Reviewed by: The Studios after the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood (1970–2010) by J. D. Connor Thomas Schatz (bio) The Studios after the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood (1970–2010) by J. D. Connor. Stanford University Press, 2015. $45.00 hardcover. Also available in e-book. 376 pages. Among the thorniest questions in the field of film studies is how to reconcile the long-standing traditions of formal and textual analysis with the burgeoning subfield of media industry studies. J. D. Connor poses a provocative answer in The Studios after the Studios, arguing that "with very few exceptions, we have not explored Hollywood's peculiar sort of self-representation in sufficient detail, and we have not committed ourselves to reading films as corporate and industrial allegories as deeply as we should."1 The need to employ this mode of allegorical "decryption"—that is, to be "reading the stories on the screen as the stories of Hollywood itself"—has been noted often enough by critics and journalists as well as scholars. In fact, Connor opens his book with a passing comment by Peter Biskind in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls about the 1984 Warner Bros. release Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (Hugh Hudson, 1984): "Like every Hollywood movie, on some level it was about the business."2 Biskind scarcely pursues the idea, however, and among the "few exceptions" who have is Jerome Christensen in his American's Corporate [End Page 153] Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures, which "makes the most sustained case yet that movies are about the business."3 Connor's objective is to both advance and refine that effort by focusing on Hollywood during what he terms the "neoclassical era"—that is, since about 1970, when a combination of social, economic, and aesthetic forces sparked the industry's recovery from a crippling postwar (and postclassical) slide. "Hollywood neoclassicism was in large part an effort to brand movies and their studios, and in the case of the major franchises, it succeeded," contends Connor. "In the process, movies became more 'about the business' than ever."4 Although Connor is interested in marketing campaigns and the ever-increasing amount of paratextual material generated in the promotion and recirculation of movies, his primary focus is on film texts themselves, which often convey "the circumstances and motives behind their composition." And as is Christensen, he is a proponent of very traditional textual analysis, albeit with a set of unconventional objectives. "The claim here," he writes, "is that the close-reading techniques that might seem best suited to the understanding of films as works or artworks should be extended to their creation and marketing." He cites two key reasons for this hermeneutic extension, both of which involve authorship and authority. One is that "this methodological fusion captures the role of the particular film project in the elaboration of an ongoing corporate or collective identity." At the same time—and somewhat contradictorily—this approach examines the industry's "attempt to harmonize or at least simultaneously explore films and the labor that constitutes them."5 Connor also poses two very reasonable questions at the outset: "How widespread are these allegories? And how important are they to the operation of the system?" Although he doesn't explicitly answer the first question, the ensuing analysis suggests that the allegorical impulse was ubiquitous—particularly with regard to certain genres (including nostalgia films, dance musicals, and historical epics), companies (notably Paramount, Warner Bros., and Universal), and directors (most prominently Steven Spielberg, predictably enough). In the course of the book, he analyzes Hollywood's peculiar approach to self-representation in a wide array of films and across entire texts, from the opening "logo play" and title sequences to the closing credits. Connor is more direct but also more circumspect regarding his second question. "The history of the system is crucially the history of the incorporation of a way of reading it" within studio films themselves, argues Connor, although he seems to let himself off the hook a few pages later when he writes, "These allegories are insistent, yet their importance is always deniable, downgradable to an in-joke, reducible to a token of industrial privacy inessential to the appreciation...
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