Movie Blockbusters

by Stringer,Julian

• ISBN13: 9780415256087
• ISBN10: 0415256089
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-06-10
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Big-budget, spectacular films designed to appeal to mass audience: is this what- or all- blockbusters are?Movie Blockbustersbrings together leading film scholars to consider this most high-profile and culturally significant genre. Drawing on a range of critical perspectives, the book traces how and why the "event movie" has played such a large role in the popular imagination, tracing a path from the spectacles of the silent era to the effects-laden mega-hits of the digital age. The contributors explain what the rise of the blockbuster says about the Hollywood film industry, address the work of notable blockbuster auteurs such as Steven Spielberg and James Cameron, discuss key movies such asJaws, The Jazz Singer, The Ten Commandments, Terminator 2andTitanic, and consider the various contexts in which blockbusters are produced, distributed, marketed and consumed. In addition, the book considers the movie scene outside Hollywood, discussing blockbusters made in Bollywood,China, South Korea, New Zealand and Argentina.

Table of Contents

List of figures	viii
List of contributors	ix
Introduction	1	(14)
JULIAN STRINGER
The New Hollywood	15	(30)
THOMAS SCHATZ
PART I Industry matters	45	(54)
1 Hollywood blockbusters: historical dimensions	47	(14)
STEVE NEALE
2 Following the money in America's sunniest company town: some notes on the political economy of the Hollywood blockbuster	61	(11)
JON LEWIS
3 The Hollywood blockbuster: industrial analysis and practice	72	(12)
DOUGLAS GOMERY
4 The role of the auteur in the age of the blockbuster: Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks	84	(15)
WARREN BULKLAND
PART II Exploring spectacle	99	(54)
5 Talking about a revolution: the blockbuster as industrial advertisement	101	(13)
MICHAEL ALLEN
6 Spectacle, narrative, and the spectacular Hollywood blockbuster	114	(14)
GEOFF KING
7 "Want to take a ride?": reflections on the blockbuster experience in Contact (1997)	128	(13)
PETER KRÄMER
8 Blockbusting sound: the case of The Fugitive	141	(12)
GIANLUCA SERGI
PART III Establishing cultural status	153	(62)
9 Circulations of taste: Titanic, the Oscars, and the middlebrow	155	(12)
GILLIAN ROBERTS
10 Sex, controversy, box-office: from blockbuster to bonkbuster	167	(11)
REBECCA FEASEY
11 Star Wars in fandom, film theory, and the museum: the cultural status of the cult blockbuster	178	(12)
MATT HILLS
12 The best place to see a film: the blockbuster, the multiplex, and the contexts of consumption	190	(12)
MARK JANCOVICH AND LUCY FAIRE
13 Neither one thing nor the other: blockbusters at film festivals	202	(13)
JULIAN STRINGER
PART IV The blockbuster in the international frame	215	(54)
14 "What's big about the big film?": "de-Westernizing" the blockbuster in Korea and China	217	(13)
CHRIS BERRY
15 Once Were Warriors: New Zealand's first indigenous blockbuster	230	(12)
KIRSTEN MOANA THOMPSON
16 Television for the big screen: how Comodines became Argentina's first blockbuster phenomenon	242	(13)
TAMARA L. FALICOV
17 Locating Bollywood: notes on the Hindi blockbuster, 1975 to the present	255	(14)
ANDREW WILLIS
Index	269