Out-of-control costs. Box office bombs that should have been foreseen. A mania for sequels at the expense of innovation. Blockbusters of ever-diminishing merit. What other industry could continue like this--and succeed as spectacularly as Hollywood has? The American movie industry's extraordinary success at home and abroad--in the face of dire threats from broadcast television and a wealth of other entertainment media that have followed--is David Waterman's focus in this book, the first full-length economic study of the movie industry in over forty years. Combining historical and economic analysis, Hollywood's Road to Riches shows how, beginning in the 1950s, a largely predictable business has been transformed into a volatile and complex multimedia enterprise now commanding over 80 percent of the world's film business. At the same time, the book asks how the economic forces leading to this success--the forces of audience demand, technology, and high risk--have combined to change the kinds of movies Hollywood produces. Waterman argues that the movie studios have multiplied their revenues by effectively using pay television and home video media to extract the maximum amounts that individual consumers are willing to pay to watch the same movies in different venues. Along the way, the Hollywood studios have masterfully handled piracy and other economic challenges to the multimedia system they use to distribute movies. The author also looks ahead to what Internet file sharing and digital production and distribution technologies might mean for Hollywood's prosperity, as well as for the quality and variety of the movies it makes.

From Wall Street to the West Coast, from blue-collar billionaires to blue-blood fortunes, from the Google guys to hedge-fund honchos, this compulsively readable book gives us the lowdown on today richest Americans. Veteran journalists Peter W. Bernstein and Annalyn Swan delve into who made and lost the most money in the past twenty-five years, the fields and industries that have produced the greatest wealth, the biggest risk takers, the most competitive players, the most wasteful family feuds, the trophy wives, the most conspicuous consumers, the biggest art collectors, and the most and least generous philanthropists. Incorporating exclusive, never-before-published data from Forbes magazine, All the Money in the World is a vastly entertaining, behind-the-scenes look at today's Big Rich.

"Behind-the-scenes" stories of ranting directors, stingy producers, temperamental actors, and the like have fascinated us since the beginnings of film and television. Today, magazines, websites, television programs, and DVDs are devoted to telling tales of trade lore—from on-set antics to labor disputes. The production of media has become as storied and mythologized as the content of the films and TV shows themselves. Production Studies is the first volume to bring together a star-studded cast of interdisciplinary media scholars to examine the unique cultural practices of media production. The all-new essays collected here combine ethnographic, sociological, critical, material, and political-economic methods to explore a wide range of topics, from contemporary industrial trends such as new media and niche markets to gender and workplace hierarchies. Together, the contributors seek to understand how the entire span of "media producers"—ranging from high-profile producers and directors to anonymous stagehands and costume designers—work through professional organizations and informal networks to form communities of shared practices, languages, and cultural understandings of the world. This landmark collection connects the cultural activities of media producers to our broader understanding of media practices and texts, establishing an innovative and agenda-setting approach to media industry scholarship for the twenty-first century. Contributors: Miranda J. Banks, John T. Caldwell, Christine Cornea, Laura Grindstaff, Felicia D. Henderson, Erin Hill, Jane Landman, Elana Levine, Amanda D. Lotz, Paul Malcolm, Denise Mann, Vicki Mayer, Candace Moore, Oli Mould, Sherry B. Ortner, Matt Stahl, John L. Sullivan, Serra Tinic, Stephen Zafirau

Winner, Best First Monograph, British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies In the 1980s and 1990s, John Hughes was one of Hollywood's most reliable hitmakers, churning out beloved teen comedies and family films such as The Breakfast Club and Home Alone, respectively. But was he an artist? Hughes, an adamantly commercial filmmaker who was dismissed by critics, might have laughed at the question. Since his death in 2009, though, he has been memorialized on Oscar night as a key voice of his time. Now the critics lionize him as a stylistic original. Holly Chard traces Hughes's evolution from entertainer to auteur. Studios recognized Hughes's distinctiveness and responded by nurturing his brand. He is therefore a case study in Hollywood's production not only of movies but also of genre and of authorship itself. The films of John Hughes, Chard shows, also owed their success to the marketers who sold them and the audiences who watched. Careful readings of Hughes's cinema reveal both the sources of his iconic status and the imprint on his films of the social, political, economic, and media contexts in which he operated. The first serious treatment of Hughes, Mainstream Maverick elucidates the priorities of the American movie industry in the New Hollywood era and explores how artists not only create but are themselves created.

Digital Media Worlds tracks the evolution of the media sector on its way toward a digital world. It focuses on core economic and management issues (cost structures, value network chain, business models) in industries such as book publishing, broadcasting, film, music, newspaper and video game.

This book investigates European efforts to overcome the American film industry's international pre-eminence.

The Oxford Handbook of Creative Industries is a reference work, bringing together many of the world's leading scholars in the application of creativity in economics, business and management, law, policy studies, organization studies, and psychology. Creative industries research has become a regular theme in academic journals and conferences across these subjects and is also an important agenda for governments throughout the world, while business people from established companies and entrepreneurs revaluate and innovate their models in creative industries. The Handbook is organized into four parts: Following the editors' introduction, Part One on Creativity includes individual creativity and how this scales up to teams, social networks, cities, and labour markets. Part Two addresses Generating and Appropriating Value from Creativity, as achieved by agents and organizations, such as entrepreneurs, stars and markets for symbolic goods, and considers how performance is measured in the creative industries. Part Three covers the mechanics of Managing and Organizing Creative Industries, with chapters on the role of brokerage and mediation in creative industry networks, disintermediation and glocalisation due to digital technology, the management of project-based organzations in creative industries, organizing events in creative fields, project ecologies, Global Production Networks, genres and classification and sunk costs and dynamics of creative industries. Part Four on Creative Industries, Culture and the Economy offers chapters on cultural change and entrepreneurship, on development, on copyright, economic spillovers and government policy. This authoritative collection is the most comprehensive source of the state of knowledge in the increasingly important field of creative industries research. Covering emerging economies and new technologies, it will be of interest to scholars and students of the arts, business, innovation, and policy.

Facilitates discussion about project-based organizations (PBOs) and how they increasingly pervade business dimensions, from R&D and new product development, to the production of complex capital goods and implementation of organizational change across very different industries such as management consulting, engineering or entertainment.

The advent of film has meant that we are able to capture in great detail - and often inadvertently - the enduring aspects of our working lives. Reading Management and Organisation in Film provides a new framework for understanding organizational theory and its development in a vital new way.

American Pie represents the most commercially successful example of the vulgar teen comedy, and this book analyses the film's development, audience-appeal and cultural significance. American Pie (1999) is a film that exemplifies that most disparaged of movie genres – the vulgar teen comedy. Largely aimed at young audiences, the vulgar teen comedy is characterised by a brazenly over-the-top humour rooted in the salacious, the scatological and the squirmingly tasteless. In this book, consideration is given to the relationship between American Pie’s success and broad shifts within both the youth market and the film business. Attention is also given to the film’s representations of youth, gender and sexuality, together with the distinctive character of its comedy and the enduring place of such humour in contemporary popular culture. While chiefly focusing on the original American Pie movie, the book also considers the development of the franchise, with discussion of the movie's three sequels and four direct-to-DVD releases. The book also charts the history, nature and appeal of vulgar teen comedy as a whole, providing the first concerted analysis of this generally overlooked category of youth film. Clear, concise and comprehensive, the book is ideal for students, scholars and general readership worldwide.