tailieunhanh - Beyond the Blockbuster

At the start of the 1960s, the studios were providing lucrative prime-time television pro- gramming, but theatrical moviemaking was not a great business to be in. Attendance was falling sharply. Road show pictures like The Sound of Mu- sic (1965), playing a single screen for months on end,were for a while bright spots on the ledger, but the cycle of epic road show productions, already over- stretched with the failure of Cleopatra (1963) and Mutiny on the Bounty (1965), crashed at the end of the decade. Soon studios faced huge losses and were taken over by conglomerates bearing mysterious names like Gulf + Western (which bought Paramount in 1966). | introduction Beyond the Blockbuster q Do you write with specific actors in mind a Always . . . but they re usually dead. CHARLES shyer Private Benjamin Irreconcilable Differences This book is about the art and craft of Hollywood cinema since 1960. In two essays I trace some major ways that filmmakers have used moving images to tell stories. The narrative techniques I ll be examining are astonishingly robust. They have engaged millions of viewers for over eighty years and they have formed a lingua franca for worldwide filmmaking. Naturally during the years I m considering American films have changed enormously. They have become sexier more profane and more violent fart jokes and kung fu are everywhere. The industry has metamorphosed into a corporate behemoth while new technologies have transformed production and exhibition. And to come to my central concern over the same decades some novel strategies of plot and style have risen to prominence. Behind these strategies however stand principles that are firmly rooted in the history of studio moviemaking. In the two essays that follow I consider how artistic change and continuity coexist in modern American film. To track the dynamic of continuity and change since 1960 it s conventional to start by looking at the film industry. As usually recounted the industry s fortunes over the period display a darkness-to-dawn arc that might satisfy a scriptwriter of epic inclinations. We now have several nuanced versions of this story so I ll merely point out some major turning The appendix provides a year-by-year chronology. Although court decisions of 1948-1949 forced the major companies to divest themselves of their theater chains during the 1950s Warner Bros. Disney Paramount Columbia 20th Century Fox United Artists MGM and Universal controlled distribution the most lucrative area of the industry. While the studios were producing a few big-budget films themselves they also relied on the package-unit system of .