• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

University of Kentucky UKnowledge Film and Media Studies Arts and Humanities 2001 American Audiences on Movies and Moviegoing Tom Stempel Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Stempel, Tom, "American Audiences on Movies and Moviegoing" (2001). Film and Media Studies. 7. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_film_and_media_studies/7 American Audiences on Movies and Moviegoing This page intentionally left blank American Audiences on Movies and Moviegoing Tom Stempel THJE UNNERSITY PRESS OlF KENTUCKY Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Copyright© 2001 by Tom Stempel Published by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre College ofKentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 05 04 03 02 01 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stempel, Tom, 1941- American audiences on movies and moviegoing I by Tom Stempel. p. em. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8131-2183-3 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Motion picture audiences-United States. 2. Motion pictures-Evaluation. 3. Motion picture industry-United States-Finance-Statistics. I. Title. PN1995.9.A8 S73 2000 791.43'01'3-dc21 00-036335 This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials. Manufactured in the United States of America. For Audrey Finally, a book of her own I know it's not a pony, but still ... This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments IX Introduction XI 1. Childhoods 1 2. Hollywood's Fifties 15 3. Sex and Seriousness 29 4. Opening the Sixties 43 5. Television and Movies 58 6. Closing the Sixties 68 7. Dark and Golden 82 8. Black and Dark 96 9. Star Wars Ill 10. Film Education 128 11. Directors 141 12. Spielberg 153 13. Studios and VCRs 168 14. Promoting Habits 182 15. Changing Experiences 198 16. Experiencing Emotions 213 17. Eastwood 233 A Concluding Thought or Two 250 Appendix 254 Notes 256 Index 273 This page intentionally left blank owledgments There are, as usual, people and institutions to thank: First, there are film and cultural historians David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, Janet Staiger, Michael Medved, and Neal Gabler. I have never met any of them, and I disagree with all of them at some points in this book. But I have to thank them because my disagreeing with their writings has made me think longer and harder than writing by many others with whom I agree. In a similar vein, there is Evander Lomke, an editor at the Continuum Publishing Company. Evander worked on the two books of mine that Continuum published, and he encouraged me in this book and helped me focus the concept, even though Continuum eventually passed on the project. Nancy Lathrop, a former student of mine (now Nancy Lathrop Rutherford) graciously agreed to be a guinea pig and let me try out on her the first version of the questionnaire for this book. If she had not told me some wonderful stories, the project would have stopped right there. Ally Acker talked me into reading the manuscript for her 1991 Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema, 1896 to the Present (New York: Continuum), andwhile doing notes on the manuscript for her I got into the process of comparing film rentals that you will see used in this book. So thanks for the start, Ally. My late friend Tovah Hollander put out the questionnaire on the Internet back in 1993, before the Net was the monolith it was to become, so we did not get the volume of responses I would have liked, but the quality was good. Unfortunately, Tovah died at much too early an age before she could answer the questionnaire herself. Thanks also to my friend Mary Ann Watson, a professor at Eastern Michigan University, who passed out the questionnaire to her students. Thanks to Ned Comstock at the Doheny Library at the University of Southern California for suggesting several sources of information. And thanks, as always, to the staff at the Margaret Herrick Library ofthe Academy ofMotion Picture Arts and Sciences, without whom anybody writing about film would be x Acknowledgments lost. In particular, Scott Curtis of the Herrick staff made several interesting suggestions. Leonard Maltin's annual Movie & Video Guides were essential in dating films, and while Maltin is the gold standard in these matters, the Internet Movie Database is beginning to overcome its early reputation for inaccuracies. The IMDB is particularly good for really obscure movies that Maltin is too classy to list. Without my wife, not only would I be without a movie-going partner, but I also would not have an on-call-twenty-four-hours-a-day computer specialist to keep me from deleting the entire book. Without my daughter Audrey, her husband Daniel, and their daughter Ilana, I would not have been in position to have certain insights that show up in the first and last chapters. When my brother John went to the University of Kentucky in the late eighties, he discovered that the University Press of Kentucky published several film books per year, which made his Christmas shopping for me very easy. In turn, it convinced me that this book might have a home at the University Press. Maria Elena de las Carreras, Virginia Van B. Keene, and Erik Bauer read the first draft of the manuscript and all of them gave me helpful feedback on it, as did the anonymous readers of the second draft for the University Press of Kentucky. Alix Parson not only took the author photograph, but helped us find the photograph for the cover of the book. And finally, of course, thanks to all those who responded to the question­ naire for this book. I think nearly everybody got quoted at least once, so I will not list everybody's name here. Without them there would be no book. oduction Moviegoing in America is a blood sport. Not that you would know that from most academic writing about it. Bruce Austin's The Film Audience: An International Bibliography of Research shows that what little research has been done on movie audiences is mostly sociological and/or economic.1 These approaches tend to be quantitative research, with the results expressed in a variety of numerical ways. As valuable as it is, the social science approach is inclined to drain the life out of the moviegoing process. After all, I used the term "moviegoing" in the title of the book, not just "moviewatching," since the latter suggests passivity. Watching movies is an emotional if not physical activity. Numbers do not get at how personal moviegoing is. I wanted to address moviegoing from a qualitative rather than quantitative point of view, if only to restore the human side of it. There have been very few books that have gone into the territory I want to explore.2 David Rosenberg's The Movie That Changed My Life is a collection of essays by famous writers about movies, but writers being as narcissistic as they are, the essays tell us more about the writers than they do about the movies and the moviegoing experience.3 Janet Staiger's Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception ofAmerican Cinema is an attempt by one of America's leading film scholars to apply reception theory (a theoretical look, often with psychological research, at how people perceive films) to a group of Arrierican films. 4 What Staiger does is review what has been written about the films and how they were received, depending on "tutored" sources, that is, what the official cultural custodians and commentators had to say. In the epilogue to her book, Staiger admits, "Only indirectly has this study asserted claims about people who have traditionally had no access to public and printed records ofcommunication. Such an unspoken mass deserves as much attention as does the popular press-if not more." I would say "more," given how often the popular press is wrong, as numerous examples in this book demonstrate.5 But Staiger adds, "How to do this for historical readers in a responsible scholarly way, however, is a very real problem."6 xii Introduction So here I am, a fool rushing in where Staiger fears to tread. Her question is quite legitimate: how do you do research what audiences think and feel about their relationships to the movies? While my approaches may come close to some conventional social science methods, I am a film historian by trade and have no desire to write a dry sociological tract. I used three approaches to gather information for this book. The first was personal observations of audiences. I have been looking at and, perhaps more importantly, listening to movie audiences since I was a kid. This is one reason the book begins with the year 1948, since I started going to movies the year before. I still keep one ear on the film and one on the audience.

Load more

  298

Copy Link