Hollywoods Road to Riches or Capital Resurgent

Hollywood's Road to Riches

Author: David Waterman

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.

Library Journal

With box office returns slumping, Waterman (telecommunications, Indiana Univ.) has produced a timely study of Tinseltown's development since the end of World War II. Special attention is paid to how Hollywood has managed to sustain its world domination of cinema and, perhaps most interestingly, what it does with all its money. In 1946, the studios had their most successful year economically, but the imminent rise of television changed the public's viewing habits forever. At first combative toward its rival, Hollywood eventually acceded to the adage "if you can't beat them, join them" and began producing its own TV series and then investing in pay television. These measures, the author reveals, did not prove to be the industry's salvation, and it began to look more aggressively at issues like movie release patterns and new technologies. Replete with numerous charts, tables, and appendixes, this scholarly (and correspondingly dry work) is geared toward economists and academics. General readers may find other current books more accessible, among them Dade Hayes and Jonathan Bing's Open Wide and Edward Jay Epstein's The Big Picture. Recommended for inclusive economics and cinema collections.-Roy Liebman, Los Angeles P.L. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents:

	Introduction : American success	1
1	The players	15
2	Television : a parting of the ways	33
3	The pay media : a shower of money	64
4	Controlling the release sequence	118
5	Rising American dominance	155
6	What has Hollywood done with the money?	205
7	Hollywood's digital future	251
App. A	Market shares of domestic box office/rentals and video revenues	281
App. B	Stability of world theatrical rentals, 1948-1975	284
App. C	U.S. distributor revenue by source	288
App. D	Prices, distributor revenue, and viewing estimates, 1948, 1975, and 2002	293
App. E	Video windows, 1988-2002	295
App. F	Comparative analysis of movie industries and trade in the United States and the EUJ5 countries, statistical data, 1950-2003	299
App. G	Determinants of U.S. box office market shares in the EUJ5, 1950-2003	307
App. H	Movie production costs and animated movie data	313
App. I	Motion picture industry employment	316
App. J	Credits analysis, top ten movies, 1971 and 2001	318
App. K	Movie genre analysis	320

Books about: Cyberlaw or Career Trek

Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution

Author: Gerard Dumenil

The advent of economic neoliberalism in the 1980s triggered a shift in the world economy. In the three decades following World War II, now considered a golden age of capitalism, economic growth was high and income inequality decreasing. But in the mid-1970s this social compact was broken as the world economy entered the stagflation crisis, following a decline in the profitability of capital. This crisis opened a new phase of stagnating growth and wages, and unemployment. Interest rates as well as dividend flows rose, and income inequality widened.

Economists Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy show that, despite free market platitudes, neoliberalism was a planned effort by financial interests against the postwar Keynesian compromise. The cluster of neoliberal policies—including privatization, liberalization of world trade, and reduction in state welfare benefits—is an expression of the power of finance in the world economy.

The sequence of events initiated by neoliberalism was not unprecedented. In the late nineteenth century, when economic conditions were similar to those of the 1970s, a structural crisis led to the first financial hegemony culminating in the speculative boom of the late 1920s. The authors argue persuasively for stabilizing the world economy before we run headlong into another economic disaster.