Movie Blockbusters

Description

Big-budget, spectacular films designed to appeal to a mass audience: is this what - or all - blockbusters are? Movie Blockbusters brings together writings from key film scholars, including Douglas Gomery, Peter Kramer, Jon Lewis and Steve Neale, to address the work of notable blockbuster auteurs such as Steven Spielberg and James Cameron, discuss key movies such as Star Wars and Titanic, and consider the context in which blockbusters are produced and consumed, including what the rise of the blockbuster says about the Hollywood film industry, how blockbusters are marketed and exhibited, and who goes to see them. The book also considers the movie scene outside Hollywood, discussing blockbusters made in Bollywood, China, South Korea, New Zealand and Argentina Cover Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of figures List of contributors Introduction The New Hollywood PART I Industry matters 1 Hollywood blockbusters: historical dimensions 2 Following the money in America’s sunniest company town: some notes on the political economy of the Hollywood blockbuster 3 The Hollywood blockbuster: industrial analysis and practice 4 The role of the auteur in the age of the blockbuster: Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks PART II Exploring spectacle 5 Talking about a revolution: the blockbuster as industrial advertisement 6 Spectacle, narrative, and the spectacular Hollywood blockbuster 7 “Want to take a ride?”: reflections on the blockbuster experience in Contact (1997) 8 Blockbusting sound: the case of The Fugitive PART III Establishing cultural status 9 Circulations of taste: Titanic, the Oscars, and the middlebrow 10 Sex, controversy, box-office: from blockbuster to bonkbuster 11 Star Wars in fandom, film theory, and the museum: the cultural status of the cult blockbuster 12 The best place to see a film: the blockbuster, the multiplex, and the contexts of consumption 13 Neither one thing nor the other: blockbusters at film festivals PART IV The blockbuster in the international frame 14 “What’s big about the big film?”: “de-Westernizing” the blockbuster in Korea and China 15 Once Were Warriors: New Zealand’s first indigenous blockbuster 16 Television for the big screen: how Comodines became Argentina’s first blockbuster phenomenon 17 Locating Bollywood: notes on the Hindi blockbuster, 1975 to the present Index