Week 7 responses

How was the saturation booking and marketing of Jaws different than other Universal films (or earlier blockbusters such as The Godfather)? 

They bought television spots on the three prime time networks.  They all targeted different demographics.  Jaws ended up having the largest television campaign.  With the marketing of the book and the buzz that was created, Universal had the film open in theaters all over the country, straying away from just releasing to the major cities like L.A. and New York.

 

 

 Name three ways in which the publishers of the book and the producers of the film worked together to promote Jaws. How did they know that their logo for Jaws was successful? [Include names/companies in your answer.]

 

1.) The producers under Universal, Zanuck and Brown helped exhibitors push the release of the book even though it did not mean any advances financially for them.  They wanted to hype the book to hype the movie.  Zanuck would go on to produce the movie Sweeney Todd by Tim Burton but that is not important.

 

2.) The author of the book Peter Benchley was having the book published by Bantam books at the same time that Universal was producing the film.  They encouraged Benchley to do a lot of interviews on talk show knowing that talk would turn to movie hype.

 

3.)  Universal planned on releasing the film within months of the paper release of the book.  Zanuck/ Brown and Bantam books all worked on the logo together so that the movie and the book could be thought of together.  They knew they were successful when they showed and two thousand people waited in the rain to see it.

 

What is “blind bidding”? Why did exhibitors object to the proposed blind bidding for Jaws? Why was the blind bidding for Jaws called off?

 

Blind bidding allows exhibitors to big on film to show in theaters that they have not seen yet.  The Justice Department regulates and has rules on how to and how many films an exhibitor can blind bid on.  Universal was asking an exorbitant amount of money for a film that no one had even seen yet.  Exhibitors had no idea if the film was any good but they knew it had potential to flop leaving them out to dry and broke.  There were extreme charges just to show the film.  After a sneak preview that ensured a successful logo for Zanuck/Brown and Bantam books, the Justice Department called off the bidding because some exhibitors had the unfair advantage of seeing the film.

Robert Altman and Nashville

Sawhill was an NYU film student in 1975, thus a product of the film culture that emerged in the late 1960s / early 1970s. Respond to his opinion of post-1975 American film culture (part 3, "A Cinema of Information.") Do you agree or disagree with his assumptions, observations, and conclusions?

 

Sawhill discusses being at the theater on opening day for Nashville and seeing Altman, running up to him and asking him for an autograph, treating him like a god.  He describes films by people like Altman and The Godfather by Coppola as an art that gives the viewer everything they could ever need.  He criticizes the baby-boomers coming in and taking control.  He ridicules them and refers to them as businessmen.  He rubs me the wrong way with this, he makes it seem like the filmmakers pre-baby boomers perfected cinema and then the young hungry businessmen moved in, kicked Altman out, sent him to New York to direct plays and then to France, as untalented and believes they just try to duplicate what has already been done.  All the techniques used by Altman became the norm and he was booted out.  He says that now he has fallen out of love with movie going.  I was confused how he made post-1975 Hollywood seem like young power kicking out the old and trying to make an easy penny by standing on the shoulders of the great men that came before them.  In class, I thought we discussed how it has always been like that.

 

 

What does Sawhill suggest are the functions of the recurring “wires, phones, intercoms, cameras, mikes, speakers” throughout the film? [Note: Read the whole article before responding, don't just look for this list of devices in the article.]

 

 

Altman uses these objects to show that all the people in Nashville are always recording themselves.  Trying to create themselves then let their own personalities form.  Altman makes the people of Nashville look pretentious and fake (which had many of the resident furious, thinking the film would be a testament).  The author went to Nashville a few years after the film was released and found that Altman was not that far off.  He describes Nashville with a long quote, “Altman treats Nashville as a provincial New York or Hollywood, as one of the places where the culture manufactures its image of itself (this is Nashville in the early stages of getting slick and L.A.-ified). Altman shows us the image, and what goes into creating and sustaining it. He cuts between public functions and private domestic scenes; he shoots in studios and theaters, from onstage and from behind control booths. We gather that this is a culture that believes that its self-image accounts, or ought to account, for everything. And its image of itself is cheerful, upbeat, carefree: "It don't worry me," people sing.”  The aspect of all the recording objects makes the people look lost in their own environment.  Altman plays with pop culture and the world’s madness associated with the spotlight of celebrity.  Everyone wants to be a celebrity and then blames the world when they don’t find any.  Sawhill writes, “With its profusion of wires, recording and communication devices, its mirrors and reflections and its concern with language, playacting, time and revelation.”

 

Which of Altman’s stylistic techniques does Sawhill associate with "inclusiveness"?

 

One of Altman’s great techniques was to use more than one camera, this way the actors couldn’t play for the camera, not knowing which shot would be edited and used in the film…brilliant but expensive.  Sawhill writes, “The sound systems he developed with the sound engineers Jim Webb and Chris McLaughlin let him record and present more ambient and minor-character noise than we'd been used to. With his cinematographers -- during this period, usually Vilmos Zsigmond and, here, Paul Lohmann -- Altman used multiple cameras and lighted entire environments, not just individual shots. This gave his actors an unusual freedom of movement; it also meant that, since they often didn't know from which direction they were being filmed, or which angle was likely to be used in the final cut, they couldn't play to a camera.”  The article talks about the beauty Altman had with shaping his actresses, some of the article made me wonder if he was sleeping with all of them.  The author describes the brilliance in the acting by stating, “The stages and studios of "Nashville" are full of professionals, but the stars themselves are near-amateurs, or very skilled at playing near-amateurs. Someone who really connects (like the Ronee Blakley character) can be a lightning rod for our frustrations.”

Week 5 Questions

How were young filmmakers in the late 1960s and early 1970s different from previous generations of filmmakers in terms of the following: how they broke into commercial filmmaking, how their films were financed, and who was in charge of the studios?

 

 

-It was almost impossible to break into the Hollywood film industry in the 1950s.  It was dominated by huge directors like Wyler and Hawks.  The younger generation started pushing things with films like Bonnie Clyde, which was produced by its 29 year old star Warren Beatty.  The Graduate is another film that did well, it was directed by a then 34 year old Mike Nichols.  In 1967, The Graduate earned 32 million dollars, becoming the movie of the decade and earning Nichols an academy award for best director.  The major studios were producing large budget movies at the time, many of which started to flop.  With the success of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, the studios began to hire younger producers and directors to try and connect to a younger audience.  This allowed great movies like Stanley Kubrick’s A Space Odyssey to be made.  Most of the major studios were being bought out.  Dennis Hopper’s Eazy Rider established the thought of turning Independent movies of young directors into blockbusters.  The auteur theory began to spend through film schools like USC and UCLA.  Producer Roger Corman began to find talented directors out of film school.  Studios started producing low-budget movies and almost always making their money back.  By a direct result of overproduction, every studio except 20^th Century Fox, Disney, and Columbia had been taken over by major conglomerates. 

 

 

Give examples of how Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios was similar and different from Roger Corman and American International Pictures.

 

-Both Zoetrope Studios and Corman’s AIP were studios that tried to produce movies that would appeal to the “youth culture.”  Coppola admits that he modeled Zoetrope Studios directly after Corman’s American International Pictures.  Coppola started producing his friend’s films such as George Lucas first feature, THX-1138.  The biggest difference between the two companies was Coppola’s desire to produce larger films.  He produced huge epics like Apocalypse Now.  Coppola was the sole owner of Zoetrope Studios.  After the movie One From the Heart, Coppola was almost bankrupt.  The highly stylized musical was expensive and did not do well at the box office.  In 1984, Coppola was forced to sell Zoetrope Studios.

Week 4 Questions

Week 4 Questions

What is meant by ³modernist² in the passage: ³Critics engaged with a
self-declared ŒNew American Cinema¹ exemplified by the work of writers and
directors such as Jonas Mekas, Kenneth Anger, and John Cassavetes, certain
aspects of which constituted, according to David Bordwell, a conscious
Œmodernist¹ break with Hollywood classicism²? [The answer is not in the
passage; I¹m asking you to look up ³modernism² and ³modernist² if you are
not familiar with the term as you should be doing for any unfamiliar terms.


I really like this question because it isn't straight out of the reading.
You do the reading a formulate your own opinion and then look for
information to support it.  Modernism is a term used when describing a
cultural change in Western society primarily in the issues of art.  It is a
constant reform of the ideas of what is impossible.  It is built upon the
idea that man can create, improve, and reshape art.  Cassavetes believed in
this reform and found a way to make beautiful movies without conforming to
the traditional system.  He knew that the time is always now and you have to
keep trying to knew things and attacking the common practice as old and
boring.  Kenneth Anger attacked the traditional medium by shocking America
with his controversial movies.

What was Kael¹s critique of art cinema and the New American Cinema, and why
was Bonnie and Clyde ³the most excitingly American American movie² at the
time?

Kael describes the difference between art cinema as taking a story and
making it beautiful versus a documentary style narrative that tells the
story as it was remembered.  "He now focused his attention on the issue of
historical accuracy as well.  Any errors, he said, might exist in the small
details, but not in the big ones."  Critics loved the movie and started
comparing it to John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath.  Some believed in summed up
the 1930s in desperate America.  Other critics wanted to smash the movie.
It made two people look like superstars while going around murdering people
and robbing banks.  It scarred the critics and their perception of the two
bandits.  Kael states, "that when a movie so clearly conceived as a new
version of a legend is attacked as historically inaccurate, it's because it
shakes people a little."  And, "only food movies..provoke attacks."


p. 32-34: What were some of the causes and consequences of the shift from
the Production Code to the Ratings System?

The decision was made in November 1968 to change to a rating system.  It was
provoked by two Supreme Court decisions upholding the rights of local
governments to prevent children being exposed to books or movies considered
suitable only for adults, the MPA introduced ratings in an attempt to
circumvent a flood of state and municipal legislation establishing local
schemes for film classification. As a consequence, independent distributors
were briefly able to gain wider access to the domestic exhibition market,
taking a 30 per cent share of it in 1970.  Exhibitors declared that they
would not play X rated movies and some newspapers refused to advertise them.
"The constraints were, however, different in nature,  Designed as a means of
labeling movies according to the degree of explicitness in their
representation of sex, violence or language, the rating system became a
marketing device, inciting such representations up to the limits of the
permissible."

377 Week 3 questions on the underground and warhol

Why was the Charles Theater important for the development of “underground film” in New York City?

 

The Charles became an independent filmmakers paradise.  It started the Filmmakers Festival, which brought young high school drop out Ron Rice into the spotlight.  The Charles started the famous midnight showings of indie movies.  The audiences went crazy.  The audience would hoot, holler, and sometimes boo.  Jonas Mekas pushed to make it a theater where New York’s finest up and coming experimental filmmakers could showcase their work.  Tickets were only 95 cents a seat.  The Charles allowed the work of young artist to be shown for a reason price.  You didn’t have to have a big name to have your work shown.  The Charles became a theater with no limits.  The wildest films were shown and the church-like audiences loved it.

 

Which underground films encountered legal problems in 1964, and why?

 

Mike Getz was arrested and found guilty by a jury of all women for showing an obscene film, Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising.  It shows brief moments of male frontal nudity.  The film had only shown a week before he was arrested.  The other film to have legal problems was Flaming Creatures.  “On Monday, March 3, two detectives from the district attorney’s office broke up a screening of Flaming Creatures- ‘It was hot enough to burn up the screen,’ one would tell the press- impounding the film, some Normal Love rushes, and Warhol’s Normal love ‘newsreel,’ along with the theater’s projector and screen.”

 

The Chelsea Girls Question

 

Warhol is similar with Luis Bunuel because they both would find themselves making controversial films and being without a strong source of funding.  “The problem of financing has at one time of another limited, or completely curtailed, the work of such masters as Griffith, von Stroheim, Flaherty, Bunuel, and Orsen Welles.”  Mussman goes on to state, “The Chelsea Girls bears a rese,blance to L’AGE D’OR or SCARFACE specifically in terms of violence which is already manifest within the human psyche.”

 

Mussman discusses how Hitchcock’s manipulative films tell the viewer what to see and how to feel.  “His audience, “unlike Hitchcock’s for instance, is not being manipulated toward a calculated end, but rather is free to establish a line of communication with what is being shown on the screen or not.  Warhol’s cinema affords the spectator and open-ended response.

 

Realism is the greatest comparison of the works of Warhol and Godard.  Mussman describes, “Warhol’s direct approach has been has been in the air for some time, from the Italian Neo-Realist films coming out of documentary to Godard’s recent work.”   Both directors were not commercial artists.