Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer

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Interesting and amusing analysis of the "Jaws & Jedi" generation of film-making

Pretty Good (but flawed)

Yes, Virginia, blockbusters did kill not just ART films...

I loved Star Wars too, but....

Fascinating, even if you're not a film buff

Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer
Tom Shone
Manufacturer: Free Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0743235681

Book Description

It's a typical summer Friday night and the smell of popcorn is in the air. Throngs of fans jam into air-conditioned multiplexes to escape for two hours in the dark, blissfully lost in Hollywood's latest glittery confection complete with megawatt celebrities, awesome special effects, and enormous marketing budgets. The world is in love with the blockbuster movie, and these cinematic behemoths have risen to dominate the film industry, breaking box office records every weekend. With the passion and wit of a true movie buff and the insight of an internationally renowned critic, Tom Shone is the first to make sense of this phenomenon by taking readers through the decades that have shaped the modern blockbuster and forever transformed the face of Hollywood.

The moment the shark fin broke the water in 1975, a new monster was born. Fast, visceral, and devouring all in its path, the blockbuster had arrived. In just a few weeks Jaws earned more than $100 million in ticket sales, an unprecedented feat that heralded a new era in film. Soon, blockbuster auteurs such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and James Cameron would revive the flagging fortunes of the studios and lure audiences back into theaters with the promise of thrills, plenty of action, and an escape from art house pretension.

But somewhere along the line, the beast they awakened took on a life of its own, and by the 1990s production budgets had escalated as quickly as profits. Hollywood entered a topsy-turvy world ruled by marketing and merchandising mavens, in which flops like Godzilla made money and hits had to break records just to break even. The blockbuster changed from a major event that took place a few times a year into something that audiences have come to expect weekly, piling into the backs of one another in an annual demolition derby that has left even Hollywood aghast.

Tom Shone has interviewed all the key participants -- from cinematic visionaries like Spielberg and Lucas and the executives who greenlight these spectacles down to the effects wizards who detonated the Death Star and blew up the White House -- in order to reveal the ways in which blockbusters have transformed how Hollywood makes movies and how we watch them. As entertaining as the films it chronicles, Blockbuster is a must-read for any fan who delights in the magic of the movies.

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"It's a typical summer Friday night and the smell of popcorn is in the air. Throngs of fans jam into air-conditioned multiplexes to escape for two hours in the dark, blissfully lost in Hollywood's latest glittery confection complete with megawatt celebrities, awesome special effects, and enormous marketing budgets. The world is in love with the blockbuster movie, and these cinematic behemoths have risen to dominate the film industry, breaking box office records every weekend. With the passion and wit of a true movie buff and the insight of an internationally renowned critic, Tom Shone is the first to make sense of this phenomenon by taking readers through the decades that have shaped the modern blockbuster and forever transformed the face of Hollywood. The moment the shark fin broke the water in 1975, a new monster was born. Fast, visceral, and devouring all in its path, the blockbuster had arrived. In just a few weeks Jaws earned more than $100 million in ticket sales, an unprecedented feat that heralded a new era in film. Soon, blockbuster auteurs such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and James Cameron would revive the flagging fortunes of the studios and lure audiences back into theaters with the promise of thrills, plenty of action, and an escape from art house pretension. But somewhere along the line, the beast they awakened took on a life of its own, and by the 1990s production budgets had escalated as quickly as profits. Hollywood entered a topsy-turvy world ruled by marketing and merchandising mavens, in which flops like Godzilla made money and hits had to break records just to break even. The blockbuster changed from a major event that took place a few times a year into something that audiences have come to expect weekly, piling into the backs of one another in an annual demolition derby that has left even Hollywood aghast. Tom Shone has interviewed all the key participants -- from cinematic visionaries like Spielberg and Lucas and the executives who greenlight these spectacles down to the effects wizards who detonated the Death Star and blew up the White House -- in order to reveal the ways in which blockbusters have transformed how Hollywood makes movies and how we watch them. As entertaining as the films it chronicles, Blockbuster is a must-read for any fan who delights in the magic of the movies. "

Customer Reviews:

Interesting and amusing analysis of the "Jaws & Jedi" generation of film-making.......2007-02-13

Some reviewers here accuse Shone of being simplistic in his rebuff of Peter Biskind's Easy Riders etc but in fact it's simplistic to view the book in this way. I think Shone just wishes to continue the story beyond the point at which Biskind chose to end his; the Biskind-bashing very evident in the early chapters comes off the back of this but one of Shone's main points is that Jaws and Star Wars should/can be seen as artistically rich and groundbreaking in their own right, just in a different vein to the films of Biskind's heroes.

The view glibly asserted by an earlier reviewer here, that Spileberg and his ilk are "dull" and therefore unsatisfying as subject matter, is exactly the somewhat sniffy received opinion that Shone attacks, and it's a pleasure to read, as is the long-overdue puncturing of some sacred icons. He isn't simply defending anything that gets called a blockbuster - he calls into question our use of that term when it's often used to describe over-hyped films that open big and then vanish. What is definitely simplistic is the notion that this is a phenomenon that can be blamed purely on Jaws and Star Wars.

I also like a good, genuinely informative list and his highest-earning films list adjusted for inflation I found very interesting (most of the very recent biggies vanish). And any book that has a graph of audience reactions during Jaws gets my vote.

Pretty Good (but flawed).......2006-01-30

Before I start of criticise, it should be noted that this is actually a rather good book. It is one of the best and most accessible books about film written in recent years; almost anybody with any interest in film of the last thirty years will find this book interesting and often entertaining.

The book is essentially a monologue (although Shone readily admits that it is the product of many conversations) expounding his thesis that blockbusters, starting with Jaws and Star Wars, saved Hollywood. Actually, it is not a particularly sophisticated thesis: he simply takes the opposite view to a very simplistic interpretation of the thesis expounded by Peter Biskind in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls that blockbusters killed Hollywood.

There is a good deal of Biskind baiting in the early chapters of his book (although Shone seems to lose interest in this as the book progresses) and Shone's makes some interesting points. However, he invites comparison between the two books and these comparisons are inevitably unfavourable to Shone.

Although there are lots of good and interesting sections, overall the book is a bit of a mess and there are some odd things about it. Shone seems strangely distant from the subject matter in the sense that this feels like a book written by a cinema goer rather than somebody with real inside knowledge and insight. Often he simply repeats well-known or previously published anecdotes. There is much less insider gossip (than the Biskind book), which some readers may approve of, but it also means that the characters are flat and uninteresting. It is also rather confusing that he wants to have his common man cake and eat it with a side order of rather esoteric, post-modern film criticism. At times it reminded me of an intellectual undergraduate post-pub rant.

Perhaps the biggest problem Shone faced is that his subjects Lucas, Spielberg et al, are dull (deathly dull in comparison to the characters in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls). Many of them appear to have no interest other than making profitable movies; this does not make them interesting characters to read about.

One other thing bothered me: the seriously over laudatory praise verging on hyperbole, from a group of people I suspect are his friends, which adorned to book cover.

Despite all my issues with the book I still enjoyed it. It is an enjoyable and interesting read.

Yes, Virginia, blockbusters did kill not just ART films..........2005-03-30

...But any movie where people talk to each other, instead of settling their problems with their fists, a crow bar, a car chase, witchcraft, or a snappy one-liner containing an adolescent observation about sex. Shone says he's setting out to prove the opposite, but then does little more than give us anecdotes about the making of his favorite films for 200 pages. The chapter on Star Wars, for example, was heavily lifted from Dale Pollack's book about George Lucas, while the chapter on Spielberg and Close Encounters was ripped mostly from Balaban's "Diary" and Julia Phillips' memoirs. More interestingly, the author starts out in his forward differentiating between true must-see blockbusters of years gone by and the everyone's-gotta-see-it films that he claims we've been getting lately--movies like The Running Man and Godzilla that grossed zillions yet were generally disliked by critics and audiences alike. Yet there have always been plenty of these latter films: Superman and Earthquake and The Swarm. Many of these films, 30+ years later, are now being referred to as "classics," but go back and read the original reviews (or just WATCH them) and you'll see they were anything but. (And the original reviews are right. Today's stinkers will become classics too when someone wants to remake them because they're out of original ideas.)

I don't think there's much doubt that blockbusters have eroded cinema, turning the most complex artform of the 20th century into little more than a glorified video game. Just listen to today's audiences discussing the latest spectacle film to see how this is so: they talk about the size of the explosions and not the characters or the acting. I was watching a documentary on the making of Bridge On The River Kwai recently and was amazed to see the filmmakers and actors debating and arguing over the motivations of the characters in the climactic scene. They actually took half a day of shooting time to decide where Alec Guiness's character accidentally or deliberately fell on the detonator that blew up the bridge just as the train was passing by. They went into great detail about exactly how the character would keel over. Today they would just worry about whether the fireball was big enough. But director David Lean stressed over and over that you can't leave details such as character intention neglected or you've cheated your audience and made a dishonest film.

Or consider Roman Polanski, talking about how he had wanted to work with Jack Nicholson for years, but couldn't find a good script until Chinatown came along, so he waited. *Worrying about the script!* Can you imagine a Roland Emmerich or a Michael Bay saying that? Today's films don't even have plots that make sense! Not that anyone notices.

I loved Star Wars too, but...........2005-03-22

I read this book based on Nick Hornby's review in the Believer. It's a strange beast. Shone makes very clear that he wants to deflate the argument made by Biskind in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls that the Blockbuster killed the New American Cinema. I really did enjoy Biskind's book, though it certainly is gossip-laden and pretty fast and loose with the facts-- so I was quite interested to read Blockbuster for an alternate take on the "Blockbuster killed the Art film" debate. Unfortunately, it is pretty weak. While Shone derides Biskind's take on the after-effects of Jaws, etc. - he really doesn't back up his own stance beyond some very basic observations that do little to convince. Basically, there is not much meat to the book - some good anecdotes are sprinkled throughout, but nothing that doesn't seem like it could have come from a back issue of Premiere magazine. All said though, I did tear through it. The prose is engaging, and it's an easy read.

Fascinating, even if you're not a film buff.......2005-01-27

I watch a fair amount of movies, but I would hardly call myself a "film buff". I was a little skeptical of the book, but I bought it anyway on Nick Hornby's recommendation in Polysyllabic Spree. It turns out that this is a pretty fascinating subject. I wouldn't have thought I'd be very interested in the making of Batman or Titanic, but I couldn't put the book down.

Shone has a very enganging writing style, and the book is as much a history of people as much as of movies. He starts with the first big blockbusters of 25 years ago -- Jaws, Star Wars, ET, Alien -- and recreates the excitement we felt when we first saw them. The latter half of the book examines Hollywood's hubristic blockbusters -- Gozilla, Last Action Hero -- and how we all went to see them anyway. I always thought of the big summer action films as something Hollywood slapped together to make a buck, but sometimes they represent somebody's dreams (Back to the Future). Then again, sometimes they really are something slapped together to make a buck, maybe crushing some dreams in the process (Batman, Godzilla).

If you're a movie snob, you may not like this book. Shone is going to take Spielberg over Scorcese, and you know if you're not going to like that. But if you can take that, I think you'll really like this book, and I say that as someone who hasn't even seen Jaws.

Book Description

Recorded history is a finely-woven magic fabric of intricate lies about events predating the sixteenth century. There is not a single piece of evidence that can be reliably and independently traced back earlier than the eleventh century. This book details events that are substantiated by hard facts and logic, and validated by new astronomical research and statistical analysis of ancient sources.

Customer Reviews:

Calculations are only as good as your numbers.......2007-08-03

Yes, we can all agree that mainstream history is nearly 100% BS due to politics, economics, ego, problems with dating techniques, and various conspiracies. Agreed. But, I've been researching the distinct possibility that human history (in terms of civilizations) are much more ancient than we've been told, so coming across this book was very interesting to me. I wondered how Fomenko could be wrong (if at all) because he is very persuasive in his presentations. Then it dawned on me. If at previous times in prehistory, due to the various catastrophies that are well documented (comets, asteroids, planetary disruptions, plasma discharge, pole reversals, etc) the Earth was in a different position in relation to the sun, different tilt on its axis, different orbit, different rotation (in terms of velocity and DIRECTION), and the continents were in different positions, then would this not cause the ancients to see the sky (constellations) differently? In other words, is Fomenko making erronious assumptions about the physics of the Earth in pre-history, which then corrupt his data with regards to dating the relevant astrology? The last event to seriously disrupt our planet occured roughly 3500 years ago, according to other good researchers, so is it possible Fomenko has been confused by this? The vastly different physics of our planet in the not so distant past may explain this confusion, which is not to say the "mainstream" version of history is correct; on the contrary. I am not an expert in these fields, but wanted to see if this idea could spark discussion.

Pants on fire?.......2007-07-19

Will people ever read before spamming? Yes, Jesuits could not rewrite world history alone, they had help. Anyway, Dr Prof Acad A.Fomenko does not point to jesuits as the driving force of world wide history manipulation in published volumes 1,2,3;, actually he barely mentions the poor devils. Check it with 'Search inside' feature, please. China is rarely mentioned either, in fact, Dr Fomenko is completely eurocentric. Right, his theory contradicts all mainstream schools of history, because in their actual state they are all built on blatantly erroneus chronology. You don't need a mysterious cabal (conspiracy) to falsify history, the falsification is its modus operandi. It is inherent to history(ians) to falsify (distort) events, as it is inherent to humans to boast as it is inherent to power (authority) to legimize itself by referrring to glorious past made to its own order. Dr Prof Fomenko and team have identified scores of instances of such manipulation in Russian, European, etc.. history, and delivered valid statistical proof thereof. His own 'reconstruction' is completely another story. Forget c14 as a valid method of dating. W.Libby has initially discovered a brilliant method of INDEPENDENT dating. Too bad, c14 method has become a joke after a forced marrige with dendrochronology with consensual chronological scale inbuilt. Radiocarbon method can't stand blind tests, but is so very productive as a rubberstamp.

Accepted History & Chronology Must Be Changed. .......2007-04-09

There is no doubt that history as most know it is a sham, & institution's version of History both University & Church is fradulent & inaccurate. Everything was established with an agenda, The real "Dark Ages" are now when we have access to incredible amounts of information past authorities & more important 'common folk' didn't have but our institutions & educators are slow to evolve because of what has ignorantly & arrogantly been taught for too long. This is on many subjects not just Chronology.

For anyone to question "Why would a Mathematician have anything credible to say of History?" The answer is from Dr. Fomenko's preface in the book: "It would be worthwhile to remind the reader that in the XVI-XVII century Chronology was considered to be a subdivision of Mathematics." These volumes could possibly be some of the most important works to date & should be read by everyone with an interest in History, especially professors & educators who have a duty to the public. I have read both books & must say that 'Chronology 1' has some very eye opening & revolutionary information. Even if these volumes are part true the implications are profound & opens the doors to further investigations & questions which must be done. I speak several different lanquages & must say the logic Dr. Fomenko uses with "inflection" of words & words being read from left to right in one region & right to left in another then written backwards, the removal of vowels & get down to basics of words, or different cities & locations having the same name etc. is correct. Vowel usage has always been optional & varied, actually complicating linquistics & study. The first thing one has to understand is that words never had a fixed spelling in history like we do now, the spelling of words was mutable & regional, as well as names & titles of people were vast, varied & changed, NOTHING WAS FIXED or understood linear. Matters of Life & Death as well as financial profiteering yesterday & today were & are made with ignorant, illogical & conspiratorial views of history & reality, it's time people get closer to the Truth & society collectively grow up.

Very Interesting.......2007-03-07

It is a good proposal and I believe it will mature into something even better in the future. I think it deserves to be read.

History as Science Fiction.......2007-01-10

Anatoly Fomenko has written a very intriguing book, full of pictures, charts, and computer 'proof' of his thesis: backwards of AD900 we don't really know what happened or when. Between AD900 and AD1600 there is more certainty, but there is still a lot of fuzzy ground, and things don't get reliable until we get past the 1600's where the printing press made it very difficult for the perpetrators of this timeline manipulation to change anything that had been committed to print. The Dark Ages did not happen. Books were burned for a reason. One organization has doubled the actual length of its existence by expanding the real chronology. Read why.

I had always wondered why Christ died about AD33 and yet men waited until the 11th century to form the Knights Templar, the Cathars, etc and go after the Holy Land by force. Why the 1000 year gap? Turns out there wasn't more than a 10-12 year gap and he proves it using astronomy. This also implies that the planet is not as old as we have been told, and current Christian and other creationist scientists are already championing that idea without being aware of Fomenko's book. The two groups, creationist scientists and the Russian mathematical analysts corroborate each other. Fascinating.

Of course, all this flies in the face of what we have been told traditionally is the 'proper' chronology of western civilization, and most readers will experience 'cognitive dissonance' in reading this book. It means that our history going backwards from AD1600 becomes progressively more incorrect and unreliable until it cannot be trusted at all... in the space of 700-800 years.

Naturally, the curious, open-minded reader will want to know WHO did this, WHY, and did any of the events we think of as really ancient ever happen?
Dr. Fomenko is a respected scientist/mathematician at Moscow State University who has already answered these questions to the satisfaction of his initially skeptical colleagues. Most of them are now believers, a few still refuse to believe (the usual diehards), and of course the western press has ignored Fomenko's work -- for obvious reasons when you read the book. The ones who perpetrated this chronology ruse have a lot to answer for. They are still with us. That's why this book is a well-kept secret.

I gave the book a 4-star rating because I was unable to check out some of his claims; those I checked were as he said. But if even 1/3 of his claims are true, this punches a big hole in what we think is our history, the meaning of western civilization, our educational process (for repeating the ruse as gospel), and the trustworthiness of the organization that perpetrated this ruse, well-intentioned or not.

This book relates to current research into a Young Earth paradigm, to John Keel's discoveries about our planet, and Fr Malachi Martin's insights (in his now out-of-print books). We are indeed sheep who are manipulated and kept ignorant -- for a reason. While knowing what these men have to say may be the "booby prize" (as in: 'what can you do with this knowledge?'), it will provide interesting reading. Didn't someone say: "...and the Truth will set you free."?? For you to judge if this book contains the truth.

Average customer rating:

Music: The Key of Human Evolution
Corinne Heline
Manufacturer: New Age Bible & Philosophy Center
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Music | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

General | Philosophy | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0933963106

Book Description

These ominous words seized the nation's attention and launched one of the most chilling television series of all time—the Outer Limits™. Recently revived, the new show is as startling as the original.

Now you can read the landmark stories that inspired the best Outer Limits episodes, old and new. Venture into mind-bending new worlds with this second volume in the Prima Publishing series.

"The Choice" by Diane Duane

Aggie is a child with extraordinary powers—and no idea of how to control them. An organization of women with similar powers exists only to kidnap such young girls and "save" them from the government?s ?experiments.? Who will win the struggle for Aggie's life?

"Arena" by Fredric Brown

This intriguing account of controlled combat pits the heroes of two races in a struggle for the survival of their species. Outer Limits fans will recognize the 1960s episode Fun and Games in the roots of this story.

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When a deaf woman starts to hear for the first time, it should be good news. But what if all she can hear are incomprehensible "messages" from outer space?

?A Feasibility Study? by Michael Marano

Feasibility studies are useful to find out if a new bridge is worth building. But if the purpose of the study is to see if the human race is worth abducting: what would you do to stop it?

The Outer Limits™ is a trademark of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.

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