Paramount Pictures Research Articles

A Mountain Standing: Paramount

With the rapid growth and evolution of the global media industry, Paramount Pictures, Inc. is facing unprecedented opportunities and challenges. As a long-established film production and distribution giant, Paramount is breaking new ground to maintain its leadership position in the global entertainment industry. This paper will explain why Paramount can be expected to become a dominant entertainment business after over a decade in terms of its corporate background, current strategy, reasons why it can continue to thrive, future challenges, and development proposals.

Reanimating experimental psychology: Media archaeology, Hugo Münsterberg, and the ‘Testing the Mind’ film series

For historians of psychology, Hugo Münsterberg is best remembered as William James’ successor as director of the Harvard Psychological Laboratory and a pioneer of applied psychology. By contrast, for film and media studies scholars, Münsterberg is recognized less for his contributions to experimental psychology than for those to film theory, a field in which his penultimate book, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916), is frequently claimed as an inaugural text. However, lost in the blind spots of both disciplinary perspectives has been a thorough examination of Münsterberg's collaboration with Paramount Pictures, translating psychological tests into experimental short films. Despite reaching millions of moviegoers in 1916, Münsterberg’s ‘Testing the Mind’ series has received little attention from historians of science and early cinema alike. One reason for this neglect is that, to date, not a single extant copy of a ‘Testing the Mind’ release has been located. This article is about the author's efforts, in collaboration with students, to reanimate these lost psychological tests for the screen through meticulous historical reconstruction based on the original scripts, journalistic accounts, and correspondence between Münsterberg and Paramount. This reconstructive process, I show, yields new insights into the relationship between psychology and early cinema and an opportunity for reflection on this promising new space for research at the intersection of media archaeology, the history of psychology, and experimental history of science. Film URL: https://archive.org/details/munsterberg_paramount.pictographs

Kung Fu Panda: The Value of Chinese Culture in Digital Films

The digital film Kung Fu Panda, produced by DreamWorks Animation of Paramount Pictures, has immediately become a hotspot worldwide since it was released in 2008. The essential reason for its bloom lies in that the film integrates Chinese culture with the spirit of the age; more specifically, by using digital film technology professionally, Chinese culture is embodied in the elements of the film, such as characters, dialogues, actions, music, scenes, etc. In a word, digital film technology brings out eye-catching brilliance when fused into Chinese culture; at the same time, Chinese culture presents immeasurable artistic and market value in digital films.

The Silent Enemy (1930) and n’Daki Menan: Reclaiming Mise-en-Scène as Authorial Expression

Paramount Pictures’ The Silent Enemy, released in 1930, is a fascinating cultural artifact made and released during the transition from silent to sound film. One of the last silent feature films made by the studio, this critically acclaimed film took three years to make and was shot in large part on location on n’Daki Menan, the traditional territory of the Teme Augama Anishnabai in northern Ontario. Like other silent films made in Indigenous communities during this period such as Curtis’ In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914) and Myles’ The Daughter of Dawn (1920), The Silent Enemy employed local Indigenous actors and drew on their knowledge and traditions to construct its vision of pre-contact Anishinaabe life. While the exact location and community are never mentioned in The Silent Enemy itself, local Anishinaabe people were hired to act in the film and make the costumes and sets according to pre-contact standards, all elements of the film form that added greatly to the production’s claims of authenticity. This cultural labour went uncredited and unacknowledged. While the film recycles the prominent ethnographic narrative of the dying “Indian” culture, it does feature ironic moments of Indigenous survivance, such as an introductory sequence with Chief Yellow Robe shot in synchronized sound, naturalistic performances, material culture designed by locals that continue to captivate community members, and over-the-top colonial takes on pre-contact life. Until now, most readings of this silent feature focused on the celebrity image of Chief Long Lance and his “outing” as an African American and its use of Native American actors in leading roles, but for far too long, the story of its long-lasting influence as both a personal and a public historical artifact for the Teme Augama Anishnabai has not been told. The authors’ method for telling this story will alternate between oral storytelling and scholarly analysis of the film’s formal and thematic elements. The authors hope that by drawing on oral and traditional storytelling approaches, Indigenous ways of knowing will be foregrounded.

In Search of Zora Neale Hurston in Hollywood

Zora Neale Hurston was an author, playwright, anthropologist, and, briefly, a screenwriter. Paramount Pictures hired Hurston in 1941, but there is little documentation of her work for the studio. The brief mentions that exist reveal that Hurston worked on the script for an unproduced musical called Very Hot in Haiti. Yet, information about the unfilmed project is scarce. In this essay, I explore Hurston’s work for Paramount through a speculative approach: I analyze the documents that are known—trade papers, newspapers, production data, and Hurston’s writings—to inform speculation about the unknown, and potentially unknowable, aspects of her experience. In short, I ask: What might Hurston have worked on at Paramount? And what do those possibilities suggest or reveal about Hurston and studio-era Hollywood? The results demonstrate the power of taking a speculative, contextual, deductive approach to analysis of underdocumented historical figures.

Confronting Anti-Asian Racism in Art and Visual Culture Education

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsRyan ShinRyan Shin, Professor, Art and Visual Culture Education, School of Art, University of Arizona in Tucson. Email: shin@email.arizona.eduJaehan BaeJaehan Bae, Professor of Art Education, Department of Art, University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh in Oshkosh. Email: baej@uwosh.eduBorim SongBorim Song, Associate Professor of Art Education, School of Art & Design, East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. Email: songb@ecu.eduNotes1 A popular trope stereotyping Asian women is the Dragon Lady, featured as cunning and deceitful. The Dragon Lady uses her sexuality as a powerful tool of manipulation but often is emotionally and sexually cold and threatens masculinity. A contemporary example of the Dragon Lady is the Japanese Yakuza leader O-Ren Ishii (played by Lucy Liu) in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (Tarantino, 2003 Tarantino, Q. (Director). (2003). Kill Bill Vol. 1 [Film]. Miramax. [Google Scholar]). Another popular stereotype is the Lotus of Blossom. Memoirs of a Geisha (Marshall, 2005 Marshall, R. (Director). (2005). Memoirs of a geisha [Film]. Columbia Pictures. [Google Scholar]) epitomizes the Lotus of Blossom (sometimes called the China Doll) trope as feminine, shy, fragile, subservient, and sexually submissive. In Mean Girls (Waters, 2004 Waters, M. (Director). (2004). Mean girls [Film]. Paramount Pictures. [Google Scholar]), the names of two Asian girl students are Trang Pak (played by Ky Pham) and Sun Jin Dinh (played by Danielle Nguyen); both these names are mash-ups of Vietnamese and Korean family names. In this film, the most problematic story of Asian woman stereotypes is that the two Asian high schoolers (Trang Pak and Sun Jin Dinh) are both entangled in a romance with their much older White gym teacher, Coach Carr (played by Dwayne Hill), a joke that underlines the fetishizing of Asian women.2 The series of Asian women portrait posters can be downloaded at https://www.istillbelieve.nyc/downloads.3 Monyee Chau’s poster can be downloaded at https://www.chinesebornamerican.com/weareresilient.4 All student names in this article are pseudonyms.

Bleak Reclamation: Anthracite Mining Moods

ABSTRACT In the late 1960s, the hills and valleys of Pennsylvania’s anthracite region came alive via two imaginative responses to the devastation of strip-mined landscapes. Paramount Pictures’ The Molly Maguires and a multiyear Penn State landscape architecture study both attempted to make something new of gouged, abandoned land. This article argues that these reclamation attempts relied upon the attraction of melancholic landscapes. The filmmakers and landscape scholars assumed that places of ruin provoked emotional reactions in viewers and visitors, producing ambiguous moods of pastness. Part contemplation and part sensation, these moods were intended to make people feel their way into new, complex relationships with the land. This article analyzes these projects within scholarly conversations about the historical dimensions of landscape tourism, the narrative framing of Appalachia, and the cultural significance of moods.

Bringing queerness to the surface: Truman Capote’s November 1971 screenplay adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Truman Capote occupied a queer position as an openly gay man adapting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for the screen in the homophobic Hollywood system of the early 1970s. In January 1972, Paramount Pictures rejected Capote’s Gatsby screenplay and dismissed him from the film entirely. In this study, I investigate a tenuous claim that has circulated for decades: that Capote was fired from the project because he wrote Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker as queer characters. I argue that Capote deployed what Alexander Doty calls ‘working-within-the-system tactics’ to suggest queerness that would be apparent to viewers accustomed to interpreting media outside of dominant codes dictated by heteronormative conventions, while also using what licence he had to incorporate more explicitly queer moments. This article contributes to research on Capote’s manuscript with a close reading of queerness in the text, and an account of the personal and professional struggles related to queer identity that Capote faced while developing the script.

Cinema’s Cosmic Shifts

Cinema’s Cosmic Shifts

Hollywood and the Spanish Civil War: The Hidden Anti-Fascist Ideology of Love Under Fire (1937)

When the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) began, Hollywood immediately rushed to create screenplays about the conflict. However, only three fiction films were made during the course of the war: The Last Train From Madrid (James Hogan, Paramount Pictures, 1937), Love Under Fire (George Marshall, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1937) and Blockade (William Dieterle, Walter Wanger/United Artists, 1938). This article examines Love Under Fire, a production that has scarcely been studied and which remains commercially unavailable. The research has made it possible to establish that, despite its appearance as an inoffensive film that adheres to the Hays Office guidelines of impartiality, Love Under Fire is neither apolitical nor neutral, but has an anti-Franco, anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi ideological subtext. In fact, archival material from the MPAA/PCA Records reveals that the film was deliberately conceived from the outset to be anti-Axis powers. Finally, the article endeavours to explain why a commercial Hollywood production company persisted in its efforts to infiltrate this ideology into the film, at the risk of undermining its box-office performance, and will demonstrate that this was due to the overwhelming mass rejection of The Siege of the Alcazar, a frustrated personal project of Darryl F. Zanuck, which was to be produced by the same company and had a completely opposite ideology.

A Kiss for Cinderella (1925) The Importance of Historical Accuracy in Reconstructing Scores to Silent Films Based on the Mirskey Collection

Abstract Collections of silent film music constitute valuable sources for historical research on the musical practice in the silent film era. The musical prints preserved in the Mirskey Collection were previously used by the author to reconstruct a score for the movie A Kiss for Cinderella (1925, dir. Herbert Brenon). This article describes the historical context considered during the reconstruction and discusses the workflow applied by Nek Mirskey (Bronisław Mirski) as a musical director of movie theatres. A comparative analysis of sheet music from the Mirskey Collection accompanied by handwritten notes, original cue sheet compiled by James Bradford for the Paramount Pictures, and a digitised copy of the film, have led to conclusions that are applicable not only to Mirskey's methods of compiling scores, but also to the more general rules for the development of musical accompaniments to silent films in the 1920s.

Kyra Markham: An Introduction

Kyra Markham: An Introduction

Movie Review “The Firm (1993)”, Director: Sydney Pollack, Written by: David Rabe, Robert Towne, David Rayfiel, Daniel Pyne. Production: Paramount Pictures

The Firm is a 1993 American legal thriller film directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Tom Cruise, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Gene Hackman, Ed Harris, Holly Hunter, Hal Holbrook, and David Strathairn. The film is based on the 1991 novel The Firm by author John Grisham. A young lawyer joins a small but prestigious law firm only to find out that most of their clients are on the wrong side of the law. The company is helping to launder mob money, get clients off charges and even murder partners who threaten to blow their cover, but when the FBI come calling to gather evidence on the lawyer's colleagues, he is caught between a rock and a hard place, juggling his life and his liberty.

A Youtube Showing that it is not Cool nor Healthy to Smoke - An Online Typeform Survey Analysis

Background The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention cite a WHO report, on the Global Tobacco Epidemic [2019] stating it causes more than 7 million deaths globally/year. MethodsA YouTube was created based upon the Audrey Hepburn Breakfast at Tiffany’s theme. Paramount Pictures Aust/NZ were contacted asking permission to utilise the theme, but didn’t reply. The TouTube has Audrey smoking, while another woman makes comments to convey the health dangers & smoking unacceptability. A Typeform online survey created in August 2021 allowed accessibility to the general public enabling generation of an online convenience survey. Questions focused on the participant’s opinion regarding the idea’s general usefulness, whether the messages about unacceptability and potential harm were conveyed and lastly whether the viewer thought it had potential to change smoking habits. ResultsThe survey was viewed 127 times, 60 people commenced the survey, and 27 completed it [completion rate; 45%, average time; 5 minutes]. Opinions on the YouTube general usefulness were; extremely [7.7%], very [42.3%], somewhat [26.9%], neutral/unsure [19.2%] or no [3.8%]. In terms of conveying that smoking is foul or disgusting replies were; extremely [32%], very much [40%], somewhat [20%], neutral/unsure [8%] or not at all [0%]. In terms of conveying harmfulness replies were; extremely [30.8%], very much [30.8%], somewhat [38.5%], neutral/unsure [0%] or not at all [0%]. In terms of the potential to change habits replies were; extremely [7.4%], very much [22.2%], somewhat [25.9%], neutral/unsure [29.6%] or not at all [14.8%].DiscussionThis novel YouTube seems to be a plausible, useful idea if you consider the replies of survey respondents. Typeform is also an easy, online package with which to generate survey forms. Conclusion Ideas such as this maybe interesting, but in terms of assessing ability to alter habits, that determination would require additional research, funding and thought and maybe indeterminable.

Militarization: A Reader ed. by Roberto J. Gonzalez et al., and: Militarized Global Apartheid by Catherine Besteman

Reviewed by: Militarization: A Reader ed. by Roberto J. Gonzalez et al., and: Militarized Global Apartheid by Catherine Besteman Leah Zani Roberto J. Gonzalez, Hugh Gusterson, and Gustaaf Houtman, eds. Militarization: A Reader. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 424 pp. Catherine Besteman. Militarized Global Apartheid. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. 208 pp. I open Militarization: A Reader and find a brief editor's note explaining that the volume is the result of an initiative by the Network of Concerned Anthropologists (NCA) to oppose the militarization of anthropology.1 The editors—Roberto Gonzalez, Hugh Gusterson, and Gustaaf Houtman—are all founding members of the NCA. The table of contents includes many other NCA members, including Catherine Besteman (author of Militarized Global Apartheid), Andrew Bickford, David Price, David Vine, and Catherine Lutz. The NCA formed as an independent network of US-based anthropologists promoting an ethical, demilitarized anthropology that refuses to participate in the US Army's Human Terrain System and related projects of the war on terror.2 These scholars are building on a century-old tradition of critical anthropological engagement with the American war machine, going back to Franz Boas's (1919) indictment of American anthropologists who worked as spies during World War I. The NCA previously published The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual (2009) (a teardown of the US Army-Marine Corps's Counterinsurgency Field Manual), with an excerpt from the text appearing in the final section of the Reader. Thus, I initially thought of Militarization: A Reader as the group's unofficial next book. To my surprise, the edited collection is a very different kind of book, softer and more invitational. The introduction begins with an account of toy soldiers: a son's love of toy soldiers, his father's grief after the death of his son in war, the father who then modifies toy soldiers as a memorial to [End Page 475] his son. The volume's cover image—a GI Joe army man—can, at first, be easily mistaken for a real soldier. It's a heartrending ethnographic account of father-son relations in a militarized American society that sells war to children. The editors go on to discuss the military-industrial complex, the invention of action figures in the 1950s, as well as ongoing collaborations between the Pentagon, Paramount Pictures, and Hasbro to design new weapons systems alongside the films and toys that feature them. The gentle, empathetic introduction shies just short of an overt critique of American militarism. There is no mention of the editors' founding membership in the NCA or the organization's mandate. The editors go right up to that line and then stop. I put the book down, confused. Where are the Concerned Anthropologists? The editors bring a compelling and timely ethic of demilitarization to our discipline—one that I share. However, I would have liked the editors to explicitly disclose that ethic in the body of the work. Back in 2019, when the collection went to press, I would likely have agreed with this gentler approach. But 2020 was a crucible of a year that has made the concerns of this volume feel more urgent. Published in 2020, by comparison, Besteman's Militarized Global Apartheid is outraged and uncompromising. Amid a global pandemic, the Reader's softness now feels a bit too parental. We've grown up. The study of militarism has become more necessary and our responsibility more pressing to model ethical anthropology. We live in a world radically transformed by pervasive militarization, especially American militarization. The Reader is a much-needed cross-cultural reference for militarization in different contexts with a focus on the United States and its outsized impact on global conflict. The volume's strength is its comprehensive coverage and intersectional, multidisciplinary approach to militarization and its impacts. The edited collection is divided into 12 sections organized by theme, each section heralded by an introductory essay: Militarization and Political Economy; Military Labor; Gender and Militarism; The Emotional Life of Militarism; Rhetorics of Militarism; Militarization, Place, and Territory; Militarized Humanitarianism; Militarism and the Media; Militarizing Knowledge; Militarization and the Body; Militarism and Technology; and, lastly, Alternatives to Militarization. There are many entrances into the study of militarization, and this...

Subtle Serpent Symbolism within Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949)

American-born Episcopalian Cecil Blount DeMille1 (1881–1959), affectionately known as “CB,” is a legendary co-founder of Hollywood, a progenitor of Paramount Pictures, and a legitimate but unsung a...

‘I am (not) Major’: anti-fan memes of Paramount Pictures’ Ghost in the Shell marketing campaign

ABSTRACT This article examines Paramount Pictures’ marketing of its 2017 live-action remake of the 1995 Japanese cult anime Ghost in the Shell and online audiences’ responses to it. Analysing the trailers, the article argues that Paramount dually serves existing fans via visually quoting the original film’s iconic imagery, and new wider audiences by promoting the remake as an A-list blockbuster via emphasising its lead Scarlett Johansson. Analysing 315 audience-made memes produced by Paramount Pictures’ viral marketing ‘meme generator’ evidences users’ responses’ anti-fan, anti-orientalist, and anti-whitewashing discourses towards the remake, its star, and Hollywood. In doing so, users perform a range of intersectional identities that read against the remake, whereby memes signify audiences’ reading of the trailers and themselves into existence when posting such content online. To conceptualise this, the article uses Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial third space, arguing that both memes’ meaning and users’ identity inscriptions occur interstitially. Resultantly, the article adds to the scarce work on media promotional materials, gives much-needed attention to online image texts, and highlights the saliency of race as part of the intersectional make-up of audience’ identities and reading strategies.

Case study: Integrating artificial intelligence metadata within Paramount’s digital asset management system

The Stills Archive team at Paramount Pictures Asset Management Group is responsible for the preservation and digitisation of all photography and artwork created in conjunction with each title produced by the studio. The studio’s digital asset management (DAM) system is a customised solution built on a trusted and widely used asset management platform. By partnering with a third-party artificial intelligence (AI) service, the DAM system creates AI metadata to coexist with human-generated metadata. Over the past year, Paramount’s Stills Archive team has experimented with this new metadata technology with the goal of streamlining workflow procedures in preservation and reducing the time spent on research requests. This paper outlines the vision, goals, implementation process and challenges associated with this endeavour.

Bringing the News from Ghent to Axanar: Fan Works and Copyright after Deckmyn and Subsequent Developments

Fan works offer a lens through which to view the complex future of copyright law. Recent years have seen an explosion in academic interest in fan works, for reasons including the ongoing crisis in copyright law, changes in the way we consume copyrighted content, and increasing interest in fandom itself. Scholarship on fan works has continued to explore the key questions of fair use, parody, and First Amendment protection that allow fan works to exist yet fail to clearly delineate the boundaries of the legal twilight zone in which they reside and thrive. It has also continued to address the intersection between fanfic and gender and what this says about the gendered nature of intellectual property law. Much has also been written about the future of copyright in general, and of fan works in particular, often looking at fan works from new perspectives, including law and economics and the closely related vexing problem, for content owners, of how to address possible infringement without alienating the fanbase. This article looks at recent developments relating to fanfic first by looking at the historical context and current state of fan works, and next by looking at story elements and the ways in which they are and are not protected by copyright. The article devotes special attention to the related issues of cultural appropriation and reinterpretation, looking at Own Voices stories and street murals as a means of reclaiming a right to cultural property appropriated by others. The article then looks at the shrinking space for online fan works, with a look at two fairly recent decisions dealing with works based on existing popular culture franchises. One, Paramount Pictures Corp. v. Axanar Productions, deals with true fan art (a Star Trek fan film), while the other, Deckmyn v. Vandersteen, deals with hate speech masquerading as fan art. Ultimately the article concludes that there is both good and bad news for fans in the current situation. The good news is that the formerly frustratingly nebulous legal status of fan works is increasingly coming to be understood by fan work creators, courts, and content owners. The bad news is that the balance of powers in copyright generally, is increasingly shifting to large content owners.

Film Review: Star Trek: The Early Years

Even though most of us were not even born when the Star Trek original TV series run, during the late 1970s, but I’m sure most college students must be familiar with Star Trek reruns and the Star Trek movie trilogy. In my initial formative years, I have been a Star Trek fan, calling myself a Trekkie and showcasing my knowledge about Star Trek movies at every social gathering. So, when I heard that Star Trek was bound to return with director J.J. Abrams, I got really excited about it, but I was unsure if the revision of Trek would resemble the original series. Finally, Star Trek (Paramount Pictures) retuned in 2009 with a prequel – The Early Years, that wasn’t destined to match the heights of its original franchise but nevertheless the young actors in the movie have managed to put up a brave show.