Justin Wyatt's *High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood* (1994) is

a fascinating attempt to discern the historical specificity of 1970s and

 80s Hollywood by studying the industry s general marketing, and

specifically synergetic, strategies in an age of accelerated media

conglomeration.  Though the films themselves tend to be given brief

discussion, it has some useful analyses of promotional materials and

discussions of industrial trends.  Like Schatz (under whose editorial

imprint the book is published), Wyatt is quite attentive to the blockbuster

phenomenon.

 

 J. Hoberman's  Ten Years that Shook the World" (*American Film*, June

1985) might also be of interest.  Like Schatz and Wyatt, the author

recognizes the mid-1970s as a major turning point in how American movies

are made but takes a more auteurist approach in explaining historical

developments.

 

Though straying from the subject of summer blockbusters, I thought I could

mention some additional readings that relate to other topics you brought

up.  If you like Jameson, you might already be familiar with his chapter on

conspiracy films in *The Geopolitical Aesthetic*, illustrating his

persistent interest in the problems of representating social totality.  In

regard to your interest in "the nostalgia film," check out David Bordwell

and Janet Staiger's   Since 1960: The Persistence of a Mode of Film

Practice" (in their and Kristin Thompson's *The Classical Hollywood Cinema*

[1985]) for their account of some of its industrial determinations.

Low-budget genre pictures are given scholarly consideration, again with a

strong industrial emphasis, in Thomas Doherty's *Teenagers and Teenpics*

(1988), which focuses on the 1950s and early '60s but also discusses issues

and trends relevant to the present.

 

Also worth a glance: Timothy Corrigan's *A Cinema without Walls* (1991), an

attempt to theorize blockbusters and other contemporary American films in

terms of postmodernism; Robin Wood's *Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan*

(1986), an essay collection that has the cumulative effect of a New

Hollywood history; and Stephen Heath's discussion of *Jaws* (1976) in Bill

Nichols' *Movies and Methods, Volume II* (1985).

 

Despite its modest presentation as an introductory textbook, Richard

Maltby's *Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction* (1995) makes up for the

occasional historical amnesia present in some of the above (as well as

other) accounts by examining the economic determinations and commercial

aesthetics of filmmaking from both the classical and the contemporary periods.

 

Hoping at least some of this is useful,

Allan Campbell

 

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