Hollywood Filmmaking Research Articles

Stag tourism and scripted liminality

Stag party tourism is a highly ritualized contemporary rite of passage that is associated with drunken excess and norm-breaking toxic masculinity. Despite contravening societal rules and encouraging deviant behaviour, stag parties are generally tolerated. This paper explores how stag tourism is a constructed rite of passage and a scripted liminality, packaged by destination marketers, staged by service providers, and performed enthusiastically by participants. Analysis of interview and observational data suggests that the bachelor movie genre is the inspiration which informs expectations and experience. Indeed, the degree of inter-textuality between on-screen (reel life) and off-screen (real life) performances confirms that this is a scripted liminality, informed not by elders or peers, but by Hollywood film makers. We conclude with a discussion of a series of contributions and implications for practice.

Communities of Style: Artistic Transformation and Social Cohesion in Hollywood, 1930 to 1999

How do social and stylistic relations in cultural fields coevolve under changing contextual conditions? Artistic communities cohere through collaborations and shared stylistic orientations among artists, but little is known about the structure and interplay of these relational processes. The authors contribute to previous studies by conducting a large-scale investigation of social and stylistic networks among Hollywood filmmakers. In particular, the authors examine how the interplay between artists’ collaborations and shared references changed throughout Hollywood’s history. Using data from the Internet Movie Database and applying relational hyperevent models, the authors analyze the coevolution of collaboration and reference networks among 15,553 Hollywood film professionals who participated in 6,800 films between 1930 and 1999. The authors complement prior sociological efforts through a longitudinal perspective on the structure of social and stylistic networks across three meaningful historical periods: before, during, and after Hollywood’s artistic transformation in the 1960s. The findings show that filmmakers are more likely to collaborate if they previously used the same references, but they are less likely to adopt the references of their previous collaborators. In addition, the results highlight that the structure of relational processes in cultural fields varies over time as the contextual conditions for tie formation change.

Cosmic Prison Break: From Gnostic Movies to Conspiracist Cosmology

The article thematically and structurally analyses a group of films usually designated as “gnostic films”. These films share a common ideology as they postulate the existence of two worlds – one illusory and the other true. The hero must escape the false world and reach the true one. As the majority of gnostic films appeared at the turn of the millennium, the article also suggests what contributed to the emergence of these films. As the cosmology of the films bears a close similarity to the cosmology of conspiracy theories, the emergence of the films is shown to be a part of the sociocultural development of the conspiracist mindset entering the mainstream. In the 1990s, conspiracism was out of the closet and gained popularity, but it was not yet perceived as an imminent societal threat and therefore was not a taboo for Hollywood filmmakers. The 1990s were also the decade of a unipolar world order where the absence of an inimical Other engendered anxiety about the system itself, which is reflected in the analysed films.

Introduction

This introduction offers an overview of the life and work of Cornell Woolrich, with a particular focus on his place within the crime-fiction mediascape of mid-twentieth-century America. During his lifetime, Woolrich's novels and short stories were adapted at least twenty-one times by Hollywood filmmakers, forty-three times for US television, and seventy-one times for radio. His importance within what Frank Krutnik has called the ‘culture of suspense’ in 1940s and 1950s America – as well as to the specific formation of film noir – is a given. Yet Woolrich remains an obscure figure in comparison with ‘hard-boiled’ authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. This introduction seeks to account for that discrepancy in terms of the different position Woolrich occupied within the era's hierarchies of literary value. It also explores the oft-noted cinematic quality to Woolrich's prose, and the relation of his work to the films of Alfred Hitchcock, whose 1954 Rear Window remains the best-known adaptation of Woolrich's work.

Between the Movie and the Money: Packaging the 1970s Motion Tax Shelter

Histories of 1970s American cinema have often positioned tax shelter financing as the economic base that allowed for a flourishing of the “New Hollywood,” a cinematic period characterized by auteurist breaks with the narrative and stylistic conventions that previously standardized Hollywood filmmaking. This article investigates how such tax shelters operated in practice and made the motion picture industry part of a growing tax shelter industry. Specifically, I detail the work of the tax shelter “packager,” an industry figure who emerged as a liaison between motion picture organizations and sources of financing. In so doing, I argue that, while tax shelter financing did not give outside investors or firms meaningful control over the content of 1970s films, this practice placed motion picture investment within the growing financialization of the American economy and attendant strategies of high-income tax avoidance.

Quantifying the remake: A historical survey

American film remakes have enjoyed growing academic attention over the past 50 years. Together with prequels, sequels, reboots and spin-offs, they have been often viewed as exponents of contemporary recycling culture, symptomatic of Hollywood’s recent creative exhaustion and commercial risk aversion. In our article, we adopt a diachronic quantitative perspective to analyse and interpret the available metadata on 986 Hollywood remakes produced between 1915 and 2020. Our quantitative research shows the number of American remakes produced every year, their ratio in the total number of feature films produced annually, the percentage of remakes in the top most watched movies among the users of IMDb, as well as remake recency and percentage of remakes with titles recognizably linked to the original over the years. We find that popular convictions concerning the remarkable derivativity of contemporary American cinema stem from availability bias (accessibility of statistics concerning recent productions and relative neglect of historical data) and systemic differences in the function and prestige ascribed to feature film remakes by Old and New Hollywood filmmakers.

Acting and Race in Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Acting and Race in <i>Night of the Living Dead</i> (1968)

Review: Rock Star / Movie Star: Power and Performance in Cinematic Rock Stardom, by Landon Palmer

Review: <i>Rock Star / Movie Star: Power and Performance in Cinematic Rock Stardom</i>, by Landon Palmer

The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s by Matthew M. Lambert

<i>The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s</i> by Matthew M. Lambert

Max Steiner

Max Steiner provided music for over 300 films during a distinguished career that extended over three decades. He is justifiably celebrated for his scores in multiple film genres, including historical epics, romances, horror movies, and dramas. Less well known are Steiner’s contributions to film noir. Yet he is a leading composer for this dark trend in Hollywood filmmaking. Three factors go into this assessment: the number of noir films that he scored, the prestige of those films, and the overall quality of his music. The span of Steiner’s noir composition is nearly identical to that of the era itself, which is generally defined as 1940–1959. Depending on which films are viewed as film noirs, Steiner is the third or fourth most prolific composer for the genre. Among these are classics such as Mildred Pierce, The Big Sleep, Key Largo, and White Heat, a roster of noir heavies unmatched by any other composer. For the most part, his music for these films consistently reflects traits that we associate with Steiner’s other film scores. This overview focus on two qualities in these films: the use of pre-composed music and thematic material as characterization. Included in this survey are Steiner’s scores for Mildred Pierce, The Woman in White, The Beast with Five Fingers, City for Conquest, and The Death of a Scoundrel.

Investing in talent development: Theory and applications

This paper examines contractual arrangements in employment settings in which employers have to invest in development of employees, and the benefits of that training are at least partially transferrable to rival employers. The problem is how to incentivize firms to make the necessary investments when employees cannot self-finance due to liquidity constraints and/or a low probability of success. Applications of the model include rules that once governed employment relations in major league baseball and Hollywood filmmaking, and noncompete clauses that limit the outside options of departing employees. The conclusions are also applied to the problem of financing of college costs.

Jacques Tati and the Philosophy of the Sight Gag

Abstract In his article “Notes on the Sight Gag” from 1991, the philosopher Noël Carroll proposed a taxonomy of sight gags that recur throughout the genre of comedian comedy in cinema. This article revisits and augments Carroll’s taxonomy by analyzing the sight gags found in the films of Jacques Tati (1907-1982). Tati worked in a very different context than that of the silent Hollywood filmmakers from whose comic films Carroll largely derives his categories. He began making films in the sound era, and five of his six feature films were made in color. As a French filmmaker, he also sought to adapt the genre of comedian comedy in cinema to his culturally specific concerns. This article shows that he drew on at least three of the types of sight gag identified by Carroll. But he modified some of them and innovated several other kinds.

‘For better or for worse, there is history, there is the book and then there's the movie’: Foregrounding and Marginalizing African American Women in the Film Hidden Figures (2016)

This paper critically examines the representation of gender and race in the biographical drama film Hidden Figures (2016), directed by Theodore Melfi. The film is based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s nonfiction book of the same title, which spotlights previously hidden figures in US history: the black female mathematicians who worked in the early US space program. The movie was released to critical acclaim and embraced by audiences as empowering African American girls. At the same time, the film was criticized for including a ‘white savior’ scene in which the black female protagonists are marginalized.&#x0D; After providing background information on Shetterly’s book and the film’s critical reception, this paper conducts a close formal analysis of a pivotal sequence in the film, which is compared to the events told in the nonfiction book. To shed light on the power structures that the film sequence projects, the results of this analysis are, subsequently, related to critical theoretical approaches to Hollywood cinema, as well as to Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘affective economies.’ In conclusion, we argue that Hollywood filmmakers’ expectations about the desires of ‘mainstream’ audiences work to perpetuate the repression of previously repressed herstory on the ‘silver screen.’

EWOKS VERSUS DEAD HEROES: CREATIVE CONFLICT IN WRITING RETURN OF THE JEDI

The original Star Wars trilogy established a storytelling model that still influences Hollywood filmmaking today. However, the third episode in the saga, Return of the Jedi (1983), was received less favorably than its predecessors by critics. This article will examine historical record and analyze aspects of syuzhet (‘plot’) and fabula (‘story’) (BORDWELL, 1985, pp. 49-50) in the screenplay in order to establish why Return of the Jedi works less successfully as a narrative than the first two films. The results of the investigation suggest that this was due to a fundamental philosophical conflict between screenwriters George Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan.

The Last Picture Show: Reconsidering Nostalgia, Desire and the Real

Peter Bogdanovich's masterpieceThe Last Picture Show(1971) remains a highly influential example of 1970s New Hollywood filmmaking. Yet it has largely escaped the sustained critical attention enjoyed by many of its contemporaries. This article seeks to revisit the status of the film and its critical reputation. Amongst the critics who have appraised this unique film, opinion is split. On the one hand, it remains an influential example of the “post-western” impulse in the American New Wave. On the other hand, it has been critically maligned as a “nostalgia film.” This article revisits these perspectives and argues that a holistic understanding of the inner dynamics of the film must necessarily take both perspectives into account. It examines how these dynamics are organized around a central formal tension between the cinematic codes of the western and those of social realism. Finally, it argues that the pejorative critical categorization ofThe Last Picture Showas a “nostalgia film” does not adequately grasp its rich, complex and contradictory affects. Instead, it proposes that the sense of loss, nostalgia and disappointment that Bogdanovich articulates can be read as an expression of that confrontation between “Desire” and the “Real” that the Marxian critic Fredric Jameson theorized was central to the “political unconscious.”

Review: Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960, by Liza Black

Review: <i>Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960</i>, by Liza Black

The Resisting Spectator and the Green Mile

Contemporary Hollywood filmmakers often look to classical Hollywood cinema for inspiration. In doing so, they also often coopt the codes of production of the earlier era of Hollywood filmmaking and reproduce its racist stereotypes of blacks. The memory film, The Green Mile, is an example of such a film. Reading the film as a resisting spectator, a term coined by the film scholar Manthia Diawara, I show how in making a return to classical Hollywood cinema and to the codes of production of the D.W. Griffith film, The Birth of a Nation, the film sacrifices the opportunity to tell a compelling story about black incarceration and criminal justice reform for a windfall at the box office.

The Iceman Cometh: “An unique dramatic achievement” (Tennessee Williams, letter to Eugene O'Neill, November 6, 1946)

<i>The Iceman Cometh</i>: “An unique dramatic achievement” (Tennessee Williams, letter to Eugene O'Neill, November 6, 1946)

Interrogating (neo)colonialism in the contemporary western: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015)

This article analyses Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015) as a contemporary western, exploring how it interrogates the overt coloniality and Anglocentrism associated with the western genre and the source story of nineteenth-century fur trapper Hugh Glass on which the film is based. Through narrative and textual analysis, the article suggests that the addition of active indigenous characters into Glass’ story, as well as the film’s focus on the genocidal violence inflicted on native peoples and self-conscious realist strategies, challenge the inherent colonialism of the western. It also points out, however, that the scope of these indigenous narratives is limited and made secondary to the narrative of the White fur trapper and how The Revenant falls back on some of the stereotypical representational norms of the generic western. The article argues that this duality, where the film both challenges and reifies the colonialist norms of the western, is a result of the film’s interstitial position in-between the industrial and genre norms of contemporary Hollywood filmmaking and Iñárritu’s specific auteurist, postcolonial and ideological vision.

No Crips Allowed: Magical Negroes, Black Superheroes, And the Hyper-Abled Black Male Body In Steven Spielberg's Amistad and Ryan Coogler's Black Panther

No Crips Allowed:Magical Negroes, Black Superheroes, And the Hyper-Abled Black Male Body In Steven Spielberg's Amistad and Ryan Coogler's Black Panther Charles I. Nero (bio) Initially, it might seem odd to discuss shared racial tropes in Amistad and Black Panther. Not only were the movies created over two decades apart, the films belong to entirely different cinematic genres. Steven Spielberg's Amistad (1997) is a historical period drama that is based on the true story of an armed insurrection aboard a 19th century slave ship. Ryan Coogler's Black Panther (2018) is a fantasy film that focuses on a futuristic advanced mythical kingdom in Africa that produces superheroes. Nevertheless, these films are connected by their subject matter and a recurring strategy. At their cores, both films emphasize Black resistance to the white supremacy that trans-Atlantic slavery and European imperialism necessitated. Both films deploy as strategy the hyper-abled Black male body as a tool for resisting white supremacy and colonialism. I call attention to the hyper-abled Black male body in these two films specifically to focus on the Black disability that trans-Atlantic slavery produced. I am writing along the lines of Nirmala Erevelles brilliant reading of Hortense Spillers's now-classic essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," in which producing and maintaining slavery required the impairment of Black bodies. The racialization of slavery meant that Blackness was always impaired, or, as Erevelles concludes, it was "at the historical moment when one class of human beings was transformed into cargo to be transported to the New World that Black bodies become disabled and disabled bodies become black."1 On the one hand, Amistad reflects upon the trans-Atlantic slave experience, while Black Panther showcases a Black nation that was spared this terrible ordeal; yet, both create magical worlds in which Black people are hyper-abled. Subsequently, in this essay, I examine the limits of the hyper-abled Black body as a tool of resistance; I also raise the question of whether such a dependence upon a specific gendered type--hyper-abled masculinity--reproduces a logic of white supremacy that equates Blackness with physicality, yet simultaneously denies Black intellect, therefore refuting political agency, or the rights of citizenship. [End Page 52] Amistad Prior the film's debut in 1997, Steven Spielberg and the film's producer, African American dancer and actress Debbie Allen, held blockbuster aspirations for Amistad. Both believed that Amistad could build upon the success of Schindler's List, Spielberg's historical period blockbuster from 1993. The commercial and critical success of Schindler's List had cemented Spielberg's status as a "serious filmmaker," though Spielberg was long credited with developing films that defined Hollywood filmmaking during the 1970s-1990s: namely, Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Poltergeist (1982), the franchises that stemmed from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Jurassic Park (1993). Despite the success of these previous films, Amistad was not the powerhouse that Spielberg and Allen had imagined. Instead, Amistad barely recouped its investment and it failed among critics, arguably because the film confused audiences. A possible source of this confusion was because of the decision to transform a genuine story of resistance into an "interracial buddy film," a subgenre that became popular during the Civil Rights Movement and subsequently expanded to include Hollywood cop film franchises, such as Lethal Weapon (beginning in 1987), Beverly Hills Cop (beginning in 1984),48 Hours (beginning in 1982), Independence Day (1996) and Men In Black (beginning in 1997). These films celebrate the developing bonds between Black and white men who overcome their racial differences and learn to work together to solve a crime, prevent corruption, or even save the planet from alien invasion. At stake in these movies are the interracial relationships between the crime-fighting duos; certainly, the buffed bodies of the captured Africans suggested this possibility. The fitness of the Beninese actor Djimon Hounsou, who played Cinque, the leader of the insurrection, was especially notable. Previously known as a fashion model, Hounsou's first cinematic appearance was as "eye candy" in the pop star Janet Jackson's video "Love...