Sex, lies and marketing: Miramax and the development of the quality indie blockbuster

Film Quarterly

Volumn 55, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 30-39

  Perren, Alisa ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62649089761     PISSN: 00151386     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/fq.2001.55.2.30     Document Type: Review

References (20)

1. Jeff Gordinier, "Defy and Conquer," Entertainment Weekly Special Edition: Our 10th Anniversary, Spring 2000, p. 31.
2. Daniel Cerone, "Independent Film Makers, Marketers, Confront Box-Office Crisis," Los Angeles Times, 15 September, 1989, sec. 6, p. 4.
3. I employ the New Hollywood label as it is used by Thomas Schatz, "The New Hollywood," in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hillary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 25-32.
4. For an extensive discussion of the intersection of aesthetics and marketing of big-budget Hollywood films, see Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994).
5. Paul D. Colford, "Movies Are Their Game; Miramax Steers Small Films into the Public Consciousness," Newsday, 20 February, 1990, part II, p. 8.
6. Scholars and journalists have acknowledged that there has been a split within the industry in recent years between low-budget niche films and high-concept event films, but in general, scholarly work on the emergence of independents and specialty houses has been limited. The majority of attention has been on the evolution of the high-concept blockbuster and big-budget product of the major studios. For examples, see Tino Balio, "'A Major Presence in All the World's Important Markets,': The Globalization of Hollywood in the 1990s," in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steve Neale and Murray Smith (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 8-36,
7. and Schatz, "The Return of the Hollywood Studio System," in Conglomerates and the Media, ed. Erik Barnouw (New York: The New York Press, 1997), pp. 73-106.
8. While Balio, Schatz, and others have addressed the growth of specialty houses to an extent, Justin Wyatt has done the majority of work on low-budget product. For examples, see his discussions of Miramax and New Line in "Economic Constraints/Economic Opportunities: Robert Altman as Auteur," The Velvet Light Trap 38 (Fall 1996): pp. 51-67;
9. "The Formation of the 'Major Independent'" Miramax, New Line and the New Hollywood," in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, pp. 74-90;
10. and "From Roadshowing to Saturation Release: Majors, Independents and Marketing/Distribution Innovations," in The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 64-86.
11. I use the word "quality" throughout in much the same way it is used by Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr, and Tise Vahimagi in MTM 'Quality Television' (London: BFI, 1984). In "The MTM Style," Feuer, for example, writes that "The very concept of 'quality' is itself ideological. In interpreting an MTM programme as a quality programme, the quality audience is permitted to enjoy a form of television which is seen as more literate, more stylistically complex and more psychologically 'deep' than ordinary fare. The quality audience gets to separate itself from the mass audience and can watch TV without guilt, and without realising that the double-edged discourse that they are getting is also ordinary TV" (56). Quality independent films functioned in a similar sense for theatrical features released in the hands of Miramax.
12. John Pierson, Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes: A Guided Tour Across a Decade of Independent American Cinema (New York: Hyperion/Miramax Books, 1995), pp. 84, 87.
13. Steven Soderbergh, sex, lies and videotape (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), p. 21. In the decade between the release of sex, lies and videotape and The Blair Witch Project (1999), this attitude shifted to a certain extent. By the end of the 1990s, it often became a means of product differentiation that a movie was shot on digital video.
14. Aljean Harmetz, "Independent Films Get Bigger but Go Begging," New York Times, 1 February, 1989, p. C17.
15. Cerone, "Taking an Independent Path," Los Angeles Times, 3 May, 1989, part 6, p. 1.
16. Cerone, "Independent Film Makers, Marketers Confront Box-Office Crisis," p. 4.
17. Cerone, "Taking an Independent Path, p. 1.
18. Jeff Gordinier and Chris Nashawaty, "Film's Next Frontier," Entertainment Weekly, 11 February, 2000, p. 20.
19. Cerone, "Smaller Films Seek a Summer Place," p. 1.
20. See Wyatt, High Concept, chapter 1.