Lecture 7: The Concept of High Concept

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Lecture 7 The Concept of High Concept
Beverly Hills Cop (1984)
Directed by Martin Brest

• Professor Michael Green

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This Lesson

• Hollywood in the Age of Reagan I Industry and
  Technology
• Hollywood in the Age of Reagan II Ideology
• High Concept
• The Player

The Player (1992) Directed by
Robert Altman
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Hollywood in the Age of Reagan I Industry and
Technology
Back to the Future (1985)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Lesson 7 Part I
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The Age of Reagan

• With a former actor in the White House, perhaps
  it was inevitable that the 1980s would be
  remembered, in movies as in politics, as the age
  of Reagan. It may be just as valid, however, to
  designate the decade as an age of Hollywood for
  the U.S. National government.
• Robert Sklar, Hollywood and the Age of Reagan

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The Factors that Shaped the Age

• Sklar argues that the relationship between two
  factors shaped the Age of Reagan for movies.
• Technology
• Ideology

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Changes in Technology

• The VCR (first Beta than VHS) became a ubiquitous
  appliance for recording television or playing
  rented movies.
• Cable television vastly expanded the number of
  channels and the availability of both recent and
  older films on the screen.
• Interactive video games and CD-ROMs further
  expanded delivery of images to the home.

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Resistance is Futile

• The movie industrys reaction to many of these
  new technologies was resistance.
• It soon became clear, however, that these new
  technologies expanded rather than contracted
  movie viewing and that the movie studios would
  realize greater profits.
• VCRs especially opened a vast new market for sale
  and rental of movies in video cassette format.

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Synergy

• Synergy is the combined or cooperative action of
  two or more elements to enhance an effect.
• Synergy has always existed in the movie business
  in the relationships between movies and source
  material.
• But the synergy in the 1980s expanded the
  delivery of movies far beyond the theater screen
  without significantly altering their original
  form.

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Synergy (continued)

• Synergy also reshaped movie materials into new
  entertainment forms distinct from old-fashioned
  dramatic and narrative storytelling.
• Video games (arcade, console, personal computer)
• Toys
• Theme and amusement parks
• Fan conventions
• Publishing
• Home video

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New Business Strategies

• 1980s-style acquisition of movie companies and
  studios was driven by the goal of synergistic
  union between movies and other media, between
  software and hardware.
• 20th century Fox/New Corp
• Time/Warner Brothers
• Sony/Columbia
• Movies became more important than ever as
  detonating points, out of which flowed stories,
  characters and images that could be transformed
  into other media.

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Big Commercial Potential

• Building on the mega-hits of the mid-late 1970s
  (Jaws, Star Wars, Rocky, Superman, Close
  Encounters of the Third Kind), the movie industry
  of the 1980s was predicated on blockbuster
  filmmaking.
• Much more of a films overall budget went to
  marketing.
• Many more screens were built and success began to
  be defined by how well a film performed on its
  opening weekend.

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1980s Top-Grossing Films

• Unlike the Golden Age of the 70s, in which art
  and gritty realism was prized in American cinema,
  top films of the 1980s tended to be fantasies for
  children and adolescents.
• As a group their dominant features included
  cardboard adventure heroes, comic book
  characters, space travel and breathtaking special
  effects.
• The Star Wars, Star Trek, Indiana Jones and Back
  to the Future movies
• Batman, Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop

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A Different Breed

• Among the notable aspects of these films is how
  little they share the characteristics of previous
  decades hits, which were drawn from novels,
  stage musicals and literature.
• In contrast they seemed to draw inspiration from
  the commercial popular culture of the Great
  Depression and World War II years the B movies,
  Saturday-matinee serials, pulp magazines and
  comic books that, for much of the postwar era,
  had been disdained and even suppressed.

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Hollywood in the Age of Reagan II Ideology
Commando (1985)
Directed by Mark L. Lester
Lesson 7 Part II
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Reagan and B Movies

• Reagan had been a B movie actor and there was
  a revival of B movie culture in the 80s
  launched by Star Wars and expanded through
  Reagans election that became a defining aspect
  of popular rhetoric in box-office hits and
  presidential politics.
• Its roots lie in reaction against the present
  the nations military defeat and withdrawal from
  Vietnam, a perception of contemporary society
  characterized by divisiveness, selfishness and
  hedonism.

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Embracing a Better Era

• WWII-era pop. culture represented the values of
  the good war unity, self-sacrifice for a
  higher calling, clarity of purpose against an
  evil enemy, implacable will toward victory.
• For some, the films of Lucas and Spielberg with
  their fascist and totalitarian villains
  resurrected the WWII ethos in tandem with the
  presidents policies against the USSR.
• Evil Empire
• Morning in America
• Shining City on a Hill

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Example
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) Directed by Steven
Spielberg
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Other Retro Values

• Unfortunately, in addition to reviving the
  WWII-era values of unity, clarity and heroic
  self-sacrifice, many of the Reagan-era hits
  trafficked in other no-so positive values.
• Racism in relation to non-European peoples.
• A believe in the efficacy of Imperialism (many
  1980s films, even many comedies such as Stripes
  and Real Genius, depicted the might of the U.S.
  military.
• Demeaning attitudes toward women and
  non-heterosexuals

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Popular Images

• The age of Reagan and the Age of Hollywood merged
  not only in policies and rhetoric but also in
  popular images.
• A widely circulated parody poster of Rambo First
  Blood Part II, attached Reagans head to
  Stallones muscled torso in the act of firing an
  automatic weapon.
• This Ronbo figure rose above partisanship to
  speak parodic truths, above all that politics and
  entertainment had become fused.
• Legacy

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Rambo and Ronbo
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Rocky IV
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Traditional Gender Role Crisis

• In the 1980s, traditional notions of maleness
  appeared to be under particularly severe
  challenge in the United States. Threats came not
  solely from military defeat (in Vietnam).
• In gender relations, they arose from a powerful
  movement for womens equality, and in the realm
  of sexuality from the most open discourse (and
  display) in the nations history of alternatives
  to heterosexual norms.

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The Hard Body

• Critic Susan Jeffords has defined the hard body
  image as the Age of Reagans answer to this
  masculine dilemma.
• These hard bodies came to stand not only for a
  national character heroic, aggressive and
  determined but for the nation itself.
• They were often loners locked in mortal combat
  with forces, powers and technologies more brutal,
  vicious and wily than themselves.

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Examples

• Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Sylvester Stallone
• Bruce Willis
• Mel Gibson
• Harrison Ford
• Jean-Claude Van Damme
• Steven Segal
• Dolph Lundgren
• Chuck Norris
• Brigitte Nielsen
• Grace Jones

Jean-Claude Van Damme
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Hard Body Limitations

• As movie characters, however, the hard bodies
  were thin and two-dimensional, and quickly lost
  their popularity.
• Narratives, however, forced the hard body
  characters to be vulnerable to prevent the
  simplicity of unequivocal outcomes.
• The figure also proved unstable as human or even
  superhuman, shifting into futuristic fantasy
  genres with elements of humanoid or robotic
  characteristics.

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Example
The Terminator (1984) Directed by James
Cameron
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High Concept
Grease (1978) Directed by Randall
Kleiser
Lesson 7 Part III
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What is High Concept?

• A striking, easily reducible narrative which
  also offers a high degree of marketability.
• The high concept film is designed to maximize
  marketability and, consequently, the economic
  potential at the box office.
• Frequently the term is used as ammunition in an
  indictment against the contemporary industry,
  suggesting a bankruptcy of creativity within
  Hollywood.
• Justin Wyatt
• Justin Wyatt

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High Concept vs. Low Concept

• While Grease and All that Jazz fit the musical
  genre . . . differences in content, marketing and
  reception between the two films illuminate one of
  the most significant forms of production in
  contemporary Hollywood . . . the contrast between
  high concept and low concept.

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Grease as High Concept

• The mixture of elements within the star
  package explains the rationale behind Greases
  marketing formula, which could be articulated as
  a focus both on the young, drawn to Travolta and
  the subject of teen romance/music, and on the
  older audience segments drawn to the nostalgia.
• Pop music and tie-ins also play a big roll. The
  soundtrack to Grease was one of the most
  successful ever.

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Selling Grease

• In addition to the stars, the music, and the
  merchandising, Grease also had the marketing
  advantage of being a pre-sold property, based on
  the long running musical, though the producers
  chose to discard the Broadway score to attract
  young audiences.
• Finally, it was sold through a simple,
  identifiable logo

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Movie Marketing Logos
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All That Jazz

• All that Jazz did not have a big name star such
  as John Travolta and it aimed at being an
  unconventional musical.
• The movie had no marketing hooks, except for its
  high quality credentials which would place the
  film commercially into the marginalized art
  house category . . . Even classical musical fans
  could be alienated by the generic deconstruction,
  not to mention the frank language, nudity, and
  suggestiveness.
• Wyatt

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Final Point

• High concept can be considered as perhaps the
  central development within post-classical cinema,
  a style of filmmaking molded by economic and
  institutional forces. Through high concept, the
  diverse manner through which economics and
  aesthetics are joined together can be
  understood.
• The irony, of course, is that high concept has
  often been thought of as low concept by film
  critics, scholars and certain movie lovers.

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Final Example
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The Player
The Player (1992) Directed by Robert
Altman
Lesson 7 Part III
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Background

• Written by Michael Tolkin and directed by Robert
  Altman, one of the seminal American directors.
• Stars Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Lyle Lovett,
  Whoopi Goldberg, Dean Stockwell and Richard E.
  Grant.
• Features cameos by a number of prominent
  Hollywood stars.
• Routinely thought of as a great film and the
  pre-eminent satire of Hollywood.

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Lamenting the End of an Era

• Altman had prospered during the 1970s Golden
  Age of filmmaking, along with such visionary
  directors as Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola,
  Hal Ashby, William Friedkin and Peter
  Bogdanovich.
• The blockbuster/high concept Hollywood of the
  1980s relegated these directors to the sidelines
  and, many felt, destroyed an era of great art to
  make room for commerce.
• Pause the lecture and watch clip 1.

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Satire

• The Player critiques the shallowness, hypocrisy,
  waste, incompetence and money madness that some
  believe typifies Hollywood and Los Angeles L.A.
  as a location is prominently featured in the
  film.
• The movie is particularly savage in its critique
  of the way in which Hollywood treats not only
  writers, but writing as an art and profession.
• Pause the lecture and watch clip 2.

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End of Lecture 7