The Battle for the Bs: 1950s Hollywood and the Rebirth of Low-Budget Cinema - Hardcover

Davis, Blair

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813552524 ISBN 13: 9780813552521

Verlag: Rutgers University Press, 2012

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Críticas:

"Trenchantly, Blair Davis upends commonplaces about B-movies as marginal, demonstrating instead their centrality to American cinema and, indeed, to mid-century popular culture overall. A rich, rigourous contribution to film history." - Dana Polan, New York University | "Blair Davis has rescued low-budget cinema from scholarly neglect with this excellent and persuasive account, a fine example of superior scholarship."

Reseña del editor:

The emergence of the double-bill in the 1930s created a divide between A-pictures and B-pictures as theatres typically screened packages featuring one of each. With the former considered more prestigious because of their larger budgets and more popular actors, the lower-budgeted Bs served largely as a support mechanism to A-films of the major studios-most of which also owned the theatre chains in which movies were shown. When a 1948 U.S. Supreme Court antitrust ruling severed ownership of theatres from the studios, the B-movie soon became a different entity. In The Battle for the Bs, Blair Davis analyses how B-films were produced, distributed, and exhibited in the 1950s and demonstrates the possibilities that existed for low-budget filmmaking. Made by newly formed independent companies, 1950s B-movies took advantage of changing demographic patterns to fashion innovative marketing approaches. They established such genre cycles as science fiction and teen-oriented films (think Destination Moon and I Was a Teenage Werewolf) well before the major studios and also contributed to the emergence of the movement now known as underground cinema. Although frequently proving to be multimillion-dollar box-office draws by the end of the decade, the Bs existed in opposition to the cinematic mainstream in the 1950s and created a legacy that was passed on to independent filmmakers in the decades to come.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: Rutgers University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0813552524
• ISBN 13: 9780813552521
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 280