My final thoughts on American film history
American film is a competition between filmmakers trying to become better than one another and using the box office as a way to represent their growth/strength. This is a thought that I have always had when learning about the history of filmmaking, and the direction that American film history is going towards is an interesting one to say the least. The way that American film is moving towards is a Blockbuster heavy market, especially with how much money is being poured into every film in the modern era, and According to Jon Lewis in American Film: A History “Blockbusters are defined by what they look and sound like as well as by the endeavor itself- the amount of cash poured into production, advertising, and promotion, and then by the astonishing revenues earned at the box office” (Lewis 422). Blockbusters also seemed to have started as a template from Gone with the Wind (Selznick, 1939). This film was one of the first highest earning films in the box office, and held that record for years until the godfather had released. This film also started the trend with spending insane amounts of money on producing a film in order to create a spectacle of a film. The advertising strategies of Gone with the Wind are also something to take into consideration as well. Gone with the Wind started a warehouse fire that then caught the attention of the media. Selznick then turned this into a way to promote the film in order to get more people to buy tickets for this film. Selznick even mentioned how Gone with the Wind was supposed to be “most comprehensive task of its kind ever undertaken in motion pictures” (Vertrees 90), which many blockbuster movies in the modern era are trying to achieve with their high budgets.
Works Cited
Lewis, Jon. American Film: A History. 2nd ed., 2021
Vertrees, Alan David. “Reconstructing the ‘Script in Sketch Form’: An Analysis of the Narrative Construction and Production Design of the Fire Sequence in ‘Gone with the Wind.’” Film History, vol. 3, no. 2, 1989, pp. 87–104.