Contemporary Film History Study Guide PDF

**CONTEMPORARY FILM HISTORY -- STUDY GUIDE** **Matthaeus Szumanski** **Updated 231010** **THE BLACKLIST** After World War II, America pivoted into the Cold War standoff against the Soviet Union. After the Soviets beat the US into space, and several high-profile spy cases, concern grew among the...

**CONTEMPORARY FILM HISTORY -- STUDY GUIDE** **Matthaeus Szumanski** **Updated 231010** **THE BLACKLIST** After World War II, America pivoted into the Cold War standoff against the Soviet Union. After the Soviets beat the US into space, and several high-profile spy cases, concern grew among the right wing in the US about Communist subversion, particularly in the culture industries. Then, as now, many artists leaned left, and during the Great Depression of the 1930's, interest in Communism had hit a high level, meaning that many screenwriters, actors, and directors in the late 1940's and 1950's had at some point attended meetings, or even joined the **Communist Party**. Partly to gain advantage in union negotiations, conservative elements within Hollywood (like **Walt Disney**, **Ronald Reagan**, and **John Wayne**) wrote a public letter decrying communist subversion in Hollywood, and a movement to clean up communist influence in US culture gained steam, spearheaded in Washington by Minnesota Senator **Joseph McCarthy**. The **House UnAmerican Activities Committee** was formed in the US House of Representatives, devoted to rooting out leftists. Many creatives were called before the committee, and asked the famous question: "Are you now or have you ever been a communist."\ \ Those testifying were in a tough position. Although being a communist, or attending communist meetings, was not technically illegal, if they were associated with such political movements, they faced blacklisting, and an end to their Hollywood careers. Careers, marriages, and even lives were ruined when people were outed as being communist or communist sympathizers. Such high-profile talents as Humphrey Bogart, Lucille Ball, and Katherine Hepburn faced accusations of being "fellow-travelers" (communist sympathizers). If you cooperated with the committee, you would be asked not only about your own experience, but to "name names" of others whom you remembered seeing at meetings and events -- exposing those people to scrutiny and potential career destruction.\ \ In October, 1947, a group that came to be known as **The Hollywood Ten** received jail sentences and were **Blacklisted** after refusing to cooperate with HUAC and publicly denouncing the Committee. These ten, which included a number of relatively prominent screenwriters and directors, including **Dalton Trumbo**, **Ring Lardner, Jr**., and others, were jailed, and were blacklisted from the industry. Some, like **Jules Dassin**, emigrated to Europe, while others remained in the US, working secretly under false names, or leaving the industry entirely.\ \ The Hollywood Blacklist lasted into the 1960's, and was eventually broken after **Dalton Trumbo** was publicly acknowledged in 1960 as having written the successful films ***Exodus*** and ***Spartacus***. The latter film's famous sequence in which many recaptured slaves each claim, "I am Spartacus," is clearly a response to Trumbo's experiences. On the other side of things, screenwriter **Budd Schulberg** and director **Elia Kazan** famously decided to cooperate with the Committee, naming names in a way that ruined many people's lives. They defended their actions in the film, "On The Waterfront" in which "snitching" is presented as the more honorable option. Their actions remain controversial today, as seen when Kazan's win of the Lifetime Achievement Oscar at the 1999 Academy Awards was picketed, and many in the audience chose not to applaud. **ACTING STYLES** **Declamatory acting is where all theater begins. In the mid-sixth century, BCE, in Athens, Greece, worshippers of the god Dionysus began celebrating him with a festival in which people would compete to present speeches for prizes. At some point someone created a presentation in which two speakers performed at the same time, and theater was born. The acoustic limitations of performing in outdoor amphitheaters without amplification required the performers to speak very clearly and loudly. Thus, the earliest acting style is a rather stiff one, in which clarity and projection are the most important. Key ideas of theater such as tragedy, comedy, the chorus, and Deus Ex Machina were created in these early days, in plays written by Aeschylus, Euripides, and others.** **Commedia Del'Arte** is a very old theater tradition that goes back to the Renaissance in Italy. Here, a set of stock characters, including **Harlequin** (the lover, wearing diagonal checks in black and white,) his lover, **Columbina**, and his romantic rival, the melancholy **Pierrot** act out a set of traditional scenarios. Commedia del'Arte featured very physical acting, including **pantomime**, and the use of such implements as the **slapstick**, a literal stick that the characters would beat each other with. Commedia del'Arte was very influential both in ballet, and also in puppet theater, where a stock set of characters was logistically helpful, since it meant not having to build new puppets for each play. A popular English offshoot of this style were the "**Punch and Judy**" puppet shows commonly performed for children where Punch and his wife, Judy, would take turns physically abusing each other with slapsticks. This style influenced contemporary children's cartoons, like the **Roadrunner and Coyote**, and **Bugs Bunny**, and also live-action physical comedy of the **Three Stooges** or **Keystone Kops** variety. **\ Classical**: The "high-brow" acting style associated with traditional British theater education, as exemplified by RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts) and the Royal Shakespeare Academy was focused on external behavior, meticulously observed and recreated. It was exemplified by Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ralph Richardson, and **Sir Laurence Olivier,** and in our day is continued by actors like Cate Blanchett, Judy Dench, and Maggie Smith. **Vaudeville** was another influential acting style. Vaudeville shows were song-and-dance affairs, lowbrow variety shows full of comedy. The acting here is physical and crude. Many of the great silent-era comedians came from this tradition, including the three greatest: Chaplin, **Harold Lloyd** and **Buster Keaton**. Related to Vaudeville were **Minstrelsy** (from "Minstrel Shows") which included some race-baiting and stereotyping elements like **blackface**. Since performance venues were often race-segregated, a system of venues catering to African-American performers across the south and up the east coast came to be known as the **Chitlin Circuit**, and a style of performance (and particularly of comedy) coalesced there. Likewise, Jewish comedians often found summer work in the Catskill resorts known as **the Borscht Belt** where Jewish New Yorkers went for the holidays. An acerbic witty verbal style developed there, as comics workshopped their material in view of each other, season after season. **Woody Allen** and **Jerry Seinfeld** are both indebted to this tradition, preceded by such comics as **Lenny Bruce**, **Henny Youngman**, and **Jackie Gleason**. **Brechtian** acting is an unusual but very interesting technique created by the playwright and director, **Bertolt Brecht,** in his Berlin theater company during the Weimar Republic period between the two world wars in Germany. In his socially conscious, acidly satirical plays, such as **"Mother Courage and Her Children"** and **"The Threepenny Opera,"** Brecht directed his actors to present the character they were playing almost as if in quotation marks, or as if wearing a mask, so that each actor in effect was both "presenting" the character, and also visibly commenting on that character. This created a shimmering multilayered "reality" for the play, where the audience was forced to acknowledge their own participation in the event, and their own sometimes uncomfortable position relative to the political and social questions being raised by the play. While not as influential as the other styles here mentioned, Brechtian irony shows up in the musicals of Bob Fosse, and arguably even shows traces in the mugging of actors in skits on Saturday Night Live. Around the turn of the Twentieth Century in Moscow, **Konstantin Stanislavski** was the Director of **The Moscow Art Theater**. Directing among other things the contemporary plays of **Anton Chekhov**, such as "The Seagull," "Uncle Vanya," and "The Cherry Orchard," Stanislavski developed a new approach to creating performance for actors, which he initially called **"The System."** He articulated this new approach in the book, "**An Actor Prepares**." The core of the idea is that in order for an actor to produce truly believable behavior, he or she must first develop the psychological conditions that produce it, and from which the behavior can then flow organically. Students of Stanislavski such as Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya spread his techniques to America, where **Lee Strasberg** and **Stella Adler** (and others, including **Sanford Meisner**) took his theories and developed them into what became known as **The Method**. Through acting schools including **The Actors Studio**, they taught a generation of American actors these techniques, including **Marlon Brando**, Judy Garland, James Dean, Paul Newman, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, and many others, who made the vivid intensity of this style the new gold standard in American film acting. **THE NEW WAVE** The **French New Wave** was a group of young filmmakers who coalesced around the film magazine **Les Cahiers du Cinema**, in Paris in the late 1940's. The magazine was edited by **Henri Langlois** (who also curated the influential **Cinematheque Francaise** screening series) and **Andre Bazin**, who attracted a group of young film nerds to write articles about film. The iconoclastic group included **Francois Truffaut**, **Claude Chabrol**, **Jean-Luc Godard**, **Claude Lelouch**, and **Jacques Rivette**, among others. These young turks denounced what they saw a stale and hidebound French tradition of "**the well-made film**" based often on safe literary adaptations and otherwise leaning on the stuffier traditions of French culture. They looked instead to American films, and often to B-movies: crude, fast, action-packed films that spoke to young people everywhere. Even though the American film industry at the time de-emphasized the artistry of individual filmmakers (in favor of the brand of the studio,) the young French writers identified certain Hollywood filmmakers such as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and Nicholas Ray as "**Auteurs**" -- that is, as authors of the films they had directed. They argued that certain creators were forceful and consistent enough in their style to merit consideration as the authors of their films, and that the films could be helpfully understood as a body of work made by an artist, in the same way that paintings or novels can be understood as the work of an artist. This idea was and remains profoundly controversial, as many many people contribute to the creation of a film, not least the screenwriters and producers, but it is a big reason why some filmmakers now put "a film by" above the title, and why directors in particular (although in rare cases also producers or screenwriters) are often discussed as the primary force in the creation of a film. This "critique des auteurs" was picked up by the American film critic **Andrew Sarris**, who promoted it in the United States as "**Auteur Theory**." When critics of their writing said to the writers at the Cahiers du Cinema, "why don't you go make films?" They said, "okay we will!" And they did, producing a wave of light-on-their feet films that careened gleefully from genre to genre (sometimes within a single film,) referenced other films, broke established conventions of filmmaking (for example by including jump cuts and by breaking the fourth wall and acknowledging the audience.) They were often shot quickly and cheaply, in real locations, using lightweight cameras (particularly the Bolex,) and created a wave of youth-oriented filmmaking that swept the world, starting with Truffaut's "**The 400 Blows**" and Godard's "**Breathless**." The history of film is in many ways a history of a big business that grows slowly staler and more conservative in the creation of expensive, elaborately spectacular films, but is then goosed by provocateurs who make a virtue of limited means and make work that is more vigorous or more truthful by breaking the rules. The French New Wave wasn't the first such movement (the Italian Neorealists were similarly positioned, and used similar strategies) nor the last, but it was one of the most influential. **TELEVISION** By the 1950's, most American households had a **television** set, and were receiving the three nationally broadcast channels: CBS, ABC, and NBC, as well as sometimes a public television channel. Unlike movies, which you had to buy a ticket to see, television was essentially free to anyone who had a receiver, and was paid for by advertising revenue. For example, soap operas were so called because they aired during the day, when mostly housewives were watching, and were funded by the makers of soaps and other household products. In the mid-century, companies would sponsor particular shows directly, giving them a lot of say in what content could be shown. Later, the television companies would sell space for individual ads. **Broadcasting** involves a company licensing the exclusive use of a certain spectrum of radiation to beam out their signal in a particular area. Since these exclusive licenses are granted by the government, the government is able to heavily regulate broadcast content through the Executive Branch of the Federal government in the form of the **Federal Communications Commission**. For the movie business, television was a formidable competitor: free (once you bought the set), at home, and convenient, television sucked away the traditional core audience for movies: working-class families. This created a series economic challenge for Hollywood, and forced them to re-orient themselves around their new core audience, which was both younger (average film-goers were now in their 20's) and better educated, with a hunger for more challenging fare. **ART HOUSE CINEMA** **Art Film** -- films whose primary purpose is artistic and/or expressive have always existed alongside "commercial" or "mainstream" film, but starting in the 1950's, many American towns had an **"art house" movie theater** whose primary purpose was to show such films. These films range from **Experimental Films** whose purpose is formal exploration, even to the extent of not having any conventional plot (such as the work of **Andy Warhol, Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger,** or **Stan Brakhage**) to independent or foreign-made films that closely resemble Hollywood product, but are made outside the usual Hollywood pipelines. The advent of Art House theaters helped introduce American audiences to foreign films in the 1950's. In addition to the French New Wave, American audiences were exposed to films from outside Europe, such as **Satiyajit Ray**'s "Apu Trilogy," starting with "**Pather Panchali**" from India, or the work of Japanese filmmaker **Akira Kurosawa**, whose "**Rashomon**" was the first non-western film to win the "Best Foreign Film" Academy Award. Kurosawa was very much inspired by western sources, from Shakespeare to Westerns, which made his action-packed, humor-leavened films very accessible to foreign audiences. His "**The Seven Samurai**" was remade as a western, ("The Magnificent Seven") and his "**Yojimbo**" was remade (by Italian "**spaghetti western**" filmmaker, **Sergio Leone**) as "**For A Fistful of Dollars**." Two other great Japanese filmmakers of the 1950's, whose work was perhaps more specifically Japanese, and therefore less accessible to American audiences were **Kenji Mizoguchi** and **Yasujiro Ozu.** **Ozu**, who almost exclusively relied on the 50mm lens that most accurately reproduces the human eye's natural field of view, and who consistently placed the camera laterally to the walls at the eye level of someone kneeling on a tatami mat, is a good example of a filmmaker who might be described as belonging to **The Ascetic School**. This is the idea that films might actually gain something by NOT using every possible device to grab the audience's attention, that by narrowing the range of your tools, you might force the audience to notice things they otherwise wouldn't, and produce work that can achieve different and perhaps deeper impacts than conventionally produced films do. Asceticism is often associated with religious and mystical pursuits, where the seeker renounces ordinary pleasures (love, food, speech, etc.) in order to heighten their perceptions of other layers of existence, and perhaps to induce hallucinations or "visions" of a religious or revelatory nature. Other filmmakers who have used such ascetic strategies include **Andrei Tarkovski**, **Carl Dreyer**, **Robert Bresson**, and **Abbas Kiarostami**. **THIRD CINEMA** **The 1960's were also a period notable for rapid de-colonization in countries around what used to be called "The Third World" (now we use the term "the developing world.") While "the Third World" was a term meant during the Cold War to distinguish countries allied neither with the capitalist west nor with the communist east, Third Cinema** is a term that has been used to describe attempts, especially in countries outside Europe and the United States, to invent approaches to the creation of films that represent an alternative to either commercial Hollywood movies on the one hand, or the introspective personal films of European and American Art House Cinema. Third Cinema is associated particularly with Latin America and Africa, and is often associated with a post-colonial political approach that emphasizes the collective over the individual. **ANGLO-AMERICAN CO-PRODUCTIONS** American cinema is unusual in the world in that it may be the only national cinema that is entirely commercial, meaning funded entirely by ticket sales and other business revenue. In most countries, **the government** plays a role in financing feature films. For example, Canada has The Canadian Film Board which supports Canadian productions financially. While no one can afford to make films that they don't think anyone will watch, such national entities usually tip the scales in favor of productions that they think will contribute to the national prestige, which means they are likely to support films that are slightly more high-minded and/or self-consciously artistic than what a purely commercial consideration might select. While some operate relatively independently of the current government, many are subject to varying degrees of political pressure in their decisions. In autocratic countries, these government interventions can become extreme, outlawing productions that they deem critical of the current regime, politically dangerous, or even just stylistically out of keeping with the authorized aesthetic. Most European countries are not large enough to support filmmaking at a truly epic scale within just one country. Therefore, many European films are modest in scale, and made at moderate budgets. Every once in a while, when a larger production is planned, several countries will join together and create a **co-production** in which financing comes from each country, usually in exchange for having star actor or other key creative personnel drawn from each contributing country. In the 1960's, American film production was reeling competition from television, from the impact of the 1948 Paramount v United States ruling, which dismantled a lot of prevailing studio business practices, and with a moviegoing public which was getting younger and more educated. Several big projects failed at the box office, and ticket revenue languished. Some studios responded by developing jointly funded co-productions with English film studios. Thus, the influence of **British cinema** on the American one, an important factor since the very beginning of movies, grew strong in the 1960's. **Alfred Hitchcock** was an English-born director who began as a title card artist, and then directed important films in England, including the first British talkie. Recruited by David O. Selznick, Hitchcock came to the US to direct the 1940 film, "Rebecca," and stayed on to become an enormous presence in Hollywood. Known as "the master of suspense," Hitchcock's many successful films include "North by Northwest," "Suspicion," "Vertigo," and "Psycho." Also notable are his collaborations with legendary costume designer **Edith Head** (the model for the character, Edna Mode, in "The Incredibles") and **Saul Bass**, the father of modern title sequence design. **David Lean** was another British director who became known for vast gorgeously photographed epic Anglo-American cinema like "Bridge on the River Kwai," "Lawrence of Arabia," "Dr. Zhivago," and "A Passage to India." **Stanley Kubrick**'s career went the other way. Born in Brooklyn, Kubrick became a photographer, then began making films in Hollywood (including "Spartacus") before moving to the UK, where he continued working and became one of the most accomplished directors in cinema, with uncompromising cerebral films like "Dr. Strangelove," "2001: A Space Odyssey," and "A Clockwork Orange." He steadfastly remained in the UK, even when making films set in the United States, such as "Lolita," or building a set of Manhattan in an English sound stage to make "Eyes Wide Shut." **THE HAYS CODE** From the beginnings of movies, they were seen by the guardians of public morality as a threat, their tendency to focus on sensational subject matter like sex and violence making them to some people a constant danger to the corruption of the youth. In an early Supreme Court Case, **1915 Mutual Film Corporation versus Industrial Commission of Ohio**, the Court held that films were NOT considered protected free speech under the First Amendment of the US Constitution, and could thus be censored. In the 1920's, politically potent forces like the **National Legion of Decency** began to pressure states to regulate the content of movies. In 1921, New York was the first state to require that films receive certification by a **state censorship board** before they could be screened in that state. Many other states followed suit. Hollywood, panicking over the logistical difficulties of dealing with each state's censorship individually decided to take preemptive steps. The **Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America** (**MPPDA**), now called the **MPAA** (**Motion Picture Association of America**) is the official trade organization that represents the film industry's interests, including to the government. Under pressure to obey a patchwork of local film censorship laws, and eager to convince America that the movie business was a wholesome industry, the MPPDA hired former Postmaster General and Presbyterian Elder, **William Hays**, as their President. In 1930, under Hays' leadership the MPAA decided to voluntarily implement what became known as the **Motion Picture Production Code** -- a set of guidelines as to what could or could not be shown in a movie for it to be distributed in the United States. The Code prohibited films showing things like open-mouthed or "lustful" kissing, homosexuality, interracial relationships, drug use, mocking foreign countries or the clergy, and required (among other things) that good triumph, that evil be punished, and that even married couples be shown to sleep in separate beds. The Code began being rigorously enforced in 1934 on behalf of the MPPDA by administrator **Joseph Breen**. Hollywood continued to abide by the Code until the late 1950's, when its authority began to be eroded by competition from Television, by foreign cinema, by controversial American directors like Otto Preminger, and by the 1952 Supreme Court decision in **Joseph Burstyn Inc. v Wilson**, which overruled their 1915 decision and extended **First Amendment Free Speech** protections to cinema, specifically in the case of a film called "The Miracle" directed by Roberto Rossellini. This decision subsequently became known as the "**Miracle Decision**." By 1968, enforcement of the Code had become impossible, and the MPAA replaced it with a four-tier ratings system: **G** - General Audiences **M** - Mature Audiences **R** - Restricted Audiences (No one under 17 admitted without a guardian) **X** - Sexually Explicit Content Additional ratings have been added: In 1972, "M" was replaced by **PG** (Parental Guidance suggested). In 1984, **PG-13** was added between PG and R In 1990, X was replaced by **NC-17**, partly because the MPAA had neglected to copyright its ratings, and "X" had become co-opted as a marketing tool for pornographic films, **EXPLOITATION CINEMA** **The collapse of the Hays Code paved the way for filmmakers to use extremes of nudity, sex, and violence to bring in audiences hungry for newly-permitted lurid pleasures. This took several forms, in emerging movie genres around the world. While many of the resulting films, heirs to the old-Hollywood B-movie tradition, are just plain bad, in certain cases this business model enabled voices from traditionally underrepresented communities to make films, and for some films to showcase experimental approaches and/or political content that would have had a hard time finding its way into mainstream commercial cinema.** **One of the strands of filmmaking that has coexisted with mainstream entertainment films since the beginning is pornography. While Los Angeles is one of the world's greatest centers for film production, the adjacent San Fernando Valley has long been the global epicenter for the production of porn films. The two industries, comparable in economic power, use a lot of the same technology and techniques, and since it can be difficult to find consistent and stable employment in the entertainment industry, some film technicians supplement their incomes by crossing from one arena into the other -- though usually not under their real names, since pornographic films remain stigmatized. In a few cases, actors have also moved from porn to the mainstream, or vice versa, but this is rare.** **In the 1960's as the Hays Code was collapsing, pornographic films were still being filmed on motion picture film stock, and many were released in feature film lengths, with fictional characters in plots interspersed between the expected scenes of explicit sex. In this strange time, a certain gray zone emerged, in which mainstream films became more explicit in their treatment of nudity and sexuality, while pornographic films in a few cases became more artistically ambitious. There was a brief flare of so-called Porno-chic, in which mainstream celebrities would attend porno premieres and the line briefly blurred between the two industries.** **As social tensions roiled in the 1970's, a lot of exploitation cinema revolved around films in which an aggrieved individual takes matters into their own hands, and responds with vigilante violence. Many of these films, freed of the Hays Code's insistence on clear-cut morality in films, depicted antiheroes who were only slightly better than the villains they (often brutally) fought.** **Angry White Men** **As heroin-wracked inner cities collapsed economically from white flight and the shift from industrial to service industries, street crime spiked. Many "angry white man" action- and crime films of the 1970's leveraged the Hays Code's collapse to depict brutal gritty urban worlds in which a violent man takes on the collapsing social order, imposing rough justice, or simply revenge. Among these films were Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver," Michael Winner's "Death Wish," William Friedkin's "The French Connection," and Don Siegel's "Dirty Harry." In the UK, films like Mike Hodges' "Get Carter" fold neatly into this grouping. Some of these "angry white man" films trafficked in fairly overt racism, catering to white audiences' terror of newly integrated cities.** **Blaxploitation** **In 1971, a young African-American filmmaker named Melvin van Peebles secured financing from porno film producers that allowed him to make "Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song," a film that showed a young black stud, irresistible to women, who catches two white policemen abusing a black man, and kills the police, then runs from the law successfully. African American audiences had never seen such an unapologetic sexy hyper-masculine portrayal of an independent black protagonist. Though Van Peebles had to self-distribute the film, it attracted enthusiastic African-American audiences.** **Hollywood noticed that money was being made and that there was an untapped market, and immediately commissioned Gordon Parks, Sr., an eminent African American photographer, to direct "Shaft," starring Richard Roundtree. These two films marked the beginning of the Blaxploitation genre, in which hyper-sexualized black protagonists confronted crime syndicates, white racists, or "The Man" in gritty urban crime films characterized by jive slang dialogue, stylish 1970's costuming, unforgettable funk music, and unapologetic attitude. Unfortunately, as the decade wore on** **The Blaxploitation moment was pretty much over by 1971, but many African Americans both in front of and behind the camera got their start here. The influence of the movement is still strongly felt, among other places in Quentin Tarantino's films and in the macho posturing of rap music.** **Hong Kong Kung Fu** **The British protectorate of Hong Kong developed a powerful and influential film industry, some of it focused on the traditional Chinese martial art of Kung Fu. While the violence of the kung fu movies was more stylized than what was depicted in the gritty urban films of the United States, there was often the same emphasis on a lone vigilante, overcoming prevailing corruption and seediness by dint of superior fighting ability. The big star of this moment was Bruce Lee, an American-born Chinese who built a film career first in Hong Kong and then later in Hollywood. His most famous film is probably "Enter the Dragon" (1973, Robert Clouse). Later Hong Kong masters of the violent arts include Chow Yun-Fat, John Woo, and Sammo Hung, and Jackie Chan.** **Mad Max** **In 1979, Australian medical doctor-turned-filmmaker, George Miller, directed the low-budget ultra-violent action film, Mad Max, starring a young Mel Gibson. Set in a cruel, amoral, post-apocalyptic wasteland, the film created a franchise that has continued to this day, and which has spawned imitators as well as inspired pretty much the entire look of Burning Man. In between Mad Max films, Miller also directed films like "Babe" and "Happy Feet," so he's a versatile fellow.** **Spaghetti Westerns** **The mythology of the American Wild West: a lawless place where tough men with guns worked out their differences, walking a line between honor and cruelty, has been a fruitful inspiration for films since the beginning of cinema. American westerns, shaped by the Hays Code, were big on clear good-versus-evil stories. In the 1960's, a group of Italian filmmakers started making a new kind of western that came to be called, Spaghetti Westerns. These were ultra-violent, amoral, and featured hard men behaving badly in a lawless world. The most famous of these filmmakers was Sergio Leone, who cast a then-unknown cowboy actor named Clint Eastwood as "The Man With No Name" in his "Dollars" trilogy: "For A Fistful of Dollars," "For a Few Dollars More," and "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly." These films, like the contemporary Blaxploitation films are characterized by an exaggerated hypermasculinity, ultra-violence, an amoral universe, and unforgettable music.** **Exploitation Cinema also had corollaries in documentary films. During the reign of the Hays Code including the "Mondo Cane" films from Italy, which assembled shocking real footage from around the world into feature length presentations.** **SECOND HALF:** **NEW HOLLYWOOD / THE MOVIE BRATS** The 1960's were a challenging period for Hollywood. Suffering from serious competition from television and foreign cinema, and rattled by legal dismantling of the Studio System's pillars (Block Booking, Vertical Integration, and Long-Term Contracts,) plus a rapidly changing audience, Hollywood found itself increasingly out of touch with the movie-going audience. A Baby Boom of kids born after World War II was coming of age in a rapidly changing culture. The Vietnam war was polarizing American politics and eroding respect for traditional authority figures, sexual and racial morality were changing fast, drugs were growing in influence, and a cresting tide of teenagers were demanding movies that would speak to them. A pivot point came when the ultra-low-budget independent film "**Easy Rider**" (1969) directed by **Dennis Hopper**, captured the young audience's attention with a very loose, almost avant-garde storytelling style and scenes of intense violence, drug use, and prominent nudity. The film earned over \$60 million on a mere \$400,000 budget, and forced the Hollywood studios to take notice. Other films helped break the mold. Among them were the more conventional Hollywood film, "**Bonnie and Clyde**" (1967) directed by **Arthur Penn**, which featured candid discussion of taboo topics like impotence and nihilism, and ended with a scene of unprecedented and protracted explicit violence. Another notable departure from "the usual" was **John Schlesinger**'s gritty, homoerotic 1969 masterpiece, "**Midnight Cowboy**" which remains the only X-rated film to ever win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Hollywood, realizing that their traditional approaches were out of touch with the young audience, began an era of allowing young directors to work with relative independence, often at modest budgets. While plenty of these films failed, they created some of the most open-ended, artistically interesting, and politically and psychologically edgy films Hollywood's industrial process has ever produced. A young generation of film directors had come of age influenced by the candor and energy of the French New Wave, and by its focus on directorial authority and style. Many of these were products of **Film Schools**, which had proliferated in the 1960's. Traditionally, Hollywood careers had begun with apprenticeships in the studios, but now a wave of filmmakers was learning increasingly sophisticated techniques in an academic context, and audiences were eager for films with a more personal touch. The first Film School in the world was the **Moscow Film School**, which opened in 1919. The oldest film program in the US is the one at the **University of Southern California** (USC) which was founded in 1929. Among other successful alumni, in the 1960's it produced **George Lucas**, **John Milius**, and **Robert Zemeckis**. Other prominent American film schools included **New York University**, whose film graduates include **Martin Scorsese** and **Spike Lee**, and the **University of California, Los Angeles** (**Francis Ford Coppola**, **Paul Schrader,** **Alexander Payne**.) Foreign film-school-educated directors who came to Hollywood to work in the 1970's also made an impact, including **Roman Polanski** (graduate of the National Polish Film School in Lodz and **Milos Forman** (educated at the Academy of Arts in Prague). Not all of the directors associated with what became known as the **American New Wave** were film-school educated. Some, like **Woody Allen** ("Manhattan," "Annie Hall") came up through stand-up comedy and television. A few idiosyncratic filmmakers of an older generation like **Hal Ashby** ("Harold and Maude," "Being There") and **Robert Altman** ("Nashville," "McCabe and Mrs. Miller") took advantage of the era's openness to make key contributions in highly personal ways. Some of the hallmarks of the films of this period, which roughly lasted from 1967-1982, were open-ended story structures, gritty naturalistic subject matter, an openness to leading actors who were not traditionally beautiful and who were in many cases more "ethnic" than prior generations of superstars. As well, the films often featured downbeat story lines, pop-music sound tracks, and sex and violence treated much more explicitly and non-judgmentally than prior films would have. One of the big success stories of the period was the debut film by director **Michael Cimino**, "**The Deerhunter**" (1978) which won five Academy Awards and was a big box office hit, rewarding the studio's faith in Cimino to alter the story and go over budget. However, Cimino's follow-up, "**Heaven's Gate**" (1980) was a box office failure so catastrophic that it destroyed the company United Artists, and was a major factor in the studios deciding to draw back from the openness strategy that had allowed this period of directorial independence. Another pivotal failure of the independent-director approach was 1982's "**Ishtar**" directed by **Elaine May**, which despite a massive budget and big stars Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty, performed terribly at the Box Office. Really, however, what ended this period of medium-size films made with little studio interference and aimed at adult audiences, was the massive success of two films that came to embody a new, marketing-centered approach: 1975's "**Jaws**" directed by **Stephen Speilberg** and 1977's "**Star Wars**" directed by **George Lucas**. These films enjoyed such massive box office receipts that they made the studios pivot toward producing fewer films, so they could focus their marketing muscle and reap potentially huge dividends. The era of the **Blockbuster** had been born. **NEW GERMAN CINEMA** Germany underwent an era of quiet introspection after World War II, but the enormous creativity of the German film industry began to reassert itself in the 1970's, producing a generation of filmmakers known as **New German cinema**. Many of these filmmakers are still active today. Among the most noteworthy are: **Wim Wenders** "Paris, Texas" (1984) "Wings of Desire" (1987) "Pina" (2011) **Werner Herzog** "Aguirre: The Wrath of God" (1972) "Fitzcarraldo" (1982) "Grizzly Man" (2005) **Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-82)** "Beware of a Holy Whore" (1971) "The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant" (1972) "Berlin Alexanderplatz" (1980) **Margarethe Von Trotta** "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum" (1975) "Sheer Madness" (1983) "Rosa Luxemburg" (1986) **HOME VIDEO** The end of the 1970's brought two new developments that increasingly brought cinema into people's homes. One was the advent of **Cable Television**, starting with **HBO** (Home Box Office) in 1972, and other was the introduction of Home Video. **Pay TV** companies like HBO would allow subscribers to see feature films after their **theatrical release**, but before their appearances on **Network TV**. One of the major business stories from film history, which is taught now in business schools, is the video format war, in which **Sony**, then the dominant electronics company in the world introduced a home video technology in 1975 called **Betamax** while the much smaller electronics company, **JVC** introduced a rival product called **VHS** in 1976. Betamax featured **superior image quality**, but it allowed for only 2 hours of recording per tape, while VHS allowed up to 4 (and later 8) hours. Betamax should have won, being the superior product, and backed by the dominant company, but Sony lost the video wars by refusing to **license** their technology for anyone else to use. They insisted that you had to buy one of their Betamax machines to play the tapes, while JVC allowed any manufacturer to use their VHS technology in exchange for paying a license fee. In 1941, the American television standard had been set by the **National Television Standards Committee (NTSC)** at **525** lines of horizontal resolution at **30** frames per second (fps). This frame rate had been chosen because it was half of the cycle speed of our wall electricity, which runs at 60hz. When color was introduced, the NTSC decided to reduce the frame rate to **29.97**, in order to accommodate the additional data in the slightly slower signal. Meanwhile in the UK, they had created a different television standard called **PAL** (Phase Alternating Line) which offered **625** lines of horizontal resolution, at **25**fps (half of their electrical current's cycle speed at 50hz). The French created their own system, **SECAM**, which was similar to PAL (and had the same resolution and frame rate) but which handled color differently. **High Definition** video signals were initially introduced in the early 1980's and replaced NTSC "Standard Resolution" as the American broadcast standard in 2010. Though technical specifications vary, nowadays **1920 x 1080** is a standard HD spec. HD video can often run as fast as **60fps**, though not everyone uses this capability, out of loyalty to the look of 24fps cinema. Since then, video cameras are rapidly pushing into higher resolutions, with many offering so-called **Ultra High Definition** resolutions such as **4K** (**4096 x 2160** for digital film projection), 8K, and other flavors. **THE BLOCKBUSTER ERA** In the early 1980's, the period of New Hollywood (let's call it 1967-1982, though boundaries are porous) ended for a variety of reasons. Audiences were getting younger, as adults increasingly stayed home while teenagers went to the movies partly to get out of the house. Movie theaters were increasingly moving away from stand-alone theaters to suburban **multiplexes**, often tied to shopping malls, where teenagers hung out. A couple of expensive failures made the studios wary of giving filmmakers too much control, prominent among these were **"Heaven's Gate"** (1980) directed by New Hollywood golden boy **Michael Cimino**, which ran way over budget and way behind schedule, and which recouped so little money at the box office that it destroyed United Artists as a viable film studio. Likewise, the film **"Ishtar"** (1987) was an expensive flop, despite being directed by the talented **Elaine May**, and starring Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty, two of the biggest stars of the era. But maybe even more significant was the success of a couple of films that scored huge hits with the new teenage audience: Stephen Spielberg's "**Jaws**" (1975) and **George Lucas**' "**Star Wars**" (1977). These films convinced the studios to focus their filmmaking and particularly their marketing efforts on fewer, more spectacular films, aimed to become big "event" movies. There had been huge hits before, but now the era of **the Blockbuster** was born. As the cost of making and especially of marketing films skyrocketed, the films Hollywood made in the 1980's (and beyond) were often focused on having a **high concept**: a central plot premise that could be concisely stated in a line, like "Snakes on a plane." Films like this were easier to sell, shifting their economic success away from the subtleties of individual creatives who the studios saw as being hard to control or predict. **TALENT AGENTS** There had been talent agents in Hollywood since the end of the long-term contracts under the Studio System. The most powerful was the **William Morris Endeavor agency**. In 1975, a group of agents left William Morris to start their own company, **Creative Artists Agency**, led by super-agent **Michael Ovitz**, whose affection for zen Buddhism and Armani suits would create a period style in Hollywood in the eighties. One of Ovitz's major efforts was to create **Packaging**, in which the screenplay (screenwriter), director, and stars of a new film project would all be packaged together, from among CAA's impressive client list, and then the project as a whole would be offered to the Studios, who previously had been able to mix and match their talent. While an agent traditionally takes a 15% share of their client's earnings, under packaging, Ovitz was able to take 15% of the total budget of the film. **INDEPENDENT CINEMA** As Hollywood studios increasingly backed away from making serious films for adult audiences, in favor of spectacular mass-market entertainments, independent production companies began to fill the void. Chief among these in the 1990's was **Miramax**, headed by brothers **Harvey and Bob Weinstein**. Miramax started in New York in 1979, as a small independent distribution company, but due to the great taste and aggressive business practices of the brothers, they scored some early successes in acquiring and distributing films, including foreign films, which they in some cases successfully reworked for the American market. Eventually they branched into producing. One of their first big hits was **Steven Soderbergh**'s first feature, "**Sex, Lies, and Videotape**" (1989.) Harvey Weinstein ran the art house division, while Bob Weinstein ran the also highly successful genre and B-movie division, **Dimension Films**, which scored big with the "**Scream**" series of teenage-focused tongue-in-cheek horror films. The Weinsteins sold Miramax to Disney in 1993, but continued to run the company with a very high level of independence until they left in 2005 to form **the Weinstein Company**. Through the 1990's, the Weinstein brothers produced and distributed a very impressive run of independent films, often aggressively positioning them for Academy Awards. It is barely an exaggeration to say that most of the artistically ambitious films made in the United States during this period were made by them, while benefitting from the marketing and distribution muscle of the Disney company. In 2017, Harvey Weinstein became embroiled in an enormous scandal, accused of some of the most notorious sexual harassment and sexual assault brought to light be what became known as the **\#MeToo** movement. A long list of actresses accused him of leveraging his power over their careers to demand and in some cases physically coerce them into sexual favors. In the wake of his fall from grace, the Weinstein company had to declare bankruptcy and is in the process of being dismantled and sold. The success of Miramax in the 1990's caused many of the major film studios to create semi-independent in-house "**Specialty divisions**," to produce smaller, edgier films designed to appeal to adult audiences. Among these were **Fine Line** (New Line Pictures), **Sony Pictures Classics** (Sony), **Paramount Vantage** (Paramount Pictures), **Picturehouse** and **Warner Independent Pictures** (Warner Brothers,) **Focus Features** (Universal), and **Fox Searchlight** (Fox.) However, as the aughts neared an end, many of them were shuttered. **SUNDANCE** **Film Festivals** have been part of the motion picture landscape since the **Venice Film Festival** began in 1932. They provide opportunities for independent films and international films to be seen, and sometimes to find **distribution**. The biggest and most prestigious film festivals are attended by representatives from every major film studio, production company, and distribution company, seeking new talent and new films. Traditionally, the "Big Three" film festivals are **Cannes**, **Berlin**, and Venice, all in Europe. The **Toronto Film Festival** was for many years the most well-attended and prestigious festival in North America. In 1978, the Utah/US Film Festival was founded in Salt Lake City by people associated with **Robert Redford**'s production company. In 1981, the festival moved to Park City, Utah, and in 1984, it changed its name to **the Sundance Film Festival**. Over the course of the 1990's, Sundance grew to become the most prestigious and important film festival in North America, and a vital step in the process by which independently made films could acquire the notoriety to find distribution and reach wider audiences. "**Sex, Lies, and Videotape**" was the breakout success of the 1991 Sundance Film Festival, and began a series of Miramax films to be premiered and launched there. Alongside the festival, the **Sundance Institute** also hosts a series of competitive **workshops** for new filmmakers organized by discipline (screenwriting, directing, producing, documentary) etc. It also has developed a series of programs to focus light on **Native American Cinema**. In 2002, **Robert DeNiro**, inspired no doubt by Robert Redford's success with Sundance, created the **TriBeCa Film Festival** in New York, which has grown in stature, and now performs a similar function as a launching pad for new talent. **THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION** All media have traditionally been **Analog**. The Mona Lisa, and other traditional paintings recreate analogs of visual images in oil paint on canvas. Vinyl records recreate lifelike sounds by subtle variations in a groove pressed into vinyl. Analog video and audio tapes encode electronic signals in magnetic particles attached to a backing material. Analog film records light by exposing it on photosensitive chemical emulsions. Computers developed over the course of the 20^th^ century, from their roots in Alan Turing's code-breaking efforts during World War II through the giant mainframe database machines that IBM produced in the 1950's and 1960's. Computers work in an entirely digital environment -- all information is processed as **parameters that have certain values**, which can change in response to algorithms. As computers grew more sophisticated, and more ubiquitous, various programs have emerged that have profoundly changed the work-flow by which most films are made. Analog media are not necessarily worse quality than digital media. Many purists find vinyl recordings superior to digital files, and many in the film world still prefer to shoot their images on film. While digital resolutions climb steadily, it is still possible to shoot a film on an analog Imax camera that produces an extremely high-quality image, recorded on a negative in which a single frame is the size of a postcard, with lots and lots of subtle information captured on it. However, the advent of digital cameras presented a few killer benefits that the film industry could not refuse: 1. **Cost**. Traditional film is very expensive, and the processing is also expensive. Each additional film release print that gets made to send out to theaters costs a significant amount of money. 2. **Generational Loss**: Any analog medium that gets copied, the copy is always worse quality than the original. Often the drop-off is very steep, with the third generation having lost most of the quality of the original. By comparison, digital copies are pristine, and exactly equal to the original (barring glitches or corruption of the files.) 3. **Modification**: Digital media, once brought into the computer, can be modified in various and subtle ways that used to be much harder in the analog work flow. Processes like **color correction**, the application of **digital effects**, and **title sequence design** are all much easier and cheaper to create in a digital work flow than in an analog one, and involve less generational loss. **Digital Acquisition** While "video art" shot on analog video dates back to the 1970's and 1980's, the quality of such work purely in terms of resolution and color- and audio-fidelity was often very bad, inadequate to the needs of projection on a large screen. Such work has often been shown on monitors in **art galleries**, and even on such small screens, the technical aspects of the video (resolution, contrast, color saturation, image depth, etc.) were often disappointing. While films have traditionally been shot on film (chemical and mechanical medium,) developments in computers eventually led to the creation of sophisticated **digital cameras**, including digital film cameras. The first feature films shot on **digital video** to be widely released generally tried to make a virtue of their poor visual quality by incorporating the "home made" feel of the video into the story structure. This was the case with "**The Blair Witch Project**" (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999) in which a brilliant grass-roots marketing campaign claimed that the film was an actual home movie left behind by students investigating paranormal occurrences. Other early digital cinema included "**Open Water**" (Chris Kentis, 2003) and "**The Celebration**" (Thomas Vinterberg,1998). Early digital cinema tended to cluster either at the very low end (where the digital work flow allowed for **low-cost filmmaking**) or at the extremely high end, where very specialized and expensive cameras shot digital video that could then be manipulated extensively to create elaborate **special effects**. The first big Hollywood production to be shot digitally was **George Lucas**' Star Wars prequel "**The Phantom Menace**." Filmmakers and audiences have both often resisted new digital formats, or have worked with filters and processing to make the digital films "feel" as much as possible like traditional film, even when that involves degrading the image quality intentionally (such as by reducing frame rates or introducing **motion blur**.) Still, such bias in favor of "traditional" looking cinema is starting to erode, as more and better films are shot digitally, and audiences get accustomed to new and varied looks. Digital Cinema has gradually taken over much of filmmaking, with the companies that actually manufactured the film stocks (**Kodak**, **Agfa**, and **Fuji**) going bankrupt, or developing new revenue streams to replace their lost film business. Fewer and fewer **laboratories** and post-production facilities still handle traditional film. Still, a significant number of films and television shows continue to be shot on film. **Non-Linear Editing.** Traditional film, once shot, was sent to the lab, where the film negative would be processed, and then a "**work print**" would be struck: an actual physical film strip that the editors and assistant editors would physically cut and tape together to create the edited version of the film. In traditional analog video editing, "source" tapes would be cued up, and the selected shots would be copied onto "record" tapes, in order. Decisions about duration and placement could be changed, but not without difficulty. The first **non-linear editing systems** were introduced in 1971, but they didn't really enter the mainstream of the film industry until the computer-based **Avid** was introduced in 1989. Avids converted film to digital files, then allowed the user to manipulate them, shortening or extending them, rearranging them, layering them, all in a virtual way, until the final **Edit Decision List** was ready with which to conform the original **camera negative**. **Color Correction** In the old film-based work-flow, the colors, brightness, and contrast in the final film print could be affected by **optical color timing** in the printing process. Another layer of color correction could be done in **Telecine** -- the process by which film was transferred to video. Even after digital editing systems were in use, this remained the color correction process as long as the films were "finished on film" meaning, conforming the camera negative to the Edit Decision List. However, once films began outputting a so-called **Digital Intermediate** from the computer that would be printed onto film, color correction could be done in the computer, with vastly more subtly controlled effects. **Digital Visual Effects** Likewise, once the Digital Intermediate process was in place, complex and subtle visual effects could be created, including fully digitally animated objects and creatures which came to be called **Computer Generated Imagery** (**CGI**). The first film to make use of digital visual effects was 1973's "**Westworld**". Important landmark films in the ongoing evolution of these now-ubiquitous techniques include "**Tron**" (1982,) "**Jurassic Park**" (1993,) and "**The Lord of the Rings**" (2001-2003.) **Motion Capture** A particular aspect of digital special effects involves the use of human actors to create animated creatures. By wearing a **motion-capture suit** covered in little white balls at key places on the body in a specially-equipped mo-cap stage, the actor can be filmed by two cameras. Computers that track the positions of each of the small white balls in three-dimensional space. These complex movement patterns could then be extrapolated and applied to the movements of digitally animated creatures whose proportions were different than the human actor's, but giving them a degree of life-likeness impossible in the days when their movements had to be hand-animated without such information. Key examples of this technique include the character of "Gollum" in "**The Lord of the Rings**" and Cesar in "**Planet of the Apes**", both played by the actor **Andy Serkis**, who has become the world's foremost authority on mo-cap acting. **Green Screen / Chromakey** Filming an actor in a sound stage, and then superimposing him or her on a different background requires **compositing** the two shots together, using a technique knows as **chroma-key**, or "**green screen**." Very often, the actor is filmed in front of an electric green background. The lighting is designed so as to light the green background as evenly and smoothly as possible. In post-production, the pixels of the screen that are green can be designated as transparent, so that a separate background shot shows through. This is how Superman appears to fly through the Metropolis sky, for example, or how the weatherman stands in front of an interactive map. The particular color is not inherently important. That electric green was simply chosen because it was a rare color to have in human skin, hair, and clothing. **Motion Control** Compositing is not particularly challenging when the foreground and background shots are both static. When a moving object is superimposed on a moving background, however, it becomes extremely challenging to match the pitch, yaw, and parallax of the two shots so they combine convincingly. To do so requires the use of a **motion control camera**. In such a setup, the camera's movements are controlled by a highly specialized computer connected to a robot that can move the camera, so that every minute detail of the camera movement is recorded. The movement can then be duplicated exactly, or even scaled up or down, to allow for combining life-size people with miniatures when there is camera movement. **COPYRIGHT** In ancient and medieval times, copying a book manuscript was an extremely labor-intensive undertaking. Young monks in Ireland might spend years meticulously transcribing a single hand-written copy of the Bible, which was a priceless, artisanal art object. Commercial publishing did not exist. However, when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1440, commercial publishing became possible. Initially, no law prevented anyone from creating copies of any book. However, starting with the 1710 **Statute of Anne**, England sought to protect the rights of authors, recognizing that the creation and dissemination of new ideas was valuable to a society, and should be encouraged. With copyright protection, an author had exclusive rights to sell or assign for a fee the rights to publish their work, securing for them any financial benefits thereof, for a period of time. The United States inherited this tradition of Intellectual Property from the U.K., and wrote various copyright protections into law. Initially, copyright protected only the written word, but it gradually expanded to include other creative works, and the field of **Intellectual Property** (IP) law now also includes areas like Patents and Registered Trademarks. Copyright protection in the US was at first only for 5-7 years, but as various companies have amassed valuable libraries, they have had incentive to turn their power to convincing congress to extend this period. The **Walt Disney company** has been a particularly noteworthy agent for this change, particularly in alliance with former California Senator Sonny Bono. This is partly because Disney holds a valuable media library, but also because **Mickey Mouse**, the company mascot, would by now have lapsed into the public domain had they not extended copyright protection. Currently, copyright lasts for the lifetime of the original author plus 70 years. After copyright expires, a creative work enters the **public domain**, meaning that anyone can use it without license or permission. Please note that while a work of art, like for example Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" might be in the public domain, particular recordings of that work are still copyright to the musicians who recorded it. In general, music rights for films need to purchased in two layers: Publishing Rights and Performance Right. ASCAP (The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers) maintains a website (ascap.com) that lists the owners of various music properties, though the small print on a CD will also tell you. **PIRACY** With analog media, **generational loss** between original and copy limits how damaging unlicensed copies can be to the owner of the copyright. It is certainly possible to buy a bootleg pirated DVD perhaps filmed off a screen in a movie theater, but the video and audio quality will be much worse than a licensed, store-bought DVD of the same film. However, the advent of digital media, in which a copy can be exactly the same as the original, has created a real crisis. Unlicensed copies can circulate, and while arguably not everyone who acquires an unlicensed copy would have bought a licensed one, some of them certainly would, and this diminishes the market potential of the original media. This is not trivial: in a theoretical world in which copyright were nonexistent or unenforceable, no one would invest the millions of dollars required to make a major motion picture, except perhaps occasionally, as an act of charity. It would destroy the entertainment industry. The dangers of digital downloading impacted the music business earlier than the film business, because music files are so much smaller than video files, and it took time for downloading speeds to catch up to the larger size of video. **The War between Northern and Southern California** Like Disney, many **"Old Media"** companies are headquartered in Southern California. In general, these companies invest much money in the creation of films and other media. Their new creations and their libraries of older properties are both protected by copyright law, which ensures that the owner companies get paid for every use of their properties, and these companies thus have a compelling interest in its rigorous enforcement. Northern California is home to **Silicon Valley**, and many of the most prominent **"New Media"** companies, including Google, Apple, and Facebook. While some tech companies (like Amazon and Netflix) are also increasingly investing in original "content," many of them see themselves not so much as publishers of media, but as **"platforms"** or "portals" like youtube (owned by Google) or Facebook, where their millions and millions of users post content independently of the company's oversight. Since these companies thrive by making it easy for their users to post content, they often make only minimal effort to ensure that copyrighted content is not posted without proper clearance. Their claim generally is that such enforcement would be impossible or financially prohibitive for them to do, as it would require them to manually approve every posting, which would radically limit the amount of new posts each day, and that only the end-user, not the tech company, should be liable for any infringement. Algorithms that detect and flag copyrighted content are constantly being developed and implemented, but there is an ongoing technological arms race between pirates and enforcers, and neither side stays ahead for long. Both sides of this debate are waging campaigns of influence in Washington, D.C., each trying to ensure that legislation protects their business model. If the old media companies win the argument, the wild-west internet that we have gotten used to will disappear, if the tech companies win the argument, the creation of media as we know, like big-budget, long-form movies and TV shows, may cease to make economic sense. Either way, the stakes are high. **SEQUELS, REMAKES, and the importance of pre-existing IP** Making a film has perhaps gotten easier and cheaper than it used to be, given the increasing accessibility of good-quality cameras and post-production tools. However, films now compete for audience attention with a broad array of entertainment options: not just theater, radio, and television, but social media, and all the hosts of the internet. As a result, the cost of marketing a film has increased greatly. Starting in the 1980's, Hollywood gradually focused more and more of its resources on marketing massive **"tent-pole"** blockbusters with exploding budgets, spectacular high-tech filmmaking, and famous, bankable **stars**, however even these do not reliably draw a big audience, and the gamble is an expensive one. To hedge its bets, Hollywood increasingly relies not only on "High Concept" films (films where the central plot idea is easily summed up in a single sentence, making it less execution-dependent and easier to market) and more on films derived from and associated with **pre-existing intellectual property**. A new James Bond or Harry Potter films arrives with a big market already developed and hungry for new content. As a result, being associated with a "brand" that already has a big following is becoming increasingly required for films hoping to secure financial investment, despite the fact that such connections typically have to be licensed, at considerable expense. Sequels, pre-quels, remakes, and adaptations (from books, TV series, games, or anything else) have become an increasingly important way for films to arrive to market with some level of essential brand awareness pre-built. This is especially true for high-budget Hollywood product, but even a modestly budget independent films have an easier time finding financing if they can bring some recognizeable brand awareness to the table. **CONSOLIDATION IN THE MEDIA INDUSTRY** In 1984, 50 independent companies owned a majority of media interests in the United States. That included not only film studios, but also television stations and networks, radio stations, publishing companies, newspapers, music divisions, etc. This was in part because various federal regulations prohibited companies from owning more than a certain number of related businesses within a certain area. During the Reagan administration in the early 1980's, the **FCC** (Federal Communications Commission) began to loosen these regulations, leading big companies to start a series of **mergers and acquisitions** of related media businesses -- and to a shrinking of the number of key players in each industry. President Bill Clinton signed the **1996 Telecommunications Act** that removed even more barriers to consolidation. Today, just a handful of companies control 90% of the media industry: **Comcast** NBC and Universal Pictures **The Walt Disney Company** Controls Walt Disney Studios, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Pixar, and Lucasfilm, as well as UTV Pictures (India) **Time Warner** Warner Brothers Pictures **CBS Corporation** (controlled by National Amusements) CBS Films **Viacom** (controlled by National Amusements) Paramount Pictures **Fox** 20^th^ Century Fox **Sony** Sony Pictures Columbia Pictures As of 2018, Disney is in the process of absorbing most of Fox's filmmaking divisions. Meanwhile, powerful technology companies are beginning to branch into media creation, including **Netflix**, **Amazon**, **Google** (YouTube), and **Facebook** (which has invested in Virtual Reality). **STREAMING** In the old days, movies could only be seen when they were playing in a theater. The average movie-goer had no control over what might be playing. You might drive by the theater and see what name was on the marquee, or what poster was next to the entrance, and then decide if you wanted to go watch it. Successful films might eventually air on **Broadcast Television**, in edited form. That changed in 1979 with the introduction of **Cable Television** (which showed re-runs of more recent film releases) -- though as with broadcast TV, audiences still had no control over what films were going to be shown. In the same year, **home video** allowed viewers to go to a store and SELECT a film to watch, provided it had been released on video, that their local store owned a copy, and that no one else had already rented it for that night. **VHS tapes** were grainy, and most televisions were small, with poor audio quality, but this freedom to choose was a powerful step toward viewer agency. Most video rental stores were small Mom and Pop operations that reflected the tastes of their owners, but by the time **DVD** was introduced in 1996, offering a much better level of video quality in a smaller package, **Blockbuster Video** (founded in 1985) had largely replaced the Mom & Pop video stores with slick, nationwide, corporate stores offering consistent product. However, in 1997, **Netflix** was founded, initially offering DVD rentals delivered and returned directly **by mail**. In the early years, their offerings included nearly all videos available on DVD, and they quickly began to replace Blockbuster, which eventually declared bankruptcy, and gradually closed all their stores. By 2007, download speeds and copy-protection technology had improved and Netflix began offering **streaming video content**, allowing users to stream feature films directly to their TV's or computers. In addition to the **monthly subscription fees**, Netflix had been learning a lot about viewers' preferences and viewing habits by analyzing **data**, and by 2013, they began producing **original content**, beginning with the series, "**House of Cards**," which they then streamed on their service. Other media companies began viewing Netflix less as an avenue for distributing their work than as a competitor gaining unfair market advantage from data analysis, and began withdrawing their libraries from Netflix. Netflix gradually ramped up their own production to compensate, and is beginning to seem more like a traditional vertically integrated studio, a path that **Amazon Studios**, Hulu, and other streaming platforms are also following. Traditionally, the **Academy Awards** has required films to be theatrically exhibited to qualify, but as more and more significant cinema is produced for streaming, their brief theatrical runs are seeming more and more like a token for consideration. During the Covid-19 pandemic, movie theaters were hit very hard, while streaming services prospered. Televisions are now larger, and wide-screen; home audio systems often offer surround-sound. While many of us miss the traditional movie theater experience, it is entirely plausible that when the dust settles after the pandemic, streaming may have become the de-facto distribution model for most cinema, and movie theaters may become a niche experience. **EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES** **Drones** are lightweight unmanned helicopters that can be operated remotely. They are proving extremely useful for creating aerial cinematography that used to require expensive helicopters. Now such shots are available even on modest budgets. **Gimbals** -- Garret Brown's original design for the Steadicam (late 1970's) was a purely mechanical system of counterweights that stabilized the camera, but a new generation of sophisticated electronically powered gimbals are making smooth "handheld" camera movement very affordable. Many cameras and even some lenses now feature electronic in-camera **image stabilization** technology. **L.E.D. lights** are replacing incandescent **tungsten-filament lights** for film work. L.E.D.s require much less power, produce much less heat, have adjustable intensity and color temperature, and are often physically smaller and lighter. **Balloon lights** are quick to set up (inflate) and deflate, and can distribute even light across a large space without requiring stands that get in the actors' and camera's way. 3-Dimensional (**3D**) filmmaking first came into vogue in the 1950's, but has experienced a renaissance in recent years. True 3D requires two cameras to film the same scene with their lenses separated by a fixed distance. The audience wears special glasses that allow them to discern the two separately projected images, one in each eye. Minute mis-calibrations can induce nausea and headaches in the audience, and the 3D production process is still cumbersome and expensive, but some films now have a kind of fake-3D effect created in postproduction, where layers of the scene are offset from each other on two separate channels. **Morphing technology** has been around since at least the 1980's, but is now being used in film editing in order to bridge cuts in similar shots to avoid noticeable jump-cuts while combining an actor's best performances into what appears to be a single take. Adobe recently demonstrated a **voice synthesizer** program that can take a recording of a person speaking for 20 or 30 minutes, and can analyze their speech patterns and then create believable speech that sounds like that person speaking, based on text typed into the program. **Virtual Reality** development has been ongoing since at least the early 1990's, but periodically there are new bursts of enthusiasm for its cinematic possibilities. In Virtual Reality, a clustered array of cameras records a 360-degree image which are stitched together in postproduction to create a seemingly complete field of view. The viewer wears VR Goggles that allow them to turn their head and "see" in any direction. More and more films are being made using this new technology, though issues of nausea and the audience's more active role require them to develop and use a largely different visual grammar than traditional filmmaking. **Light-Field Cameras**, also known as **Plenoptic** cameras, capture information about the light entering the camera beyond intensity and position (which traditional cameras record) including the direction in which the light rays are traveling. This has a variety of potentially transformative benefits, including allowing the filmmakers to decide in postproduction which part(s) of the image to have in focus, and freeing them from worrying about focus on set. Such cameras are still in relatively early stages of development. **Affective Computing** -- **Dr. Rosalind Picard** of the **MIT Media Lab** has been researching the way humans express emotion, initially to help people on the autism spectrum, but in recent years, she has branched out, creating a company called **Affectiva** that scans people's faces and tracks their emotional states. She is selling this technology to Hollywood film studios, so they can get more reliable test screening results, by actively measuring the audience's faces, and tracking their emotional states second-by-second with the film. **Speculation:** With our increasingly sophisticated understanding of facial geometry and its behaviors during emotional expression, and our increasing ability to create effective digital animation, is it not likely that soon these technologies will begin to interact, giving us the ability to detect when an actor's performance is on or off whatever emotion is intended, perhaps to correct it with subtle digital modification, or even to synthesize entire performances? And with these new developments, film will lose whatever special role it always had, and still clings to now, even despite innovations in CGI: a guarantor of reality. When someone shows you a video clip of something happening, you mostly believe it to be real. That is already no longer true of photographs, and it may soon no longer be true of video and film.