Great article from Murdoch paper The Times taking a wry, but well-informed, look at the process of making a hit movie - lots here you can reference, especially within your coursework blogs and evaluations:
From Times Online
-->
April 24, 2010
A beginner's guide to blockbusters
You need neither script nor star to have a box office success, it’s all just a matter of timing, chutzpah and explosives
-->
-->
-->
-->
-->
-->
“The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things — Bread and Games!”
So wrote the poet Juvenal in AD104, but then he never lived to witness the blockbuster movie season in America: one long canyon run stretching between Memorial Day and Labour Day, in which the studios loose one $200-million behemoth after another in what amounts to what one observer has called a “multimillion-dollar demolition derby played with Porsches”. To make sense of all this, here is a ten-point guide to surviving the summer season.
1. Pick a date. Any date, as long as it lies between May and August. The summer used to be a wasteland, the place the studios dumped dreck like
Electra Glide in Blue (“He’s a good cop. On a big bike. On a bad road”); blockbusters were things that happened once in a generation, like
Gone with the Wind. But then along came
Jaws and
Star Wars, ripping up all known box-office records, and audiences hunkered down for repeats. Blockbusters became things that happened every year. Now, a new one is expected every week. This year
Iron Man 2 on May 7 is followed a week later by
Robin Hood, then
Shrek Forever After, then
Prince Caspian, all jostling for position.
“There are more teens living in America now than in the history of this country,” says Tom Sherak, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “It’s all about when the schools are out. It’s driven by that, by how you get them into theatres
