Critical Commentary: Recommended Reading [Week 5]

Reading 1:  Lewis, Jon, “The Perfect Money Machine(s): George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Auteurism in the New Hollywood”, Film International vol. 1, no.1 (2003), pp.12-26

By mid-decade, Spielberg's Jaws and Lucas's Star Wars took things to another level (financially at least) while at the same time hinting at another sort of moviemaking that did not require such big concessions to talent. Jaws was the first film to break the $100 million mark. Star Wars nearly doubled the domestic revenues earned byJaws and it exploited ancillary I merchandising tie-ins in ways that no film-even the animated films made at the Disney Studios-had done before it.
p. 66

As Hollywood evolved into a blockbuster industry in the late 1970s, Lucas and Spielberg provided the formula for high-concept entertainment. "If a person can tell me the idea in 25 words or less," Spielberg boasted to J. Hoberman in 1985, "it's going to make a good movie. I like ideas, especially movie ideas, you can hold in your hand."  With such an embrace of simple, striking narratives-narratives that support mass marketability Spielberg displayed a penchant for deliberating upon marketing schemes in advance of principal photography.
p. 68
Quote: Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies andMarketing in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), pp.13.

In the new Hollywood, auteurism and celebrity intersect in interesting ways. Auteurs gain notoriety less for a signature style than for a signature product. Lucas's and Spielberg's films are easy to package and multiply in form and format. Their oeuvre presents a model of contemporary filmmaking in an industry that is no longer (just) about making movies. But success is never so simple. Auteurism in the present tense is about celebrity and reputation and how a particular director or producer might use his or her celebrity and reputation to make deals and thus films and money. On that score, Lucas and Spielberg are unrivalled.
p. 68

For historians, auteurism regards the relative quality of an artistic signature. The evaluation of a given oeuvre becomes a matter of posterity and legacy. On that score-in some future account of late-twentieth-century American filmmaking - Lucas and Spielberg may well have plenty to worry about.
p. 69

In a 1996 essay titled "Who Killed the Movies?"David Thomson looks back and laments the end of the auteur renaissance and the emergence in its place of a "medium [that has] sunk beyond anything we dreamed of,leaving us stranded, a race of dreamers. This is more and worse than a bad cycle... and I blame Spielberg and Lucas."Thomson's essay is nostalgic and rueful. "Twenty-five years ago,"he writes, "the best directors were identifiable. They had their own language, the deepest sense of personal style."
p. 69

Special effects have gained prominence at the expense of mise-en-scene, performance (of the human kind), and narrative/thematic depth.The primacy of special effects is never more apparent than it is in two Spielberg-produced films. The first, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit, directed by Spielberg's protege Robert Zemekis features animated characters with which live-action actors occasionally interfere. The film is at its most interesting in Toon Town where the effects bedevil and overwhelm the flesh and blood on screen.
p. 70

While the first wave auteurs focused primarily on mise-en-scene and took pride and care in directing actors during the production phase, Lucas and Spielberg are almost exclusively post-production directors.
p. 70

If a director or producer's claim to auteur status regards the degree to which he or she has controlled a project, Lucas and Spielberg are auteurs of the highest, strictest order. Such a degree of control was from the start dependent on a similarly high degree of box office success.
Thomson and others are right to downplay Lucas's and Spielberg's commitment to a directoral, auteur cinema. Lucas and Spielberg used their postproduction expertise to establish another sort of auteur project. As much as the old studios-MGM, Warner, etc.-cultivated a signature look in the so-called classical era, Lucasfilm, 1L M,and Spielberg's production unit, Amblin, have produced a recognizable, signature product." Like no other directors before or since, Lucas and Spielberg successfully challenged studio control over postproduction, and they did so in order, as auteurs, to control their products completely. Lucas has gone so far as to exert control over the exhibition of his films through his THx-line of theatre sound systems and videocassette and DVD sound reproduction.
p. 71

Lucas and Spielberg have exploited their auteur celebrity more deftly than did any of their predecessors. Most film historians damn them for this particular skill, or at least insist that we need to put their oeuvres in the context of certain significant changes in the film industry. As the film historian Henry Jenkins writes: "By treating filmmakers as independent contractors, the new production system places particular emphasis on the development of market value of an individual director." 18 This market value is tied to the consistent supply of a familiar, visual, and narrative formula. Directors are wont to develop and consistently adhere to such a recognisable style and form because familiarity breeds success. And success insures control.
p. 71/72

In virtually all of the early interviews, Spielberg espouses a pure joy in filmmaking. But at the same time he discounts the very pretensions that supported 1970S auteurism: personal signature, marginal and/or antagonistic relations with studio Hollywood, a priority on artistic integrity, and a seeming disinterest, though it need not be altogether honest or true, in a film's stake in the marketplace. By embracing high-concept filmmaking, Spielberg expressed (according to his critics at least) undue interest in what works and what doesn't work with audiences. By seeming to prioritise public relations over personal artistic principals, he effectively snubbed the very filmmaking practice that reviewers, critics, and historians had come to idealise.
p. 73/74

As to his own role within 1980s American cinema, Spielberg concluded, again off the cuff. "Francis [Coppola] lives in a world of his own, George [Lucas] lives in a galaxy far, far away but close to human audiences, and I'm an independent moviemaker working within the Hollywood establishment."
Spielberg's deceptively simple remarks here are revelatory.Independence is and always has been an ideal in Hollywood. But while Spielberg's success at the box office has enabled him to maintain control over his movies, the notion that he was ever making films somehow independent of the studios is patently ridiculous.
p. 74
Quote: Chris Auty,"The Complete Spielberg," Sight  and Sound (Autumn 1982): pp. 279.

In Visions of Empire, the film historian Stephen Prince puts the culture commerce dichotomy in Lucas's and Spielberg's oeuvre into a specifically Reaganite context-a context at once reflected in and refracted out from the world of movies and moviemaking,
"Relationships between culture and commerce, film characters, and commodities," writes Prince, "are being reorganised in the era of the blockbuster as an economy of advertising comes to regulate film production and its representations of our cultural life in new ways. Some films become ads, and characters like ET become products." 
p. 76 
Quote: Stephen Prince, Visions of Empire: Political Imagery in Contemporary American Film (New York: Praeger, 1992), pp. 22.

Kolker's book reveals the difficulty of doing auteurist history in the blockbuster era-an era that marks the industrial demise of the auteur. For example, in the third edition Kolker's book reveals the difficulty of doing auteurist history in the blockbuster era-an era that marks the industrial demise of the auteur. For example, in the third edition he adds a section on Spielberg, a director that he tries to like but in the final analysis regards as merely the best director in a particularly bad era"of minimal experimentation and large scale repetition." For Kolker, Spielberg is the avatar of a pervasive "cinema of retrenchment."
p. 78/79 
Quote: Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, 3rd ed, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 247-248. 

Though Lucas's work has been no less mainstream or commercial than that of Spielberg, Lucas has historically been far less willing than Spielberg to publicly embrace the Hollywood system. Lucas's account of his decision to seek a modicum of autonomy from Hollywood reveals a film student's notion of independence based in large part on the European model championed by the auteur critics and French New Wave filmmakers whose work dominated the film school curriculum in the 1960s and 1970s.
p. 80

It is important to remember that the freedom to make movies "independently" in Hollywood comes at a cost. Lucas and Spielberg found a formula for success with the film-going public. But more significantly,they found a formula for success in their dealings with the studios. In the mid-1970s, when Lucas and Spielberg first hit the scene,auteurs were under significant pressure to turn things around at the box office. And that's exactly what these two auteurs did.
p. 84

The 1970s studios' conglomerate owners, the likes of Transamerica, Coca-Cola, and Gulf and Western, dealt with their studios like any of their subsidiaries as units held accountable to consistent business practices, marketing policies, and bottom-line performance. As the entertainment market expanded in the 1980s,these corporations began to insist that films be distributed in a variety of forms and formats to better exploit the vertically and horizontally integrated marketplace. Lucas and Spielberg were the first and the best at the very sort of filmmaking designed to succeed under such an economic policy. In light of this we might ask here, at the end, had Lucas and Spielberg not arrived on the scene just when they did, would studio executives in 1980s Hollywood have had to invent them? 
p. 84