Beyond the Bottom Line The Producer in Film and Television Studies

by Spicer, Andrew; McKenna, Anthony; Meir, Christopher

• ISBN13: 9781441172365
• ISBN10: 144117236X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-07-31
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

This is the first collection of original critical essays devoted to exploring the misunderstood, neglected and frequently caricatured role played by the film producer. The editors' introduction provides a conceptual and methodological overview, arguing that the producer's complex and multifaceted role is crucial to a film's success or failure.

The collection is divided into three sections where detailed individual essays explore a broad range of contrasting producers working in different historical, geographical, generic and industrial contexts. Rather than suggest there is a single type of producer, the collection analyses the rich variety of roles producers play, providing fascinating and informative insights into how the film industry actually works. This groundbreaking collection challenges several of the conventional orthodoxies of film studies, providing a new approach that will become required reading for scholars and students.

Author Biography

Andrew Spicer, Professor of Cultural Production at the University of the West of England, UK, has published widely on British cinema, masculinity and film noir, most recently The Man Who Got Carter: Michael Klinger, Independent Production and the British Film Industry, 1960-1980, co-authored with A.T. McKenna he is currently working on a study of Sean Connery.


Anthony McKenna teaches Media and International Communications at the University of Nottingham in Ningbo, China. His work has appeared in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Journal of British Cinema and Television, and the Journal of Popular Film and Television. He is currently working on a monograph on Joseph E. Levine.

Christopher Meir is Lecturer in Film at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine in Trinidad and Tobago. He edited a special issue of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television on film marketing and has published on Jeremy Thomas. He is currently completing Scottish Cinema: Texts and Contexts.

Table of Contents

Editors' Introduction (Spicer, McKenna, Meir)
Section I: Framing the Producer
Editors' introduction
Individual Essays:
Representing the Producer (McKenna)
- Types of Producers (Spicer)
- The Emergence of the Producer (Joe Kember -University of Exeter; Jon Burrows - University of Warwick; Richard Abel - University of Michigan; Charlie Keil - University of Toronto)
Section II: Producers in Contexts: History, Experimentation and Genre
Editors' introduction
- Documentary Producers (Stella Bruzzi - University of Warwick)
- The Producer and Avant-Garde/Experimental Cinema (Julia Knight - Sunderland University)
- Popular Genre Producers (Mark Jankovich - University of East Anglia; Justin Smith - University of Portsmouth)
- The Studio Producer (Tino Balio - Wisconsin; Steve Neale - University of Exeter; Thomas Schatz - University of Texas, Austin; Janet Staiger - Wisconsin)
- The Independent Producer (Paul Newland - University of Aberystwyth)
- The Auteur Producers [Director-producers such as Hitchcock or Preminger; Star-producers such as Eastwood; writer-producers such as Preston Sturgess] (Matthew Bernstein - Emory College, Atlanta)
- Cross-over Film and Television Producers (tbc)
- New Media Producers (Tim Tarrant - University of the West of England)
Section III: Producers in National, Regional and Transnational Contexts
Editors' introduction
- The Film Producer in a National Cinema [Britain, France, Norway etc.] (Engelstadt/Sondre - Lillehammer University College)
- The European Producer (Tim Bergfelder - University of Southampton; Mette Hjort - Lingnan University; Anne Jackël - UWE)
- The Regional Producer 1 [sub-national e.g. North of England] (Jack Newsinger - University of Leicester)
- The Regional Producer 2 [supra-national e.g. East Asia, The Caribbean] (Constanza Burucua - University of Western Ontario; Bruce Paddington University of the West Indies, St. Augustine)
- The Bollywood Producer (Rachel Dwyer - SOAS)
- The Producer and Post-Imperial Networks (Meir)