Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer by Tom Shone (4-Oct-2004) Hardcover

by Tom Shone

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Film, Media Tie In, Art, History

Unknown Binding

First published October 4, 2004

About the author

Tom Shone was born in Horsham, England, in 1967. From 1994 to 1999 he was the film critic of the London Sunday Times and has since written for a number of publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, the London Daily Telegraph, and Vogue. He lives in Brooklyn, New York."

Reviews

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up after seeing it recommended in a Nick Hornby essay, and it's a pretty good bet that if you like Nick Hornby's style of British humor - or if you're a fan of any of the big blockbuster SF/fantasy movies that have come out since the 1970s and are tired of seeing the genre heralded as the death of true (i.e. arthouse) cinema civilization - you'll enjoy this book. It occasionally veers into the realm of style over substance, but it's witty and entertaining and full of fun anecdotes.

[Carla Remy · Rating 5 out of 5]

03/2011

A very entertaining, fun to read book. This was well-done and interesting.

[Del · Rating 5 out of 5]

First things first. This book came out before the third Star Wars prequel arrived. The blockbuster has moved on a helluva lot since those days. Disney/Marvel have their eyes on the prize, which seems to be a complete monopoly, and they've kinda rejuvinated the summer, to last all year round. James Cameron's Avatar outstripped the previous highest grossing movie of all time, James Cameron's Titanic, and now we're all waiting to see just how much money James Cameron can make with his three (I think) Avatar sequels, all shooting back to back. Somewhere, right now, on a James Cameron film set, some poor suit will be fearing for his life, if this little nugget is anything to go by: 'Cameron's way with studio executives and accountants was notorious; During the shooting of The Abyss, he dangled Fox executive Harold Schneider over the edge of a forty-five-foot diving platform and threatened to let him drop.'

We've come a long way from 1975, and Jaws; widely (in)famous for being the first ever summer blockbuster, the first hundred million dollar movie, and the year the world got to know Steven Spielberg. Capitalising on he success of Peter Benchley's pulpy hit novel, the marketing campaign for Jaws was way ahead of its time, and worked to perfection. None of which would have mattered, had the movie sucked. And after all the problems actually getting the movie made (of which there are numerous books and articles and documentaries), who could have expected that Jaws would be the runaway success it became? Never mind the scary shark; the secret ingredient was Spielberg, and the all the little moments that in later movies became Spielberg trademarks - 'Dreyfuss crushing his styrofoam cup, in response to Quint crushing his beer can, or Brody's son copying his finger-steepling at the dinner table, both moments silent, as all the best moments in Spielberg are, and both arising from the enforced improv session that arose while he and his crew waited for his shark to work.'/'And there you have Jaws, a film buoyed up by more high spirits than any movie about killer sharks ought by rights to be. Barreling along beneath cloudless skies that are a perfect match for its directors temperament, Jaws picked up its audience, wiped them out, and deposited them on the sidewalk, two hours later, exhausted but delighted.' The amount of money the film took was almost as frightening as the shark itself, but if Spielberg expected to be given the seal of approval with an Oscar nomination, he was left bitterly disappointed, the effect of the snub 'opening a fault line that would run right down the next decade of his career, as he hankered for a respectability that never quite arrived and sought popular success that he then distrusted.'

Still, he would soon be able to share his worries with his good friend George Lucas; Star Wars was coming at us from a galaxy far, far away. Totally unlike anything else around at the time, Star Wars was a rip-roaring jaunt through the cosmos, featuring 'hammerheaded aliens and high-speed dogfights, light-sabers and land-speeders, twin suns and detonating moons, all strung together by a director who seemingly couldn't wait to get from one end of his freshly summoned universe to the other.' Where sci-fi had before been a bit dry and po-faced, now it was swashbuckling and full of likeable rogues and comic-relief robots - and the appeal was that it felt like a place we knew: 'Even better is the moment when they first board the Millennium Falcon to flee the Imperial Guards, start her up, and she stalls. Nobody had ever seen a spaceship that stalled in a sci-fi film before.'

We were, in a sense, spoiled with these two visionary directors appearing at around the same time. Many films attempted to repeat the formula of Jaws and Star Wars, but it was well nigh impossible, and these films cast a long shadow, that even Spielberg and (especially) Lucas would struggle to step out of.

The book then moves through the eighties and into the nineties, and although, by and large, the films it discusses don't have the same pull for me as the likes of Jaws, the filthy business stuff is utterly captivating. Studio execs with no intimate knowledge of the movie-making business throwing around millions of dollars like confetti, the movie itself soon becoming secondary to the marketing campaign. Take Tim Burton's Batman, for example: ' "Batman tested the boundaries of how enormous merchandising could be driven by toy manufacturers who would wrap the toys pre-Christmas or pre-summer and participate in the advertising. They helped promote the film, which helped promote the merchandising, which helped promote the sequel." ' The film was almost an afterthought, and a hellish experience for Burton. ' "Cereal manufacturers and fast food companies, who wanted to make bat-shaped toys and hamburgers were looking over my shoulder the whole time." ' Burton may as well have been working with a gun to his head. The climax of the film was supposed to have Jack Nicholson's Joker kill Kim Basinger's Vicki Vale, causing Batman go get medieval on the Joker. The producers decided the audience wouldn't like the idea of Batman beating up an old man, so, without telling Burton, they changed the entire ending: the Joker would take Vale captive and climb to the top of Gotham Cathedral's bell tower. Burton hated the idea, having no idea how it would end, but he was just as much a captive as Vicki Vale. ' "Here were Jack Nicholson and Kim Basinger walking up this cathedral, and halfway up Jack turns around and says 'Why am I walking up all these stairs? Where am I going?' " "We'll talk about it when you get to the top!" Burton called back.'

The book takes us up to the release of the likes of The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings, and while it does end on a slightly dour note, reflecting on 'the good old days' - 'We got Raiders of the Lost Ark, they get The Mummy Returns; we got Top Gun, they get Armageddon; we got Star Wars, they get the prequels', it's smart enough to reflect that the 'good old days' probably only seem that way to those of us who lived them. I'd like to see an updated version with Shone telling us what he makes of the uber-success of the Avengers, and Marvel's Cinematic Universe; and conversely, the stumbling attempts by other studios to launch their own 'universe'. One thing is for sure; the Blockbuster isn't going anywhere.

[Danny Marcalo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of course I've read the New Hollywood bible aka "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" so I was somewhat skeptical as to what this book could offer me. Quite a lot actually. It takes some of Biskind's theories and discusses them eloquently. I like Shone's interpretations of some of the movies he writes about. He points to some interesting aspects, for example the fact, that the uber-gimmick in "Back to the Future", the time machine, becomes a piece of junk pretty fast, thus enabling the filmmakers to focus on character and storytelling. Also I think Shone is right about the economical conclusions he draws. Blockbuster filmmaking soon became a business, more than filmmaking had ever been. It's nice that he looks sideways at the way movies made money apart from selling tickets. The anecdotes he tells are marvellous, I especially loved his description of James Cameron's lunacy, some would say genius. All in all the book lacks an ongoing narratives, jumping from movie to movie and connecting the discussion of that movie with an aspect of Blockbusters is a little forced. Then again, it's not entirely the author's fault, because there probably was no single line of event one could track, but lots of things happening at the same time to different films, so he had to compartmentalize a bit.

[Joan · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of my hobbies is looking at box office sites, which can be kind of fun (or used to be fun until it became a contest to see which comic book movie would be king of the box office this summer -yawn). So I thought it would be a complete joy to read how this crazy contest became a thing. Of course I was kind of familiar with some of it (especially Spielberg being the start of it all with Jaws- I think most of the world is familiar with Spielberg, and I don't mean that in a good way). Even though this felt like junk food, I felt like it was worthwhile junk food, and I think of a lot of those movies as art house blockbusters (especially in this day and age with the 20th star wars sequel- ugh). I actually felt proud that I grew up in that time period and feel kind of sorry that kids half my age that don't have that.
One thing that I was not aware of was that because a lot of these early blockbusters were considered art house, one thing the studios started doing at the beginning of the 2000s, was to let art house directors direct blockbusters. I don't know how far they've continued with that to the present, but it kind of felt sad to me because I would rather see a good small film than a mediocre big one, even if the small film is slow and hard to watch.

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let's call this a solid 3.5 stars. I like the anecdotal approach, as it provides new (and sometimes very bitchy) insights into the thoughts and opinions of film makers and Hollywood executives. That said, I found some of the text overly-verbose...and the author tosses out his own throwaway catty comments, with no follow up. I would love to see a second volume covering the last 25 years, as many things have changed since this book was published.

[James Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great insight into the movie industry, and the past and future of blockbusters

[Rodney Montague · Rating 5 out of 5]

A real story of Hollywood. Read it. Lived it. Loved it all.

[Richard Moss · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tom Shone digests 30 years of crowd-pleasing cinema from Jaws to The Lord of the Rings, exploring the birth of the blockbuster and it's evolution (and deterioration).

Shone is provocative and opinionated - but makes an excellent case about why it's unfair for some to blame Jaws, Close Encounters, Star Wars, Raiders, ET and Alien for the ruination of cinema.

Instead he captures what was so great about those early blockbusters - the innocence and lack of calculation that have made them classics.

But then he also turns his attention to how Hollywood began churning out sub-standard fare to cash in on the blockbuster market - losing sight of what made the original films so great, and focusing entirely on the bottom line.

The irony is that duff decisions driven by money ended up closing cinema screens and threatening the financial security of studios. There is a fantastic section about the calamity that was Schwarzenegger's Last Action Hero - nailing why it could never work. The failure of the Star Wars prequels is also dissected.

I did find myself disagreeing with Shone from time to time - but he's never less than engaging and sharp in his analysis.

And I admired the fact that he sought out the merit in the films of Spielberg, Lucas, Scott and Cameron, rather than just dismissing them as the directors who diverted Hollywood away the from Scorseses and Coppolas.

The book was published in 2004, so we don't get a dissection of the most recent trends in cinema - so perhaps it's time for an update, but much of what Shone talks about remains true today as our cinemas remain dominated by superhero franchises.

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up because Nick Hornby wrote so enthusiastically about it that I was compelled to do so. And I am so glad I did. This is a fascinating chronological examination of Blockbusters in Hollywood: how they came to be (with Jaws leading the way) and where they are now. What is remarkable is the data collected on box office sales for each, what other movies were released at the time, and the details offered through interviews with the stars and directors of most of them. I also especially enjoyed learning about how blockbusters, in fact, saved the movie industry. While many of us undoubtedly cringe every time summer rolls around because we know it means that some big-budget vapid film is coming our way, replete with a flimsy script and even less reliable acting, Shone demonstrates convincingly that it is those very movies, because of their success, that then allow studios to green light and fund independent and "quieter" mid-budget films...you know, the ones that actually then get nominated for Oscars, and that we find ourselves talking about, not because of the special effects, but because of the acting. And all of this information is conveyed in an absolutely irresistibly sharp writing of Shone that had me laughing out loud throughout. His dissertation on what an unsuccessful archaeologist Indiana Jones is should alone be enough to get you to read this book, and thank goodness there is so much more than that.

[Thomas Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two stars is a little harsh, it's a really interesting book, but it's clearly (from how many times it's referred to) a riposte to Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Down and Dirty Pictures by Peter Biskind, and the extent to which it's set up in opposition to the idea that the shift from the auteur pictures of the seventies to popcorn movies makes it feel a little debate classish at times. The glibness of Shone's dimissal of a lot of other forms of movie feels like grist for contrarianism as opposed to views he sincerely holds, at times.

Chuck Klosterman did something similar with hair metal in Fargo Rock City, around the idea that, even though the Pixies and Sonic Youth loomed larger in column inches and scholarly hosannas, a lot more people loved glam rock in the eighties, and the fervency of that love wasn't any less meaningful than for The Replacements. But Klosterman didn't feel the need to establish parameters where that other music was worthless for the music he's writing about to be meaningful. And given that Tom Shone is still a film critic, the binary he establishes feels more rhetorical than sincere.

[Ellyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating look at the evolution of the blockbuster film, from "Jaws" and "Star Wars" to "Titanic" and "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. The author takes a fresh and uncompromising view on the hits and misses in the blockbuster world and how they changed how Hollywood makes movies. I liked that the author acknowledged the bad things that came through blockbusters (how they affected theaters and how they got churned out too quickly to sometimes pay attention to a good plot) but he also defended them as a great aspect of the film world and as something audiences really want. Filled with great insights from all the major directors, this is a great book for film buffs.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intelligently argued case, by someone who grew up with the first wave of blockbusters (and is pretty much the same age as me, as it happens - he comments on how great it was to be a teen when “Raiders” first opened and, like him, I remember coming out of the cinema and wanting to be an archaeologist!), that attempts to put right the myth that Spielberg and Lucas, between them, killed decent films in Hollywood. Apart from a few niggles (he used “Skywalking” as a source, but makes some elemental mistakes regarding “Star Wars”, which bugged me), this is a good book, encompassing a wide range of films and talking indepth with a lot of directors. Well worth a read.

[MKat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended to me by my film studies professor at the time, I found this book witty and well researched. The author revels in summertime movies meant to entertain the masses without pandering to the Lowest Common Denominator. He makes the point that gratuitous explosions and ridiculous action sequences coupled with great characters and solid scripts are just as important as all those "intelligent" and "Oscar-worthy" films out there. These are the movies that make us fall in LOVE with The Movies, but what those movies are has evolved significantly over the years.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easy and humorous read about the birth and rise of the "blockbuster" movie in modern-day Hollywood. Very enlightening (albeit on a topic that's not terribly important).

It lays out a pretty consistent thesis for how we ended up with one sequel after another, one reboot after another, one comic book film after another.

The book was published in 2004 and I'm not sure there's a new edition available, but there should be.

[Chris Lilly · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book about film by someone who thinks "Aliens" was better than "Alien". He likes billion dollar popcorn movies, he likes sequels, he likes films with 20 minutes of idea blown up into three hours of banging noises. He has the critical acumen of a caddis fly. However, he writes knowledgeably about the films that dominate the cinemas now, and that needs to be understood.

[Ryan Rinchiuso · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting book that is actually about movies that everyone sees but no one writes about. The book is funny, very knowledgable and will make you look at the biggest movies in a different light.

[Joann]

A must-read if like me, you grew up on Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. We had no clue, but we were witnessing a giant leap forward - a mutation, if you will - in the evolution of movies. Shone depicts that evolution with great (if dry) wit and obvious affection for his material.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

solidly entertaining movie trivia. written as a reaction to Easy Riders Raging Bulls and serves as an excellent counterpoint

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good, and well written, but a lot of the stories are very familiar from other Hollywood books. Almost the whole time I felt like I had read the book before.

[Pearse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good insight into how a few films defined the future of the promotion and management of films, and not always for the better.

[V · Rating 4 out of 5]

Has a blurb by Nick Hornby and reads like something he would write. A fun and quick read.