Putting academy awards and accounting together. Franco Cristaldi and his Italian film productions (1954–1992)

ABSTRACTIncreasingly universities and film schools are looking for ways to provide richer experiences for students to enhance their employability as well as find ways to make their programmes stand out in a competitive marketplace. Likewise, economic pressure on commercial feature film production companies, particularly independents, is forcing them to consider alternative means of production and new sources of cost-effective project support. This paper looks at the emergence of formal academic–industry collaboration in the creation, production and support of commercial feature films. Looking at a wide range of examples from collaborations worldwide, it considers three basic models: University as film production company with ‘soft’ investment; University as film production company with ‘hard’ investment; and University as film production service provider. It is argued that all three models can be viable but that alignment with corporate and institutional objectives, as well as realistic expectations, are essential to success.

In the last decade, individual awareness of the impacts generated by the activities of businesses has increased more than ever. Consumers, employees and investors have begun to criticize business behaviors that negatively affect either society or the environment. Given this context, and relying on the literature relating to hybrid organizations and sustainable business models, our research aims to investigate how dual logic affects the business model of benefit corporations in the Italian film production industry. To capture the complexity of this type of firm, we adopted a qualitative research method, the case study approach. The case selected was ARE FILMS srl, a creative film production company. It has been a benefit corporation since it was founded. The study suggests that the capacity of hybrid businesses to achieve a hybrid mission is intrinsically embedded in their business model. A young film production benefit corporation is more likely to adopt a semi-integrated business model that does not create an external perception of dual corporate identity and does not affect economic sustainability. Moreover, the sustainable value proposition emerges even without the formal application of accepted protocols. Furthermore, we realized that the size of the firm affects business modelling. Finally, this research underlines the fact that benefit corporations do not require external pressure to implement sustainable practices.

In 2014, the California Department of Public Health was notified by a local health department of a diagnosis of acute human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection* and rectal gonorrhea in a male adult film industry performer, aged 25 years (patient A). Patient A had a 6-day history of rash, fever, and sore throat suggestive of acute retroviral syndrome at the time of examination. He was informed of his positive HIV and gonorrhea test results 6 days after his examination. Patient A had a negative HIV-1 RNA qualitative nucleic acid amplification test (NAAT)(†) 10 days before symptom onset. This investigation found that during the 22 days between the negative NAAT and being informed of his positive HIV test results, two different production companies directed patient A to have condomless sex with a total of 12 male performers. Patient A also provided contact information for five male non-work-related sexual partners during the month before and after his symptom onset. Patient A had additional partners during this time period for which no locating information was provided. Neither patient A nor any of his interviewed sexual partners reported taking HIV preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP). Contact tracing and phylogenetic analysis of HIV sequences amplified from pretreatment plasma revealed that a non-work-related partner likely infected patient A, and that patient A likely subsequently infected both a coworker during the second film production and a non-work-related partner during the interval between his negative test and receipt of his positive HIV results. Adult film performers and production companies, medical providers, and all persons at risk for HIV should be aware that testing alone is not sufficient to prevent HIV transmission. Condom use provides additional protection from HIV and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Performers and all persons at risk for HIV infection in their professional and personal lives should discuss the use of PrEP with their medical providers.

Film and TV productions, a key area in production screen business, comprise of processes with high demand for creativity and flexibility. However, despite the era of fast developing technology, film production processes are carried out in an old fashioned way. This is reflected, for example, by the fact that document processing accompanied by daily shooting activities is still primarily paper-based and coordinating geographically distributed cast and crew is purely manual or at best through emails. There is an opportunity to bring process innovation into this industry, which can streamline and optimise film production processes and thus reduce production costs. Business Process Management (BPM) is the mainstream contemporary technology-enabled business improvement method. It has proven to provide significant benefits to an organisation in terms of cost savings and responsiveness to changes. In this paper, we apply BPM technology to process innovation for film production. We also share experiences in how to deal with innovation barriers in the film industry. Over the course of the investigation, a prototype called YAWL4Film was developed on top of a state-of-the-art BPM system. YAWL4Film supports collection and entering of production related data and automatic generation of reports required during film production. The system was deployed in two student productions at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), as well as in a feature film production by Porchlight, an independent film production company.

In recent years, digitization processes and media convergence trends have changed the film industry in various ways. Scholars have indicated various alterations in the aesthetics, production, distribution, exhibition and reception of films, thereby pointing at new technological possibilities and challenges, an increasing participatory cinema culture, changes in the broader creative and economic strategies of film and media companies and an overall convergence between film and other media. The expansion of film industry activities from film to various other media has a long history. Media convergence trends, however, have recently intensified this expansion. In a European context, the role of film policy is particularly relevant in this respect, as film policy forms a crucial cornerstone for the organization of European film industries. By focusing on recent developments in Flanders (the northern, Dutch-language region in Belgium), this case study examines how, in tune with digitization and media convergence processes, government film policy in Europe has increasingly expanded its scope. More specifically, we analyse how film policy has evolved from a focus on the production of films into a more complex set of policy measures towards ‘creative screen media’ production. With this case study, we want to argue that contemporary film policy should be seen within the broader media environment and media policies, which are characterized by the growth of a conceptual and practical convergence between various (old and new) media, information and communication technologies and creative arts. This transition process is not ‘new’ as such, but has remarkably intensified since the turn of the millennium. Indeed, the evolution from film policy to broader creative screens policies runs parallel with and is connected to a more general shift in government policy (in Flanders and elsewhere), from a ‘cultural’ to a ‘creative’ industries policy paradigm.

Italian national cinema developed quickly between the last decade of the 19th century and the outbreak of World War I (particularly in Turin and also in Rome), and it won a sizeable share of film audiences around the world for, in particular, its epic films set in classical settings. The outbreak of the war virtually destroyed the industry, but with the coming of sound and the advent of the Fascist government, support for the industry grew before World War II broke out, with the building of the film studio complex at Cinecittà (“Cinema City”), the establishment of Luce (the government agency charged with producing documentaries and newsreels), and the opening of an important national film school in Rome, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. Unlike its counterparts in totalitarian Russia or Germany, the Italian industry was not completely dominated by government propaganda, and in fact some of the major Fascist figures in the industry wanted to imitate the entertainment of Hollywood rather than support a completely ideological cinema. Major directors emerged during this period, such as Mario Camerini, Alessandro Blasetti, and Vittorio De Sica (all of whom continued to work after the end of the war), and the cinema during the Fascist period trained a great many people involved in basic film production who were to play a vital role in the dramatic rebirth of Italian cinema after 1945. With the end of the war, Italian neorealism burst on the international scene. Such figures as Roberto Rossellini, De Sica, Luchino Visconti, and Giuseppe De Santis won international acclaim for their “realistic” portrayal of contemporary Italian social and economic problems. During the 1950s, many young directors (Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and Pietro Germi among them) sought to move beyond the kind of programmatic social realism Marxist critics in Italy and France championed, and in the 1960s a second generation of even younger figures (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marco Bellocchio, Bernardo Bertolucci, Gillo Pontecorvo, and Francesco Rosi) looked both backward to their Italian neorealist heritage and abroad to French cinema for inspiration. During the same time, but less beloved by film scholars and critics, Italian cinema began to produce an enormous number of highly profitable works that might be described as genre films or, to use the Hollywood term, B films. First, in the late 1950s and the 1960s, the peplum or “sword and sandal” epic film starring foreign bodybuilders became immensely popular and was quickly exported. This genre was followed closely by the spaghetti western, an incredibly successful genre that produced almost five hundred films in a very short time and revolutionized the face of a classic Hollywood genre almost overnight. Subsequently, in the 1970s and 1980s, the thriller (known as a giallo in Italy) and the spaghetti horror film (with its zombie and cannibal variants) were also extremely popular. Perhaps the most popular genre of all, one that continued to thrive during the entire postwar period, was the so-called commedia all’italiana or “comedy, Italian style,” a form of comic film indebted not only to the traditional commedia dell’arte but also to a collection of brilliant actors and scriptwriter-directors who combined humor with a biting and often cynical vision of Italian culture, providing a type of social criticism that Italy’s politicians often avoided. The period between 1945 and around 1975 thus witnessed an Italian cinema that managed to combine popular entertainment in a variety of film genres with art films, box office power with critical acclaim at film festivals and among auteur-oriented critics and film historians. Nevertheless, directors and technicians of genius continued to work, and in the last decade some new faces have added luster and box office appeal to the national cinema’s treatment of new themes (racial and gender identity in a multiethnic and multicultural Italy, terrorism, crime, and the Mafia), themes that have evolved in Italian cinema’s reflection of everyday reality in the peninsula. Italian film scholarship has evolved dramatically in the recent past, moving from a focus on postwar neorealism and the art film toward a broader definition of film history that encompasses an interest in multicultural themes, more film theory imported from abroad (especially from the United Kingdom and the United States), and more interest in two periods (the silent era and the Fascist period) that have long been neglected in comparison with postwar Italy.

This article investigates an alleged link between US organized crime and the UK’s Hammer Film Productions Ltd that is said to have operated via Meyer Lansky (the notorious Syndicate casino lynchpin) and Eliot Hyman, the latter being head of Seven Arts Productions Ltd, a US film production company. It does so by first examining the significant business link between Hammer and Seven Arts, which encompassed many Hammer film productions in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It then traces aspects of the business history of Seven Arts and its various corporate investments such as in The Grand Bahama Development Company, the latter being engineered primarily by Seven Arts board member Lou Chesler, whose nickname was ‘The Big Fat Money Machine’. It concludes that the link between Seven Arts and the organized crime Syndicate was certainly real for a specific period of time, but it was limited primarily to some of the business operations of Chesler, the removal of whom from the company was engineered by Hyman after the controversial link to Lansky became apparent in the early 1960s.

The film ‘Konstgjorda Svensson’/‘Artificial Svensson’ (Edgren, 1929) has recently been restored with its original soundtrack by the Swedish Film Institute. The restoration shows how film production companies in Sweden tried to connect the new medium of sound film to other sound technologies like radio and gramophone. Using the case study of early sound film production at the company Svensk Filmindustri,this article examines how gramophonic recordings of music facilitated the assimilation of sound and dialogue within the diegesis, making for a smooth conversion to sound. A distinguishing feature during the first sound years was that dialogue and sound created a heightened media-sensitivity. Music that adheres more to the demands of the narrative than to the image per se facilitated this process, masking the technical construction of the film medium.

Chapter 2 contemplates why British horror was revived at the dawning of the new millennium, and also considers some of the reasons why British horror films produced in the 2000s and 2010s can be viewed as constituting a distinctive aspect of contemporary British cinema. I discuss the establishment of the UK Film Council (UKFC) in 2000 and contextualise the contemporary British horror film in the international film marketplace, drawing parallels between British horror and British film production more broadly, British horror and international horror production, and the audience demographics targeted by distributers and film production companies. This involves examining British horror’s shift from a theatrical genre to one associated primarily with the home video and online market.

This article addresses the neglect in academic studies of film culture of the publicist’s role, particularly in British film production and distribution. Taking the last decade of the British studio system (the 1950s) and the leading British studio (Rank) as its timeframe and focus, the article explores the role of the publicist in the film industry and film culture. After reviewing contemporary debates about publicity strategies and the importance of star creation, the article identifies leading practitioners and then discusses their relationship to the newspaper press before offering a job description for the film publicist and the significance of women in the profession. The second section considers the interactions between publicists, contract artists and studio managers, noting the importance of personal appearances by stars and their frequent frustrations with the way they were treated and used by the Rank Organisation. The third section deals with Rank’s mid-decade shift towards markets in continental Europe as British exhibition revenues declined, and the impact this had on promotional practices, particularly with the growing importance of overseas film festivals. The fourth section focuses on the production of pictorial publicity, considering in some detail the roles played by the studio photographer, Cornel Lucas, and the Italian poster artists who were used to give a contemporary and continental gloss to Rank’s products. The final section briefly describes and accounts for the decline of Rank as a film production company and the consequence of this for its promotional activities.

A Study on the Meaning and Feature Film Production of Geuk-dong-heung-eop Film Production Company in 1960's

Film production companies play a key role in hiring companies and professionals that will carry out specific activities, which, in turn, are produced by organising temporary teams, in projects. Observing the structuring of Brazilian cinema production in networks, the need to confirm these assumptions with information from the field itself can be observed. This study aims to understand the existing relations between production companies, as well as companies and professionals of different activities related to film production, especially in terms of hiring and selecting these professionals. To this end, a survey was conducted with Brazilian feature film production companies. Complementarily combines the propositions about the different capitals - economic, social and cultural - existing in society and diversely valued in social and economic situations, as markers of the relations analysed here. As results was thus possible to understand some characteristics of the field, such as the organisation by projects, the contracts mostly in independent professional Legal Entity regime, the variation between the criteria for selecting professionals according to the function exercised, the small internal fixed teams of production companies and the capital valued in certain activities and contexts.

Linking the word ‘entrepreneur’ to Fellini’s name may seem a contradiction. Yet, according to the literature, Fellini was founder, member or manager of no less than three film production companies. Research based on archival material, however, reveals that Fellini never played the role of producer, nor founded a film production company. Thus, the albeit frail aura of Fellini as entrepreneur falls apart. His name seems to have been used by producers as a brand to foster commercial operations. This process starts with La Dolce Vita (1960), which granted Fellini the status of ‘archetypical art film director’ and freed him from producer-imposed obligations. Delving into a mass of various, new archival sources and cross-referencing data, this article analyses how the Fellini brand – as auteur versus the film producer’s traditional capitalist logic – was constructed and later exploited by Fellini and his producers.

MOTION PICTURES WERE REPORTEDLY FIRST SCREENED IN NIGERIA in August of 1903, when Nigerian nationalist Herbert Macaulay, in association with the Balboa film company of Spain, introduced the new medium to an audience assembled in Glover Memorial Hall in Lagos (Owens-lbie). Over five decades later, the first film production companies, Latola Film (founded in 1962) and Calpeny Nigeria Limited (1970), were established in Nigeria (Amobi). In addition to Latola and Calpeny, members of the Nigerian theater community promoted film culture as well. In fact, the current video film industry in Nigeria owes a huge debt to the pioneers of Nigerian theater, particularly practitioners of the Yoruba Traveling Theater, who branched off from mainstream theater to experiment with celluloid. While the introduction of mobile cinema by the British during colonial times may have created awareness and interest in film, the medium was used primarily to educate Nigerians about such issues as health, sanitation, and nutrition. In the late 1960s, dramatists Hubert Ogunde, who recorded his plays on celluloid, Moses Adejumo (alias Baba Sala), and Duro Ladipo were responsible for elevating the cinema to a popular art that also contained social commentary (Ekwuazi 9). The legacy of those indigenous filmmakers was bequeathed to Ola Balogun, Ade Love, and Eddie Ugbomah-prolific filmmakers of the 1980s who extended the pioneer efforts of the early dramatists and ushered Nigerian moviemaking into the modern age. The collapse of movie-theatergoing culture in the 1980s, caused by the incessant harassment of innocent citizens by criminals, the country's economic downturn, and various problems affecting celluloid film production, gave rise to the video film-a less powerful but more convenient [form of] film making utilising UMatik, super VHS and ordinary VHS cameras (Dike). Video films, known in Nigeria as home movies, are a new initiative in popular culture, though their impact is already phenomenal. Although many productions preceded it, Kenneth Nnebue's successful Living in Bondage (1993) is credited with jumpstarting the video film industry. Since the early 1990s, the industry, now stylishly called Nollywood, has churned out thousands of titles and brought many producers, marketers, actors, and technicians into the limelight. The video film is a household word in contemporary Nigeria and has become a popular form of audio-visual entertainment. The industry has also become too significant for the world to ignore. According to a press release for a 2005 international convention on Nollywood held in Los Angeles, it has been estimated that the industry produces an average of fifty movies per week, though this is surely an exaggeration (Bequette). Video films gross an estimated 200 million dollars a year and Nigeria has been ranked the world's third-largest film industry, after Hollywood and Bollywood (India) (Vasagar). Video films are not only popular in their native Nigeria and other African countries, but in less than twenty years they have attracted the attention of many media practitioners, film festivals, and some American and European universities. In fact, DSTV (Digital Satellite Television), a digital satellite service in Africa, features Africa Magic (Channel 102), a channel devoted to Nollywood films. Nollywood films are popular in Nigeria because they have Indigenous content and address issues relevant to a mass audience. Through an amalgam of Nigerian narrative techniques (African storylines) and Western technology, these films document and re-create sociopolitical and cultural events that occurred within and beyond the country's borders.1 The industry has also saved poor Nigerians the cost of procuring expensive films from the West (the price per film ranges from N200 to N400-about $2.50). Ogunleye contends that with the global world united under the sway of visual culture, the emergence of the video film in Nigeria is timely and crucial as it serves as the voice of its people and responds to the drudgery of a socioeconomic existence characterized by high unemployment and dwindling opportunities (ix). …

Music Publishers and Synchronized Scores: Mascagni, Ricordi, and <i>Rapsodia satanica</i>