Movie Blockbusters

✍ Scribed by Julian Stringer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 289
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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

✦ Table of Contents

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