Reading Lists for Research Essay

High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood. 
Justin Wyatt
Austin: University of Texas Press 1994

Agents of Chaos: An Analysis of the Poster Campaign for “The Dark Knight” as an Example of Corporate Culture Jamming.
Reed, Charles Tyma, Adam W. (advisor) ; Holland, Jonna (committee member) ; Reilly, Hugh (committee member)
ProQuest Dissertations Publishing 2010

Contemporary US cinema
Michael Allen 1957- author.
Oxfordshire, England ; New York : Routledge 2014

The fictional Christopher Nolan
Todd. McGowan
Austin: University of Texas Press 2012 1st edition.
Available at Library Main (PN 1998.A3 N65)

The Cinema of Christopher Nolan: Imagining the Impossible. 
Jacqueline. Furby Stuart Joy
New York: Columbia University Press 2015

Christopher Nolan--Creator of the Blockbuster Dark Knight Film Trilogy--to Be Immortalized at Grauman's Chinese Theatre 
Business Wire, Jun 28, 2012

Blockbuster with Brains 
Pratt, Steve
Northern Echo, Jul 10, 2010

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=YVz21WyZ0PkC&pg=PA44&dq=auteur+nolan&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiP8KWT-PPQAhUlDcAKHT_HCHUQ6AEIKzAD#v=onepage&q=auteur%20nolan&f=false

http://variety.com/2008/digital/features/dvd-the-dark-knight-1200472793/

http://www.linhofstudio.com/catalogue/pages/content/documents/LinhofMasterTechnikaBrochureLinhofStudio.pdf

Week 11 [Reading Notes] - Stardom and Race

Reading 1:Quinn, Ethne (2013) “Black talent and conglomerate Hollywood: Will Smith, Tyler Perry and the continuing significance of race” Popular Communication 11:3

Abstract

This article offers a comparative study of the strategies employed by Will Smith (together with his partner James Lassiter) and Tyler Perry as they surmounted racial barriers to become two of the most successful people in film. What emerges in both cases—despite very different institutional, production, and marketing strategies—is that race has strongly determined the career development of black top-talent. Racial hierarchies have presented various obstacles hindering the progress of these individuals, but more surprisingly, such hierarchies have also indirectly facilitated their success. They were seized on by Smith, Lassiter, and Perry as both impetus and opportunity. The final section turns to a consideration of the racial implications of their breaking into film’s elite ranks, suggesting that neither the racially incorporative nor resistive dimensions of this achievement have been sufficiently considered.

- The shift toward more conglomerate domination in the US film industry has led to a widening divide between prestige core film workers and an extensive and precarious peripheral workforce (Christopherson, 2008a, 2008b; Hesmondhalgh, 2013, pp. 83–85, 253–258). Susan Christopherson describes the “strengthening of defensive exclusionary networks to dominate access to the least risky and most lucrative and prestigious end of the industry production spectrum. These networks,” she continues, “are composed almost exclusively of white men” (Christopherson, 2008b, p. 89). By and large, then, the white men who always ran the film industry continue to do so, hoarding high-status creative and commercial work as well as the lion’s share of profits.

p. 196

- Los Angeles Times columnist Patrick Goldstein (2011) summarises, Hollywood is “one of the most minority free industries in America,” with “barely any people of colour in any high-level positions at any major studio, talent agency or management firm.”

p. 196

- The two black Americans who have regularly ranked in the Forbes Top 10 lists of Hollywood earners are Will Smith (since the mid-2000s) and Tyler Perry (since the late 2000s). Both have broken significant racial ceilings: Smith became Hollywood’s most bankable star by several measures, including the most consecutive films (eight) to gross over $100 million in which he had top billing, with many grossing many times that amount (Koehler, 2008). In 2008, Perry became the first black American to own a film studio and, in 2011, the first to top the annual chart of highest earner in the film industry (albeit with earnings from several media), when he made an estimated $130 million (Forbes).

p. 197

- Using trade press articles and press interviews, this article offers a comparative study of the different strategies employed by Will Smith (along with his partner James Lassiter) and Tyler Perry as they surmounted racial barriers to become two of the most successful people in film. I organise these strategies into four areas: cross-platform range; commercial imperative; innovative marketing; and self-determination. What emerges is that race has strongly determined the career development of black top-talent as they pursued different institutional, production, and marketing strategies.

p. 197

- Thomas Schatz has influentially mapped the contemporary film industry, which, since the early 1990s, has been dominated by what he terms “Conglomerate Hollywood”: “A new breed of media giants took command of the US film and television industries and became the dominant powers in the rapidly expanding global entertainment industry” (2008, pp. 25–26). With their production company Overbrook Entertainment, Smith and his manager James Lassiter are very much emblems of Conglomerate Hollywood: Smith is a star brand associated with high-production, high-yield films with international reach and Overbrook, founded in 1997, is typical of the star-fronted companies that have sprung up and enjoyed increasing clout as they struck preferential deals with major film companies.

p. 198

- Will Smith stars in films with multiracial casts that tend to portray America as “postracial,” and in his publicity image he is consistently described as having “transcended race” (see Palmer, 2011). A representative Newsweek cover story declared that Smith’s “appeal is so universal that it transcends race” (Smith, 2007). The postracial refrain also pertains to audience: Smith’s is huge, racially diverse, and international.

p. 198

- Will Smith first achieved fame as a rapper with his radio-friendly group Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, releasing five albums starting in 1987. With James Lassiter already on board as the group’s manager, Smith’s first cross-media move was into television, in 1990, when he starred in the sitcom hit Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and then into film, with his first major role in the play adaptation Six Degrees of Separation (Fred Schepisi, 1993). This was followed by a starring role in the action-comedy hit Bad Boys (Michael Bay, 1995) and his blockbuster breakthrough in Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996). The cross-promotional synergy for which Smith is most renowned is the releasing of singles (with heavy video rotation on MTV) and albums to coincide with the theatrical and DVD launch of hit films, aligning release dates to maximise sales (G. King, 2003).

p. 199

- Media scholar David Marshall posits that “whereas the film celebrity plays with aura through the construction of distance, the television celebrity is configured around conceptions of familiarity” (1997, p. 119). Smith, by and large, serves to uphold such an organising division in his cross-platform trajectory: he first became a household name through television (and music) which he then parlayed into a more “distanced” film career, leaving television behind. Indeed, the star describes his own career development explicitly in terms of using the televisual familiarity of Fresh Prince to aid both filmic and racial crossover. In his early screen role in Six Degrees of Separation, he describes how, as the only nonwhite protagonist, his character “Paul claiming he was Poitier’s son made himself feel welcome in a home that he would never otherwise enter, but since TV viewers had already welcomed me into their homes, I could make Paul believable” (quoted in Koehler, 2008). Thus, Overbrook used Smith’s televisual ubiquity, from Fresh Prince as well as music television, as a stepping stone to mainstream filmic prestige.

p. 199

- In a repeated anecdote, Smith says that in 1990 (the year Fresh Prince of Bel Air launched) he already “[wanted] to be the biggest movie star in the world.” He and Lassiter found a list of the ten top-grossing films of all time and “said, OK, what are the patterns? We realised that 10 out of 10 had special effects. Nine out of 10 had special effects with creatures. Eight out of 10 had special effects with creatures and a love story” (quoted in Keegan, 2007). Resulting from this bottom-line market analysis, they sought to develop “science fiction films [that] also had other angles going for them” (quoted in Koehler, 2008). Smith’s frank commercial imperative is also evident when his rap persona Fresh Prince traveled into the title of his sitcom to maximize exposure and, when Overbrook developed Will Smith singles to market his films, the movie titles—Men in Black (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1997) and Wild Wild West (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1999)—were used as track titles and also became the insistent chorus hooks. Geoff King (2003, p. 64) describes this as a “particularly blatant form of cross-media promotion,” encapsulating broader “exercises in cross-platform marketing” that Paul Gilroy has identified, in which music is “relegated to the role of ... mnemonic trigger” (2010, p. 126).

p. 200

- With their move into mainstream filmmaking, Smith and Lassiter encountered Hollywood’s set wisdom about the foreign market for black film, which is tersely described by producer Stephanie Allain as “black doesn’t travel” (quoted in Galloway, 2006). According to Lassiter, “people don’t understand what a struggle it was,” facing the line that “African-Americans don’t sell around the world” (quoted in Smith, 2007). Overbrook first encountered this industry precept on Bad Boys, which had two black leads (Smith and Martin Lawrence). Frustrated in preproduction that the attitudes of producers, Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson, and of overseas buyers had constrained the raising of production finance, Overbrook embarked on an aggressive international publicity campaign. As Lassiter remarks, “it is a lot of work, but to Will’s credit, he is willing to start at zero for each territory” (quoted in Siegel, 2008).

p. 201

- Many of Smith’s more recent vehicles have focused on particular countries, notably China, the fastest growing theatrical market, and Overbrook has also been aggressive in its pursuit of foreign investment—another key trend of the conglomerates. The release of blockbuster smash Hancock (Peter Berg, 2008) coincided with the Beijing Olympics, and Overbrook’s Karate Kid (Harald Zwart, 2010), starring Will Smith’s son Jaden, was filmed in China and co-funded by China Film Group, the government-run film company. As Amy Pascal chair of Columbia Pictures remarks, Overbrook “caught on” to the commercial need for global stories “before a lot of other people did” (quoted in Smith, 2007). It seems clear that Overbrook’s early crossover cultivation of the suburbs, with Smith being welcomed into people’s homes because of Fresh Prince, provided the model for developing a transnational fanbase.

p. 202

- The increased clout of top-talent in the contemporary industry not only gives rise to vast earnings but also to more creative control. Lassiter, Smith, and their agent Ken Stovitz, who has worked with them for more than 20 years and became an Overbrook co-partner in 2008, have been able to build the Smith and Overbrook brands, finding their own scripts and directors and coming up with packages. As a result, in his monograph on contemporary Hollywood stardom, McDonald states that “what is maybe most interesting about Smith is how he illustrates star agency in the system” (2013, p. 176).

p. 203

- Many black musicians, notably Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson), Queen Latifah (Dana Owens), and Master P (Percy Miller), have used their music careers as entrée into film, establishing successful movie production companies. Perry and Smith/Lassiter are among a number of celebrated black self-made entertainment entities or “moguls,” such as Oprah Winfrey, Sean (P-Diddy) Combs, and Curtis (50 Cent) Jackson, who produce and perform and are masters of synergy.

p. 204

- While both Smith and Perry have key white executives in their core networks, such as Overbrook’s in-house agent Ovitz and Tyler Perry’s studio production head Ozzie Areu, their companies remain much more diverse than is standard. Given that there are hardly any minorities at Hollywood’s key management firms, Lassiter himself, as Smith’s longtime production company chief, represents diversification. When journalist Patrick Goldstein (2011) “asked a couple of reporter pals to name the most powerful black executive in town, a lot of head-scratching ensued before we decided that the person with the most clout was probably James Lassiter.” Smith’s black wife Jada Pinkett Smith is also an Overbrook producer and director. Perry’s attorney, Matthew Johnson, is an African-American partner in the leading firm Ziffren Brittenham—one of the few prominent black lawyers in Hollywood.

p. 205

- Smith and Lassiter have spoken out about racial barriers in Hollywood that affect them individually, as in the budget and casting of particular films. This happened pointedly during the development of the romantic comedy Hitch (Andy Tennant, 2005). Columbia executives did not want to cast a black actress to play alongside Smith in case it was seen as a “black film,” leading Lassiter to criticise Hollywood’s assumption that “African Americans can’t have successful romantic comedies” (quoted in Smith, 2007; see Onwuachi-Willig, 2007). However, Smith and Lassiter have had very little to say about the endemic racial exclusions that affect less elite minority workers. In fact, perhaps fuelled by his own overwhelming sense of liberal-individualist achievement, Smith tends to stress opportunities rather than barriers: “For black actors, when you hit that tipping point and you’ve made it, your position is locked forever. You know Sam Jackson, Eddie Murphy, Denzel Washington, Martin Lawrence, Halle Berry—we can go on making movies as long as we want. It’s the white actors that come and go” (quoted in Stein, 2006). By adding the quip about white disadvantage, Smith risks trivialising the continuing poor prospects of many minority workers in the industry.

p. 205

- The different racial outlooks of Overbrook and Perry in industry terms travel into the textual meanings of their film products. As scholars have argued, hugely successful Will Smith vehicles such as Pursuit of Happyness (Gabriele Muccino, 2006), I am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007), and Hancock depict worlds that are largely postracial in which there is little sense of racial hierarchy. While some scholars persuasively suggest that veiled racial critiques circulate in particular Smith films (see Brayton, 2011; Palmer, 2011), there is a general, and generally convincing, view that Smith’s star image of professionalism under duress, transcendence and sacrifice, and acculturated black charisma, by and large, serve to disavow continuing, entrenched racial injustice in America (Aldridge, 2011; Vera & Gordon, 2003, pp. 181–184).

 p. 206

- Will Smith and James Lassiter greatly enriched Columbia and the other majors in financial and symbolic terms. In their business practice and on screen, they have showcased the potential for racial advances within neoliberalism. In doing so, they, perhaps unavoidably, help to legitimate that system which is built on profound inequalities. Nonetheless, Smith and Lassiter did become very active black agents, confronting some of the industry’s racist precepts, and, at their best, Will Smith vehicles subtly engage these racial politics. By skillfully developing their conglomerate- and audience-facing brands, they showed themselves to be highly adept and focused brokers of symbolic and commercial capital. They hustled the corporations with a deep hip-hop-inflected awareness of the conglomerates’ great dependency on top creatives to reduce financial risk. This enabled Overbrook, despite racial barriers, to negotiate as much self-determination as any star-fronted company in Conglomerate Hollywood—this feat should not be underestimated.

p. 207

__________________________________________

Reading 2:McDonald, Paul (1998) "Reconceptualising Stardom", supplementary chapter in Richard Dyer, Stars London: BFI 

- The picture personality was named as someone who worked in film and was only known for that work. A 'star' discourse emerged as commentary extended to the off-screen life of film performers. If the discourse on acting and the picture personality constructed knowledge about the professional life of screen actors, from 1913 the star discourse made known the private lives of film actors. As a general point about star studies, overuse of the term 'star' to describe any well-known film actor obscures how with most popular film performers, knowledge is limited to the on-screen 'personality'.

p. 178

- Contextualising the meaning of stars is always open to the charge of presenting a simple 'reflectionist' history of stardom: societies change historically and stars reflect those changes. A balance needs to be struck between the signs and discourses which are particular to film stardom at any moment and a sense of the context of social beliefs and conditions in which the star circulates. This raises questions of what defines and delimits a 'context', and what forms of context are to be judged as of most relevance to the study of stardom.

p. 179

Star Bodies and Performance

- Beliefs or concepts of identity are intangible things. Stars are significant for how they make such elusive and metaphysical notions into a visible show. It is this visualising of identity which makes the bodies of stars and the actions performed by those bodies into such a key element of a star's meaning.

p. 180

- Studying stars as moving bodies involves analysis of acting and performance. In acting, stars represent characters by the uses of the body and voice, and the significance of these minute actions may be described in terms of what Valentin Nikolaevic Volosinov saw in the potential of the body to produce what he called 'ideological scraps' (Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, p. 92). For example, in the opening scene of Silence of the Lambs (Jona than Dem me, 1991, US), Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling is seen jogging. Her breathlessness, sweat-matted hair, regular running rhythm and gritted teeth immediately establish the perseverance and resilience of the character, qualities which the rest of the investigative narrative will only further confirm. Ideologically, these small actions of the body already serve to indicate the 'temperament' which federal law must necessarily take if it is to contain the visceral, psychological and sexual threats posed by the narrative. 

p. 182/3

- Star autonomy can also be achieved by masking or de-emphasising the actor. In Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979, US), the narrative builds towards the final meeting between Martin Sheen as Willard and Marlon Brando as Kurtz. As the scene is so heavily predetermined, Brando/Kurtz can be almost entirely obscured in darkness during the meeting but still retain his star significance. Where with Roberts, star autonomy was produced by foregrounding her as glamorous spectacle, Brando's autonomy is signified by the 'anti-spectacle' he occupies. However, it is not only visual elements which produce Brande's autonomy. His ponderous delivery of the speech about inoculating the Vietnamese villagers shows the star's voice controlling the overall tempo of the film. When combined with stories of indulgent improvisations (Peter Manso, Brande; p. 843), the scene becomes an example of how the power of star autonomy is partly achieved through control of the voice or body.

p. 185

Stars and Audiences

- Fundamental to spectatorship theory wasLauraMulvey's 1975essay'VisualPleasure and Narrative Film: in which she argues, using a psychoanalytic framework, that classic narrative cinema continually organises looks which centre on the woman as spectacle. For Mulvey, the effect of this way of looking is that the moviegoer is positioned according to the pleasures of male heterosexual desire. Difficulties with the empirical evidence, theo retical foundations and universalising claims of Mulvey's argument have produced various critiques. Narrative film continually includes looks directed at the male bod y and also looks between male characters. Steve Neale argues that looks between male characters on film are made obviously threatening and aggressive in order to divert their erotic potential ('Masculinity and Spectacle', p. 14).
p. 187/188

- Laura Mulvey's use of Freudian/Lacanian thinking leads her to conclude that the male gaze produces a sadistically voyeuristic pleasure.
p. 189

- Stars perform representational work, and any examination of the place of stars in film production cannot be disconnected from the issues of representation raised by the image and the audience. Whatever the status of stars in film production, their value is bargained through their representational power. As the analysis of star images has considered issues of power in the struggles and negotiations of the moviegoer's making of meanings, so explorations of performers in film production will be concerned with how stars negotiate power relationships in their work of making meaning
p. 194

- Thomas Schatz has argued that since the mid-70s, American cinema has seen significant changes in its corporate structure, methods of marketing and stylistic conventions. In this 'New Hollywood', Schatz argues that three categories of film are mainly produced ('The New Hollywood', p. 35). Each of these categories can be associated with particular groups ofstars. From the expensive spectacle of the single-film deal has emerged the big-budget 'blockbuster'. Justin Wyatt refers to this same sector of production by the more contemporary industry vernacular of 'high-concept'. High concept film-making does not necessarily mean big budget or large box-office returns but is defined by Wyatt as 'a form of narrative which is highly marketable' (High Concept, p. 12). In high-concept, marketing possibilities are already influential in pre-production planning. Effective marketing requires a film proj ect to have an image which can be simply and directly communicated to the public. Wyatt sees the images of stars as instrumental in this strategy, with marketing seeking to fit a star's image to the premise ofthe film narrative. In other words, the star personifies the concept of the film. With high -concept, style overrides narrative content, foregrounding and possibly exaggerating of the qualities that stars are best known for. Wyatt's example of this is Jack Nicholson's performance as the Joker in Batman (Tim Burton, 1989, US), where Nicholson's demonic, maniacal quality witnessed in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980, US) and The Witches of Eastwick (George Miller, 1987, US) is turned into comic hysteria to perform an excessive display of Jack Nicholson-ness.
p. 195/6

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Week 10 [Seminar Notes] - Hollywood and Gender

Women in Hollywood and Zero Dark Thirty

The under-representation of women on and off-screen

- In 2014, the major six studios released only three films directed by women

- In 2011, women directed just 4.1% of theatrical releases in the US, 14.1% of films had female screenwriters

- Females comprised only 12% of protagonists featured in the top 100 grossing films of 2014, a decline of 3% from the previous year

- Females account for 29% of major characters

Women in Power

Donna Langley - Chairperson of Universal Pictures

Reese Witherspoon and Bruna Papandrea formed a company called Pacific Standard formed to develop more roles for women e.g. Gone Girl and Wild

Annapurna Pictures

- Founded by Megan Ellison, daughter of billionaire Larry Ellison (Oracle Corporation)

- An important player in the prestige market, films include:

The Master (2012)

Spring Breakers (2012)

The Grandmaster (2013)

American Hustle (2013)

Her (2013)

Foxcatcher (2014)

- She produced ZDT

Week 10 [Reading Notes] - Gender and Hollywood

Week 10: Gender and Hollywood

Reading 1:
Coll, Steve (2013) “‘Disturbing’ and ‘Misleading’”. New York Review of Books, February 7.
[Available at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/02/07/disturbing-misleading-zero-dark-thirty/]

- Zero Dark Thirty (ZDT) makes two choices: it aligns its methods with those of journalists and historians, and it appropriates as drama what remains the most undigested trauma in American national life during the last several decades.

- Critics have celebrated ZDT for its pacing, control, and arresting but complicated depictions of political violence. The New York Film Critics Circle has named the film best picture of 2012, and it has been nominated for five Academy Awards, including one for the best picture of the year. The qualities some critics admire in the film are familiar from The Hurt Locker, the previous collaboration—about an American bomb squad in Iraq—between the scriptwriter, Mark Boal, and the director, Kathryn Bigelow.
(The film made Bigelow the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director, in 2009, and it also won an Oscar for Best Picture.)

- Boal has said that he believes his script captures “a very complex debate about torture” because it shows some prisoners giving up information under duress, while others dissemble. There is no reason to doubt that Boal and Bigelow intended to depict the role of torture in the search for bin Laden ambiguously.

- There can be no mistaking what Zero Dark Thirty shows: torture plays an outsized part in Maya’s success. The first detainee she helps to interrogate is Ammar. He is tortured extensively in the film’s opening sequence, immediately after we hear the voices of World Trade Center victims. Ammar’s face is swollen; we see him strung up by ropes, waterboarded, sexually humiliated, deprived of sleep through the blasting of loud music, and stuffed into a small wooden box. During his ordeal, Ammar does not initially give up reliable information. After he has been subdued and fooled into thinking that he has already been cooperative while delirious, however, he gives up vital intelligence about the courier over a comfortable meal.

- In virtually every instance in the film where Maya extracts important clues from prisoners, then, torture is a factor. Arguably, the film’s degree of emphasis on torture’s significance goes beyond what even the most die-hard defenders of the CIA interrogation regime, such as Rodriguez, have argued. Rodriguez’s position in his memoir is that “enhanced interrogation” was indispensable to the search for bin Laden—not that it was the predominant means of gathering important clues.

- The film’s torture scenes depart from the historical record in two respects. Boal and Bigelow have conflated the pseudoscience of the CIA’s clinical, carefully reviewed “enhanced techniques” such as waterboarding with the out-of-control abuse of prisoners by low-level military police in places such as Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Dan puts Ammar in a dog collar and walks him around in an act of ritualised humiliation, but this was never an approved CIA technique.

- Zero Dark Thirty was constructed to bring viewers to the edges of their seats, and judging by its critical reception, for many viewers it has succeeded in that respect. Its faults as journalism matter because they may well affect the unresolved public debate about torture, to which the film makes a distorted contribution.

___________________________________________________

Reading 2:
Moore, Michael (2013) “In Defense of Zero Dark Thirty”. Huffington Post, January 25. [Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-moore/zero-dark-thirty-torture_b_2548079.html]

- There comes a point about two-thirds of the way through Zero Dark Thirty where it is clear something, or someone, on high has changed. The mood at the CIA has shifted, become subdued. It appears that the torture-approving guy who’s been president for the past eight years seems to be, well, gone. And, just as a fish rots from the head down, the stench also seems to be gone. Word then comes down that — get this! — we can’t torture any more! The CIA agents seem a bit disgruntled and dumbfounded. I mean, torture has worked soooo well these past eight years! Why can’t we torture any more??? 

- The answer is provided on a TV screen in the background where you see a black man (who apparently is the new president) and he’s saying, in plain English, that America’s torturing days are over, done, finished. There’s an “aw, shit” look on their faces and then some new boss comes into the meeting room, slams his fist on the table and says, essentially, you’ve had eight years to find bin Laden — and all you’ve got to show for it are a bunch of photos of naked Arab men peeing on themselves and wearing dog collars and black hoods.

- In the final third of Zero Dark Thirty, the agents switch from torture to detective work — and guess what happens? We find bin Laden! Eight years of torture — no bin Laden. Two years of detective work — boom! Bin Laden! And that really should be the main takeaway from Zero Dark Thirty: That good detective work can bring fruitful results — and that torture is wrong.

- The CIA has had the name of this guy all along! For ten years! And how did they get this name ten years ago? From “a tip.” A random tip! No torture involved. But, as was the rule during those years of incompetency and no desire to find bin Laden, the tip was filed away somewhere in some room — and not discovered until 2010. So, instead of torturing hundreds for eight years to find this important morsel of intelligence, they could have found it in their own CIA file cabinet in about eight minutes. Yeah, torture works.

- Oh — and girl. ‘Zero Dark Thirty — a movie made by a woman (Kathryn Bigelow), produced by a woman (Megan Ellison), distributed by a woman (Amy Pascal, the co-chairman of Sony Pictures), and starring a woman (Jessica Chastain) is really about how an agency of mostly men are dismissive of a woman who is on the right path to finding bin Laden. Yes, guys, this is a movie about how we don’t listen to women, how hard it is for them to have their voice heard even in these enlightened times. You could say this is a 21st century chick flick — and it would do you well to see it.

- After I saw Zero Dark Thirty, a friend asked me, “During the torture scenes, who did you feel empathy for the most — the American torturer or the Arab suspect?” That was easy to answer. “Oh, God, the poor guy being waterboarded. The torturer was a sadist.” “Yes, that’s the answer everyone gives me afterward. The movie actually makes you care for the tortured guys who may have, in fact, been part of 9/11. Like rooting for the Germans on the submarine to make it back to port in Das Boot, that’s the sign of some great filmmaking when the writer and director are able to get you to empathise with the person you’ve been told everywhere else to hate.”

___________________________________________________

Reading 3:
Lauzen, Martha M (2011). “Kathryn Bigelow: On Her Own in No-(Wo)Man’s-Land”, Camera Obscura, vol. 26, no. 3, pp.146-153.

- According to the latest Celluloid Ceiling report, women comprised only 7 percent of all directors working on the top 250 grossing films of 2010. Thus, when a woman who directs garners substantial public attention for her work, it provides a significant opportunity to consider how she navigates the journey to star-auteur.
p. 146

- Bigelow’s interviews with various US and international newspapers over this period of time reveal her attempt to fit into the male-dominated business of film directing by distancing herself from gender issues, while simultaneously aligning herself with traditionally male-identified traits, including toughness and the desire for control.
p. 147

- In interviews, Bigelow’s own words provide evidence that she has a deliberate and consistent strategy for managing her gender. She says as little as possible regarding women’s continuing underemployment as directors. Scholars who study how women in male-dominated industries manage their gender might refer to such an approach as a “refusal-to-be-bothered strategy.”6 This strategy allows women to avoid being overly concerned or defeated by the inequities they face. They are neither victims of an unfair system nor somehow inferior to men. It is ultimately a face-saving strategy that avoids directly addressing the system that necessitates its employment.
p. 147

- Articles appearing on Bigelow since the release of The Hurt Locker also mention her relationship with James Cameron. In some cases, it becomes the subject of the lead for the story or the sole focus of the story. This emphasis became especially pronounced as groups bestowing awards nominated both Bigelow and Cameron, as well as their films, in the same categories, culminating with the Oscar ceremony in March 2010.
p. 150

- Kathryn Bigelow’s public persona exists in a kind of nowoman’s land. It includes male traits typically deemed necessary to be a great director and sufficient female traits to soften her image and deflect possible accusations of gender deviancy. She has constructed a “girl wonder” myth by using the building blocks typically employed by men seeking “boy wonder” status. In the short term, Bigelow’s strategy seems likely to bolster her own career prospects, perhaps at the expense of other women who direct. In the long term, however, Bigelow’s strategy may serve as an intermediary step, readjusting public perceptions of women’s skills and abilities, making it possible for future women who direct to present themselves not as the exception but as the rule.
p. 151/2

___________________________________________________

Reading 4:
McRobbie, Angela (2007) “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture”. Feminist Media Studies, vol. 4, no.3. pp. 255-264.

- McRobbie's argument regarding post-feminism positively draws on and invokes feminism as that which can be taken into account, to suggest that equality is achieved, in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasise that it is no longer needed, it is a spent force. Feminism is cast into the shadows, where at best it can expect to have some afterlife, where it might be regarded ambivalently by those young women who must in more public venues stake a distance from it, for the sake of social and sexual recognition.
p. 255


- In feminist cultural studies, the early 1990s also marks a moment of feminist reflexivity. In her article “Pedagogies of the Feminine” Brunsdon queried the hitherto assumed use value to feminist media scholarship of the binary opposition between femininity and feminism, or as she put it the extent to which the “housewife” or “ordinary woman” was conceived of as the assumed subject of attention for feminism (Charlotte Brunsdon [1991] 1997). Looking back we can see how heavily utilised this dualism was, and also how particular it was to gender arrangements for largely white and relatively affluent (i.e. housewifely) women.
p. 256

- The year 1990 also marked the moment at which the concept of popular feminism found expression. Andrea Stuart (1990) considered the wider circulation of feminist values across the landscape of popular culture, in particular magazines, where quite suddenly issues which had been central to the formation of the women’s movement like domestic violence, equal pay, and workplace harassment, were now addressed to a vast readership.
p. 256

- TO BE CONTINUED

___________________________________________________

Reading 5:
Williams, Linda Ruth (2006) “Women in Recent US Cinema”, in Linda Ruth Williams and Michael Hammond (eds.), Contemporary American Cinema. Maidenhead and New York: Open University Press, pp. 299-314.

- Women have been involved in all aspects of the filmmaking process since the birth of the medium. For Gwendolyn Foster, the question is not whether women have had the opportunity to contribute to the history of cinema, but why film historians have noticed so few of their contributions. Women's marginalisation is twofold: after the 1920s they became rare breeds in the industry, but those who were working were also largely ignored by chroniclers (Foster 1999: xvi).
p. 299

- Auteurist approaches have limited scope in studies of the studio era - Lupino and Arzner were the only female directors to develop significant bodies of work in classical Hollywood. Other filmmaking professions fare better. There is, of course, a rich history of female stardom in the classical period and Lizzie Franke's Script Girls shows how screenwriting has been one profession open to [women] throughout the history of Hollywood.
They've been allowed to be editors too, but sewing up films in a dark room under the judicious eyes of the director obviously limited their participation in the story-telling process.... (Franke 1994: 1).
p. 299

- Ann Kaplan (2003: 16-22) reads women's film history in four phases: the first up to 1930 (the period of women pioneers); the second from 1930-60 (the period of "the Silencing of Women"); the third, from 1960- 90, in which white women became more dominant in US and other national cinemas; the fourth, from 1990 onwards, in which a growing multiculturalism became evident in European and North American women's cinema. Of phase three she writes that women filmmakers "gained power from the 1970s/ 1980s sense of embattlement, of challenging an unjust patriarchal order and claiming what was due to women" (Kaplan 2003: 19), but she is also careful to point out that the landscape of North American filmmaking has most dramatically altered recently with the impact of work from independent and foreign filmmakers.
p. 300

- Christina Lane (2000: 13) writes in her important survey of women who have made the transition from independent to mainstream directing: Before the 1970s, when access to commercial production opened up slightly, women had only two avenues for becoming Hollywood directors: as film actresses or as secretaries/production assistants who worked their way up through the ranks of the system. Only recently have women been hired as directors on the basis of their independent films.
p. 300

- In the 1980s and 1990s more women took the route from writing to directing, including one of the most successful contemporary filmmakers, Nora Ephron. Ephron is mostly known for her seminal "chick flick" examinations of contemporary relationships and neuroses, developed through When Harry Met Sally (1989), which she wrote, and Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You've Got Mail (1998), bothof which she wrote and directed. She has also helmed other star-led projects marked by a light tone which belies their knowing cleverness, including Mixed Nuts (1994), Michael (1996), Lucky Numbers (2000), and Bewitched (2005).
p. 303

- This was also an important period for women moving into production from other lowlier studio roles or from success as agents. Rachel Abramowitz (2000 : xii) argues that even recently women worked in a depressing context:
in an industry dominated not just by men but by the likes and dislikes of the young male consumer, and by a certain saber-rattling ethos of masculinity, in which women were relentlessly sexualized, their gender constantly accessed and reaccessed as a key component of their professional abilities.
p. 310/11

- In the 1990s screenwriting continues to be an attractive opening for women. Writers whose work deserves fuller analysis include Amanda Silver. But such a diverse range of films raises the question of whether there is anything specifically female about these texts. Clearly, any overview of women in US cinema in this period is bound to be selective, offering a survey of significant moments. The vast differences across and between films cited here demonstrate the diversity of projects which women have developed.
p. 312

- Most female film directors want "to be seen as film-makers first and women film-makers second or not at all" (Felperin 1999: 10). For popular audiences, the most startling example of "feminist filmmaking" from the 1990s was not directed by a woman but a man, although it was written by Callie Khouri, who won an Oscar for her screenplay. Thelma and Louise (1991), according to Sharon Willis (1993: 120), "troubled borderlines that contemporary popular critical discourse continues to code as fragile: those between art and life, fantasy and agency, cinematic fiction and the life stories we tell ourselves". It also troubles notions about what men and women should be and do on screen, and behind the camera. Many films by women have of course done this too, but whether they have been able consistently to achieve it for mass audiences is another question. And whether the greater involvement of women in the filmmaking process has radically transformed representations of screen gender remains an issue of fierce debate.
p. 313

Week 9 [Seminar Notes] - Global Hollywood

Global Hollywood

- Hollywood as a global business.

- The global organisation of production, distribution, marketing and exhibition.

- The relationship between overseas audiences and Hollywood films.

- What are the arguments for and against viewing Hollywood as an agent of 'cultural imperialism'?

- In what ways are films: products engineered for success across global market and customised for and by local audiences?

Key Points from Miller Reading:

-  Miller et al. - Political economy perspective as a critique of Hollywood as part of transnational capitalism/US economic and cultural imperialism. Globalised production as part of international division of labour.

- To describe Hollywood's place in the global economy, they adapt the term 'New International Division of Labour' - Hollywood as part of a 'New International Division of Labour'

They emphasise:

- Globalisation as a labour process

- Hollywood's coordination of and authority over cultural labour markets overseas

- The role of the governments play in conjunction with multinational corporations 

- Hollywood operates like other industries, which have sought to lower costs by offshoring productions to areas with cheaper workforces, less regulation and weaker unions.

- "Hollywood's hegemony is built upon and sustained by the internal suppression of worker's rights, the explorations of a global division of labour, and the impact of colonialism on language."

Runaway Production

- First became a major trend in the 40s-50s. Hollywood productions made in the UK and European studios and on location in a range of global destinations. 

Benefits:

- Lower costs

- Government incentives

- Authenticity

- Touristic aspect to the viewing experience

- May help sell the product to local audiences

- License plating - e.g. Toronto or Vancouver as New York and other American cities

- Opposed by US craft unions in Southern California. Frequent topic of debate in the trade press.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)

- Financed by New Lines Cinemas and Warner Bros.

- US financed, NZ production, international cast

- $25M at least in tax credits from NZ government

- Labour dispute --> NZ rewrites legislation to remove rights of workers on film productions.

- 266 days of shooting

- 99 sets built

- 6,750 domestic flights taken

- 1,800 rental cards hired

- $380,000 spent on coffee

- $1.5M spent on local food suppliers

For tax purposes, Hollywood films try to make their film qualify in other countries which contributed to the film's modes of production.

Presentation Script: Yellow Future

Slide 2

Jane Chi Hyun Park’s book Yellow Future: Oriental Style in New Hollywood (2010) references East Asia as futuristic and technologized in a range of Hollywood movies since the 1980s. She contextualises these references within the social, economic, and cultural developments of this period. As you can see, Park explains that this a collective fantasy which is based on the national consciousness of East Asia and sustained through imagery, iconography, and modes of performance that conflate East Asia with technology in a global, multicultural context, constituting what Park calls “oriental style.” and it’s “conditional visibility” in contemporary Hollywood films.

Slide 3

In regards to conditional visibility, this is the ways in which certain bodies, objects, and images are sometimes visible and other times invisible in the dominant culture, that for Park: “defines how the Asiatic appears in U.S. commercial media and how people of Asian descent are seen—and just as often not seen—in the public sphere.”

It can be easy for the people of East Asia to condemn images of how they are projected in media as racist stereotypes due to the feelings of anger, disgust, and shame that may arise from seeing themselves distorted in such images on-screen.

Although, it is just as easy to celebrate openly or to consume secretly due to the recent proliferation of “cool” Asian tropes in more contemporary Hollywood films. For example the Rush Hour series, the Kill Bill volumes, and The Forbidden Kingdom (2008).

Slide 4

So what is Oriental style? For Park, it is “the process and product of the ways in which Hollywood films crystallise and commodify multiple, heterogeneous Asiatic cultures, histories, and aesthetics into a small number of easily recognisable, often interchangeable tropes that help to shape dominant cultural attitudes about Asia and people of Asian descent.” Thus, the 'oriental' refers to the racialisation of East Asians living in America, and the 'style' refers to the aesthetic product that appeals to multiple audiences due precisely to its seeming lack of depth, subjectivity, and history. These themes create the background and foreground of more contemporary Hollywood movies and implicitly structures the primary narratives and characters of these films.

Slide 5

As East Asian culture has developed, so has the industry’s use of oriental style. For example, Park’s refers to the current Asian imagery in Hollywood and how it seems to deviate from earlier, more explicitly stereotypical depictions of East Asians and Asian Americans. Oriental style can be depicted through elements of the film such as:

• Beautifully showcase Asian landscapes and cultures (from a Hollywood perspective) in high-budget films such as The Last Samurai (2003) and Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)
• The appearance of a desirable Asiatic masculinity embodied in glamorous action heroes played by stars such as Jet Li, Jackie Chan, and Chow Yun-Fat and performed through martial arts, now de rigueur in Hollywood action sequences.

Here is a short clip from Edward Zwick's film The Last Samurai which exhibits both these qualities of Oriental Style in New Hollywood cinema.

SHOW CLIP

From Park’s perspective, these signs seem to indicate that “East Asia, once abject and rejected, has become, or is very much in the process of becoming, attractive and even celebrated in U.S. popular media.” I'll now hand over to Marshall who will further explore Park's article on oriental style.

Week 9 [Screening Notes] - Global Hollywood

The Bourne Ultimatum (Greengrass, 2007)

1. In what ways might this film appeal to global audiences?
2. How does it represent the world as landscape/backdrop for narrative action? What images, activities and associations are linked to these countries (and the USA) as settings for the film’s plot?
3. How does it represent other countries, cultures, peoples?
4. What relationship between the US and the world does it depict?
5. What aspects of globalisation does this film represent or embody?
6. How is coherence and continuity maintained in spite of the visual style?
7. This film had a number of product placement deals associated with it. Can you work out what they are from watching the film?