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UC Irvine UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Allegories of Industry and the Limits of Reflexivity in Hollywood, 1992-2006 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6xr6r3nd Author Watschke, Erik Allen Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Allegories of Industry and the Limits of Reflexivity in Hollywood, 1992-2006 DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Visual Studies by Erik Watschke Dissertation Committee: Associate Professor Catherine L. Benamou, Chair Associate Professor Kristen Hatch Associate Professor Bliss Cua Lim 2014 © 2014 Erik Watschke DEDICATION To my dad who introduced me to the movies ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF TABLES iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v CURRICULUM VITAE vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION vii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: “He Made the Whole World Laugh and Cry”: 23 The Mythologization of the Film Artist in Chaplin CHAPTER TWO: “Love Never Dies”: The Status of the Image and 65 Cinephilic Reaction in Bram Stoker's Dracula CHAPTER THREE: “There Are No Boundaries”: The Status of Sound 109 and the Transnational in The English Patient CHAPTER FOUR: “From the Creator of Being John Malkovich, Comes the 171 Story of the Creator of Being John Malkovich”: Adaptation. CHAPTER FIVE: “Are You Watching Closely?”: The Status of Story in 223 The Prestige CONCLUSION 277 BIBLIOGRAPHY 310 FILMOGRAPHY 324 APPENDIX: Industrial Chronology of the New New Hollywood 337 iii LIST OF TABLES Page Table 5.1 Narrative Structure of The Prestige 235 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank my committee chair, Professor Catherine Benamou, who encouraged me to pursue a film historical project in the first place, and whose guidance and tireless support helped transform and strengthen my study at every stage. I am also indebted to Professor Bliss Cua Lim and Professor Kristen Hatch, who served on the committee and contributed important advice and encouragement throughout my research and writing. At crucial early stages, Professor Bert Winther-Tamaki and Professor Amy Powell contributed important feedback regarding the conceptual framework of my project, and for this I am grateful. My research would not have been possible without financial support from The School of Humanities, University of California, Irvine, which granted me a Summer Dissertation Fellowship at a critical point in my studies. I would also like to thank Valerie Sanchez and UCI’s Institutional Review Board for assisting in the implementation of primary research procedures. Over the years I have been greatly assisted in my studies by several key staff at UCI who deserve recognition and my thanks: Film & Media Studies Department Manager Peter Chang, Department Assistant Kelly Swanholm, and Visual Studies Graduate Coordinators Madeline Mullens, Caroline Mcguire, Shauntay Larkins, and Clara Quijano. Archival research could not have been completed without the help of the great librarians at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library. I am much obliged to Jenni McCormick at American Cinema Editors, and the staff at The American Society of Cinematographers for assistance in gathering information and facilitating primary research. I would also like to give special thanks to Tom C. McCarthy at Sony Pictures and Marc Wanamaker of Bison Archives for graciously agreeing to be interviewed about their work on the films studied. Years of collegial support and encouragement have indebted me to my comrades in Visual Studies and dear friends Christina Spiker, Vuslat Demirkoparan, Shahriar Fouladi, Kristen Galvin, Cecilia Joulain, and Patrick Boyle. I am thankful for the support of my parents in this endeavor. My father, Frank Watschke, was my original inspiration to become a scholar of film, and my only regret is that I did not finish in time for him to see how far I have come. My mother, Terry Watschke, has been my most ceaseless advocate from beginning to end, and has continued to encourage me even from many miles away. Finally, I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to Racquel M. Gonzales, who provided advice and criticism, aided in research, generally challenged me to make my project better, and without whose support and affinity I would not be where I am today. v CURRICULUM VITAE Erik Watschke EDUCATION 2014 Ph.D. in Visual Studies, University of California, Irvine 2010 M.A. in Visual Studies, University of California, Irvine 2007 B.A. in Studies in Cinema and Media Culture, University of Minnesota ACADEMIC EMPLOYMENT 2012- Adjunct Professor, Film Studies and Journalism, Irvine Valley College Present 2012-13 Teaching Associate, Humanities Core, University of California, Irvine 2012 Teaching Associate, Film & Media Studies, University of California, Irvine 2007-11 Teaching Assistant, Film & Media Studies, University of California, Irvine FIELD OF STUDY Visual Studies, Film History ACADEMIC PRESENTATIONS 2014 Paper, “There Are No Boundaries: A Crisis of Sound and the Transnational in The English Patient,” presented at Film & History Annual Conference, Madison, WI, October 31 2010 Paper, “Exilic Space in the City of Refuge,” presented at “Contingent Communities,” Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature Conference, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, October 15 vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Allegories of Industry and the Limits of Reflexivity in Hollywood, 1992-2006 By Erik Watschke Doctor of Philosophy in Visual Studies University of California, Irvine, 2014 Professor Catherine L. Benamou, Chair This dissertation examines technological and paradigmatic changes to the American Film Industry of the last twenty-five years through the lens of popular modes and methods of reflexivity, as manifested in selected film texts. I argue for the historical importance of this period, referred to as “The New New Hollywood,” in transforming issues of labor, authorship, and audience within United States-based film production. This entails an analysis of the way that discourses are narrated within Hollywood films themselves, along with the rhetoric of trade organizations, film critics, and film studios. I do this through a series of case studies of films and their promotional materials. In the first three chapters respectively, I analyze Richard Attenborough's Chaplin (1992) for its employment of literal reflexivity in the biopic genre, Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) for its metaphorical reflexivity concerning digital imaging, and Anthony Minghella's The English Patient (1996) as an independent-blockbuster whose sound allegories comment on transnational filmmaking. In the last two chapters, I analyze Spike Jonze's Adaptation (2002) as a film-à-clef that literally dramatizes screenwriting conventions, and finally, Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (2006), whose allegorical vii reflexivity centers on the current state of cinematic illusionism. Ultimately, I consider how these films and the rhetoric surrounding them alternatively represent and mystify debates concerning independent and blockbuster film forms, photochemical and digital technologies, and the work of narrative feature filmmaking. The broader goal of this study is to historicize recent Hollywood forms that arise between the early 1990s and mid-2000s, and suggest that the development of new, specific definitions of “Hollywood” and “filmmaker” are necessary to an understanding of contemporary globalized media industries. This is due to three key historical shifts that characterize the period: changes in ancillary marketing strategies, transformation of formal and narrative structures, and the digitization of the technical processes of cinema. viii INTRODUCTION The contemporary American cinema is exceedingly hard to define as American in national terms, and only ever more elusively cinematic with each passing year. Outsourcing and the development of ancillary markets – where often not only production has been shifted overseas, but the audience as well – have tended in recent years to make any proposed nationality for Hollywood difficult to logically ascertain. Empirical studies reveal that a quite large number of Hollywood films are, on the whole, routinely not made by Americans or for them: while the importation of foreign talent to Hollywood has been a popular strategy since its earliest days, more recent is the way in which blockbuster Hollywood film production has focused largely on international marketing and exportation of U.S. products even more so than the sale of these products within North America.1 Even simply tracing the financing of film production is a difficult prospect when many of the United States's largest and most successful film studios have been purchased in recent years by, and function as subsidiaries of, larger substantially multi-national media corporations, some of which began by the 1990s to be financially-centered elsewhere in the world.2 In short, it becomes possible for the first time for a film to be created entirely 1 Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, and Richard Maxwell argue persuasively based on empirical research, that while Hollywood has always dominated international market places, it is in the late 90s that the Hollywood domination of foreign film industries, based on percentage of international distribution and marketing, and in terms of profit margins, begins to reach extreme proportions. Toby Miller, et al. Global Hollywood (London: