Another Steven Soderbergh Experience: Authorship and Contemporary Hollywood

Notes

279 Introduction 1. Bubble debuted at the Venice, Toronto, and New York film festivals, all in September 2005. 2. Cieply, “Independent Filmmakers Distribute on Their Own,” 2009. 3. Bubble’s aesthetic is hardly the result of technological determinism, though. The Sony HDW-F900 camera and Panavision lenses used for Bubble also captured the images of George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy of 1999–2004. 4. The film’s official website details the simultaneous-release outlets and includes a promotional interview with Soderbergh (http://www.bubblethefilm .com/about.html [accessed November 10, 2007]). 5. Zimmermann, “Digital Deployment(s),” 246. 6. In 2005, Skoll founded Participant Productions, whose co-productions include An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Good Night, and Good Luck, and Syriana. Jarecki first earned creative acclaim as director of the Magnoliadistributed Capturing the Friedmans (2003). 7. Weiner, “Shyamalan’s Hollywood Horror Story, With Twist.” 8. Caldwell, “Welcome to the Viral Future of Cinema (Television),” 95; see also Caldwell, Production Culture. 9. See, for example, Silverman, “Bubble Fails to Rock Tinseltown.” 10. On the weekend of the film’s release, for example, Variety’s Gabriel Snyder and Stephen Zeitchik (“Movie Biz on the ‘Bubble’”) wrote that “the pic has become the totem for those advocating a distribution model that would put films everywhere all at the same time.” 11. In a conference call with industry analysts, Iger had hinted at the inevitability of day-and-date releases, prompting Fithian’s later claim that such notions were a “death threat” against exhibitors (see Kirsner, “Maverick Mogul”). 12. Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex, 241. 13. Zimmermann, “Digital Deployment(s),” 251. Notes 280 Notes to Pages 13–21 14. Prominent director-auteurs or producer-auteurs include, for example, Jerry Bruckheimer (film/television), J.J. Abrams (television/film), Joss Whedon (television/internet/film), David Lynch (film/television/internet), and Edward Zwick (film/television/internet). 15. Caldwell, “Welcome to the Viral Future of Cinema (Television),” 93. 16. This inversion corresponds with Caldwell’s mischievous but fundamentally serious claim that “feature film is rapidly approaching the aesthetic significance, cultural stature, and industrial condition of television” (“Welcome to the Viral Future of Cinema (Television),” 92). 17. “The Steven Soderbergh Experience Vidcast,” Bubble: The Movie, http ://www.bubblethefilm.com/ssexp.html (accessed November 10, 2007). 18. Hozic, Hollyworld. 19. Following its initial release on standard DVD, Bubble has appeared on Blu-ray (in Region A format, for North and South American release) and in the now-obsolete HD-DVD format. 20. Reaching U.S. audiences is another issue. News accounts invoked theater chains’ long-standing policies of not showing films already available on home-video formats, though such a policy is routinely violated for holiday screenings or rereleases. Bubble remains inarguably a text with no specific commercial appeal—absent multiplatforming, it would likely have remained a small niche release. 21. No DVD or pay-TV returns have been publicized, but it did not appear on top rental or sale lists. In its theatrical run, it grossed just under $262,000, including $145,000 in the U.S. (“Bubble,” http://www.boxofficemojo.com /movies/?id=bubble.htm [accessed July 8, 2010]). Chapter 1 1. Malcolm, “Back in Sight,” 111. 2. Waxman, Rebels on the Backlot, 104. 3. Mottram, The Sundance Kids, 174–175. 4. For more on changes in film content resulting from the rise of independent producers in the 1950s, see Mann, Hollywood Independents. 5. For an interrogation of the “commercial/independent text” as understood during the 1980s, see Palmer, “Blood Simple: Defining the Commercial/ Independent Text.” 6. Warner Independent Pictures was rumored to have been created partly to maintain Soderbergh and Clooney’s relationship with Warner Bros. Warners announced in May 2008 the decision to shutter WIP and its other boutique division, Picturehouse, claiming that the remaining New Line division could absorb its independent-minded projects. See Kit and Goldstein, “Warners Axes Picturehouse, WIP.” 7. Minsky, “Hot Phenom,” 9. 8. Kelleher, “Out of Sight,” 106. Kafka relied on a similar if more structured compromise, with a color version prepared for release in some European television markets. (In its U.S. theatrical release, Kafka was in black and white, with a small number of expressive color sequences.) 9. In Soderbergh’s recounting, he deliberated with financiers over the absence of female nudity, seemingly promised in the script and the film’s title, and regarded as an asset in home-video circulation. Reviewing production dailies, RCA/Columbia Home Video executive...