American Cinema of the 1990s: Themes and Variations

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS From start to finish this anthology has been a collective endeavor, even though I have held primary responsibility as editor. Together the essayists and I have discussed how best to showcase key films among the many from the 1990s we find intriguing. We have tried to make our individual essays dovetail with each other, in order to provide a more complex picture of the cultural, political, and technological shifts that affected both Hollywood and U.S. independent films during this decade. We have also tried to highlight how and why the U.S. film industry was connected to other film industries and multinational corporations. And we have made a point of mentioning other films and authors we think you will appreciate in our essays as well as in the bibliography. In these acknowledgments, therefore, I want first and foremost to thank my ten co-authors for their great insights, good humor, and warm support over the several years it has taken to finish this project. I’m so pleased to count you as friends! Many thanks, too—and on behalf of my colleagues as well—to our students. You may not always realize it, but we learn a lot from you. Every essay included here draws on our teaching experiences, not just on our research. My work on the volume has bene- fited immensely from testing my ideas and those of others in this collection in classes on U.S. cinema of the 1990s and American independent film. Profound thanks to my students in these classes in particular for your feedback and suggestions. Working with Rutgers University Press has been great: special thanks to Leslie Mitchner and Rachel Friedman for their help, as well as to Marilyn Campbell and Eric Schramm. Thanks, too, to series editors Les Friedman and Murray Pomerance. I really appreciate how readily and cheerfully you pitched in each time I needed you! I also want to thank the skilled staff at the University of Tennessee library and the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick library for help with archival sources. And I thank the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures, the Office of Research, and the Humanities Initiative at the University of Tennessee for funding the cost of the cover image and indexing. Last and not least, warm thanks to my friends and family in the United States, Sweden, and elsewhere. Special hugs to Diane Waldman for many wonderful hikes and discussions over the years; “tack så mycket” to Karin vii Bark, my oldest friend; “tack också” to my beloved aunt Gunnel Källgren. And Dad: “tusen tack” for being such a terrific father and role model, and for becoming one of my very best friends. viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...