Copyright by Kevin John Bozelka 2008 The Dissertation Committee for Kevin John Bozelka certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: The Musical Mode: Rock and Hollywood Cinema Committee: ____________________________________ Janet Staiger, Supervisor ____________________________________ James Buhler ____________________________________ Adrienne McLean ____________________________________ Mary C. Kearney ____________________________________ Thomas Schatz The Musical Mode: Rock and Hollywood Cinema by Kevin John Bozelka, B.A, M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2008 Dedication To my father, John Leonard Bozelka and my mother Georgia Rose (1938-1993) Acknowledgements I would first like to thank my family for their support throughout this exceedingly long journey. Without them, said journey would be even longer. I also would like to thank the professors at University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee who provided me with an impeccable undergraduate education in film and television – Lynne Joyrich, Patricia Mellencamp, and, especially, Patrice Petro. They made the transition into graduate school much smoother and remain a model of academic excellence. Although he probably does not know it, Will Straw, my mentor and academic idol in Montréal, directly inspired this project with an off-the cuff but typically insightful comment he made in one of his amazing courses at McGill University where I achieved my MA. His ability to straddle film and popular music studies so brilliantly is a standard to which I will always aspire. I am not sure what I did to deserve Janet Staiger. But a better advisor would have to be some sort of divine spirit indeed. Janet went well above and beyond the call of duty to bring this project to completion. In her captivating courses, superlative scholarship, and unstinting editing, she is the Platonic ideal of a professor. And I still have so much to learn from her, especially how she balances it all! Janet, I am in your eternal debt. I need to thank my committee – James Buhler, Mary Kearney, Adrienne McLean, and Thomas Schatz. I would like to single out Mary and Tom in particular for making me proud of the Radio Television Film dept. I also want to thank RTF’s nerve center of operations for pesky graduate students – Stephanie Crouch, Susan Dirks, and Bert Herigstad. And the Instructional Media Center was a luxury most graduate students only dream about. I want to thank the Center’s staff, particularly Larry Horvat. v The Intellectual Entrepreneurship Program afforded me the opportunity to have three fantastic undergraduate students help with me this project – Hunter Callaway, Rhett Morgan, and Shirin Ricklefs. I sincerely hope the intellectual rigor they received from me in return continues to enrich them. Nicholas Bacuez, Morgan Blue, Courtney Brannon Donoghue, Rose Coyle, Carolyn Cunningham, Brian Dauth, Donna De Ville, Fabio Ferreira, Caroline Frick, Kristen Grant, Michael Grigsby, Qian Hua, Erin Lee, Blake Lucas, Madhavi Mallapragada, Susan McLeland, Assem Nasr, Elissa Nelson, Joan Neuberger, Tamara Oxley, Elliot Panek, Matt Payne, Susan Pearlman, Andy Scahill, David Schaefer, Lisa Schmidt, Suzanne Schulz, Bryan Sebok, Sharon Shahaf, Matt Stahl, Joseph Straubhaar, Sharon Strover, David Uskovich, Wei-Ching Wang, Kristen Warner, Jessica Wurster, and Ger Zielinski all contributed to this project in a variety of ways. Thank you all! Special thanks to Kyle and Lisa Barnett for holding my hand and David Gurney for always being there. Finally, I owe an incalculable debt to my husband Stuart Lombard. Because of Stuart, I now understand better why Ed Emshwiller’s Thanatopsis remains one of my most beloved films. Our life over the past four years resembled Emshwiller’s dynamic mise-en-scene with me as the blurred vision fluttering around Stuart’s sturdy fulcrum. And so he always had better perspective of me than I could acquire myself. Without his constant reminder of my potential, I might have blurred right out of the frame altogether. Sainthood awaits you, mon amour. December 2008 vi The Musical Mode: Rock and Hollywood Cinema Kevin John Bozelka, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2008 Supervisor: Janet K. Staiger This project seeks to determine the extent to which rock music brought an end to the Hollywood film genre of the musical. It stresses the importance of rock and post- 1960s popular music scholarship to film studies and vice-versa. Both objects of popular music inquiry remain relatively unexamined within film studies. But while the value of film studies to popular music scholarship has been much more widely acknowledged, much more work remains in these areas. Therefore, this project will look at the workings of rock ideology and how it impacted the development of the Hollywood musical. It will also examine recording technology and the ways in which it transformed both the film and music industries. The second half of this project is an extended analysis of how Hollywood films of the post-rock era (1970 onward) have reflected these changes. It theorizes that it was not so much the musical that “died” in this era as it was a particular kind of musical number – the Spontaneous Outburst of Song. The later chapters use the concept of mode as opposed to genre to examine how the pleasures offered by the musical of the classical Hollywood era remain available albeit in different guises and genres. Furthermore, these pleasures are capable of fostering the kinds of communities, if not utopias, that some scholars claim have died along with the classical Hollywood era. vii Table of Contents INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................................... 1 LITERATURE REVIEW ........................................................................................................................................ 6 METHODOLOGY...............................................................................................................................................16 CHAPTER OVERVIEW....................................................................................................................................... 17 CHAPTER 1 – MEDIA MERGERS/PROFESSIONAL MERGERS: ROCK’S ASCENDANCY OVER TIN PAN ALLEY AND ITS IMPACT ON THE HOLLYWOOD FILM INDUSTRY .......23 TIN PAN ALLEY STYLE.................................................................................................................................... 24 THE BUSINESS OF TIN PAN ALLEY .................................................................................................................29 THE MERGED PROFESSIONAL .........................................................................................................................35 RADIO AND BMI..............................................................................................................................................37 SONG GIVES WAY TO RECORDING .................................................................................................................42 ROCK ‘N’ ROLL STYLE.................................................................................................................................... 48 THE REACTION TO ROCK ‘N’ ROLL ................................................................................................................50 DEVELOPMENTS IN THE MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY...................................................................................54 ROCK................................................................................................................................................................58 CHAPTER 2: PEEL IT OFF YOUR FACE: THE IDEOLOGY OF ROCK.......................................... 61 IDEOLOGY ........................................................................................................................................................61 ART/COMMERCE..............................................................................................................................................63 COMMUNITY ....................................................................................................................................................79 CHAPTER 3 – NO POINT BEING ASHAMED OF IT: THE SPONTANEOUS OUTBURST OF SONG ............................................................................................................................................................102 INTEGRATION THEORY..................................................................................................................................103 THE INTEGRATED MUSICAL NUMBER AND HISTORY ..................................................................................111 CRITIQUES OF INTEGRATION THEORY ..........................................................................................................122 THE SOS ........................................................................................................................................................139 ROCK IDEOLOGY AND THE SOS ...................................................................................................................146 viii CHAPTER 4 – THE MUSICAL AS MODE ...............................................................................................152