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INTRODUCTION . John C. Rice and May Irwin were the stars of the popular stage play The Widow Jones (1895). The kiss portrayed in the Edison film is from the final act of the play. . The Edison catalogue description for The Kiss explains: “They get ready to kiss, begin to kiss, and kiss and kiss and kiss in a way that brings down the house every time” (quoted in Gray, “Kiss in the Tunnel,” 60). . See Gunning, “Aesthetic of Astonishment,” for a detailed discussion of early train films and modernity. . See Lawrence, Blaxploitation Films; Seate, Two Wheels on Two Reels; and Middleton, Dying for a Laugh. . In Chapter 2, I disprove Altman’s claim that film cycles are bound to a single studio. . Hoberman and Rosenbaum argue: “The fleeting evanescence of cinema as a medium has been both its blessing and its curse—establishing at once the grounds for its loftiest claims to transcendence and some of its sleazier business transactions” (Midnight Movies, 16). . See Cawelti, Six-Gun Mystique; Warshow, “Gangster as Tragic Hero”; Will Wright, Sixguns and Society; and Kaminsky, American Film Genres. . Kaminsky recommends this approach to the study of genres: “Genre in film, if it is to have meaning, must have a limited scope, a limited definition . . . a narrowing of definition” (American Film Genres, 7). . For example, the blaxploitation cycle contains westerns (Boss Nigger [1975, Jack Arnold]), gangster films (Black Caesar [1973, Larry Cohen]), and horror films (Blacula, [1972 William Crain]). . For example, Andy Warhol’s films undercut even the most basic audience expectations. Sleep (1963) is composed of six hours of footage of a sleeping man. Even the director was bored by the footage. When asked why he left during the screening of this film, Warhol replied, “Sometimes I like to be bored, and sometimes I don’t” (quoted in Hoberman and Rosenbaum, Midnight Movies, 58). . Earlier adult-targeted social problem films like Knock on Any Door (1949, Nicholas Ray) and The City Across the River (1949, Maxwell Shane) also warned of the dangers of juvenile delinquency, but these films did not capture the youth imagination (Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics, 121). . All box-office figures cited in this chapter are taken from www.boxoffice mojo.com. . Here it is worth noting that later films in a cycle are often advertised as “sequels” to an earlier, more successful film, even if the cast, directors, or writers used in the sequel are different from those used in the original film. Saw II (2005, Darren Lynn Bousman) was advertised as a sequel to Saw but employed a different director and a different cast from the original film (which makes sense, since almost every character dies in the first film), retaining only the premise of NOTES the Jigsaw Killer. Audiences did not seem to mind this change, since Saw II made even more money ($87 million) than the original. . See for example, Edelstein, “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex”; Cochrane , “For Your Entertainment”; and Ouellette, “Reclaiming Our Space.” . See Soloway, “Remove the Rating for Captivity”; Lopez, “Billboard’s ‘Captivity ’ Audience Disgusted”; and the blog Remove the Rating (http://removethe rating.blogspot.com/). . See Chapter 5 for a more detailed discussion of cycle parodies. . Although film cycles live for a short period of time in order to capitalize on the public’s interest in a particular topic, select film cycles also recur periodically throughout film history. For example, disaster film cycles appeared in the 1970s (Airport [1970, George Seaton], The Poseidon Adventure [1972, Ronald Neame], The Towering Inferno [1974, John Guillermin and Irwin Allen]) and in the 2000s (The Day after Tomorrow [2004, Roland Emmerich], Poseidon [2006, Wolfgang Petersen], 2012 [2009, Roland Emmerich]). Disaster films address audience anxieties about the stability of the world, so it makes sense that these cycles appeared in the 1970s and in the 2000s, which coincided with U.S. involvement in “quagmires” like Vietnam and Iraq and with rising concerns over the human impact on the environment. . Gustave LeBon first proposed these theories in The Crowd. . See Guerrero, Framing Blackness; S. Craig Watkins, Representing; Massood , Black City Cinema; Harris, Boys, Boyz, Bois; and Fisher, Black on Black. CHAPTER 1 . According to Stephen Prince, the gangster film was a major target of the PCA: “Perhaps because their violence belonged to a recognizably real world of urban streets, rather than ancient castles in Europe or uncharted tropical islands , the gangster films ignited a level of controversy that surpassed what surrounded the horror...
