their smallest decisions were
world shaping. This chapter discusses Groundhog Day, Jurassic Park, and
Pocahontas.
7That Oceanic Feeling: One Merger Too Many
chapter abstract
This chapter looks at two colossal corporate meltdowns-the destruction of
Vivendi Universal and the catastrophic corporate losses at AOL
TimeWarner-in order to understand what happens to the movies when the
synergy goes terribly wrong. At Vivendi, the crucial story is the failed
attempt to turn Curious George into a company mascot on the order of Mickey
Mouse. At Warners, the essential story was Steven Soderbergh's valiant
attempt to generate, via the Ocean's 11 series, enough corporate momentum
to keep the dream alive.
8The Anxious Epic and the Qualms of Empire: Conglomerate Overstretch
chapter abstract
The wave of epics that followed Gladiator-King Arthur, Alexander, Kingdom
of Heaven, 300-became think pieces for conglomerate overstretch. The epics
of the new millennium weren't like the roadshows of the fifties. These were
not tales of empires on the march but of empires in retreat. Directors who
wanted to tell stories about the perils of empire during the Iraq War found
themselves dependent upon far-flung international megacorporations that
looked an awful lot like the imperialists they were opposing. Criticism of
the war started to look like criticism of the company, and the studios
began to lose their hold on the corporate imagination.