Reaction to Chapter Seven
I found it surprising that early theatres were called nickelodeons. It makes me wonder if the current Nickelodeon channel derived its name for the same reason, the world being the Greek word for theatre, or if there is some other reason.It's interested to read about Mary Pickford, and how she was basically one of the first celebrities. Her career evolved when her boss, Adolph Zukor realized that his movies would make more money if he had continuous actors in his movies; this would create familiar faces to the viewers, even moreso causing them to want to watch a movie. Pickford was in many movies, became known as "America's Sweetheart", and earned a high salary. People always wonder why these big celebrities and athletes earn so much money, when what they do seems that it isn't worth all that. It's interesting to see how it all started.
I did not know that Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004) was actually an indie film. I did not know that it was rejected by Hollywood studios.
I also did not know that box office ticket sales accounted for only twenty percent of the film's revenue, while video and DVD sales make up fifty percent of that income. I would have though the opposite considering the high cost of going to see a movie in theatres is; I would think that a system that forces each person to pay a significant amount, compared to a system where many people can watch a movie over and over again for a one-time-price would earn more money.
Vocabulary :
1. celluloid: a transparent and pliable film that can hold a coating of chemicals sensitive to light
2. kinetograph: an early movie camera developed by Thomas Edison's assistant in the 1890s
3. kinetoscope: an early film projection system that served as a kind of peep show in which viewers looked through a hole and saw images moving on a tiny plate
4. vitascope: a large-screen movie projection system developed by Thomas Edison
5. narrative films: a movie that tells a story, with dramatic action and conflict emerging mainly from individual characters
6. nickelodeons: the first small make short movie theaters, which were often converted cigar stores, pawnshops, or restaurants redecorated to mimic vaudeville theaters
7. vertical integration: in media economics, the phenomenon of controlling a mass media industry at its three essential levels: production, distribution, and exhibition
8. oligopoly: in media economics, an organizational structure in which a few firms control most of an industry's production and distribution resources
9. studio system: an early film production system that constituted a sort of assembly-line process for movie making; major film studios controlled not only actors but also directors, editors, writers, and other employees, all of whom worked under exclusive contracts
10. block booking: an early tactic of movie studios to control exhibition involving pressuring theater operators to accept marginal films with no stars in other to get access to films with the most popular stars
11. movie palace: ornate, lavish single-screen movie theaters that emerged int eh 1910s in the US
12. multiplexes: contemporary movie theaters that exhibit many movies at the same time on multiple screens
13. Big Five/Little Three: from the late 1920s through the late 1940s, the major movie studios that were vertically integrated and that dominated the industry. The Big Five were Paramount, MGM, Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, and RKO. the Little Three were those studios that did not own theaters: Columbia, Universal, and United Artists
14. talkies: movies with sound, beginning in 1927
15. newsreels: weekly ten-minute magazine-style compilations of filmed news events from around the world organized in a sequence of short reports; prominent in movie theaters between the 1920s and the 1950s
16. blockbuster: the type of big-budget special effects films that typically have summer or holiday release dates, heavy promotion, and lucrative merchandising tie-ins
17: genre: a narrative category in which conventions regarding similar characters, scenes, structures, and themes recur in combination
18. documentary: a movie or TV news genre that documents reality be recording actual characters and settings
19. cinema verite: French term for truth film, a documentary style that records fragments of everyday life unobtrusively; it often features a rough, grainy look and shaky, handheld camera work
20. indies: independent music and film production houses that work outside industry oligopolies; they often produce less mainstream music and film
21: megaplexes: movie theater facilities with fourteen or more screens
22. Hollywood Ten: the nine screenwriters and one film director subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) who were sent to prison in the late 1940s for refusing to discuss their memberships or to identify communist sympathizers
23. Paramount decision: the 1948 Supreme Court decision that ended vertical integration int eh film industry by forcing the studios to divest themselves of their theaters
24. synergy: in media economics, the promotion and sale of a product (and all its versions) throughout the various subsidiaries of a media conglomerate
25: digital video: the production of format that is replacing celluloid film and revolutionizing filmmaking because the cameras are more portable and production costs are much less expensive
26: consensus narrative: cultural products that become popular and command wide attention, providing shared cultural experiences
posted by maggie @ 8:12 AM
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