US Movie Research Articles

Trends in US movie tobacco portrayal since 1950: a historical analysis

ObjectivePortrayal of tobacco use in films has been causally linked to youth smoking initiation. However, findings regarding trends in portrayal in US films since 1950 are inconsistent, potentially due to...

The Art of Creative Scriptural Extrapolation

THE ART OF CREATIVE SCRIPTURAL EXTRAPOLATION: BITHIAH, MERED AND I CHRONICLES 4:18 WITHIN CECIL B. DE MILLE'S THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956) DeMille: Master of the American Biblical Epic THE LEGENDARY Cecil B. DeMille(1) (1881-1959), affectionately know as "CB," was a seminal cofounder of Hollywood and a progenitor of Paramount studio who helped turn an obscure Californian orange grove into a major US movie production centre that became the synonym for filmmaking worldwide.(2) Not only did this pioneering "auteur of auteurs"(3) help institute "the Age of Hollywood,"(4) and is today considered "one of the comparatively few filmmakers who might justifiably be described as a 'household name'"(5), but he also earned an international reputation as the master of the American biblical epic and awarded such honorific tags as: "King of the epic Biblical spectacular,"(6) the "arch apostle of spectacle,"(7) the "high priest...

An empirical investigation of the Paramount antitrust case

Production patterns in the US movie industry changed drastically between 1940 and 1960. During these decades, a major event took place: the Paramount antitrust case was resolved by the US Supreme Court in 1948. As a result, the five largest studios (MGM, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers and RKO) were forced to vertically disintegrate and separate production and distribution from exhibition. The Supreme Court also banned these and three other studios (Columbia, Universal and United Artists) from using block booking as contractual practice. In this article, I examine how this antitrust ruling affected the movie industry.

Learning from broadcasts of project participation: selection of second-tier actors during project-venture formation in the movie industry, 1931—40

The disintegration of project ventures after task completion creates challenges for the retention and transfer of knowledge to future projects. Consequently, it is not clear to what degree and under what conditions learning across projects occurs in project-venture settings. This study argues that the industry-wide broadcasting of project participants' identities plays a key role in supporting performance-outcome learning during the formation of project-venture teams. In a stratified random sample of 233 US movie projects between 1931 and 1940, performance-outcome learning affected the selection of second-tier participants. Such learning, however, was conditional on the industry-level availability of both project participant information and project performance for prior projects. Industry-wide broadcasting of participants' identities by individual projects in the form of on-screen credits was sufficient to enable this form of performance-outcome learning in the movie industry. The emergence of the internet has created similar industry-wide broadcasting opportunities for other project-venture systems.

SU-FF-J-123: US Remains a Viable and Important Complementary Modality for Image-Guided RT

Purpose: We propose that by integrating a unique user interface,calibration protocol and tumor motion assessment strategy, that USimaging can provide a useful tool for image‐guidedradiation therapy. Its high temporal precision and direct tissue imaging provides a compelling advantage over systems that rely on motion surrogates. We developed a system that uses a unique spatialcalibration protocol that allows it to be transported to any room possessing three‐point lasers. The system also allows live overlay of a spatially registered 3DCT data set and the USimage.Methods:Testing was performed using two anatomical phantoms and a programmable motion table. The spatialcalibration was determined by touching the tip of the articulating arm to the standard three point laser positions. A GE Lightspeed scanner was used to acquire 4DCT images. High and low contrast test objects were evaluated. The peak‐peak motion amplitude of the test objects was measured on the 4DCT scans using three reconstruction data sets; Max/Min pixel intensity, Average pixel intensity, and 4D movie loop. The motion of the test objects was also measured using the US system. Results: The three point calibration procedure yielded accurate registration to within the precision of the system (1–2 mm). Assessment of the user interface was qualitative but demonstrated that the superposition of CT and USdata sets facilitated discrimination of US artifacts. The US and 4DCT movie loop methods yielded the most accurate motion results. The maximum/minimum pixel intensity reconstructions yielded consistent results but tended to under‐estimate the motion by a few millimeters. The 4DCT average pixel intensity reconstruction did not perform well for the low contrast object. Conclusions: Integrated US and 4DCT is accurate in assessing respiratory‐induced tissue motion. These modalities are complimentary, with US providing good temporal resolution and CT providing excellent geometric accuracy in most situations. NIHEB002899.

Defending the Penguin Army: An Inconvenient Truth

Sir John Houghton, former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s scientific assessment working group, has argued that we must think of global warming as a weapon of mass destruction, on a par with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and terrorism.1 Yet the most powerful state in the world, the United States, regards terrorism as a much more serious threat than global warming, even though the latter is set to cause far more destruction and loss of lives (and livelihoods) than the former. The costs of the Iraq War to the United States are now greater than the expected costs of the USA meeting its Kyoto targets.2 But as the UK Stern Report on the economic costs of climate change makes clear, if you don’t like the mitigation bill for global warming, just wait until you see the damage bill. An Inconvenient Truth sets out to convince Americans, and anyone else who needs persuading, that the problem of global warming is deadly serious, frighteningly real and already under way. Directed by Davis Guggenheim, this is essentially a documentary of a lecture by Al Gore. However, this is no ordinary talking-head lecture. Al Gore’s finely honed slide show, with its masses of graphs, images, cartoons (by Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons), a few carefully timed oneliners and other props, educates, shocks, and at times entertains viewers about global warming and its implications for life on Earth. In the film, Guggenheim fractures and personalises the lecture by interpolating some defining moments in Al Gore’s life-story and political career, including his attempts over a period of more than 30 years to convince a sceptical America that it needs to change its ways. In fact, An Inconvenient Truth is not so much a movie as a phenomenon, with its accompanying website and book, and an educational programme which includes training 1,000 ‘climate messengers’ to deliver the film’s message to community groups in the USA and, soon, also in Australia. Within a month of its official release in US movie theatres in May 2006, An Inconvenient Truth had risen to the rank of the world’s thirdhighest-earning documentary, after Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11

Designed to ‘effectively frustrate’: copyright, technology and the agency of users

Recently, the major US music and movie companies have pursued a dramatic renovation in their approach to copyright enforcement. This shift, from the ‘code’ of law to the ‘code’ of software, looks to technologies themselves to regulate or make unavailable those uses of content traditionally handled through law. Critics worry about the ‘compliance’ rules built into such systems: design mandates for manufacturers indicating what users can and cannot do under particular conditions. But these are accompanied by a second set of limitations: ‘robustness’ rules. Robustness rules obligate manufacturers to build devices such that they prevent tinkering - not only must the technology regulate its users, it must be inscrutable to them. This article examines this aspect of technical copyright regulation, looking particularly at the Content Scramble System (CSS) encryption system for DVDs and the recent ‘broadcast flag’ proposed for digital television. In the name of preventing piracy, these arrangements threaten to undermine users’ sense of agency with their own technologies.

Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing (review)

Reviewed by: Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing Michael Dorland (bio) Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter. Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing McGill-Queens University Press. x, 386. $80.00, $29.95 Actually, what drew me to this book was the subtitle, as it struck me as a tremendously important issue. When I grasped that the main title referred to a study of video games, I was a bit disappointed, having little personal interest in the things since my son outgrew them. But if I was right on the former, I was wrong regarding the latter. Digital Play is an important book, on both levels. First, because in four decades, 'the digital game [has been] transformed from the whimsical invention of bored Pentagon researchers, computer science graduate students, and nuclear research engineers into the fastest-expanding sector of the entertainment industry.' In 1999, the interactive game industry's revenues were over $8.9 billion, compared to the US movie industry box office of $7.3 billion. Interactive games, the authors note, span a growing range of new technological platforms, from home video game consoles to virtual reality theme parks, not to mention SMSes on cell phones. And supposedly over 60 per cent of Americans, or some 145 million people, play interactive games on a regular basis. Secondly, and despite all the hype about both new media and new economies, it is the Nintendos, Segas, and Sonys of this world that, according to even critics of so-called 'digital capitalism,' are the first companies to have created a successful and global multimedia product [End Page 378] market. If so, then perhaps Alvin Toffler was right when he talked in the 1980s of the coming of 'the prosumer' (as opposed to the consumer). Or digerati Martyn Lee when he terms the interactive game 'the ideal commodity.' Why this might or might not be the case is of course the burden of the present book, and I'll get to their main argument briefly. Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Puiter argue in their introduction for a (well-founded) scepticism regarding the long-proferred promises that technologies - and communication technologies in particular - will free us from toil and make us better human beings. Such scepticism is all to the good, but one counter is that this is just old-fogeyism and that 'the kids' themselves have understood the real, liberatory potential of 'world creation' where reality is the accomplishment of its participants. And this is a possibility that our authors are prepared to take on. Part of the problem is that the 'toolkit' for the usual thinking about many of these issues in media studies is one of its crankiest branches, the Marxist-derived 'political economy' of communication approach. Here, to exaggerate just a bit, it's all a big capitalist conspiracy and all the dice are always already loaded: Leonard Cohen, no political economist but a pretty good poet, put it best in his song, 'Everybody Knows.' As our authors recognize, a 'conspiratorial' approach won't really do. An improved analytical model of understanding interactivity is called for, that they term the 'three circuits,' which combines three streams in communications or media studies (political economy, media texts and audiences, and institutional decisions). Or, to hugely simplify matters, the recognition that one trait that makes human beings human is that they like to 'play' - with words, with toys, games, whatever. And it is precisely in their conception of the perfectability of 'playability' that Kline et al not only begin to get at what's preoccupying about the enormous increase in the interactive game business, and in turn its transformation of the entire business, namely, the fusion of technology, culture and marketing. Without going into their three-circuits model at any length (but see especially their chapter 2), suffice it simply to say that it offers a dynamic model of the 'convergence of myth, machines and markets.' Thus, through an analytical model of how technology, markets, and cultures intersect, historical analysis of the rise of the interactive game industry, and case studies and interviews, they identify three major sets of contradictions...

Morts et renaissances du cinéma hollywoodien

The decline of the movie theater is perhaps one of the most significant manifestations of the evolution of the US movie industry. Consequently, the emergence of new technologies (television, cable, home video, to name but a few) has been interpreted as a sign of the potential demise of the Hollywood cinema. Movies are sometimes depicted as little more than commodities peddled to the general public by an entertainment industry obsessed with state-of-the-art technology and profit rather than artistic achievement. By focusing on spectatorship as well as the exhibition end of the film trade, this paper endeavors to show that these new communication technologies cannot really be construed as a threat to the Hollywood cinema, or for that matter to cinema at large.

The Promise and The Lost City of Z: Diasporas, Cinematic Imperialism and Commercial Films

Through a mutual interview exchange, the authors reflect on two recent commercial films – The Promise and The Lost City of Z. The films deal with the Armenian genocide and British exploration of the Amazon, respectively, both chronicling events that took place in the early twentieth century. The authors’ inquiries address questions of diasporic imperialism through film, Othering, violence, and the US movie industry. While differing in their readings and opinions of the films, the authors argue that both movies reflect contemporary US fantasies and preoccupations, and that commercial cinema – and pop culture in the Global North more broadly – ought to be taken more seriously by anthropologists.