{"title":"Putting Penn to Paper: Warner Bros.' Contract Governance and the Transition to New Hollywood","authors":"Peter S. Labuza","doi":"10.7560/VLT8002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/VLT8002","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the contracts at Warner Bros. for two productions by director Arthur Penn as a case study to consider how these agreements shaped production cultures during the emergence of New Hollywood. Through the 1950s, the studio employed production-distribution agreements that used strict controls and regulations to mimic its in-house procedures. But in the 1960s, it preferred short-form joint venture agreements that allowed more direct control in shaping the film's production while turning the producers into self-regulators. As the contracts reveal, Warner Bros. reshaped their business to grant production culture control to producers while also ensuring the studios' corporate role in the New Hollywood landscape.","PeriodicalId":335072,"journal":{"name":"The Velvet Light Trap","volume":"314 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122219117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Between-the-Lines: Social Media, Professional Identity, and TV's Liminal Laborers","authors":"M. McNutt","doi":"10.7560/VLT8007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/VLT8007","url":null,"abstract":"Increasingly, online spaces for self-disclosure (personal websites, social media networks) are offering television laborers spaces in which to form distinct and comprehensive professional identities in relation to dominant conceptions of industry hierarchies. This article considers television laborers who position themselves \"between-the-lines\" in these spaces, where they have access to discourses of creativity and authority associated with above-the-line laborers but nonetheless occupy marginalized positions within industry hierarchies. Drawing on a central case study of composer Bear McCreary (Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead), the article explores how his experience establishes \"between-the-lines\" as a precarious form of professional identity formation, inaccessible to many and unsustainable without careful, ongoing, and uncertain negotiation.","PeriodicalId":335072,"journal":{"name":"The Velvet Light Trap","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115073460","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Herding Cats; or, The Possibilities of Unproduction Studies","authors":"Peter C. Kunze","doi":"10.7560/VLT8003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/VLT8003","url":null,"abstract":"It goes without saying that media studies examines media that has been produced, but what value might we find in those projects that were not produced? This article turns to failure as a productive site for inquiry, especially for archival work into production cultures. Taking Amblin's unproduced adaptation of Cats, I argue that we can turn to correspondence, contracts, and scripts of unproduced media for useful case studies into the complex relationship between creatives and industry. This model proves particularly useful for a production studies–informed inquiry in which individual creative agency and labor are foregrounded through textual and discursive analyses.","PeriodicalId":335072,"journal":{"name":"The Velvet Light Trap","volume":"80 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128799499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Dancing, Flying Camera Jockeys\": Invisible Labor, Craft Discourse, and Embodied Steadicam and Panaglide Technique from 1972 to 1985","authors":"K. Bird","doi":"10.7560/VLT8005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/VLT8005","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines how below-the-line discourse shaped the aesthetics and labor of Steadicam craft style. Through over thirty years of industrial training, Steadicam operators cultivated an invisible style to formally mimic a kind of faster and cheaper dolly shot and to mitigate the apparatus's uniquely embodied quirks. This article reexamines how Steadicam's discursive and industrial history with competing technologies like Panaglide potentially destabilizes a coherent narrative of technological and craft evolution. By highlighting the eccentricities of stabilizer craft in the late 1970s and early 1980s, this article explores how the formation of practitioners' athletic training and metaphoric discourse reimagines how we as film and media scholars might account for histories of style, labor, and technology more broadly.","PeriodicalId":335072,"journal":{"name":"The Velvet Light Trap","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117151977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Progressive Television, Translation, and Globalization: The Case of Glee in Latin America","authors":"L. Bernabo","doi":"10.7560/VLT8006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/VLT8006","url":null,"abstract":"Global media scholars and translation scholars have long studied the circulation of American programming around the world, but these two fields are rarely put into communication. This article bridges the divide, using Glee as a case study to analyze the relationship between global media flows and dubbing. By articulating the numerous factors that impact a program's dub, we develop a new lens for understanding how the translation process changes globally circulating television shows. This article argues that various forms of identity are alternately exaggerated and downplayed through the adaptation process, affecting the ways American programming globally circulates ideologically rich identities.","PeriodicalId":335072,"journal":{"name":"The Velvet Light Trap","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125136640","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Girl Reporters and Cyclic Seriality","authors":"Zoë Wallin","doi":"10.7560/VLT7905","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/VLT7905","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, the cycle framework is applied to the 1930s girl reporter pictures. The films illuminate the operations of a programmer cycle, a form yet to be explored in cycle studies, opening the consideration of cycles to a wider cross-media trend. The formal and informal practices of repetition and seriality within the cycle are shown to possess limited life spans that, like cycles, were subject to market determinants. Studying cycles as historical, commercial processes contributes a deeper understanding of how industrial strategies were developed, modified, and adjusted in response to a particular set of economic and cultural conditions.","PeriodicalId":335072,"journal":{"name":"The Velvet Light Trap","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126194681","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mad Men’s Serially Falling Man","authors":"Mark Sandberg","doi":"10.7560/VLT7902","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/VLT7902","url":null,"abstract":"The opening credits of Mad Men have often been mentioned as part of a broader post-9/11 cultural repertoire that imagines the act of falling. This article argues that falling is a powerful way to depict the fetishistic knowledge structures that are typical of both serial period dramas and trauma narratives more generally: the dilation of time around a turning point, the repeated rehearsal of the oblivious moment before the dramatic change, the investigation of the consequences of traumatic knowledge, and the scarred sense of futurity. Mad Men, like other period serials, asks whether it matters to know in time.","PeriodicalId":335072,"journal":{"name":"The Velvet Light Trap","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126900206","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In the Nick of Time?: Detective Film Serials, Temporality, and Contingency Management, 1919–1926","authors":"R. Mayer","doi":"10.7560/VLT7903","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/VLT7903","url":null,"abstract":"The American film serial of the 1920s is a particularly underresearched cinematic format. This article investigates the genre’s “time politics” in close regard to its serial structure, focusing on two popular detective serials of the period. The serials are aware of and reflect upon their own position in a longer history of cinematic storytelling (including a decade of serials), and they also respond to the larger cinematic and extracinematic context of the day, which is heavily imbued with the forces of standardization and serialization. The detective serial, as the most popular genre of the format, epitomizes this serial creativity. It can thus be seen as an exemplary instrument in a larger apparatus of modernist contingency management.","PeriodicalId":335072,"journal":{"name":"The Velvet Light Trap","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121871959","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Suspended Animation: Ace Drummond, Buck Rogers, and the Sustained Desires of Seriality","authors":"Justin J. Morris","doi":"10.7560/VLT7906","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/VLT7906","url":null,"abstract":"Despite their traditionally assumed boundaries, the serial media of film, radio, and newspaper comic strips in the 1930s and 1940s were intimately connected. Building upon recent scholarship devoted to the Hollywood film serials of the sound era, this article posits seriality as a kind of “cultural paradigm,” an intermedial bonding agent that serves to engender distinct interconnections between media forms in the mind of the audience and to drive them toward further consumption. The various franchise incarnations of Buck Rogers and Ace Drummond in this period are used here as case studies to underscore what one might term a “plane of suspended animation,” a potentially indefinite imaginative space opened in the mind of the spectator by the narrative disruption of the serial’s cliff-hanger where one might engage in franchise-based play and be encouraged to continue consuming said franchises across media.","PeriodicalId":335072,"journal":{"name":"The Velvet Light Trap","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133387809","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“That Magic Box Lies”: Queer Theory, Seriality, and American Horror Story","authors":"T. Geller, Anna Marie Banker","doi":"10.7560/VLT7904","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/VLT7904","url":null,"abstract":"The unusual temporality of the FX series American Horror Story (2011–) prompts the authors to ask, what would a queer theory of television look like if it took as its starting point not the identity of the queer, but rather queerness itself as temporality? The series’ radical antisocial queerness is anchored as much in its form—its structural belatedness and disruptive imagery—as in its queer iconography and characters. Rejecting historical verisimilitude, each season examines the historicity of its diegetic present by enchaining it within the historical past, creating “temporal drag.” If politics is propped on the fantasy of the (reproductive) future, then AHS’s freaks, witches, and ghosts refuse that future at every turn through spectacles of sex, death, and stomach-churning violence. The third season, “Coven,” exemplifies the queerness of temporal drag as a formal structure, communicating the pain of history through its nauseating effects that interrupt the flow of narrative momentum.","PeriodicalId":335072,"journal":{"name":"The Velvet Light Trap","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127062649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}