Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History

Conclusion

260 Conclusion We have sought in this book to detail the history and characteristics of large-scale, high-cost film productions in the United States from the 1890s to the 2000s. In doing so, we have also noted the scale and the characteristics of a number of major boxof fice successes. Drawing principally on the trade press and on archival sources, we have sought to relate them to the industrial contexts from which they emerged, into which they intervened, and which some of them, at least, helped to modify. Insofar as these contexts were conditioned by wider social, political, or cultural trends, events, or policies—among them the two world wars, the Great Depression, the advent of radio in the 1920s, and home video in the late 1970s, the spread of television and the diversification of leisure in the 1950s, the restrictions placed on the export of foreign earnings in Western Europe in the late 1940s and 1950s, the history and application of antitrust legislation in the United States from 1910s to the 1980s—they too have been discussed. Attention has also been paid to vaudeville, the legitimate theater, the music and publishing industries, the television and video industries, and other institutions of commercial entertainment, all of which have acted as key sites, models, or sources for the production, distribution, exhibition, presentation, or promotion of films at a number of points in U.S. film history. However, the emphasis has been as much on the deployment of audio-visual technologies and on policies and practices of film production, distribution, and exhibition as on broader contextual factors. The attention paid to distribution and exhibition is, we would argue, one of the innovative features of this book. The history of roadshowing, a set of practices central in all its various forms to the history and circulation of high-cost productions from the 1910s to the 1970s, has never been told in full before. Nor has the history of what is now called wide or saturation releasing, a set of practices that has hitherto been associated almost exclusively with Hollywood since the mid-1970s, but that has in fact been deployed on an occasional and localized basis since the 1910s, and which came to be 261 C O N C L U S I O N used more and more in the postwar era for occasional special productions, routine releases, exploitable imports, and series and sequels such as the James Bond films. As we have seen, the costliest prestige productions were either roadshown or released in other exclusive ways in the 1950s and 1960s. Roadshowing more or less disappeared in the 1970s, to be revived only with the use of IMAX for the exhibition of a number of high-cost Hollywood features in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But while many high-cost films were widely released in regular cinemas from that point on, it was King Kong (1976) and Superman rather than Jaws or Star Wars that led the way, and alongside films like these, prestige productions, including high-cost ones, continued and continue to be released on a platform or limited or exclusive basis, as the examples provided by A Star Is Born (1976), The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Ragtime, Gandhi, Dances with Wolves, Schindler’s List, The Thin Red Line, and Chicago make clear. Roadshowing and exclusive releasing have nearly always been used to pioneer new technologies, especially those that have challenged the prevailing norms of film production and film exhibition. These include IMAX films or IMAX versions of films, which have necessarily been exhibited in specialized cinemas. But they also include films that pioneered a number of sound technologies in the 1900s, 1910s, and 1920s; additive color films; the films made or shown in various large-gauge, large-screen, and wide-screen formats in the late 1920s and early 1930s and in the 1950s and 1960s; the films released with magnetic, Dolby, or digital stereo soundtracks in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and early 1990s; and the films released in 3-D in the early 1950s and the early 1980s. Some of these processes were successful on a long-term basis; others were short-lived. In the broadest sense, most of them have been used to produce or showcase a sense of aural or visual spectacle. As is well known, the U.S. film industry’s output is cyclic. As is also well known, and as we have detailed, the industry underwent a major series of shifts in...