Just how risky is the movie industry? Is screenwriter William Goldman's claim that "nobody knows anything" really true? Can a star and a big opening change a movie's risks and return? Do studio ...executives really earn their huge paychecks?
These and many other questions are answered in Hollywood Economics . The book uses powerful analytical models to uncover the wild uncertainty that shapes the industry. The centerpiece of the analysis is the unpredictable and often chaotic dynamic behaviour of motion picture audiences.
This unique and important book will be of interest to students and researchers involved in the economics of movies, industrial economics and business studies. The book will also be a real eye-opener for film writers, movie executives, finance and risk management professionals as well as more general movie fans.
Arthur De Vany is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of California, Irvine and President of Arts Analytica, a consulting company specializing in energy, motion pictures and risk-return analysis.
'If you want an applied exposition of the "wild" type of uncertainty, this is the book. I know of no better text to understand kurtosis, the contribution of the very small to the very large, and the dynamics of rare events. The value of this book lies way beyond the film industry. In addition it is is written with great clarity and does not use anything beyond intuitive mathematics.' — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, PhD, Empirica LLC, Bestselling author of Fooled by Randomness
'A heretical and wise perspective on the economics and consumer patterns of Hollywood. Provocative and eye opening for its depth and intelligent analysis.' — Thom Mount, Producer and former Universal Studios President
'This book provides dramatic evidence that, in comparison with the film industry, normally uncertain things are virtually sure things. Not even popular stars or large first-week audiences are valid predictors of a film's future success. The volume demonstrates what sophisticated analysis can and cannot reveal about an industry in which "no one knows anything". It will be extremely valuable to anyone with an intellectual, financial or other interest in the market for popular films and for anyone concerned with analysis of subjects characterized by extreme uncertainty. Nonspecialists should not be daunted by the demanding technical analysis for there is plenty that will readily be understandable and fascinating to any intelligent reader.' — William J. Baumol, Professor of Economics, New York University and Senior Research Economist at Princeton University, USA
'Professor De Vany has written a seminal work on the risks of film investment, a topic with which Hollywood may be painfully familiar, but which has rarely, if ever, been the subject of such thorough analysis. Through his statistical studies and analyses, Professor De Vany questions many of the assumptions made by Hollywood dealmakers, investors and studio executives.' — Sam Pryor, Partner, Alschuler Grossman Stein & Kahan, Adjunct Professor, Entertainment Law, USC Law School
Part I: Box-office champions, chaotic dynamics and herding 1. The market for motion pictures: Rank, revenue and survival 2. Bose-Einstein dynamics and adaptive contracting in the motion picture industry 3. Quality evaluations and the breakdown of statistical herding in the dynamics of box-office revenue Part II: "Wild" uncertainty, tough decisions and false beliefs 4. Uncertainty in the movie industry: Can star power reduce the terror of the box office? 5. Does Hollywood make too many R-rated movies?: Risk, stochastic dominance and the illusion of expectation 6. Big budgets, big openings and legs: Analysis of the blockbuster strategy Part III: Judges, lawyers and the movies 7. Motion picture antitrust: The Paramount cases revisited 8. Was the antitrust action that broke up the movie studios good for the movies?: Evidence from the stock market 9. Stochastic market structure: Concentration measures and motion picture antitrust Part IV: A business of extremes 10. Motion picture profit, the stable Paretian hypothesis and the curse of the superstar 11. Contracting with stars when "nobody knows anything" 12. How extreme uncertainty shapes the movie business Epilogue: Can you manage a business when "nobody knows anything"?
What is the work of film in the age of transnational production? To answer that question, Randall Halle focuses on the film industry of Germany, one of Europe's largest film markets and one of the ...world's largest film-producing nations. In the 1990s Germany experienced an extreme transition from a state-subsidized mode of film production that was free of anxious concerns about profit and audience entertainment to a mode dominated by private interest and big capital. At the same time, the European Union began actively drawing together the national markets of Germany and other European nations, sublating their individual significances into a synergistic whole. This book studies these changes broadly, but also focuses on the transformations in their particular national context. It balances film politics and film aesthetics, tracing transformations in financing along with analyses of particular films to describe the effects on the film object itself. Halle concludes that we witness currently the emergence of a new transnational aesthetic, a fundamental shift in cultural production with ramifications for communal identifications, state cohesion, and national economies.
Never Done Hill, Erin
2016, 20161005, 2016-10-05
eBook
Histories of women in Hollywood usually recount the contributions of female directors, screenwriters, designers, actresses, and other creative personnel whose names loom large in the credits. Yet, ...from its inception, the American film industry relied on the labor of thousands more women, workers whose vital contributions often went unrecognized.
Never Doneintroduces generations of women who worked behind the scenes in the film industry-from the employees' wives who hand-colored the Edison Company's films frame-by-frame, to the female immigrants who toiled in MGM's backrooms to produce beautifully beaded and embroidered costumes. Challenging the dismissive characterization of these women as merely menial workers, media historian Erin Hill shows how their labor was essential to the industry and required considerable technical and interpersonal skills. Sketching a history of how Hollywood came to define certain occupations as lower-paid "women's work," or "feminized labor," Hill also reveals how enterprising women eventually gained a foothold in more prestigious divisions like casting and publicity.
Poring through rare archives and integrating the firsthand accounts of women employed in the film industry, the book gives a voice to women whose work was indispensable yet largely invisible. As it traces this long history of women in Hollywood,Never Donereveals the persistence of sexist assumptions that, even today, leave women in the media industry underpraised and underpaid.For more information:http://erinhill.squarespace.com
Rebecca Prime documents the untold story of the American directors, screenwriters, and actors who exiled themselves to Europe as a result of the Hollywood blacklist. During the 1950s and 1960s, these ...Hollywood émigrés directed, wrote, or starred in almost one hundred European productions, their contributions ranging from crime film masterpieces likeDu rififi chez les hommes(1955, Jules Dassin, director) to international blockbusters likeThe Bridge on the River
Kwai(1957, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, screenwriters) and acclaimed art films likeThe Servant(1963, Joseph Losey, director).
At once a lively portrait of a lesser-known American "lost generation" and an examination of an important transitional moment in European cinema, the book offers a compelling argument for the significance of the blacklisted émigrés to our understanding of postwar American and European cinema and Cold War relations. Prime provides detailed accounts of the production and reception of their European films that clarify the ambivalence with which Hollywood was regarded within postwar European culture. Drawing upon extensive archival research, including previously classified material,Hollywood Exiles in Europesuggests the need to rethink our understanding of the Hollywood blacklist as a purely domestic phenomenon. By shedding new light on European cinema's changing relationship with Hollywood, the book illuminates the postwar shift from national to transnational cinema.
One of the country’s most picturesque cities and conveniently located just a few hours’ drive from Hollywood, San Francisco became the most frequently and extensively filmed American city beyond the ...production hubs of Los Angeles and New York in the three decades after World War II. During those years, the cinematic image of the city morphed from the dreamy beauty of Vertigo to the nightmarish wasteland of Dirty Harry, although San Francisco itself experienced no such decline. This intriguing disconnect gives impetus to Hollywood in San Francisco, the most comprehensive study to date of Hollywood’s move from studio to location production in the postwar era. In this thirty-year history of feature filmmaking in San Francisco, Joshua Gleich tracks a sea change in Hollywood production practices, as location shooting overtook studio-based filming as the dominant production method by the early 1970s. He shows how this transformation intersected with a precipitous decline in public perceptions of the American city, to which filmmakers responded by developing a stark, realist aesthetic that suited America’s growing urban pessimism and superseded a fidelity to local realities. Analyzing major films set in San Francisco, ranging from Dark Passage and Vertigo to The Conversation, The Towering Inferno, and Bullitt, as well as the TV show The Streets of San Francisco, Gleich demonstrates that the city is a physical environment used to stage urban fantasies that reveal far more about Hollywood filmmaking and American culture than they do about San Francisco.
In what kind of state is the European film business? This study is the first in a series that provides an accessible understanding of how the world's contemporary screen industries function. It looks ...at all the factors in play, from government regulation to the marketing strategies behind an international success like 'Run Lola Run'/'Lola Rennt'. Anne Jackel evaluates how Europe's film industries operate, their working practices and the region's place within the global business of cinema. Exploring trends in production, distribution and exhibition, the book considers a range of national and pan-regional developments. Key areas of critical debate are highlighted, including private and public financing, co-production, film policy, links between the film and television industries, and the threats to 'art cinema' from within and without Europe.
Film is often used to represent the natural landscape and, increasingly, to communicate environmentalist messages. Yet behind even today's "green" movies are ecologically unsustainable production, ...distribution, and consumption processes. Noting how seemingly immaterial moving images are supported by highly durable resource-dependent infrastructures,The Cinematic Footprinttraces the history of how the "hydrocarbon imagination" has been central to the development of film as a medium.
Nadia Bozak's innovative fusion of film studies and environmental studies makes provocative connections between the disappearance of material resources and the emergence of digital media-with examples ranging from early cinema to Dziga Vertov's prescient eye, from Chris Marker's analog experiments to the digital work of Agnès Varda, James Benning, and Zacharias Kunuk. Combining an analysis of cinema technology with a sensitive consideration of film aesthetics,The Cinematic Footprintoffers a new perspective on moving images and the natural resources that sustain them.
Gaze Regimes is a bricolage of essays and interviews showcasing the experiences of women working in film, either directly as practitioners or in other areas as curators, festival programme directors ...or fundraisers. It does not shy away from questioning the relations of power in the practice of filmmaking and the power invested in the gaze itself. Who is looking and who is being looked at, who is telling women’s stories in Africa and what governs the mechanics of making those films on the continent?
The interviews with film practitioners such as Tsitsi Dangarembga, Taghreed Elsanhouri, Jihan El-Tahri, Anita Khanna, Isabel Noronhe, Arya Lalloo and Shannon Walsh demonstrate the contradictory points of departure of women in film – from their understanding of feminisms in relation to lived-experiences and the realpolitik of women working as cultural practitioners.
The disciplines of gender studies, postcolonial theory, and film theory provide the framework for the book’s essays. Jyoti Mistry, Antje Schuhmann, Nobunye Levin, Dorothee Wenner and Christina von Braun are some of the contributors who provide valuable context, analysis and insight into, among other things, the politics of representation, the role of film festivals and the collective and individual experiences of trauma and marginality which contribute to the layered and complex filmic responses of Africa’s film practitioners.
In Indigenous North American film Native Americans tell their own stories and thereby challenge a range of political and historical contradictions, including egregious misrepresentations by ...Hollywood. Although Indians in film have long been studied, especially as characters in Hollywood westerns, Indian film itself has received relatively little scholarly attention. In Imagic Moments Lee Schweninger offers a much-needed corrective, examining films in which the major inspiration, the source material, and the acting are essentially Native. Schweninger looks at a selection of mostly narrative fiction films from the United States and Canada and places them in historical and generic contexts. Exploring films such as Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals, and Skins, he argues that in and of themselves these films constitute and in fact emphatically demonstrate forms of resistance and stories of survival as they talk back to Hollywood. Self-representation itself can be seen as a valid form of resistance and as an aspect of a cinema of sovereignty in which the Indigenous peoples represented are the same people who engage in the filming and who control the camera. Despite their low budgets and often nonprofessional acting, Indigenous films succeed in being all the more engaging in their own right and are indicative of the complexity, vibrancy, and survival of myriad contemporary Native cultures.
