Blockbuster : How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer

by Tom Shone

• ISBN13: 9780743235686
• ISBN10: 0743235681
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-11-30
• Publisher: Free Press

Summary

It's a typical summer Friday night and the smell of popcorn is in the air. Throngs of fans jam into air-conditioned multiplexes to escape for two hours in the dark, blissfully lost in Hollywood's latest glittery confection complete with megawatt celebrities, awesome special effects, and enormous marketing budgets. The world is in love with the blockbuster movie, and these cinematic behemoths have risen to dominate the film industry, breaking box office records every weekend. With the passion and wit of a true movie buff and the insight of an internationally renowned critic, Tom Shone is the first to make sense of this phenomenon by taking readers through the decades that have shaped the modern blockbuster and forever transformed the face of Hollywood.

The moment the shark fin broke the water in 1975, a new monster was born. Fast, visceral, and devouring all in its path, the blockbuster had arrived. In just a few weeks Jaws earned more than $100 million in ticket sales, an unprecedented feat that heralded a new era in film. Soon, blockbuster auteurs such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and James Cameron would revive the flagging fortunes of the studios and lure audiences back into theaters with the promise of thrills, plenty of action, and an escape from art house pretension.

But somewhere along the line, the beast they awakened took on a life of its own, and by the 1990s production budgets had escalated as quickly as profits. Hollywood entered a topsy-turvy world ruled by marketing and merchandising mavens, in which flops like Godzilla made money and hits had to break records just to break even. The blockbuster changed from a major event that took place a few times a year into something that audiences have come to expect weekly, piling into the backs of one another in an annual demolition derby that has left even Hollywood aghast.

Tom Shone has interviewed all the key participants -- from cinematic visionaries like Spielberg and Lucas and the executives who greenlight these spectacles down to the effects wizards who detonated the Death Star and blew up the White House -- in order to reveal the ways in which blockbusters have transformed how Hollywood makes movies and how we watch them. As entertaining as the films it chronicles, Blockbuster is a must-read for any fan who delights in the magic of the movies.

Table of Contents

Introduction The Boys of Summer	1	(22)
ACT I: 1975--1983 WAKING GIANTS
Panic on the 4th of July	23	(21)
Empire State Express	44	(21)
Halloween for Grown-Ups	65	(17)
The Education of Ellen Ripley	82	(20)
First Action Hero	102	(20)
Morning in America	122	(19)
ACT II: 1984--1993 COMETH THE TITANS
Time Travelers Inc.	141	(20)
Ripley Redux	161	(13)
War Zones, High Concepts	174	(11)
The Long Dark Night	185	(14)
Extinction	199	(16)
Planet Hollywood	215	(18)
ACT III: 1994--2004 DECLINE AND FALL
Oops, Apocalypse!	233	(16)
Staring into the Abyss	249	(15)
Does Size Matter?	264	(14)
The Empire Strikes Back	278	(15)
Un-American Activities	293	(14)
Conclusion Return of the Kings	307	(8)
Acknowledgments	315	(2)
Sources	317	(5)
Bibliography	322	(4)
Picture Credits	326	(1)
Index	327

Excerpts

Introduction: The Boys of Summer When he was five, Steven Spielberg was taken by his father to see The Greatest Show on Earth, Cecil B. DeMille's movie about the circus -- except he didn't hear his father say the word "movie," only the word "circus." He'd never seen a movie before, but he knew what to expect from a circus: elephants, lions, ringmaster, clowns...After a wait in line for an hour and a half, they entered the theater, and he laid eyes on the row upon row of chairs, all folded up, in front of a blank screen, "nothing but a flat piece of white cardboard, a canvas, and I look at the canvas and suddenly a movie comes on and it's The Greatest Show on Earth." He thought it the Worst Swindle in Town, couldn't believe his father had done this to him. "'Gee, that's not fair,' he thought, 'I wanted to see three-dimensional characters and all this was was flat shadows, flat surfaces.' I was disappointed by everything after that. I didn't trust anybody....I never felt life was good enough so I had to embellish it."The embellishments took many forms, each requiring the sort of improvisational skills known only to those growing up in suburban Cincinnati in the fifties. There was the time he rigged his mother's pressure cooker to explode, splattering the kitchen with food, or the time he tossed one of her cherry pies to the ceiling and watched as all the pie filling glooped to the floor. He was fascinated by anything that had the texture of blood -- cherries, ketchup -- which he could then use to smear over the walls or the heads of his sister's dolls. He was a scrawny kid -- crew cut, ears out to here, like the kid on the cover of Mad magazine -- and ravenously curious, endlessly bombarding his father with questions relating to fire engines and things blowing up. Teachers worried about him; he seemed to go in such fits and starts, always starting one thing, then, getting bored, moving on to the next. "I didn't know what the hell he was," said his mother later. "Steven wasn't exactly cuddly. What he was was scary."It was when the family moved from Cincinnati to Phoenix that the boy's experiments in pandemonium kicked up a notch. The landscape itself promised so much: on the one hand a suburban sprawl of lawns, backyards, and sprinklers, and edging it, the Arizona desert with its scorpions and Gila monsters. The perfect place to lock yourself in the upstairs bathroom, until the Phoenix fire brigade were summoned -- great red trucks tearing up and down the quiet suburban streets, much to the admiration of his neighbor's children. "I thought it was really neat," said one, "seeing the fire department coming through the windows and everything." By this time Spielberg had rediscovered the movie theater, and made the secondary, but equally important discovery that they needn't be just for watching movies. If they had balcony seats, for instance, they were also a perfect place from which to projectile-vomit a mixture of peas, cream cheese, and milk, as Spielberg did on the audience who had come to see Irwin Allen's The Lost World in 1960.The only thing that seemed to induce anything like calm in the boy was TV. He would soak up as many episodes of The Twilight Zone and Science Fiction Theater as he could, and when his parents tried to limit his intake, he would sneak down at night and stick his eye right up to the snow on the RCA nineteen-inch screen, seeking ghostly communion with the black-and-white images that flickered past. "I was this far away from the TV set and there would always be some out-of-the-way channel, some far-off channel that was getting its signal through the station that wasn't broadcasting and there would be ghosts and images of some broadcasting station five hundred miles away."Seven hundred miles away, in Modesto, California, the young George Lucas was tuned into much the same wavelength -- a pixilated blur of Adventure T