Hollywood don't skate: US production trends, industry analysis, and the roller disco movie

Abstract

Through an analysis of the American film industry's fleeting 1979 foray into the production of roller disco movies, this paper counters prevailing notions about the conditions underwriting production trends. Scholars and commentators usually suggest that upsurges of a given type of film are either by-products of preoccupation with topical discourse or a response to a single hit. These conditions, I argue, do not account for production trends because they bypass the logic undergirding green-lighting, thereby failing to explain why only certain topical discourses are articulated in trends and why only some hits appear to spawn trends. I suggest instead that production trends are determined by industry decision-makers' perceptions of the profit potential of a given type of film, of its profit potential relative to that of other pictures, and of its capacity to maintain the profitability of the supply chain that links producers to consumers. The production of roller disco movies was not determined either by the success of roller disco rinks or solely the disco-centred film Saturday Night Fever (1977). Its onset was instead ultimately determined by shifts in the perceived profit potential of youth-oriented films and its decline precipitated by an inability to support the cost of distribution.