The End of the Studio System

A useful article by the Cyber College on the reasons for the decline and end of the Hollywood studio system
http://www.cybercollege.com/frtv/frtv005.htm

Hello Mummy Moore!

You have three nice looking blogs on film and media! I make it a point of visiting them and I'll add your most appropriate blog to this page. I know that Welling has special media status. All my best to you and your students.

Case Study Concept Maps for an art-house film

In the next few days I'll post my completed concept maps for "American Beauty". As the maps will be JPEGS I'll have to add the live links to the posts. Each map will feature issues on production, distribution and exhibition. There's also a generic map for any film. Of course, not everything will be covered but enough will be there for a meaningful Hollywood studio comparison with "ONCE" for FS6. I produced the maps as exemplars for my AS Media Studies class as they are creating case studies for OCR on film production and distribution companies. These concept maps will be followed up by another concept map which deals with the main issues for Section B of FS6: Film and its audience.

Recent small group research by my students on the problems they faced on how to produce, find and buy cameras, get permits for locations, finance and distribute their own films will be incorporated into the final concept map as this will be a good aid memoir for their essays. ( I'll hear the students' pitches this coming week.)

Work and posts on Section C of FS6 will also follow.

A Scottish TV interview with Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova on "ONCE"

This 14 minute interview with Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova was made during the pairs promotion of the film as they helped ICON Films market "ONCE" when it was released in mid October, 2007. It's useful for understanding the origins of the film and for Glen's comments on how "ONCE" compares with mainstream Hollywood films released during the same period.

An interview by FILMdetail's Ambrose Heron with John Carney, director of "ONCE"

Film students studying "ONCE" as an independent film for FS6 would do well to well to listen to this audio interview of Ambrose Heron with ONCE director John Carney.
Interesting topics are:

• Carney's ideas on how music can be used in films
• acting and naturalism
• the story on how the film found its main distributor, FOX Searchlight.

Bear with the brief advert halfway through this interview. Scroll down on the web page for the audio link.

http://www.filmdetail.com/archives/2007/10/21/john-carney-on-once/

Early UK Box Office Statistics for "The Lives of Others"

For students researching "The Lives of Other" as an "indie" these are helpful stats for studying the theatrical release of the film in the UK. Notice how many cinema (sites) it opened in and how this changed in subsequent weeks. Of course, these "sites" would have an art-house following. There is a running figure for the rise and fall of "the weekly gross" on the left with a running total for "the box offfice to date" on the right of the chart.
http://www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk/12435

Track the film into the following month(s) to see its fortunes and where the box office trail peters out.

Why and how the line between Hollywood and Independent films is becoming blurred

http://voice.paly.net/view_story.php?id=4502

Here's another link to a really useful Wikipedia article on this issue. Scroll down for the relevant parts, particularly the discussion on Dennis Hopper's "Easy Rider", the first film recognised as and "independent" film.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_films

Scroll down to read the second article by John Lewis on Independent Films and how major Hollywood studios muscled in on "Indies" by trying to "corner the market in "independent films. It's well worth reading to get an overview of how Hollywood has tried to blur the differences in audiences' minds between themselves and real indepent films.

http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Independent-Film-Road-Movies/Independent-Film-INDEPENDENCE-IN-CONTEMPORARY-HOLLYWOOD.html