Bibliography:

Thomas Schatz, The New Hollywood, in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins (eds) 'Film Theory Goes to the Movies' (New York, Routledge, 1993)

Warren Buckland, A Close Encounter with Raiders of the Lost Ark: Notes on Aspects of the new Hollywood Blockbuster, in Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds) 'Contemporary Hollywood Cinema' (New York, Routledge,1998)

Lecture Notes - Aims
1. To contextualise BLOCKBUSTER economically and historically – esp. in ref to Jaws.
2. To consider the aesthetic of this phase of Post-Fordian Hollywood

According to Schatz, Jaws recalibrated the profit potential of the Hollywood hit – brought an emphatic end to Hollywood’s 5 year recession – ushered in an era of high cost, high tech, high speed thriller.

Like Love Story, Godfather, Exorcist, was pre-sold via best-selling novel. Movie rights bought before novel published – itself generating publicity + spurring book sales.

Initial budget = $3.5 million (av. In 1975 = $2.5 m) Yet top end productions of musicals and disaster movies = $10 – 20 m. So was comparatively cheap. But escalating costs – mechanical shark effects alone = $3m – publicity for which hyped movie more!

Summer ’75 release – unusual but subject matter demanded. Zanuck & Brown spent another $2.5m on promotion before opening in 464 screens across USA.

25m tickets sold in 38 days. Took $102.5m through summer run, prving not just hpe but word of mouth i.e. genuine hit.

Formula: Blockbuster = GENRE MELDING
Action film + thriller. Tapped into revenge-of-nature sub-text (i.e. King Kong, The Birds). + latter stages of film shark takes on supernatural quality – Satanic elements (i.e.Rosemary’s Baby, Exorcist) catered for. Also tied into taste for high-gore “slasher” genre generated by Texas Chainsaw Massacre (’74). Sea chase also offered elements of buddy film + male initiation. Chase elements meant well paced and John Williams score crucial to effect.

CRITICS
Many dismissed as mechanical + manipulative, more exciting than interesting, more style than substance: new blockbuster phenomenon meant cinema mere machine of entertainment, precisely calculated to achieve their effect. Others argued that had political element, anti-establishment (cover-up) valuing humanity of Brodie + cameraderie of three pursuers.

INDUSTRY + CONSUMPTION
Jaws was social, economic phenomenon, cinematic idea & cultural commodty. Consolodated trends in terms of marketing, saturation booking, advertising + front-loaded release pattern that created a movie’s event status. Also created notion of “the Summer hit”. Recognised a youth market shifting from political hip to younger, more conservative tastes. Reflected ageing of front-end baby boomers + ascendance of younger siblings and their children who valued repeated viewing of favourite films.

Consumption patterns also influenced by rise of “shopping centre” exhibition venues. 1965 – 1970 – shopping malls in US went from approx 1,500 to 12,500;
by 1980 – 22,500.
by 1990 – 22,750

Mid-1970’s saw decline of art cinemas. Hollywood renaissance marked by Penn, Altman, Polanski peaked 1974.

“While Coppola was in the Philippines filming Apocalypse Now, a brilliant though self-destructive venture of Wellesian proportions, his proteges Lucas and Spielberg were busy refining the New Hollywood’s Bruce aesthetic (via Star Wars and Close Encounters), while replacing the director-as-author with a director-as-superstar ethos.” p20.

“This conservative turn coincided with an upswing in defensive market tactics, notably an increase in sequels, series, reissues and remakes.”
From 1964 to 1968 sequels + reissues = under 5% of Hollywood releases.
1974-78 = 17.5%
Jaws reissued 1976 (as was Exorcist) generating $16m
1978 – Jaws 2 ($49.3m) established the Jaws “franchise”

CINEMA & TV
This relationship underwent refinement in mid-1970s. Through
1. advertsiing Case of Billy Jack (low-budget 1971 indie taking $4m) re-issued in 1974 with massive TV advertising – “ a revolutionary marketing tactic” (Variety) – and took $32.5m. This tacticgained further credibility with Jaws and soon became standard practice.
2. Launch of cable and satellite ended network stranglehold. Pay-cable after 1972, HBO in 1975 became truly national “movie-channel” – increased demand for syndicated series and movies.
3. Videotape players - Sony Betamax 1975 was beaten out by the inferior VHS format not only because cheaper and more flexible but also because Matsushita (owners of VHS) had acquired rights to more movie titles. Key to home video was Hollywood film

1975 - domestic gross =     $2b …
by 1977                       =      $2.65b …
1978                            =      $2.8b              [i.e. 40% climb in 3 years]

From 1965 (Sound of Music) to 1976 only 7 pictures had grossed $50m; in 1977-78, 9 passed that! Star Wars was top hit of period = $127m in 1977, then $38m in 1978 on reissue. Saturday Night Fever marked significant change also from traditional Hollywood musical to the music movie – an obvious precursor to MTV.

INTERPRETTING BLOCKBUSTER CONTENT
Saturday Night Fever also a male coming-of-age film, male initiation rite – which had found new life in The Graduate. Now such an underlying narrative seems to structure the Blockbuster – Star Wars also charts Luke Skywalker’s initiation into manhood - but now on superficial level, with fast-paced action interspersed.

Guiding characteristic of Blockbuster [according to Schatz] was plot over character – this distinguishes it from classical Hollywood – including Godfather and even Jaws, where plot tended to emerge more organically. In Star Wars characters are essentially plot functions. And yet there are connections with a film like Godfather – each is drama of succession, a coming-of-age story, ascension to warrior status, with mythic dimensions, variations on the Arthurian legend. But where plot drives characters in Star Wars, story of Godfather emerges from decisions of characters, whose actions define narrative trajectory.

Schatz: “From The Godfather to Jaws to Star War, we see films that are increasingly reliant on special effects, increasingly “fantastic” (and thus apolitical), and increasingly targeted at younger audiences.” p23.

Star Wars pioneered the genre pastiche: from Western to war film to vine-swinging adventure … the bar scene is amalgam of Western, film noir, hard-boiled detective and sci-fi. One dimensional characters are off-set by purposeful incoherence

Which opens the film to different reading (and readers) – allows multiple interpretive strategies – and also has an oddly nostalgic quality, evoking old movie serials – evoked also through the excessive John Williams score/signature theme – praised as widely as effects.

BUCKLAND re-examines the blockbuster – which he says has often been shunned or dismissed as an exercises in profit-making – argues that thus New Hollywood’s mode of production has not been properly understood. Points out that because in New Hollywood talent is hired on a film-by-film basis, power shifts to the deal-maker (agents) and more money goes into fewer and fewer films. Consequently films that are produced need to make enormous amounts.

But what, aside from costs are dominant characteristic? How do they attract, engage, entertain millions? Answer: mode of address to undifferentiated audience through mix of genres – comedy, drama, romance, science-fiction by not so much privileging plot over character as re-modeling of character and plot.

Negative critics see unstructured psychological motivation, lack of cause-and-effect narrative logic, loosely linked, self-sustaining action sequences built around spectacle, stars and special effects. But these traits have been overstated, according to Buckland. In his examination of Raiders, he argues for a recognition of the aesthetic possibilities of the episodic narrative form with a provenance in an Old, Classical model.

A HISTORICAL POETIC APPROACH

Using a historical poetic approach, Buckland concerns himself with the principles, norms and conventions dominant at any one point. These might be listed:

1. sources, influences, received forms
2. composition
3. varying responses, including later evaluation

1. What FORMS were available to the filmmaker? What choices have been made? What unique features emerge? What emergent features are shared with other texts or forms?

Henry Jenkins: “By treating film-makers as independent contractors, the new production system places particular emphasis on the development of an idiosyncratic style which helps to increase the market value of individual directors, rather than treating them as interchangeable parts. Directors such as Steven Spielberg, David Lynch, Brian DePalma and David Cronenberg develop distinctive ways of structuring narratives, moving their camera, or cutting scenes which become known to film-
goers and studio executives alike.” p168.

Their own recognisable style increases their market value – this then becomes THE approach to New Hollywood. These directors choose – or alternate - between a transparency of style and the conscious inflection of their INFLUENCES. That is between an immediacy and mediated systems. Popularity is nor simply a question of escapism, but a symptomatic of a historical period. Classic films articulated a universal human need for stories of loss; the then popular melodrama replayed familiar moral situations, which allowed the spectator to submit to a paternal authority of the storyteller. However one must also consider the inventiveness of the text and its responses to a historical moment.

Buckland: “…the film is seen, not merely as the manifestation of universal rules, but in terms of its individuality, including its response to its historical moment, in which style and composition respond to the historical questions posed in the culture in which the film is made.” 169

2. For directors of New Hollywood films a variety of COMPOSITIONAL norms are available for exploitation inc. quotation from old Hollywood, comic books, television aesthetcs, European art film etc.

Raiders is structured according to the serial format of B movies, story-board action sequences and television aesthetics [TV, due to small size of screen, lack of resolution, has little use for complex, deep focus. Instead, CUs dominate, rapid cutting, mobile camera, shallow, lateral space, telephoto lens]. Many say this foregrounds action, divorcing style and technique from narrative.

Crispin Miller: “Each shot (in contemporary Hollywood films) presents a content closed and unified, like a fist, and makes the point right in your face: big gun, big car, nice ass, full moon, a chase (great shoes!), big crash, (blood, glass), a lobby (doorman), sarcasm, drinks, a tonguey, pugilistic kiss (nice sheets!), and so on.”

This effect is a result of excess: of technique, of colour, lighting, editing, camera mobility, sound effects, etc. Hence style becomes self-sufficient, autonomous.

>>>Yet this makes narrative even more important. (according to Spielberg)<<<

Spielberg: “You need good story-telling to off-set the amount of …spectacle the audience demand[s] before they’ll leave their television sets. And I think people will leave their television sets for a good story before anything else. Before fire and skyscrapers and floods, plane crashes, laser fire and spaceships, they want good stories.”

Peter Biskind [in an essay in ‘Seeing through Movies’, Miller, 1990] has argued that Lucas and Spielberg set out to re-establish traditional narrative values – though their attempts had the unintended effect of creating spectacle that annihilated story. The serial format contains a style or mode of storytelling that was suppressed or dismissed as marginal in most accounts of ‘classical’ Hollywood narrative.

3. Spielberg and Lucas are committed to narrative in which causal motivation appears to be suspended, while a single plot in fact can be seen, often only in retrospect, to link each sequence. Commonly an unseen or off-screen presence or agent is used systematically to generate suspense and surprise, accumulating in an over-arching pattern that transcends individual episodes. Such a device is used to structure Jaws & Close Encounters. One of the functions of this device is to make the spectator RETROSPECTIVELY INTERPRET the scene, negating its previously omniscient nature and negating the hierarchy of knowledge in which the spectator assumes s/he has privilege. This process of reinterpretation is a major filmic pleasure of the blockbuster.
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Academy Awards (not for best picture, director, screenplay) but for editing, art direction, costume design, visual effects, musical score + sp. achievement for sound effects [inducing theatre owners to install Dolby systems.

May     1977    Star Wars released
July     1978    Star Wars reissue #1
May     1979    Star Wars reissue #2
May     1980    Star Wars 2: The Empire Strikes Back released
Apr      1981    Star Wars reissue #3
May     1982    Star Wars goes to video
Aug     1982    Star Wars reissue #4
Feb      1983    Star Wars on pay-cable TV
May     1983    Star Wars 3: The Return of the Jedi released
Feb      1984    Star Wars on network TV
Mar     1985    Star Wars Trilogy screened in 8 cities
Jan      1987    “Star Tours” opens at Disneyland.

Promise of Jaws realised in Star Wars – only other film to gross $100m. Also secured place of Lucas & Spielberg as members of the Brash Pack of “Hollywood’s delayed New Wave” (inc. DePalma, Landis, Kasden, Carpenter, etc.). Lucas & Spielberg joined forces in late 70’s and result was Raiders or Indiana Jones franchise.

END