Search Results

This chapter discusses films inspired by internal conflicts in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s, as divisions between young and old, black and white, and left and right became increasingly polarised. This can be seen as the period of Hollywood modernism, in which a series of films and filmmakers displayed the influence of the international art cinema. It can also been seen as one in which Hollywood cinema incorporated other cinemas, containing their threat by absorbing that which was threatening. In political terms, this can also be seen as both an era of political radicalism in which a whole series of aspects of American culture and society were criticised and as one of conservatism in which there was an attack on the claims and gains made by the left. The chapter also includes the study, ‘Inner-City Exhibition and the Genre Film: Distributing Night of the Living Dead’ (1968) by Kevin Heffernan, which uses the film to open up a series of issues about distribution in the late 1960s.

This chapter, by Alice Lovejoy, chronicles the United States Office of War Information’s plans to distribute forty Hollywood feature films in liberated Europe under the auspices of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force’s Psychological Warfare Division (PWD-SHAEF). From the comparative perspectives of OWI and the Allied countries for which the films were destined (Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Czechoslovakia, its central case study), it examines the economic, ideological, and pragmatic questions that intersected in these films’ selection and distribution, focusing on the tensions caused by OWI’s close relationship with the American film industry. The chapter argues that the case study of these forty films highlights Europe’s fraught political, cultural, and diplomatic relationship with American cinema on the cusp of the Cold War, as well as the complex logics underpinning film distribution in this period.

This chapter offers a concise characterisation of the network of intermediaries: film distribution, the issue of copyright, and the phenomenon of film criticism. Film distribution traditionally forms the connection between film production and film exhibition. It determines which films are to be seen where, by whom, and under what circumstances. Film distribution companies are also the main suppliers for a curator. With regards to issues of copyright, a film curator has to acquire the formal permission to show a film in a public screening. Film curating, as well as professional film criticism, is part of a process of creating reputations. The possible similarity between the tasks of a professional film critic and a film curator is that both experts are attempting to provide relevant information to situate a film in its context and to propose structures of reflection, to reveal diverse relations of similarities and connections, to formulate value concepts, and to construct criteria of judgement.

This chapter discusses the cinema of the 1980s, which saw not only the stabilisation of audience numbers, but also the creation of new audiences. One of the main reasons for this was the emergence of new forms of film exhibition. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw the emergence of home video as a new form of domestic technology. One use of the video was to time-shift the viewing of television programming by taping its transmission and playing it back at another point. It also allowed the distribution of films on video that could be viewed in the home. The chapter also includes the study, ‘Talkin' 'Bout a Revolution: Home Video’ by Janet Wasko, which seeks to explain the industry and its practices in terms of its structural conditions as a capitalist industry.

In the final two years of Thomas Ince's career, First National was to become steadily less central, only one among several distribution outlets. One of the key concessions as a result of the litigation between Ince and First National was that, while he maintained his output for them, additional movies, boasting his name, could be released through other concerns after March 1, 1923. Ince contracted with a number of companies to bring his product to theaters, finding commercial success with special arrangements with specific distributors, based on star quality, budget, or content. This became official policy at the board meeting of December 28, 1922; Clark Thomas had already begun an arrangement for Soul of the Beast with Metro, the company having also distributed J. Parker Read's His Own Law, starring Hobart Bosworth and now owned by Ince.

This chapter begins with the discussion of the birth of the Films Division as Nehru’s brainchild and the hope Indian filmmakers placed in the power of the documentary medium to contribute to the project of development on the brink of Independence. It shows that in spite of what appeared to be a denunciation of colonial filmmaking by leaders of post-Independence India, the Films Division adopted production and distribution policies similar to those introduced by the British, including a compulsory exhibition scheme and an assembly-like production pipeline that suppressed the creative input of individual artists. A section on internal tensions brings out evidence from diaries, personal collections and FD record rooms proving that despite these strong continuities, FD was a “melting pot” of ideas about filmmaking and development as early as the 1950s. A separate discussion of FD’s Cartoon Film Unit is included, analyzing the role of animation in government film. The chapter concludes with an extensively researched compilation of views on FD expressed by Indian film critics and political commentators from the late 1940s up until the Emergency. These voices echo the book’s argument about colonial-postcolonial continuity while also hinting at the heterogeneity of voices within FD.

Drawing on both documentation and extensive interviews with key industry and policy players, this chapter analyses the role that the transition to digital played in both the policy thinking and interventional practice of the UKFC. It examines the origins, development and impact of the Digital Screen Network (DSN), which became one of the flagship digital policy initiatives of the UKFC. It documents the conflicting industry views around the impact of the DSN on the UK film distribution sector and highlights the policy complexities that digital posed for the UKFC during its lifetime.

The chapter tells the history of New Day Films, a film collective founded 1972. Today, New Day is one of the most financially stable nontheatrical distribution collectives in North America, boasting more than 165 members and 1m USD in yearly revenues. Films distributed by the collective have been screened, broadcast and awarded around the workd, studied in media journals, discussed at organised events, showcased in museums and collected by libraries. New Day’s collective (and its collection) provide compelling objects of study for the history of gender and documentary authorship.

Using largely un-researched congressional records, this chapter examines the four hearings held between 1936 and 1940 on trade practices in distribution, notably block-booking and blind selling, which underwrote an effective big-studio monopoly. It examines how the material problem of getting commercial entertainment from the scene of production to thousands of theatres nationwide impacted on the way various elements in the film industry, notably the big studios and independent exhibitors, represented its practices, as well as its products, both to Congress and to themselves. Although the studios were able to frustrate legislative efforts to challenge their interests, this only ensured that the Justice Department would seek legal redress through the courts. The coming of World War II briefly suspended New Deal efforts to strengthen federal regulation of the film business but the seeds were sewn by the end of the 1930s for the US v Paramountet al Supreme Court decision that did much to undermine studio power by requiring separation of the ownership of production and exhibition of films.

This chapter covers film distribution, exhibition, and reception in Havana during the era of silent cinema and of Cuba’s first republic, which roughly overlapped. At the turn-of-the-century, moving pictures arrived in Havana just as Cubans achieved independence from Spain and founded their own nation. But, by forcing the Platt Amendment into Cuba’s constitution, the United States assured that Cuba was only “semi-sovereign” in relation to US power, exerted in the form of military occupations, political tinkering, trade policies, investors, and a flood of US-made goods. Among those goods were US-made films, which began to monopolize Havana’s multiplying moving picture halls especially during World War I, which saw the rise of Hollywood’s studio system and its global dominance. The big Hollywood studios had each opened a distribution office in Havana by the early 1920s, and a number operated their own “picture palaces,” to the dismay of local distributors and exhibitors. This chapter finds that Havana’s early cinemas—and the business and print cultures emerging around them—were sites where Cubans continued to forge their national identity through complex negotiations with US power. They were not just sites for the conveyance of US influence but also for the continued promotion of revolutionary Cuban nationalism.

This chapter examines the role of George Spoor, George Kleine, and the Nickelodeon in the development of Chicago's film industry. Spoor had a theatrical background that made him a natural for the movie business. His partnership with Edward Amet, a local inventor, is a good illustration of how, in the film industry of the late nineteenth century, the divisions between artist and inventor, scientist and businessman, producer and distributor, were often blurred. The most important development in the film distribution business in the early twentieth century was the founding of “film exchanges.” Kleine had a leg up on the competition in the movie distribution business because he had set up the Kleine Optical Company in Chicago in 1893. The other serious shift that occurred in the film industry in the first decade of the twentieth century was the transition of exhibition away from the vaudeville halls and penny arcades and towards the newly established storefront theaters known as “Nickelodeons.” Once again, Chicago would be at the forefront of this new phenomenon.

With the switch to streaming video, a whole host or royalty, content, and distribution issues need to be addressed. In addition, there is a plethora of programming designed specifically for the web. Some come and go like mayflies, and die a quick death; others build up a long-term audience, and keep coming back year after year to a cadre of loyal viewers. Web Therapy, for example, has now amassed 46 episodes, with Meryl Streep featured as a recent guest star in a three-episode story arc. Syfy Television (formerly Sci-fi, until the need to copyright the channel’s name forced the somewhat awkward switch to Syfy) has been churning out 10 minute segments of a web serial entitled Riese, with an eye to combining the sections into a two hour TV pilot for the network; and Showtime has oddly created an animated web companion for its hit live action serial killer television show Dexter, entitled Dark Echo, which offers brief (3 to 6 minute) of additional back-story on the series for its numerous devotees.

This chapter is about Levine’s career in the late 1950s—the period when he first became famous. It was at this time that Levine achieved success with saturation in selling Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Attila, and Hercules. The chapter provides many overlooked details about the success of these films, such as the colleagues who were an integral part of promoting them and the importance of gaining the backing of the film industry as a whole—movie exhibitors in particular—to create a sympathetic climate. This chapter also details Levine’s journey from movie promoter to self-promoting celebrity—from a largely anonymous member of the team that promoted Godzilla to the nationally famous focal point for the Hercules promotional campaign.

The book concludes with a discussion of nostalgia's relevance to the growing field of fan studies, arguing that much recent scholarship on fandom leans disproportionately toward figuring fans as technological early adopters and social-media mavens, and thereby plays into a corporate boosterism. By taking fuller account of how and why certain fan cultures may evince longing for the cultural past and deep scepticism about the present moment, future work on fandom will better account for the sheer range of fan cultures that fall outside the field's current purview. The conclusion ends with a political reading of a single retrosploitation film trailer as an example of further directions for research on this cinematic corpus.

This chapter details the various partnerships and business ventures Levine entered into in the immediate postwar era. He learned how to capitalize on current events at this time, with varying degrees of success. He sought to take advantage of the public’s feelings at the end of the Second World War by investing in the nostalgic film compilation Gaslight Follies and by producing a documentary based on the expeditions of the famous explorer Admiral Byrd. Levine also developed as a film distributor and promoter with arthouse, exploitation, and teen films, which he distributed in New England. This chapter also investigates Levine’s experiences with drive-in cinemas and saturation openings—two things that would help to define his early career and pedigree as a showman. The chapter demonstrates how his eye for an opportunity and gambler’s approach to investing helped to shape his career as a showman and promoter.