Fox Film Research Articles

Over That Hill: Cinematic adaptations and cross-cultural remakes, from Depression-era America to post-war Korea

This article explores the ways in which film-makers of South Korea's cinematic golden age tapped into a vast repository of images and themes borrowed from other national contexts, from Depression-era America to post-war Japan. To illustrate Korean film-makers' unusual penchant for narrative assimilation and cross-cultural adaptation, the author highlights a representative melodrama of that era. Produced by Sin Sang-ok and directed by Kang Ch'an-u, Over That Hill/Chŏ ŏndŏk nŏmŏsŏ (1968) is a remake of Over the Hill (1931), a motion picture directed by Henry King and produced at Fox Film Corp. Besides looking west for its narrative and thematic material, Over That Hill looks toward neighbouring Japan. In fact, there are numerous similarities between Over That Hill and Ozu Yasujiro's Tokyo Story (1953), above all their shared focus on the love/hate relationship between rural parents and city children — a generational as well as geographic schism that casts in relief an issue central to the study of remakes and adaptations: fidelity to an ancestral or antecedent text. Given this diegetic as well as extra-diegetic focus on loyalty (to one's literal or figurative ‘parents’), it seems appropriate to ask if the structural isomorphism between South Korean films and their American and Japanese predecessors simply revives the spectre of cultural imperialism. Or, as the culmination of several cross-cultural ‘makeovers’ and adaptations, do films like Over That Hill mark a break from the past by using Euro-American and Japanese signifiers as mere pretexts for distinctively Korean texts envisioning the nation's socio-economic future?

The Hollywood Career of Gershwin's Second Rhapsody

Abstract Around the time of its premiere in January 1932, George Gershwin's Second Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra was erroneously described as an “expanded” version of music that had been written specifically for a 1931 Fox film entitled Delicious, and for decades this misinformation has been echoed by Gershwin scholars. In fact, Gershwin put the finishing touches on the Second Rhapsody months before Delicious went into production, and his sketch for what in essence is the complete work was made when the screenplay was still in its embryonic stage. Relying on evidence that includes Gershwin manuscripts, various drafts of the screenplay, the conductor's score that was used for the film's recording sessions, and—importantly—the recently restored film itself, this article seeks to clarify both the chronological and the substantive relationship between the fifteen-minute Second Rhapsody and the film's seven-minute “New York Rhapsody.” Along with offering the first detailed account of the musico-narrative content of the film's “New York Rhapsody” sequence, the article shows that the “New York Rhapsody” is a truncation of the Second Rhapsody engineered not by Gershwin but, probably, by Fox employee Hugo Friedhofer.

Fox Film Noir: Laura, Call Northside 777, Panic in the Streets; House of Bamboo, Nightmare Alley, The Street with No Name (review)

Reviewed by: Fox Film Noir: Laura, Call Northside 777, Panic in the Streets House of Bamboo, Nightmare Alley, The Street with No Name Dana Polan (bio) Fox Film Noir: Laura, Call Northside 777, Panic in the Streets House of Bamboo, Nightmare Alley, The Street with No Name A recollection: when I went on the academic job market for the first time, in 1979, I would answer the inevitable interview question about [End Page 110] what I was working on with the reply "film noir," since I had plans to study the American forties through that genre of film. The problem was that a number of cinema jobs were in English departments, where, it seemed, few had ever heard of the genre. Certainly, it was then easy to bring out some hashed-over Borde and Chaumeton or Paul Schrader and explain that noir was a genre of 1940s crime-oriented films that revealed a cynicism about sexual relationships or about the American dream. Still, it was unnerving to have what one considered a compelling, ideologically important domain of critical investigation be simply unfamiliar to people who claimed to know culture. Today, of course, the situation is quite different. Noir has become part of common parlance to the point of cliché. And with that popular diffusion comes a predictable stretching of the term beyond its initial applications. To take just one example, there is Nature Noir, a 2006 book by a park ranger who describes all the terrible things he sees both natural creatures and humans do to each other and to themselves as he wanders around forest spaces quite removed from the mean streets glistening with rain that we're familiar with from classic film noir. More than ever, noir has become a marketable style that floats far beyond the films that honed its look and its meanings. And this dissemination, or dispersion even, of the idea of noir has both positive and negative aspects. On the one hand, it is no doubt salutary when a concept that seemed to belong to specialists and cultists moves out of its rarified confines to become accessible to a more general population. Noir in particular is a publicly important part of the history of U.S. culture insofar as it is so much about the promise and limits of the American dream. As anyone who has taught film noir has undoubtedly experienced, the topic is pedagogically attractive for its blend of ease (it is a genre that wears its stylistic traits and their connections to the times on its sleeve) and relevance (neo-noir is a reminder that we still live under many of the political, cultural, and psycho-social dynamics of the United States of the last half century). On the other hand, with the diffusion of noir comes also a diffuseness that brings with it a lack of critical rigor. Noir suddenly can seem to be everywhere, inherent in everything, and this means it loses its critical edge as either a cinematic or sociological concept. Think, for instance, of that vast and ever-growing array of coffee table books on film noir that treat it as little more than a fascinating look, a compelling style, a mere ambience, a fashion. Noir becomes noir-chic, one more retro commodity disconnected from everything the genre meant—and fundamentally continues to mean—as part of our contemporaneity. In this respect, the problem of noir parallels the problem of the DVD as a critical instrument in the study and analysis of films. Beyond its obvious function of materializing a film in a compact and fairly durable format that is amenable to ever more refined methods of restoration and visual/oral polishing, the DVD holds the promise of critical supplementation of the film through background material of a diverse sort: the commentary track but also all sorts of archival material that can be added as special features. Yet it is all too often the case that such DVD extras are inconsistent in quality and in richness and variety of source material, which limits their scholarly usefulness. Just as noir often appears in today's market as a mere hint of an idea without any solidity, so do...

Winning hearts and minds

When the furniture store Ikea first started selling a limited range of flat packed furniture that customers would buy from a warehouse, carry home, and assemble themselves, few could have predicted its phenomenal success. Equally surprising, for different reasons, was the success of the television series The Simpsons , initially considered a big risk by the Fox film corporation and now the longest running cartoon ever. Both are examples of clever market positioning. The trick, says an article in this month's Harvard Business Review , is to find out what your customers expect from you—and then shatter those expectations in ways that lift you …

Copyrights, moral rights, and the end of the right of attribution under US trademark law

In the spring of 2003, the United States Supreme Court was presented with what appeared to be the relatively simple issue of whether the provisions of the U.S. Trademark Act (“the Lanaham Act”) prohibiting “false designations of origin” could be used to prevent the copying of creative work without giving attribution or credit to the original producers of the work. The Supreme Court, in Dastar v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., incorrectly held that the relevant provision, section 43(a), was incapable of identifying the parties or entities that were the origin of “communicative content” because “origin of goods” as used in the provision only applied to the producers of the tangible physical objects. The holding in Dastar goes against over 50 years of precedent, literal statutory language, and legislative history. Prior to the Dastar opinion, plaintiffs had been successful in cases involving unauthorized edits of recordings, television programmes, stories, omission of co-author's credit, and even imitation of artistic style by asserting that under trademark law the incorrect attribution or credit was a “false designation of origin”. That avenue is no longer open. All attribution right under the Copyright Act, however, is quite limited in scope and only applies to “works of visual art” a definition that was included as part of the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA). As discussed in this article, the provisions of VARA were never intended to pre-empt or supersede other laws related to attribution. The Supreme Court ignored the distinction between trademark law and copyright law. The two are not mutually exclusive. Dastar Film Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. is one of the most important cases in the United States intellectual property law in years. Congress should rectify the doctrinal wrongs wrought by the Supreme Court so that credit is given where and when credit is due.

The Trademark Function of Authorship

The use of authorial marks in relation to the sale of creative works, like the use of business trademarks in relation to the sale of goods and services, creates social benefits that deserve legal protection. Authorial attribution acts as an incentive to authorial production, provides valuable information to consumers, and provides additional social benefits that go beyond issues of market efficiency. However, the use of authorial marks, like the use of trademarks, can create social harms. Just as counterfeiters place illegitimate trademarks on goods, exploiters of entertainment markets may be tempted to misattribute authorship. In the United States, such deceptive practices were traditionally subject to the remedial mechanisms of trademark and unfair competition laws. However, in a recent decision, Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. (2003), the United States Supreme Court held that federal trademark law does not address the misattribution of authorship. The Dastar decision stated that trademark protections were designed to protect the creators of tangible products sold in the marketplace. The Court stated that trademark law was not designed to protect the interests of those who originate creative ideas or communications. This article explores society's interests in ascertaining the authorship of creative works and explains how those interests both resemble and diverge from standard trademark interests. It concludes that authorship marks are sufficiently analogous to trademarks that the Dastar approach is misguided. Consumers can and should be protected from misattributions of authorship where such misattributions can easily be remedied by law and where the failure to provide such remedies is likely to lead to significant consumer harms.

<sc>Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World</sc>. Directed by Peter Weir. Screenplay by Peter Weir and John Collee, based on novels by Patrick O'Brian. USA. 2003; color; 138 minutes. Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

<sc>Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World</sc>. Directed by Peter Weir. Screenplay by Peter Weir and John Collee, based on novels by Patrick O'Brian. USA. 2003; color; 138 minutes. Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive closes

n 12 January 2002, New York's Museum of Modern Art, as part of the preparation for a complete renovation of its Manhattan location, closed its Film Stills Archive. The Archive's over four million images were shipped to the Museum's Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center in rural Hamlin, Pennsylvania, a storage facility which houses the Museum's archival film collection, where they are now stored in file cabinets and boxes in climate controlled hallways. The Museum plans to keep the collection at the Bartos Center for the duration of the renovation. Stills have been inaccessible since the Archive closed, and the Museum has not yet been determined if they will become available before its scheduled re-opening in 2005. Stephen Higgins, Collections Manager of the Museum's Department of Film and Media, said there is hope of digitising the collection for access purposes, but that such an initiative is 'a ways down the road, [since] digitisation requires a lot of planning and a lot of fundraising'. A comment made by museum director Glenn Lowry about 'whether or not it makes more sense to keep all the film-related material together'1 has led to speculation that the stills may remain in Hamlin permanently. In any case, Higgins says it is the Museum's intention 'to get access open again, and to get people using it. Otherwise, it's of no use to anyone. We recognise that.' The Archive was originally to be included in MoMA's temporary site in Queens, New York; why it was closed and relocated instead to Hamlin has been the subject of heated debate. The Museum's position is that the location change was necessitated by a lack of space in its Queens branch, and its web site indicates that the move has a benefit: 'We believe the transfer of the Film Stills Archive to the Bartos Center, while restricting public access in the short term, will ensure its long-term care and preservation during this time of transition at MoMA'. However, press accounts have suggested that the move was related to the vocal participation of the Archives' two long-time staff members Assistant Curator Mary Corliss and Cataloguer Terry Geesken in the Museum employees' union strike of 2000. The Village Voice reported that, 'Corliss had always planned for the Archive to stay open to the public during the museum's reconstruction. Together with architects from Cooper, Robertson & Partners, she helped supervise the final plans for a mezzaninelevel space in MoMA Queens to house the stills. But then on 28 April 2000, Corliss, along with 250 MoMA staffers, went on strike. And when she returned in the fall after a bitter 134-day walkout, plans for a Film Stills Archive in Queens no longer seemed to exist.'2 Both Corliss and Geesken were laid off on the day that the Archive closed. Whatever the reason, the shutting of the facility has become a hardship for the people who once used it. The Achive received over 1,000 visitors annually and fielded requests from researchers, writers, curators, programming venues, distribution companies, 'anyone', says Corliss, 'with a serious interest in film'. While broad ranging, the collection is particularly strong in its holdings of silent and i ternational titles, and it is researchers in these areas who have been most affected. Film scholar Merrill McCord, for example, is working on a comprehensive history of the Fox Film Corporation, from its founding in 1915 to its 1935 merger with Twentieth

Effect of Film Thickness and Cure Temperature on the Mechanical Properties of FOx® Flowable Oxide Thin Films

AbstractThe mechanical properties and thermal stresses of FOx thin films at different thickness and cured at different temperatures have been investigated by a nanoindentor and a profilometer. In this study, the correlation between structure change, thickness, Si-H/Si-O ratio, modulus, hardness, and calculated coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) of FOx films have been established. The results show that the modulus of 400°C cured FOx film decreases with increasing film thickness while the hardness slightly varies with increasing film thickness. The calculated CTE of FOx film increases with increasing film thickness. In addition, both the modulus and hardness of FOx films increase with increasing curing temperature. However, the calculated CTE of FOx film decreases with increasing curing temperature. The Si-H/Si-O ratio increases with increasing film thickness but decreases with increasing curing temperature. These results indicate that the increase in modulus and hardness and the decreases in CTE for FOx films are either due to the remaining of Si-H bonds in FOx film at different film thickness or the conversion of Si-H into Si-O when forming the network structure in the FOx film at higher curing temperatures.

López Rubio and the Well-Made Metaplay

Spanish author Jose López Rubio (b. 1903) was living in Hollywood, writing screenplays for Fox Films, when he started drafting Celas del aire in 1935. The work remained unfinished until 1949, opened in Madrid in 1950, and proved to be the greatest commercial success, both in Spain and abroad, of the playwright's long and distinguished career. Following staged readings by the Intiman Theatre Company in Seattle in 198 I and The Writers Theatre in New York City in 1982, the López Rubio comedy achieved its first American stage production in 1986. The translation by Marion Peter Holt, titled In August We Play the Pyrenees, fittingly opened on 5 August and ran for five weeks at the Shady Lane Playhouse in Marengo, Illinois. As one reviewer commented, "It is a wonder something so clever took so long to cross the Atlantic . ... In August We Play the Pyrenees is a perfect diversion for a lazy summer evening."

Latin America in the Movietone News Collection

In 1980 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation announced that its Movietone newsfilm collection, containing documentary footage produced between 1919 and 1963, would be given to the University of South Carolina. Soon thereafter one-fifth of the collection, some twelve million feet of unduplicated footage, was shipped to the university's central campus in Columbia. Transfer of the film was suspended, however, when Twentieth Century Fox was purchased by a multinational corporation. Footage for the years between 1919 and 1935, and for the period from September 1942 through August 1944, was included in the initial gift. This material is presently housed and available for research in Columbia, South Carolina. Among these materials are hundreds of thousands of feet of documentary film with Latin American content, much of it untouched since the time it was “vaulted” by Fox fifty years ago or more. As such, this material represents a largely unmined and potentially rich source of film information on Latin America. This research note will suggest the nature and extent of this collection.

Federal Law Held to Govern Effect of the Release of a Joint Tortfeasor in Private Antitrust Suit: Winchester Drive-in Theatre, Inc. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Co.

Federal Law Held to Govern Effect of the Release of a Joint Tortfeasor in Private Antitrust Suit: Winchester Drive-in Theatre, Inc. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Co.

Design of Power Plant and Electrical Distribution in Large Studios

In modern studio design, the greatest problem before any studio engineer or architect is undoubtedly that of adequate and proper facilities for lighting the various stages. The arrangement of stages and the locations of lights is generally known to be the most uncertain feature in the operation of a studio. This condition requires the utmost flexibility. In the control of the studio lighting in large projects such as the Famous Players-Lasky and Fox Film Studios, the arrangement of the electrical equipment is a matter of prime consideration.